Renew Extra Weekly

The International Energy Agency's new Global Energy Roadmap sets a pathway to net zero carbon by 2050, with, by 2040, the global electricity sector reaching net-zero emissions. It wants no investment in new fossil fuel supply projects, and no further final investment decisions for new unabated coal plants. And by 2035, it calls for no sales of new internal combustion engine passenger cars. Instead it looks to ‘the immediate and massive deployment of all available clean and efficient energy technologies, combined with a major global push to accelerate innovation’.  The pathway calls for annual additions of solar PV to reach 630 GW by 2030, and those of wind power to reach 390 GW. All in, this is four times the record level set in 2020. By 2050 it wants about 24,000 GW of wind and solar to be in place. A major push to increase energy efficiency is also seen as essential, with the global rate of energy efficiency improvements averaging 4% a year through 2030, about three times the av

‘A world based on 100% renewable energy is possible, and we are able to transform the energy system fast enough to avoid the climate catastrophe!’  So says the Joint declaration of the global 100% renewable energy strategy group.  Set up initially by a core of 7 leading climate and energy scientists, including Prof. Mark Jacobson from Stanford in the USA, and Prof Christopher Breyer from LUT in Finland, and then backed by 40 other scientists, it claims that ‘a 100% renewable electricity supply is possible by 2030, and with substantial political will around the world, 100% renewable energy is also technically and economically feasible across all other sectors by 2035. A 100% RE system will be more cost effective than will a future system based primarily on fossil and nuclear power. The transformation to 100% renewables will boost the global economy, create millions more jobs than lost, and substantially reduce health problems and mortality due to pollution’.                The group are

COP 26, the next gathering of the Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, is scheduled for November in Glasgow, and climate issues are climbing up the political agenda, including in the UK, the COP26 host.  As part of its sixth Carbon Budget, set to run from 2033 to 2037, the UK government has announced that it will aim for a 78% reduction on 1990 levels by 2035, with the UK share of emissions from shipping and aviation included for the first time. The new target is 15 years earlier than the previous ‘80% reduction by 2050’ target, which was replaced by the UKs ‘net zero’ by 2050 commitment in 2019.  Prime Minister Boris Johnson said ‘We want to see world leaders follow our lead and match our ambition in the run up to the crucial climate summit COP26, as we will only build back greener’. That should put the UK at the front of the pack in policy terms, with the EU struggling to get commitment to an ‘at least 55%’ EU emission reduction target for 2030. M

The debate over the merits or otherwise of hydrogen as an energy vector continues to run and run , with one focus being the choice between green and blue hydrogen. A good overview article in the Athropocene magazine looked back to an article last year co-authored by Schalk Cloete, a Research Scientist at Sintef in Norway. It said that Blue hydrogen, where natural gas is converted to hydrogen, with CCS to reduce emissions, has significant cost and emissions advantages over green hydrogen, produced using renewable power. According to the research paper, the key issue was the capital under-utilisation involved in using electrolysers part time to make hydrogen from variable output renewables.   The Sintef study considered ‘Green H2’ scenarios, where hydrogen could only be produced via electrolysis using surplus renewable power, and mixed scenarios, where ‘Blue hydrogen’, produced using natural gas with CCS, was also available for deployment. In addition to the conventional Steam reformin

While some people see hydrogen as a key energy vector for the future, others do not, claiming that its benefits have been oversold . ‘Much of the hype for hydrogen is coming from the oil and gas sector, in the hope that gullible politicians, seduced by an unattainable vision of limitless green hydrogen, will subsidise the vast investments needed to capture the emissions from gas-powered hydrogen. Their motivation couldn’t be clearer: to postpone the inevitable decline of their industry’. So says Jonathon Porritt in the Guardian.  Well yes, most greens don’t want ‘grey’ fossil fuel-derived hydrogen - ‘black’ if from coal, ‘brown’ if from lignite.  Neither do they want ‘blue’ hydrogen- derived from steam reforming natural gas and capturing (some of) the resultant carbon dioxide gas. For most greens that is just a way to allow for the continued uses of fossil fuel, via reliance on as yet unproven large- scale CCS.  But they do want zero carbon green hydrogen, made by the electrolysis of