Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

QrizB

EVandPV said:

Nice clean grid today, plenty wind and solar ......

Nice!

But Electric Insights still shows prices around £250/MWh all morning? I guess the CfD payments will work in our favour, at least.

shinytop

EVandPV said:

Nice clean grid today, plenty wind and solar ......

When it's windy and sunny like today, do we use all the wind and PV generated or is there excess RE capacity? 

Martyn1981

This weeks Carbon Commentary newsletter from Chris Goodall:

 Things I noticed and thought were interesting
Week ending 3rd October 2021
 
1, Green steel. After similar ventures in Spain and Germany in recent months, Arcelor Mittal signed a deal with the Belgian government to part-fund a new hydrogen direct reduction plant alongside the existing blast furnaces in Gent. At €1.1bn, the total cost here for decarbonisation of about 0.2 per cent of new world steel suggests a figure of about €500-€600bn for the entire global industry over the next decades, or about 20% of its annual turnover. In this industry at least, the hydrogen transition is eminently possible.
 
2, Peak oil before 2030. TotalEnergies used its investor day to say that it expected the demand for oil to peak before 2030. This story was extensively covered but many of the other less positive conclusions were not. TotalEnergies forecasts that about a third of the car fleet will still be powered by fossil fuels in 2050, using well over half as much petrol/gasoline or diesel as today.  Oil products will retain an even larger share of heavy vehicle fuels and electricity will provide little more than 10% of their total energy need by mid-century. Similarly aviation will still be about 70% fossil oil whereas the transition to lower carbon fuels in shipping will have gone further with hydrogen-based fuels and biofuels capturing over half total demand. TotalEnergies foresees the production of 300 million tonnes of hydrogen annually in 2050, less than half most recent forecasts. Oil demand will still be running at about 65% of current levels in 2050. And in one terse comment at the bottom of a page, TotalEnergies provides its rationale for continuing to actively explore for and exploit fossil fuels around the world. It writes ‘Decrease in demand post-2030 lower than the natural decline of producing oil fields’. In other words, Total is saying it wants to continue to explore for new fossil fuels because the market for oil and gas will gradually decline, but at a slower rate than the production from existing fields. Frightening.

3, Vertical farming. The size of vertical farms continues to increase. A new complex operating on 17 layers and occupying about 14,000 sq. metres will be built near Bristol in the west of England, partly funded by Ocado, the highly innovative grocery delivery company. This will be probably the world’s largest but the title may be lost next year to an even bigger farm in Singapore. Jones Food Company promises about 1,000 tonnes of produce a year of high value herbs and salads, equivalent to about 60 kilogrammes per square metre. (Compare that to what you can get growing lettuces in the garden). The entrepreneur says that he believes 70% of the UK’s fresh produce can come from huge vertical farms, all powered by renewable energy. Advances in automation, he suggests, mean that within a few years an entire farm of this size could have just a single employee.
 
4, Green(er) cement. European leader Hoffman Green Cement started selling its lowest carbon cement to date. It has a footprint smaller than any other commercially available product. It claims a six-fold emissions reduction compared to conventional cements. (Even if all cement were replaced by Hoffman Green Cement, emissions from making the product would nevertheless still account for over 1% of today’s global CO2). The product is made from ground blast furnace slag and calcium sulphate, bound together with Hoffman Green Cement’s proprietary chemicals. A large number of companies are working on CO2 reduction in the manufacture of cement but this product seems the most advanced. In particular, the manufacturing process avoids use of a high temperature kiln. I couldn’t find details of how much the cement costs compared to conventional products but the company claims it will soon be on sale at 5,500 retailers in France. (Thanks to Mark Ellingham)
 
5, ‘Dispatchable’ renewables using hydrogen. The French territory of La Guyane on the northern coast of South America will install a power plant using solar PV, electrolyser, hydrogen storage and a fuel cell. The operator will guarantee delivery of 10 megawatts during the day and 3 megawatts at night from mid 2023. This will be achieved by storing daytime surpluses from a PV farm in the form of up to 130 megawatt hours of hydrogen. An electrolyser of 16 megawatts capacity from French manufacturer McPhy will produce the H2. The owners claim that this is currently the largest project in the world in which a power station stocks electricity in the form of hydrogen. It also says that power will be produced at a comparable price to fossil fuel generation. If it works, the scheme has worldwide significance but it is particularly important to countries with good resources of sun or wind but no cheap fossil fuels. (Thanks to Nick Hanna).
 
6, Offshore wind. The UK renewables trade association published new estimates of how much offshore wind is operational or in the pipeline around the world. Its figure of 417 gigawatts is about half the size of global onshore wind capacity today and, if all proposed projects are completed, will produce about 4% of today’s electricity demand. The UK, China and the US have about 40% of the world's fleet between them. Floating offshore wind, still an industry in very early infancy, contributes about 13% of the total. Surprisingly, the publisher doesn’t note some of the extraordinary differences between this year’s forecasts and last year’s numbers. The research last year suggested a pipeline of about 160 GW, less than 40% of the recent estimates. The biggest changes were in the estimates for China (more than tripled and now rivalling the UK in size), Sweden, now forecast to install 33 GW but not mentioned in last year’s press summary, and Vietnam, up sixfold in the last year and now fifth in the world rankings of prospective offshore installations. (Thanks to Daniel Scharf).
 
7, Carbon removal. Microsoft people and external scientists wrote a very useful article in Nature that covered many of the difficulties implementing robust carbon removal policies. Microsoft is now committed to being carbon negative by 2030, requiring extensive permanent storage of CO2 to offset remaining emissions. But the article said that of the 154 million tonnes of CO2 removal offered in response to its latest request for proposals, only 2 million tonnes met the company’s criteria for genuine carbon removal. The writers complained that most proposals they had received for CO2 extraction, including tree planting of course, do not offer permanent or reliable storage. Measurement and verification are usually poor. The authors are critical of most offerings of biological storage because ‘reliable tools for tracking carbon at scale are lacking’. But because nature-based offsets are typically priced at a tenth the cost of more robust geosphere storage, the temptation to use tree-planting remains strong, says Microsoft.
 
