Renew Extra Weekly

There has of late been something of a global nuclear PR push, but it's perhaps been oddly timed in that  not everything has been going its own way. The USA’s flagship NuScale Small Modular Reactor (SMR) has taken a dive. It was seen as the pioneer for cheap fast-build mini-reactors, a scaled down but otherwise conventional pressurised water reactor. But, despite some speculative funding, it was looking increasingly dodgy financially, with lawyers circling like vultures . And then the big Idaho Falls NuScale project was cancelled. WIRED said this had been on the cards since ‘the utilities backing the plant were spooked by a 50% increase in the projected costs’. That was not seen as good news for other SMRs further back in development. Some see it all as a bit of a dangerous gamble .  Maybe not the right time then for the UK to launch what amounted to a promotional report ‘ Made in Britain : The Pathway to a Nuclear Renaissance’. Produced by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (...

After a review of the evidence, including the impact of global events on supply chains, the government has raised the maximum price offshore wind projects can receive in the next UK Contracts for Difference (CfD) next year. Infamously, in the last round in September, with gas prices and materials costs rising, the price cap was set too low for offshore wind and there were no bids for projects – which came as a big shock since it had been doing very well.  Some predicted the ‘end of wind power as we know it’, and it certainly was worrying, with some plans for new projects being halted.  However, on reflection, what was arguably more worrying was that the government had been warned about this problem, but had done little about it. Thankfully, now it has. So for the next round, the maximum strike price has been increased by 66% for offshore wind projects, from £44/MWh to £73/MWh, and by 52% for floating offshore wind projects, from £116/MWh to £176/MWh, also for Allocation Round...

Hydrogen is the most common molecule in the Universe, and on earth we have a lot of water, as well as hydrocarbon fossil deposits, from which hydrogen can be extracted. There are even a few geological sources of natural hydrogen around the world .  Since it produces mainly just water when it’s burnt, some look to a future hydrogen-based society, with hydrogen acting as a key clean energy vector. It’s a lively field for research and discussion, with a quite wide range of options being on the table and much debate about choices as to which should be followed up and the way ahead.      An Open University webinar last November, part of its Green Infrastructure week, looked at ‘what would it take for hydrogen to have a place in the UK’s net zero energy future?’ It was hosted by Dr Victoria Hands, OU Sustainability Director, with a panel of OU experts led by Dr William J. Nuttall, OU Professor of Energy. He argued that, though green power electrification was very importa...

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...