Renew Extra Weekly

UK renewable capacity growth has fallen to an average increase of 4.45% in the past three years, compared with an average 9.67% annual increase globally, with investment confidence falling. In a review, the UK Energy Research Centre ( UKERC ) looks at what the government is doing and says there is a looming investment gap. It says ‘to deliver on 1.5C will need substantial build-out of renewables at pace, scaling green heat (still nascent) and actually addressing energy efficiency, building retrofit and demand side flexibility and at the different scales that make up the energy transition.’ So it says the government must do more, and develop a bold new investment plan . Whereas power generation has been relatively well addressed, as UKERC says, a key nascent area is heat supply. There’s been a long running green heat debate, which continues, although electric heat pumps seem to have seen off green hydrogen on the basis that they use 3-4 times less energy for home heating. However th...

The UK Government’s new Biomass Strategy outlines the role that bio-resources can play in reaching net-zero while improving energy security. They are already supplying over 11% of UK electricity as well as heat energy and some transport fuels and the report says the prospects look good. For example, biomethane will ‘continue to play an important role in optimising the path to net zero and increasing energy security; it can support decarbonising a number of sectors such as heat, transport and power, and the anaerobic digestion (AD) process is recognised as a recycling activity, creating a more circular economy.’ However, expansion will involve some challenges, not least in terms of regulatory needs, with consistency in sustainability criteria across the bioeconomy being seen as crucial. In a forward, Energy and Net zero Minister Graham Stuart said that ‘one of the most significant challenges is securing a sustainable supply of biomass, both from within the UK and from imports. We are c...

Allison Macfarlane, who was Chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) from 2012-2014, has been looking at Small Modular Reactors in the USA and elsewhere. She thinks they are likely to be uneconomic, much like the their larger brethren, which, as she describes, have recently been doing very poorly in the USA.  Indeed, just like the EPR story in the EU, it makes for a sorry saga: ‘The two units under construction in South Carolina were abandoned in 2017, after an investment of US$9 billion. The two AP-1000 units in Georgia were to start in 2016/2017 for a price of US$14 billion. One unit started in April, 2023, the second unit promises to start later in 2023. The total cost is now over US$30 billion.’ Big reactors do look increasingly hard to fund and build on time and budget, while it is argued that smaller ones could be mass produced in factories at lower unit costs and finished units installed on site more rapidly. However, that would mean foregoing conventional econom...

 ‘Climate catastrophism has triumphed’, says Andy West in ‘The Grip of Culture,’ a new contrarian book published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). He says that this is terrible news since ‘its hi-jacking of the authority of science has enabled it to corrupt the entire policy arena,’ including energy policy. It’s bad enough that the idea of a global catastrophe, which he says is ‘unsupported by climate science’, is being spread widely, but it has also ‘overridden rational discourse, replacing technical justifications for renewables with social (moral and subjective) ones, which technical authors are ill-equipped to analyse’.  However, he says some are fighting back, for example in the renewables area. Thus he notes that geologist, climate scientist & energy analyst David Archibald, who sees renewables motivation as ‘religious’, says ‘the only reason solar & wind get a look-in is because solar panels & wind turbines are made using energy from coal at $...

Offshore wind power generation has been doing very well in the UK, with around 14 Gigawatts (GW) of capacity now installed, and progress should continue, with Hornsea 4 getting the go ahead and Crown estate releasing 6 more offshore sites for development. There is the issue of how much of the profits from these projects King Charles should retain, but maybe more importantly, there are signs that the profitability of new projects may be falling due inflation.  Vattenfall had won a contract for its Boreas project off Norfolk last year at a record low price of £37.35/MWh. But with gas and supply chain costs rising, the market has now changed, making it economically unviable at that price.  The Swedish state-owned company said costs had climbed by 40% due to a rise in global gas prices which have fed through to the cost manufacturing, putting ‘significant pressure on all new offshore wind projects’. Jess Ralston, the head of energy at the thinktank the Energy and Climate Intel...

A bit delayed, the secretary of state for energy security and net zero, Grant Shapps, has officially launched Great British Nuclear (GBN), the new ‘arm’s-length’ government agency that is meant drive the delivery of new nuclear energy projects- especially small modular reactors (SMRs). The press release was very up tempo, with the headline: ‘British nuclear revival to move towards energy independence’. It said that GBN will ‘drive rapid expansion of nuclear power at an unprecedented scale’, all apparently for just an extra £157 million, with most of that being for SMRs, including advanced High Temperature Reactors, and some new fuel production plants, the later ‘supporting the global move away from Russian fuel’.  Well, while it would be good not to use Russian fuel in future (e.g. for new SMR/HTR designs), talk of a ‘massive revival’ of UK nuclear may be a bit premature. In all about £233m has been allocated to new SMR work so far, plus £700m for the big Sizewell C., and it’s far...

It has been claimed by the Climate Change Committee (CCC) that the net-zero energy transition in the UK can deliver net-growth for jobs in key sectors. However, it also been claimed that the Government’s current ‘hands off’ approach risks stifling economic opportunities and clean technology market growth. So a big strategic issue is emerging. So far around 250,000 jobs have been created in the transition, but there are fears that the Government remains off-track to deliver its flagship goal of creating two million green jobs by 2030. Crucially, the CCC notes that the net-zero transition could offer new green employment opportunities to current economically deprived areas, although it says the majority of the UK will see ‘no major impacts’ from the net-zero transition, with only 20% of the current workforce operating in sectors that have a ‘core role’ on the delivery of net-zero. However, that still means a lot of changes. The CCC calculates that the net-zero transition can deliver be...