Renew Extra Weekly

Some say that renewables cannot expand fast enough to deal with the climate crisis.   That in the end is a matter of political will- technologically, they can be ramped up to meet all our needs, the ramp rate however depends on how much support they are given. If, instead, support is given to other options, then the negative conclusion becomes self fulfilling. The most obvious alternative is nuclear power. That is not doing well at present most places in the world, with its economics looking very problematic compared to all else, including renewables, but resources do still flow to it. And the nuclear lobby is still very strong, forever churning out promotional material. Even the usually hard-headed Financial Times occasionally succumbs, as with a piece by Jonathan Ford on 17th Nov 2019, in which he said ‘nuclear power remains one of the few technologies the world has for reliably generating zero-carbon electricity’ . As was quickly pointed out by academic critics, the evide...

The UK Government is to remove its ban on funding onshore wind & solar PV via the Contracts for Difference subsidy system. If current plans are accepted, they will both be eligible for support in the next years CfD auction, and, depending on how the competition plays out, there could be 1GW going ahead - 700 MW of wind and 300 MW of solar in that round.   A big change from the dramatic slow-down caused by the constraints imposed by the government, with, longer term, up to 7GW of onshore wind projects being said to be ready to go ahead, and also 6GW of PV . Other CfD changes are also proposed, including the creation of a new support framework for floating offshore wind and the extension of the CfD ‘delivery years’ to March 2030 . But, with public support for solar at 85% and for on-shore wind at 78%, the U-turn on the CfD block to them, long called for, was the big news and it was widely welcomed , although Labour Energy Minister Dr Alan Whitehead said: ‘We now need to ca...