8, Green fertiliser. The development of competitively priced green hydrogen will change the location of some industries. Fertiliser production, for example, may shift to smaller plants in the centre of major agricultural areas using cheap local renewable resources. One such potential project was announced last week. Subsidiaries of the Italian process engineering company Maire Tecnimont said that they were working with an ammonia start-up in the US Mid-West on a feasibility study for a small plant to make 80,000 tonnes of green fertiliser from renewable ammonia a year to serve the local market. 6 million tonnes of ammonia are currently imported into the US.
 
9, ‘Renewables plus hydrogen’. I wrote an article that looked at how much electrolyser capacity would be needed to run the UK electricity system entirely on renewables. 25 GW seems to make sense financially. In my view, an electricity system running on intermittent renewables with hydrogen acting as the storage buffer is now almost certainly the lowest cost way of providing power in the UK.

10, Synthetic liquid natural gas. The first vessel ever powered by synthetic gas sailed from Germany to St Petersburg. The trial used a 50/50 mixture of fossil and synthetic gas. The renewable methane is made from the CO2 collected from an anaerobic digestion plant and chemically combined with hydrogen from electrolysis at a plant in Werlte, Germany. Furious debate rages as to whether synthetic methane made from agricultural wastes can ever provide more than a tiny fraction of total energy needs because of the demands made on land availability. An outline plan from one of the UK’s domestic gas suppliers to replace half the country’s needs for natural gas in the home with synthetic methane from the anaerobic digestion of grass was widely criticised for needing at least 20% of the nation’s farmed area.
 
 
I made an arithmetic mistake in last week’s newsletter. In the analysis of the costs of making petrol/gasoline using the approach of Prometheus Fuels, I mixed up litres and US gallons. The cost of the energy needed by the Prometheus technology to make a litre of gasoline is about the same as the wholesale price of gasoline in the US, not a quarter of the cost as I suggested. Apologies.   

michaels

Martyn1981 said:

This weeks Carbon Commentary newsletter from Chris Goodall:

 Things I noticed and thought were interesting
Week ending 3rd October 2021
 
1, Green steel. After similar ventures in Spain and Germany in recent months, Arcelor Mittal signed a deal with the Belgian government to part-fund a new hydrogen direct reduction plant alongside the existing blast furnaces in Gent. At €1.1bn, the total cost here for decarbonisation of about 0.2 per cent of new world steel suggests a figure of about €500-€600bn for the entire global industry over the next decades, or about 20% of its annual turnover. In this industry at least, the hydrogen transition is eminently possible.
 
2, Peak oil before 2030. TotalEnergies used its investor day to say that it expected the demand for oil to peak before 2030. This story was extensively covered but many of the other less positive conclusions were not. TotalEnergies forecasts that about a third of the car fleet will still be powered by fossil fuels in 2050, using well over half as much petrol/gasoline or diesel as today.  Oil products will retain an even larger share of heavy vehicle fuels and electricity will provide little more than 10% of their total energy need by mid-century. Similarly aviation will still be about 70% fossil oil whereas the transition to lower carbon fuels in shipping will have gone further with hydrogen-based fuels and biofuels capturing over half total demand. TotalEnergies foresees the production of 300 million tonnes of hydrogen annually in 2050, less than half most recent forecasts. Oil demand will still be running at about 65% of current levels in 2050. And in one terse comment at the bottom of a page, TotalEnergies provides its rationale for continuing to actively explore for and exploit fossil fuels around the world. It writes ‘Decrease in demand post-2030 lower than the natural decline of producing oil fields’. In other words, Total is saying it wants to continue to explore for new fossil fuels because the market for oil and gas will gradually decline, but at a slower rate than the production from existing fields. Frightening.

3, Vertical farming. The size of vertical farms continues to increase. A new complex operating on 17 layers and occupying about 14,000 sq. metres will be built near Bristol in the west of England, partly funded by Ocado, the highly innovative grocery delivery company. This will be probably the world’s largest but the title may be lost next year to an even bigger farm in Singapore. Jones Food Company promises about 1,000 tonnes of produce a year of high value herbs and salads, equivalent to about 60 kilogrammes per square metre. (Compare that to what you can get growing lettuces in the garden). The entrepreneur says that he believes 70% of the UK’s fresh produce can come from huge vertical farms, all powered by renewable energy. Advances in automation, he suggests, mean that within a few years an entire farm of this size could have just a single employee.
 
4, Green(er) cement. European leader Hoffman Green Cement started selling its lowest carbon cement to date. It has a footprint smaller than any other commercially available product. It claims a six-fold emissions reduction compared to conventional cements. (Even if all cement were replaced by Hoffman Green Cement, emissions from making the product would nevertheless still account for over 1% of today’s global CO2). The product is made from ground blast furnace slag and calcium sulphate, bound together with Hoffman Green Cement’s proprietary chemicals. A large number of companies are working on CO2 reduction in the manufacture of cement but this product seems the most advanced. In particular, the manufacturing process avoids use of a high temperature kiln. I couldn’t find details of how much the cement costs compared to conventional products but the company claims it will soon be on sale at 5,500 retailers in France. (Thanks to Mark Ellingham)
 
5, ‘Dispatchable’ renewables using hydrogen. The French territory of La Guyane on the northern coast of South America will install a power plant using solar PV, electrolyser, hydrogen storage and a fuel cell. The operator will guarantee delivery of 10 megawatts during the day and 3 megawatts at night from mid 2023. This will be achieved by storing daytime surpluses from a PV farm in the form of up to 130 megawatt hours of hydrogen. An electrolyser of 16 megawatts capacity from French manufacturer McPhy will produce the H2. The owners claim that this is currently the largest project in the world in which a power station stocks electricity in the form of hydrogen. It also says that power will be produced at a comparable price to fossil fuel generation. If it works, the scheme has worldwide significance but it is particularly important to countries with good resources of sun or wind but no cheap fossil fuels. (Thanks to Nick Hanna).
 
