Renew Extra Weekly

There has never been any shortage of critical commentary on renewables. Indeed, as they succeed and expand more it seems to increase! Australia’s Salt Bush Club is a reliable source of invective in this area.  In a recent post it summarised its environmental case against renewables as follows : ‘Green Energy isn’t green. It has a huge cost in rare metals; it creates toxic waste problems; solar panels create solar deserts; turbines chop birds and steal wind and rain from inland areas; and now they want to steal fresh water and energy to export low-energy explosive hydrogen.’ Some of this is old stuff- which is being addressed. That  may often only require relatively simple modifications.  For example, wind turbine impacts on birds are relatively rare if the wind farms are properly sited, but collision risks can evidently be reduced even more (by 72%) if one blade is painted black .  The scale of water use from hydrogen production is a newer issue. Salt Bush say ‘Elec...

The International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2020 says the pandemic will have had  major global impacts in energy terms.  Global energy demand is set to drop by 5% in 2020, and energy investment by 18%. The impacts vary by fuel, with estimated falls of 8% in oil demand and 7% in coal use, but only a 3% fall in gas demand, while global electricity demand looks set to be down by a relatively modest 2% for the year.  In climate terms, that means that energy-related CO2 emissions fell by 7%, aided by the fact the renewables showed a slight increase despite the pandemic. As a result, there is expected to be a 2.4 gigatonne decline in annual CO2 emissions, taking them globally back to where they were a decade ago, although there may not have been a similar fall in 2020 in emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from the energy sector, despite lower oil & gas output. So there is still a way to go to achieve climate targets. Although the pandemic and its a...

Renewables have been accelerating ahead in China, which is adding far more capacity each year than any other country, with over 760GW installed so far.  By contrast, the EU has only managed 500GW, the USA 250 GW.  However, the pace of expansion in China has slowed of late.  Annual onshore wind capacity additions in China are expected to fall by over 16% to 19 GW from 2020 to 2021, given the Chinese government’s decision to end subsidies, say analysts Wood Mackenzie .   Even so, over the next decade Wood Mac expect 250 GW of wind capacity to be added, with repowering opportunities onshore and growth potential offshore. Indeed, some see the latter booming dramatically. So, while wind subsidies will fall by 3.2%, wind capacity will still grow, and PV solar seem likely to do even better: incentives for PV will rise by 14%, with some seeing solar as the major growth area longer term, helping China get 62% of its power from non-fossil sources by 2030.   Whe...

Electricity generated from wind and solar is up to 50% cheaper than previously thought, a new UK Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy report suggests. BEIS had already cut its estimates of the levelised cost of wind and solar by 30% in a previous review in 2016, but now, in the new report , even lower figures have emerged: in their estimates for 2025, electricity from onshore wind and solar is nearly half the cost of gas-fired power.  In their estimates for projects starting in 2030, 2035 and 2040, while gas and carbon capature and storage costs fall slightly (from £85/MWh in 2025 to £81/MWh in 2040), wind & solar do progressively much better, with large PV falling from £44 in 2025 to £33/MWk by 2040, offshore wind from £57 to £40, beating onshore wind at £44 by 2040. The nuclear cost path is assumed to be as in the 2016 study with costs falling. That’s very debateble: much has changed with nuclear since then, not least continued EPR project cost rises . Th...

Renewables have done very well recently in the UK and globally, nuclear not so well (it supplies around 14% of UK power now) although, while it has lost some ground, there is still some backing for it, for example, in the UK. Last year Prof Jim Watson , then director of the UK Energy Research Centre, told BBC News: ‘Most analysts now have accepted that we don't need 30% of energy from nuclear - renewables can take a substantially bigger share. But taking any option off the table makes the job of meeting essential carbon targets even harder. It would certainly be hard to do without nuclear altogether.’  That is debatable. Some say that large inflexible nuclear just gets in the way of the flexible supply and demand management system we need to support and balance variable renewables. A few nuclear plants might be able to operate at the margins, possibly generating hydrogen overnight when their power is not needed, but otherwise, in many national and global scenarios, nuclear only pla...