In my last post I looked back at how I had covered the history of renewables in the Renew newsletter over the years. Renew started life in 1979 as the bimonthly newsletter of NATTA, the Open University based Network for Alternative Technology and Technology Assessment, sent out to members in paper format until 2009, after which it went digital. It’s still running in various formats offering continual on-line coverage of renewable developments, a useful research resource if nothing else.
However, with that in mind, given that my old office at the Open University was being closed down, I wanted to find a home for all the NATTA paper files and hard copy back issues of Renew- it seemed a waste to junk all this unique material. So I was very pleased that the Mills Archive in Reading offered to take it all. Their archive programme seems a very valuable project and it is evidently expanding its coverage of recent developments.
As their web site says ‘The Mills Archive Trust protects, preserves and promotes the history of milling and renewable energy for people to learn about and enjoy. It does this to ensure that the roles of milling, renewable energy, and their contributors – from ancient times and up to the present day – are understood, valued and recognised as integral to people’s histories and lives today. It operates a permanent repository for the historical and contemporary records of mills, milling and renewable power sources’.
The move from the OU was quite an operation, with 21 cardboard crates involved. Sad to watch all this stuff go...But it will be interesting to see what the archivist in Reading will make of all it, which, as well as Renew 1-180, also includes all NATTA’s reports, many book and all the back issues of Undercurrents, the UK’s pioneering Alternative Technology magazine. You can still access that digitally and of course also all the back issues of the bimonthly Renew on line (ROL), which started in 1995 at issue 100 of Renew. It’s now at ROL 166.
Meantime, leaving the past behind, the renewables story (and Renew!) goes on, with renewables accelerating around the world. Indeed, the International Energy Agency sees the shift towards renewable energy as ‘unstoppable’, although it also said that the ‘phase down’ of fossil fuels was not happening quickly enough. It’s latest World Energy Outlook predicted that renewables would provide half of global electricity by 2030, though it warned that emissions overall were still too high to prevent temperatures rising above the key threshold of 1.5C. More needs to be done and investment in fossil fuels needed to be cut in half. But IEA’s Director warned that ‘countries who are slowing down in terms of pushing clean energy may well have a disadvantage in terms of their competitiveness for the next chapter of industry.’
That may have been partly directed at the UK, where the government does seem to be backing off some green polices. It’s even a bit wobbly on the ones you might think it was keen on and some that were arguably less attractive. For example, the government has indicated that it will continue to push hydrogen for home heating, as well as heat pumps, despite a new National Infrastructure Commission report indicating that heat pumps were far the best and that hydrogen was not suitable for heating homes. The NIC said that its analysis ‘demonstrates that there is no public policy case for hydrogen to be used to heat individual buildings. It should be ruled out as an option to enable an exclusive focus on switching to electrified heat.’ However, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said that the gas network ‘will always be part of our energy system’, and told the Guardian it would continue to work with the heating industry to explore the potential for hydrogen in home heating.
The UK government has also responded a bit oddly to a Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee report on new nuclear power plant delivery. It keeps talking up Great British Nuclear (GBN), but so far it has not offered much detail. All we have in the new statement is the comment that, in the interim, ‘GBN will operate through British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL) in the period ahead of legislation passing’. So BNFL, which most people thought to be extinct, is it seems to back in action. And although a new roadmap is promised, for now there are no details on plans, costs or funding. That hasn’t stopped others from speculating-for example on the cost of the proposed Sizewell C reactor.
Of course, there are those who see nuclear as the only way ahead, as for example in a recent rather bizarre watts up with that article, which disparages solar as hopeless: ‘Under ideal conditions in the Australian desert, solar panels produce power equivalent to the cost of power from diesel at $0.20/kWh. If you used power from solar panels to produce more solar panels, the cost of the power they produced would be about $1.00/kWh’. It looks to breeder reactors instead.
Then again there is the old dream of putting giant PV solar arrays far out in geostationary orbit in deep space and micro-waving power back to giant receiving dishes on earth. It’s back again, with some projects around the world, including now some UK funding, in part since launch costs have fallen. So have solar cell costs. But why not just put them on roof tops or brown field sites, and avoid all the launch costs and micro wave power transfer risks and energy losses? Yes, you would miss out on potentially getting access to solar at night, and many of us are fascinated by space tech, but, although there are some interesting ideas, including using micro wave links in near space orbits to eliminate the need for some long distance power grids on earth, space solar still feels a little like science fiction. Mind you I like some science fiction...
Meantime, back on earth, what next for Renew? In addition to the long running bimonthly Renew newsletter, I also produce this weekly ‘Renew extra’ post . It grew out of the weekly 1000 word post, initially called ‘Renew your energy’, I did for several years for the Institute of Physics- some of which is still on line. Despite having just passed my 80th birthday, as well as continuing with the bimonthly Renew, I will endeavour to keep this independent Renew extra going on a weekly basis, but do accept my apologies if I lapse occasionally!
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