6, Offshore wind. The UK renewables trade association published new estimates of how much offshore wind is operational or in the pipeline around the world. Its figure of 417 gigawatts is about half the size of global onshore wind capacity today and, if all proposed projects are completed, will produce about 4% of today’s electricity demand. The UK, China and the US have about 40% of the world's fleet between them. Floating offshore wind, still an industry in very early infancy, contributes about 13% of the total. Surprisingly, the publisher doesn’t note some of the extraordinary differences between this year’s forecasts and last year’s numbers. The research last year suggested a pipeline of about 160 GW, less than 40% of the recent estimates. The biggest changes were in the estimates for China (more than tripled and now rivalling the UK in size), Sweden, now forecast to install 33 GW but not mentioned in last year’s press summary, and Vietnam, up sixfold in the last year and now fifth in the world rankings of prospective offshore installations. (Thanks to Daniel Scharf).
 
7, Carbon removal. Microsoft people and external scientists wrote a very useful article in Nature that covered many of the difficulties implementing robust carbon removal policies. Microsoft is now committed to being carbon negative by 2030, requiring extensive permanent storage of CO2 to offset remaining emissions. But the article said that of the 154 million tonnes of CO2 removal offered in response to its latest request for proposals, only 2 million tonnes met the company’s criteria for genuine carbon removal. The writers complained that most proposals they had received for CO2 extraction, including tree planting of course, do not offer permanent or reliable storage. Measurement and verification are usually poor. The authors are critical of most offerings of biological storage because ‘reliable tools for tracking carbon at scale are lacking’. But because nature-based offsets are typically priced at a tenth the cost of more robust geosphere storage, the temptation to use tree-planting remains strong, says Microsoft.
 
8, Green fertiliser. The development of competitively priced green hydrogen will change the location of some industries. Fertiliser production, for example, may shift to smaller plants in the centre of major agricultural areas using cheap local renewable resources. One such potential project was announced last week. Subsidiaries of the Italian process engineering company Maire Tecnimont said that they were working with an ammonia start-up in the US Mid-West on a feasibility study for a small plant to make 80,000 tonnes of green fertiliser from renewable ammonia a year to serve the local market. 6 million tonnes of ammonia are currently imported into the US.
 
9, ‘Renewables plus hydrogen’. I wrote an article that looked at how much electrolyser capacity would be needed to run the UK electricity system entirely on renewables. 25 GW seems to make sense financially. In my view, an electricity system running on intermittent renewables with hydrogen acting as the storage buffer is now almost certainly the lowest cost way of providing power in the UK.

10, Synthetic liquid natural gas. The first vessel ever powered by synthetic gas sailed from Germany to St Petersburg. The trial used a 50/50 mixture of fossil and synthetic gas. The renewable methane is made from the CO2 collected from an anaerobic digestion plant and chemically combined with hydrogen from electrolysis at a plant in Werlte, Germany. Furious debate rages as to whether synthetic methane made from agricultural wastes can ever provide more than a tiny fraction of total energy needs because of the demands made on land availability. An outline plan from one of the UK’s domestic gas suppliers to replace half the country’s needs for natural gas in the home with synthetic methane from the anaerobic digestion of grass was widely criticised for needing at least 20% of the nation’s farmed area.
 
 
I made an arithmetic mistake in last week’s newsletter. In the analysis of the costs of making petrol/gasoline using the approach of Prometheus Fuels, I mixed up litres and US gallons. The cost of the energy needed by the Prometheus technology to make a litre of gasoline is about the same as the wholesale price of gasoline in the US, not a quarter of the cost as I suggested. Apologies.   

Just pulling out the link in (9) as it is something we have discussed a few times:
More on 'renewables plus hydrogen' | Carbon Commentary
Using H2 as long term storage to supplement RE

ABrass

shinytop said:

EVandPV said:

Nice clean grid today, plenty wind and solar ......

When it's windy and sunny like today, do we use all the wind and PV generated or is there excess RE capacity? 

There have been a few times that we've had to 'spill' excess renewables but it's very rare. It only crops up when there's loads of renewables working well and when it's cheaper to drop them out the system rather than shut down a fossil fuel plant. It's an odd situation but sometimes fossil fuel systems can't be turned off and on fast enough for them to be able to react to expected changes.

It'll become more common in the future as the renewables percentage increases. Slightly balanced by more storage but that'll just trim some of the peaks.

Martyn1981

michaels said:

Martyn1981 said:

This weeks Carbon Commentary newsletter from Chris Goodall:

 Things I noticed and thought were interesting
Week ending 3rd October 2021
 
1, Green steel. After similar ventures in Spain and Germany in recent months, Arcelor Mittal signed a deal with the Belgian government to part-fund a new hydrogen direct reduction plant alongside the existing blast furnaces in Gent. At €1.1bn, the total cost here for decarbonisation of about 0.2 per cent of new world steel suggests a figure of about €500-€600bn for the entire global industry over the next decades, or about 20% of its annual turnover. In this industry at least, the hydrogen transition is eminently possible.
 
2, Peak oil before 2030. TotalEnergies used its investor day to say that it expected the demand for oil to peak before 2030. This story was extensively covered but many of the other less positive conclusions were not. TotalEnergies forecasts that about a third of the car fleet will still be powered by fossil fuels in 2050, using well over half as much petrol/gasoline or diesel as today.  Oil products will retain an even larger share of heavy vehicle fuels and electricity will provide little more than 10% of their total energy need by mid-century. Similarly aviation will still be about 70% fossil oil whereas the transition to lower carbon fuels in shipping will have gone further with hydrogen-based fuels and biofuels capturing over half total demand. TotalEnergies foresees the production of 300 million tonnes of hydrogen annually in 2050, less than half most recent forecasts. Oil demand will still be running at about 65% of current levels in 2050. And in one terse comment at the bottom of a page, TotalEnergies provides its rationale for continuing to actively explore for and exploit fossil fuels around the world. It writes ‘Decrease in demand post-2030 lower than the natural decline of producing oil fields’. In other words, Total is saying it wants to continue to explore for new fossil fuels because the market for oil and gas will gradually decline, but at a slower rate than the production from existing fields. Frightening.

