Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

gefnew

Hydrogen plant proposal for Saltend chemicals park

A power station in Hull plans to switch from using fossil fuels in favour of hydrogen

The gas-fired plant at Saltend is planning the change as part of a bigger project across the Humber estuary to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.

Geoff Holmes, the chief executive of Px Group, says: "Hydrogen is a much cleaner fuel to burn in generating electricity and that's why we're moving to a lower carbon footprint for the power station and the entire chemicals park.

"As well as creating new hydrogen we're also creating a facility to take all of the discharge gases and store them safely in an unused reservoir offshore."

Solarchaser

Martyn1981 said:

Martyn1981 said:

If anyone is interested in Highview and LAES (I've been carping on for years), then a Youtube channel I enjoy 'Undecided' has done a good vid on it and how progress is now being made with several installations taking place.

Liquid Air Battery Explained - Rival to Lithium Ion Batteries?

Handy recent vid, for those interested.

Very interesting, thanks.

I'd like to see the proof of a working 70% efficient plant, im rather sceptical. 

However built up next to steel Mills, cement factories etc where there exhausted heat is just wasted, sounds like a great use of industrial waste 👍 

Martyn1981

RE expanding rapidly all over the World, and could exceed coal generation by 2025. I was thinking they meant capacity, not generation, but a later paragraph suggests RE will generate 1/3rd of generation by 2025, so if the rest is spread over gas, coal, nuclear and oil, I suppose it may be true.

Renewable energy defies Covid-19 to hit record growth in 2020

Global renewable electricity installation will hit a record level in 2020, according to the International Energy Agency, in sharp contrast with the declines caused by the coronavirus pandemic in the fossil fuel sectors.

The IEA report published on Tuesday says almost 90% of new electricity generation in 2020 will be renewable, with just 10% powered by gas and coal. The trend puts green electricity on track to become the largest power source in 2025, displacing coal, which has dominated for the past 50 years.

“In 2025, renewables are set to become the largest source of electricity generation worldwide, ending coal’s five decades as the top power provider,” Birol said. “By that time, renewables are expected to supply one-third of the world’s electricity.”

EVandPV

Could be good or bad news, depending on your point of view.

Rolls Royce plans UK class of mini-nuclear plants

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54703204

Martyn1981

EVandPV said:

Could be good or bad news, depending on your point of view.

Rolls Royce plans UK class of mini-nuclear plants

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54703204

I've been pondering a 'good news' angle since this morning, but it's a bit of a stretch. But, if the Gov seems OK providing some funding towards this idea, then it might be possible to get them to switch it to RE, or storage, or both, since that should be a fraction of the cost of the generation from these SMR's. If they are around 1/3rd more expensive than conventional nuclear, and the latest build (HPC) is £104/MWh, then puts the cost of the leccy somewhere around £140/MWh, approx £100/MWh more than PV, on-shore wind, or off-shore wind, which must be a great opener for a discussion on where best to spend this 'extra' Gov money.

Just some head scratching numbers, but in the US where there have been contracts for RE and RE + storage, the '+ storage' bit seems to add around 1c/kWh or $10/MWh, for about 4hrs of storage, let's just convert $'s to £'s.
So, running with those numbers, the £140/MWh for SMR's would buy around 3MWh of RE leccy and storage capacity for 8hrs, which sounds like a sweet deal to me.

I did chuckle at this bit:

Each plant would produce 440 megawatts of electricity - roughly enough to power Sheffield - and the hope is that, once the first few have been made, they will cost around £2bn each.

Hope forever springs eternal, and I wonder how much those first few will cost, and how many that few will turn out to be?

But it seems that some nuclear experts are learning fast and adapting to the changing economics:

Finally, he questioned whether there will be a market for these plants by the 2030s, when UK SMR says the first will be ready.
"Ten years from now, the competition will be renewables which are going to be far cheaper with much better storage technology than we have today," said Prof Ramana.

Another decade of wasted time, wasted money, and FF emissions, when we could simply roll out more RE today, and at a lower cost. Too simple perhaps!

michaels

Martyn1981 said:

EVandPV said:

Could be good or bad news, depending on your point of view.

Rolls Royce plans UK class of mini-nuclear plants

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54703204

I've been pondering a 'good news' angle since this morning, but it's a bit of a stretch. But, if the Gov seems OK providing some funding towards this idea, then it might be possible to get them to switch it to RE, or storage, or both, since that should be a fraction of the cost of the generation from these SMR's. If they are around 1/3rd more expensive than conventional nuclear, and the latest build (HPC) is £104/MWh, then puts the cost of the leccy somewhere around £140/MWh, approx £100/MWh more than PV, on-shore wind, or off-shore wind, which must be a great opener for a discussion on where best to spend this 'extra' Gov money.

Just some head scratching numbers, but in the US where there have been contracts for RE and RE + storage, the '+ storage' bit seems to add around 1c/kWh or $10/MWh, for about 4hrs of storage, let's just convert $'s to £'s.
So, running with those numbers, the £140/MWh for SMR's would buy around 3MWh of RE leccy and storage capacity for 8hrs, which sounds like a sweet deal to me.

