Renew Extra Weekly

2024 has seen some big changes in the energy world, with, for example, the UK announcing an 81% climate emissions cut target for 2035 at the COP 29 climate summit!  Renewables have gone from strength to strength, with offshore wind expanding rapidly in the UK and PV solar now getting amazingly cheap- under €0.06/W in Europe. And the problem of having to balance variable renewables with variable demand may have become a bit less onerous, with a new German study claiming that an energy system dominated by solar and wind energy, along with storage and flexible demand management systems, need not have nuclear or fossil fuel base-load power stations to guarantee supply security.  Indeed, even leaving aside green hydrogen storage and other backup options, it has been  claimed that grid stability and inertia management may not be as hard with renewables on the grid as it’s sometimes portrayed, although it may add to the cost, as of course will storage.  However, in terms ...

In a useful new monograph on hydrogen, Prof Bill Nuttall and his co-authors are quite upbeat about the prospect for hydrogen, challenging the current view that the future will be mostly electric. ‘Electricity did not triumph in the twentieth century because it was the cheapest way to light a city at night or to drive factory machinery by day, it succeeded because it aligned with user needs (electricity was clean, convenient and increasingly reliable) and it also sat well with the Zeitgeist of the 1930s and modernism. Similarly, hydrogen transport and mobility sells itself not on price, but on other attributes’.  So will hydrogen and  clean synfuels triumph in the Twenty-First Century? The authors of this monograph mostly seem to think so! And not just for ‘ simply balancing the future electricity system.’ They say hydrogen ‘is much more than just an energy carrier. It is a potential future cryogen for high temperature superconducting magnets in a wide range of applications, b...

This interesting paper, by a team of North American and Chinese academics, says that ‘extended and unexpected periods of extremely low wind and solar resources (i.e., wind and solar droughts) pose a threat to reliability’ and it adds that ‘the challenge is further exacerbated if shortages of the two occur simultaneously or if they affect neighboring grids simultaneously’.  It propose three metrics to comprehensively assess renewable energy quality: resource availability, variability, and extremeness.  The paper, published in Nature, says that in China and many other countries, the resource availability ‘has traditionally been the decisive metric for renewable energy project development.’ But  renewable availability can and does also vary over time, so ‘variability’ is a second key metric. And extreme wind and solar ‘droughts’ can sometimes coincide locally. So it also proposes a third metric, ‘extremeness’.  Based on its mapping of China, it says that ‘at many sites...