3, Vertical farming. The size of vertical farms continues to increase. A new complex operating on 17 layers and occupying about 14,000 sq. metres will be built near Bristol in the west of England, partly funded by Ocado, the highly innovative grocery delivery company. This will be probably the world’s largest but the title may be lost next year to an even bigger farm in Singapore. Jones Food Company promises about 1,000 tonnes of produce a year of high value herbs and salads, equivalent to about 60 kilogrammes per square metre. (Compare that to what you can get growing lettuces in the garden). The entrepreneur says that he believes 70% of the UK’s fresh produce can come from huge vertical farms, all powered by renewable energy. Advances in automation, he suggests, mean that within a few years an entire farm of this size could have just a single employee.
 
4, Green(er) cement. European leader Hoffman Green Cement started selling its lowest carbon cement to date. It has a footprint smaller than any other commercially available product. It claims a six-fold emissions reduction compared to conventional cements. (Even if all cement were replaced by Hoffman Green Cement, emissions from making the product would nevertheless still account for over 1% of today’s global CO2). The product is made from ground blast furnace slag and calcium sulphate, bound together with Hoffman Green Cement’s proprietary chemicals. A large number of companies are working on CO2 reduction in the manufacture of cement but this product seems the most advanced. In particular, the manufacturing process avoids use of a high temperature kiln. I couldn’t find details of how much the cement costs compared to conventional products but the company claims it will soon be on sale at 5,500 retailers in France. (Thanks to Mark Ellingham)
 
5, ‘Dispatchable’ renewables using hydrogen. The French territory of La Guyane on the northern coast of South America will install a power plant using solar PV, electrolyser, hydrogen storage and a fuel cell. The operator will guarantee delivery of 10 megawatts during the day and 3 megawatts at night from mid 2023. This will be achieved by storing daytime surpluses from a PV farm in the form of up to 130 megawatt hours of hydrogen. An electrolyser of 16 megawatts capacity from French manufacturer McPhy will produce the H2. The owners claim that this is currently the largest project in the world in which a power station stocks electricity in the form of hydrogen. It also says that power will be produced at a comparable price to fossil fuel generation. If it works, the scheme has worldwide significance but it is particularly important to countries with good resources of sun or wind but no cheap fossil fuels. (Thanks to Nick Hanna).
 
6, Offshore wind. The UK renewables trade association published new estimates of how much offshore wind is operational or in the pipeline around the world. Its figure of 417 gigawatts is about half the size of global onshore wind capacity today and, if all proposed projects are completed, will produce about 4% of today’s electricity demand. The UK, China and the US have about 40% of the world's fleet between them. Floating offshore wind, still an industry in very early infancy, contributes about 13% of the total. Surprisingly, the publisher doesn’t note some of the extraordinary differences between this year’s forecasts and last year’s numbers. The research last year suggested a pipeline of about 160 GW, less than 40% of the recent estimates. The biggest changes were in the estimates for China (more than tripled and now rivalling the UK in size), Sweden, now forecast to install 33 GW but not mentioned in last year’s press summary, and Vietnam, up sixfold in the last year and now fifth in the world rankings of prospective offshore installations. (Thanks to Daniel Scharf).
 
7, Carbon removal. Microsoft people and external scientists wrote a very useful article in Nature that covered many of the difficulties implementing robust carbon removal policies. Microsoft is now committed to being carbon negative by 2030, requiring extensive permanent storage of CO2 to offset remaining emissions. But the article said that of the 154 million tonnes of CO2 removal offered in response to its latest request for proposals, only 2 million tonnes met the company’s criteria for genuine carbon removal. The writers complained that most proposals they had received for CO2 extraction, including tree planting of course, do not offer permanent or reliable storage. Measurement and verification are usually poor. The authors are critical of most offerings of biological storage because ‘reliable tools for tracking carbon at scale are lacking’. But because nature-based offsets are typically priced at a tenth the cost of more robust geosphere storage, the temptation to use tree-planting remains strong, says Microsoft.
 
8, Green fertiliser. The development of competitively priced green hydrogen will change the location of some industries. Fertiliser production, for example, may shift to smaller plants in the centre of major agricultural areas using cheap local renewable resources. One such potential project was announced last week. Subsidiaries of the Italian process engineering company Maire Tecnimont said that they were working with an ammonia start-up in the US Mid-West on a feasibility study for a small plant to make 80,000 tonnes of green fertiliser from renewable ammonia a year to serve the local market. 6 million tonnes of ammonia are currently imported into the US.
 
9, ‘Renewables plus hydrogen’. I wrote an article that looked at how much electrolyser capacity would be needed to run the UK electricity system entirely on renewables. 25 GW seems to make sense financially. In my view, an electricity system running on intermittent renewables with hydrogen acting as the storage buffer is now almost certainly the lowest cost way of providing power in the UK.

10, Synthetic liquid natural gas. The first vessel ever powered by synthetic gas sailed from Germany to St Petersburg. The trial used a 50/50 mixture of fossil and synthetic gas. The renewable methane is made from the CO2 collected from an anaerobic digestion plant and chemically combined with hydrogen from electrolysis at a plant in Werlte, Germany. Furious debate rages as to whether synthetic methane made from agricultural wastes can ever provide more than a tiny fraction of total energy needs because of the demands made on land availability. An outline plan from one of the UK’s domestic gas suppliers to replace half the country’s needs for natural gas in the home with synthetic methane from the anaerobic digestion of grass was widely criticised for needing at least 20% of the nation’s farmed area.
 
