Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

michaels

Martyn1981 said:

Bad news, we lose some (existing) low carbon generation. But good news, this again helps with the debate, particularly the economic debate, on where best to target future investments ...... RE (and storage) of course. 

Scottish nuclear power station to shut down early after reactor problems

Hunterston nuclear power station, one of the UK’s oldest remaining nuclear plants, is to close down next year, earlier than expected, after encountering a series of safety-critical problems in its reactors.

Industry sources told the Guardian that EDF Energy, the state-owned French operator of Hunterston, decided at a board meeting on Thursday afternoon that the plant would stop generating electricity in late 2021, at least two years earlier than planned.

The energy company had hoped to keep generating electricity from the 44-year-old nuclear plant on the Firth of Clyde until 2023, after ploughing more than £200m into repairing the reactor.

Hunterston, which first began generating electricity in 1976, has been offline since 2018 after inspectors discovered 350 microscopic cracks in the reactor’s graphite core.

Certainly a mixed blessing, I was hoping we could extend the lives of our nuclear fleet as in most cases nuclear output will currently be replaced by gas (or even coal)

Martyn1981

michaels said:

Martyn1981 said:

Bad news, we lose some (existing) low carbon generation. But good news, this again helps with the debate, particularly the economic debate, on where best to target future investments ...... RE (and storage) of course. 

Scottish nuclear power station to shut down early after reactor problems

Hunterston nuclear power station, one of the UK’s oldest remaining nuclear plants, is to close down next year, earlier than expected, after encountering a series of safety-critical problems in its reactors.

Industry sources told the Guardian that EDF Energy, the state-owned French operator of Hunterston, decided at a board meeting on Thursday afternoon that the plant would stop generating electricity in late 2021, at least two years earlier than planned.

The energy company had hoped to keep generating electricity from the 44-year-old nuclear plant on the Firth of Clyde until 2023, after ploughing more than £200m into repairing the reactor.

Hunterston, which first began generating electricity in 1976, has been offline since 2018 after inspectors discovered 350 microscopic cracks in the reactor’s graphite core.

Certainly a mixed blessing, I was hoping we could extend the lives of our nuclear fleet as in most cases nuclear output will currently be replaced by gas (or even coal)

Or cheap RE rolled out even faster, since it's proving to be cheaper than FF's.

Martyn1981

Remember Gravitricity? Well testing is moving forward on their energy storage idea.

Work underway on Gravitricity storage demo

Gravitricity lead engineer Miles Franklin said: "Our demonstrator will use two 25-tonnes weights suspended by steel  cables. In one test we’ll drop the weights together to generate full power and verify our speed of response.

"We calculate we can go from zero to full power in less than a second – which can be extremely valuable in the frequency response and back-up power markets

"We’ll then run tests with the two single weights, dropping one after the other to verify smooth energy output over a longer period, alongside a programme of other tests to demonstrate and refine the full capabilities of the system.

Martyn1981

Extracts from this week's Carbon Commentary Newsletter:

1, Direct Air Capture of CO2. The differing strategies of the two main competitors were contrasted this week. Canada’s Carbon Engineering promoted its plans to work with Occidental and an outside equity fund to build the first million tonne a year plant and pump the CO2 into oil reservoirs to increase production. Its main rival, Climeworks, moved in a different direction, announcing a scale-up of its existing facility in Iceland which injects captured CO2 into basalt for permanent sequestration. Carbon Engineering’s weakness is its reliance on ‘Enhanced Oil Recovery’ as the market for its carbon dioxide but the scale of its project is several hundred times the size of the Climeworks plant, which will store just four thousand tonnes a year. (Thanks to Bela Hanratty).
 
2, Domestic housing, storage and demand response. Two interesting developments this week in the drive to make domestic electricity demand more flexible. In the UK, low carbon housing developer Sero has combined with a wide range of energy companies to offer houses  that can shift electricity demand to periods of low prices. An array of new(ish) technologies including ground source heat pumps, PV, Sonnen batteries and Mixergy hot water tanks, as well as sophisticated control software, will allow householders to manage their power consumption. But is it all a little too complicated? I’ll be interested to see if the new owners productively use the digital intelligence that is provided. In California, Sonnen batteries are working with a different approach that also uses building solar PV but passes control of the net electricity consumption of large apartment blocks to an energy market participant via a ‘Virtual Power Plant’ (VPP). This 3,000 home project will become the largest domestic home VPP in the world in 2021 with 60 MWh of storage.  (Thanks to Alison Fogg)
 
