Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981

ABrass said:

michaels said:

Next gen oil tankers may be powered by batteries:
https://electrek.co/2020/05/22/electric-oil-tankers-coming/

Which got me thinking - given how cheap some of the solar power deployed in the gulf (of order 1p/kwh) is could there be an economic case for building battery tankers to ship the electricity to Europe to feed into the grid?!  It could be a short sea route from the Red sea Saudi coast to Sicily so each ship could complete a round trip in a few days....

It'd use up the entire world's battery supplies and ship virtually no power. Maybe with flow batteries or using hydrogen or Ammonia as the storage medium. But not batteries as we know them.

There's also the question of interconnectors. Australia looks like it might be the leader in shipping 'sunshine' via ammonia to Asia, especially Japan. But there are a lot of smart people considering HVDC potential for Indonesia and locations near, or should that be nearer, but still a long way from Aus.

It would be great if Europe could keep expanding its HVDC links within and between nations, as this could mean N.African sunshine leccy straight into the grid at Spain, or Middle East supplies via Greece and Turkey, with relatively short cable distances. With these supplies working there way through Europe.

I might be making this up, but I think there may have been some thought given to ship mounted wind or wave generation, but stored in batts to save on cabling costs ...... no idea if that's viable, or even real (imagination playing tricks on me perhaps).

Martyn1981

Stole this article from the nice people on Navitron. If I'm understanding it correctly, new solar with storage is undercutting coal generation costs. That's off the charts when it comes to good news, and must Shirley undermine confidence in investing in new coal generation.

View: Cleaner, and now cheaper, solar power beats coal

During the day, India now has excess power capacity. Solar generation is given priority, while thermal stations have to back down till sunset. Priority to solar power makes economic sense since it entails no running costs, whereas thermal power entails fuel costs. But thermal plants that once ran 75% of the time have been forced to back down to just 55-58% to accommodate rising solar production. This hidden cost of solar power cannot be borne fully by the thermal sector, which needs a new tariff.

In the giant 1,200 MW Bhadla solar park in Rajasthan, the winning auction in 2018 was just Rs 2.44/unit. But it had no provision for storage, something experts estimated would add Rs 2/unit to the tariff. That meant solar power was not cheaper than thermal power and could not be switched on and off at will, as thermal plants could.

However, the new 400 MW deal won by ReNew Power includes enough storage to ensure 80% capacity utilisation over a year and not less than 70% in any month. This is not quite 24/7 power, but is as efficient as thermal power and much cheaper. That is why it is a breakthrough.

Martyn1981

Martyn1981 said:

ABrass said:

michaels said:

Next gen oil tankers may be powered by batteries:
https://electrek.co/2020/05/22/electric-oil-tankers-coming/

Which got me thinking - given how cheap some of the solar power deployed in the gulf (of order 1p/kwh) is could there be an economic case for building battery tankers to ship the electricity to Europe to feed into the grid?!  It could be a short sea route from the Red sea Saudi coast to Sicily so each ship could complete a round trip in a few days....

It'd use up the entire world's battery supplies and ship virtually no power. Maybe with flow batteries or using hydrogen or Ammonia as the storage medium. But not batteries as we know them.

There's also the question of interconnectors. Australia looks like it might be the leader in shipping 'sunshine' via ammonia to Asia, especially Japan. But there are a lot of smart people considering HVDC potential for Indonesia and locations near, or should that be nearer, but still a long way from Aus.

It would be great if Europe could keep expanding its HVDC links within and between nations, as this could mean N.African sunshine leccy straight into the grid at Spain, or Middle East supplies via Greece and Turkey, with relatively short cable distances. With these supplies working there way through Europe.

I might be making this up, but I think there may have been some thought given to ship mounted wind or wave generation, but stored in batts to save on cabling costs ...... no idea if that's viable, or even real (imagination playing tricks on me perhaps).

Nice timing. Just watched this vid from the excellent (IMO) Just Have a Think series, posted today:

Green Hydrogen : Can Australia lead the world?

Martyn1981

Extracts from the latest Carbon Commentary newsletter, hope you like Hydrogen news:

2, Power to gas. Turbine manufacturer Wartsila said it was planning a new power to methane facility at a waste-to-energy plant not far from Helsinki. In a venture with the municipal utility, it will estimate how much synthetic natural gas will cost made from hydrogen and waste carbon dioxide from the existing power plant. The chemistry of making natural gas is simple but the viability depends critically on the price of the electricity used to make the hydrogen.
 
