Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Verdigris

I'll be quite surprised if I'm still around to see HPC working!

Coastalwatch

Verdigris said:

I'll be quite surprised if I'm still around to see HPC working!

shinytop

Martyn1981 said:

shinytop said:

The Guardian usually features in this thread quite a lot but I think this might have been missed.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/10/france-to-build-up-to-14-new-nuclear-reactors-by-2050-says-macron?fbclid=IwAR3k7qdfQWo7t7uYEj10YhS-I4x99XEYUIvIa51yNWaJ4CEUrPwPbQXMfFA

They're building some wind and PV too, so a balanced approach. 

I apologise for this long and winding (windy) response, but I just wanted to make clear that whilst I think the arguments for nuclear these days are simply ideological, the counter arguments are reasonable, based on facts and evidence, and have developed over a decade as the technology and economics of RE and storage have evolved.

I'll respond because it was my (slightly) tongue in cheek comment you responded to.  Thanks and some very interesting points.

I still have never seen explained what 'storage' is, what it costs and when it will appear.  Lots of trials, schemes and ideas though. Until I do I'm not convinced that the UK's wind-based strategy RE will work.  I certainly don't have an ideological attachment to nuclear; I just think we need a reliable energy source.

FWIW I think a worldwide grid based on PV is a viable solution. We'd need co-operation and some allies in sunny places but we've had that with oil for the last 100 plus years.    

QrizB

shinytop said:

I still have never seen explained what 'storage' is, what it costs and when it will appear.

Regardless of technology, the economics are different for "storage" depending on how long you're storing it for.

• Intraday storage (where you're eg. storing surplus renewable generation in the morning to sell in the evening) is what we're seeing most of currently. The economics are fairly straightforward in that you can cycle your storage every day; if you buy a kWh power for 5p and sell it for 10p, you make 5p and can continue to make that return every day. £18/yr for each kWh of capacity.
• Interday storage (eg. storing surplus power at the weekend and selling in the week) is financially more challenging as you can only do that once a week; your return is now £2.60/yr per kWh of capacity.
• Inter-seasonal storage (eg. storing in the summer to sell in the winter) has even worse economics in that you'll only make 5p per year from your stored kWh.

The only saving grace is that as the timescale gets longer, so does the speed at which you need your storage to respond. Intraday storage needs things that move quickly; batteries, flywheels, weights-in-mineshafts. Once you get to inter-seasonal timescales you can use eg. massive phase-change heat stores. (Just to illustrate, a cubic metre of common salt would take around 300kWh to melt, and would release the same on cooling. Retail price of rock salt is £200/tonne, around £1.40/kWh.)

Martyn1981

Coastalwatch said:

It seems the truth will out, eventually!

Climate change: Satellites map huge methane plumes from oil and gas

Huge plumes of the warming gas methane have been mapped globally for the first time from oil and gas fields using satellites.

Plugging these leaks would be an important step in buying extra time to curb climate change.

The new research found plumes covering vast areas, sometimes stretching to 200 miles - the leaks are thought to be mostly unintended.

Last year, about 100 countries promised to cut methane emissions by 2030.

"We knew about individual gas blow-outs before, but this work shows the true methane footprint of oil and gas operations around the planet", explains Riley Duren, an author of the paper and CEO of Carbon Mapper which tracks methane emissions.

Image source, Thomas Lauvaux

Image caption,

Methane leaks have been systemically mapped from space

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-60203683

Heard some news and thought of you CW.

Your comment that the truth will out, with satellites mapping methane leaks, ties in nicely with news from New Mexico. They have about 50k oil and gas wells, and have to report gas lost to vents and flares. But last year the rules changed a bit, and tightened up on reporting. Check out the graph to see how much leaks 'increased' from 2019 to 2020 to 2021 when things got a bit stricter. But also remember that this is largely self regulated/reported so will be under-reported.

The state only has 10 inspectors and the Governor hasn't been able to get the budget increased for more ..... possibly because of the enormous income the state gets from oil and gas?

