Renew Extra Weekly

 The UK power grid will need upgrading as it tries to take on heat pump power demand and electric vehicle battery charging loads. And on the supply side, new grid links are needed around the country to link to new wind projects – including those in sensitive areas like the Highland of Scotland .  There’s also a need for new links across East Anglia to carry power from its offshore wind projects and from the proposed Sizewell C nuclear plant on the Suffolk coast to the rest of the country. It’s the same in some other parts of the country- new power links will be needed  However, there has been strong opposition to new pylons in most places. In some locations it may be possibly to put power grids underground, but although views are changing  (for example, given their possible role in starting wild fires) overhead cables have usually been strongly favoured. They can carry more power at higher voltages and, crucially, burying grid cables safely is a very expensive ...

The UK may have been having issues with some areas of energy, but at least it did look to still be doing well with offshore wind- its flagship green energy programme. However then came the results of the 5th round of the Contract for Difference (CfD) support system. Offshore wind had been tokenly allocated 5GW in that, but in the event no offshore wind projects have gone forward- zero!   There had been plenty of warnings, not least Vattenfall’s exit from the 1.4 GW Boreas offshore wind project. It had had won a CfD contract for its Boreas project last year at a record low price of £37.35/MWh. But the market has now evidently changed, making it economically unviable for Vallenfall and it seems others, even at the £44/MWh CfD strike price cap initially set for this round.  As noted in my last post, there had been some minor adjustments (a bit more capital head room) to try to keep the show on the road, but to no avail- this round was a complete wipe out for offshore wind. I...

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...