Renew Extra Weekly

 The UK Labour government has finally started to come to terms with how to deal with energy, but it hasn’t all always been pretty. Against strong green opposition, it has decided to press ahead with the Jackdaw fossil gas project, to ‘protect hundreds of jobs and help keep millions of homes warm this winter’ as Andy Burnham put it. Though the actual figures were not that impressive- it would only supply under 3% of overall UK gas needs and create 27 new jobs, although ‘safeguarding 273’.  But, when burnt, gas from Jackdaw could release between 23.6m and 35.8m tonnes of CO2 equivalent over its 11-year operational lifespan. Not good news for slowing climate change.  The Green Party called it climate vandalism.  The fact that, although it wouldn’t help to reduce bills, Jackdaw would add to UK gas supplies (over 6% at peak ) was however evidently a key issue and given that the Rosebank  oil project would not, and would just add to exports, it seems that it may not ...

Renewables outpace and overtake nuclear    For the first time ever, in 2025 solar photovoltaics provided more electricity in the world than nuclear reactors. Adding wind turbines, these two renewable energy technologies generated more than twice as many kilowatt-hours than nuclear plants. And with solar and wind still expanding, solar in particular, and nuclear more or less static globally, the gap between nuclear and the main new renewable energy technologies is growing.    These are some of the findings of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2026 , with Mycle Schneider, WNISR Coordinator and Publisher, saying: ‘It is remarkable to what extent public perception of the status of the nuclear sector fundamentally differs from industrial reality’. For example, he notes that China was ‘really the only country significantly expanding its nuclear program’, but it had actually added ‘120 times more solar megawatts than nuclear capacity in the past year.’ It also has a ...

 The Green Party of England and Wales has abandoned it long standing opposition to nuclear power. A bit of a shock. However, its briefing paper on ‘Ending the Green Party’s Blanket Opposition to Nuclear Fission’, produced evidently by the ‘greens for nuclear’ group, says the proposed new policy, now accepted by the Party, ‘does not commit the green party to being a pro-nuclear party in any way beyond committing the party to following contemporary scientific research. We contend this is what the motion is really about: evidence’. OK so let’s look at its marshalling of the evidence. First it points to an ‘Our World in Data’ chart which it says shows that ‘nuclear power has the lowest carbon footprint and the second lowest death rate of any energy source.’  It’s hard to know where to start with these much debated and controversial topics.  It is true that nuclear plants do not generate carbon dioxide when running, but producing the fuel for them does. That’s not the case for...

UK Minister for Energy Michael Shanks reportedly said that ‘Fusion has the potential to provide virtually limitless clean energy’. That’s a dream that some now see as getting a bit more real.  The UK has form in this area. It was a pioneer in nuclear fusion, with the ZETA device built at Harwell in the late 1950s getting, briefly, a very good press: there was front-page newspaper coverage saying it was a breakthrough towards unlimited energy. Sadly, and embarrassingly, it turned out not to be the case .   However, the UK persevered with fusion over the years, for example playing host to JET, the Joint European Torus test unit at UKAEA Culham. And now the UK government has committed more than £2.5 billion over five years to new nuclear fusion , including £1.3 billion for UK Fusion Energy to deliver the STEP programme (a spin-off from Culham)  in partnership with industry. A further £740 million is earmarked for research and development infrastructure and facilities....

 The future may look bit uncertain, with technologically-heightened challenges proliferating: for example, there’s the growing impacts of climate change, but also of AI, that now being portrayed as a new existential threat, with calls for a halt or delay in its development- even from the Pope!  Quite apart from the local impact of AI/data centres, there are certainly some big issues .  Just as there are with climate change. We are struggling to deal with the later- mainly by pushing for renewables. But not everyone agrees.  And it’s the same for AI. For example, in September, addressing the UN General Assembly in New York, US president Donald Trump said we should not to block AI, which he called ‘superintelligence’, adding that the people who warn that it is going to ‘kill us’ are the same ones who warned about global warming. Which evidently, unlike AI, he does not believe in. That is why he is so against renewables and so pro coal. It is good to have it all laid o...

With the energy policy debate churning on, I thought I would look back at what has sometimes been seen as useful metric for comparison of energy options - Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI). That’s a measure of how much energy you have to use to build (and where relevant, run) an energy supply system, compared with how much energy you get out of it over its lifetime of operation. For example, as fossil fuel resources get scarcer and harder to extract, the EROEI ratios for their use are falling (e.g. from 44:1 in 1950, to 8:1 in 2020 for oil) this being one more reason why they are on the way out .  In terms of the non-fossil energy options, in some (but not all) studies I have seen, renewables generally do much better than nuclear, their only supply side rival, which should be no surprise, since (bio energy systems apart) renewables do not need any fuel to run. With nuclear, energy has to be used to mine, mill and process uranium ore into fuel, and the amount of energy needed...