Renew Extra Weekly

Energy prices are rising fast. The costs of renewables like wind and solar are falling. So you would think that would be a good thing- helping out. And the more the better.  However, there can be problems when financial support systems use fossil fuel prices as the base for subsidies for renewables. They were assumed to cost more, but that’s no longer true, and so, although it’s not the cause of consumer price rises, there have been some perverse out-comes, with, for example, renewables getting more support than they need and enjoying so-called windfall profits.  That has happened in parts of Europe where, under the marginal cost ‘premium price’ subsidy systems, the cost of the most expensive generator defines the price for all generators. Originally the high costs options were wind and solar, but now it is gas. So some consumers are being overcharged. A critique carried by Euractiv claimed that ‘in Germany (and proportionally in other countries) citizens are funding renewabl...

Nuclear power’s development has been both exciting and difficult, as well as controversial. In this new book , an updated and much expanded second edition of the 2017 text that I wrote for the Institute of Physics (IoP), I look first at the early history of nuclear innovation in the 1950s, when, growing out of the weapons programme, a wide range of ideas for uranium fission reactors were tested, mainly in the USA and UK. As it attempts to show, many of the pilot projects were unsuccessful, indeed some proved dangerous, but some viable lines of power plant development were identified, mostly water-cooled reactors.  The book then moves on to the present, when, with economic problems facing the current generation of water-cooled nuclear plants, some of the other older ideas are being revisited.  The book looks critically at progress on these ideas so far and asks will any of them be successful, or will nuclear fission prove to be a dead end as an energy option? It also looks at ...

Renewable energy has the potential to create twice as many jobs as nuclear, and three times as many jobs per million pounds invested compared to gas or coal power, while investment in energy efficiency can create five times as many. So says a new UK Energy Research Centre study of Green Job Creation , based on a new review of the literature.  It’s an update to their earlier 2014 low carbon energy & employment study. That was a bit more cautious about making final pronouncements, since, it said , it was difficult to assess net economy-wide impacts over time. For example, though some sectors might benefit more than others, if there was full employment, new investment was unlikely to create extra jobs net of any losses. A bit sniffily it said  ‘the proper domain for the debate about the long-term role of renewable energy and energy efficiency is the wider framework of energy and environmental policy, not a narrow analysis of green job impacts.’ It certainly can be tricky to ...

UK energy policy seems to be in a mess.  For example, it’s very odd that, given the huge problem of rising power bills, the government is still constraining the expansion onshore wind, outside of a few local projects. UCL’s Prof. Mike Grubb told the FT (10/4/22), that it was ‘our cheapest energy resource - it typically costs about a third to a quarter of what people will soon be paying for their electricity - but it is, with solar, the only one that could make a dent in the short term’.  On shore wind is also now very popular, with 80 % backing it in the last official poll . In a more recent Opinium poll , 79% of Tory voters asked backed winds farms, as did 83% of Labour voters, but only 46% of all voters backed nuclear and that fell to under a third for nuclear plants near them. Picking up on the nuclear issue, Grubb commented that : ‘Nuclear is not only slow and expensive, it would need to be flexible to ramp up and down with the swings of demand, wind and solar. This furthe...