A major Clever energy study led by negawatt has found that Europe, including Norway, Switzerland and the UK, can reach climate neutrality by 2045, based on a demand-first ‘sufficiency’ approach, with renewables supplying all the reduced energy needs by 2050. And all with no nuclear and no CCS. Green Hydrogen plays a key role in decarbonising industry as does materials recycling.
The Clever scenario is obviously interesting, showing the gains that can be achieved by demand side changes and a sufficiency approach, but that should no longer be in doubt, with, for example, the scenarios produced for 149 countries globally by Jacobson at al, showed how energy use can be cut by 54.4%.
If all that looks too optimistic, take a look at the actual progress made so far in Germany. A new report from energy think-tank Agora Energiewende says that German greenhouse gas emissions are now at their lowest point in around 70 years, as Europe's largest economy has managed to reduce its dependence on coal faster than expected and expand its renewables, while also finally exiting nuclear. Its total GHG emissions were 9.8% lower than in 2022, and 46% lower than in 1990, getting closer to the European Union's 2030 target to have cut emissions by 55% compared with the same reference year. Electricity generation from renewable sources was over 50% of the total in 2023 for the first time, while coal's share dropped to 26% from a 34%.
Sounds too good to be true? Well, Reuters relayed similar data from an Ember think tank report which said that ‘a record 56% of Germany's electricity was produced from clean sources in 2023, and total power sector emissions tumbled more than 20% from 2022's levels to the lowest in decades’. It added ‘Coal-fired electricity generation dropped by nearly 30%, while electricity output from all fossil fuel sources shrank by over 20% to ensure that 2023 will enter the record books in terms of the clean power share of Europe's largest economy’.
Reuters also noted that ‘power prices have pulled back from the record peaks scaled around mid-2022 following the gas supply cuts,’ but ‘average German wholesale power prices in 2023 remained nearly twice their average from 2019 through 2021’. So it’s not all good news, with economic demand in some key sectors also being depressed as a result. However, Reuters looked to possible price changes in 2024 ‘as new fixed power cost deals for businesses kick in’, with the government and industrial groups agreeing on a package of measures designed to reduce power prices for key businesses and spur a return to growth in 2024.
Of courses some portray it all differently, as a sorry saga of industrial decline due to crazy green anti-nuclear policies. There was a wiff of that recently in reports from Spain, which still has plans to phase out its 7 nuclear plants. And also from France, with nuclear recently being talked up against renewables expansion. France has certainly been slow to adopt renewables on a mass scale and there have been some wild revisionist/populists views on such issues.
There is only a bit of that in the UK, outside the EU- mainly from the Global Warming Policy Foundation. But of course, although renewables are generally popular and doing well in the UK, there is also pressure for more nuclear, large and small, with a huge overall 24GW government target- allegedly to meet growing needs for stable supplies. So we now have a new nuclear push (‘the biggest expansion in 70 years’). Of course, some say that the UK nuclear expansion is at least partly driven not by energy needs, but by military technology concerns, with Andrew Warren arguing that ‘the UK government is pursuing an uneconomic nuclear programme in large part so as to maintain & renew military nuclear capabilities’.
The debate over that will no doubt run and run. Back in 1995, Sir Michael Atiyah OM, then President of the Royal Society, said ‘I believe history will show that insistence on a UK nuclear capability [weapons and energy] was fundamentally misguided, a total waste of resources and a significant factor in our relative economic decline over the past 50 years’.
Views change and can differ. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was recently quoted as having said that nuclear was the ‘perfect antidote to the energy challenges facing Britain’. However, in the 2020’s, arguably, quite apart from the continued risks that nuclear weapons present, we have even more reasons to also challenge old technological choices, and in the case of energy there are now much better cheaper and faster to deploy options than nuclear. As Greenpeace commented on the UK governments latest nuclear PR push ‘the energy industry knows that the economic case for slow, expensive nuclear just doesn’t add up, and the future is renewable. This vague, aspirational announcement with its unevidenced claims of cheap energy is unlikely to change their minds.’
Certainly, the UK governments new nuclear road map provides no new information on funding for the programme, though it is interesting that, with increasing uncertainly about being able to find private backers, even with lucrative RAB consumer-surcharge deals, the government has been offering more taxpayers money. That includes £700m for Sizewell C. With China (and of course Russia) blocked, will there be any takers? Note that the programme also includes an allocation of £300m for new advanced fuel enrichment technology so that the UK doesn’t have to use Russian specialist fuel.
There those who talk up new nuclear technology like this, and small modular reactors especially (see my last but one post), but, there are also fast growing renewable energy technologies with falling costs, and, as indicated above, there are some good, hopeful, green energy supply scenarios and clever demand side management alternatives. Though sadly it is still far from clear whether ideas like this will be adopted on a sufficient scale to ensure longer term global sustainability, we do have choices.
*Sorry for the typos in the first draft of the above (now corrected). Im still struggling with post-Covid fatigue and brain fog
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