Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981

I've got a real soft spot for Highview and LAES (liquid air energy storage), having followed their story/trials for 5yrs or so now.

The beauty of LAES is that it's concentrated, and the design is scaleable and modular, so going bigger, even to a GWh scale is easy(ish), and it can demand follow, whether excess RE, or demand peaks.

Efficiency wise it's around 50-60%, but can go much higher (even 100%+) with enough waste heat or waste cold from nearby industries if co-located. [That may seem like cheating, but if the heat/cold is to be wasted, then it does boost LAES efficiency.]

Highview unveils US storage plan

Highview Power Storage and Encore Renewable Energy are to build a 50MW liquid air energy storage system in the US state of Vermont.

The facility, which the partners said will be the first utility-scale liquid air energy storage system in the country, will provide over eight hours of storage.

It will contribute to resolving longstanding energy transmission challenges surrounding the Vermont’s Sheffield-Highgate Export Interface (SHEI) and enable the efficient transport and integration of renewable energy, the two companies said.

Martyn1981

Bit of on-shore wind news for a change:

Giant Shetland wind farm plans revived with new mainland link proposal

A giant Shetland wind project has renewed its commitment to push on with construction, as a fresh proposal to connect the island to the mainland was approved by officials yesterday.

The news was touted as a massive shot in the arm for the 103-turbine Viking Onshore Wind Farm, which lost out on a UK Government contract bid in September.

It is understood around 140 local jobs would be created during Viking’s construction phase, with around 35 permanent jobs needed to maintain the project once complete.

The wind farm would look to generate enough energy to power almost half a million homes.

GreatApe

Martyn1981 wrote: »

I've got a real soft spot for Highview and LAES (liquid air energy storage), having followed their story/trials for 5yrs or so now.

The beauty of LAES is that it's concentrated, and the design is scaleable and modular, so going bigger, even to a GWh scale is easy(ish), and it can demand follow, whether excess RE, or demand peaks.

Efficiency wise it's around 50-60%, but can go much higher (even 100%+) with enough waste heat or waste cold from nearby industries if co-located. [That may seem like cheating, but if the heat/cold is to be wasted, then it does boost LAES efficiency.]

Highview unveils US storage plan

A solution looking for a problem to solve

Curtailment is solved by time of use pricing

Where there is too much wind or solar in the system prices crash and users get to buy electricity for cheap prices enabling them to use electricity to displace other fuel sources like natural gas or oil on heating.

The cost of which is close to zero and the efficiency is over 100%

Not forgetting the simpler still which is interconntors
2GW can be built as cheap as £1.1 billion and they will last a lifetime
Bi direction near instant and huge quantities of power and electricity

Martyn1981

Exiled_Tyke wrote: »

Seriously why don't you just give it a rest? Most of us here are very pleased to see the articles Martyn's research digs up. And we can form our own judgements on what we agree or disagree with.

Thanks guys.

@GA again - This thread (and board) are clearly for the enjoyment of those with a green and ethical bias to their beliefs. Also in the case of green energy and combating AGW that expands into views and opinions that coincide with the facts, science and evidence that are now beyond any doubt.

You may have differing views, like the example of a rugby fan v's football, and like that example, there will be sites where you can discuss your preference, but arguing against football on a football forum, or vice versa on a rugby forum is clearly not reasonable, certainly not 'ethical'.

This board now gives you an easy out, as there is now a thread for those with 'alternative' views, and on which you could quote my posts and 'go to town on them'.

So in respect to other forumites (if not G&E matters) perhaps you could do that now?

Thanks.

Martyn1981

Nice milestone for the UK. Obviously it's a tougher target for Q4 (and Q1), but great to see another one get ticked off the list.

UK renewables power past gas for first time

Renewable electricity generation between July and September has outstripped the share coming from gas for the first time, the government's latest energy trends data confirmed today.

Renewable technologies produced 38.9 per cent of the total over the three-month period, compared with 38.8 per cent from gas.

Edit - same story, but a different article:

Fossil fuels fall to record low proportion of UK energy mix

The proportion of the UK’s power generation mix made up by fossil fuels has fallen to a record low after renewable energy became the UK’s largest source of electricity.

The rise of renewables combined with output from nuclear power plants pushed fossil fuels to their lowest share of the UK’s energy mix on record, according to the official data.

The dwindling number of coal-fired power stations contributed 1% of the UK’s electricity in the third quarter, down from 2.5% in the same period in 2018.

Martyn1981

Martyn1981 wrote: »

The last post was so depressing I had to go hunting for something better to end on today, so perhaps a Tory promise (no sniggering in the back please!)

If we can rollout 40GW of off-shore wind by 2030, then that would be roughly half our generation/consumption at today's levels, though I don't know if the 40GW is to be commissioned by 2030 or contracted by 2030, as off-shore wind contracts do seem to take about 5yrs to complete.

Johnson urged to deliver 40GW UK offshore pledge

So this means it's going to happen, does it? Certainly sounds promising.

