Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Coastalwatch

Does this announcement suggest the governments newly heralded Green Recovery is little more than a Green washing exercise!

Whitehaven coal mine: Government refuses to call in plans

Plans for the UK's first deep coal mine in 30 years can progress after the government decided not to intervene.

Cumbria County Council approved the £165m West Cumbria Mining plan in Whitehaven in October.

The government could have called in the plans for an inquiry, but has chosen not to do so, the council said.

Citing environmental concerns, Westmorland and Lonsdale MP Tim Farron said the decision was a "complete disaster for our children's future".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-55561852

EVandPV

Coastalwatch said:

Does this announcement suggest the governments newly heralded Green Recovery is little more than a Green washing exercise!

Whitehaven coal mine: Government refuses to call in plans

Plans for the UK's first deep coal mine in 30 years can progress after the government decided not to intervene.

Cumbria County Council approved the £165m West Cumbria Mining plan in Whitehaven in October.

The government could have called in the plans for an inquiry, but has chosen not to do so, the council said.

Citing environmental concerns, Westmorland and Lonsdale MP Tim Farron said the decision was a "complete disaster for our children's future".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-55561852

W.T.F !!??😨

Martyn1981

EVandPV said:

Coastalwatch said:

Does this announcement suggest the governments newly heralded Green Recovery is little more than a Green washing exercise!

Whitehaven coal mine: Government refuses to call in plans

Plans for the UK's first deep coal mine in 30 years can progress after the government decided not to intervene.

Cumbria County Council approved the £165m West Cumbria Mining plan in Whitehaven in October.

The government could have called in the plans for an inquiry, but has chosen not to do so, the council said.

Citing environmental concerns, Westmorland and Lonsdale MP Tim Farron said the decision was a "complete disaster for our children's future".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-55561852

W.T.F !!??😨

Playing Devil's Advocate, it's for coking coal, not thermal coal. But, hopefully the future lies in RE leccy generation to hydrogen for a cleaner method to produce raw iron and steel.
So it's bad news, but perhaps (maybe?) not as bad as it may first appear to be.

Edit - LOL, I'm feeling really uncomfortable about this post. I knew that New Year resolution to 'Big up' coal would bite me on the as........

EVandPV

At 300MW / 1,200MWh, the world’s largest battery storage system so far is up and running

https://www.energy-storage.news/news/at-300mw-1200mwh-the-worlds-largest-battery-storage-system-so-far-is-up-and

Martyn1981

Short (very) and sweet article that not only shows how far the FF industry and its cronies will go, but more importantly how toxic the industry now is to banks and bankers, whether financially or just to their image.

Trump Admin Trying To Force Banks To Finance Fossil Fuel Projects — Wall Street’s !!!!!!

Wall Street banks slammed a proposed rule that would force lenders to finance fossil fuel projects, Bloomberg reports, questioning both its legal underpinnings and fast-tracked process.

Coastalwatch

Gresham House continue to pursue Battery Storage sites to aid Grid stability and seemingly taking advantage of various price spikes as mentioned elsewhere on the Forum last week. Guess the Grid needs all it can get, not only now but for the foreseeable future as well!

Gresham House completes 25MW Tynemouth acquisition

The 25MW battery-only Tynemouth site – which is connected to the distribution network – was commissioned in 2018 and generates availability-based contracted revenues from Enhanced Frequency Response services provided to National Grid.

It was acquired from Enel Global Thermal Generation and comes off the back of other recent acquisitions of the 50MW Wickham and also 50MW Thurcroft batteries, costing £32.75 million and £32.5 million respectively.

Ben Guest, fund manager of Gresham House Energy Storage Fund, pointed to recent wholesale power price short term spikes - with prices in the Nord Pool N2EX auction hitting £1,000.04/MWh last week, the highest hourly price seen on the auction - highlighting the "urgent need for more energy storage capacity in the UK".

He added that the company is "moving swiftly to deploy the £120 million we raised in November into our near-term pipeline and look forward to updating shareholders on our continued progress".

https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/news/gresham_house_completes_25mw_tynemouth_acquisition

Martyn1981

It's newsletter time again. [I thought item 7 on stranded FF assets was very interesting. it may be an outlier, or the value of FF reserves may already be tumbling, since the vast majority can never be extracted if we hope to stay within CO2 targets.]

Extracts from Carbon Commentary newsletter

 

2, Green steel. Considerable attention has been paid to the SSAB moves towards the use of hydrogen for zero-carbon steel manufacture in Sweden through a process called Direct Reduction (DRI). Largely unnoticed - at least by me - Austrian steel manufacture VoestAlpine has been building a much larger DRI plant using Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) technology. This steel furnace will open this year and is expected to produce about 250,000 tonnes a year. (Overall world production would be about 1.9 billion tonnes in a normal year). MHI is investing heavily in creating full capability to build a full hydrogen supply chain for steel, including recently acquiring a stake in HydrogenPro, a Norwegian alkaline electrolyser manufacturer. (Thanks to Sam Penrose)

3, Impact of ride-sharing growth. Previous studies have demonstrated that when Uber and Lyft arrive in a city, congestion mounts, adding to travel times and increasing pollution, particularly as drivers spend a large fraction of their day driving without passengers. New work shows that, in addition, total car ownership increases as a result of the arrival of ride-sharing apps. However, the effect is relatively small, typically raising the ratio of cars to people by 0.7%, with considerable variation between cities. Perhaps surprisingly, public transport usage levels show little effect from the advent of ridesharing.
 
