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I know its not always good to draw direct comparisons, but it just maybe that the investigation and number crunching carried out across the pond could well suggest a similar outcome here leading to net zero by 2050. The suggested savings and job numbers created should certainly give some confidence to those in government charged with taking the country to it's own net zero target recently hinted at by Boris's announcement of a 68% reduction in emissions by 2030. I'd be interested to see the roadmap setting out how it might be achieved. Given their huge emission projections I wonder how either HS2 or Sizewell C might be accommodated?

The roadmap to the lowest cost grid is paved with distributed solar and storage

We wanted to know what the grid would look like, and cost, if we stopped ignoring the benefits of DERs and optimized the integration of these resources through a better modeling process. We found that when you use better planning models and scale both local solar and storage, as well as utility-scale solar and wind, you maximize cost savings and unlock the path to the lowest cost grid.

For months now we have heard President-elect Joe Biden tout the job and economic growth that would come from transitioning to a clean electric grid. We’ve also heard from critics who say the new clean electric grid he is proposing will cost upwards of $2 trillion.

These assumptions about costs are misguided, as are other widely-held assumptions about a clean electric grid. Transitioning to a clean electric grid could actually cost less money and save us billions of dollars, create jobs, and result in a cleaner, more reliable grid across the United States.

We found that when you use better planning models and scale both local solar and storage, as well as utility-scale solar and wind, you maximize cost savings and unlock the path to the lowest cost grid. In fact, it could generate nearly half a trillion dollars in savings to ratepayers over the next 30 years.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/12/03/the-roadmap-to-the-lowest-cost-grid-is-paved-with-distributed-solar-and-storage/

joefizz

silverwhistle said:

Skip forward 10 years and your nuclear power station will still not be on stream..

So we should probably spend more now, but I still don't think nuclear is the answer..

Agreed. I think its too late, the UK has been ballsing about for years. Its the good times scenario. Far too easy to think 10 years is two parliaments and a lifetime away to not worry about it and spend the money now giving it to your mates.

Today, the lights could start going out.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-05/u-k-power-prices-jump-after-grid-warns-of-narrowing-reserves

Believe it or not the lights going out isnt the problem, plenty of places in the world its a regular occurence and as you say its about people getting used to it and adapting.
Where the problem does lie is that if you look at national grid or the met office you will see 60-70 days a year like today where there is no wind over the UK (Ireland is further down the line with renewables, they did multiple studies about the effect of percentage renewables in the grid and have ended up at roughly where they are now realising they need nuclear, the corrib gas lines or something else to cover the sometimes big gaps).
All the batteries in the world (and I mean that quite literally) with a 5-6 day no wind scenario. Even any hydrogen reserves would be depleted and you get into the things mentioned above in the bloomberg article.
The uk is at about 25GW installed, it has planned to be at a theoretical maximum in 2030 of about 70GW (with all onshore and offshore implemented). Ive seen studies where 110GW or so is the theoretical optimum maximum. So thats about 4-5 times whats out there now. 4-5 times zero is still zero.

Reading posts on my comments about planning and RE its clear a lot of the posters have never had any interaction with onshore planning and RE. You draw up plans and have the wind surveys done with maybe 2 or 3 plots for the individual turbine and planners come back and say no we want it here (probably behind a hill/mountain with no wind). Thats not uncommon, but that will have to change and theres noises about it happening.

I grew up hearing about how the Irish sea was the most radioactive on earth (passed since by fukashima I believe) so Im against nuclear and always have been...
...but you have to look at the data. 60-70 days in the UK with negligable wind output, sometimes a week or more. Most of all the long term plans for storage are only stor or stopgaps, no capability for sustained operation of the base load. Right now theres no plans for a FF alternative in 10 years, none. Every time I look at this the answer always ends up at nuclear. Governments talk a good game but like the brexit thing, one day someone in a uniform is going to put a big document down on an important desk and say it needs to be implemented. Its 20 years since I had any input into civil contingencies but over the last couple of weeks Ive noticed certain radio ads here in NI which were on the page 1 to do list. Once it gets to test power cuts you know we are going to be in trouble (or not if the wind blows).

