Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981

michaels said:

NigeWick said:

EVandPV said:

Homeowners will be offered £7,000 to help replace gas boilers with green heating units in new £400m scrappage scheme

Homeowners in the UK will be offered £7,000 grants to help replace their gas boilers in a new £400million scrappage scheme. 

Plans have been pulled together to improve the Clean Heat Grants scheme for relaunch in April next year. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9893211/Homeowners-offered-7-000-help-replace-gas-boilers-new-400m-scrappage-scheme.html

Problem is, it's about £15,000 for installation of a heat pump at present, and, that doesn't include new radiators if required. No brainer once they cost close to what a gas boiler does now.

Is it?  A gas boiler is still much cheaper to run.

And why does it cost so much? Under the old green deal I could have got a grant of up to 10k towards direct solar water heating....and the quote came in at just under 10k for a job that would probably cost about 4k if I shopped around and had no grant - and this to save about 60 quid a year on water heating cost by gas.

I don't believe your situation is representative of most households. If you didn't use staggering amounts of energy and water for DHW, then you may find the economics fine.

Hopefully, over time, solutions for users like you may be found, but it doesn't make sense to use edge case examples like yourself to judge the whole sector. Just the metered cost of all the water you consume must be a staggering expense v's the average household, so more than one economic and environmental win should be possible for you.

Martyn1981

Sounds like a good idea, and timely, putting some rules and regs around what is classed as a green tariff so we know what we are getting and can have more faith in them

Renewable electricity deals investigated by UK government

The UK government has launched an investigation into renewable electricity deals amid growing concern over the extent of “greenwashing” by large energy firms claiming to offer environmental benefits to customers.

In a crackdown as increasing numbers of people switch to a renewable energy deal, the government said it would review how the sector markets its green electricity tariffs to consumers.

Warning that it planned to tighten the rules to stop firms from exaggerating the environmental benefits of their green electricity tariffs – a marketing tactic known as greenwashing – the business department said the investigation would focus on whether labels such as “100% renewable” or “green” remained fit for purpose.

Martyn1981

Nice big milestone reached for India. All the more impressive when you consider how low their emissions are per capita (about 1/3rd of the UK).

Clean power hits 100GW in India

India's total installed clean power capacity, excluding large hydro, has hit 100GW, according to the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy.

The ministry added that a further 50GW is being built and 27GW under tendering.

It added that, if large hydro is included, installed renewable energy capacity is 146GW.

The country has set a target of 450GW of green energy by 2030.

Martyn1981

Looks like the Gov is taking the future hydrogen economy seriously, but they are still trying to include 'blue' hydrogen in the mix (not like this Gov to bet on the wrong horse ....... after the race is already over!)

Millions of UK homes could be heated with hydrogen by 2030

About 3 million households in the UK could begin using low-carbon hydrogen to heat their homes and cook rather than fossil fuel gas under government proposals to attract at least £4bn of investment to the hydrogen economy by 2030.

The government has published its long-awaited plans for a UK-wide hydrogen economy, which it says could be worth £900m and create more than 9,000 high-quality jobs by the end of the decade, rising to £13bn and 100,000 new jobs by 2050.

The strategy document lays out its efforts to attract investment in 5 gigawatts of hydrogen production by 2030. It suggests hydrogen could cover 20-35% of the UK’s energy consumption by 2050, providing a clean alternative to oil and gas in energy-intensive industries, power and transport.

The hydrogen projects under development include “green hydrogen” schemes, which extract hydrogen from water, leaving only oxygen as a byproduct, and “blue hydrogen”, which extracts hydrogen from fossil fuel gas before trapping the greenhouse gas emissions that are left behind.

However, last week a study by academics at Cornell and Stanford universities in the US, warned that blue hydrogen could be up to 20% worse for the climate than fossil gas owing to the emissions that escape during its production, multiplied by the amount of gas required to make the equivalent amount of energy from hydrogen.

Martyn1981

Staying with H2, we have some 'nice' steel for Volvo to build cars with.

Have to admit to being quite surprised/shocked by the 8% figure!

‘Green steel’: Swedish company ships first batch made without using coal

The world’s first customer delivery of “green steel” produced without using coal is taking place in Sweden, according to its manufacturer.

The Swedish venture Hybrit said it was delivering the steel to truck-maker Volvo AB as a trial run before full commercial production in 2026. Volvo has said it will start production in 2021 of prototype vehicles and components from the green steel.

Steel production using coal accounts for around 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Hybrit started test operations at its pilot plant for green free steel in Lulea, northern Sweden, a year ago. It aims to replace coking coal, traditionally needed for ore-based steel making, with renewable electricity and hydrogen. Hydrogen is a key part of the EU’s plan to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Reed_Richards

QrizB said:

You can buy an 11kW Mitsubishi Ecodan for around £5k, 

I noticed the other day that Screwfix now offer a whole range of Samsung heat pumps so you can see exactly how much one might cost:  The price includes the hot water cylinder.   https://www.screwfix.com/c/heating-plumbing/heat-pumps/cat14210001#category=cat14210002

Edit:  I guess this is more news of my own that "in the news" but I think it is an interesting development.

