Renew Extra Weekly

A new study by the Hydrogen Council , with consultants McKinsey, says that hydrogen production and distribution systems at scale will unlock hydrogen’s competitiveness in many applications sooner than previously anticipated. It looks to a 60% cost reduction by 2030 for the end user. It says hydrogen can meet about 15% of transport energy demand cost- competitively by 2030 and make similar incursions into other sectors. For example, in addition to the continued use of hydrogen as an industrial feedstock, it says that hydrogen boilers will be a competitive low-carbon building heating alternative, especially for existing buildings currently served by natural gas networks, while in industrial heating, hydrogen will be the only viable option to decarbonise in some cases. And it claims that hydrogen will play an increasingly systemic role in balancing the power system as hydrogen production costs drop and demand rises. The case for a shift to the ‘hydrogen economy’ has been made many

UK FIRES , a £5m government-backed project bringing together academics from six universities in conjunction with businesses across the supply-chain, have written a report , ‘Absolute Zero’, looking to an ‘absolute zero’ emission 100% all-electric non fossil 2050 UK future.   It assumes that renewables ramp up rapidly and a bit of nuclear stays with us, but CCS does not happen in time, so that there will still be a gap- and the ‘absolute zero’ idea seems to imply that this can’t be filled with carbon offsets or illusions to ‘net zero carbon’ balances.   The gap is actually one between the electricity supplied and the total energy needed, but that’s arguably a bit misleading. Evidently keen to get away from inefficient and dirty fossil fuel combustion, the study insist that everything has to be done with electricity, with that ‘ delivering all the transport, heat and goods we use in the UK’, which it says ‘would require 3x more electricity than we use today.’   No doubt- and it sa