 
I made an arithmetic mistake in last week’s newsletter. In the analysis of the costs of making petrol/gasoline using the approach of Prometheus Fuels, I mixed up litres and US gallons. The cost of the energy needed by the Prometheus technology to make a litre of gasoline is about the same as the wholesale price of gasoline in the US, not a quarter of the cost as I suggested. Apologies.   

Just pulling out the link in (9) as it is something we have discussed a few times:
More on 'renewables plus hydrogen' | Carbon Commentary
Using H2 as long term storage to supplement RE

Yep, I thought it was the 'stand out' item too. Not sure if it means having 25GW running most of the time, or having upto 25GW ready to convert excess RE into longer term storage, but either way it's nice to have a number.

It also seems close to the ~20GW of storage capacity that I've seen mentioned many times in the past. That of course being 20GW of power that can back up the grid at times, not 20GWh of energy, as we'll need a hell of a lot more long term storage, perhaps several days worth, with a day being around 1TWh+.

The numbers actually look quite intimidating, but then again I suppose GW's of PV and wind did too a while back.



@ABrass - curtailment is a funny thing. It's always existed, and as you mention, used to impact FF generation, where the 'grid' would ask a power station to dial back (and lose revenue), but get paid for doing so. This helped balance the grid, whilst having the additional power ready to go in mins, rather than hours. I doubt most of us had ever heard of it, until wind energy started getting curtailment payments, and the DM and Telegraph starting hyping it up, without mentioning the need/history, nor in the early days reporting that the curtailments wind was getting were roughly in line with the percentage of wind generation on the grid.

Since then, the proportion of payments to wind have actually increased, but that's because it seems to have become the 'goto' for grid balancing in these situations, as wind generation can be reduced very fast, simply by reducing the efficiency of the blade angle, or yawing the nacelle, so the whole WT is no longer seeing the wind at an efficient angle.

Also worth mentioning as this can happen with each new windfarm build out - the National Grid has a policy of building out the infrastructure to connect a windfarm, only after the scheme is complete or progressing well. This may seem odd, but it's to avoid spending money on expansion when there's a chance that the farm may not be completed. I've always thought this was an odd practice, but presumably the economics work out, and it's better to pay for generation capacity that is unable to generate (for a while), v's 'wasted' capital expenditure?

shinytop

Martyn1981 said:

michaels said:

Martyn1981 said:

This weeks Carbon Commentary newsletter from Chris Goodall:

 Things I noticed and thought were interesting
Week ending 3rd October 2021
 
1, Green steel. After similar ventures in Spain and Germany in recent months, Arcelor Mittal signed a deal with the Belgian government to part-fund a new hydrogen direct reduction plant alongside the existing blast furnaces in Gent. At €1.1bn, the total cost here for decarbonisation of about 0.2 per cent of new world steel suggests a figure of about €500-€600bn for the entire global industry over the next decades, or about 20% of its annual turnover. In this industry at least, the hydrogen transition is eminently possible.
 
2, Peak oil before 2030. TotalEnergies used its investor day to say that it expected the demand for oil to peak before 2030. This story was extensively covered but many of the other less positive conclusions were not. TotalEnergies forecasts that about a third of the car fleet will still be powered by fossil fuels in 2050, using well over half as much petrol/gasoline or diesel as today.  Oil products will retain an even larger share of heavy vehicle fuels and electricity will provide little more than 10% of their total energy need by mid-century. Similarly aviation will still be about 70% fossil oil whereas the transition to lower carbon fuels in shipping will have gone further with hydrogen-based fuels and biofuels capturing over half total demand. TotalEnergies foresees the production of 300 million tonnes of hydrogen annually in 2050, less than half most recent forecasts. Oil demand will still be running at about 65% of current levels in 2050. And in one terse comment at the bottom of a page, TotalEnergies provides its rationale for continuing to actively explore for and exploit fossil fuels around the world. It writes ‘Decrease in demand post-2030 lower than the natural decline of producing oil fields’. In other words, Total is saying it wants to continue to explore for new fossil fuels because the market for oil and gas will gradually decline, but at a slower rate than the production from existing fields. Frightening.

3, Vertical farming. The size of vertical farms continues to increase. A new complex operating on 17 layers and occupying about 14,000 sq. metres will be built near Bristol in the west of England, partly funded by Ocado, the highly innovative grocery delivery company. This will be probably the world’s largest but the title may be lost next year to an even bigger farm in Singapore. Jones Food Company promises about 1,000 tonnes of produce a year of high value herbs and salads, equivalent to about 60 kilogrammes per square metre. (Compare that to what you can get growing lettuces in the garden). The entrepreneur says that he believes 70% of the UK’s fresh produce can come from huge vertical farms, all powered by renewable energy. Advances in automation, he suggests, mean that within a few years an entire farm of this size could have just a single employee.
 
4, Green(er) cement. European leader Hoffman Green Cement started selling its lowest carbon cement to date. It has a footprint smaller than any other commercially available product. It claims a six-fold emissions reduction compared to conventional cements. (Even if all cement were replaced by Hoffman Green Cement, emissions from making the product would nevertheless still account for over 1% of today’s global CO2). The product is made from ground blast furnace slag and calcium sulphate, bound together with Hoffman Green Cement’s proprietary chemicals. A large number of companies are working on CO2 reduction in the manufacture of cement but this product seems the most advanced. In particular, the manufacturing process avoids use of a high temperature kiln. I couldn’t find details of how much the cement costs compared to conventional products but the company claims it will soon be on sale at 5,500 retailers in France. (Thanks to Mark Ellingham)
 
5, ‘Dispatchable’ renewables using hydrogen. The French territory of La Guyane on the northern coast of South America will install a power plant using solar PV, electrolyser, hydrogen storage and a fuel cell. The operator will guarantee delivery of 10 megawatts during the day and 3 megawatts at night from mid 2023. This will be achieved by storing daytime surpluses from a PV farm in the form of up to 130 megawatt hours of hydrogen. An electrolyser of 16 megawatts capacity from French manufacturer McPhy will produce the H2. The owners claim that this is currently the largest project in the world in which a power station stocks electricity in the form of hydrogen. It also says that power will be produced at a comparable price to fossil fuel generation. If it works, the scheme has worldwide significance but it is particularly important to countries with good resources of sun or wind but no cheap fossil fuels. (Thanks to Nick Hanna).
 
