The 250th issue of Renew, the renewable energy info-journal, has just emerged. I started Renew in 1979 as the newsletter of NATTA, the Network for Alternative Technology and Technology Assessment that was set up based at the Open University in 1976. Renew has come out bimonthly ever since in various formats, with an e-version, Renew On Line, starting at Renew issue 100. Since I retired, I have continued with that as a free service, in parallel with the full subscription-based Renew, with Tam Dougan’s help.
Over the years, Renew has promoted a wide range of renewable alternatives to fossil and nuclear, mainly wind and solar power, but also some, like tidal stream power, that have not yet taken off widely. It has also looked critically at others, for example large tidal barrages (in line with the ‘TA’ bit in the NATTA name) and has supported smaller scale community projects. Of late, it has backed ‘Power to Gas’ green hydrogen production using renewable power sources as a grid balancing option. But it has also had to deal with perennial threats to renewable development from nuclear power. It’s been a long battle, and is still continuing.
Nuclear power
It is maybe odd that policies and decisions on nuclear power often dominate perceptions of energy policy when nuclear power plants only supply about 4% of global primary energy, and 10% of global electricity, but that perhaps indicates the entrenched political power of the nuclear lobby. That is changing slowly now that renewables are supplying around 11% of global final energy and over 26% of global electricity, but, even so, new nuclear project proposals are often buttressed with claims about how important they will be for energy, jobs and the economy, when the reality is that renewables offer a much better package.
The arguably anomalous continuation of support by some governments may be due to the fact that they see nuclear technology and expertise as valuable for their nuclear weapons programmes. In the past the UK government has always stressed that civil and military nuclear were separate things, possibly since it wanted to avoid any backlash from those who opposed nuclear weapons. That never seems to have been an issue in France, where the ‘Force de Frappe’ seems to be widely accepted along with civil-nuclear links. But now the benefits of civil-military technical and skills links are being talked up in UK, in the case of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). Maybe it is felt that opposition to nuclear weapons is no longer an issue and that the otherwise weak economic case for civil nuclear can be buttressed by the need to support weapons tech, or at least work on nuclear submarine propulsion.
SMRs are of course not to everyone’s taste, even within the nuclear lobby. Some parts of it want to stick with large plants and try to diversify their market by producing hydrogen and other synfuels, as well as just electricity. Heat is another option, although SMRs would probably be better for that, since, in theory, they can be sited nearer heat loads. However, as I noted in my last post, that may be hard in practice- not everyone wants a nuclear plant near them, however small.
Hydrogen and Carbon Capture
While the nuclear lobby struggles with internal strategic development issues like this, the renewables lobby, though somewhat less constrained, still has its own internal issues, mostly to do with green power once it is produced. For example, for heating, should green electricity be used directly to power heat pumps, or should it be converted to hydrogen for heating? Heat pumps are far more efficient, but are expensive and don’t work efficiently all the time. Whereas green P2G hydrogen will get cheap and, in fact, even if heat pumps become the main options, may have to be used as backup, to meet peak heat demand.
Green hydrogen also has many other uses- in vehicles, and in industry, and crucially stored ready for later power production to balance variable renewables on the grid. Indeed everyone is looking to hydrogen just now- the nuclear lobby as well as the renewable lobby, and the fossil gas lobby too, with blue hydrogen produced by the steam reformation of methane gas –‘SMR’. Not to be confused with nuclear SMR! For greens, neither looks good, although there are also bigger debates. Greens may not want SMR systems of either sort, but can renewables, plus energy efficiency, be expanded fast enough to halt global temperature rises? If not, do they have to accept some carbon removal/CCS as an emergency short term option?
That seems to be the view of the UK Committee on Climate change (CCC). Certainly it does not think that electrification via renewables can expand fast enough to get the UK to net zero carbon by 2050. So it back CCS and also some nuclear, although, in its Sixth Carbon Budget recommendations to the government, that is left pretty much marginal, at 5-10GW by 2050 However, while backing CCS, it says ‘our scenarios also try to reflect preferences, such as a preference for nature-based removals over engineered removals […], or the use of synthetic fuels in aviation instead of only offsetting aviation emissions via emission removals’.
Although CCC is thus willing to countenance a range of possible new technologies, it does seem to lack boldness in terms of pushing renewables harder. This seems odd. The potential for renewables is vast, and, given proper support, rapid wide-scale deployment seem to far more credible than for nuclear – or for CCS. And the costs are significantly less. Surely we don’t have to move on from the rather silly contest of a choice between nuclear and renewables to a new contest between CCS/carbon removal and renewables. A recent Australian study suggested that CCS was six times the cost of renewables. That may overstate the difference, but it does seem unwise to bet the future on our ability to store large volumes of CO2 somewhere safely and for ever. Although the volumes are much smaller, you might say the same for nuclear waste.
While Renew, and this posting based on it, covers issues like this, its main focus has been of the attractions of renewables, as positive alternatives. And that seem to be getting clearer every day, with every new zero carbon 100% renewable scenario and every new price fall. So you can expect the mix in Renew to stay the same- although we would very much like to get some comments on the material in Renew on Line and this Renew Extra post. Is our range of coverage right for you? Are there areas you want more or less of?
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