Renew Extra Weekly

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 ...

 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...

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 ...