6, Offshore wind. The UK renewables trade association published new estimates of how much offshore wind is operational or in the pipeline around the world. Its figure of 417 gigawatts is about half the size of global onshore wind capacity today and, if all proposed projects are completed, will produce about 4% of today’s electricity demand. The UK, China and the US have about 40% of the world's fleet between them. Floating offshore wind, still an industry in very early infancy, contributes about 13% of the total. Surprisingly, the publisher doesn’t note some of the extraordinary differences between this year’s forecasts and last year’s numbers. The research last year suggested a pipeline of about 160 GW, less than 40% of the recent estimates. The biggest changes were in the estimates for China (more than tripled and now rivalling the UK in size), Sweden, now forecast to install 33 GW but not mentioned in last year’s press summary, and Vietnam, up sixfold in the last year and now fifth in the world rankings of prospective offshore installations. (Thanks to Daniel Scharf).
 
7, Carbon removal. Microsoft people and external scientists wrote a very useful article in Nature that covered many of the difficulties implementing robust carbon removal policies. Microsoft is now committed to being carbon negative by 2030, requiring extensive permanent storage of CO2 to offset remaining emissions. But the article said that of the 154 million tonnes of CO2 removal offered in response to its latest request for proposals, only 2 million tonnes met the company’s criteria for genuine carbon removal. The writers complained that most proposals they had received for CO2 extraction, including tree planting of course, do not offer permanent or reliable storage. Measurement and verification are usually poor. The authors are critical of most offerings of biological storage because ‘reliable tools for tracking carbon at scale are lacking’. But because nature-based offsets are typically priced at a tenth the cost of more robust geosphere storage, the temptation to use tree-planting remains strong, says Microsoft.
 
8, Green fertiliser. The development of competitively priced green hydrogen will change the location of some industries. Fertiliser production, for example, may shift to smaller plants in the centre of major agricultural areas using cheap local renewable resources. One such potential project was announced last week. Subsidiaries of the Italian process engineering company Maire Tecnimont said that they were working with an ammonia start-up in the US Mid-West on a feasibility study for a small plant to make 80,000 tonnes of green fertiliser from renewable ammonia a year to serve the local market. 6 million tonnes of ammonia are currently imported into the US.
 
9, ‘Renewables plus hydrogen’. I wrote an article that looked at how much electrolyser capacity would be needed to run the UK electricity system entirely on renewables. 25 GW seems to make sense financially. In my view, an electricity system running on intermittent renewables with hydrogen acting as the storage buffer is now almost certainly the lowest cost way of providing power in the UK.

10, Synthetic liquid natural gas. The first vessel ever powered by synthetic gas sailed from Germany to St Petersburg. The trial used a 50/50 mixture of fossil and synthetic gas. The renewable methane is made from the CO2 collected from an anaerobic digestion plant and chemically combined with hydrogen from electrolysis at a plant in Werlte, Germany. Furious debate rages as to whether synthetic methane made from agricultural wastes can ever provide more than a tiny fraction of total energy needs because of the demands made on land availability. An outline plan from one of the UK’s domestic gas suppliers to replace half the country’s needs for natural gas in the home with synthetic methane from the anaerobic digestion of grass was widely criticised for needing at least 20% of the nation’s farmed area.
 
 
I made an arithmetic mistake in last week’s newsletter. In the analysis of the costs of making petrol/gasoline using the approach of Prometheus Fuels, I mixed up litres and US gallons. The cost of the energy needed by the Prometheus technology to make a litre of gasoline is about the same as the wholesale price of gasoline in the US, not a quarter of the cost as I suggested. Apologies.   

Just pulling out the link in (9) as it is something we have discussed a few times:
More on 'renewables plus hydrogen' | Carbon Commentary
Using H2 as long term storage to supplement RE

Yep, I thought it was the 'stand out' item too. Not sure if it means having 25GW running most of the time, or having upto 25GW ready to convert excess RE into longer term storage, but either way it's nice to have a number.

It also seems close to the ~20GW of storage capacity that I've seen mentioned many times in the past. That of course being 20GW of power that can back up the grid at times, not 20GWh of energy, as we'll need a hell of a lot more long term storage, perhaps several days worth, with a day being around 1TWh+.

The numbers actually look quite intimidating, but then again I suppose GW's of PV and wind did too a while back.



@ABrass - curtailment is a funny thing. It's always existed, and as you mention, used to impact FF generation, where the 'grid' would ask a power station to dial back (and lose revenue), but get paid for doing so. This helped balance the grid, whilst having the additional power ready to go in mins, rather than hours. I doubt most of us had ever heard of it, until wind energy started getting curtailment payments, and the DM and Telegraph starting hyping it up, without mentioning the need/history, nor in the early days reporting that the curtailments wind was getting were roughly in line with the percentage of wind generation on the grid.

Since then, the proportion of payments to wind have actually increased, but that's because it seems to have become the 'goto' for grid balancing in these situations, as wind generation can be reduced very fast, simply by reducing the efficiency of the blade angle, or yawing the nacelle, so the whole WT is no longer seeing the wind at an efficient angle.

Also worth mentioning as this can happen with each new windfarm build out - the National Grid has a policy of building out the infrastructure to connect a windfarm, only after the scheme is complete or progressing well. This may seem odd, but it's to avoid spending money on expansion when there's a chance that the farm may not be completed. I've always thought this was an odd practice, but presumably the economics work out, and it's better to pay for generation capacity that is unable to generate (for a while), v's 'wasted' capital expenditure?

The article looks at electricity generation in isolation.  Won't we also have large scale H2 production and storage from RE to replace domestic and other direct gas use?  Then, we'd use some of that that when it's calm/cloudy to top up electricity generation.

