Renew Extra Weekly

The long awaited, much delayed, White Paper on Energy did not emerge as expected in mid November, but UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson did launch a ten-point energy plan to set the UK on a path to ‘net zero carbon’ by 2050. As had been indicated in previous announcements, renewables are strongly featured in the proposed ‘Green Industrial Revolution’. Offshore was wind expected to be producing enough power ‘for every home, quadrupling how much we produce to 40GW by 2030, supporting up to 60,000 jobs’.  In particular, 1 GW of floating offshore wind capacity was expected to be in place by then.  The 40 GW offshore wind target had already been set in the 2019 Conservative Manifesto and most of the other commitment in the new plan are in fact not new. Indeed, it has been claimed that only £3bn of the £12 bn total mentioned was actually new money. However, there was now more detail.  For example, on hydrogen, much talked up of late, there is a target to generate 5GW of low car...

As I reported in my last post , the use of hydrogen has been talked up strongly recently, but it has also been opposed quite strongly. Indeed BNEFs Michael Liebreich says ‘forget hydrogen’ for many things - it will be too expensive to replace fossil gas for some end uses and is not very efficient as an energy vector.   In a new review he claims that ‘as an energy storage medium, it has only a 50% round-trip efficiency – far worse than batteries. As a source of work, fuel cells, turbines and engines are only 60% efficient – far worse than electric motors – and far more complex. As a source of heat, hydrogen costs four times as much as natural gas. As a way of transporting energy, hydrogen pipelines cost three times as much as power lines, and ships and trucks are even worse’.  This view seems to clash with an earlier more positive vision promoted by BNEF in its 'Hydrogen Economy Outlook' , which claimed that ‘hydrogen has potential to become the fuel that powers a clean e...

Trade body RenewableUK wants the UK to become a global leader in the development of green hydrogen. It says the UK government must publish a hydrogen strategy detailing how the fuel will evolve from a niche alternative to a central driver of the net zero transition.  RUK’s report Renewable Hydrogen - Seizing the UK Opportunity calls on the government to back green hydrogen, produced using renewable energy, by supporting the renewable sector as it attempts to replicate the success of the UK's offshore wind industry: ‘The Strategy should include a clear plan to deliver the first gigawatt of electrolyser capacity in the UK, identifying potential projects and funding where appropriate to drive innovation and investment, including "at scale" demonstrations for production and storage’. RUK recommends setting a target of 5GW of renewable electrolyser capacity by 2030 and 10GW by 2035, along with a cost reduction target of £2 per kilogram of green hydrogen by 2030, from £8/kg cu...

Ecosystems are complex, and if we want to change ours, or rather avoid what we have being changed too much by our activities, we have to make some trade offs amongst some of the energy sources and sinks in the mix, and avoid what may seem to be easy short cuts.  For example, some look to using food waste as an energy source. It sounds sensible, since the waste already exits, but Feedback research carried out with help from Bangor University says that to cut emissions most we need to cut food waste not recycle it as energy.  Feedback’s report ‘Bad Energy’ claims that preventing food waste results in direct emissions savings of over nine times higher than from processing it into biogas via anaerobic digestion (AD)- basically letting it rot in a confined space thus producing methane gas.  And afforestation on the roughly 3 million hectares of grassland that would be spared if we could halve UK food waste, would save and offset about 11.3% of the UK's current total greenhous...

There has never been any shortage of critical commentary on renewables. Indeed, as they succeed and expand more it seems to increase! Australia’s Salt Bush Club is a reliable source of invective in this area.  In a recent post it summarised its environmental case against renewables as follows : ‘Green Energy isn’t green. It has a huge cost in rare metals; it creates toxic waste problems; solar panels create solar deserts; turbines chop birds and steal wind and rain from inland areas; and now they want to steal fresh water and energy to export low-energy explosive hydrogen.’ Some of this is old stuff- which is being addressed. That  may often only require relatively simple modifications.  For example, wind turbine impacts on birds are relatively rare if the wind farms are properly sited, but collision risks can evidently be reduced even more (by 72%) if one blade is painted black .  The scale of water use from hydrogen production is a newer issue. Salt Bush say ‘Elec...

The International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2020 says the pandemic will have had  major global impacts in energy terms.  Global energy demand is set to drop by 5% in 2020, and energy investment by 18%. The impacts vary by fuel, with estimated falls of 8% in oil demand and 7% in coal use, but only a 3% fall in gas demand, while global electricity demand looks set to be down by a relatively modest 2% for the year.  In climate terms, that means that energy-related CO2 emissions fell by 7%, aided by the fact the renewables showed a slight increase despite the pandemic. As a result, there is expected to be a 2.4 gigatonne decline in annual CO2 emissions, taking them globally back to where they were a decade ago, although there may not have been a similar fall in 2020 in emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from the energy sector, despite lower oil & gas output. So there is still a way to go to achieve climate targets. Although the pandemic and its a...

Renewables have been accelerating ahead in China, which is adding far more capacity each year than any other country, with over 760GW installed so far.  By contrast, the EU has only managed 500GW, the USA 250 GW.  However, the pace of expansion in China has slowed of late.  Annual onshore wind capacity additions in China are expected to fall by over 16% to 19 GW from 2020 to 2021, given the Chinese government’s decision to end subsidies, say analysts Wood Mackenzie .   Even so, over the next decade Wood Mac expect 250 GW of wind capacity to be added, with repowering opportunities onshore and growth potential offshore. Indeed, some see the latter booming dramatically. So, while wind subsidies will fall by 3.2%, wind capacity will still grow, and PV solar seem likely to do even better: incentives for PV will rise by 14%, with some seeing solar as the major growth area longer term, helping China get 62% of its power from non-fossil sources by 2030.   Whe...