Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

silverwhistle

The Daily Telegraph seems a sad little paper these days, at least what I see of it. The following headline came up on my feed, but the article itself is behind a paywall:

"Goodbye renewable energy. Hello cheap oil.

The current dual crises of oil and Covid-19b have thrown the future of renewables in to doubt"

Now maybe a sub-editor is responsible for this byline and I'm unable to read the main article, but it's a pretty p**s-poor analysis of the situation.

Coastalwatch

silverwhistle said:

The Daily Telegraph seems a sad little paper these days, at least what I see of it. The following headline came up on my feed, but the article itself is behind a paywall:

"Goodbye renewable energy. Hello cheap oil.

The current dual crises of oil and Covid-19b have thrown the future of renewables in to doubt"

Now maybe a sub-editor is responsible for this byline and I'm unable to read the main article, but it's a pretty p**s-poor analysis of the situation.

Are you sure it wasn't an Ad!

Solarchaser

Seen it as a suggested article on Google suggested news.

The tory graph has been a sad right wing shill for quite some time I'm afraid.

Try finding any positive article about anything in Scotland,  especially about the NHS

Coastalwatch

Solarchaser said:

Seen it as a suggested article on Google suggested news.

The tory graph has been a sad right wing shill for quite some time I'm afraid.

Try finding any positive article about anything in Scotland,  especially about the NHS

Stopped taking Nationals years ago due to their bias, be it left or right. If it's any consolation, when it comes to renewables, I believe Scotland is way ahead of Telegraphland on that score!

ed110220

silverwhistle said:

The Daily Telegraph seems a sad little paper these days, at least what I see of it. The following headline came up on my feed, but the article itself is behind a paywall:

"Goodbye renewable energy. Hello cheap oil.

The current dual crises of oil and Covid-19b have thrown the future of renewables in to doubt"

Now maybe a sub-editor is responsible for this byline and I'm unable to read the main article, but it's a pretty p**s-poor analysis of the situation.

A a severely demographically-depleted rump of a paper too Telling some fairytales to comfort the faithful. 
Meanwhile in the real world, oil isn't much used to generate electricity and no-one in their right mind is going to build a power station with an expected life of decades on the basis of the fuel happening to be cheap today. It may have a little impact on the takeup of EVs and people's choice of vehicle, but that is all I think.

Solarchaser

Coastalwatch said:

Solarchaser said:

Seen it as a suggested article on Google suggested news.

The tory graph has been a sad right wing shill for quite some time I'm afraid.

Try finding any positive article about anything in Scotland,  especially about the NHS

Stopped taking Nationals years ago due to their bias, be it left or right. If it's any consolation, when it comes to renewables, I believe Scotland is way ahead of Telegraphland on that score!

Yeah I hear you, as the wee nyaf from the church of scientology once famously said "I want the truth", unfortunately the days of straight up unbiased reporting seem to be long gone.
Whats reported and how its biased seems to be entirely based on the owner.

silverwhistle

ed110220 said:

Meanwhile in the real world, oil isn't much used to generate electricity and no-one in their right mind is going to build a power station with an expected life of decades on the basis of the fuel happening to be cheap today

Exactly. Also in the real world Octopus Agile have plunge pricing - i.e. they pay YOU tomorrow. Not overnight but between 10.30 and 16.00 and paying, in my area, up to 3.31 pence.  As they called it in the email they sent: the sunshine edition. Might be a good day to top up the EV, the home battery or heat the swimming pool. ;-) Good time to do a few hygiene washes, wash the car, and any other useful usage of electricity..
 

Martyn1981

ed110220 said:

silverwhistle said:

The Daily Telegraph seems a sad little paper these days, at least what I see of it. The following headline came up on my feed, but the article itself is behind a paywall:

"Goodbye renewable energy. Hello cheap oil.

The current dual crises of oil and Covid-19b have thrown the future of renewables in to doubt"

Now maybe a sub-editor is responsible for this byline and I'm unable to read the main article, but it's a pretty p**s-poor analysis of the situation.

A a severely demographically-depleted rump of a paper too Telling some fairytales to comfort the faithful. 
Meanwhile in the real world, oil isn't much used to generate electricity and no-one in their right mind is going to build a power station with an expected life of decades on the basis of the fuel happening to be cheap today. It may have a little impact on the takeup of EVs and people's choice of vehicle, but that is all I think.

Yep, the low price won't impact leccy these days, and it's simply down to oversupply and low demand. Even the US won't benefit from it in the medium term as the low price is absolutely destroying their land based oil companies. Some of the frackers can produce at around $35/b, but most are losing money before that, and the price is now around $20/b, and as storage (all over the World) threatens to fill up for the first time ever, the price could fall to sub $10/b.

