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https://twitter.com/adamvaughan_uk/status/1174935765555376130

- there will no doubt some in the media who will try and criticise the protestors for a variety of things - the 'hypocrisy' of actually travelling to demonstrate, the lack of a coherent plan from millions of independent individuals to fix the environment, naivety, poor punctuation or just being downright under the age of 25.

However these people are taking the message that climate change cannot be ignored or talked around any longer. We had years of attempts to try and get market nudges to try and fix the problem - remember that carbon trading stuff - well between 2008 and 2018 the price of CO2 per tonne averaged around 8 euros per tonne.

Is this a good or a bad price ? Well Carbon Capture and Storage is currently working out at between $600 and $800 per tonne. ( https://www.power-technology.com/features/carbon-capture-cost/ ) - so to provide sufficient incentive for the market to clean up the pollution caused by current, and historic, CO2 generation would require a carbon price some 100 times higher that it was in the 10 years between 2008 and 2018 - that's a completely lost decade which probably accounted for something like 350 Gigatonnes of CO2 being added to the atmosphere.

Again is this a good or a bad figure ? Well the most recent estimate from the IPCC ( https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-the-ipcc-1-5c-report-expanded-the-carbon-budget ) in 2018 gave a CO2 budget of 580 Gigatonnes of CO2 to have a 50% chance of exceeding 1.5 deg C global temperature rise. That's 14 years of generation at current rates. Had we acted 10 years ago, it would have bee around 30 years from then (generation was lower). It's like driving at a brick wall, the longer you leave it to act the worse the result gets.

I for one am happy that there is now grassroots acceptance that serious action has to be taken right now, that BMN is helping to bring energy efficient solutions to the planet, and salute both the protestors and the far-sighted team at Bushveld Minerals and Bushveld Energy.

The postscript about superconductivity in Tantalum alloys at very high pressure piqued my interest, primarily because in the 1990's I developed one of the very few ultra-high pressure systems capable of measuring superconducting properties down to temperatures below 100 millikelvin absolute. I can attest that the presence of superconductivity up to 1.9Megabar is indeed most unusual - whilst my diamond anvil cell apparatus only went to about 500,000 atmospheres the uber-high pressure boys in Princeton and Harvard, and of course the russians from Troitsk used to spend all their time trying to make metallic hydrogen as they were convinced there was a nobel in it - nice to see that they are doing something more interesting these days. Interesting it may be but it's not going to result in the need for much tantalum - the samples in these diamond anvil cells are barely visible. If you want a metal that people actually can make useful superconducting wires out of then the number one choice has to be Niobium - NbTi alloy for medium fields, Nb3Sn for High field.

You might wish to suggest that these people follow @BMNperspective on Twitter

pb940 - I heard that Gwede was concerned about the country's ability to obtain sufficient Unobtainium to proceed with their plans.

https://mybroadband.co.za/news/energy/320153-the-11-billion-green-energy-plan-to-save-eskom.html

We're not just ready we are at the head of the queue. The consultation period for the Vametco minigrid finished yesterday.

Where do you think other miners will come when they are looking for someone to build them a minigrid. Answers on a postcard to Bushveld Vametco Ltd, Main Mothuthlung Road, Brits PO Box 595, Brits, 0250, South Africa

It's a community effort

if you need reminding just what an exciting place BMN and BE are currently in then you should read this:-

https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/energy-storage-europe-2019-414 then https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/energy-storage-europe-2019-415 then
https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/blog/public-articles-1/post/energy-storage-europe-2019-416

if after that you don't find it exciting please explain to me why.

- someone going all in with the full 20K for a Bed and ISA this morning

5000 tpa is not yet

Good find SG - both Aurora and Wyelands bank were presenting at the Solar + Storage show at the NEC yesterday. It's still on for today and tomorrow, and is completely free - hall 3A at NEC, birmingham

simply algorithms trading to try and understand the real spread.

is evidently here today - shares trades of 7 pounds, 14 pounds and 28 pounds.

Anyone detect a pattern ?

... whilst some in the UK industry are still labouring under the impression that storage is just a 2 foot by 4 foot white box that you can attach to your garage wall it is evident that serious investment and financial institutions are smelling an opportunity that they can put tens of millions of dollars into.

And great to see so many other bushwackers at the show , you know who you are.

someone obviously knew

SG - that's the key point - they can only get the required cost for battery storage down to the incredibly low levels that they are claiming that they can achieve for their spin-off company (ahhh yes they neglected to mention that perhaps) if they require that the PV + wind penetration is as high as 100%.

It is next to impossible to conceive of a complete energy system in which full decarbonisation can happen without the generation of some green fuels such as green (i.e. generated from excess renewable electricity) hydrogen, methanol or ammonia - this is because the further from the temperate regions you are the more of a seasonal storage requirement you have - the only way to deal with this is to generate and store green fuels for heating, and maybe electrical, use in the cold season. This might be achieved through excess generation in the summer, or, I think more likely, generation in the hot regions of the globe, followed by transportation. Much like transporting oil right now, except the stuff will not have come out of the ground, but instead out of the sky, as water, Nitrogen and CO2.

These round trip efficiency of these fuels is significantly lower than for batteries, which will always have a place for daily and weekly peak shifting, but fuel will need to be stockpiled for interseasonal balancing. You can kind of think of the green fuel system as like a mega battery that you charge and discharge only once a year.

Well done for correcting the Motley Fool articles RichKen !

dubmaskullanga - well the RNLI are another £20 better off as a result of that outrageous story by the Daily Mail. What has this country become ?

Well it's not cast in stone yet but it does seem that BMN have got Cellcube to quote.