Renew Extra Weekly

In a useful new monograph on hydrogen, Prof Bill Nuttall and his co-authors are quite upbeat about the prospect for hydrogen, challenging the current view that the future will be mostly electric. ‘Electricity did not triumph in the twentieth century because it was the cheapest way to light a city at night or to drive factory machinery by day, it succeeded because it aligned with user needs (electricity was clean, convenient and increasingly reliable) and it also sat well with the Zeitgeist of the 1930s and modernism. Similarly, hydrogen transport and mobility sells itself not on price, but on other attributes’.  So will hydrogen and  clean synfuels triumph in the Twenty-First Century? The authors of this monograph mostly seem to think so! And not just for ‘ simply balancing the future electricity system.’ They say hydrogen ‘is much more than just an energy carrier. It is a potential future cryogen for high temperature superconducting magnets in a wide range of applications, b...

This interesting paper, by a team of North American and Chinese academics, says that ‘extended and unexpected periods of extremely low wind and solar resources (i.e., wind and solar droughts) pose a threat to reliability’ and it adds that ‘the challenge is further exacerbated if shortages of the two occur simultaneously or if they affect neighboring grids simultaneously’.  It propose three metrics to comprehensively assess renewable energy quality: resource availability, variability, and extremeness.  The paper, published in Nature, says that in China and many other countries, the resource availability ‘has traditionally been the decisive metric for renewable energy project development.’ But  renewable availability can and does also vary over time, so ‘variability’ is a second key metric. And extreme wind and solar ‘droughts’ can sometimes coincide locally. So it also proposes a third metric, ‘extremeness’.  Based on its mapping of China, it says that ‘at many sites...

Renewable energy is booming, and that means many new jobs are being created, replacing those lost as fossil fuel related employment falls. However, it is not a seamless transition. Though some of the skills involved with building and operating renewable energy systems are like those that some people already have, not all of them are the same. Some new green energy techs need people with specialist skills & some of these may be in short supply.  There have been several studies of the issues, including one by Economist Impact , as I noted in an earlier post. It’s quite comprehensive, looking at the state of play globally and at what industry and others can do to improve the situation.  Certainly there are problems. A new report from LinkedIn , warns that demand for green talent increased by 11.6% between 2023 and 2024, compared to just a 5.6% rise in available talent. Looking forward, it said that Gen Z, which will comprise one-third of the workforce by 2030, were showing st...

NESO’s new Clean Power 2030 plan is quite ambitious. In what it says is advice to the government, the National Energy System Operator looks at how ‘it is possible to build, connect and operate a clean power system for Great Britain by 2030, while maintaining security of supply.’ Though it does warn that ‘several elements must deliver at the limit of what is feasible, with a key challenge being to make sure all deliver simultaneously, in full and at maximum pace, in a way that does not overheat supply chains, is sustainable and sets Great Britain on the right path beyond 2030’.  It does this by expanding renewables and flexibility options beyond was is currently planned. e.g. it wants to ‘contract as much offshore wind capacity in the coming one to two years as in the last six combined’.   It says that ‘ Offshore wind must be the bedrock of that system, providing over half of Great Britain’s generation, with onshore wind and solar providing another 29%.’ So it also backs on s...

Finland’s LUT University has looked in detail at long-term inter-annual renewable power balancing, which it says goes beyond just seasonal balancing, as longer muti-year time frames must be investigated which can significantly increase the necessary storage infrastructure and overall energy system costs.  In its new report it notes that ‘inter-annual variations are either caused by natural resource fluctuation or potentially unpredictable mutations due to climate change impacts,’ and it looks at storage of electricity-derived green gases and fuels as options- focussing on methane (CH4) and hydrogen (H2), using the British Isles as a context. Interestingly, and a bit controversially, it says that ‘inter-annual variations of solar PV have been excluded for simplification and due to the fact that lower variations are expected than for wind power’. Well yes, wind does vary a lot in the UK and Ireland, annually and also maybe inter-annually, but so does solar (this year was particularl...

 Ed Miliband’s Department for Energy Security & Net Zero did quite well in the October Budget , with a 35% capital uplift for 2025/26, although not much of that will go to new renewables-  just £134m to support the delivery of port infrastructure to facilitate floating offshore wind and backing for 11 green hydrogen projects in industrial sites around the country. That’s welcome, so is the £1bn for small scale local renewable projects.  But it’s still quite small compared to the main funding allocations for 2025-26, which went to Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage, a massive £3.9bn, and to nuclear, with £2.7bn for the initial phase of the Sizewell plant programme, plus, announced later, around £1bn for the winning Small Modular Reactors in the UK SMR competition .  However, there was also, as the first step in the Warm Homes Plan, a provision of over £1 bn in 2025, and to provide supply chain certainty, a guarantee of investment of an initial £3.4 bn towards...