And if I've counted my zeros correctly, couldn't a every million EVs at 50kWh each, store 50 GWh?  There will be a lot of EVs around in the future.

Martyn1981

shinytop said:

Martyn1981 said:

michaels said:

Martyn1981 said:

This weeks Carbon Commentary newsletter from Chris Goodall:

 Things I noticed and thought were interesting
Week ending 3rd October 2021
 
1, Green steel. After similar ventures in Spain and Germany in recent months, Arcelor Mittal signed a deal with the Belgian government to part-fund a new hydrogen direct reduction plant alongside the existing blast furnaces in Gent. At €1.1bn, the total cost here for decarbonisation of about 0.2 per cent of new world steel suggests a figure of about €500-€600bn for the entire global industry over the next decades, or about 20% of its annual turnover. In this industry at least, the hydrogen transition is eminently possible.
 
2, Peak oil before 2030. TotalEnergies used its investor day to say that it expected the demand for oil to peak before 2030. This story was extensively covered but many of the other less positive conclusions were not. TotalEnergies forecasts that about a third of the car fleet will still be powered by fossil fuels in 2050, using well over half as much petrol/gasoline or diesel as today.  Oil products will retain an even larger share of heavy vehicle fuels and electricity will provide little more than 10% of their total energy need by mid-century. Similarly aviation will still be about 70% fossil oil whereas the transition to lower carbon fuels in shipping will have gone further with hydrogen-based fuels and biofuels capturing over half total demand. TotalEnergies foresees the production of 300 million tonnes of hydrogen annually in 2050, less than half most recent forecasts. Oil demand will still be running at about 65% of current levels in 2050. And in one terse comment at the bottom of a page, TotalEnergies provides its rationale for continuing to actively explore for and exploit fossil fuels around the world. It writes ‘Decrease in demand post-2030 lower than the natural decline of producing oil fields’. In other words, Total is saying it wants to continue to explore for new fossil fuels because the market for oil and gas will gradually decline, but at a slower rate than the production from existing fields. Frightening.

3, Vertical farming. The size of vertical farms continues to increase. A new complex operating on 17 layers and occupying about 14,000 sq. metres will be built near Bristol in the west of England, partly funded by Ocado, the highly innovative grocery delivery company. This will be probably the world’s largest but the title may be lost next year to an even bigger farm in Singapore. Jones Food Company promises about 1,000 tonnes of produce a year of high value herbs and salads, equivalent to about 60 kilogrammes per square metre. (Compare that to what you can get growing lettuces in the garden). The entrepreneur says that he believes 70% of the UK’s fresh produce can come from huge vertical farms, all powered by renewable energy. Advances in automation, he suggests, mean that within a few years an entire farm of this size could have just a single employee.
 
4, Green(er) cement. European leader Hoffman Green Cement started selling its lowest carbon cement to date. It has a footprint smaller than any other commercially available product. It claims a six-fold emissions reduction compared to conventional cements. (Even if all cement were replaced by Hoffman Green Cement, emissions from making the product would nevertheless still account for over 1% of today’s global CO2). The product is made from ground blast furnace slag and calcium sulphate, bound together with Hoffman Green Cement’s proprietary chemicals. A large number of companies are working on CO2 reduction in the manufacture of cement but this product seems the most advanced. In particular, the manufacturing process avoids use of a high temperature kiln. I couldn’t find details of how much the cement costs compared to conventional products but the company claims it will soon be on sale at 5,500 retailers in France. (Thanks to Mark Ellingham)
 
5, ‘Dispatchable’ renewables using hydrogen. The French territory of La Guyane on the northern coast of South America will install a power plant using solar PV, electrolyser, hydrogen storage and a fuel cell. The operator will guarantee delivery of 10 megawatts during the day and 3 megawatts at night from mid 2023. This will be achieved by storing daytime surpluses from a PV farm in the form of up to 130 megawatt hours of hydrogen. An electrolyser of 16 megawatts capacity from French manufacturer McPhy will produce the H2. The owners claim that this is currently the largest project in the world in which a power station stocks electricity in the form of hydrogen. It also says that power will be produced at a comparable price to fossil fuel generation. If it works, the scheme has worldwide significance but it is particularly important to countries with good resources of sun or wind but no cheap fossil fuels. (Thanks to Nick Hanna).
 
6, Offshore wind. The UK renewables trade association published new estimates of how much offshore wind is operational or in the pipeline around the world. Its figure of 417 gigawatts is about half the size of global onshore wind capacity today and, if all proposed projects are completed, will produce about 4% of today’s electricity demand. The UK, China and the US have about 40% of the world's fleet between them. Floating offshore wind, still an industry in very early infancy, contributes about 13% of the total. Surprisingly, the publisher doesn’t note some of the extraordinary differences between this year’s forecasts and last year’s numbers. The research last year suggested a pipeline of about 160 GW, less than 40% of the recent estimates. The biggest changes were in the estimates for China (more than tripled and now rivalling the UK in size), Sweden, now forecast to install 33 GW but not mentioned in last year’s press summary, and Vietnam, up sixfold in the last year and now fifth in the world rankings of prospective offshore installations. (Thanks to Daniel Scharf).
 
7, Carbon removal. Microsoft people and external scientists wrote a very useful article in Nature that covered many of the difficulties implementing robust carbon removal policies. Microsoft is now committed to being carbon negative by 2030, requiring extensive permanent storage of CO2 to offset remaining emissions. But the article said that of the 154 million tonnes of CO2 removal offered in response to its latest request for proposals, only 2 million tonnes met the company’s criteria for genuine carbon removal. The writers complained that most proposals they had received for CO2 extraction, including tree planting of course, do not offer permanent or reliable storage. Measurement and verification are usually poor. The authors are critical of most offerings of biological storage because ‘reliable tools for tracking carbon at scale are lacking’. But because nature-based offsets are typically priced at a tenth the cost of more robust geosphere storage, the temptation to use tree-planting remains strong, says Microsoft.
 
