Renew Extra Weekly

To reach Net Zero, the UK will need a lot of renewables, with the National Grid Electricity System Operator (NG ESO) looking to wind and solar power, which currently make up 43% of GB energy supply, rising to at least 66% across all of its new scenarios by 2030. But, given the variability of these sources, in its latest Future Energy Scenarios study, it says that  ‘flexibility solutions will be required at greater levels than present today’. It notes that ‘increasingly peak demand will not be the only driver of system stress - it will be driven as much by peaks & troughs of electricity supply as by peak demand’, and ‘electrification of other sectors will increase the scale of electricity flexibility needed’.   So it predicts that  ‘large amounts of flexibility with duration of a few hours will be needed to match supply and demand within day. This includes up to 35 GW of electricity storage with an average discharge duration of less than 4 hours by 2050.’ In addi...

The Rocky Mountain Institute’s Dr Amory Lovins has produced yet another devasting review of nuclear power , this one ostensibly being about the prospects for it in the USA- which he sees as very poor. But it also offers provocative insights into why he thinks nuclear is not going to fly anywhere- whereas renewables can and will.  Indeed he says they are romping ahead, leaving nuclear in decay.   He says that there are  ‘at least six countries in 2019 already generating 100%-renewable power, 12 exceeding Sweden’s [operationally] carbon-free 97.9%, and 20 surpassing France’s 90.5%’ while ‘careful choreography has lately met annual national electricity demand with 97% renewables (79% without hydro) in Scotland in 2020, 79% in Denmark (with 0.06% hydro) in 2019, 66% in Portugal in 2018 (42% without hydro), 52% in Germany (with 3.3% hydro) in 2020, and 46% in Spain in 2016 and 2020 (27/33% without hydro), all according to official national statistics. None of these nation...

In a new article, energy guru Vaclav Smil offers some sobering views on the global energy  and climate Future: ‘even though the supply of new renewables (wind, solar, new biofuels) rose impressively - about fiftyfold  during the first 20 years of the 21st century- the world’s dependence on fossil carbon declined only marginally, from 87% to 85% of the total supply.’ So he says ‘to conclude that we will be able to achieve decarbonization anytime soon, effectively, and on the required scale runs against all past evidence’. The latest edition of BPs annual review of global energy statistics makes for similarly gloomy reading, although the figures are slightly better.  It says that ‘fossil fuels accounted for 82% of primary energy use last year, down from 83% in 2019 & 85% five years ago’ . But with global primary energy use expanding by a giant 5.8% in 2021, it’s still a grim tale, renewable expansion (an annual growth rate of 15%) being the only good story- though, ev...

The political crisis may have blanked out the latest twists and turns in energy debate, but as I reported in my last post, radical changes had been prefigured in media speculation about the upcoming Energy Security Bill. Raising the temperature further, the Committee on Climate Change  noted that that UK emissions rose 4% in 2021 compared with 2020, as the economy began to recover from the pandemic, and said that, although a solid Net Zero strategy was in place, ‘greater emphasis and focus must be placed on delivery’. The Net Zero Strategy ‘contained warm words on many of the cross-cutting enablers of the transition, but there has been little concrete progress’.  There was also a lot of lobbying on specific policies. For example, RenewableUK set out a Roadmap to net zero: a manifesto for a fully decarbonised power system by 2035, calling for the Contracts for Difference system to be reformed so as attract more investment, particularly in supply chains. It said that, though t...

The  UK government wants to break the link between gas prices and power prices, but that’s hard when some power is generated using gas and some renewables are still supported by the Renewables Obligation (RO) subsidy system that in effect uses gas prices as a base - a marginal price approach dating from the time when gas was cheap, renewables expensive. Now gas is very costly, around four times the cost of renewables, but consumers are not yet benefitting from the lower cost of renewables. So, as UCL Prof. Mike Grubb has noted, in some cases ‘households are paying for their electricity several times what it now costs to generate and transmit it from the cleanest energy sources at scale.’                                                    In a way, it’s a problem of success. As Simon Cran-McGreehin , from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, has put...