I'll go back to my lights out thing, thats the first sign (have worked in manufacturing where they have implemented load schemes so the plants started up their dirty diesel generators, and real dirty old ones). The base load powers the fresh water coming into houses, the gas flowing through the gas networks for heating, the taking sewage away, the telco networks (core, not necessarily end user - BT used to have 24hr battery backup in each street cabinet but druggies used to break in etc, dont think the newer telcos do that any more), command and control infrastructure, hospitals etc etc. Thats why the current and previous governments will pay any price for nuclear kwh because it will ensure their ability to govern. That is what they are paying for, not the electricity. Everything else pales in comparison.
Ive mentioned the projected interlink network in the past, but consider the Brexit talks today, if you want a real threat, cut off the interlinks tonight at around 5pm.... Ive mentioned before that during the cold war the USSR kept the gas flowing through Germany but Germany also knew it could be off at any time and that was more of a threat than any missile. Interconnects are good but with the demise of oil every country will be scrambling to ensure energy security (previous wars over oil have been about energy security).

All that matters more to governments than co2 or anything else years in the future.

ABrass

Nuclear is so expensive carbon capture gas probably makes more sense to plug the gaps. Nuclear just can't compete

Martyn1981

Nice big wind and PV development planned in India. It's actually a group of hybrid parks being developed.

41.5 Gigawatt Hybrid Wind & Solar Power Park Planned In India

A hybrid power plant with 41.5 GW worth of wind and solar! For perspective, that is almost as much solar as is currently installed in the entire United States. This hybrid wind and solar power park* is being approved for the Kutch district in the Indian state of Gujarat. (*It’s perhaps better to call this a combination of various solar & wind power parks.)

Hybrid projects are making more and more sense as renewables reach higher levels. The two are yin and yang, and the choreography is increasingly ideal for meeting power demands.

Martyn1981

Carbon Commentary newsletter extracts:
 

2 Direct Air Capture of CO2 (DAC). Climeworks, one of the two global leaders in DAC, is building a new facility in Iceland near the geothermal power station where it already has a pilot plant. The new site, to be finished in spring 2021, will capture 4,000 tonnes of CO2 a year and inject it into basalt. (The CO2 converts basaltic rocks into carbonates over a period of months and is permanently captured). The Icelandic location offers an unusual mixture of low cost renewable electricity, heat from the power plant and easy access to basalt. Climeworks tells me it expects this new plant to require about 2MWh of heat and 650kWh of electricity per tonne of CO2. We can envisage an eventual energy cost of less than $50 for this requirement in Iceland. Any global ‘cap and trade’ (or taxation) system for CO2 should therefore not need a price much above this level. Climeworks will continue to offer individuals and companies the opportunity to pay for sequestration of CO2 in Iceland as a carbon offset. It already has almost 3,000 customers.
 
3, Power to heat or cold (and back). Storage of energy for medium duration is an important gap in the decarbonisation armoury. Batteries will offer day-to-day shifting of electricity supply and hydrogen will provide seasonal storage. Technologies such as compressed air offer possible routes for balancing of supply and demand over periods of weeks rather than days or months. A new contender is a system pioneered by MAN in Germany that uses surplus power to heat a closed loop of CO2 to 120 degrees which then takes water to high temperatures as a source of heat. This can be used for district heating systems. The CO2 can be decompressed and provide a cooling fluid for data centres, for example. Electricity can be regenerated at points in the cycles. This is the first integrated electricity, heating and cooling system in the world. Its grid-to-grid electrical efficiency is about 50-55%, increasing to up to 70% is heating and/or cooling is used. These numbers are similar to those from Highview Power, the UK supplier of grid-to-grid storage and heat from liquid air. The German state of NRW funded a small study into the viability of putting a 7MW installation into use for the city of Aachen. (Thanks to Martin).
 
5, E-methanol. Danish wind and solar developer European Energy said that it had ‘join(ed) the scramble’ towards to using electricity to make liquid fuels. It bought a large stake in the Danish e-methanol specialist REintegrate. E-methanol is made from hydrogen and CO2, which may come from biogas.  This is another example of a renewables company developing expertise in ‘downstream’ activities in order to ensure a market for electricity. In the last few days REintegrate also announced that it will sell 50 million litres of e-methanol a year to Denmark’s largest fuel retailer, Circle K. This is about 3% of the country’s annual needs for motor fuels. 
 
6, Green ammonia. Fertiliser manufacturer Yara has been investigating the partial conversion of a factory in Pilbara in north-western Australia to use of renewable energy to make hydrogen, rather than natural gas as at present. It published its feasibility study (link in this article) prior to starting construction next year. It intends to devote 10MW of solar PV to produce about half a percent of the total hydrogen needs of the factory. (Iberdrola’s plans for green hydrogen for fertilisers in Spain are more ambitious). Eventually, Yara will add a second ammonia plant here and fuel it largely with renewable hydrogen. This will require about 1.5GW of solar PV. If all the world’s current fertiliser needs were provided using renewable hydrogen, total PV requirements would be about 500GW, a little less than the today’s global capacity.

