Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981

This is only experimental at the moment, but it's about using artificial photosynthesis to help produce H2, and I thought since the issue of H2 as storage/fuel alternative had recently be raised, that it might be of interest:

More Solar Power To Drive The All-Electric Economy Of The Sparkling Green Future

Lelievre foresees that renewable hydrogen (meaning conventional water-splitting, for now) could be a “massive game-changer” that enables energy storage to ramp up at scale, potentially fostering more rapid growth in solar power and other renewables.

The energy storage aspect is important because millions of battery EVs are set to hit the road within the next several years. They will be competing with each other for grid space, and they will also be competing with all-electric buildings and electrified industrial processes. Energy storage — and lots of it — is the key to managing demand and providing other grid services in an all-electric economy.

Martyn1981

Another story on low energy homes, designed not only to reduce their impact/energy demand, but also the cost of ownership by reducing/removing energy bills:

Public Private Partnership Building Net Zero Homes For Low Income Families In Rhode Island

The five homes are being built on a three quarter acre lot in the densely populated Olneyville section of Providence. Once a place where mills lined the Woonasquatucket River, it is one of the city’s poorer neighborhoods whose main claim to fame is the New York System hot dog — a gustatory delight featuring chili, onions, and peppers with Pepto Bismol for dessert.

The homes will have triple-glazed windows, 11-inch thick walls, electric heat pumps and air exchange systems, and highly insulated roofs. They will also have a solar array on the roof oriented to capture the most sunlight possible. Knowles says his students figured out how to lower the cost of the homes by using slab-on-grade foundations and no frills finishes like polished concrete floors and tub surrounds instead of tile.

The project, called Sheridan Small Homes, marks the city’s first attempt to pair zero-emission design with affordable homeownership. It is a case study of sorts for future projects, as the city has identified some 250 vacant, tax-reverted lots that might be suitable for small, affordable homes, said Bonnie Nickerson, director of planning and development.

“When you think about affordable housing, it’s both the cost to acquire the unit as well as the long-term cost to maintain it,” Nickerson said. “We think any investment we can make upfront to reduce those long-term costs is really good for future buyers or tenants.”

Martyn1981

Didn't know whether to post this or not, as such issues/discussions can cause a bit of offence to some, but then I saw the investment numbers and I was, shall we say, a tad shocked!

Harvard and Yale students disrupt football game for fossil fuel protest

Students and alumni from Harvard and Yale disrupted the annual football game between the two elite universities on Saturday, occupying the field in New Haven, Connecticut, at half-time and demanding the colleges divest from investment in fossil fuels.

Students began campaigning in 2012 for both schools to stop investing in oil and gas and coal companies that contribute to the climate crisis. Both universities refused, arguing that they would be in a better position to encourage corporate climate action if they remained shareholders.

“They believe that they can engage with these companies and get them to change their fundamentally extractive business models, which we think comes from a place of naivety amounting to gross negligence,” Nora Heaphy, an undergraduate at Yale, said.

“It’s absurd to make those kinds of claims. So since then our campaign has moved away from administrative engagement, recognizing that it is often a stalling tactic.”

[My bold - :rotfl: M.]

Both schools have massive endowments invested across the economy, including in fossil fuels. Harvard’s is worth $39bn, Yale’s $29bn. Activists believe that if the universities divest, hundreds of institutions will follow them.

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Students at other prestigious schools are locked in similar battles. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one group is opposing the decision to accept $3m and name an auditorium after the oil company Shell, which some experts call an example of the “colonization of academia” by fossil fuel corporations.

Martyn1981

Couple of articles on solar contribution to future energy demand in US and China, but I thought they related better to this thread on the grounds of a shift to overall green and ethical energy packages.

Study: Solar can help China decarbonise by 2050 with ‘minimal’ GDP tradeoff

The world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter could reach net-zero status by 2050 and deploy a terawatt-scale solar fleet without damaging economic growth in the process, a study has said.

China’s currently high savings and investment rates would allow it to fully decarbonise by mid-century in a “technically and economically feasible” manner, according to new analysis by think tanks the Energy Transitions Commission (ETC) and the Rocky Mountain Institute.

The three-decade zero-carbon push could be accomplished, the report claimed, if the Asian superpower more than doubled power generation – to ensure the full electrification of road and rail transport – even as it curbs broader energy demand by about 27% via efficiency policies.

The power generation surge from today’s 7,000TWh to 15,000TWh by 2050 would be chiefly met by solar (2,500GW) and wind (2,400GW), which would cover a joint 75% of national power needs. Reaching the PV capacity mark of 2.5TW would only require 1% of China’s landmass, the study said.

