Renew Extra Weekly

It’s that time of year when editors seem happy to let a few dubious stories through. Most of the media ran with this one on yet another nuclear fusion breakthrough- this one at the Lawrence Livermore labs in California, at the National Ignition Facility. Well, with the climate change threat looming, non-fossil energy is a big issue just now-  and its certainly cold out! So is help at hand? Well no, not for some time at least . And at unknown cost. Even if this laser based system, which was designed primarily for replicating the physics of H-bomb ignition, can be made to deliver energy on a large scale reliably and safely , it’s going to take a while- it’s a very long shot . An equally familiar but arguably much more welcome newspaper article was this one on energy saving . As seems to be said almost every week now, saving energy saves money.  And it’s available now. But no one seems to notice. Energy conservation is just not sexy. Not like high tech fusion or  hydrogen- ...

It’s been a wild year politically in the UK. After a period when windfall taxes were resisted, we ended up with a government which bowed to them- as did most of the EU. And they even  got extended to cover power. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt hit electricity generation companies with a 45% Energy Electricity Generator Levy , on their ‘excess returns’ as he attempted to fund measures to ease the cost of living crisis. That was in addition to the existing windfall tax on North Sea oil & gas operators which is to be raised from 25% to 35% and extended by 2 years until 2028.  Renewable energy suppliers that operate under the Contracts for Difference system are exempted from the new electricity tax, but not those who are operating under the Renewables Obligation (RO). So they will be hit quite hard- they had after all enjoyed a significant wind fall since the RO subsidy level was high, based on the assumption that gas was cheap. It no longer is.  There will now be an incentive to...

Drax, a major UK biomass energy company, wants to develop biomass plants with carbon capture and storge (BECCS) on a large scale, but a new report depicts Drax as being caught up a ‘swirl of controversy and increased polarisation’, including starkly diverging views between many of the scientists involved in the biomass area. That certainly seem to be the case, with some NGOs also being bitterly opposed to Drax’s current large scale operations. The report notes that ‘some NGOs now believe that there is no role for unabated bioenergy (i.e. burning biomass without CCS, as currently happens at Drax), and only a very limited role for BECCS at scale. Others acknowledge that there may indeed be a role, but only if certain conditions as to ‘BECCS Done Well’ are strictly complied with’. To explore that possibility, Drax commissioned Forum for the Future to carry out an independent Inquiry into what those conditions for ' BECCS Done Well'  might look like, primarily with a focus on Drax...

The battle over whether nuclear power should be retained in UK energy plans continues, with press reports that the go ahead given by Boris Johnson for the proposed  Sizewell C European Pressurised-water Reactor might be reconsidered given its costs.  However, lobby support for nuclear remain quite strong (there was even a pro-nuclear editorial in the Observer ) and the standard view, that we needed more nuclear, was given a full airing by Baroness Byrony Worthington in Prospect magazine.   She was once an opponent of nuclear, but now says that its problems have been overstated, and that it has a great future, there being many still not fully developed options. For example, she points to high temperature and fast reactors, and the use of thorium and molten salt fuels.  She even managed to be positive on waste: ‘The higher the radioactivity, the quicker it decays to a safe state’. And also on costs: ‘Nuclear power provides power throughout the year and this makes...

Technological innovation can be chaotic and even disastrous at times, as with early attempts at flight .  In the renewable energy field there have been failures, including with some early wave energy systems.  But in general, we have learnt from them, and, for the leading technologies, wind and solar, we have now moved on to steady progress. Some new wind ideas have emerged, most obviously floating offshore systems, but the basic horizontal propellor-type technology dominates so far, with the units getting larger and taller . Nevertheless,  Darius ‘eggbeater’ type vertical axis systems are being looked at again. So too are double-unit vertical axis contra-rotating systems. However, although very varied in design, micro wind designs have generally not been favoured of late, given their lower efficiency, but some novel small wind ideas have still emerged and may yet have niche markets.   Some new PV cell materials are emerging, beyond just crystalline and thin ...

A new optimistic Nature paper from the LUT University in Finland looks to a key role being played by renewables for rapid transitioning of the power sector across states in India. Progress has been uneven at times, but LUT says that a renewables-based power system by 2050 could be ‘lower in cost than the current  coal dominated system’ and have ‘zero greenhouse gas emissions’ while providing ‘reliable electricity to around 1.7 billion people’.  Electricity generation would be based on solar PV, wind energy, and hydropower, while batteries and multi-fuel reciprocating internal combustion engines based on synthetic fuels provide the required flexibility to the power system. This transition, it says, would ‘address  multiple imperatives: affordability, accessibility, and sustainability without compromising economic growth’. Solar PV capacity increases in all the states during the transition, and from 2030 onwards, PV has a steady average annual growth rate of 35% across th...

The UK may currently be going through a very erratic time politically, but a recent Oxford-based study suggests there may be some clarity ahead when it comes to energy issues. It asks ‘Is there a path forward that can get us to net-zero emissions cheaply and quickly?’ and its answer is: ‘Very likely, and the savings are probably quite large.’ Indeed, the savings could be very large, mainly since, the team says ‘its analysis supports other recent efforts using up-to-date data and technology assumptions that conclude that the green energy transition may be cheap’.   It notes that the 2022 IPCC AR6 estimates that the additional cost of decarbonizing the energy system in order to have a greater than 67% chance of keeping warming below 2°C corresponds to a GDP loss in 2050 of 1.3%–2.7%. But the Oxford team study suggests that  ‘there is likely no cost at all—the transition is expected to be a net economic benefit, raising future GDP’.  Is this credible? The teams ‘empiri...