Business secretary Greg Clark and energy watchdog Ofgem on Monday announced regulatory changes to encourage more battery storage and allow households to increase or decrease their usage when required and sell electricity back to the grid. The plans to open the electricity grid to battery storage devices and spur low-pollution power plants aims to o help energy consumers and industry save as much as £40bn on their bills, reports Bloomberg. The plans could see smart household appliances switched off remotely when electricity supplies are scarce and programmed to run when power is plentiful, the Timesreports. The government also wants to encourage energy suppliers to charge different prices through the day in the hope that this will encourage households to shift their electricity usage to times when power is plentiful. Ofgem said it will relax licensing and data sharing rules in order to let tech firms (such as Google and Amazon) introduce the new gas and electric tariffs, says the Telegraph. Clark also launched a £246m fund to boost the development and manufacturing of electric batteries, says Reuters. The Evening Standard, the MailOnline, BusinessGreen, EnergyLiveNews and the Guardian also cover Clark and Ofgem’s announcement. BusinessGreen also rounds up the reaction of the green economy.

Britain faces a future of record-breaking wet winters according to new modelling by the government’s Met Office that incorporates changing climate patterns. England and Wales now have a 34% chance of record rainfall between October and March, the study found potentially leading to more of the widespread flooding seen in recent years. Writing in Nature Communications the Met Office team also said they had used computer models of the climate to show the major flooding in 2013-2014 that caused £1bn-worth of damage to the Thames Valley “could have been anticipated”, reports the Independent. The story was widely covered, including in the Telegraph, the Times, the BBC, the Guardian, the MailOnline, Press Association and BusinessGreen.

Britain should seek to fill the leadership void created by Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the landmark Paris Agreement, climate change minister Claire Perry said Monday. Perry said UK ministers “haven’t missed an opportunity” to express their disappointment over US President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw form the Paris Agreement and that she has been having discussions with heads of state and “other players” in the US who aim to ensure it delivers on its carbon reduction commitments. ““The UK is ranked third in the world in tackling climate change. I think we need to exploit and take that leadership position because we can change the world doing this and we can also generate highly productive jobs,” she said while visiting a green housing project at Nottingham University, in the East Midlands of England.

Scientists are “very worried” that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet could accelerate and raise sea levels more than expected, the BBC reports. Warmer conditions are encouraging algae to grow and darken the surface, which in turn leads to absorption of more solar radiation than clean white ice so warms up and melts more rapidly. The Greenland ice sheet is the largest mass of ice in the northern hemisphere and the average sea level would rise around the world by about seven metres if it all melted. “People are very worried about the possibility that the ice sheet might be melting faster and faster in the future,” said Prof Martyn Tranter of Bristol University, who is leading a five year UK research project known as Black and Bloom to investigate the impact of algae on sea level rise. “We suspect that in a warming climate these dark algae will grow over larger and larger parts of the Greenland ice sheet and it might well be that they will cause more melting and an acceleration of sea level rise.”

Extreme El Niño events are likely to be far more frequent even if the world pulls off mission improbable and limits global warming to 1.5C, the Guardian reports. The new modelling published in Nature Climate Change projects that drought-causing El Niño events, which pull rainfall away from Australia, will continue increasing in frequency even if the climate is stabilised for a further 100 years afterward, to about 14 events per century by 2150. “It was really a surprise that what we find is after we reach 1.5C and stabilise world temperatures, the frequency of extreme El Niño continued to increase for another century,” Wenju Cai, a chief research scientist at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and one of the study’s lead authors, told the Washington Post. “We were expecting that the risk would stabilise.” The Sunday Morning Herald and SBS Australia also covered the story, while Carbon Brief‘s coverage of the study also includes an explainer on how El Niño works.

Inspiring speeches and a flurry of major commitments suggest the two Secretaries of State may have been let off the climate leash, writes BusinessGreen editor James Murray. And while “there are good reasons to be deeply sceptical about Gove’s professed desire for a green Brexit”…”consider it in tandem with the Greg Clark’s announcement on fresh funding for battery storage, Ofgem’s new strategy for supporting the emerging smart grid, the promise of more support through the Industrial Strategy for technical skills development, and the flurry of recent stories on the plummeting cost of clean energy”.”Quietly, but inexorably, something really exciting is happening in the green economy.”

In an episode of the Bernie Sanders Show published as a full transcript in the Guardian, Sanders and former US vice-president Al Gore discuss Gore’s new film An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. “The movie will tell you everything you need to know about the climate crisis, the solutions to the crisis and how you can become an activist to help solve it,” says Gore. USA Today also has an interview with Gore and the film’s directors Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk.” “For so long, it was very difficult for people in the environmental movement to personalize the issue and make it immediate for people’s everyday lives,” Shenk says. “As storytellers, we had an ‘aha’ moment of ‘If we tell the stories of people who are actually suffering and dealing with the front-line issues of climate change, then it could be film drama.’ ” However a separate piece by Emily Atkin in the NewRepublic warns that many activists in the environmental movement hope Gore will not reclaim the “climate hero” mantle. “Gore is the most polarising figure in climate politics—disputed on the left, and widely loathed on the right….Gore’s return has provoked a predictable reaction from the right. Senator Jim Inhofe mocking him on the Senate floor. The Daily Caller dubbed the new film ‘climate narcissism.’ This reception from conservatives corners raises red flags for inclusionists.”

Water-cooled thermoelectric power plants across Europe could be increasingly affected by water stress, a new study says. Researchers assessed climate impacts on 1,326 individual power plants and 818 water basins in 2020 and 2030. They find that the number of regions experiencing some reduction in power availability due to water stress rises from 47 basins to 54 basins between 2014 and 2030. “The majority of vulnerable basins lie in the Mediterranean region, with further basins in France, Germany and Poland,” the paper notes.

The likelihood of meeting the Paris global temperature limits of 1.5C and 2C is highly dependent on the choice of “pre-industrial” baseline period it relates to, a new study says. Under the strongest mitigation scenario, the probability of crossing 1.5C by the end of the century varies from 61% to 88% depending on how the baseline is defined, the study finds. In a scenario with no mitigation, the baseline is less important, the researchers say, as both 1.5C and 2C would “almost certainly be exceeded by the middle of the century”.

People living on low-lying islands at risk from rising seas prefer to stay where they are and adapt, rather than being relocated, a new study suggests. Researchers carried out surveys in four low-lying island communities in central Philippines that have experienced flooding in the wake of a 2013 earthquake that induced land subsidence. They found that residents “generally prefer in situ adaptation strategies rather than relocation to the mainland”. The results are unexpected, the researchers say, “particularly because a relocation programme has been developed by authorities on the mainland.”