New Data Shows Massive Climate-Warming Leaks by New Mexico Oil and Gas Operators

A review of year-end data from the state’s Oil Conservation Division (OCD) shows that producers vented or flared enough natural gas to power nearly 39,000 homes for a year — roughly the number of households in Las Cruces, the state’s second-largest city.

The actual total for the year is likely much higher as the new reporting only began in May.

Not only that, but the new reporting system also reveals that the state’s largest natural gas producer, Hilcorp Energy of Houston, reported surprisingly low numbers of incidents — about a hundred times lower than either similarly sized competitors or the size of its operations would suggest.

It’s not that venting and flaring is more common than it used to be. In fact it shouldn’t be, as the new state rule has banned the practice in most instances since May 25.

Instead, OCD’s new reports require much more careful accounting on the part of producers. And the threat of new penalties for not reporting, along with upcoming mandated venting and flaring reductions, likely play a part, too.

Martyn1981

Carbon Commentary newsletter time.

See correction at the end, if like me you were confused by last weeks calcs on gravity storage.

I thought item 9 was very important with his calcs suggesting an 81% increase in annual leccy demand with transport and space heating moved to leccy. That sounds fine, better than I thought actually. But the impact on peak demand will need management as he suggests. My first thought was V2G / V2H during peak periods, perhaps 4pm to 8pm? And if smart chargers are to be limited during these periods, then perhaps heatpumps could carry some load reduction requirements too?

Industry news

Things I noticed and thought were interesting

Week ending 13th February 2022
 
1, Home solar. Current electricity prices, particularly in Europe, make solar panels appealing. But the initial capital cost can be excessive for many homeowners. A rapidly growing German start-up gets round the problem by installing PV and battery systems, as well providing maintenance support. The customer just pays for the electricity produced. Today’s long-term rates from 24 Euro cents per kilowatt hour are considerably cheaper than current German retail prices. Sunvigo raised €15m from new investors, including the venture arm of Dutch utility Eneco. Previous reports have suggested that Sunvigo will become a ‘virtual power plant’ operator, selling surplus solar electricity to customers without space for PV on their roofs. Falling solar costs combined with upward leaps in electricity prices make residential PV viable without subsidy in many countries. 

2, Reforestation. A crowdfunding site started raising money for a 195 hectare project to reforest agricultural land in England. This scheme has many interesting aspects. First, it will use a deciduous Asian tree variety that can grow at many times the rate of conventional plantation trees. The plants come from a specialist German nursery that claims that its trees can grow at around ten times the rate of oaks. According to the funding prospectus this means a carbon sequestration rate of up to 55 tonnes per hectare a year. If correct, this would mean that growing this type of tree on 4% of the UK’s land (1m hectares) would be sufficient to capture about one sixth of the country’s current CO2 emissions. And since the UK is the least forested large country in Europe, this may make very good sense. Planting large areas with a single tree variety will be controversial, particularly since this particular woodland will be sited on land currently used for food production. But the prospectus carefully goes through the measures to be taken to encourage biodiversity, reduce chemical use and conserve water. (Parts of eastern England are becoming short of water for irrigation). The harvests carried out every five years will replace timber bought from abroad, improving the UK’s woeful trade imbalance in wood products.
 
3, Demand management. The innovative UK utility Octopus, now expanding into other markets, including France in the last weeks, said that it would work with the UK transmission system operator, National Grid, on a two month trial that will test how much electricity demand can be cut at peak times. Customers with smart meters will be offered free electricity for reducing their rate of consumption to below a level set by Octopus. The target will be set by reference to previous usage. If the home usually consumes at a rate of 2 kW during the evening peak, for example, Octopus may require usage to fall below 1 kW for the free power to be won. The times of the experiments and the customer’s target will be sent out a few hours in advance. This sounds like a good idea but seems far too complicated for the very small amounts of money at stake. I suspect that a better experiment would be to offer devices that automatically cut off power to refrigerators, drying machines and other appliances when wholesale prices peak, in return for a regular financial reward.  (Thanks to Paul King)
 