The Rocky Mountain Institute and the ETC – the latter is backed by Shell, Schneider Electric, the European Climate Foundation and others – said net-zero success by 2050 will demand “forceful” policies on China’s part, including a nation-wide carbon price system.

In addition, the report went on to say, the country should work to offset the intermittency of a 75% solar and wind share. Cost drops, likely to be “dramatic”, could help China set up major portfolios for battery (510GW) and pumped hydro storage (142GW), the document claimed.

Peering into a 55% solar future for the US

Modeling by researchers from the strategic energy analysis center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has illustrated how the U.S.’ three main power grids would run on the most solar power-rich days in an energy system where 55% of annual power was supplied by PV.

The hourly modelling in the Sunny with a Chance of Curtailment: Operating the US Grid with Very High Levels of Solar Photovoltaics report published on the ScienceDirect website considers days when at least 90% of electricity is from PV and demonstrates how much surplus solar power would be generated in spring and how energy pricing might be affected.

joefizz

GreatApe wrote: »

We can but it requires more investment

This. Its always been this.


Not getting involved in ping pong postings so heres where to get the actual information on wind rather than reading made up or misinterpreted posts on the internet.


UK is concentrating on offshore wind from now on (for obvious reasons). The seabed around the uk is owned by the crown. The Crown Estates are responsible for windfarm allocation/rollout etc. Their website has details on every wind farm plan in the past, present and forseeable future.
It is relevant to the post because the latest phase of areas to be released are up for tender this month. The whole process is detailed so you can see it will take about 10-15 years from the assessment process date (now) to going fully online.
The Hornsea project involved in this summers blackout is about to go live in its first phase any month now (been partially connected to the grid since Feb I think). Again you can look up when it was bid for and I think it was around 10-12 years ago.
You can see all the details there, size of the areas, expected outputs, seabed surveys etc. The actual initial process, bidding, review, environmental impact from winners, further seabed surveys and test drilling takes roughly 5 years give or take so with offshore its not a case of having wind in a few years its a long process.
Each of the winning bidders has a site and the uk gov website also tracks the progress along with any tests required for final rollout (such as battery backup incentives - more later) in x years time.
Anyone interested in this sort of stuff will find the sheer scale fascinating both from a geographic standpoint (area the size of hampshire required to replace one nuclear power station, in fact the latest whole south coast wind farm development area may not produce as much as hinkley c - hence why they are talking about it) and from an engineering standpoint. The met office also publish the wind pattern information and whilst the tories dont want onshore wind in the south of England the wind patterns show its not the most suitable place either for investment (more for your money further north, which is why it will be interesting to see who bids for the south coast wind farm area as they would get better returns on dogger bank but different environment/geology).


All the bidders will submit planning for interconnects for where they come ashore. Most cases just this interconnect will take 5 years or so to get through planning, and if a new installation and routing needs vested purchases etc etc. So again its not a case of being able to throw this stuff up, takes decades of planning.


Which brings me on to the network and the question of why you cant really plug in a power station in inverness and use it to turn on the washing machine in winchester. The grid is a transmission and distribution network, it was originally designed around where the power was needed and where it could be supplied from. Power stations were typically built on coasts and rivers so you could get coal barges/oil ships/LNG ships to them. The main lines from there then feed a network of substations and these then break down bit like a tree growing and branches out down to houses.
Of course the network is interconnected at various points and those interconnections spread the loads and are calculated on various load factors so whilst you would expect some power transfers and frequency balancing not all connections are capable of carrying all the load (as witnessed this summer with the blackouts). The grid has also been underfunded for years and privatisation doesnt help but thats a political argument Im not getting into.
Essentially adding new wind farms is no different to adding new power stations, the main difference being is that they are by nature best suited to remote locations where people dont actually live so the local grid may not be up to the task and you wouldnt normally design a power station to be installed a great distance from where most of the power is required. If you are building a new power station then it makes sense to build it beside the old one and use the existing connections/loading facilities.

That really isnt a problem as we will see from the new dogger bank install which would probably require a new high voltage dc interconnect to say London. That will take planning, routing etc etc. Some have suggested it could take the HS2 route down seeing as thats already being done, you would almost think it was designed that way.
It may also precipitate govt incentives for power hungry industry/services/call centres to move closer to the landfall areas for these new sites. Northern Powerhouse anyone? The whole northern area will have a power surplus when all the current and bid operations come onstream.
Thats why we here in Ireland and Scotland (and wales probably) will have a good chance of being close to 100% renewables in 10-15 years time, small population and demand helps.


