Renew Extra Weekly

Labours new plan for siting many small modular reactor (SMR) plants around the UK feels almost like something Trump would come up with. As I argued in a letter to the Guardian , the reality is that many of them would not be small - for example, the system being developed by Rolls Royce is 470 MW, larger than most of the old, now closed, Magnox reactors that were built in the UK in the 1960s.  And whatever the design chosen they will not be cheap - even backers, like the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change , have admitted that they ‘could have higher costs per MW compared to gigawatt-scale reactors’.   In addition, there would be a range of safety and security risk issues with local deployment, especially with large numbers of small units in or near urban areas- nuclear plants are usually located in remote sites. Will many people want one near them? By comparison, with costs falling, as I noted in my last post, public support for renewables, like solar and offshore wi...

 The Social Market Foundation, a cross-party think-tank, says that 48% of UK  survey respondents felt the ‘green transition’ was ‘happening to them, not with them’.  And 63% thought it wouldn’t work anyway. Certainly there has been some opposition to some green polices, and there have been claims that Starmer’s plan to remove ‘infrastructure blockers’, for example local objectors to green energy projects like wind and solar farms, and the extra grid links needed for them, could backfire .  Although Labours plans for ‘pushing past nimbyism’ and putting many new small nuclear plants around the country could also attract fierce local opposition. In this case, small isn’t green- indeed, as well as potentially costing more, SMRs may actually increase security, safety and waste management problem. Lots of issues there too then. So, one way or another there may be battles ahead. For example, the government wants to bring large onshore wind projects back into the National...

In recent months, the deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has been pushed as a key way forward for economic growth, for example by Kier Starmer in the UK and Trump in the USA. See my earlier post .  It’s certainly been seen as a big deal, by the USA especially, not least in terms of its likely impact on power demand . Globally, by 2035, IDTechEx forecasts that the continued growth of artificial intelligence will result in over 2000 TWh of energy being consumed by data centres.  So with a vast and increasing  amount of energy being used to churn through ever larger data bases, emission targets may be hard to achieve. Some US big data companies seemed to think that green sources would not be enough to deal with this and that a big expansion of nuclear would be necessary- either new Small Modular Reactors or revamped large plants.  In one of its scenarios, Goodman Sachs Research claimed that ‘85-90 GW of new nuclear capacity would be needed to meet a...

 The green energy transition  ‘is often presented as the latest in a series of transitions that have shaped modern history. The first was from organic energy – muscle, wind and water power – to coal. The second was from coal to hydrocarbons (oil and gas). The third transition will be the replacement of fossil fuels by forms of renewable energy.’ So says Adam Tooze in a useful extended LRB review of French historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s book ‘Moore and more: an all- consuming history of energy,’ which, as Tooze says, is very challenging, to current energy and climate policies, given that Fressoz doesn’t agree with this model of change.  Instead Fressoz argues that, far from the industrial era passing through a series of transformations, each new phase has in practice remained almost wholly entangled with the previous one. So he adopts what Tooze calls an ‘accumulation’ view, ‘based not on progressive shifts from one source of energy to the next, but on their interdepe...