Renew Extra Weekly

The UK needs to green its heat supplies - it can’t continue to use fossil gas. But there is a lot of debate over how. Electric heat pumps are the option favoured by many since they can use green power to upgrade ambient heat with very high efficiencies.  One unit of power in can produce up to 4 units of heat out. However, there are opponents, and not just from those like Reform UK with anti-green tech views. For example, although the Ecotricity-backed Green Britain Foundation accepts that, ‘well-designed and installed heat pumps can deliver substantial savings in CO2 emissions’ it says  ‘there are significant risks in terms of running costs’ and that ‘capital costs are much higher than gas boilers.’ Specifically, ‘to deliver the same amount of heat via a heat pump would cost 24% more than a gas boiler,’ while ‘the capital cost of installing an ASHP, including alterations to the distribution system, is more than 4 times the capital cost of replacing a gas boiler'. And it also ...

The pace of global warming has nearly doubled since 2015, while global energy issues are becoming much more fraught, with wars and market chaos adding to the worsening climate problem.  But the UN says countries should not delay climate action in an era of geopolitical instability.  Instead they should recognise decarbonisation & adaptation as the foundation for security and crisis management.  However, while some are trying, the US notably apart, in this context, some recent policy shifts in Europe seem to be perverse. For example, as I noted in my last post, France has cut its renewable energy targets back. In addition, Germany  is to scrap parts of a contentious heating law mandating the use of renewables in favour of a draft law allowing homeowners to rely on fossil fuels.  The previous energy law in Germany, produced in 2023 when the Greens were in the governing coalition, required most new heating systems to use at least 65% renewable energy, with h...

 It’s all change for new energy technology in France, although in France, dominated for so long by nuclear, what ‘change’ means is slightly different from what it means in most other countries. However, although it still supplies around 67% of French electricity, nuclear did fall from grace when, in the early 2020s, generic faults were discovered in many of its increasingly elderly reactors. Dealing with that has been expensive (many of France's 56 nuclear reactors had to be shut down for tests/repairs), but, although financial problems continue, that did not lead to major policy changes- or too much of a lift-off for renewables, despite political pressure from the left for change.  Energy and climate policy has clearly been a contentious political issue in France for decades, with the socialist government in the 2010s planning to cut nuclear back to a 50% contribution, but the right calling for more nuclear plants, to replace the old, soon to be obsolete ones. At one time 6 ...

 Renewable energy is doing quite well in the UK, as the latest Office of National Statistics report shows, although it says there is uneven development . ‘What is working is now clear, with power generation, storage & transport electrification are delivering scale, investment & export potential. What is not working is balance. Jobs are volatile, heat is underperforming & delivery capacity is struggling to keep pace with ambition’.  There certainly are some ambitious targets. In an interesting interview, Net Zero Mission Controller Chris Stark say how the UK energy team set a range ‘for all the clean technologies, so onshore wind, offshore wind, solar [and] also the energy storage technologies…that we’re trying to hit by 2030 that is right at the top end of what we think is possible. Then we went about constructing the policies to make that happen.’ And he says it is working, so far: the economics of clean energy ‘just get better and better’, with renewables being ...

The UK government is looking to ‘a new golden age of nuclear’, committing £17 billion to ‘the most ambitious programme of new plants for a generation’. As its new Advanced Nuclear Frameworks plan says, in the 2025 Spending Review, it committed £14.2 billion to Sizewell C and over £2.5 billion to the Great British Energy – Nuclear (GBE N) Small Modular Reactor (SMR) project at Wylfa. And it says ‘together with Hinkley Point C, these projects will add almost 8 GW of capacity in the 2030s’.  However, it also wants to do more, with plans for advanced nuclear, some based on US Advanced Modular Reactor (AMR) developments. As it notes, some major commercial deals have been concluded between UK and US companies, including ‘plans for X-Energy and Centrica to build 12 advanced modular reactors in Hartlepool, supporting 2,500 jobs, as well as plans for Holtec, EDF, and Tritax to build small modular reactors at the former coal-fired power station Cottam in Nottinghamshire, providing clean, se...

 ‘For much of the past decade, renewable-energy costs fell rapidly’, but now ‘the cost of creating new clean power has risen across much of the system’. So says Tone Lagengen, in a new report from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. It calls for a new approach to supporting clean energy technology with a focus on allegedly cheaper options.    She says that, under the current approach, for renewables like offshore wind, ‘inflation, higher interest rates, constrained supply chains & global competition for key components have pushed up capital costs. This is evident in the upward trajectory of strike prices at offshore-wind auctions in recent years. In 2019’s Allocation Round 3, offshore wind cleared at the lowest prices recorded: about £55 per megawatt hour (MWh) based on 2024 prices’.  By contrast, she says ‘Allocation Round 5 in 2023 failed to attract a single offshore-wind bid, as no project could be delivered below the administrative strike price. Allo...