Renewables are on the up most places, the UK especially. S&P Global Platts forecasts that renewables will account for over 56% of UK power demand in 2026, with wind output set to double from current levels. And UK energy minister Greg Hands said UK renewables were ‘on track to deliver the majority of electricity by 2030’. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine adding to the pressure on gas prices and energy security, Energy and Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said ‘with gas prices at record highs, and the price of renewable energy plummeting, we need to accelerate our transition away from expensive gas. Now, more than ever, we must focus on generating cheaper, cleaner power in Britain, for Britain. This is how we become energy independent in the long term’.
Expansion of renewables will hopefully be accelerated by the UK government's decision to move to annual Contracts for Difference (CfD) auctions. Previously they were biannual. BEIS said that ‘The auction scheme has already proved successful at bringing down the per unit price of offshore wind by around 65% since the first auctions were held - helping the UK become one of the world’s largest generators of wind power’. In the last round, 12 new contracts were awarded, with the potential for nearly 6GW of further capacity. The current 4th round is looking to 12GW, with a £285m budget. The next round will open in March 2023.
Welcoming the move to annual rounds, Dan McGrail, Chief Executive of RenewableUK said: ‘We need build up to 4GW of new offshore wind capacity every year to stay on track for net zero, which means quadrupling our current annual rate. Similar increases in onshore wind, solar and other clean power sources are vital too, as well as ramping up the roll-out of innovative technologies like floating wind, green hydrogen and marine power’..
However, at the same time, the government has announced a range of extra taxpayer support for the nuclear sector. This includes up to £1.7 bn to enable a final investment decision on a large-scale nuclear project in this Parliament, the Nuclear Energy (Financing) Bill, a £120m Future Nuclear Enabling Fund, and a £210m grant to a Rolls-Royce-led consortium to develop a UK Small Modular Reactor. Clearly, with climate change in mind, the government wants both renewables and nuclear, and has seen fit to back nuclear through grants rather than through a competitive auction system. Basically it has had to do that since, while renewable costs have fallen dramatically, nuclear is still very expensive, with prices rising, making it unattractive for the UK or, you would think, anyone else. It does seem odd. In terms of responding quickly to the energy impacts of the invasion of Ukraine and high energy prices, UCL Professor of energy policy Jim Watson said ‘I would advocate renewables first because the costs are lower’.
Certainly it is getting harder for those with pro-nuclear views to argue that nuclear power is competitive at present. For example, a recent Carnegie Institute study of 42 countries, also involving SMR developer Terra Power and Gates Ventures, who are backing Terra Power’s Natrium reactor, admits that ‘in moderate decarbonization scenarios, solar and wind can provide less costly electricity when competing against nuclear’, at current US power price levels. But it also claimed that ‘in deeply decarbonized systems (for example, beyond ~80% emissions reduction) and in the absence of low-cost grid-flexibility mechanisms, nuclear can be competitive with solar and wind’.
That view is based on the idea that there will be a 10-20% ‘energy gap’ that can’t be filled with wind & solar: it needs something less variable. According to the Carnegie press release, Ken Caldeira, one of the lead authors of the paper, seems to think nuclear is the answer across the board, insisting rather boldly that ‘nuclear is the cheapest way to eliminate all electricity-system carbon emissions nearly everywhere,’ although more cautiously he also notes that ‘if energy storage technologies became very cheap, then wind and solar could potentially be the least-cost path to a zero-emission electricity system.’
Indeed, even more cautiously, the Carnegie press release says that the study found that ‘in countries such as the U.S., which have the right geographic and climate conditions for generating ample wind power, nuclear would not be deployed until it was needed to get over the last remaining hurdles of decarbonization.’ It did add that ‘in countries with poorer wind resources, such as Brazil, strategic use of nuclear power could enable a faster transition away from carbon,’ but now at least we are taking about options in specific regions and are also addressing compatibility and system issues, with the abstract saying ‘thermal heat storage coupled to nuclear power can, in some cases, promote wind and solar,’ while adding that ‘high-quality wind resources can make it difficult for nuclear to compete’.
Carnegie’s press release does warn that, if nuclear wasn’t used to fill the ‘gaps between supply & demand’ due to variability, then there would have to be ‘significant infrastructure changes - massive expansions in energy storage and transmission capabilities, as well as in energy generating infrastructure’. And the paper seems to suggest that nuclear could help with/avoid some of this, although with reservations- it may not be the cheapest option.
Well fair enough. Some advanced SMRs may possibly be able to play a balancing role at some point in the future - at a cost. But surely non-variable renewables, smart grid demand management, and especially supergrid links and long duration storage, including systems using hydrogen, can all play a role and may be better- cheaper, safer and more flexible. See my next post on supergrids and one coming soon on Aurora’s new review of long duration storage .
Ah but what about nuclear fusion!? As I noted in a recent post, that has been creeping up the political agenda, thanks to the emergence of several small start-ups in the USA and UK pushing novel ideas, as well as some progress being made with existing test rigs like JET, the Joint European Torus, at Culham near Oxford. According to widespread and rather gushing media coverage, in late 2021 JET ‘smashed its own world record’ for the amount of energy extracted from fusion, with a recent experiment producing ‘59 megajoules of energy over 5 seconds, 11 MW of power, more than double what was achieved in similar tests back in 1997’.
Checking back, according to the IoP, it was actually 22MJ of energy in 1977, but with a higher 16.1 MW peak power output, though only for 0.15 seconds, from 24 MW of plasma heating input, compared to the 40MW input in 2021. More power in clearly can give you a longer generation period and more net energy, but, with this design, the power in is always more than the power out, and the whole thing relies on two 400 MW flywheels to provide the burst of power needed. A big net drain. JET has been reconfigured as a test bed for ITER, the €22 bn+ 500MW rated tokamak being built in France. That may be ready for full tests by 2035, but, while it may do better than JET, it too is not designed to produce net overall power output- it’s not a power plant.
Leaving seemingly endless talk of near ‘limitless power’ aside, the BBC’s Jon Amos admitted that ‘fusion is not a solution to get us to 2050 net zero. This is a solution to power society in the second half of this century.’ That is certainly true for ITER- it’s a way off. Some of the other smaller projects may deliver something earlier, and a lot of new money has been chucked at them. Some have claimed as likely to be running ‘in the early 2030s’. However over-eager projections and promises, along with media hype, have led some to be very cynical about the prospects for fusion: maybe it will always be 10 or 20 years away….
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