Which brings me on to this coming tuesday. Look at the weather forecast. There is going to be a period this tuesday where theres no wind. Thats going to be about a 10GW shortfall from capacity. Thats about the headroom we have in gas production so unless we want the lights to go out on Tuesday afternoon we will be running coal (as we are doing as I type this early on a sunday morning).
This isnt unusal for this time of year as I mentioned in another post elsewhere travelling to liverpool earlier this month, none of the wind turbines at burbo were turning.

People will then talk about batteries and australia and so on but going back up this post you have to consider the sheer scale of it all. The battery in australia is just over 100 Mwh. This coming tuesday we will need between 50Gwh and 100Gwh just for the afternoon. So thats up to 1000 of them. Or to put it in context we would need the approximate equivalent of one years battery production globally just to cover tuesday afternoon.....
Of course there are ongoing other trials with pumped hydro, compressed gas storage as well as smaller scale local storage. We have about 10 years to complete the trials, get some test sites up and then start tender process/installations for this.

In 15 years time around this time in November we will be looking at at least 3 times that shortfall as we migrate to more RE so any plan for future network will also include gas plants (not coal thankfully). Its also why they still keep banging on about nuclear power in the uk as the future network plans have to take these shortfalls into consideration (or plan for rationing... see below).



Going back to Tuesday and rationing, heres something not a lot of people would consider but for those of us with EVs and home battery systems charged from the grid, spare a thought to charging this tuesday/wednesday as its highly likely that whatever charge you put in will be coal powered... not very environmentally friendly...
Ive been feeding info into a small scale trial about electricity habits and have gone into it partially ad nauseum over on the battery thread. All this stuff is either going to cost big (currently dumped onto the private sector, hence the spiraling real costs - again political - dont go there) or will require behaviour modification (or reduction in uk population - hmmm can of worms).
Even some of the proposed mitigation (extra connectors to ireland, norway, iceland, all exporters of excess green energy) will cost and cost big time but its not a full solution for the uk as all these countries populations is less than greater london.
The good thing is, although slow, you can see from the crown estates websites that this planning has actually been planned and has been going on for years. You can also see from all the documentation that its not going to be easy and its going to be expensive whatever happens. Expensive but if the uk hadnt bailed out the bankers and put it into national infrastructure and boosted the economy that way they would probably be there by now... ...still better late than never.... ...interesting times ahead.

Martyn1981

A few quick points.

Whilst the government is concentrating on off-shore wind in terms of subsidies, we are starting to see on-shore wind and PV going subsidy free, or being rolled out via PPA's.

RE is extremely flexible regarding deployment, especially solar. FF powerstations are somewhat limited, and nuclear more so, requiring coastal locations for cooling water (in the UK).

Nuclear does not help us at all to meet demand / fluctuating demand. It can't demand follow or even ramp down economically, both of these simply produce less energy for the same cost, so to maximise the economics of nuclear you need storage, but storage validates RE, and thus eliminates the nuclear.

RE + storage can provide everything that nuclear does, but at a lower cost, and a lower risk, and faster. It's also more dependable due to its modular format, be it the number of wind/PV farms for example, or even the modular nature of the power supply withing each farm - whereas losing a nuclear powerstation, or even a single reactor, unscheduled, is a major problem/concern, requiring backup be available as the NG would stuggle at the instantaneous loss of 1.6GW.

Also, due to the nature of nuclear, all it really does is make us a smaller country (in energy terms), let's say we have a demand that fluctuates between 30GW and 60GW in the winter, then having 10GW of nuclear running, simply makes us comparable to a non nuclear country running at 20GW-50GW. If that country can cope, then why can't we without nuclear, if that country can't cope, then every country needs to have nuclear equal to at least its minimum demand, yet most countries don't have nuclear, and don't plan to have any nuclear, in fact nuclear as a percentage of World leccy generation is not increasing. Putting China to one side, as it's expanding all energy generation, we have the US and France, one with the most reactors, the other with the highest percentage of generation from nuclear - both are embracing RE, neither are expanding nuclear. Their reasoning is simple, it costs too much. Nuclear went bust in France, and in the US some existing reactors aren't even being run to max life expectancy, as the cost of servicing/upgrading them for their extensions would require a sell price of the leccy that is no longer competitive. Half of the US's 4 new reactors have been shelved mid construction as they will not be economically viable on completion.