UK government confirms 40GW offshore goal

The new UK Conservative government has included an election manifesto pledge to increase new offshore wind capacity to 40GW by 2030, from 30GW previously, in today's Queen's speech, which outlines its agenda for the next parliament.

Coastalwatch

Martyn1981 wrote: »

So this means it's going to happen, does it? Certainly sounds promising.

UK government confirms 40GW offshore goal

Thanks for posting Mart. Following the link I came across another on the same platform showing that Poland appears to be adopting on shore wind turbines in the very near future.
Further good news surely. I found it encouraging at least.
https://renews.biz/57099/poland-auctions-22gw-onshore-wind/

Martyn1981

What's that coming over the hill, is it a monster, is it a monster?

Nope, it's a lawyer, but potentially far more scary.

Dutch supreme court upholds landmark ruling demanding climate action

The Netherlands’ supreme court has upheld a ruling ordering the country’s government to do much more to cut carbon emissions, after a six-year fight for climate justice.

The court ruled that the government had explicit duties to protect its citizens’ human rights in the face of climate change and must reduce emissions by at least 25% compared with 1990 levels by the end of 2020.

The non-profit Urgenda Foundation, which brought the case, welcomed the “groundbreaking” judgment. The original judgment in 2015 was seen as a landmark in the then nascent field of climate litigation, and inspired similar cases across the world, from Pakistan to New Zealand.

David Boyd, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment, said it was “the most important climate change court decision in the world so far, confirming that human rights are jeopardised by the climate emergency and that wealthy nations are legally obligated to achieve rapid and substantial emission reductions.”

Martyn1981

For those that recall the older WWS study, and also those that don't (this is an equal opportunities post) here is part one of 3 parts reviewing the updated version.

100% WWS Part 1: Jacobson’s New Study Displaces 99.7% Fossil Energy With Massive Savings

A small handful of years ago, Mark Z. Jacobson, Mark A. Delucchi and the team in Stanford released a study showing the electrical generation mix for 139 countries worldwide using wind, water, and solar (WWS), along with a few hangers-on. The usual suspects were up in arms immediately, as nuclear and carbon capture and sequestration were noticeably absent from the mix. 21 of them wrote a critique and fireworks ensued.

Well, expect more fireworks.

Jacobson and team have just released a new study covering 143 countries representing 99.7% of fossil fuel CO2 emissions. It’s an update and maintains the mix of technologies, omitting nuclear and CCS. Expect more pushback from people who don’t accept the empirical realities related to those technologies. My assessment of various aspects of the report will be broken down into three chunks of roughly equal size around specific subsets of the topic. The first covers the economics.

The social costs point is critical to understand for policy and politics. The comparison to make is between the black line at the top and the green line at the bottom of this chart, the total social costs by country under the business as usual and wind, water, solar model. This makes visual the 91% reduction in uncosted negative externalities. As does the IMF with its subsidy calculations, Jacobson and team tie in costing of negative externalities, which are much higher than most people realize. The IMF US calculations for the implicit annual subsidy of fossil fuels by not pricing negative externalities was more money than the US annual defense budget, $649 billion. Jacobson et al., calculate a reduction in negative externalities — not elimination — by about $69 trillion a year.

For context, global GDP is about $85 trillion annually. We are consuming human lives and the environment at a rate almost equal to the total acknowledged economy due to the use of fossil fuels.

The last point is that the transition over 30 years would cost money, of course, $73 trillion. And $73 trillion over 30 years is about $2.4 trillion per year, a long way under the savings on private energy alone and a drop in the bucket compared to the $76.1 trillion annual negative externalities. I’ve done less sophisticated calculations to cross-verify this a few times in the past decade, and the scale of the numbers are correct.

Martyn1981

And here are parts 2 and 3, the former on storage and the later looking at the 'New Green Deal' which has made quite a bit of news.

100% WWS Part 2: Jacobson’s Latest Study Covers Storage, Transmission, & More

This ties back to the much smaller amount of energy we need when we don’t throw away the majority of it, but I wanted to draw out a different point, that related to storage. I’ve know for years based on my reading, analysis, and discussions that we need much less storage than most people realize (and certainly much less than detractors assert) and that it won’t be an unreasonable cost. I also know that it’s more of an end game requirement for decarbonization, not a must-have at the beginning of the transition.

100% WWS Part 3: Jacobson’s New Study Leans Into The Green New Deal

This portion of the study talks to the ongoing attacks on renewables by advocates of both nuclear energy and the fossil fuel industry, finding common cause to attack the technologies which are disrupting their revenues and profits. The amount of land actually required for renewables globally is a tiny fraction of what’s available. I’ve run these numbers myself in CleanTechnica, finding that if we just wanted to use wind energy, a space smaller than the tiny state of Delaware would be required.

The distributed nature of renewables just isn’t a real concern, in other words, but a drummed up meme, and in any event the cost of land is costed into the cost of electricity, and renewables are vastly cheaper than nuclear, coal and increasingly gas generation without negative externalities or subsidies.

“… studies among at least 11 independent research groups have found that transitioning to 100% renewable energy in one or all energy sectors, while keeping the electricity and/or heat grids stable at reasonable cost, is possible”