I forget the exact figures, but I think that whilst Russia and Saudia Arabia can produce oil quite cheap, their national economies/budgets require a higher price to maintain current spending. I think Russia is around $65 and Saudi around $85, so both can't keep this oil war going for too long as they are eating their national reserves.

So Russia, OPEC and the US all want/need higher prices for their industry/economy.

Medium term, they are all in trouble as oil demand is slowing due to BEV rollouts, especially the transformation of the Chinese bus fleets, so supply exceeding demand is about to become a permanent reality, something suggested a year or so back, that oil may have reached 'peak price'.

Another industry that has served us well, but we now know better and need to transition away from it.

Martyn1981

Some wishes do come true. So, to get us out of a recession, perhaps even avoid a depression, large spending, ideally on infrastructure, is a solution ......... but what large infrastructure ....... let me think?

And So It Begins: World’s 11th-Biggest Economy Pitches Renewable Energy For COVID-19 Recovery

The COVID-19 outbreak has provided one last opportunity for fossil fuel stakeholders to beat back the renewable energy revolution. One especially interesting example is the notorious Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline. The once-dormant project suddenly sprang into action last week, while protesters have been sidelined by the virus. That may be so, but the window for fossil fuels is already narrowing and it’s about to slam shut. Key US states are already taking action to accelerate their renewable energy plans, virus or no virus.

World’s 11th-Largest Economy Hearts Renewable Energy

One key state is New York State, which by some measures would be the world’s 11th-largest economy if it was an independent country. On Friday, April 3, New York announced the passage of enabling legislation for its new clean power plans. If that date rings a bell, April 3 is the same day that seven top oil and gas executives went to the White House to discuss the plight of their industry.

If that’s not a clapback, nothing is.

Along with the now-familiar goal of creating jobs and fighting climate change, the new clean power plan makes the connection between renewable energy and economic recovery from the COVID-19 crisis.

To that end, the so-named Accelerated Renewable Energy Growth and Community Benefit Act creates the nation’s first ever “Office of Renewable Energy Siting.” The idea is that more private sector investment will be attracted more quickly, by tailoring the state’s approval process to fit renewable energy projects. The legislation also provides for reducing financial risk, helping to attract more private sector dollars that might otherwise go elsewhere.
In addition, the legislation takes grid planning and transmission into account.

Martyn1981

This weeks Carbon Commentary newsletter is, again, 'heavy on hydrogen', with a nice mix of items, for a quick peruse.

1, Hydrogen outlook. BNEF produced a new report on hydrogen, seeing a price as low as about 2.4 US cents per kWh by 2050 in renewables-rich countries. The cost estimates are unchanged since its last public forecast in summer 2019, even though the amount of announced electrolyser capacity may have gone up 100 fold since then. 2.4 cents/kWh is still well above the price of natural gas, of course, and BNEF says that it will require a carbon tax of around $120/tonne to make hydrogen cost competitive in all electricity generation across the world. However steel-making and cement production need a carbon price of less than $60 for hydrogen to be better than the alternatives. In the first such analysis I have seen, BNEF hypothesises that under its ‘strong’ scenario - hydrogen meeting 24% of all energy demand - renewables will need a 20 times expansion by 2050. (What We Need To Do Now suggests a similar number for the UK). The theoretical maximum, the analysts suggest is about twice this level but to my surprise they see heavy road freight switching to hydrogen in all their scenarios. The growing evidence of all but the very largest trucks moving to batteries suggests to me that this assumption may need changing.
 
 2, Electric utility innovation. By some measures, Vermont’s Green Mountain Power is the most innovative electric utility in the world. As well as pioneering utility-owned home batteries for grid stabilisation, it is involved in a new programme that builds a marketplace for excess power from local generation. A PV-equipped home, for example, might send electricity out into the grid and businesses seeking more renewable power can directly buy it through Green Mountain Power’s blockchain system. This is an important step towards a much more decentralised model of electricity production and use that enables peer-to-peer transactions. (Thanks to Thad Curtz).
 
3, ESG fund outperformance. Stock market funds which select their holdings partly on the basis of good environmental and social commitments by companies have seen a much better performance over recent months than stock markets as a whole. Some of this relative outperformance will have arisen because of the particular weakness in the large oil and gas companies in the wider market. Nevertheless, Bloomberg analysis, published in mid-March, suggested that ESG weighted funds had lost 12% of their value this year compared to twice this loss in the main US stock index. This relatively buoyant achievement supports a growing hypothesis that good ESG attributes help protect a company against unexpected and adverse events.
 
