Renew Extra Weekly

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New energy policy for Burnham?

The soon to be UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, is being portrayed as a ‘new broom’ that could, or might, adopt better polices in all areas. Well, what about the energy sector? It’s in a mess, economically, driven by high fossil gas prices, with retail electricity prices at an all-time high, despite renewable energy doing well (65 GW so far) with its wholesale price mostly being low. It’s in a mess technologically, at risk of undermining the crucial next stage of its important renewables programme by diverting cash to support major high-cost nuclear and fossil carbon capture and storage projects. Both of these programme involve multi-billion funding. The much delayed Hinkley Point nuclear plant may end up costing £40-50bn, inflation adjusted, when it finally gets completed, probably in 2030. Its follow-on project, Sizewell C, may not do much better, despite promises about learning from Hinkley, and despite the investment risks being met by a consumer levy. ...

The renewables story - good so far, but must try harder

Renewables remain the cheapest source of new electricity in most markets and have further strengthened their cost advantage over fossil fuels. New cost data from IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency, shows that renewables helped avoid an estimated USD 480 billion in fossil-fuel costs in 2025, protecting users against fuel-price volatility. So the story so far is a good one - a technological and economic success, for wind and solar especially. With costs falling dramatically, they have both boomed globally and look likely to continue to do so, with wind going offshore and into deeper water, thanks to floating systems, and floating solar PV arrays also spreading on lakes and reservoirs. Agri-solar/ solar grazing projects are also getting popular. Projections see solar beating all comers globally in the years ahead. What about the other renewables? Although so far less developed, new wave and tidal projects also continue to emerge around the world, t...

Heatwave - climate change bites

The heatwave across Europe over the last month, with temperatures reaching 40 C and more, had a big impact and seems consistent with what might expect from climate change . The record-breaking temperatures recorded over Europe would have been ‘virtually impossible’ 50 years ago, according to the World Weather Attribution service, with climate change being ‘unequivocally to blame’. It certainly is worrying , with the excess death statistics across Europe rising- including over 1000 in initial reports from France and up to 900 reported in Spain , all this being coupled with huge economic disruption costs. It’s still continuing as I write. And we are likely to see more regularly repeated extreme heatwave episodes like in the years ahead, with even higher peak temperatures – and with the impacts of rising heat in some parts of the word already being much more severe than in Europe. In India especially. In addition, there are the other impacts of global clim...

Carbon removal - not so easy

The removal of carbon dioxide gas from the atmosphere is seen by some as crucial to compensate for the emissions from human activities that are, it is claimed, difficult to decarbonise – for instance, those generated in aviation and agriculture. However, an interesting Quadrature Climate Foundation (QCF) overview back in 2024 noted that since the concentration of CO2 in the air is about 0.04% it is ‘very difficult & correspondingly costly to do CDR’. Ii added it is ‘scientifically, environmentally & economically more effective to avoid a ton of emissions than it is to remove it from the atmosphere’. So, CDR should ‘not be used as an excuse to continue with business as usual’ and ‘net negative emissions technologies should only be deployed to compensate for residual emissions after abatement, or as a means of addressing legacy emissions’. So though it thought Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) was important, especially natural as opposed to engineered CDR, it wa...

AI - will it help or hinder climate action?

Some have argued that the wide use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will require substantial amounts of energy and that this will overwhelm any environmental gains from improved energy use efficiency and emission reduction. However, there are other views. LSE's Grantham Institute and Systemiq produced a study last year claiming that AI applications in just three sectors (power, food, and mobility) could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 3.2 to 5.4 billion metric tons annually by 2035. That would more than offset all projected data centre emissions from AI across the entire global economy in the same period, and move us 36% closer to an ambitious 2035 emissions reduction trajectory versus business as usual. A recent overview of the issues said that ‘This would be a huge win, and powered by only three sectors’. But it also reported that a more recent paper from MIT is much more cautious: ‘AI is likely to worsen climate change even if it stimulates large emi...

Renewables- low system costs and lots of green jobs

Integrated renewables- the cheapest option IRENA has develop a new energy costing system and found that renewables plus storage could supply firm power at low system costs- see my earlier post . Another new metric for assessing the total levelized cost of energy (LCOE) has also emerged with equally striking results. It puts the costs of a mix of offshore wind & solar at about €46/MWh in a future climate-neutral energy system for Denmark- less than half the equivalent cost of nuclear under the same conditions. Thats the conclusion of a new multi-authored peer reviewed study with inputs from Denmark, Finland, Chile, Croatia and the UK. It introduces a new system-based LCOE metric - referred to as SLCOE. It says that ‘while the LCOE is only a function of the respective technology, the SLCOE is a function of both the technology and the energy system context in which it operates’. It shows that ‘the SLCOE of wind power and solar photovoltaics can be much lo...