Renew Extra Weekly

The cross-party Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Select Committee has warned that the UK Government’s plan is set to fail to generate enough electricity from fossil fuel free sources by 2035, risking the country’s security of supply and its ability to meet its net zero target.  Its report on Decarbonising the UK Power sector  says that ‘the absence of strategic leadership from Ministers and the lack of a coherent, overarching plan to deliver national targets undermines our ability to reduce our dependence on imported expensive fossil fuels for electricity’. And it warns that funding for renewables was under threat as the UK’s attractiveness for investment in low-carbon technologies has ‘deteriorated’. The report suggests that investor confidence has been hit by policy instability, including windfall tax exemptions that favoured fossil fuels;  failure to tackle rising development costs;  15-year delays to connect to the grid, and  a cumbersome planning re...

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, hel...

In July 2022, the Government doubled the UK’s ambition for up to 10GW of low carbon hydrogen production capacity by 2030, with at least half of this coming from electrolytic hydrogen. The stated goal is to have up to 1GW of electrolytic hydrogen and up to 1GW of CCUS-enabled hydrogen operational or in construction by 2025. However things have gone rather slowly. A new independent advisory ‘Hydrogen Champion’ report looks at what might be done to speed the programme up.  It notes that ‘Government analysis suggests that by 2050, the UK will need between 250 and 460 TWh of hydrogen, delivering 20- 35% of the UK’s final energy consumption – equivalent to the UK’s total energy consumption today.’ So it could be big. It says ‘Following delays in the passage of the Energy Bill, and with decisions on the next phase of CCS industrial cluster sequencing and the Net Zero Hydrogen Fund application process pending, there is market uncertainty. It is time for the UK Government to take key polic...

Last year, in a ruling by the High Court, the UK government’s plan for achieving net zero was deemed unlawful . According to the court, the emissions reduction proposals were inadequate, necessitating a revision.  In the event, as a I noted in my last post, in its new plan , ‘Powering up Britain’,  the government seem to have focussed mainly on the Carbon Capture Utilisation and Storage option, with £20bn allocated, as already announced in the Spring Budget . Although so far there not much to show for it, the plan says that progress on this is being made ‘to the next stage of the negotiations to rollout the first Carbon Capture clusters in our industrial heartlands’, with at least two more cluster rounds to follow.  The carbon capture plan didn’t go down too well with some academics- it was seen as deflecting resources from carbon-free investment. Bob War d, head of policy at the Grantham Institute, said CCS would be needed for certain industries, but that using it to ena...

 The 6th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report says ‘there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.’  The urgent need for effective response is very clear from IPCC’s synthesis report headline statements . Crucially, they say that ‘all global modelled pathways that limit warming to 1.5°C (>50%) with no or limited overshoot, and those that limit warming to 2°C (>67%), involve rapid and deep and, in most cases, immediate greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors this decade’. With that in mind, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres said that all countries should bring forward their net zero plans by a decade: ‘Leaders of developed countries must commit to reaching net zero as close as possible to 2040, the limit they should all aim to respect’. He also called on the likes of India and China, who have net zero plans for beyond 2050, to try to bring them forward by a decade as well. In terms of the ...