Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981

AAAAaaaahhhhhh  ..... PHCAES ...... bless you!

So, this is a new one on me, sounds good, and yet another potential tool for the RE + storage toolbox.

New, Cheap Electric Energy Storage System (Like Pumped Hydro, But Subterranean!)

Pumped Hydro Compressed Air Energy Storage (PHCAES) is a new system that can deliver stored energy at two to three cents per kilowatt-hour. This cost, far lower than that of lithium batteries, is similar to Pumped Hydro Energy Storage (PHES), a proven technology. Although it has many similarities to PHES, PHCAES has significant advantages over PHES — including lower capital costs and significantly less land space required. 

Like PHES, PHCAES uses a ground-level water reservoir and a power plant. The difference is in the pressure reservoirs. While PHES uses a high elevation water reservoir to create a water pressure head, PHCAES uses a depleted underground well (gas/oil/water) that contains a reservoir of water along with high-pressure air to create its water pressure head. Both PHES and PHCAES pump/reverse water flow between the surface water reservoir and their respective high- pressure head reservoirs through a power plant to either store or produce electric power.

Martyn1981

Thought I'd post these articles, as there's a theme (not just off-shore wind) of large scale expansion and possibilities. I've included Poland as the scale is large (for them) and any positive RE moves Poland makes are important as they burn so, so much coal at the moment.

Scots Crown opens 10GW ScotWind for applications

Crown Estate Scotland has opened the application window for registered developers to submit projects for the 10GW ScotWind offshore wind leasing round.
The closing date for submitting applications is 31 March, Crown Estate Scotland said.

WATCH: Danish team unveils energy island vision

The Vindo consortium has revealed its vision for the world’s first energy island in the Danish part of the North Sea in a YouTube video.
The consortium comprises two of Denmark’s largest pension funds PensionDanmark and PFA, the country's largest utility Andel, as well as assistance from Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners.
The artificial island would be built about 100km from land by 2030 and connect 3GW of offshore wind.
Vindo said that over time, the island will connect 10GW of offshore wind and host energy storage and Power-to-X.

Polish utility signs grid agreement for 1.2GW offshore

Polish energy company PKN Orlen's subsidiary Baltic Power has secured a grid connection agreement with the Poland's transmission system operator Polskie Sieci Elektroenergetyczne (PSE) for a 1200MW offshore wind farm.
PKN Orlen said the agreement is one of the key stages of investment preparation, ensuring that clean energy produced at sea will go to the national power system.

Martyn1981

Saw this article, skimmed and moved on, then realised how I'd already 'normalised' something that is so significant, and that's the roll out (in the wild) of 9.5MW WT's. 
RE is moving forward so fast that I often have to pause and think how impressive these advances are, be they technological or cost. The fact that I've already normalised so much is, I think, great news, and a reflection on how far we have come in the last 10yrs (hope that makes some sense).

Ocean Winds toasts first Moray East turbine

MHI Vestas and Fred Olsen Windcarrier have installed the first of 100 turbines at the 950MW Moray East offshore wind farm off the east coast of Scotland.

And some good news regarding peat.

BnM puts full focus on renewables after peat pledge

Irish semi-state Bord na Mona (BnM) has permanently ceased peat harvesting operations, fulfilling a key pledge of its ‘brown to green’ strategy to become a large-scale renewables developer.
Chief executive Tom Donnellan said the move means the company can now focus on its green energy business, which includes a plan to develop 1GW of new capacity that will be dominated by onshore wind in this decade.

Martyn1981

Coal generation in Texas has halved in a decade, and also interesting to see just how important wind energy is to them in the long run, far more than solar.

Texas Wind Power Dominates Coal In Crossover Year

Everything is bigger in Texas, and wind power is no exception. Wind power has been growing in Texas for years. Now, for the first time, wind power has beaten coal power in the Lone Star State. In 2020, Texas received 22% of its electricity from wind and only 18% from coal. In contrast, in 2010, coal made up 40% of the grid’s power. Coal’s downfall, unfortunately, is also partly due to natural gas generation. However, in the coming years, 95% of the proposed investment into power generation will be renewable according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).