4, Another route to low carbon steel. Boston Metals, an MIT spin-off that has Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures as a shareholder, raised another $50m to develop its technology for making metals from metal oxides using only electricity (as opposed to hydrogen that has been produced by electricity in note 2). The falling price of renewable electricity may make the stripping of oxygen atoms from ores financially viable but the company gives little detail on its web site. 
 
5, New process for recycling fabrics. More progress toward recycling cotton clothing. Recent newsletters have frequently mentioned innovations seeking to create a closed loop for clothes production and recycling, particularly for cotton fabrics. A new process shreds garments and turns the cotton into a pulp. This pulp is then reconstituted into cotton fibres similar to the original material. Recycling can be carried out in existing paper mills. The CEO of the company pioneering the approach said that ‘The … process can be run with modest retrofitting at existing pulp mills so paper mills can convert existing lines to garment recycling, rather than shutting down as demand for paper declines’. 

6, Plant based food. A large Chinese takeaway chain started using substitutes for eggs made from mung beans across almost all of its menu. Apparently these 'eggs' can even be scrambled. The egg-substitute is made by US company Eat Just and uses a fraction of the water of conventional eggs, as well as only producing a tiny fraction of the CO2 of hens. The general point here is that restaurant groups know that they are very vulnerable to epidemics among animals in their supply chains, creating a strong reason to move towards vegan food. This is a separate force at work in addition to the rapid growth in consumer interest in non-meat products.
 
7, Stranded assets. This time last year BP announced the sale of its stake in two oilfields in the North Sea. The price agreed was $625m. After the oil price slump in the first half of last year, the buyer negotiated the price down to $210m, albeit with a further consideration in the event of rising oil prices. The deal eventually fell through, partly because the prospective buyer was taken over. BP has just begun another attempt to sell the fields. This time, industry sources report, the likely price ‘is unlikely to exceed $80m’, or almost 90% down on January 2020.
 
8, CO2 to jet fuel. An early academic study from Oxford University shows how an inexpensive catalyst can convert carbon dioxide and hydrogen into jet fuel. Aviation will require liquid fuels for the foreseeable future and airlines would strongly prefer to be able to use existing jet engines. The world needs renewable jet fuel if people are to continue flying in a zero carbon world. The researchers combined CO2 with hydrogen using an unusual catalyst made from iron, magnesium and potassium. The production process creates a mixture of hydrocarbons containing a large percentage of molecules that could be used to replace conventional jet fuel. The results are really impressive but the financial viability is still under question. The senior researcher said that one litre of jet fuel would require 4.7kg of CO2 to be captured. At CO2 capture costs of $50 a tonne - the lowest figure that is likely in the next few years - the carbon dioxide alone will cost almost as much as the oil in aviation fuel. However I particularly liked the mention of also trying out additives to the catalyst including citric acid (lemon juice), flour and sugar. Rather than chemistry, it sometimes sounded more like cooking a biscuit/cookie.
 
9, Hydrogen directly from wind power. The Norwegian government put money into a $11m project to store hydrogen made at an offshore wind turbine on the sea floor. The scheme also envisages the use of a subsurface fuel cell to convert the hydrogen back into electricity when needed. Many question the energy economics of this; the electricity-to-electricity losses are going to be at least 50%. The simple response to this is that power prices are likely to vary by far more, making conversion financially beneficial. Several similar large scale experiments are in prospect, some envisaging shipping hydrogen directly to the shore on the basis that this route is cheaper than installing an electricity cable.
 
10, Low carbon ship designs. The transition away from heavy fuel oils as the key international shipping fuel will take several decades because of the long life of existing ships. However plans to design and build ammonia, methanol and hydrogen vessels are proceeding. A Korean shipyard and MAN Energy announced a design for a fully methanol powered ship. The partnership said that the ship would have a 10% construction cost premium but only a 0.5% loss of cargo capacity arising from the larger fuel tanks. Green methanol, made from hydrogen and captured CO2, is likely to be the easiest fuel to store onshore and for which to develop a large scale distribution system. New designs were also announced for hydrogen and ammonia powered ships. The hydrogen plans outlined a vessel which will also ship the fuel internationally, for which a large scale need is becoming more apparent every week. 

silverwhistle

 I caught the end of a radio programme on 4 this morning which was talking about how close they are to production of perovskite PV panels at Oxford, hopefully next year with initial % efficiencies of ~30 and a roadmap towards ~40% for multi-layer panels. I think he mentioned 440w for standard size panels. As the guy pointed out such efficiencies open up smaller areas to be productive: he mentioned 4kWp from smaller roofs, but I could see  such efficiencies being useful on refrigerated lorries and the like. I imagine the programme is available on catch up although not sure of the title.

Martyn1981

Can't recall if this has been mentioned before, which is in itself good news as I'm losing track of massive batts already.

New South Wales Will Host 700 MW/2800 MWh Battery Storage Installation

The story here is not that planning for the largest storage battery in the world is going forward in the New South Wales, Australia. The story is that this is happening despite fierce opposition to renewable energy by the Australian government. In effect, the individual states and several energy producers are thumbing their noses at the unremitting intransigence of Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his enablers.

Martyn1981

Short article on generation retirements in the US, as ageing plants and cheaper alternatives slowly move in. This does mean that new gas generation is being built, but the majority of US capacity built each year is now RE.

Nuclear & Coal Will Account for Majority of U.S. Generating Capacity Retirements in 2021

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) latest inventory of electric generators, 9.1 gigawatts (GW) of electric generating capacity is scheduled to retire in 2021. Nuclear generating capacity will account for the largest share of total capacity retirements (56%), followed by coal (30%).