Renew Extra Weekly

Energy prices are rising fast. The costs of renewables like wind and solar are falling. So you would think that would be a good thing- helping out. And the more the better.  However, there can be problems when financial support systems use fossil fuel prices as the base for subsidies for renewables. They were assumed to cost more, but that’s no longer true, and so, although it’s not the cause of consumer price rises, there have been some perverse out-comes, with, for example, renewables getting more support than they need and enjoying so-called windfall profits.  That has happened in parts of Europe where, under the marginal cost ‘premium price’ subsidy systems, the cost of the most expensive generator defines the price for all generators. Originally the high costs options were wind and solar, but now it is gas. So some consumers are being overcharged. A critique carried by Euractiv claimed that ‘in Germany (and proportionally in other countries) citizens are funding renewabl...

Nuclear power’s development has been both exciting and difficult, as well as controversial. In this new book , an updated and much expanded second edition of the 2017 text that I wrote for the Institute of Physics (IoP), I look first at the early history of nuclear innovation in the 1950s, when, growing out of the weapons programme, a wide range of ideas for uranium fission reactors were tested, mainly in the USA and UK. As it attempts to show, many of the pilot projects were unsuccessful, indeed some proved dangerous, but some viable lines of power plant development were identified, mostly water-cooled reactors.  The book then moves on to the present, when, with economic problems facing the current generation of water-cooled nuclear plants, some of the other older ideas are being revisited.  The book looks critically at progress on these ideas so far and asks will any of them be successful, or will nuclear fission prove to be a dead end as an energy option? It also looks at ...

Renewable energy has the potential to create twice as many jobs as nuclear, and three times as many jobs per million pounds invested compared to gas or coal power, while investment in energy efficiency can create five times as many. So says a new UK Energy Research Centre study of Green Job Creation , based on a new review of the literature.  It’s an update to their earlier 2014 low carbon energy & employment study. That was a bit more cautious about making final pronouncements, since, it said , it was difficult to assess net economy-wide impacts over time. For example, though some sectors might benefit more than others, if there was full employment, new investment was unlikely to create extra jobs net of any losses. A bit sniffily it said  ‘the proper domain for the debate about the long-term role of renewable energy and energy efficiency is the wider framework of energy and environmental policy, not a narrow analysis of green job impacts.’ It certainly can be tricky to ...

UK energy policy seems to be in a mess.  For example, it’s very odd that, given the huge problem of rising power bills, the government is still constraining the expansion onshore wind, outside of a few local projects. UCL’s Prof. Mike Grubb told the FT (10/4/22), that it was ‘our cheapest energy resource - it typically costs about a third to a quarter of what people will soon be paying for their electricity - but it is, with solar, the only one that could make a dent in the short term’.  On shore wind is also now very popular, with 80 % backing it in the last official poll . In a more recent Opinium poll , 79% of Tory voters asked backed winds farms, as did 83% of Labour voters, but only 46% of all voters backed nuclear and that fell to under a third for nuclear plants near them. Picking up on the nuclear issue, Grubb commented that : ‘Nuclear is not only slow and expensive, it would need to be flexible to ramp up and down with the swings of demand, wind and solar. This furthe...

In a paper on the UK’s Net Zero Carbon plan, produced for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Prof. Michael Kelly says that ‘we are certain to have an economic and societal catastrophe if we persist on the projects to deliver the net-zero economy by 2050.’ And, via a tour of the energy sectors, he provides chapter and verse on why he thinks that the planned programme can’t realistically achieve its targets. In terms of heating, he worries about the idea of replacing gas use with electric heat pumps. He notes that ‘in winter, we use three times as much heat as electricity. If this heat was provided by radiant heaters, we would need a grid four times the size of today’s just to keep homes & businesses warm. If we use air-source & ground-source heat pumps, with a coefficient of performance of 3:1 - optimistic given the poor quality of the thermal envelope of UK houses - then the grid would need only to be double the size, for the heat element alone’.  However, combining thi...

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)  is sometimes claimed to be able to capture up to 90% of the carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by burning fossil fuels like coal or natural gas, and it has been strongly promoted as a major carbon removal option. Certainly there is a lot of interest in it. However, there are some big issues, not least that it rarely achieves anything like 90% removal- the CCS process needs energy to run and producing that generates CO2. In the case of production of so-called Blue Hydrogen from fossil gas using the Steam Methane Reformation process (SMR) backed up by CCS, flue gasses are also released, which can reduce the overall CO2 saving to 60%. So a review by Pembrina in Canada says that if an SMR facility with CCS  ‘captures 80% of its carbon process stream - but only about 60% of carbon is emitted in the process stream – it captures only 48% of the total carbon produced’. That figure was used in a Global Witness report, which also said that total system CO2 s...

Renewables are expanding rapidly, but since some of them have variable power outputs, there is a need for balancing systems, including energy storage.  That may have to cope with occasional long lulls in renewable power availability. The need for long duration electricity storage (LDES) has certainly been recognised by policy makers, but at present, according to a new study by Aurora Energy Research, ‘high upfront costs and long lead times, combined with a lack of revenue certainty and missing market signals, leads to under investment, resulting in higher power sector costs and emissions’. So it is not happening yet.   However, Aurora says the UK will need 24 GW of LDES by 2035 to effectively manage the intermittency of renewable generation, and as part of 46 GW of overall storage.  And it claims that this will be very worth-while, since ‘introducing LDES in large quantities in GB by 2035 can reduce carbon emissions by 10 MtCO2 p.a., reduce system costs by £1.13 bn ...