Renew Extra Weekly

Nuclear fusion is being talked up as the next big energy thing- although it remains some way off and there are many technical and economic question marks. But Boris Johnson is evidently a fan. The UK government, keen to maintain headway in this field after the UK’s exit from Euratom, has set aside £222m for the development of new fusion technology.  It has also asked local authorities to nominate potential sites for a prototype fusion plant, based on the MAST Tokamak developed at Culham in Oxfordshire. The Atomic Energy Authority will assess the sites before making recommendation to the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Candidate sites for the ‘Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production’ ( STEP ) project include Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, Nottinghamshire and Aberthaw Power Station, near Barry, in Wales. With there being concerns about local job as coal plants close, new projects like this are obviously attractive, but the STEP programme is fairly ...

Some renewables energy systems are well suited to development at the small, local scale, with funding direct from and by the local community. Indeed, local community-owned wind projects initially dominated the expansion of wind energy in Denmark , with, by 2016, 67% of onshore wind energy being generated by citizen-owned projects. Local ownership, initially via wind co-ops/wind guilds, then spread elsewhere in Northern Europe, most notably in Germany , with the PV solar share expanding, and at one stage about half of the 100GW of renewable capacity in place being locally owned via energy co-ops or local farmers.  Clearly many people wanted to buy into local projects- a welcome indication that green energy options had local support. Indeed, providing an opportunity for local ownership has sometimes been see as a way to avoid any potential local opposition. As the Danes say ‘your own pigs don’t smell’. The positive economic benefits in terms of the income earned from the scheme can o...

Electricity powered heat pumps can be used to convert low grade heat from the environment to heat homes very efficiently and the UK government want us all to switch over to using them. The environmental case is strong, and, it seems, so too is the economic case. Air-source heat pumps are ‘by far the most cost-effective, low carbon means of heating European homes’, with household energy bills likely to cost around half that of running hydrogen boilers, according to research by the International Council on Clean Transportation .   It compares the cost of several low-greenhouse gas (GHG) or GHG-neutral residential heating technologies in the year 2050 including hydrogen boilers, hydrogen fuel cells with an auxiliary hydrogen boiler for cold spells, air-source heat pumps using renewable electricity, and heat pumps with an auxiliary hydrogen boiler for cold spells.  It concludes that, even if natural gas costs were 50% lower and renewable electricity prices 50% higher, electri...