EVandPV

Air pollution in Scotland has remained within legal limits for the first time, according to environmental campaigners.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-55661358

Martyn1981

I watched this vid yesterday, and thought it was a great introduction to liquid metal batteries, and the problems they face entering the market to reach a scale where the costs fall. They potentially should be cheaper than Li-ion for stationary storage, and with negligible degradation, and more efficient than PHS (pumped hydro storage) with a round trip efficiency of 80%.

Liquid Metal Batteries. Are they an economic possibility?

I've been meaning to post lots of vids from this channel - 'Just Have a Think' - as they are very good at explaining technologies, and (I believe) unbiased. But I kept forgetting to post them. So folk may be interested in the channel for vids on gravity storage, SMR's, perovskite solar and many more.

Just Have a Think

Martyn1981

Short article on the contribution of RE to Europe's leccy supply last year.

Wind delivers '15% of European power in 2020'

Wind farms contributed 15% of total electricity generation in Europe in 2020, the sector's highest ever contribution to the region's power mix, according to new analysis by EnAppSys.

A total of 429 terrawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity was generated by wind farms last year, up 4% on 2019, out of a total of 2727TWh, EnAppSys said.

Overall, renewables delivered 41% of Europe's power last year, nuclear 25% and fossil-fuels 33%.

Clean power output was 1116TWh, up 8% on 2019's 1035TWh.

Martyn1981

Carbon Commentary Newsletter extracts:

1, Largest solar park in Europe. Plans for gigawatt scale solar farms are now popping up in Australia, India and locations in the Middle East. Last week saw the first outline scheme of 1 GW in Europe. Two French companies, Engie and Neoen, said that they wanted to develop the plant in the south west of the country. If built, this would be almost twice the size of any other solar farm in Europe and many times the largest in the UK. It will come with green hydrogen, batteries and a data centre to use some of the power. Extending over 1,000 hectares (5km by 2km), the scheme will result in some loss of valuable forest and the challenge will be to convince regulators that plans to replace the woodland with reforestation elsewhere are satisfactory.
 
2, Biodegradable plastics. As the oil industry recognises that demand from transport uses will fall, it increasingly presents plastics as its main engine of growth. But deep consumer resistance to plastics use is growing, albeit from a low base. Evidence of the severe effect on marine life is becoming clearer. Biodegradable plastic substitutes have long been touted as potential replacements for single use applications, such as most packaging. But progress has been slow, particularly in developing strong films that will genuinely rot in the open air. Cambridge spin-out Xampla looks to have a good chance of producing materials that will offer genuine substitutes for oil-based plastics. It uses engineered proteins rather than the more usual polysaccharides. The company raised another $8m of seed capital fronted by legendary investor Li Ka-shing’s fund, a backer of Impossible Foods, the plant burger company that also uses engineered proteins.
 
3, Solar powered pumped hydro. Hawai’i islands offer good locations to experiment with new ideas because they are often currently reliant on expensive diesel power. Kauai Electric wants to install a solar system that pumps water back up to 3 refurbished dams. During the day surplus electricity will be used to raise the water while at night the water will flow out from the dams through turbines. Although efficiencies losses in ‘pumped hydro’, of which this scheme is a variant, are relatively high compared to batteries, cheap solar power makes this scheme financially viable. I think this is the first attempt to use PV in combination with dams for storage and will offer up to a quarter of the island’s maximum power need. (I saw this on GreenTechMedia).
 
4, Blue hydrogen. A consortium including steel-maker ThyssenKrupp and oil company Equinor released limited details of a scheme to produce ‘blue’ hydrogen, using natural gas and carbon capture, for the steel plant at Duisburg, one of the largest single sources of CO2 in Europe. The consortium claims that its approach will produce hydrogen at a cost of about €2.10 per kilogramme, compared to about €1.50 for hydrogen without capture. The CO2 will either be sent by pipeline to Norway for injection into depleted gas fields or to similar sites off the Netherlands. In the UK, a similar project (paywall) was revealed to make a hydrogen hub near to industries in north west England. The backers said that it would need support of around £25/€28 a megawatt hour, roughly the same as the ThyssenKrupp estimate of the cost premium in Germany. (I asked ThyssenKrupp for more information about how their costs were calculated and was told the information was ‘confidential’. How companies expect to argue successfully for public support for their projects without revealing how their requirements for subsidy are calculated is a mystery to me).
 
