Renew Extra Weekly

The National Energy System Operator estimates that up to 4.1GW of nuclear will be needed to deliver a clean power system in the UK by 2030, with scope for further capacity to be delivered if new small modular reactor (SMR) technology can be developed. Overall, the government’s aim seems to be to ramp up nuclear capacity to 24GW by 2050 – though that is still to be confirmed, with new ‘roadmap’ review underway.  It certainly would be hard. And expensive. But the money seems to be there for things like this. For example, Rolls Royce’s Small Modular Reactor design has been backed by up to £599m from the National Wealth Fund in a partnership deal with Great British Energy - Nuclear (GBE-N). This, it is said , will enable work to begin on the delivery of the UK's first SMR on Anglesey in North Wales, with £2.5bn having been allocated to SMR development. And over £14bn has been provided for the next large reactor at Sizewell. With, presumably, more to come.  However, major projects...

 In a key new report entitled ‘24 / 7 Renewables: the economics of firm solar and wind’, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) says that hybrid renewables plus battery systems can deliver firm power at lower costs than fossil fuels when combined to provide ‘round-the-clock’ electricity supply. For example, it says the costs of ‘firm levelised supply’ for solar projects combined with storage now range from $54-82 per megawatt-hour (MWh) in most regions, compared to $70–85 per MWh for new coal in China and $100 per MWh for new gas globally. The IRENA report comes at a time when the conventional metric for comparing power cost, the Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE), has come under attack for ignoring the full cost of using variable renewables. For example, the LSE Grantham Institute says LCOE doesn’t measure the full system costs of balancing variable renewable and some see this as undermining the case for renewables. IRENA accepts that ‘plant level metrics such as LCOE mu...

Lots of UK oil and gas jobs are disappearing. Will enough green jobs emerged to replace them? It is a big local issue in Scotland in particular. The UK government’s view is that moving from oil and gas to green energy will cut emissions and make the economy, and energy prices, more stable. But not everyone agrees. For example, Reform UK plans to gut existing climate & green policies and expand gas and oil drilling. Though it’s been claimed that this would cause 500,000 job losses, rising to more than 1.4 million people put out of work by 2040, according to new research for Transition Economics. However, it not at all clear if the drive to clean energy as currently planned will be sufficient to avoid net job losses. So some people could face real problems . Certainly, there will be a massive need for retraining- not least to avoid skill gaps opening up in the short term, as Terry Cook and I argued in a recent paper .  There are some good plans. Last year, the government announc...

 ‘At the moment, when gas prices are high, we end up paying more for our electricity, even though the cost of producing it doesn’t change. And so myself and Ed Miliband are now working to come up with a practical way that we can delink those prices’. So said Chancellor  Rachel Reeves . And a few days later,  Energy Secretary Ed Miliband doubled down on net zero with a new plan to face up to fuel prices rises and energy uncertainty, saying that in ‘the era of clean energy, security must come of age’.  In his new plan , the older ‘legacy’ renewables with Renewable Obligation (RO) contracts will have to move to fixed price Contract for a Difference (CfD) arrangements, to escape paying the Energy Generation Levy (EGL), the already existing  ‘windfall tax’ on excess  power market profits, which will be increased from 45% to 55% at peak gas price times. The extra funds raised by this will be used to cut household power bills. About 30% of renewable projects are ...

The UK has been setting new renewable generation records, while also pushing its share of imported energy, particularly gas, to the lowest level since 2004.  The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) has used new government data to show that 46% of primary energy used to supply electricity to the UK was imported in 2025, down from 48% in 2024, and well down on the peak of 67% in 2013. ‘The expansion of renewables is more than making up for the ongoing decline in North Sea gas output which has happened even under decades of policy to maximise extraction.’                         However, not everyone is so sure that all is going well. Electricity is too expensive- and renewables aren’t helping. So says Justin Rowlatt in a recent BBC news report , under the heading ‘Why cheap power could matter more than clean power in the push to net zero.’  He says that, on the supply side ‘solar power has seen dramatic co...

 We are producing too much climate changing carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels. The obvious answer is to stop using them. But if it is too hard, then perhaps we can capture and store the carbon dioxide, or find other ways to offset the impacts of climate change. Various geo-engineering ideas are getting attention these days, so it is interesting to see how they are being received by the general public.   Engaging 323 lay-people across the world, a new technology foresight study explores imagined futures where climate interventions, such as solar radiation modification and large-scale carbon removal, are widely implemented in 2030. The participants generated 299 distinct ‘futures’, each characterized by an imagined newspaper headline. Some were positive, some negative, some neutral. For example, in terms of Solar Radiation Management, the study says ‘futures were on balance more positive for Marine Cloud Brightening, evenly split for space-based approaches, and more n...