About the Author
Mark Howitt is Chief Technical Officer, a founding director of Storelectric. He leads Storelectric’s technical and operations, minimising technological risk, maximising efficiency and environmental friendliness, and speed to market. He focuses on technologically simple solutions using proven technologies wherever possible.
His degree was in Physics with Electronics. He has 12 years’ management and innovation consultancy experience world-wide. In a rail multinational, Mark developed 3 profitable and successful businesses: in commercialising a non-destructive technology he had innovated, in logistics and in equipment overhaul. In electronics manufacturing, he developed and introduced to the markets 5 product ranges and helped 2 businesses grow strategically.
Where Grid Regulation Went Wrong
Where Grid Regulation Went Wrong The Smart Systems and Flexibility Plan is the UK government's and Ofgem's proposal to achieve Net Zero emissions in the energy system. Most of the other current BEIS consultations are detailed looks into elements of this plan. Our...
Facilitating the deployment of large-scale and long-duration electricity storage
This is Storelectric’s abridged response to the call for evidence on facilitating the deployment of large-scale and long-duration electricity storage. This call seeks to identify the blockers to deploying large-scale long-duration electricity storage, and the best...
(Very) Early Competition in Onshore Electricity Transmission Networks
Excessive Costs of the Current System National Grid’s (NG’s) Network Options Analysis 2021 proposed ~£16bn grid reinforcement to accommodate ~17GW new offshore wind by 2025, almost £1bn/GW. This ignored that NG would also have to source balancing and stability...
Offshore Energy Networks
Offshore Energy Networks The subject here is how to regulate OFTOs (cables owned by Offshore Transmission Owners) so that (for example) they can be linked together into offshore grids and/or interconnectors, or how other farms/plants can be connected to existing...
Fads and Fallacies of the Energy Transition
Throughout the energy transition, technology after technology has been lauded as "the big thing" of the energy transition, "the solution" to the challenges involved – in effect, a magic wand. The energy transition cannot be achieved by an over-emphasis on some...
Comparing Energy Storage, Like with Like
One of the biggest challenges facing those who wish to invest in, or otherwise work with, energy storage is how to compare the costs and performance of different technologies. Many (e.g. batteries) carefully select their data points to flatter both their capabilities...
Incentivising Clean Energy
While this article is written from the viewpoint of the United Kingdom, all its content would apply equally to most other countries or trading blocs such as the European Union. Current Situation Currently clean energy is incentivised by an uncoordinated mish-mash of...
Batteries – Expensive and Inadequate Solutions
Batteries – Expensive and Inadequate Solutions Enabling an Affordable, Reliable and Resilient Energy Transition Grid connected batteries are being used for many grid services that would be much better and more cheaply delivered by large-scale long-duration storage,...
Global Lessons from the Texas Blackouts
Three Perfect Storms? Three severe winter storms swept across America in the period February 10-20, 2021. While causing many problems across the country, in Texas they caused widespread blackouts, affecting almost the entire population in rolling brown-outs and total...