Independent access to the wholesale market and the balancing mechanism for demand-side response would help businesses bridge the electricity capacity gap by 2020. Equal contract lengths in the capacity market with new power plants and simplified user-friendly balancing services would also enable businesses to utilise DSR to provide up to 9.8GW by flexing their demand and utilising onsite generation. The Association for Decentralised Energy (ADE) made the recommendations in a new report highlighting the potential for DSR to help keep the lights on in the UK, while saving consumers £2.3 billion by 2035 by preventing “wasteful” construction of more than 1,300 diesel engines. The reduction in demand on electricity networks would lower networks costs by £8.1 billion by 2030. ADE said the UK’s DSR potential includes 2.8GW from industrial demand flexibility, 1.7GW from commercial and public sector demand flexibility, 2.3GW from combined heat and power capacity and 3GW from on-site back-up generation. ADE director Tim Rotheray said: “If we are to meet [keeping the lights on] successfully, we need to access the enormous resource that energy users can provide, whether they are NHS hospitals, pharmaceutical manufacturers or your local retail store. “Unfortunately, we too often miss the true size of this potential, and design our systems to meet the needs of an older, less flexible, and more centralised energy system. By making these changes to the balancing market, the capacity market and balancing services, we will allow businesses to compete fairly and help deliver the UK’s demand-side response potential.” National Grid’s head of commercial, electricity Cathy McClay said: “National Grid is actively working on how we as an electricity industry can enable increased participation of a range of flexibility sources in our markets. We believe that there are great opportunities for consumers of energy to play an active role in flexibility and realise benefits of doing so. “National Grid welcomes the report and is committed through Power Responsive to continue to focus on actions to help unlock the potential volumes of demand-side response”. Source link

A new tax for foreign property buyers is being introduced in British Columbia in Canada in an attempt to cool escalating house prices. The 15% foreign buyer tax will come into effect on 02 August 2016 at a time when prices in the province’s capital city Vancouver are escalating. Indeed, the latest global cities index from international real estate firm Knight Frank shows that prices in the city have increased by 17.3% in the mainstream market and by 26.3% in the prime market in the year to March 2016. Policymakers have been looking at ways to cool price inflation in recent months and the new tax will relate to residential purchases in Metro Vancouver, an area that extends from Bowen Island to Maple Ridge/Langley Township. According to Knight Frank, in real terms the new tax will result in an extra $300,000 in property transfer tax based on a property bought for $2 million by a foreign citizen. This figure will rise to $1.5 million for a $10 million home. The latest government data shows foreign buyers, mainly from China, purchased more than $1 billion worth of property in British Colombia between 10 June 2016 and 14 July 2016 of which around 86% was located in the Lower Mainland. The foreign buyer tax will also apply to corporations that purchase residential real estate and the British Columbia Government has the power to examine the citizenship status of directors and the beneficiaries of corporate profits in deciding whether to add taxes. According to the Finance Minister, the resulting revenue from the new tax will be spent on housing affordability projects. However, Knight Frank points out that some loopholes exist and details as to how it will be policed remain unclear. For example, the tax itself relies on buyers self reporting their nationality and providing a social insurance number, backed up by new auditing procedures and penalties. However, as yet it is unclear whether a resident with citizenship could buy a property by proxy for a family member living abroad. ‘There is no doubt that the new law will cool sales volumes and prices as foreign buyers absorb the additional cost implications. It is worth noting that the planned legislation also allows the BC cabinet to alter the foreign tax rate by between 10% and 20% at a later date and expand it to outside the Lower Mainland,’ the firm explains. ‘The legislature was originally recalled to discuss the merits of a tax on vacant homes, whilst the legislation provides an enabling power for such a measure, it is unclear at this stage whether the Government will go ahead with such a move,’ it adds. Vancouver isn’t the only city where policy makers are trying to stem the flow of speculative capital into their local housing market. Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Switzerland and Mexico have all taken steps either by imposing additional taxes or stamp duties, introducing a one off fee or restricting where or what type of property foreign purchasers can acquire. Source link

©AFP Thousands of Chinese coal miners have taken to the streets in a city near the Siberian border to protest against unpaid wages, in the first direct challenge to Beijing’s plan for orderly downsizing and job cuts in the state-owned coal sector. Beijing has said it would lay aside Rmb100bn ($15.4bn) to “resettle” coal and steel workers as part of a plan to cut unproductive capacity in both sectors, but local governments and the companies themselves are supposed to bear a portion of the costs. More On this topic IN China Slowing Chinese growth and the end of the commodities supercycle have turned overcapacity into a pressing economic issue for Beijing. Data published this weekend showed that in the first two months of this year, Chinese production of thermal coal and steel both fell 6 per cent while output of metallurgical, or coking, coal — the steel ingredient produced by the protesting miners — dropped 10 per cent. Miners at state-owned Shuangyashan Mine, one of four mines that make up ailing Longmay Coal, began a third day of protests holding banners that read “We want to eat, we want our wages” and “Lu Hao lies with his eyes open” referring Mr Lu, the provincial governor of Heilongjiang province. Last week Mr Lu said that Longmay had met all its salary obligations and criticised the company, which is rapidly becoming the poster child for lossmaking state-owned coal groups, for its lack of productivity. One protesting miner in Shuangyashan told the Financial Times: “He said during the National People’s Congress that Heilongjiang had not delayed payments to its 80,000 coal miners. Well, at the time he said that, we had not gotten our salaries for four months. That’s the key.” He did not give his name as Chinese authorities regularly imprison workers who lead protests or speak to foreign media. Mr Lu then said he had been “misinformed” about Longmay’s wage arrears problem. He is the youngest member of the Communist party’s Central Committee and was considered a rising star among China’s younger leaders during the previous administration of Hu Jintao. Chinese authorities had been loathe to allow lossmaking state-owned groups to go bankrupt, in part because of the possibility of mass unrest of the type that paralysed the rust-belt north-east during the previous round of restructuring, in the late 1990s. Xiao Yaqing, the head of the State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, told reporters on Saturday: “Those of us who lived through the 1990s know that it was very different”, in part because China’s economy was much smaller than it is today. He added: “More mergers mean less bankruptcies and can help us peacefully resolve any disputes. I don’t think we will see any return to the 1990s.” Beijing’s plan involves trimming excess capacity across the board while allowing the companies themselves to survive or merge into even larger entities. However, the result can be large but weak state-owned companies such as Longmay, which was formed by merging four state-owned coal mines about a decade ago. The Chinese coal sector is split between privately- or locally-owned smaller miners and enormous state-owned mines, many first developed before the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war. Many of the state-owned mines are lossmaking in part because they are contractually obliged to provide coal at below-market prices to the state-owned power and steel sectors while maintaining bloated work forces and social services as a legacy of their importance to the planned economy. Additional reporting by Luna Lin Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016. You may share using our article tools. Please don’t cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web. Source link