3, EU and hydrogen. Hydrogen made from natural gas produces high levels of CO2 emissions as a byproduct. As part of its Green New Deal, the EU Commission is likely this week to recommend a new subsidy scheme for hydrogen made from renewables. The subsidy will take the form of a payment for avoided CO2, using the existing EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) as part of its structure. The Commission plans to make green hydrogen cost-competitive with existing manufacturing technologies. The assumption seems to be that the hydrogen will be fed into refineries and fertiliser plants to replace some of the fossil-derived alternative. This is a step towards the achievement of a large task: I estimate that replacing all the hydrogen currently made from gas in the EU would demand about 150 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity. World leader UK has about 9 GW today.  (Thanks to Thad Curtz).
 
4, Carbon removal. The US payments company Stripe said it had chosen the suppliers for its corporate carbon sequestration programme. The four companies are Climeworks (Direct Air Capture of CO2), Project Vesta, which plans to place a mineral called olivine on beaches with strong waves that quickly weather the rock, adding carbon dioxide in the process, CarbonCure, a process that adds CO2 to concrete as it hardens and Charm Oil, which intends to pipe oil made from biological sources into permanent geologic storage. Some reflections on this pioneering investment. First, it involves costs that range from $75 (Vesta) to $775 (Climeworks) a tonne. If the average cost of sequestration is eventually $100 a tonne, a gigatonne (1,000 million tonnes) will cost about $100bn or 0.1% of global GDP a year. A gigatonne is about 2.5% of current world emissions. Second, only one of these solutions involves biomass, which Stripe seems to see as an inherently impermanent route. Third, all these projects can be carried out at massive scale with limited land use implications This is pathbreaking action from Stripe. (Thanks to John Philip Smyth).
 
5, Australian green hydrogen. Australia is seeing a growing number of very large scale outline plans for green hydrogen production with several gigawatt scale projects coming to light in the last few weeks. Some are to provide ‘baseload’ power with hydrogen being stored for periods of low renewables production. Others are aimed at the export market to Japan and Korean. BP Lightsource is looking at a 1.5 GW project north of Perth, Siemens has a 5 GW plant in mind and other plans are larger still.  This week a business run by ex-oil and gas people pitched a 1 GW plan for wind, solar and hydrogen in New South Wales, possibly to be expanded several fold. The hydrogen will be used in fuel cells for power generation on site. One particular advantage of the scheme, according to its proponents, is that it will employ large numbers of people currently working in the coal sector. (Thanks to Tony Cooke).
  
7, Green hydrogen for domestic supply. SGN, a UK gas distributor, announced a plan to pipe hydrogen to a group of 300 homes in Scotland. The gas will be made using renewable electricity. The houses will use the hydrogen for heating and for cooking. I think this may be the first attempt in the world to show the feasibility of switching from natural gas to 100% hydrogen for domestic use.

8, Energy islands. In What We Need To Do Now, I write about the plan by the Dutch electricity grip operator TenneT to build man-made islands, both to agglomerate power from multiple gigawatt-scale offshore wind farms and to act as staging points for international interconnections between the countries that border the North Sea. A smaller version of this extremely ambitious plan is now being put into place by Denmark. One artificial island, connected to 2 GW of wind, will link the Netherlands and Denmark. An existing island will be used a connector to Poland. The announcement talked of the two islands possibly being expanded up to a total of 10 GW, higher than the average level of Danish electricity consumption.
 
9, Bio-hydrogen. We currently assume that electrolysis is the obvious means to generate renewable hydrogen. Certainly the elevated stock market valuations of electrolyser companies would support this view. However we probably shouldn’t rule out cheaper biological routes to hydrogen generation. A paper (paywall) from researchers at the University of Kiel showed how fusing a cyanobacterium and an enzyme results in the continuous production of hydrogen when the organism is exposed to sunshine. This research is still at the proof of concept stage but the potential advantages of biological manufacture include much lower capital costs, low operating temperatures and pressures plus high responsiveness to varying levels of sunshine. Similarly methane, the main constituent of natural gas, may be best achieved by the use of ancient organisms called archaea, which can be engineered to naturally exude it, rather than using the conventional Sabatier approach envisaged in note 2 above.
 
