Renew Extra Weekly

The Global Warming Policy Foundation, no stranger to controversy, has published a report on nuclear prospects , which is quite damning, with the GWPF claiming that it shows that the nuclear industry is now so dysfunctional it may have no future in the UK without a concerted policy and regulatory effort. The report’s author, energy consultant and Daily Telegraph columnist Kathryn Porter, says ‘most of our existing nuclear fleet will close in the next few years, with almost nothing to replace it, and I see little cause for optimism that the economic or regulatory environment will produce significant new capacity any time soon.’ GWPF director Dr Benny Peiser said: ‘If policymakers are serious about realistic and sustainable decarbonisation policies, they need to be serious about accelerating nuclear power - and swiftly. Kathryn Porter’s paper shows that they are nothing of the sort. The Government needs to adopt a radically different attitude in order to turbo charge a nuclear renaissance...

The National Infrastructure Commissions new report says that ‘heat pumps should be the dominant electrified heating solution. They are highly efficient, available now and are deploying rapidly in other countries. For every unit of energy paid for, a heat pump can generate around three units of heat (by ‘pumping’ heat from outside into the house), whereas a fossil fuel boiler generates less than one unit of heat per unit of energy paid for’. There is certainly a widespread view now that they are better than hydrogen for home heating.  And, on the basis of its analysis, the NIC asserts that ‘there is no public policy case for hydrogen to be used to heat individual buildings. It should be ruled out as an option to enable an exclusive focus on switching to electrified heat’.  It notes that ‘there is growing evidence that heat pumps are suitable in a wide range of building types. The government has stated that 90% of homes already have sufficient energy efficiency and internal ele...

In an update for the Sustainability by Numbers web site, Hannah Ritchie takes a new look at the late Prof. David MacKay’s influential 2008 energy study, ‘ Sustainable energy without the hot air ’, based on a recent study from the Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, which found that renewables are much better placed now. She says it shows that the potential for solar PV and wind, on and offshore, are much larger than MacKay thought, with floating wind adding an extra new resource, and public acceptance now much higher, while costs are very much lower. It does seem that, a result of these and other changes, MacKay’s conclusions that renewables were not very viable now looks very dated.   The Smith School study estimated that the UK could produce 2,895 TWh of electricity each year from solar and wind. That’s almost double its estimate for final energy demand in 2050 and very much more than the 203TWh MacKay calculated for the ‘practical’ resource. It’s even m...

In my last post I looked back at how I had covered the history of renewables in the Renew newsletter over the years. Renew started life in 1979 as the bimonthly newsletter of NATTA, the Open University based Network for Alternative Technology and Technology Assessment, sent out to members in paper format until 2009, after which it went digital. It’s still running in various formats offering continual on-line coverage of renewable developments, a useful research resource if nothing else.    However, with that in mind, given that my old office at the Open University was being closed down, I wanted to find a home for all the NATTA paper files and hard copy back issues of Renew- it seemed a waste to junk all this unique material. So I was very pleased that the Mills Archive in Reading offered to take it all. Their archive programme seems a very valuable project and it is evidently expanding its coverage of recent developments.  As their web site says  ‘The Mills Archive...

An overview by Dave Elliott As I am just about to hit my 80th birthday, I felt that I could indulge in a little retrospective commentary on what I’ve been covering, in various formats, in the Renew news service over the years, since I started it as an OU-based Newsletter back in 1979 . You may recall that was when Margaret Thatcher took over as UK Prime Minister. In terms of power supply, the issues in the UK at the time were coal and nuclear, with the renewables only slowly getting recognised, and then only marginally.  43 years on and it’s mostly a different  story-  renewables have won pretty much across the board , coal is out, and gas maybe too soon, but nuclear is still with us, just about.  My focus as Renew’s editor has always been to support the progressive outsider options. So in terms of renewables, early on that meant pushing wind and solar at a time when both were seen as beyond the pale. For example, as I noted in my history of UK renewables book , a 1...

Wind, solar and storage now look like the cheapest power mix for the UK, with a new report from the Royal Society looking to ‘200 GW of wind & solar capacity & 100 TWh of storage capacity’, by 2050, assuming 570 TWh/yr of national power demand. Their report sees renewables as well able to supply all UK power needs, but needing significant storage capacity to balance long lulls in renewable availability. For that, it backs Hydrogen, which it says ‘can be stored at scale in solution- mined salt caverns, for which GB has a much more than adequate potential, albeit not widely distributed’. In addition to large-scale storage, it notes that ‘some fast response storage is needed to regulate grid voltage and frequency’, with advanced batteries being an option, but it says ‘this function, which is costed assuming that it is provided by Li-ion batteries, takes little energy and has a negligible impact on other storage needs’. It says that Compressed air energy storage can help a bit, bu...

The Conservative government has been cutting back on some green policies, with, for example, the date after which the sale of new petrol and diesel cars are banned being shifted from 2030 to 2035,  the energy efficiency task force being shut down and the Hydrogen levy being abandoned. These and other green policy changes will have impacts and they have attracted some strong reactions . Although the conservatives have nevertheless still maintained support for renewables, they have had problems with the deployment of heat pumps, and also planning issues with on shore wind and large solar farm, and even the much vaunted off-shore wind programme has gone a bit amiss .  So it is not surprising that Labour thinks it can take a lead in pushing green energy policies. Ed Miliband, shadow secretary of state of climate change and net zero, announced plans to double onshore wind, treble solar and quadruple offshore wind as part of his speech at the recent Labour Party conference- altho...