An overview by Dave Elliott
As I am just about to hit my 80th birthday, I felt that I could indulge in a little retrospective commentary on what I’ve been covering, in various formats, in the Renew news service over the years, since I started it as an OU-based Newsletter back in 1979 . You may recall that was when Margaret Thatcher took over as UK Prime Minister. In terms of power supply, the issues in the UK at the time were coal and nuclear, with the renewables only slowly getting recognised, and then only marginally. 43 years on and it’s mostly a different story- renewables have won pretty much across the board , coal is out, and gas maybe too soon, but nuclear is still with us, just about.
My focus as Renew’s editor has always been to support the progressive outsider options. So in terms of renewables, early on that meant pushing wind and solar at a time when both were seen as beyond the pale. For example, as I noted in my history of UK renewables book, a 1978 government White paper ‘saw little present potential for the use of wind power for electricity generation’. And in 1981, a CEGB review booklet on renewables, said that solar power ‘is never likely to be of much use for supplying electricity to the Grid in this country’. Things changed a bit subsequently, as the US launched a wind turbine programme, with the UK governments focus then being mainly on a few very big wind turbines (MW sized) and very big tidal barrages ideas (GW sized)- big suff. Wave energy too- to the extent that it was also seen as possibly being a large energy supplier.
Renew, by contrast, although keen on modular wave power, pushed small community-scale solar and wind, and looked at the eco-problems of large tidal barrages. But it also backed smaller scale tidal stream technology - and that proved reasonably successful in later years, although, like wave energy, it has not yet lifted off seriously anywhere. Wind power however did lift off, and amazingly so - but not the single large MW units of the early years. Multiple (initially) smaller units were clustered together in wind farms- and that’s now the dominant form globally, with an increasing share offshore, including floating systems further out to sea in deeper water. But with each individual unit now being several MW in scale.
Solar took a lot longer to get going in the UK, but it has now started to boom here as well as abroad, initially on roof tops but also on land, in solar farms. Renew has mostly favoured the former, especially as an alternative to using arrays on high-quality arable land. Although it recognised that other locations are possible at various scales- e.g. brown field sites and also floating arrays, for example on reservoirs.
Renew was initially keen on some biomass use, but using energy crops for power, not biofuels growing for vehicles. Shot rotation coppice was seen as attractive for local bio-plantations. But it didn’t catch on in the UK, whereas, sadly, biofuels (biodiesel and/or bioethanol) did , across much of the EU and also globally. A classic invasive cash crop. Though it has met with resistance. So has the use of forestry products for power. So nowadays in Renew we tend to focus mostly on biogas from bio-waste recycling as being more sustainable use of biomass.
Another big area of eco dispute is hydro . Renew has always been concerned about the eco impact of large hydro projects and favoured less invasive tidal lagoons and run-of-the river schemes without giant reservoirs. But reservoirs can provide pumped storage - and we need that to balance variable renewables: batteries won’t be enough.
That of course brings us to wider grid balancing issues, which Renew has followed over the years . Our tendency, following on the view often expressed in the Claverton Energy Group, (CEG) with which we have had links over many years, has been to back systems which involved storage of gasses or heat – since electricity is hard to store directly. That linked into CEGs (and our) commitment to Combined Heat and Power (CHP) and district heating. CHP is less popular these days, even biomass-fired CHP, but district heating, fed with solar heat or geothermal heat (possibly involving geothermal CHP for grid balancing ), along with large scale local heat storage, still looks worthwhile, depending on location.
However, while heat storage remains an interesting option, the emphasis of the long running storage debate has moved on. Renew has always supported conversion of excess green power to hydrogen for storage and then grid power balancing, and that remains a key option, but there are also other uses for hydrogen, not all of them ideal. For example, it’s now thought that heat pumps are a much more efficient way to provide heating. Though that does mean we will need more green power and some way to store it for when it's needed.
Alternatively, green power might be imported from where it is abundant to where it is needed by long distance low-loss high voltage direct current supergrids. Renew has looked at that idea in the past. It has its attractions (e.g. transferring power from large solar arrays in desert area), but it sits uneasily with the ‘localism’ that is common in most green thinking- local generation for local use and local storage . But that debate, like that the one on green heating and storage, is still ongoing.
So too is the nuclear debate. I must admit to being surprised that it’s still around. Much as I’m also surprised that carbon capture and storage is still being talked up. With renewables doing so well, I don’t feel we need either of these expensive and dubious options. It’s sometimes claimed we will need them for balancing variable renewables and for powering ‘hard to decarbonise’ sectors. But as far as I can see all that is being said is that nuclear may at some point get cheaper, safer, cleaner and faster to install (we’ve heard all that before) and that we can carry on using fossil fuels if we store the resultant carbon dioxide somewhere – for ever. I’m not convinced about any of those suggestions. Or that we need them.
Given the urgency of the climate crisis, there might be a bit of a case for compensatory atmospheric carbon removal, for storage or conversion to synthetic fuels (so called carbon capture and utilisation), but both of those options require energy, and CCU needs green hydrogen. It’s not clear to me if either is a sensible use for green energy- if we have it, why not use it directly? Instead what I think we need is lots more flexible clean renewables plus storage, and also the more efficient use of our hard won green energy in smart dynamic-demand energy use systems. Can we do that? Maybe. And Renew will I hope continue in some form to report on progress!
Comments
Post a Comment