Renew Extra Weekly

With the future looking a bit grim of late, what with Trump and Farage’s hostility to most things green , coupled with BP’s retreat to fossil fuel, I thought I would look at some possible better energy futures. There is no shortage of well-developed technical scenarios, offering quantitative data on practical options, but that can be a bit dull, and rather than go back over them, I thought that I would try a different, possibly more subjective, approach, looking at some normative imaginative scenarios. Maybe they would be more convincing/motivating? For what it’s worth, here is what, a bit idiosyncratically, I found via a web search.  Being positive and perhaps whimsical, might we hope for some form of solar punk utopia? Solar punk is a newish movement that has followed on from the earlier ‘retro-futuristic’ steam punk movement, which, as an AI definition on the web has it, involved futures ‘based on the technology and aesthetic of the past, specifically the Victorian era with its...

 The Labour government has produced a Planning and Infrastructure Bill  which aims to streamline approvals for major energy projects, including offshore wind, solar, hydrogen, and carbon capture- and also nuclear. A new ‘first ready, first connected’ system will replace the ‘first come, first served’ approach, which meant  speculative projects could block the queue while viable project might be forced to wait. In addition, residents living within 500 meters of new electricity pylons will get up to £2,500 off their energy bills over ten years. And developers will also be required to provide local benefits , such as funding for local sports clubs, educational programmes and leisure facilities, with communities getting £200,000/km  overhead electricity cable & £530,000 per substation. These ideas seemed to be welcomed . However there has been no decision yet on what some might see as a linked issue- locational pricing, the idea that power prices should reflect loca...

 The renewables revolution demands up-skilling , with there being shortfalls in electronic, electrical, technical, & engineering and other key skills.  For example,  the recent UK Engineering Construction Industry Training Board’s (ECITB) Sectoral Workforce Census report notes that 81% of renewables employers in the ECI sector are experiencing challenges hiring workers, compared to 71% in the wider ECI in Great Britain. Electrical and mechanical fitters, pipefitters, platers, non-destructive testing technicians and planners are among the roles that are proving most difficult to recruit.   That is worrying, since employment in conventional energy fields is declining as the use of fossil fuel is being phased out. In theory that means there ought to be plenty of takers for the new green jobs. The ECITB report highlights the unique opportunities in the six key renewables sub-sectors, with biomass being the largest construction sub-sectors, accounting for 24% of...

 In the USA, Donald Trump is leading a pro-fossil fuel, anti-green power push as part of his war on Biden’s climate policies .  Offshore wind has been one of his targets. That could put the US  behind s ome other countries , but he seems locked into it- even lashing out against offshore wind projects in the UK . In the UK itself, the new Reform UK party is similarly inclined. Party leader Nigel Farage has said: ‘We view the net zero targets as being the prime reason for the de-industrialisation of Britain’. It recently said , if elected, it would introduce a windfall tax on renewable energy and announced they were ‘serving notice’ on the industry with a set of policies ‘to undo the effects of net zero’. Their election manifesto last year pledged to ‘scrap energy levies and net zero to slash energy bills and save each household £500 per year’ and to ‘unlock Britain’s vast oil and gas reserves to beat the cost of living crisis and unleash real economic growth’.  Now,...

Labours new plan for siting many small modular reactor (SMR) plants around the UK feels almost like something Trump would come up with. As I argued in a letter to the Guardian , the reality is that many of them would not be small - for example, the system being developed by Rolls Royce is 470 MW, larger than most of the old, now closed, Magnox reactors that were built in the UK in the 1960s.  And whatever the design chosen they will not be cheap - even backers, like the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change , have admitted that they ‘could have higher costs per MW compared to gigawatt-scale reactors’.   In addition, there would be a range of safety and security risk issues with local deployment, especially with large numbers of small units in or near urban areas- nuclear plants are usually located in remote sites. Will many people want one near them? By comparison, with costs falling, as I noted in my last post, public support for renewables, like solar and offshore wi...

 The Social Market Foundation, a cross-party think-tank, says that 48% of UK  survey respondents felt the ‘green transition’ was ‘happening to them, not with them’.  And 63% thought it wouldn’t work anyway. Certainly there has been some opposition to some green polices, and there have been claims that Starmer’s plan to remove ‘infrastructure blockers’, for example local objectors to green energy projects like wind and solar farms, and the extra grid links needed for them, could backfire .  Although Labours plans for ‘pushing past nimbyism’ and putting many new small nuclear plants around the country could also attract fierce local opposition. In this case, small isn’t green- indeed, as well as potentially costing more, SMRs may actually increase security, safety and waste management problem. Lots of issues there too then. So, one way or another there may be battles ahead. For example, the government wants to bring large onshore wind projects back into the National...