Renew Extra Weekly

As the public debate unfolded, the basic eco-climate context was clear, at least to some.  Greenpeace UK said ‘We've had the wettest and warmest years on record, but right at the time the government should have been ramping up climate action, they made a series of devastating row backs that have put future generations at risk. We desperately need politicians who prioritise clean cheap energy, warm homes & healthy clean air & water.’ Business Green added that ‘ Ministers have repeatedly argued Labour's plan to deliver a clean power system by 2030 is not feasible and risks driving up energy bills, while also highlighting their record of delivering the deepest decarbonisation in the G20 and engineering a huge increase in renewables capacity & green investment. But Labour has hit back by accusing the government of overseeing policy uncertainty and insufficient infrastructure underinvestment that has hampered the clean energy transition, driven up energy bills, and led ...

Wind and solar PV have expanded rapidly in recent years round the world. Since solar is  easier to install it has grown faster in some countries, but in countries in the north wind has been in the lead -  and in the UK offshore wind now has the edge over onshore wind. That’s in part since wind speeds are generally higher and more consistent offshore (so the capacity factors are higher) and also since the machines can be much larger. That’s important because the energy output from wind turbines is proportional to the square of the blade size and the cube of the wind speed. So, put simply, big and windy is best, and so, depending on location, the cost/MWh offshore can be cheaper than onshore, despite the extra cost of installation/maintenance and undersea power transmission. Moreover, the offshore advantage may increase given the advent of floating devices, which makes it easier to install systems in deep water far out to sea where the wind regime is best.  Given that, alth...

A review of the benefits and challenges of hydrogen and carbon capture utilization and storage, by an international team led by Prof. Ben Sovocool at Sussex University, is based on interviews with engineers and other experts in areas of the UK where local industrial cluster projects are planned or underway. The review adopts a neutral approach, attempting to assess the technical, economic and social pros and cons, but it soon becomes clear form the interview material that there are strong views in this area.   Some is just understandable and reasonable incumbent technological and skills partisanship. For example, one benefit of deploying hydrogen in clusters is said to be that there is already a trained workforce in such areas, as well as existing infrastructure. A participant said that ‘we have been handling and moving hydrogen for 70 years. We have 1600 miles of dedicated hydrogen pipeline. We know how to handle it. We know how to move it. We know how to respond to an emerg...

The moon is a long way off, and so, for now, is ‘lunar power’- extracted from the gravitationally induced tides. But we are getting there slowly. Indeed it is sometimes thought that, since they have some similarities, tidal stream turbines, using the fast tidal flows in some estuaries, could replicate wind power’s success, with costs falling as capacity built up. However, so far, progress with what might be depicted as ‘underwater wind turbines’ has been slow , in part due to the high cost of the technology at the initial stage, with early estimates putting the likely cost of power at well over £300/MWh, much higher than for wind. The pioneering work of Prof. Peter Fraenkel and Marine Current Turbines Ltd in the 1990s, with its two-bladed sea bed mounted 1.2MW Seagen in Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland, was however followed up by SIMEC/Atlantis with three-bladed 1.5MW units, four of which were successfully installed in 2017 in Pentland Firth in Scotland, as the first stage of a pla...

The UK is to provide ‘up to £20 billion funding for early deployment of Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage (CCUS), to help meet the government’s climate commitments .’ Does this make any sense when progress on this new set of technologies has been so slow around the world? Some major projects have been abandoned and a recent study from Oxford University Smith Business School claimed that the economics was not attractive . What is being talked up is not just carbon capture and storage to allow for continued  use of fossil fuel, but also the use of biomass as a feedstock so that the overall process, with carbon storage, is carbon negative. The problem is that there are eco-issues with the use of biomass from forestry products , as well as issues with trying secure carbon storage sites on an indefinite basis- not least the cost. One way in which the cost might be offset/avoided is to convert some of the captured  CO2 into a usable synfuel-  that’s the CCUS idea. But the conv...