7, Geothermal in oil fields. Many of the skills involved in drilling oil wells can be transferred to exploring for geothermal energy. One example is the recent completion of a long horizontal well at a depth of about 3km in Western Canada. This is the first horizontal well drilled to collect heat rather than fuel. The water temperature is not particularly high - about 125 degrees celsius - but the volumes of hot water available from this single well are said to be able generate 3MW of electricity, probably at a conversion efficiency of around 20%. Other projects in Western Canada envisage converting existing oil wells into heat production. (Thanks to Thad Curtz).

8, Wind direct to hydrogen. Siemens Gamesa said it would connect an electrolyser directly to a wind turbine in Denmark in early 2021. This will be a part of its investigation into how best to produce hydrogen from directly from turbines without direct connection to the electricity grid. Tractebel advertised outline designs for floating 15MW floating turbines in which hydrogen production facilities are also integrated. The development cost of offshore wind would be significantly reduced if there was no need to link wind farms to the shore.
 
9, Hydrogen for CHP. Routes towards decarbonisation that have low costs for additional infrastructure are better than pathways that demand large upfront capital investment. One important means to minimising costs is to install equipment that can function both with fossil fuels and low carbon alternatives. Gas turbines that can switch to hydrogen with expensive modification are a good example. The Leipzig city utility in Germany bought turbines from Siemens that operate at up to 100% hydrogen. The heat from the turbines will be used for the district heating system, reducing the amount taken from a local power plant that burns lignite.

 

Martyn1981

Going 'green' could be net cost free from now on ..... maybe ...... hopefully ...... fingers crossed.

Ending UK’s climate emissions ‘affordable’, say official advisers

The world’s first detailed route map to ending a nation’s use of fossil fuels is both “ambitious and affordable”, according to the UK government’s official advisers, and would see half of the cars on the road being electric by 2030 and 10,000 giant wind turbines in the North Sea.

The Climate Change Committee’s analysis found that the future cost savings from no longer having to buy oil and gas almost offsets the £50bn-a-year investment needed in low-carbon power, transport and home heating across the next three decades.

The annual net cost across the 30 years to 2050 is £10bn, or about 0.5% of GDP, the CCC said. This does not include the benefits of new jobs or better health as air pollution and damp, cold homes are reduced. Today, poor housing alone costs the NHS £1.5bn a year. “It’s now clear that – at worst – we’ve got a very small cost overall in order to unlock those very big benefits of tackling climate change,” said Stark.

Edit - The article suggests 50% of cars on the road being BEV's by 2030, which is actually a very strong target. That wouldn't allow for a last minute boost to 100% by 2030, instead we'll need to see a strong transition throughout the 20's, with around 50% of sales being BEV's by 2025, to displace 50% of ICEV's by 2030, I think?

Martyn1981

More on the shift to green and the impacts and actions.

What would a climate-friendly UK mean for you?

A cleaner, greener future is set out in a detailed new route map towards ending the UK’s climate emissions by 2050 from the Climate Change Committee, the government’s official advisers.

“These stretching targets will see climate policies increasingly overlap with everyday life, bringing changes in the cars we drive and how we heat our homes,” said Jonathan Marshall, at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit. “The overwhelming backing among the British public for climate action means that these measures are likely to be popular and well supported, as long as well-thought policies are used to bring about change.”

Prof Daniela Schmidt, at the University of Bristol, said: “These actions need to be taken to reduce the risk of climate change impacts in the UK such as drought, crop failures and floods. Such a transition will make the UK a better place to live, with cleaner air, healthier ways of living and greener cities.”

Interesting quote from the CCC (last but one paragraph):

The CCC said about one-third of farmland needs to be converted to forestry and growing crops that can be burned in power stations which capture CO2 emissions, thereby removing carbon from the atmosphere. Food production can be boosted with greater efficiency and farmers would be paid for helping to fight climate change.

I wasn't expecting that. I know that bio-mass is highly controversial, but it does bring some large benefits, such as BECCS as mentioned. This allows for the removal of CO2 from a concentrated atmospheric source, rather than an already 'dead and buried' FF source with CCS.
Also, so long as it's done sustainably, then bio-mass would add a demand follower tool to the RE toolbox, and one with its own large scale storage (on-site fuel). This will help balance the intermittency and storage issues/costs of wind and PV.

michaels

Martyn1981 said:

More on the shift to green and the impacts and actions.

What would a climate-friendly UK mean for you?

A cleaner, greener future is set out in a detailed new route map towards ending the UK’s climate emissions by 2050 from the Climate Change Committee, the government’s official advisers.

