Renew Extra Weekly

The UK spring budget announced investment of £20bn spread over the next two decades in carbon capture and support for nuclear, with a commitment to ‘spades in the ground on these projects from next year’ as energy security secretary, Grant Shapps , put it. He added ‘already a global leader in offshore wind power, we now want to do the same for the UK’s nuclear and carbon capture industries, which in turn will help cut the wholesale electricity prices to among the lowest in Europe.’  The plan is seen as part of the government’s wider strategy to address high energy costs in the future. And also as part of its Net Zero policy. Trade group  Energy UK  said: ‘High energy bills in the UK have been driven by international gas prices, so boosting our own sources of clean generation is a must to shield us from future price shocks’. But it’s hard to see how investing in CCS will help- that is fossil based. And, like nuclear, it's expensive. Energy UK does say that the new governme...

The idea that green hydrogen, produced electrolytically using renewably generated electricity, could be used for home heating has its attractions.  Green hydrogen gas could be piped to homes instead of fossil gas, or, as an interim, admixed with fossil gas to reduce the carbon content. It could be burnt in standard boilers with some marginal adjustment to the jets and make use of the old gas mains, suitably upgraded from iron to plastic, something that is well in hand anyway. So what’s not to like? It’s clean, green, storable and zero carbon and has the virtue of allowing consumers to change energy source without making major changes in their homes.  Well, that’s now all pretty much a heresy. Hydrogen heating has gone from a ‘good idea’ to a ‘bad thing’ quite quickly. BNEFs Michael Liebreich was one of the first to challenge the over-selling of hydrogen and hydrogen heating in particular. Many others joined in the critique , with the high cost of electrolysis being a major i...

 ‘Wind, hydro, and solar projects generated more electricity than gas fired power stations this winter, providing enough clean power to meet all household demand and helping to significantly reduce gas imports’. So said the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit recently.    Dr Iain Staffell from Imperial College London also said the UK was doing very well given that  ‘electricity is the only form of energy where we produce more than we consume - in comparison to our coal and gas requirements where 60-75% are still imported from abroad.’ For example, as his report for Drax indicated, on  30th December, Britain had a record of 3GW of surplus clean power produced – clean power sources produced more than 26.4GW while demand was only 23.4GW. However, the term ‘clean power’ includes nuclear power, not just renewables, and not everyone sees that as ‘green’ or sustainable.  While the likes of Boris Johnson and Grant Shapps, are very pro-nuclear, the story on the gr...

The UK remains way off to track from meeting its heat pump deployment goals: a new analysis of census data has confirmed that the vast majority of UK homes remain reliant on gas boilers. The study by innovation charity Nesta says 74% of homes continue to use gas boilers with the number of households heated by gas central heating falling by just 4% between 2011-2021. And over the past decade only 111,000 dwellings have switched from gas boilers to cleaner options.   The governments £450m boiler upgrade scheme clearly isn’t working. The scheme was allocated £150m a year for three years for £5,000 grants for the installation of home heat pumps and other low-carbon boiler replacements in England and Wales, as part of a wider heat and buildings strategy design to help meet net zero goals. The poor take-up has led to adverse comments from the House of Lords environment and climate change committee.  It noted that only a third of the schemes annual budget had been used since i...

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, ...