Martyn1981

Take a seat, ideally with a heavily sugared tea at hand, because there is some shocking news:

Oil firms made ‘false claims’ on blue hydrogen costs, says ex-lobby boss

Oil companies have used false claims over the cost of producing fossil fuel hydrogen to win over the Treasury and access billions in taxpayer subsidies, according to the outgoing hydrogen lobby boss.

Chris Jackson quit as the chair of a leading hydrogen industry association earlier this week ahead of a government strategy paper featuring support for “blue hydrogen”, which is derived from fossil gas and produces carbon emissions.

He told the Guardian he could no longer lead an industry association that includes oil companies backing blue hydrogen projects, because the schemes are “not sustainable” and “make no sense at all”.

“The Treasury has been told that blue hydrogen is cheap and will take millions of tonnes of carbon emissions out of the economy, which is all they need to hear. It checks the boxes they’re worrying about,” Jackson said.

“If the false claims made by oil companies about the cost of blue hydrogen were true, their projects would make a profit by 2030, after starting up in 2027 or 2028, because carbon prices are forecast to rise to £80 a tonne.

“Instead, they’re asking taxpayers for billions in subsidies for the next 25 years. They should tell the government they don’t need it. The fact that they don’t tells you everything you need to know.”

My personal guess on what the Gov will do? - Well, it looks like blue hydrogen will be a waste of time, energy and money, that helps to lock us into the use of FF's for a longer time period, whilst benefitting nobody, and reducing real support for cleaner, greener industries ....... so yep, just like shale gas, I assume the Gov will back it all the way, down the drain.

The funny thing here, and it's about as funny as a hole in the head, is that burning nat-gas at a power station for leccy generation, with CCS (carbon capture and sequestration) has been an utter failure economically. Also remember all the promises for 'clean coal' put out by the coal industry in the US, who appear to have chosen bankruptcy rather than actually develop it themselves (because (spoiler) it's a joke). So now, instead of capturing the CO2 from nat-gas, we are potentially going to waste £bn's paying the nat-gas industry to turn methane into hydrogen, whilst capturing and storing about 85% of the CO2 ....... Time loop, what's that?

EVandPV

China reveals plans to launch a fleet of mile-long solar panels into space to beam energy back to Earth by 2035 - and says the system could have the same output as a nuclear power station by 2050

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9904651/amp/China-reveals-plans-launch-fleet-mile-long-solar-panels-space.html

Martyn1981

Hooray, the Carbon Commentary Newsletter from Chris Goodall is back.

1, Public opinion. Surveys around the world consistently show that the percentage of people deeply concerned about climate change has risen rapidly in recent years. It is often commented that one of the reasons is the increasing knowledge of global heating among young people. But a UK survey published this week showed that older people are more worried by climate change than the young. It is the middle aged who care least.
 
                                                                        16-34   34-54   65+
 
‘Very concerned about climate change’         48%     42%     56%
 
Another conventional view is that attitudes are related to income and social class. Wrong again. 
 
                                                                        AB*     DE*
‘Very concerned about climate change’         50%     49%
 
‘
*AB is circa top 25% of the income distribution, DE is circa bottom 25%
 
Females and the better educated worry somewhat more about global heating. But the real differences are between the political left and right. This makes political action hugely difficult.
 
                                                                        Conservative* Labour*
 
‘Very concerned about climate change’         34%                 66%
 
*Conservatives are a party of the right, Labour of the left.
 
2, UK hydrogen costs. The British government finally produced its hydrogen strategy this week. I wrote a note that focused on the utterly extraordinary projections for the cost of green hydrogen by 2050. The UK foresees an average of £71 (€83/$95) per MWh of energy value. This is over twice what the EU forecasts for low cost regional locations by 2030. 
 
Absurdly, the costs of green hydrogen are projected to be slightly higher in 2050 than blue hydrogen made with natural gas and carbon capture. This helps justify the high levels of support that the UK is promising to provide to blue hydrogen manufacturers. No other country that I know of sees a remotely similar outcome. This raises the suspicion that UK policy towards hydrogen is now being carefully managed by fossil fuel interests.
 
I continue to be astounded by the failure of administrations, not just the UK, to note what is happen in the rest of the world. If the UK can only produce hydrogen at £71 a MWh in 2050, there will no market for it, and governmental financing support will have been wholly wasted. Hydrogen made in North Africa, and piped by Marco Alverà’s company (see note 4) into the European network, will be half this price within a decade or so.
 