4, Green hydrogen. Australian academics offered estimates for the cost of making hydrogen from electrolysis, writing that a figure of about US$1.5 per kg was plausible for 2030. That is roughly equivalent to the average cost of hydrogen made from fossil fuels today. If this level is attained Australia will be an excellent position to export hydrogen to Asian economies where manufacturing costs are unlikely to reach this level. Is the target achievable? I thought the some of the underlying assumptions, such as electrolyser efficiencies, were actually a little conservative. In a separate report, analysts Wood Mackenzie agreed that green hydrogen might well be cost competitive by 2030, although I wasn’t convinced by their view that Germany would be one of the first places to achieve parity with fossil hydrogen. 
 
5, Oil majors and decarbonisation. Petro-China is the latest large oil company to announce an intention to switch to low-carbon sources of energy. In a first for the company it said it would participate in renewables development, including geothermal, and would also spend on developing hydrogen capability. It promised investment of about 0.5% of its annual revenue by 2025. For comparison, BP has committed to about four times this level. 
 
6, Green steel. The world's most advanced experiment in making iron (the precursor to steel) without the use of coal starts production on Monday 31st August. The steelmaker SSAB's new plant in northern Sweden uses hydrogen to reduce ore to a form of iron that can be used in electric arc furnaces to make steel. Steelmaking is an unusually important source of Swedish emissions. SSAB's targets a reduction of 10% in national CO2 by fully replacing fossil fuels. This is just one step in a long process that will see the company first starting to sell near zero-carbon steel in 2026 but it is probably the most significant point in the long period of trials. SSAB has always claimed that hydrogen steel can be cost competitive with coal-based metal but I suspect this depends on a high carbon price.

7, Fashion and emissions. McKinsey produced some useful numbers on the impact of textiles, saying that fashion is responsible for about 5% of overall global emissions. It offered a view that up to half this total could be avoided by better supply chain management at no financial cost. It barely mentions that the most obvious way of reducing the impact of fast fashion is simply to reduce the volumes of clothing sold, by improving genuine recycling, making full refashioning of clothes possible and by increasing manufacturing quality. This industry is unusually conscious of its extreme environmental impact but seems slow to realise that the fast fashion business model is incompatible with climate stability.
 
8, Synthetic fuels. A range of Danish companies and Norwegian electrolyser manufacturer Nel announced a plan to build a small hydrogen plant by 2023, expanding to synthetic fuels in 2027 using the green hydrogen and CO2 captured from biogas or municipal waste treatment. The companies in the consortium include some of the big Danish shipping companies, including Maersk. Their interest is, of course, in finding a zero-carbon fuel for their ships. By 2030, the group wants to have 1.3 GW of electrolysis capacity to make renewable liquid fuels, equivalent to about 0.3% of world hydrogen demand today. But the group says that this target is dependent on large-scale access to power from the wind farm off Bornholm island in the Baltic sea, another example of the vital links between offshore wind and hydrogen. The project points again to the potentially vital global role of the Danish catalytic chemistry specialist Haldor Topsoe, which is also a key participant in the huge renewable ammonia NOEM project in Saudi Arabia. The Danish plan mirrors some aspects of the Norwegian power-to-fuels scheme announced in June but is less aggressive in its timing.
  
10, Space needed for renewables. I wrote an over-complicated post about the amount of land needed for renewables in the UK. I roughly calculated how much total energy, not just electricity, that the UK will need and how much hydrogen would be required for storage and synthetic fuels. Using data from existing projects, I estimated the number of watts per square metre that will be produced by wind and solar and then projected the surface area required. Perhaps crucially, these calculations suggest that the UK may have to devote about 1/3 of its shallow waters to offshore wind but a relatively small area for PV farms. If floating wind becomes cost competitive with all other renewables, which some experts believe will happen, the surface requirements offshore become much less demanding. In another article, I wrote about the expected energy productivity of an offshore wind farm that has just been approved off the Netherlands coast. The calculations in this note support the UK figures.

Martyn1981

MP's asking for the Moon on a stick again. This time the cheeky so-an-so's want to give us more than a 50:50 chance of avoiding greater than 1.5C of heating ......... they'll be wanting clean air and World peace next!

Climate emergency bill offers real hope

A group of MPs urge the government to get serious on tackling the climate crisis with the tabling of the climate and ecological emergency bill

From these cooler years of the early 21st century, we look to a bleak future. A future where the Earth continues to heat, with more extreme weather, with parts of our planet made uninhabitable, leaving millions homeless and destitute. A future where we face the threat of mass extinctions, for which we are responsible.

