Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981

I had no idea things were moving so fast on storage, but this should boost renewables:

UK battery storage pipeline reaches 2.3GW according to new report

The UK has a pipeline of 2.3GW of commercial and industrial (C&I) battery-based energy storage projects, with many developers already looking to ‘stack’ revenues through providing multiple services, a new report has found.

Many of these developers are the same names that have been behind the rapid growth in utility-scale renewables that the country has seen over the past few years, including Anesco, Low Carbon and Green Hedge Energy, according to the UK Battery Storage Project Database, produced by the market research division of Solar Power Portal's publisher, Solar Media.

“Battery storage in the UK is poised to become one of the fastest growth segments within the country’s energy sector, often co-located with conventional or renewable generation,” analyst Lauren Cook said, adding that “the renewables sector has the most to gain from storage co-location, due to the variable supply from wind and solar”.

Martyn1981

Massive targets for Scotland:

Scotland sets ambitious goal of 66% emissions cut within 15 years

• 40% of all new cars and vans sold in Scotland to be ultra-low-emission by 2032, with 50% of Scotland’s buses to be low-carbon.

• A totally carbon-free electricity sector based entirely on renewable energy sources by 2032, when Scotland’s last nuclear power station will close.

• Four out of five of Scotland’s 2m homes to be heated using low-carbon technologies.

• The repairing of 250,000 hectares of degraded peatlands, which store a total of 1.7 gigatonnes of CO2 in Scotland.

• At least 30% of Scotland’s vital publicly owned ferry fleet to be low-carbon, powered by hybrid engines.

michaels

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Massive targets for Scotland:

Scotland sets ambitious goal of 66% emissions cut within 15 years

I think we mentioned natural gas home heating is 'scheduled' for phasing out. Interesting as presumably it is more efficient to use gas directly for heating than to convert it to electricity in a power station and then use that for heating? Does this remain true with ashp?

Martyn1981

Renewables Now Cheapest, But How To Enable Faster Renewable Energy Growth?


This is going to make life tricky for Trump. Renewables are cheaper than coal, and employ more people.

Martyn1981

michaels wrote: »

I think we mentioned natural gas home heating is 'scheduled' for phasing out. Interesting as presumably it is more efficient to use gas directly for heating than to convert it to electricity in a power station and then use that for heating? Does this remain true with ashp?

I don't know. Need to find out the average efficiency of a heat pump across the whole heating season, but it's the externalities of gas that'll confuse the issue, and the value placed on heating homes with low carbon leccy v's GCH.

Long way to go still, but that's an ambitious target to meet, unless they are planning to use some form of bio-gas?

Without Scotland's RE additions, the UK would look rather bad, and sadly that includes Wales too ..... need to get those tidal lagoons built.

Cardew

Grown-up reading?

http://euanmearns.com/the-energy-return-of-solar-pv/

A new study by Ferroni and Hopkirk [1] estimates the ERoEI of temperate latitude solar photovoltaic (PV) systems to be 0.83. If correct, that means more energy is used to make the PV panels than will ever be recovered from them during their 25 year lifetime. A PV panel will produce more CO2 than if coal were simply used directly to make electricity. Worse than that, all the CO2 from PV production is in the atmosphere today, while burning coal to make electricity, the emissions would be spread over the 25 year period. The image shows the true green credentials of solar PV where industrial wastelands have been created in China so that Europeans can make believe they are reducing CO2 emissions

Concluding comments

The findings of this single study suggest that deploying solar PV at high latitudes in countries like Germany and the UK is a total waste of time, energy and money. All that is achieved is to raise the price of electricity and destabilise the grid. Defenders of RE and solar will point out that this is a single paper and there are certainly some of the inputs to Ferroni and Hopkirk that are open to debate. But there are reasons to believe that the findings are zeroing in on reality. For example Prieto and Hall found ERoEI for solar PV = 2. Looking only at cloudy, high temperate latitudes will substantially degrade that number.
And you just need to look at the outputs as shown below. Solar PV produces a dribble in winter and absolutely nothing at the 18:00 peak demand. There is a large financial cost and energy cost to compensate for this that RE enthusiasts dismiss with a wave of the arm.

Even more.

http://euanmearns.com/the-energy-return-of-solar-pv-a-response-from-ferroni-and-hopkirk/

P.S.
The author:

http://euanmearns.com/about-euan-mearns/

Cardew

More grown-up reading!

Finally, for those who want to learn more about electricity supplies I can warmly recommend the online book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. The author, Prof David MacKay is currently Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change.

Cardew

Doubtless the two posts above will be condemned as ‘trolling’ and attempts made to discredit the authors as with George Monboit.

This in a thread with over 400 posts eulogising about Solar PV – with input almost exclusively provided by the solar industry. No vested interests there then!!

zeupater

Cardew wrote: »

More grown-up reading!

Finally, for those who want to learn more about electricity supplies I can warmly recommend the online book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. The author, Prof David MacKay is currently Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change.

Hi

Copy on my records was downloaded mid 2009 - that being the year it was first published! .... so that's probably even before the anti-pv (/wind/tidal/everything) campaigners even learned to mount their high horses .... read it once and might be minded to read a sequel if it ever appears (different author ?), but I'll not be minded to check for net changes over the intervening years ...

Anyway, as I remember it the issue of technology mix wasn't fully addressed, preferring to address various technologies as stand-alone entities then poke a stick at the reader by inviting them to model their own mix, but it did act as a source to highlight & clarify the scale of the energy-gap which the UK had committed to through signing international 'climate-change' treaties and as such concentrated the minds of government & provided much of the required 'push' towards adopting renewable energy incentives as a form of 'kick-starting' the sector ....

Oh, by the way, the 'Ferroni & Hopkirk' link becomes pretty interesting when you reach the comments section where the discussion seems to reflect many on these boards .... strange really, whether it's a Monbiot article, MacKay book or Ferroni & Hopkirk study there's one consistent thread - all of the data is around a decade old, which considering the evident changes over that period provides little to the current discussion ... perhaps a new thread 'Renewables on this day in history' would be more appropriate (?) ...

Finally, regarding 'The author, Prof David MacKay ...' held the DECC advisory position until 2014 and is sadly will not be returning ... ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2016/04/15/professor-sir-david-mackay-physicist--obituary/ )

HTH
Z

Martyn1981

Cardew wrote: »

Grown-up reading?

http://euanmearns.com/the-energy-return-of-solar-pv/


Even more.

http://euanmearns.com/the-energy-return-of-solar-pv-a-response-from-ferroni-and-hopkirk/

P.S.
The author:

http://euanmearns.com/about-euan-mearns/

The Ferruccio Ferroni and Richard Hopkirk report has been completely discredited. It is now only used by those trying to spread false information about PV.

ANOTHER FAILURE OF SCIENTIFIC PEER-REVIEW: A COMPLETELY WRONG PAPER ON THE ENERGY RETURN OF PHOTOVOLTAIC ENERGY

The paper by Ferroni and Hopkirk is simply wrong. You can read below a complete demolition of their arguments performed by Maury Markowitz. But, no matter how wrong is the paper – and it is wrong – this story raises some disturbing points about how scientific information is validated and diffused.

Personally I find this argument quite funny, as it comes up every now and then on forums. It PV did consume more energy in production than it ever returns, then last year we would have seen a worldwide increase in energy consumption of around 70GWp x 1,400kWh/kWp x 30yrs = 2,940TWh. That's around 10x the UK's whole leccy consumption, just to make PV panels!

You suggest that your comments may be considered as trolling, well that depends, would you consider posting false information in order to mislead as trolling?