Renew Extra Weekly

The long awaited, much delayed, White Paper on Energy did not emerge as expected in mid November, but UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson did launch a ten-point energy plan to set the UK on a path to ‘net zero carbon’ by 2050. As had been indicated in previous announcements, renewables are strongly featured in the proposed ‘Green Industrial Revolution’. Offshore was wind expected to be producing enough power ‘for every home, quadrupling how much we produce to 40GW by 2030, supporting up to 60,000 jobs’.  In particular, 1 GW of floating offshore wind capacity was expected to be in place by then.  The 40 GW offshore wind target had already been set in the 2019 Conservative Manifesto and most of the other commitment in the new plan are in fact not new. Indeed, it has been claimed that only £3bn of the £12 bn total mentioned was actually new money. However, there was now more detail.  For example, on hydrogen, much talked up of late, there is a target to generate 5GW of low car...

As I reported in my last post , the use of hydrogen has been talked up strongly recently, but it has also been opposed quite strongly. Indeed BNEFs Michael Liebreich says ‘forget hydrogen’ for many things - it will be too expensive to replace fossil gas for some end uses and is not very efficient as an energy vector.   In a new review he claims that ‘as an energy storage medium, it has only a 50% round-trip efficiency – far worse than batteries. As a source of work, fuel cells, turbines and engines are only 60% efficient – far worse than electric motors – and far more complex. As a source of heat, hydrogen costs four times as much as natural gas. As a way of transporting energy, hydrogen pipelines cost three times as much as power lines, and ships and trucks are even worse’.  This view seems to clash with an earlier more positive vision promoted by BNEF in its 'Hydrogen Economy Outlook' , which claimed that ‘hydrogen has potential to become the fuel that powers a clean e...

Trade body RenewableUK wants the UK to become a global leader in the development of green hydrogen. It says the UK government must publish a hydrogen strategy detailing how the fuel will evolve from a niche alternative to a central driver of the net zero transition.  RUK’s report Renewable Hydrogen - Seizing the UK Opportunity calls on the government to back green hydrogen, produced using renewable energy, by supporting the renewable sector as it attempts to replicate the success of the UK's offshore wind industry: ‘The Strategy should include a clear plan to deliver the first gigawatt of electrolyser capacity in the UK, identifying potential projects and funding where appropriate to drive innovation and investment, including "at scale" demonstrations for production and storage’. RUK recommends setting a target of 5GW of renewable electrolyser capacity by 2030 and 10GW by 2035, along with a cost reduction target of £2 per kilogram of green hydrogen by 2030, from £8/kg cu...

Ecosystems are complex, and if we want to change ours, or rather avoid what we have being changed too much by our activities, we have to make some trade offs amongst some of the energy sources and sinks in the mix, and avoid what may seem to be easy short cuts.  For example, some look to using food waste as an energy source. It sounds sensible, since the waste already exits, but Feedback research carried out with help from Bangor University says that to cut emissions most we need to cut food waste not recycle it as energy.  Feedback’s report ‘Bad Energy’ claims that preventing food waste results in direct emissions savings of over nine times higher than from processing it into biogas via anaerobic digestion (AD)- basically letting it rot in a confined space thus producing methane gas.  And afforestation on the roughly 3 million hectares of grassland that would be spared if we could halve UK food waste, would save and offset about 11.3% of the UK's current total greenhous...