I did chuckle at this bit:

Each plant would produce 440 megawatts of electricity - roughly enough to power Sheffield - and the hope is that, once the first few have been made, they will cost around £2bn each.

Hope forever springs eternal, and I wonder how much those first few will cost, and how many that few will turn out to be?

But it seems that some nuclear experts are learning fast and adapting to the changing economics:

Finally, he questioned whether there will be a market for these plants by the 2030s, when UK SMR says the first will be ready.
"Ten years from now, the competition will be renewables which are going to be far cheaper with much better storage technology than we have today," said Prof Ramana.

Another decade of wasted time, wasted money, and FF emissions, when we could simply roll out more RE today, and at a lower cost. Too simple perhaps!

Just playing devils advocate how many MWH nominal of wind power would you need to produce the same annual output as a 440mwh SMR - about double?  And then how much storage would you need to ensure 24/7/365 power availability from wind (or wind plus solar) based on historic weather records?

Martyn1981

michaels said:

Martyn1981 said:

EVandPV said:

Could be good or bad news, depending on your point of view.

Rolls Royce plans UK class of mini-nuclear plants

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54703204

I've been pondering a 'good news' angle since this morning, but it's a bit of a stretch. But, if the Gov seems OK providing some funding towards this idea, then it might be possible to get them to switch it to RE, or storage, or both, since that should be a fraction of the cost of the generation from these SMR's. If they are around 1/3rd more expensive than conventional nuclear, and the latest build (HPC) is £104/MWh, then puts the cost of the leccy somewhere around £140/MWh, approx £100/MWh more than PV, on-shore wind, or off-shore wind, which must be a great opener for a discussion on where best to spend this 'extra' Gov money.

Just some head scratching numbers, but in the US where there have been contracts for RE and RE + storage, the '+ storage' bit seems to add around 1c/kWh or $10/MWh, for about 4hrs of storage, let's just convert $'s to £'s.
So, running with those numbers, the £140/MWh for SMR's would buy around 3MWh of RE leccy and storage capacity for 8hrs, which sounds like a sweet deal to me.

I did chuckle at this bit:

Each plant would produce 440 megawatts of electricity - roughly enough to power Sheffield - and the hope is that, once the first few have been made, they will cost around £2bn each.

Hope forever springs eternal, and I wonder how much those first few will cost, and how many that few will turn out to be?

But it seems that some nuclear experts are learning fast and adapting to the changing economics:

Finally, he questioned whether there will be a market for these plants by the 2030s, when UK SMR says the first will be ready.
"Ten years from now, the competition will be renewables which are going to be far cheaper with much better storage technology than we have today," said Prof Ramana.

Another decade of wasted time, wasted money, and FF emissions, when we could simply roll out more RE today, and at a lower cost. Too simple perhaps!

Just playing devils advocate how many MWH nominal of wind power would you need to produce the same annual output as a 440mwh SMR - about double?  And then how much storage would you need to ensure 24/7/365 power availability from wind (or wind plus solar) based on historic weather records?

I've compared MWh to MWh. Approx £40/MWh gets you RE deployment, but £100 to £140 needs to be spent to get a MWh of conventional / SMR nuclear respectively.
Nuclear needs storage too if we are being fair.

Martyn1981

Not exactly a surprise I suspect for most on here, but still nice to see it being said out loud.

Reaching UK net zero target cheaper than we thought, says climate adviser

Reaching net zero carbon emissions in the UK is likely to be much easier and cheaper than previously thought, and can be designed in such a way as to quickly improve the lives of millions of people, a senior adviser to the government has said.

Chris Stark, the chief executive of the Committee on Climate Change, the UK’s independent statutory adviser, said costs had come down rapidly in recent years, and past estimates that moving to a low-carbon economy would cut trillions from GDP were wrong.

“Overall, the cost is surprisingly low – it’s cheaper than even we thought last year when we made our assessments. Net zero is relatively low-cost across the economy,” he said. “But that rests on action now. You can’t sit on your hands and imagine it’s just going to get cheaper by magic.”

ASavvyBuyer

Power prices have fallen to their lowest in nearly two decades.

"Prices are down by two-thirds over the last two years, reaching a minimum of just £22/MWh over the month of May. Britain spent £1.3 billion less on electricity supply over the second quarter of this year compared to last year. The total cost of generation (based on wholesale prices plus balancing charges) fell from £3.0 to £1.7 billion over the three months."

Coastalwatch

I came across this video of Celtic Renewables founder and President Martin Tangney's Presentation to be used for the warm up of the important COP 26 Event. He describes in his own words the journey from an idea at university through to the building of an industrial scale operation near completion at Grangemouth taking waste from the whisky industry and creating Acetone , Butanol and Ethanol from it. Creating a truly circular and sustainable process which the Petrochemical industry replaced some sixty years ago.

A huge opportunity to return the compliment now that CO2 emissions are globally frowned upon.

I found it compelling viewing and brilliant that it's been developed here in the UK. Well, Scotland actually.

You can watch Martin’s talk here.