Regarding the sheer scale of storage needed, as we have discussed so many, many times on this thread already, the intra-day demands look to be around 500GWh (a figure that the pro-nuclear Euan Mearns has suggested) but that works out at 1/3rd of a BEV car fleet, before we consider commercial vehicles. Smart charging to absorb excess, or provide top ups is not a new idea, and is already being played with, and this is before we consider stationary storage which is already being deployed on a small, but appropriate scale. We also know from both the wind and solar industries that the farms stand ready to add storage, as and when it is commercially sensible for them. There is no additional cost for doing this retrospectively, and they already have the grid connections and land available.

In Aus they are expanding the 'big battery' and Elon has chatted about World storage production ramping into the TWh's. The 'big battery' in Aus uses Powerpacks, Powerpacks have grown/range from 100kWh to about 210kWh, but their new product is the Megapack, and these are upto 3MWh/1.5MW.

PHS, H2, CAES, LAES etc etc are all existing technologies, but they are not really needed yet, as they are to provide longer term storage, not the intra-day balancing that batteries do/will. Also these can demand follow.

Obviously, when RE penetration is very high, to 100%, we will of course need gas generation as a back up, but its a mistake to think this will be FF gas, when, for so long, so many of us have been talking about storing excess RE as H2 or bio-methane. And these powerstations already exist.

We should also not be scared about the cost. We are already seeing RE costs matching or even beating new FF generation powerstation costs (and that's the fair comparison as they don't last forever), however they will approach the marginal cost of generation, or the cost of running existing FF powerstations if CAPEX has been fully amortized. But we should also note, be it green, ethical, or simply rational, that those FF generation costs do not include externalities, such as pollution or do I need to say it ..... AGW. And recently we saw battery storage winning big in contracts for enhanced frequency response. So RE is already the cheaper option.

And lastly, something else worth remembering, as it often gets forgotten, with RE costs continuing to fall, one of the first and simplest forms of back-up/storage/grid reliability etc, is simply over-capacity with waste/spill, but as I've said before, excess, such as spill/curtailment will itself be a driver of storage investment as it will open the door to arbitrage profit viability.

Edit - couple of addendum's.

1. I should have mentioned/reminded that the NAO predictions for future leccy prices have actually tumbled. Apologies for repeating these numbers and the link yet again. Predictions of ~£85/MWh in late 2020's have been revised down repeatedly, and are now suggesting a peak of approx £55/MWh in the 20's, before dropping into the mid (even low) £40's in the 2030's. NAO report on HPC, page 39, prices in 2016 £'s).

2. Advice to the Government last year from their advisers The National Infrastructure Commission (NIC), was to slow down on the plans for 16GW of new nuclear, and instead just build HPC, and perhaps one more, whilst keeping an eye on RE and storage costs, as that was starting to look like the cheaper option for 100% low carbon leccy generation.

Martyn1981

More good (or at least promising) news.

Scottish Power plans major expansion of onshore windfarms

ScottishPower has begun plans for a major expansion of onshore windfarm projects across Scotland in anticipation of a government U-turn on support for wind power projects.

The renewable energy arm of the big six power supplier has already considered almost 100 sites for a new generation of windfarm, using a smaller number of more powerful wind turbines to generate clean electricity. Most of the sites are in Scotland, but the company is also considering plots in Ireland.

Scottish Power expects the Conservative party’s block on onshore generation to be cast aside in the next parliament due to the growing need for cheap, clean energy to power the UK towards its climate goals.

The government’s official climate advisers, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), has said the UK will need to build at least 1,000MW of onshore wind every year for the next three decades if it hopes to meet its target to create a carbon-neutral economy by 2050. This steady rollout is necessary, in addition to building offshore windfarms at four times the present rate.

[Approx conversion - if we assume a cf (capacity factor) of 25-30% for on-shore wind, then that additional 30GW of on-shore wind capacity would be roughly equal to 7.5GW - 9GW of 24/7 generation, against perhaps a future average leccy demand somewhere around double what it is today, so ~80GW. Nice!]

The Labour party, Liberal Democrats, Green party and SNP have all voiced support for reinstating support for onshore wind, and evidence has emerged that Tory supporters overwhelmingly back it too.

A survey over the summer for the Conservative Environment Network showed that 74% of people who voted Conservative in the last election support onshore windfarms. The survey revealed that only a third of Tory voters support fracking, and within months the government called for an immediate halt to fracking across England.

Martyn1981

Martyn1981 wrote: »

A few quick points.

Another quick addendum.

The issue was raised that RE can't just be deployed anywhere, but I'd not only disagree personally with the premise of that claim, since RE is of course vastly more distributed than centralised FF/nuclear generation, but I should have also mentioned demand side generation, such as wind, PV, hydro offsetting grid demand, and I also need to mention that not all supply side RE generation is connected to the high voltage transmission network (operated by the NG), some is of course connected to the low voltage distribution network (operated by the DNO's).


