Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

silverwhistle

michaels wrote: »

Presumably the subsidy helps pay for the overpriced solar panels resulting from the import tariffs designed to protect a few hundred German jobs at the expense of 400m Europeans - luckily European 'democracy' prevents a powerful producers group from rent seeking at the expense of everyone else - not

Perhaps we should have done some more lobbying, but given that our own government have managed to knock back PV, kill off on-shore wind, now seems to be doing similar to tidal and wants to directly put in billions to nuclear, I'd be more concerned about that.


The example of Spain's policy on PV (to be changed I understand) shows that national governments are still far more adept at making wrong decisions than the EU.

Martyn1981

Not sure if anyone will find this interesting, but some bad news in the US a while back, was the rolling back of CAFE standards. These are corporate average fuel efficiencies for vehicles.

They meant that fuel efficiency had to keep rising across a car manufacturers fleet, and where doing fairly well. But the EPA rolled them back to remove costs on car companies.

The EPA under Trump has been rolling back all this 'red tape' and 'anti-business' regulations, such as rules against pouring coal waste into rivers.

Obviously the EPA is there to make business life harder, in order to protect the environment, but some (in the US) find this confusing!

So, a number of states, particularly California, are imposing their own emissions standards, and the number of states joining together and going down this route is growing.

Colorado Governor Orders Low Emissions Vehicle Standards

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper issued an executive order on June 19 directing the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to develop a rule to establish a low emissions vehicle program for the state which incorporates the requirements of the California LEV program. It also directs the DPHE to propose that rule to the Colorado Air Quality Control Commission during its August 2018 meeting for possible adoption into the Colorado Code of Regulations by December 30, 2018.

Martyn1981

Hoping I'm not getting over excited about this, but it's a follow up to a story I posted some time back, which looks at co-locating crops and PV, described as agrophotovoltaics or APV. This article looks at the trials.

This system 'only' gets 80% of what an all PV or all crop set up would get, but, and here's the important maths, that's 80% of both, so a total of 160% v's single use.

The article goes on to explain how the generation is being used on site to help with the crop production, packaging etc.

Fraunhofer Experiments In Chile And Vietnam Prove Value Of Agrophotovoltaic Farming

The three pilot farms will be monitored for three years. Different types of crops will be grown to determine which ones adapt best to the APV environment. “At the beginning of the project, there was a transfer of technology and know-how from Germany to Chile. In the meanwhile, the transfer is taking place at the same level in both directions. Fraunhofer ISE is profiting from the new experiences with APV in Chile and vice versa,” reports Stephan Schindele, project head of Agrophotovoltaics at Fraunhofer ISE.

The partial shading of crops planted beneath the APV scaffolding can reduce the need for irrigation. Various fruits which normally do not grow well in dry climates with high solar radiation can flourish when shaded by an APV system and livestock can benefit from less exposure to the sun. The electricity generated can power water pumps or desalination systems. In addition, it can be used for cooling and processing crops, making them preservable and therefore more profitable.

In remote regions, the quality of life is improved by access to electricity that provides improved access to information, education, and better medical care. In sub-Saharan Africa, about 92% of the rural population have no access to electricity. APV offers new sources of income to the local population and at the same time reduces the dependence on the fossil fuels that are often used to run diesel generators.

GreatApe

Martyn1981 wrote: »

This article is so, so depressing, as UK tidal potentially gets abandoned (just like PV and on-shore wind) just short of the finishing line.

!!!8216;Huge mistake!!!8217;: Britain throwing away lead in tidal energy, say developers

The UK has pretty much achieved its green goals with what is currently under development or likely to be built. We probably dont need tidal especially in the time frames it is likely to arrive and we dont have a lead to throw away

If you look at the UK grid coal and gas will make up ~40% of this years mix.
Over the next 5 years more wind and solar is being added and a LOT more interconnectors (>7GW).

The inter-connectors alone could displace the 135TWh coal/gas down towards 100TWh
If over the next 10 years solar adds 10TWh and wind 50TWh the UK grid would go towards 85% green 15% gas which is more or less as good as you can get and much better than most other nations.

Going forward if transport and heating is to be electrified we would be better off with generation that is more winter heavy so offshore wind would be better than tidal power.

Edit: This assumes the old nukes are replaced by 6-7GW of new nukes which is likely imo

zeupater

GreatApe wrote: »

The UK has pretty much achieved its green goals with what is currently under development or likely to be built. We probably dont need tidal especially in the time frames it is likely to arrive and we dont have a lead to throw away

If you look at the UK grid coal and gas will make up ~40% of this years mix.
Over the next 5 years more wind and solar is being added and a LOT more interconnectors (>7GW).