We will need all of our ingenuity and imagination to prevent this future from unfolding. As we see in the response to Covid-19, people can come together, and our governments can – when they need to – do the “impossible”. The climate and ecological emergency bill was introduced in parliament today by the Green party MP Caroline Lucas with our support. Drafted by scientists, academics and lawyers, it will – if backed all the way by MPs – strengthen the Climate Change Act and ensure that Britain has a comprehensive strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and restore our natural world.

Martyn1981

France to invest ~€33bn in green measures such as energy and efficiency.

French PM says jobs and green economy at heart of Covid recovery plan

France’s prime minister has stressed the importance of getting the country back on its feet within 18 months and “transforming” the French economy with a green makeover as he unveiled a €100bn (£89bn) coronavirus recovery plan.

Jean Castex outlined how France would spend its way out of the crisis, rather than create “social misery” through austerity measures, with a plan that had the environment, competitiveness and employment as its three pillars.

One third of the €100bn will be used to make the economy greener, including investment in ecological transition, hydrogen and renewable energy, as well as the renovation of homes and buildings to make them more energy efficient.

Martyn1981

I um'd and ah'd about where to pop this, then just tossed a coin.

So here's an article on V2G and just how big a part it will play in energy storage according to ESO (formerly part of the National Grid):

The Present & Future of Vehicle-to-Grid Technology

By 2050, up to 45% of households will actively provide vehicle-to-grid (V2G) services, according to National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO)’s Future Energy Scenarios, published in July 2020. But will the average electric vehicle (EV) driver be able to use V2G charging over the next few years?

Martyn1981

Time for some extracts from the Carbon Commentary newsletter. I thought #9 was interesting, suggesting a switch from sheep farming in the UK to forestry, or even a forestry industry to provide for our bio-mass demands:

2, France green restart. France offered €30bn towards green ventures as part of its €100bn recovery plan. €2bn is directed towards hydrogen. This money will be used for the development of giga-factories for making electrolysers and fuel cells. This takes the government’s total support for hydrogen up to about €9bn, or around the same amount as Germany. This will completely change the scale of the European hydrogen industry. In other measures, €5bn will go towards rail transport, including improving freight lines and rural passenger links. Large sums will be devoted to improving the insulation standards of public buildings and social housing. A portion of expenditure will be on reducing the emissions impact of agriculture and bringing back food production to France. I haven’t seen this given weight in other green plans by government. Environmental NGOs admitted that the targets were impressive but said further speeding up of the pace of change is necessary.
 
3, Lower carbon shipping. Japanese companies, including an oil refinery owner, launched a partnership to build a coastal ferry powered by a hydrogen fuel cell by 2024. The consortium also includes shipping line NYK which also announced this week a different venture with another group to build a tugboat that will use ammonia, not hydrogen, as its source of power. In the same week, north European shippers Wilhelmsen and Hafnia announced their possible choices for the replacement of diesel. Wilhelmsen backs hydrogen but Hafnia is investing in methanol. However BW Group, the majority owner of Hafnia, said it thought ammonia was the most likely route forward. Although the shipping industry is clearly terrified of the sums it will have to invest to get to zero carbon, and real progress is therefore slow, there is no shortage of potential routes forward
 
4, Plastics and oil demand. BP’s 2019 Outlook projected oil demand growth of about 7 million barrels a day between now and 2040. In BP’s model, all of this growth arises from ‘non-combusted’ oil use, of which by far the most important component is plastics. Without buoyant use of plastics, oil demand will undeniably fall, even if EV growth is slower than expected. But despite the risks, the petrochemicals industry continues to invest in plants to produce higher quantities of ethylene and other precursor chemicals. Kingsmill Bond and the Carbon Tracker team produced an outstandingly clear analysis of the risks of stranded assets in the sector, particularly those involved in making single use plastics, which use about 4% of world oil consumption today. Their conclusion is that the environmental damage caused by warrants a $1,000 a tonne tax on these items, roughly doubling the cost. BP has itself modelled a worldwide single use plastics ban, estimating that this change alone would cause world oil demand to fall from around 2030. Many others would now suspect that 2019 represented ‘peak oil’.
  