4, Biofuels from wood. The world’s first plant for making commercial-quality biomethanol (a possible substitute for petrol) opened at a paper mill in Sweden. Papermaking produces a number of waste products, including dilute methanol. The new process purifies this liquid and, in addition, makes useful pure lignin, which is useful as a fuel or as the raw material for specialty chemicals. The objective of Andritz, the developer of the technology, is to enable a paper mill to reduce its net fossil fuel to zero or less. Many people are sceptical about using forest products to make zero-carbon fuels, claiming that this simply encourages deforestation. In this case I think the manufacture of methanol is unambiguously good for the climate.

5, Storage and shipping of hydrogen. The port of Singapore - one of the most important transhipment points in the world -  said it was examining how to create the full infrastructure for hydrogen production, shipment and storage. It linked up with Japanese chemicals company Chiyoda, which has a highly plausible approach to binding hydrogen to the simple toluene molecule so that it can be shipped as a liquid at atmospheric pressure. The product carries 500 times as much energy as gaseous hydrogen per unit of volume. Removing the hydrogen is relatively easy and the resulting pure toluene can then be reused. Chiyoda says that since the toluene+hydrogen molecule has the same flammability as gasoline and therefore  much of the same infrastructure can be used, this molecule is far cheaper to store than gaseous or liquid hydrogen.

6, Carbon capture and use. An online trade conference awarded its prize for the best carbon use project to Air Co, which makes a vodka from renewable energy, hydrogen and captured carbon dioxide. The conference organiser said ‘the winning product, a vodka made from CO2 and renewable energy, will not be able to save the climate. But ethanol made from CO2 and renewable energy has a significantly lower carbon, land and water footprint than ethanol made from biomass’. Air Co beat two of my favourite companies, Electrochaea (biological methanation) and Climeworks (direct air capture of carbon dioxide) to win the award. 
 
7, Low carbon cement. Cement manufacture is responsible for about 5% of world CO2 emissions. Because most of the CO2 is produced by the chemical changes necessary to turn limestone into cement, this industry is possible the most difficult to fully decarbonise. Conventional production produces a dilute mixture of exhaust CO2 but a new process, pioneered by the Australian company Calix, generates near 100% CO2. This is far cheaper to store, or reprocess into usable hydrocarbons. Heidelberg Cement, one of the world’s largest manufacturers, announced that it would build a scaled up version of its original Calix plant after strong results from the pilot in Belgium. It also restated its commitment to 100% decarbonisation by 2050 and said it would devoting 80% of its global R+D budget to this challenge by 2030.

8, Fuel cell ships. A new tug boat that will push cargo barges upstream on the Rhone between Marseille and Lyon will use hydrogen and fuel cells for power. The hydrogen storage capacity will be enough for two weeks’ work, and the fuel tank will be removable and exchangeable with refilled hydrogen. Completion is expected in 2021. 
 
9, Renewables share of electricity production. The figures are distorted by the current reduction in power demand but Germany’s electricity generation was more than half renewable in the first quarter of the year. High winds in February and better than usual sun in March pushed the share to 52%. 
 
10, Ramping up renewables investment. Spanish global utility Iberdrola said it would increase its capital spending on renewables, even in the face of the economic slowdown. It is developing 9 GW of capacity, including 30 solar farms and 50 onshore wind parks. (This is equivalent to about 5% of total additions to global renewable capacity in 2019). Capital expenditure will be about €10bn in 2020, up from around €5bn in 2018. The CO2 content of its electricity production is already down to about 110 grams per kWh. ‘We will move forward with the total conviction that we will come through this situation and that this new infrastructure will be absolutely necessary’ said the chairman. He added ‘Iberdrola’s renewables investment drive will help “turbo-charge” economies as countries recover from the coronavirus pandemic’. ‘Speeding up investments, once these exceptional circumstances come to an end, is the best - I would venture to say the only - way to get through this situation of crisis and uncertainty’. Iberdrola’s actions, along with its strong financial performance, represent a good example of how capitalism can help rescue the world from the climate emergency. Anyone wanting to read a systematic prospectus on how corporations can reform themselves to become our allies on climate change should buy Rebecca Henderson’s new book (UK edition, US edition). Harvard professor Henderson writes limpidly and effectively on this most critical of issues. 

Am I the only one who thought, whilst reading item 6:

The conference organiser said ‘the winning product, a vodka made from CO2 and renewable energy, will not be able to save the climate.

but after a few glasses, you'll no longer care?