“These stretching targets will see climate policies increasingly overlap with everyday life, bringing changes in the cars we drive and how we heat our homes,” said Jonathan Marshall, at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit. “The overwhelming backing among the British public for climate action means that these measures are likely to be popular and well supported, as long as well-thought policies are used to bring about change.”

Prof Daniela !!!!!!, at the University of Bristol, said: “These actions need to be taken to reduce the risk of climate change impacts in the UK such as drought, crop failures and floods. Such a transition will make the UK a better place to live, with cleaner air, healthier ways of living and greener cities.”

Interesting quote from the CCC (last but one paragraph):

The CCC said about one-third of farmland needs to be converted to forestry and growing crops that can be burned in power stations which capture CO2 emissions, thereby removing carbon from the atmosphere. Food production can be boosted with greater efficiency and farmers would be paid for helping to fight climate change.

I wasn't expecting that. I know that bio-mass is highly controversial, but it does bring some large benefits, such as BECCS as mentioned. This allows for the removal of CO2 from a concentrated atmospheric source, rather than an already 'dead and buried' FF source with CCS.
Also, so long as it's done sustainably, then bio-mass would add a demand follower tool to the RE toolbox, and one with its own large scale storage (on-site fuel). This will help balance the intermittency and storage issues/costs of wind and PV.

Given how much more energy efficient pv is than bio-fuels I am surprised that biofuels would be the most cost efficient route to direct carbon capture.

However it is good to see that at least in terms of the advice it is getting the govt is now catching up with the reality of renewable generation and energy usage.  Of course while we are still seeing more money spent on SMR research than green home grants and the grants themselves are skewed towards a strange set of priorities we can see that old fashioned ideas of big engineering are still driving govt policy.

Martyn1981

Interesting plans from Porsche who hope to be producing 550m liters of synth fuel by 2026, using RE leccy and CO2 extracted from the air. That's equal to about 10m car fill ups. Might help to reduce new FF CO2 emissions if more of the existing ICEV vehicles in the World can be fueled this way. But we'll need a lot more of these plants.

Porsche-Backed Factory To Begin Producing Synthetic Fuel At Scale

Porsche has been working with companies like Siemens and ENAP to develop synthetic, carbon-neutral fuels for its internal combustion engines for a while now. Those plans have recently taken a big step forward, however, as Porsche and Siemens have announced plans to build a pilot plant in Chile that will be the world’s first fully integrated plant capable of producing synthetic fuel at an industrial scale — and the new factory should be up and running as early as next year.

According to the joint press release issued by Siemens Energy and Porsche, the initial pilot phase of the factory is set to produce around 130,000 liters of synthetic fuel (“eFuels”) by 2022. Production will increase in two further phases, bumping capacity to 55 million liters of eFuels a year in 2024, and 550 million liters per year in 2026.

Obviously that’s not going to be enough eFuels to really go around, but 550 million liters does translate to just over 145 million gallons of carbon-neutral fuel. That’s not nothing — especially in a country like Chile, where the pilot factory is being built. Known as Haru Oni, the Chilean fuels plant will feature a wind turbine to generating the electricity needed to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen will then be combined with carbon dioxide from the air to produce synthetic methanol, which is then refined into synthetic substitutes for gasoline, diesel, and kerosene to power existing internal-combustion vehicles.

Martyn1981

A serious carbon price/tax to come in in Canada, and it's to be revenue neutral.

A Carbon Price In Canada Of $170 CAD By 2030 Is Great Climate News

Today, Canada’s federal government dropped its new climate change plan, led by a very big number: $170 per ton of CO2 as a carbon price by 2030. This is excellent news, and let’s hope it persists in the face of inevitable opposition. What does this mean?

First off, Canada has had a price on carbon for a while, albeit a very low one. At present, it’s at $30 CAD per ton of CO2, about US$23.50, and was scheduled to peak at $50 per ton of CO2 in 2023. The plan comes with a revenue-neutral rebate to Canadian citizens, so everyone got money back last year, and people with low-carbon lifestyles did very nicely. The last election was, as much as anything else, a referendum on the carbon price, with the federal Conservative party fighting against it and the Liberals (and everyone else) supporting it. The Conservative’s alternative plan? Sell a lot more of Canada’s oil and gas domestically and internationally, so you can see why they were soundly rejected.

Before we go further, it’s important to note that the Canadian price on carbon is revenue neutral. That means that the proceeds are returned to taxpayers when they pay their income taxes. The people and businesses driving electric cars and using heat pumps get a lot of extra money back that’s pure bonus, while the people and businesses persisting in high-carbon consumption get their costs defrayed a bit. There’s a big incentive for people to switch.