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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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1976 to 2026- 50 years of Natta

Some changes are afoot with Renew and NATTA, so here’s a short update, along with a retrospective account of their long history. The normal Renew extra weekly news service will return with the next issue.  In 1976, along with colleagues from the Open University Faculty of Technology, I helped organise a conference on alternative energy held at Cranfield University. It attracted about over 50 people from around the UK and led to the establishment of NATTA, the Network for Alternative Technology and Technology Assessment, which I then led. Alternative Technology- what’s that? Basically, it means wind, solar, and other sources of renewable energy - then something of a novelty but now commonplace. And NATTA played a role it making that happen.  It started out by organising follow up conferences around the country and, in 1979, setting up a bimonthly membership newsletter. That expanded and became ‘Renew’ which I have run bimonthly, in various formats, to this day .  The ...
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USA loses its way?

 The USA under Trump is losing ground to China on, amongst other things, renewable energy. China is investing heavily in it, Trump is trying to stop it, onshore and offshore wind especially. It all adds up to what some see as fatal energy policy error, with the US trapped into a dead-end commitment to fossil fuels , destined to lead to ever rising energy and climate costs, with the war on Iran possibly being seen by future historians as a key part in a process of US decline. By contrast, China is now leading the way on low cost green energy deployment, and also on new energy tech R&D.  For example, it now leads on solar research – actually aided by Trump.  Collaboration on PV research with the US did significantly decreased after the 2018 ‘China Initiative’ launched by the Trump administration. But there has been a compensatory acceleration of collaborations between China & other countries, particularly with S. Korea and Germany. And now there are more impactf...
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