The inter-connectors alone could displace the 135TWh coal/gas down towards 100TWh
If over the next 10 years solar adds 10TWh and wind 50TWh the UK grid would go towards 85% green 15% gas which is more or less as good as you can get and much better than most other nations.

Going forward if transport and heating is to be electrified we would be better off with generation that is more winter heavy so offshore wind would be better than tidal power.

Edit: This assumes the old nukes are replaced by 6-7GW of new nukes which is likely imo

Hi

Yet, with a published timetable in hand you can predict the hourly generation for the next century with a fair degree of accuracy ... combine tidal with storage to provide a smoothing mechanism & it becomes a strategic schedulable renewable energy solution as opposed to an opportunist one requiring carbon based alternatives acting as a back-up.

The problem is that the lobby for tidal isn't as powerful as that for nuclear, coal & gas .... also, the legacy energy generation sector see such a reliable alternative source as a great threat to their own margins on maintaining plant in a 'standby' condition to cope with extended periods where wind+solar+storage tend to struggle ....

HTH
Z

Martyn1981

zeupater wrote: »

Hi

The problem is that the lobby for tidal isn't as powerful as that for nuclear, coal & gas .... also, the legacy energy generation sector see such a reliable alternative source as a great threat to their own margins on maintaining plant in a 'standby' condition to cope with extended periods where wind+solar+storage tend to struggle ....

HTH
Z

As you say the conventional fuel lobbies are very strong. Some times folk forget the big difference between RE and FF/nuclear is that RE gets its fuel for free (apart from the bio-energy industries).

I doubt the construction industry care either way what they build, but the fuel suppliers 100% need conventional generation or their business ends, completely.

Unfortunately, whilst the UK looks OK on paper, regarding leccy generation, we are falling behind now as we don't have any decent plans to de-carbonize other sectors and look like we will fail to meet targets. Promoting EV's and heat pumps would be a great start, and a return to supporting PV and on-shore wind to improve the balance of RE generation. I believe tidal is essential to help boost the RE mix, though cheap longer term storage may become viable from P2G (power to gas) but the inefficiencies work against us there unless the generation is dirt cheap.

I guess it all comes down to money, and by the time the government has rolled out the 16-17GW of new nuclear, we won't have a penny left for anything else.

The £44bn subsidy for HPC (3.2GW 7% of demand) would subsidise about 60% of our leccy mix from off-shore wind!

The £5bn investment plus £30bn subsidy for Wylfa (3GW 6.5% of demand) would subsidise about 45% of generation from off-shore wind!

Current RE 30% + 60% + 45% = 135% ..... something odd is going on, and that's before the remaining 10GW of new nuclear is built, or we start to get subsidy free, or net-subsidy free PV and on-shore wind.

silverwhistle

Promoting EV's and heat pumps would be a great start,

Something as simple as not cancelling railway electrification schemes would be an even better start. The idea of having dual mode trains is a costly idiocy.

Martyn1981

Here's a weird thought experiment for anyone with 15 mins to spare.

This morning I read this article and thought that's bad news:-

Methane Emissions In US 60% Higher Than Previously Reported, Finds CIRES Study

But I've been pondering it, and may have found a way to polish a turd!

First off, the article tells us nothing new, we already knew that fugitive methane emissions from cheap fracking meant that the overall GHG (green house gas) emissions from burning frack gas are no better than burning coal.

But, coal was king in the US, renewables generation cost more, and saving the planet / morals were not considered of interest.

Then shale gas came along and the US happily threw a whole industry (coal) under the bus at the altar of economics. Plus, those sneaky frackers inserted the 'environment' argument into big business regarding lower CO2 emissions. Yep it was greenwash, but they played the card.

Now jump forward a decade and we now have RE generation starting to undercut new gas generation and possibly prevent gas gen running long enough to recoup the capital investment:-

Clean Energy & DER Portfolios More Cost-Effective Than Natural Gas Replacements Worth $500 Billion

A new analysis from researchers at RMI has concluded that a more cost-effective and environmentally friendly method of replacing retiring fossil fuel-powered power plants is to rely instead on clean energy portfolios made up of renewable energy sources like wind and solar, and distributed energy resources (DERs) such as energy storage batteries.

