Renew Extra Weekly

A new Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) consultation paper proposes reforms to the UK Capacity Market, the contract system which provides incentives to electricity providers to ensure security of supply is maintained. The potential changes to the market are designed to boost investment in cleaner alternatives to the gas-fired power stations that have so far dominated this market , with most of them being existing plants.  Controversially, some old inflexible nuclear plants have also been subsidised under the scheme- for example 4 in the 2021 four year ahead (T4) contract round. BEIS doesn’t mention that, but says energy storage systems and flexible grid/demand response services ought to be encouraged now, along possibly with Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage plants, although it’s worth noting that the gas plants with CCUS are likely to be less flexible. But, for good or ill, as we shall see, some gas plants will be allowed to run if their emissi...

LUT University in Finland has found that a 100% renewable energy/storage mix would save the UK over €120 bn by 2050 compared with the UK Government’s current net zero plan. That’s one conclusion from a series of scenarios in a new LUT report . Its ‘Best Policy Scenario’ (BPS), aims for 100% renewable energy in 2050, with offshore wind as the main resource, limiting onshore wind and solar according to available land area, but its backed up by a second scenario called ‘Inter-Annual Storage’ (IAS) which adds on to the BPS the required inter-annual storage needed to provide good levels of insurance against the possibilities of low-wind years.  A third scenario (BPSplus) tests the limits of higher land area availability for onshore wind and solar photovoltaics, and where also renewable electricity-based e-fuel imports are allowed. And finally, a fourth scenario, called ‘Current Policy Scenario’ (CPS), looks at the UK Government’s strategy for net zero as published in 2020. The generatio...

The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) has produced a radical set of proposals for ‘accelerating the transition from fossil fuels and securing energy supplies’.  On the demand side, it says that a national ‘war effort’ on energy efficiency is required to cut energy bills, reduce emissions and ensure energy security. according to a cross-party committee of MPs. On energy saving in buildings , it says ‘the current ECO scheme is not delivering anywhere near the numbers of energy efficiency improvements it did at its peak a decade ago. The Government needs to ensure that ECO+ is properly funded to deliver hundreds of thousands if not millions of improvements every year for the remainder of this decade. We recommend that the Government set a target to build capacity in the energy efficiency sector, with an objective to deliver at least 1 million installations a year by 2025 and 2.5 million a year by the end of the decade. The Government should direct the newly-announc...

Writing in the venerable US journal Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Markku Lehtonen takes at look at Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), warning that they may be being oversold .  He says  ‘Despite the boost from the Ukraine crisis, it is uncertain whether SMR advocates can muster the political will and societal acceptance needed to turn SMRs into a commercial success. The economic viability of the SMR promise will crucially depend on how much further down the road towards  deglobalization, authoritarianism in its various guises, and further tweaking of the energy markets the Western societies are willing to go. Moreover, the reliance of the SMR business case on complex global supply chains as well as on massive deployment and geographical dispersion of nuclear facilities creates its own geopolitical vulnerabilities and security problems’. A key issue for the selling of  SMRs is ease of deployment . Well it may not be as easy as some hope, although the US Nuclear Regul...