6, Small nuclear reactors. The horrendous complexity and expense of building the latest generation of large nuclear power plants has pushed some policymakers in the US and UK into supporting much smaller reactors. The most advanced design is the NuScale variant, which has just received its initial safety approval from the US regulator. The first working power station, probably of 60 MW capacity, will start on US government land in 2029 with more following on the same site in 2030. The current estimate of the cost of electricity from the power station is about $55 per megawatt hour, above what a well-sited wind or solar plant would be able to achieve today in the US.
 
7, Integration of renewables and hydrogen. Mitsubishi, which owns one of the three biggest makers of gas turbines, announced a package that integrates renewables and hydrogen to provide near-dispatchable electricity. Excess renewables are converted to hydrogen which is then stored before being used in a gas turbine to make electricity when wind or solar are in short supply. The company also said that three US utilities had signed up to the package it offers. These customers will initially run the turbines on 30% hydrogen and 70% natural gas but will eventually increase to 100% hydrogen. I think this is the first indication that US utilities envisage replacing natural gas with hydrogen made from renewables at large power plants.
 
8, Misunderstanding of relative importance of climate actions. Researchers and policy-makers consistently find that citizens don’t rank climate actions accurately. The vital importance of cutting flying and restraining meat consumption is particularly underestimated. A recent Canadian university study showed that well-informed individuals rated the carbon impact of a very long flight as approximately the same as using an electric drier for clothes. (This second activity would have a negligible carbon consequence in a renewables-dominated electricity network). The researcher said of his questionnaire ‘People might have been focusing on choices where the harms are highly visible or on actions that are symbolic of environmentalism but not related to climate. For example, littering creates no emissions, but we found it was perceived similarly to a high-pollution flight across the Pacific Ocean’.
 
9, European sheep farming. Sheep produce methane as a result of their digestive processes. In the UK, for example, herds are responsible for about 1% of national emissions. At the same time, sheep farming is heavily subsidised and uses perhaps 20% of UK land area. Few sheep farms would come close to covering their costs without today’s heavy subsidies. British farmers receive over £1bn ($1.3bn) a year in support. The land used by sheep could almost always be used for forestry, cutting net carbon emissions. Removing sheep and allowing natural regeneration would cost virtually nothing, according to a new analysis from a UK university, meaning that taxpayers would save money at the same time as carbon emissions were reduced. It might be still better to invest in rebuilding a full-scale domestic forestry industry although this would need an initial subsidy of around $60 per tonne of CO2 captured, the researchers thought. The UK imports more wood products (about £8bn a year) than any other country in the world with the exception of China. As I argue in What We Need To Do Now, a healthy forestry industry might employ an order of magnitude more people than the 35,000 employed farming sheep.
 
10, Virtual power plants (VPP). Expansion of a large scale VPP will see more South Australian homes get free PV on the roof, a 13.5 kWh Tesla battery and 22% off the standard electricity price. The battery will be controlled by the electricity company. The current phase of the plan links another 3,000 homes to provide a total of 50 MWh of storage, roughly equivalent to the extra capacity now being installed at the Hornsdale site which first brought large scale battery storage to Australia in 2017. The plan for the new VPP is to eventually build a total of 50,000 systems and I presume this will provide about 600 MWh for grid stability. For comparison, the amount of electricity consumed in South Australia on a Saturday in September swings between 600 MW and 1.3 GW. (I saw this on RenewEconomy.com.au. 

Martyn1981

Here's an update/revision on the old argument that the cheapest way to get to 100% (or just high) RE penetration is simply overcapacity. With falling RE costs and falling costs across multiple forms of storage, the idea has now been studied in detail. Note this study is based on the US:

The Best Electricity Plan: Overbuild Solar & Wind Power Plants

More than 8 years ago, researchers from the University of Delaware (UD) and Delaware Technical College (DTCC) put forward a rather “radical” idea — to deal with wind and solar power’s intermittency while also acknowledging wind and solar power’s falling costs, why not just overbuild wind and solar power plants in the future?

Much has changed since 2012. The biggest thing that changed in this industry is that solar power costs came down much quicker than expected. Battery costs have also come down faster than most analysts expected. The result with regards to this study is clear: it makes even more sense to simply overbuild cheap wind and solar power plants than to try to fill in the gaps between supply and demand using fossil fuel power plants. Even leaving environmental matters out of it, it’s simply cheaper to overbuild low-cost solar and wind power plants.

ASavvyBuyer

Construction begins on energy storage system relying on gravity

Last week, a British energy startup company placed its own stamp on the history of gravity by beginning construction of an energy storage system powered by—gravity.