8, Green fertiliser. The development of competitively priced green hydrogen will change the location of some industries. Fertiliser production, for example, may shift to smaller plants in the centre of major agricultural areas using cheap local renewable resources. One such potential project was announced last week. Subsidiaries of the Italian process engineering company Maire Tecnimont said that they were working with an ammonia start-up in the US Mid-West on a feasibility study for a small plant to make 80,000 tonnes of green fertiliser from renewable ammonia a year to serve the local market. 6 million tonnes of ammonia are currently imported into the US.
 
9, ‘Renewables plus hydrogen’. I wrote an article that looked at how much electrolyser capacity would be needed to run the UK electricity system entirely on renewables. 25 GW seems to make sense financially. In my view, an electricity system running on intermittent renewables with hydrogen acting as the storage buffer is now almost certainly the lowest cost way of providing power in the UK.

10, Synthetic liquid natural gas. The first vessel ever powered by synthetic gas sailed from Germany to St Petersburg. The trial used a 50/50 mixture of fossil and synthetic gas. The renewable methane is made from the CO2 collected from an anaerobic digestion plant and chemically combined with hydrogen from electrolysis at a plant in Werlte, Germany. Furious debate rages as to whether synthetic methane made from agricultural wastes can ever provide more than a tiny fraction of total energy needs because of the demands made on land availability. An outline plan from one of the UK’s domestic gas suppliers to replace half the country’s needs for natural gas in the home with synthetic methane from the anaerobic digestion of grass was widely criticised for needing at least 20% of the nation’s farmed area.
 
 
I made an arithmetic mistake in last week’s newsletter. In the analysis of the costs of making petrol/gasoline using the approach of Prometheus Fuels, I mixed up litres and US gallons. The cost of the energy needed by the Prometheus technology to make a litre of gasoline is about the same as the wholesale price of gasoline in the US, not a quarter of the cost as I suggested. Apologies.   

Just pulling out the link in (9) as it is something we have discussed a few times:
More on 'renewables plus hydrogen' | Carbon Commentary
Using H2 as long term storage to supplement RE

Yep, I thought it was the 'stand out' item too. Not sure if it means having 25GW running most of the time, or having upto 25GW ready to convert excess RE into longer term storage, but either way it's nice to have a number.

It also seems close to the ~20GW of storage capacity that I've seen mentioned many times in the past. That of course being 20GW of power that can back up the grid at times, not 20GWh of energy, as we'll need a hell of a lot more long term storage, perhaps several days worth, with a day being around 1TWh+.

The numbers actually look quite intimidating, but then again I suppose GW's of PV and wind did too a while back.



@ABrass - curtailment is a funny thing. It's always existed, and as you mention, used to impact FF generation, where the 'grid' would ask a power station to dial back (and lose revenue), but get paid for doing so. This helped balance the grid, whilst having the additional power ready to go in mins, rather than hours. I doubt most of us had ever heard of it, until wind energy started getting curtailment payments, and the DM and Telegraph starting hyping it up, without mentioning the need/history, nor in the early days reporting that the curtailments wind was getting were roughly in line with the percentage of wind generation on the grid.

Since then, the proportion of payments to wind have actually increased, but that's because it seems to have become the 'goto' for grid balancing in these situations, as wind generation can be reduced very fast, simply by reducing the efficiency of the blade angle, or yawing the nacelle, so the whole WT is no longer seeing the wind at an efficient angle.

Also worth mentioning as this can happen with each new windfarm build out - the National Grid has a policy of building out the infrastructure to connect a windfarm, only after the scheme is complete or progressing well. This may seem odd, but it's to avoid spending money on expansion when there's a chance that the farm may not be completed. I've always thought this was an odd practice, but presumably the economics work out, and it's better to pay for generation capacity that is unable to generate (for a while), v's 'wasted' capital expenditure?

The article looks at electricity generation in isolation.  Won't we also have large scale H2 production and storage from RE to replace domestic and other direct gas use?  Then, we'd use some of that that when it's calm/cloudy to top up electricity generation.

And if I've counted my zeros correctly, couldn't a every million EVs at 50kWh each, store 50 GWh?  There will be a lot of EVs around in the future.

I'd have thought that too, but there are issues with making sure the gas grid can cope with more H2, and also the reduction in energy due to H2 being a less dense gas. Maybe we'll see localised differences, some running on heat pumps, others on methane (ideally bio-gas not FF's) and other areas, perhaps on a H2 system. What ever happens, the transition is going to be big.

Regarding BEV's and V2G, the potential for intraday storage is vast, and almost as a side effect of the BEV transition. The studies using Leaf batts seem to show it actually helps the batts, as the low levels of charge/discharge v's road demand, help to balance the batts. See my recent comment here:

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/78648319/#Comment_78648319

Martyn1981

Boris is talking big again, and now that it suits him (and denial won't work anymore) he seems to like renewables, and believe in AGW/science.

It's a tad frustrating to hear him saying what so many of us have been saying for decades, but if they can deliver on this, then all the best to them, they may have arrived late to the tent, but at least they've stopped pee'ing into it from outside.

UK electricity generation to be fossil fuel free by 2035, says Boris Johnson

The prime minister has confirmed plans to eliminate fossil fuels from UK electricity generation by 2035.

Speaking during the Conservative party conference, Boris Johnson said the proposed shift would help the UK decarbonise, while softening the impact of the kind of gas price fluctuations that have prompted fears of a winter energy crisis in recent weeks.

“What I’m saying is we can do for our entire energy production by 2035 what we’re doing with internal combustion engines in vehicles by 2030,” he said, during a visit to a Network Rail site in Manchester.

Johnson said removing gas from electricity generation would help safeguard against future price surges.

“We will be reliant on our own clean power generation, which will help us also to keep costs down.”

QrizB

The problem is, the incumbent PM has only a tangential relationship with reality.

Until these plans are published, reviewed and funded, I'm not convinced they actually exist.