5, Consumer attitudes. A European Investment Bank (EIB) survey asked questions about whether people were prepared to change their behaviour in response to the climate crisis. Perhaps the most striking finding was that Chinese citizens were much more willing than Europeans or Americans. 95% said that they would be in favour of stricter restrictions to enforce change, compared to 70% across the EU and 65% in the UK. 94% of Chinese people said that climate change is having an impact on everyday life, compared to 58% of Britons. On more specific topics, people’s attitude to flying seems to be changing; 74% of global respondents said that they would now fly less for environmental reasons. (But is this a valuable statistic? In no country does more than about half the population fly in a typical year so a large fraction of that 74% wouldn’t fly anyway). A large majority of respondents also typically said that they would eat less meat to help the climate.
  
7, Electrolysers. The industrial gases manufacturer Linde is a joint venture partner of UK-based ITM Power, one of the leading producers of PEM electrolysers. The gas producer said it would purchase a 24 megawatt ITM unit for a chemicals industry park in Germany. Although NEL, one of ITM’s electrolyser competitors, has a letter of intent for a much larger unit at a steel plant in Norway, the new purchase represents the largest definite sale. The output might be about 4,000 tonnes of hydrogen a year, a tiny fraction of the 70 million tonnes of pure hydrogen used globally.  The enormous scale of the potential market for electrolysers is one reason why ITM Power is now worth over $5bn on the UK stock market even though its sales were less than $5m in the last reported year.
 
8, Green hydrogen from offshore wind. One of the most striking trends over the last months has been the growth of interest in making hydrogen at wind turbines, rather than sending the electricity to a remote electrolyser. The potential benefits include the lower cost of transmission infrastructure offshore, a hydrogen pipeline being cheaper to install than an equivalent electricity link. And, second, it may be possible to reduce the costs of electronics in the turbine because of the absence of need to synchronise the output precisely to the grid AC frequency. (Comments on this last point from more knowledgeable people than me particularly welcome). Siemens’s wind turbine business and its subsidiary making electrolysers announced a €120m joint venture to develop a full scale offshore wind + hydrogen demonstration site by 2025/26.
 
9, Deep geothermal and lithium. At some engineered geothermal sites (often 5 km deep or more) that produce electricity, it may be possible to extract lithium from the brine brought to the surface as part of the power generation process. The Australian company Vulcan Energy Resources presented its plan for the development of a power + lithium site in the Upper Rhine valley in western Germany. It proposes a €700m project to build a 74 megawatt power plant and a processor that will produce enough lithium for the batteries of about a million cars a year. (Annual car sales in the EU typically run at around 12m units). Vulcan says that the total resources available at the three sites it has licenced should be enough for 400 million cars, or about 40% of the world’s current total. (Lithium is not widely recycled at the moment but probably will be in the future).
 
10, Floating solar. We are seeing increased numbers of installations of solar on dams and lakes. Oil and gas company Equinor says it will float the first PV on rough seas in a location off western Norway in 2021. It will also put panels in much calmer waters off Sri Lanka. The experiment will use an 80m by 80m array, sitting about 3 metres above the waves. As the engineer in charge of the Norwegian trial says, ‘if we succeed here, we can succeed anywhere’.

Martyn1981

Bad news for Canadian tar sand oil, and hopefully (if done in the first days of Biden's presidency) an indication of the changes to US policy that may follow ..... or might not!

Biden to cancel $9bn Keystone XL pipeline's permit, says source

Joe Biden is planning to cancel the permit for the $9bn Keystone XL pipeline project as one of his first acts as president, perhaps as soon as his first day in office, according to a source familiar with his thinking.

ASavvyBuyer

Octopus Energy launches world’s first electricity tariff that gets cheaper when it’s windy.