10, H2 network in Germany. Germany needs a large hydrogen network because of the difficulties moving more electricity from north to south. Pipelines are politically much less difficult. The gas pipeline operators published a plan to convert existing natural gas links to hydrogen across the country. Initially about 1,200 km of pipelines would provide access to Munich in the south up to Rostock on the Baltic. This proposal envisages the largest hydrogen network in the world but it would need to grow several fold for a full replacement of the main natural gas network, including links into the Netherlands.  

Martyn1981

No idea if this will work, but it's a fun idea:

German Company Combines Wind, Wave, & Solar Power In One System

Go big or go home. That seems to be the motto of SINN Power of Germany. Founded in 2014 by Phillip Sinn, the company’s primary focus is “providing people living near coasts all over the world with access to clean electricity to enable sustainable development and contribute to our planet at the same time.” It has been researching wave power for 5 years using floating platforms with wave energy generators hanging below them.

But then the company hit on the idea of adding solar panels and wind turbines to those floating platforms. “The floating platform can supply renewable energy to islands across the world … and contribute to the worldwide implementation of offshore wind farms,” Sinn told Forbes recently. Bazanga! A trifecta of clean, renewable energy. The company calls it the world’s “first floating ocean hybrid platform.”

The company claims the wave generator platform can be equipped with a 20 kW solar array and up to four 6 kW wind turbines. It says it is operating fully functional prototypes at its research location in Heraklion, Greece and is “on the verge” of commercializing its technology. Sounds cool, but does it work?

gefnew

Hi
Just spotted this on the news about edf and sizewell power plant.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-52813171

NigeWick

gefnew said: Just spotted this on the news about edf and sizewell power plant.

Wind farms are far cheaper, far faster to build and far safer if something were to go wrong.

michaels

Martyn1981 said:

No idea if this will work, but it's a fun idea:

German Company Combines Wind, Wave, & Solar Power In One System

Go big or go home. That seems to be the motto of SINN Power of Germany. Founded in 2014 by Phillip Sinn, the company’s primary focus is “providing people living near coasts all over the world with access to clean electricity to enable sustainable development and contribute to our planet at the same time.” It has been researching wave power for 5 years using floating platforms with wave energy generators hanging below them.

But then the company hit on the idea of adding solar panels and wind turbines to those floating platforms. “The floating platform can supply renewable energy to islands across the world … and contribute to the worldwide implementation of offshore wind farms,” Sinn told Forbes recently. Bazanga! A trifecta of clean, renewable energy. The company calls it the world’s “first floating ocean hybrid platform.”

The company claims the wave generator platform can be equipped with a 20 kW solar array and up to four 6 kW wind turbines. It says it is operating fully functional prototypes at its research location in Heraklion, Greece and is “on the verge” of commercializing its technology. Sounds cool, but does it work?

You could even use any spare energy to power desalinisation as fresh water supplies are increasingly a problem.

Martyn1981

Big talk, and to be fair, good talk, but will it lead to anything, keep those fingers crossed.

UK MPs call for extra £30bn to aid green recovery from Covid-19

The UK needs to invest an additional £30bn a year in shovel-ready green projects to create jobs, energise the post-lockdown economy and put the country back on track to achieve its climate targets, a new cross-party commission recommends.

In the most detailed blueprint to date for a green recovery from Covid-19, it also advises the government to make an initial down payment of £5bn into a national “just transition fund” that would support the regions likely to be worst affected by the shift away from fossil fuels.

The 96-page dossier was unveiled on Wednesday by the environmental justice commission, which is composed of MPs, business executives, union leaders, climate activists and members of the Institute for Public Policy Research.

Coastalwatch

gefnew said:

Hi
Just spotted this on the news about edf and sizewell power plant.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-52813171

Apparently the cost is about £18 billion, but in any case less than the £21.5 -£22.5 billion that Hinckley point is expected to complete at. There has been no timescale mentioned in the recent press release although output of 3.2 GW is stated. EDF are planning to finance it mostly through pension schemes!

It does rather beg the question How many wind farms could be built for such a sum, what might the output be and cost per kWh of energy once built?