4, Carbon capture. Major technology improvements are promised by several participants in the Direct Air Capture (DAC) sector. The aim is to push the cost of collecting a tonne of CO2 to below $100, or approximately the current price of EU emissions permits. Capturing carbon dioxide would then make good business sense. (The current costs of the Climeworks plants are said to be around six times this target level). Verdox, which has pioneered a new approach which may be able to break the $100 barrier, raised $80m from investors including Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Verdox needs much less energy to capture CO2 than other technologies and this gives it a huge advantage. Figures published by the company suggest a figure of around half a megawatt hour for each tonne of CO2 captured, or even less in certain circumstances. In countries with low cost renewables, such as northern Europe, half a megawatt hour of electricity might cost no more than €20 today. Verdox says its technology, based around ‘electro-swing adsorption’ will make financial sense at any scale and can both capture the gas from streams of CO2-rich exhaust gas from industrial processes and from the tiny concentrations in the atmosphere. The company also claims relatively low capital costs for each tonne of DAC capacity
 
5, Green steel. Divergence between China and Europe. BMW announced new targets for the percentage of green steel in its cars, saying that it wanted 40% to come from low carbon sources by 2030, including H2 Green Steel in Sweden. China moved in the opposite direction, admitting that its steel industry - responsible for about 15% of national emissions - will not be obliged to reduce its overall emissions before 2030. The previous target was 2025. Pressure will grow even stronger for the EU to introduce a carbon border tax that penalises Chinese producers and encourages the growth of hydrogen steel in Europe.

6, Green ammonia in Norway, Chile and Spain. Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP), one of the world’s leading green investors, has made three major commitments to ammonia manufacture in recent weeks. The project in Norway looks to make ammonia for marine engines while the Spain venture targets fertiliser production (alongside Spanish producer Fertiberia, which is pushing fast into green ammonia). In Chile, CIP is working with Austrian companies to develop a large hydrogen and ammonia export industry based on the country’s excellent onshore wind resources.
 
7, Solar PV. BloombergNEF produced a useful forecast for solar PV until 2030. It says that installations this year will be about 328 GW, up 25% on 2021. BNEF forecasts that the rise in raw material prices will stop within months, helped by large volumes of new polysilicon manufacturing capacity. The cost of solar panels will continue to fall, reaching 23-24 cents per watt in the second half of 2022. That’s down from almost 28 cents at the peak of the silicon supply crunch last year. In other interesting findings, BNEF says that solar will be increasingly installed alongside large amounts of storage. It comments that about half of all German residential installations are already merged with batteries and other countries will follow. I came away with one question: new PV installations in 2022 will be about five times as much as eight years ago. But over the next eight years solar power is projected to rise by only 50%, or one tenth of the previous rate. Why expect this slowdown? There’s no obvious reason.

8, E-fuels. Steel producer ArcelorMittal said last week that it would replace two out of the three blast furnaces in Dunkerque, France with steel-making using hydrogen. This week ENGIE and Infinium, a leading US synthetic fuels innovator, told us of a plan to use CO2, presumably from the remaining coal-fired blast furnace, to make transport fuels and chemicals from 2026 at the ArcelorMittal site. This is perhaps the largest synthetic fuels scheme in the world. It targets reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 300,000 tonnes a year and plans a 400 MW electrolyser to make the required hydrogen. The talk is of spending over €500m on the project but the final investment decision is not scheduled until the end of next year. Of course if captured CO2 is made into synthetic fuels it ends up into the atmosphere exactly as before. But it has still done a useful job in replacing the need for some fossil fuels. In the long run, e-fuels will be made from carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere. (See note 4)
 
9, The impact of electrifying road transport and heating on power demand. Although we all understand that a net zero future demands full electrification of home heating and road transport, few studies have estimated how much this will add to electricity demand. I made some calculations for the UK, suggesting that adding 100% heat pumps to UK homes and powering all cars and commercial vehicles with batteries will add about 81% to annual electricity demand. This looks manageable. More crucially perhaps, I estimated that peak electricity demand  will rise by about 150%, largely as a result of home heating requirements in early evenings in cold winters. This assumes some switching of peak daily heat pump use away from periods when electricity requirements are at their maximum. The highly variable level of electricity use will pose significant problems for the electricity grid unless hydrogen is used as a storage medium.


