Renew Extra Weekly

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A new year - but old policies

Given the UK’s tight economic situation, there were some concerns about backsliding on renewables and watering down plans to fully decarbonise the power grid by 2030 after PM Starmer said, at the end of last year, that the target was now to have ‘at least 95%’ clean power generation by that year, i.e. lots more renewables plus some new nuclear, but not totalling 100%. However, Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband said the remaining 5% was due to the need to maintain a strategic gas reserve. Well it is wise to have a reserve margin, and it does seem that these plant will have Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) added. But it will be quite challenging to get down to 5%, and all with CCS, by 2030, given that fossil gas fired plants supply around 30% of UK power at present and there are as yet no full scale gas CCS plants working in the UK. The first ones look like, at best, they won’t be starting up on Teesside/Humberside until 2028. He also said nuclear power was vital, and that...

Big changes: an end of the year review

2024 has seen some big changes in the energy world, with, for example, the UK announcing an 81% climate emissions cut target for 2035 at the COP 29 climate summit! Renewables have gone from strength to strength, with offshore wind expanding rapidly in the UK and PV solar now getting amazingly cheap- under €0.06/W in Europe. And the problem of having to balance variable renewables with variable demand may have become a bit less onerous, with a new German study claiming that an energy system dominated by solar and wind energy, along with storage and flexible demand management systems, need not have nuclear or fossil fuel base-load power stations to guarantee supply security. Indeed, even leaving aside green hydrogen storage and other backup options, it has been claimed that grid stability and inertia management may not be as hard with renewables on the grid as it’s sometimes portrayed, although it may add to the cost, as of course will storage. However, in terms ...

New Hydrogen Insights- it looks quite good

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...

Wind & solar variability in China - dealing with it may be costly

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...

Green skills gap- the way ahead

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...

Clean Power plan for 2030 - NESO’s grand plan for the UK

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...