Renew Extra Weekly

A new study from the UK National Energy System Operator claims that, as a share of GDP, energy costs are set to fall from 10% of GDP today to 5-6% of GDP by 2050 if the transition to a low-carbon system is well-managed, based on NESO’s heavily renewable based Future Energy Scenarios. The new NESO study is quite a complex, looking to the significant change that is planned and what the costs would be. Perhaps unsuprisingly, there was some media confusion over what it was saying, with headlines asking ‘would net zero cost householders £500 p.a?’   So what does NESO actually say? While it accepted that there would be major costs, peaking at about £460bn by 2029 in some scenarios, it claimed that continuing as at present would also cost and not just in terms of climate impact.  As Edie noted, the UK’s energy system is currently importing fossil fuels; some £50bn was spent in 2024, equivalent to 2% of GDP, with £27bn attributable to road fuel, the remainder being split evenl...

 In a spirited overview of nuclear prospects, Prof. Steve Thomas from Greenwich University says that ‘despite a major public relations push in the media and with policymakers for new nuclear, the anticipated nuclear revival will not happen because of the fundamentals of the technology in terms of cost, construction time, and reliability. Commercial financiers will remain very reluctant to fund these projects if any of the risk falls on them. Nuclear projects also take far too long before a return on investment can begin to be earned, typically more than 15 years from investment decision to first power’.  Small modular Reactors (SMRs) are sometimes seen as the way ahead, but Arnie Gundersen , a former nuclear industry executive with 50 years of experience managing 70 nuclear projects  says  ‘Despite all the headlines and billions in taxpayer subsidies, an SMR will never be built—not in time to matter, and not at a price that makes sense’.  He adds ‘I once b...

 Wind power has been doing well in the UK, especially offshore.  But there are issues.  The variability of renewable energy sources like wind and solar is not their only problem- pushing the full system costs of energy up, as I discussed in my last post. There are also curtailment costs incurred when local potential green power supply exceeds what can be delivered to consumers.  For example, last year, SSE earned nearly £10 million in ‘constraint’ payments for unused wind power generated in Scotland, the vast majority from its Viking on-shore 103 turbine wind farm. It is not alone. For example, a Feature article in the Times (Jan 10th) noted that SSE’s Seagreen offshore wind farm off the East coast of Scotland has been paid to curtail output from it 114 turbines for 63% of the time.   In all, the Times report noted, curtailment cost consumers £1.5 bn last year and it said the fundamental problem was the ‘lack of cables’ to users- with wind farms mostly bein...

 The widely used Levelised Cost of Energy metric isn’t comprehensive enough, says the LSE Grantham Institute. For example, when using variable renewables, the system cost of balancing must be added in, as is also argued forcefully in a blistering attack on LCOEs by Art Berman w ho goes even further and says ‘The energy transition is collapsing- not in headlines, but in economics…Wind and solar may be cheap at the generator fence, but not at the system level. The gap between those two is where the economic case collapses’.  A somewhat more measured report by the UNECE group based in Switzerland looks in detail the LCOE issue, with all the various extra cost due to the use of variable renewable energy (VRE) sources being explored.  While Bermen says ‘What began as a hopeful vision for a cleaner future has become an economic bust. While markets and workers sense the failure, activists and policymakers remain caught in a consensus trance’, UNECE is bit more hopeful about th...

 ‘Wind generated more than 85TWh - nearly 30% - of Great Britain's electricity last year,’ so said the BBC recently . It certainly does seem to be a big success.  So to welcome in the new year, we take a look back at the early days of UK wind, to see how we got here, with coverage of a new report by alternative energy pioneer and eco-architect Dr Derek Taylor, who is now a Visiting Fellow at the Open University. He has had over 50 years of involvement with wind energy, including having developed some novel wind turbine designs at the OU.  Back in 1975 he organised the UK’s First Workshop conference series on wind power held at the Architectural Association in London. It was evidently a seminal event.  In his new report he looks in detail at the contributions he and others made to it. He focusses in particular at two large pioneering projects, part of the of the impressive 1950’s British wind power programme managed by the Electrical Research Association (ERA) Wind P...

Professor Peter Chapman and the Open University (OU) Energy Research Group (ERG) that he set up in the early 1970s, came up with some challenging ideas about how energy should be used. The key message, pioneered in Chapman’s seminal 1975 Penguin book ‘Fuels Paradise’, was that we wasted most of it in inefficient generation, transmission and utilisation systems. Instead they argued for a switch to hyper-efficient combined heat and power plants, feeding (otherwise wasted) heat and power to users who would consume it in well designed and insulated buildings and also maybe in gas fired heat pumps. It mostly sounds familiar nowadays, but then it was revolutionary, and the OU ERG team were often perceived as a wild men (and women) from the hills! But many of their ideas were good and have stood the test of time….  A new video focuses on the energy efficient housing issues in MK and tells the story of the pioneering work done by Chapman and architect and MKDC engineer John Doggart, in cre...