Renew Extra Weekly

Graham Stuart, now a Minister of State at the new Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, recently told the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee : ‘I would love it if storage to deal with the intermittent renewables became cheaper, more effective and better for long-term storage and the like. I am not saying that we will definitely have 25% of our electricity from nuclear. That is our ambition; that is our thinking; but as technology, prices and the economics develop, we want tensions between these technologies to deliver it. However, what I can say is that we are absolutely committed to nuclear as a significant share of our electricity because we need that baseload and are committed to driving it forward.’  So that’s a positive ‘go’ signal, although funding is still a major problem, and, despite much talk, progress on the proposed  ‘24 GW of nuclear by 2050’ programme seems to have slipped behind.  As NuClear News 141 reported, at the end of November la...

In a new Ember report on European power, Dave Jones, perhaps rather surprisingly, says  ‘Europe has avoided the worst of the energy crisis. The shocks of 2022 only caused a minor ripple in coal power and a huge wave of support for renewables. Any fears of a coal rebound are now dead. Europe's clean power transition emerges from this crisis stronger than ever. Not only are European countries still committed to phasing out coal, they are now striving to phase out gas as well. The energy crisis has undoubtedly sped up Europe’s electricity transition. Europe is hurtling towards a clean, electrified economy.’  That’s pretty optimistic stuff. But then there is plenty to be optimistic about. For example, it’s not just the massive expansion of renewables on the supply side, with wind and especially PV roaring ahead, progress is at last hopefully to be made on the demand side as well. The European  Commission has called for all new buildings in the EU to be zero-emission by 2028,...

In the early days of renewable energy development, attempts were made to predict or project likely energy contributions in the future. They mostly got it spectacularly wrong. Although it did seem clear that the theoretical potential was very high, in practice the realistic contribution in the short to medium term was seen as being relatively small.   In 1982, the UK Energy Technology Support Unit, based at the UKAEA nuclear labs at Harwell, explored the likely rate of diffusion of the various renewable energy technologies, using the ETSU supply/demand/ fuel price scenarios up to 2025 as a backdrop. ESTU’s R14 report concluded that ‘the technical potential of the renewable resources is about half to two thirds of the total UK energy supplied by oil, coal, gas and nuclear’. But it said  ‘these are unrealistic figures since they take no account of the economic, environmental and market related factors’. Thus by 2025, wind, tidal and geothermal power were seen in reality as, ...

The share of renewables in global primary energy may increase ‘from around 10% in 2019 to between 35-65% by 2050, driven by the improved cost competitiveness of renewables, together with the increasing prevalence of policies encouraging a shift to low-carbon energy’. So says BP in its latest Global Energy Outlook . It does see wind and solar accounting ‘for all or most of the growth in power generation’, but even at the top of the range quoted, it still falls a lot short of the renewable ‘100% of total energy’ scenarios that have been produced by some academics in recent years.  To fill the gap to zero net carbon, BP sees wide-scale use being made use of carbon capture technology, as well as some nuclear power. And it says ‘Natural declines in existing production sources mean there needs to be continuing upstream investment in oil and natural gas over the next 30 years’. You won’t find much support for these fossil and nuclear options in the scenarios produced by Stanford Universi...

A new Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) consultation paper proposes reforms to the UK Capacity Market, the contract system which provides incentives to electricity providers to ensure security of supply is maintained. The potential changes to the market are designed to boost investment in cleaner alternatives to the gas-fired power stations that have so far dominated this market , with most of them being existing plants.  Controversially, some old inflexible nuclear plants have also been subsidised under the scheme- for example 4 in the 2021 four year ahead (T4) contract round. BEIS doesn’t mention that, but says energy storage systems and flexible grid/demand response services ought to be encouraged now, along possibly with Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage plants, although it’s worth noting that the gas plants with CCUS are likely to be less flexible. But, for good or ill, as we shall see, some gas plants will be allowed to run if their emissi...

LUT University in Finland has found that a 100% renewable energy/storage mix would save the UK over €120 bn by 2050 compared with the UK Government’s current net zero plan. That’s one conclusion from a series of scenarios in a new LUT report . Its ‘Best Policy Scenario’ (BPS), aims for 100% renewable energy in 2050, with offshore wind as the main resource, limiting onshore wind and solar according to available land area, but its backed up by a second scenario called ‘Inter-Annual Storage’ (IAS) which adds on to the BPS the required inter-annual storage needed to provide good levels of insurance against the possibilities of low-wind years.  A third scenario (BPSplus) tests the limits of higher land area availability for onshore wind and solar photovoltaics, and where also renewable electricity-based e-fuel imports are allowed. And finally, a fourth scenario, called ‘Current Policy Scenario’ (CPS), looks at the UK Government’s strategy for net zero as published in 2020. The generatio...

The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) has produced a radical set of proposals for ‘accelerating the transition from fossil fuels and securing energy supplies’.  On the demand side, it says that a national ‘war effort’ on energy efficiency is required to cut energy bills, reduce emissions and ensure energy security. according to a cross-party committee of MPs. On energy saving in buildings , it says ‘the current ECO scheme is not delivering anywhere near the numbers of energy efficiency improvements it did at its peak a decade ago. The Government needs to ensure that ECO+ is properly funded to deliver hundreds of thousands if not millions of improvements every year for the remainder of this decade. We recommend that the Government set a target to build capacity in the energy efficiency sector, with an objective to deliver at least 1 million installations a year by 2025 and 2.5 million a year by the end of the decade. The Government should direct the newly-announc...