The ‘100% renewable UK’ campaign conference in London this weekend went off well, focussing on the UK 100% renewables by 2050 scenario produced for the campaign by LUT University in Finland. It was prefigured by a very clear on-line overview from Green MP Caroline Lucas of the UK’s dire energy policy context, with the LUT report seen as just what was needed as a corrective. So that set up Prof. Christian Breyer from LUT to outline the approach in detail online, with his main message being that ‘100% can be done’- and at less cost than any other approach.
As I noted in an earlier post, in his team’s scenario, wind takes the lead, with offshore at 44% of the total, onshore at 16%. Solar PV is at 25%, although it could be much larger if land-use constraints were relaxed. Wave energy is also plays a small part, but surprisingly not tidal power. A special feature is the conversion of surplus green power into hydrogen, with that being converted to methane for storage, helping to balance variable renewables over the year/interannually. Use is also made in a range of sectors of other e-fuels, including methanol and ammonia, helping the system overall to avoid emissions- a ‘Power to X’ conversion approach that is clearly currently getting serious attention.
All in all, LUT's scenario is pretty radical, pushing renewables hard and pushing out nuclear and most fossil fuel, and contrasting strongly with the UK government’s new Net Zero plan for 2050, which, although it backs renewables, has a lot of nuclear, as well as fossil CCS. That of course has not gone without opposition from UK energy activists and academics, and the conference heard contributions from some of them, some of whom relayed their own energy plans and models. They including Prof. Mark Barrett (University College London), who has developed his own UK energy modelling system, and Prof. Nick Eyre (University of Oxford) who leads research on demand management- he saw taming demand as a key issue.
Dr Doug Parr, UK Greenpeace’s energy campaigner, looked at some of the policy obstacles, Alison Downes looked at the Stop Sizewell campaign, while Rianna Gargiulo (FoE) looked the need to divest from fossil fuels. More positively, there was welcome news of grass roots action and community projects from, amongst others Ali Warrington from Possible and Rupert Meadows from Power for People, along with Charmian Larke, who is one of the directors of 100% Renewable UK.
Will it happen?
As Jonathon Porritt said in his introduction, although deadwood remains, a lot of progress has been made in recent years and pretty much everyone at the conference seemed to agree that is was technically viable to get to 100% renewables- as long as we also cut back on demand. But was it politically viable when the UK government and the Labour opposition seemed so wedded to nuclear and to Carbon Capture and Storage?
The story elsewhere suggests that it should be possible (and actually beneficial) to do without nuclear, with the last nuclear plants finally closed in Germany, but CCS is still being pushed hard most places. Indeed, to make LUT’s methane fully green you would have to collect the CO2 produced when it was burnt and store it somewhere. And then presumably keep on collecting and recycling it, using energy. But methane is seen as easier and cheaper to store and transmit than hydrogen.
Like most current energy plans, LUT’s plan sees decarbonisation as cutting energy use, since there is a switch to electrification and e-fuels in most sectors, this being deemed to be more efficient. So away with gas for heating in favour of electric heat pumps. Indeed, Michael Liebreich has claimed that ‘Pipes into pylons’ is the new ‘swords into ploughshares’. However not everyone agrees with the electrification of everything. In some end uses, green gases and green heat, delivered by pipe, may be more efficient. The ‘pipes v wires’ debate has been long running, with the latest variant being focussed on whether green hydrogen can be used for home heating. The dominant view at present seems to be that no it can’t, although there are other views (see my earlier post), with hydrogen also being seen as playing a role in transport and industry. However, for the moment though, heat pumps and electric vehicles mostly rule the roost, and some green hydrogen purveyors are feeling the pinch. For example, the pioneering UK electrolytic cell producer, ITM Power, which is based in Sheffield, has had to throttle back on some of its activities, although it is still in the game and still selling its PEM cells to Germany.
That technology is important, since LUT rely on storage, including of green hydrogen, converted to methane, and stored ready for green power supply lulls /demand peaks, to avoid the need for ‘firm’, so-called ‘base load,’ capacity. Indeed, with the new supply, demand management and storage technologies emerging, the whole idea that we need baseload plant, and nuclear plants in particular, to balance variable renewables now seems redundant- although there seems to be some confusion on this in the UK government. Whereas, the UK’s new Net Zero plan (p.19) it says ‘nuclear is the critical baseload of the future energy system’, in answer to a parliamentary question, the Energy Department Minister of State, Graham Stuart MP, said ‘although some power plants are referred to as baseload generators, there is no formal definition of this term. The Department also does not place requirements on generation from particular technologies’.
All of which suggests that, despite protestations otherwise, 100% renewables should possible. Certainly Peter Roche, who runs the long established No2Nuclear web site, thought so in a recent overview. It does now look clear that after being marginalised so long in favour of nuclear, renewables are now leading the pack- although nuclear is still far from dead. And fossil CCS is also backed by some, including the UK. As I said in my own short intervention, we don’t need any of this. What we need, and can do, is to expand renewables rapidly. We can back that up by power-to-gas conversion and reduce peak demands as much as possible. LUTs scenario shows one way that this can be done- at lower cost than the currently planned approach. So its good that this conference has put out a clear message- well done to Dr Dave Toke and Dr Ian Fairlie for organising it. But will the government listen? Or will they continue to waste money on nuclear and CCS?
Kate Hudson from CND offered a final wrap up to the conference, after a lively presentation by Dave Andrews on Trams! She said you might have hoped that the government would have produce a report like LUTs, but in the absence of that, we had to fund it ourselves. That might seem odd. But, although no one had followed it up, Prof. Christian Breyer had earlier in the day, in cross questioning, raised the controversial question of the interaction between the UK's civil and military nuclear infrastructure and skill base. Is that why renewables are less favoured? Well, we do keep seeing reports saying how indispensable civil nuclear is…Perish the thought...
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