So long as folk don't mind going over some of this again, then it might actually be a useful reminder of just how far we have gone this decade*, and how much progress/change has been made.

We have gone from approx 5% RE generation and 75% FF generation, to roughly 35% RE and 45% FF, with coal being the big loser, and close to be removed completely.

Also this decade, we have seen RE subsidies, such as PV and off-shore wind tumble. PV is close to subsidy free, and the latest off-shore CfD's are approx £45/MWh down from ~£180/MWh, and with average wholesale costs somewhere in the region of £40-£50/MWh, that could mean net subsidy free off-shore wind.

Acceptance of RE which was strong to start with in the first public attitudes survey, has only grown over the 8yrs and 31 quarterly surveys, whilst the small amount of opposition has fallen.

And we are now seeing a push for ever cleaner leccy into the transport and space heating arenas too.

Quite a decade.

*Personally, I think the decade ends on the 31st Dec 2020 (not 2019) as I count from 1 to 10, not 0 to 9, but my position that the 1st Jan 2000 wasn't the start of a new millennium, was not popular, even when I suggested we could have a second party, so I won't push the point!

Martyn1981

Again, I think this is general energy news, as it relates to grid frequency balancing not PV.

It's completely new news to me, and whilst I was expecting it to relate to storage, it's not, it's all about using inverters for frequency stabilisation ......... cool!

Solar farms can keep UK’s lights on even at night

Solar farms could soon play a vital role in the energy system 24 hours a day, after a breakthrough trial proved they can even help balance the grid at night. National Grid used a solar farm in East Sussex to help smooth overnight voltage fluctuations for the first time earlier this month, proving solar farms don’t need sunshine to help keep the lights on.

Lightsource BP, the owner of the solar farm, said an inexpensive tweak to the project’s electrical equipment meant it could help balance the grid with only two seconds’ notice. Kareen Boutonnat, the company’s chief operating officer, said: “We have proven that solar plants can play a larger role across the electricity network. But this is only the beginning.”

The breakthrough could mean that UK solar farms will soon help stabilise the energy grid at night, which could save £400m on grid upgrades or building new power plants. “Inverters” at the solar farm are usually used in the process of converting solar energy to electric current. But at night, when the grid is often less stable, the same equipment can adapt grid electricity to a healthier voltage.

Martyn1981

Another good / bad news combo, but these are both very big.

First the bad, and it's really bad:

Climate-heating greenhouse gases hit new high, UN reports

The concentration of climate-heating greenhouse gases has hit a record high, according to a report from the UN’s World Meteorological Organization.

The jumps in the key gases measured in 2018 were all above the average for the last decade, showing action on the climate emergency to date is having no effect in the atmosphere. The WMO said the gap between targets and reality were both “glaring and growing”.

The rise in concentration of greenhouses gases follows inevitably from the continued surge in global emissions, which was described as “brutal news” for 2018. The world’s scientists calculate that emissions must fall by half by 2030 to give a good chance of limiting global heating to 1.5C, beyond which hundreds of millions of people will suffer more heatwaves, droughts, floods and poverty.

“It is worth recalling that the last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of carbon dioxide was 3-5m years ago. Back then, the temperature was 2-3C warmer and sea level was 10-20 metres higher than now.”

Now for the good news, and I was surprised by this, we may have reached peak coal, I certainly hope so.

Global use of coal-fired electricity set for biggest fall this year

The world’s use of coal-fired electricity is on track for its biggest annual fall on record this year after more than four decades of near-uninterrupted growth that has stoked the global climate crisis.

Data shows that coal-fired electricity is expected to fall by 3% in 2019, or more than the combined coal generation in Germany, Spain and the UK last year and could help stall the world’s rising carbon emissions this year.

The steepest global slump on record is likely to emerge in 2019 as India’s reliance on coal power falls for the first time in at least three decades this year, and China’s coal power demand plateaus.

The researchers found that China’s coal-fired power generation was flatlining, despite an increase in the number of coal plants being built, because they were running at record low rates. China builds the equivalent of one large new coal plant every two weeks, according to the report, but its coal plants run for only 48.6% of the time, compared with a global utilisation rate of 54% on average.

The EU reported a record slump in coal-fired electricity use in the first half of the year of almost a fifth compared with the same months last year. This trend is expected to accelerate over the second half of the year to average a 23% fall over 2019 as a whole. The EU is using less coal power in favour of gas-fired electricity – which can have roughly half the carbon footprint of coal – and renewable energy.