I made a mistake last week when calculating the energy available from letting large weights fall under gravity. I underestimated the figure by a factor of 10. This makes the economics of the Energy Vault project in China more attractive, though it still does not looking financially compelling. I am very grateful to Ambrose Smith for carefully explaining my error. Apologies.  

Coastalwatch

Thanks for posting Mart, Carbon Commentary is always an interesting read and a little more so this week as item 2, Reforestation, appears to be the very project announced on Abundance this week and highlighted on the Investment thread.

Amazing to think that a million hectares of such plantations would capture about one sixth of the country's CO2 emissions.

That's a fair contribution and surely a more sustainable means than any industrial process set up to sequestor CO2, however green it's promoters may claim it to be!

shinytop

Martyn1981 said:

Carbon Commentary newsletter time.

See correction at the end, if like me you were confused by last weeks calcs on gravity storage.

I thought item 9 was very important with his calcs suggesting an 81% increase in annual leccy demand with transport and space heating moved to leccy. That sounds fine, better than I thought actually. But the impact on peak demand will need management as he suggests. My first thought was V2G / V2H during peak periods, perhaps 4pm to 8pm? And if smart chargers are to be limited during these periods, then perhaps heatpumps could carry some load reduction requirements too?

Interesting.  The author has probably come to the right conclusion about ASHP peaks (that they are lower than ff heating) using the wrong assumptions.  An ASHP doesn't have to have the same peak usage pattern as gas CH; it's better not to run it like a gas boiler but keep it running most of the time. There's no point in cranking it up to heat your cold house at 6pm when you're due home from work because it'll be bedtime before it warms up.  I'm exaggerating but you get the point.   My ASHP is off and uses no energy 12-5am and has a single peak when it starts up at 5am.  Other than that usage depends on the outside temperature.  Even people who turn theirs down during the day should not do it by much.  

A battery that could run them for 3-4 hours could smooth out in-day demand for heat pumps. Or your V2G enabled EV.    

EricMears

Martyn1981 said:

Carbon Commentary newsletter time.

The new Octopus 'Demand management' scheme strikes me as a little silly !  Whilst you might earn a little by complying with a request to shed load,  if you make a real effort and drop imports to near zero you earn nothing at all.  Some sort of scheme that rewards bigger drops with more discount would make far more sense.

Martyn1981

shinytop said:

Martyn1981 said:

Carbon Commentary newsletter time.

See correction at the end, if like me you were confused by last weeks calcs on gravity storage.

I thought item 9 was very important with his calcs suggesting an 81% increase in annual leccy demand with transport and space heating moved to leccy. That sounds fine, better than I thought actually. But the impact on peak demand will need management as he suggests. My first thought was V2G / V2H during peak periods, perhaps 4pm to 8pm? And if smart chargers are to be limited during these periods, then perhaps heatpumps could carry some load reduction requirements too?

Interesting.  The author has probably come to the right conclusion about ASHP peaks (that they are lower than ff heating) using the wrong assumptions.  An ASHP doesn't have to have the same peak usage pattern as gas CH; it's better not to run it like a gas boiler but keep it running most of the time. There's no point in cranking it up to heat your cold house at 6pm when you're due home from work because it'll be bedtime before it warms up.  I'm exaggerating but you get the point.   My ASHP is off and uses no energy 12-5am and has a single peak when it starts up at 5am.  Other than that usage depends on the outside temperature.  Even people who turn theirs down during the day should not do it by much.  

A battery that could run them for 3-4 hours could smooth out in-day demand for heat pumps. Or your V2G enabled EV.    

Thanks for that, I was wondering the same. In my head I had the 'hot country' peak where A/C gets cranked up as folk head home, but was thinking that for cold homes it would be too late. I only have the small air to air units assisting, so couldn't speak for 'proper jobs' like yourself, but did think that peak periods could be avoided or demand reduced. Am I right in thinking that for underfloor heating it takes days to warm up / cool down, so avoiding an evening peak and or responding to TOU tariffs is wholly possible and sensible?

BTW, many thanks to you and RR for all the heatpump advice as for 10yrs+ any threads would get jumped on by one poster telling us all how they don't work. Though I must admit, I struggle to follow a lot of what you two guys discuss.