3, Clothing reuse. This is one to follow carefully. H&M said it would set up a platform in Canada that will enable individuals to offer their second hand clothes directly to other consumers. What value will it add above other offerings, such as Depop? One potentially powerful feature is a good colour photograph of the item. H&M says that the seller will simply have to enter a code that is on the labels of all of its items and will be provided with the original publicity shot. Loyalty card customers will be able to make a full offer on the market, including a price recommended by H&M, with just one click. From slow beginnings, 2nd hand sales are rising sharply, particularly among Gen Z customers. One report suggests that second hand clothing sales (as opposed to donations) will triple in the US over the next four years.

4, Marco Alverà and hydrogen. It is the executives of natural gas transport companies who are most eager to encourage the widest use of hydrogen. The new gas will fill their pipelines when fossil fuels are phased out. Many will therefore disregard Marco Alverà’s new book on The Hydrogen Revolution, assuming it simply argues the case for the preservation of his company, Europe’s largest gas distribution network. This might be a bad decision. Alverà’s writing is great fun to read, and extremely well informed. He makes a very bullish case for hydrogen, saying that it will be extensively employed in road transport and home heating as well as in sectors such as steel and aviation. He concludes that hydrogen will eventually provide about 25% of world energy demand, a larger percentage than currently filled by natural gas. But I’m not sure about another key conclusion of the book. He says hydrogen will enable the wealthy world to continue to live life unchanged from the present. I think our environmental problems are far wider than just global heating.
 
5, Steel made using hydrogen. All attention was focused this week on SSAB’s first commercial production of steel made with hydrogen in northern Sweden. The metal was sent to Volvo for use in trials of new components. But full commercial production of green steel by SSAB isn’t slated to start until 2026.
 
VW’s truck subsidiary Scania has already committed to work with SSAB’s future competitor H2 Green Steel, a well-funded Swedish startup. Scania wants to obtain the five tonnes or so of steel needed for each vehicle from the new company. H2 Green Steel intends to start production in 2024, building to 5 million tonnes a year by 2030, which is about the same as SSAB’s total European output today. New steel companies may undermine the position of even fast-moving incumbents such as SSAB, which does not expect to fully convert to hydrogen until the 2040s.
 
In July, I wrote a piece about Arcelor Mittal, the much larger global steelmaker. Aided by substantial government support, It announced plans to convert a large Spanish plant to hydrogen. This will be the first fully hydrogen-enabled steelworks in the world The figures released in connection with the project  that full worldwide conversion of the seed industry away from coal will probably cost about $1trn, or 2% of the industry’s annual turnover over the next 25 years.
 
6, Methanol for shipping. Maersk is looking at a variety of different routes to the full decarbonisation of long-distance shipping. This week it announced where it is going to obtain the low carbon synthetic methanol that will be needed for the ‘duel-fuel’ container ship it ordered earlier this year. Danish renewables company European Energy and a subsidiary, the biomethanol company REintegrate, will set up a refinery in Denmark to make the 10,000 tonnes a year necessary for the new vessel in 2023. The CO2 for the production of the methanol will be derived from the mixture of carbon dioxide and methane generated in an anaerobic digestion plant. Hydrogen will be made by electricity from a European Energy wind farm. REintegrate claims its biomethanol is ‘price-competitive to other bio-products’.
 
7, Carbon capture. On July 30th I wrote an article on the problems of the Gorgon carbon capture project in Western Australia. Gorgon is a giant gas field but the natural gas contains too much CO2 to be sellable in international markets. The developers, led by Chevron, promised to capture and store much of the carbon dioxide in the geologic formation that contains the natural gas. It has proved much more difficult than expected to both insert the gas in the first place but also to then safely extract the water that needs to be taken out in order to keep pressure to safe levels. The problems in Australia mirror those of the In Salah project in Algeria a decade ago. The central conclusion from these two failures must be that CO2 storage in oil and gas formations is much more technically complex, and expensive, than expected. There is, of course, no mention of these problems in the positon papers of governments such as the UK, the Netherlands and Norway which are promising large scale backing for geologic storage.
 
8, Fuel cell bicycles. Will hydrogen only be used for the heaviest vehicles? Perhaps not. The city of Groningen in the northern Netherlands bought a small group of electric bikes, powered by fuel cells and hydrogen. The reason for the purchase is interesting; pure electric vehicles in the city ‘would be too much of a burden on the electricity network’. I suspect a lot of hydrogen use will be driven by the need to avoid overstretching local power distribution systems.
 
I'll be trying to write a newsletter most weeks from now on. 

ABrass

16MW wind turbine announced.

MingYang Smart Energy just rolled out the world’s largest hybrid drive wind turbine, the company claims. It’s the 16-megawatt (MW) MySE 16.0-242. Details are as follows:

https://cleantechnica.com/2021/08/23/mingyang-launches-worlds-largest-offshore-hybrid-drive-wind-turbine/

Also typhoon proofed, which is cool.