Relying on clean energy portfolios may have been prohibitively expensive 10 years ago, and would have relied solely on doing things for “environmentally friendly” reasons. However, over the last decade, the cost of renewable energy and DER technologies have fallen dramatically and, according to RMI, are now not only cheaper based on a levelized cost basis than proposed natural gas-fired power plants but are increasingly threatening the levelized cost of existing gas plants.

So having removed a very old and strong lobby force in the coal industry, can the younger frack-gas lobby successfully take on RE generation if RE can play em at their own game and use the two trump cards, economics and environmental?

Well, I assume it comes down to how fast costs of RE generation fall, and how big the war chests of the frack gas industry is. And that's when things get even more interesting, as the war chest size will depend on retained profits, and retained profits will depend on actual profits, and there might not have been ANY profits so far:

The Great American Fracking Bubble

From 2008 to 2009, Chesapeake Energy’s stock swung from $64 a share under McClendon to around $17. Today, it’s worth just $3 a share — the same price it was in 2000. A visionary when it came to fracking, McClendon perfected the formula of borrowing money to drive the revolution that reshaped American energy markets.

An Industry Built on Debt
Roughly a decade after McClendon’s rise, the Wall Street Journal reported that “energy companies [since 2007] have spent $280 billion more than they generated from operations on shale investments, according to advisory firm Evercore ISI.”

As a whole, the American fracking experiment has been a financial disaster for many of its investors, who have been plagued by the industry’s heavy borrowing, low returns, and bankruptcies, and the path to becoming profitable is lined with significant potential hurdles. Up to this point, the industry has been drilling the “sweet spots” in the country’s major shale formations, reaching the easiest and most valuable oil first.

But at the same time energy companies are borrowing more money to drill more wells, the sweet spots are drying up, creating a Catch-22 as more drilling drives more debt.

If they haven't made any profits yet, could face higher costs if they are made to clean up (reduce) their methane emissions, and cheaper RE is arriving, then will the actual legacy of US frack-gas be that it killed off coal, prior to its own demise?

I've made loads and loads of logic leaps here, so the argument may be strong, or extremely weak, but regardless, it was fun trying to find the silver lining hiding behind today's whopping great methane cloud news.

Martyn1981

Oh well.

£1.3bn Swansea Bay tidal lagoon project thrown out

GreatApe

Martyn1981 wrote: »

As you say the conventional fuel lobbies are very strong. Some times folk forget the big difference between RE and FF/nuclear is that RE gets its fuel for free (apart from the bio-energy industries).

I doubt the construction industry care either way what they build, but the fuel suppliers 100% need conventional generation or their business ends, completely.

Unfortunately, whilst the UK looks OK on paper, regarding leccy generation, we are falling behind now as we don't have any decent plans to de-carbonize other sectors and look like we will fail to meet targets. Promoting EV's and heat pumps would be a great start, and a return to supporting PV and on-shore wind to improve the balance of RE generation. I believe tidal is essential to help boost the RE mix, though cheap longer term storage may become viable from P2G (power to gas) but the inefficiencies work against us there unless the generation is dirt cheap.

I guess it all comes down to money, and by the time the government has rolled out the 16-17GW of new nuclear, we won't have a penny left for anything else.

The £44bn subsidy for HPC (3.2GW 7% of demand) would subsidise about 60% of our leccy mix from off-shore wind!

The £5bn investment plus £30bn subsidy for Wylfa (3GW 6.5% of demand) would subsidise about 45% of generation from off-shore wind!

Current RE 30% + 60% + 45% = 135% ..... something odd is going on, and that's before the remaining 10GW of new nuclear is built, or we start to get subsidy free, or net-subsidy free PV and on-shore wind.

In the UK I would prefer offshore wind over new nuclear however you are clearly not comparing like with like

The nuclear reactors dont need backup to the degree wind farms do so its more like 15GW of nuclear vs 30GW offshore wind + 15GW CCGTs backup and most the reason we are spending the best part of £10 billion on interconnectors over the next decade is due to intermittent wind and pv

So its more like 30GW offshore wind + 15GW CCGT (cost to run and maintain and fuel sometimes) + £10 billion in inter-connectors to reduce the amount of curtailment needed = 15GW of nucealr. Plus the nuclear power stations could last a hundred years while the offshore wind farms most probably will need replacing 3-4-5 x during those 100 years

Also imo new nuclear in the UK will just about replace existing nuclear output so some 6-7GW I doubt the UK would go for more than that.