Domain
Clean Energy & Net Zero
Decarbonisation with numbers attached, not just a tasteful shade of green.
Hydrogen, heat, storage, and the British weather as an energy source rather than a personality test. The work is urgent. The engineering still has to be right.
The electricity story is largely won on the generation side and largely unresolved everywhere else. Offshore wind is a British industrial success by any honest measure. Industrial heat, heavy transport, the distribution network and the buildings we already have remain genuinely hard, and they are where most of the remaining emissions sit.
Industrial heat in particular suffers from a specific failure: a plant manager is told electrification is not for them, believes it, and stops asking. Much of the useful work here is not new physics but a competent integration study, done on a real site, with the actual tariff and the actual duty cycle rather than an annual average.
The other recurring theme is duration. Batteries answer minutes to hours. Hydrogen, thermal stores and pumped systems answer days to seasons, and each carries a round-trip penalty someone must pay for. Projects that name their duration honestly tend to survive contact with a finance director.
- Generation, storage, and the grid that has to cope
- Industrial heat that does not apologise for existing
- Trials that survive contact with a real site
- Hydrogen production, handling and the materials it argues with
- Techno-economics using the tariff you actually pay
What sits inside
The sub-disciplines people actually search for.
Offshore and marine energy
Fixed and floating wind, tidal stream, moorings, installation windows, and the North Atlantic's reliable talent for finding the weakest bolt.
Hydrogen and alternative fuels
Electrolysis, storage, embrittlement, combustion behaviour, and the difference between a hydrogen-ready label and a hydrogen-ready component.
Industrial heat and process integration
High-temperature heat pumps, waste-heat recovery, electrification of process steps, and the retrofit that has to happen during a shutdown.
Storage and flexibility
Electrochemical, thermal and mechanical storage, degradation under real duty cycles, and the market signals that decide whether any of it pays.
Networks and system operation
Connection constraints, flexibility services, and the quiet fact that a grid connection is now often the longest lead item on a project.
Where the UK stands
Without the boosterism, and without the gloom.
- Offshore wind is the genuine success; the supply-chain content and the port infrastructure are the arguments still in progress.
- Test infrastructure is unusually good — EMEC in Orkney, ORE Catapult in Blyth, the tank complexes in Glasgow and Newcastle.
- Industrial clusters in Teesside, Humberside and the North West are where hydrogen and carbon capture stop being a policy document.
- Grid connection queues and planning consent now shape timelines more than technology readiness does.
Work that gets commissioned
The shape of a package in this domain.
- Site integration studies with a heat-and-mass balance and a board-ready payback
- Degradation testing against a measured duty cycle rather than a standard one
- Materials compatibility work for hydrogen service, including the unwelcome results
- Tank or berth test campaigns with a defined weather-window plan
- Independent techno-economic review for a project about to seek finance
Where projects come unstuck
Reliably, and usually in week nine.
- Modelling an annual average and then meeting a February morning
- Quoting an efficiency without stating the boundary it was measured across
- Assuming a site shutdown can be extended because the science is interesting
- Treating the grid connection as an administrative step rather than a two-year risk