Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981

Wave power - Loads of energy, that typically destroys wave energy converters. Here's news on a device advancing through development. Fingers crossed.

Bombora advances 1.5MW wave demonstrator

Bombora Wave Power is conducting final tests at the Pembrokeshire Demonstration Project in Wales as it prepares to deploy its wave energy converter (WEC) technology in open water.

The 1.5MW system known as mWave, which Bombora describes as the "world's most powerful" WEC, can be configured to suit either fixed-bed nearshore foundation systems or floating offshore ocean environments.

Bombora COO Dave Rigg said: “In the coming months we will complete the final assembly process on the quayside in Pembroke Dock before loadout to the operational site at East Pickard Bay, where the mWave technology will be validated in the open ocean, advancing it to TRL (Technology Readiness Level) 7/8.”

Development of the £20m project is being progressed with financial support from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) via the Welsh government.

Coastalwatch

Probably not surprising given the current energy crisis and we can but surmise that prices will continue in that direction until supply matches or surpasses demand. With Russia not backing down and Europe refusing to purchase their gas until they do then I suspect we are in for more of the same in the months or even years ahead.

At least these higher prices should encourage manufacturers and installers of renewable energy sources alike to crack on asap in order to make hay while the sunshines!

S'funny, how the powers that be seem to get far more excited about rolling out Renewable energy sources when it comes to earning a dollar or two extra as opposed to the boring topic of limiting climate change!

UK solar PPA increases 18.4% in Q2 to over £60/MWh in new European PPA Index

Solar power purchase agreements (PPA) in the UK rose 18.4% during Q2 and exceeding £60/MWh, but less than the 24% increase of wind prices.

Overall in Europe PPA prices have skyrocketted 47% year-on-year as the continent’s energy crisis persists along with soaring inflation, according to renewable energy marketplace LevelTen Energy's latest Price Index report.

The ongoing conflict in Ukraine has caused PPA prices to soar with supply failing to keep up with demand, said Flemming Sørensen, VP of Europe at LevelTen Energy.

“With public and private sector renewable ambitions growing, developers have no shortage of options when it comes to selling their clean electricity,” said the report.

This is a trend seen in Poland, where P25 solar prices have reached €95/MWh (£80.32/MWh) – prices spiked 36.2% due to the cessation of natural gas imports from Russia – with developers taking their projects to the wholesale market as its electricity prices remain high, forgoing PPAs.

https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/news/uk_solar_ppa_increases_18.4_in_q2_to_over_60_mwh_in_new_european_ppa_index

Coastalwatch

I have to confess that the 80% increase seen with installations in this six month period were mostly already in the pipeline prior to any hint of the war in Ukraine supplemented by projects delayed by covid around the world this last two years. Admittedly its barely half a GW and we need increasing amounts going forward but at least shows it on an upward trend. It will be interesting to see how the next six months installation figures compare!

UK installs 556MW of new solar capacity in first six months of 2022

During the first six months of 2022, the UK posted 80% growth in new solar PV installations compared to the same period last year, with 556MW of capacity installed. This article explains the factors driving this growth and what can be expected for the rest of 2022 and into 2023.

Growth across all key segments

The most general segmentation of the UK market is across residential installations, small commercial rooftops (<100kW), large commercial rooftops (>100kW) and ground-mount (dominated by utility-scale solar farms). The key segments driving current growth are coming from residential, large commercial rooftops and ground-mount sites.

Residential is seeing huge growth today, with the sector fully recovered from the reset that occurred at the start of 2019, when FiTs ended. New builds form the basis of this market recovery. The graphic below illustrates this clearly.

https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/blogs/uk_installs_556mw_of_new_solar_capacity_in_first_six_months_of_2022

Martyn1981

Hooray, Chris Goodall's Carbon Commentary Newsletter is back.

Apologies for the length of my absence from this newsletter. And thank you to all who have written to me since the last edition, including very helpful suggestions of topics to cover. 

Things I noticed and thought were interesting

Week ending 18th July 2022 
 
1, BP and hydrogen. BP linked with steel manufacturer ThyssenKrupp to provide the hydrogen for direct reduction plants that will make iron. ThyssenKrupp’s steelmaking is responsible for almost 3% of German emissions, particularly from its plant in Duisburg. Obtaining the hydrogen is going to be a challenge and the press release isn’t specific on how or where BP will produce the necessary volumes, or how they will be transported to Duisburg or elsewhere. Last month the British oil major also bought a large minority stake in one of the largest Australian proposed solar and wind developments in Pilbara, with a potential for 26 GW of capacity. I don’t think that the entire output of this project would provide enough hydrogen to cover ThyssenKrupp’s German needs. However BP’s increasing interest in moving into large scale hydrogen production and distribution is a very positive development.
 
2, Sustainable consumption. Deloitte UK published its 2022 survey of consumer attitudes to sustainability. It noted a significant rise in the percentage of British consumers who said that they are ‘buying just what they need’ (59% of respondents, up 20% in a year). Very large numbers are repairing their goods rather than purchasing new items. These actions are helpful aids to building a society that lives within the Earth’s capacity. But at the same Deloitte observed that a large percentage of people (52%) were rejecting sustainable living because ‘it’s too expensive’ or they weren’t ‘interested’ (51%). The conflict between these two sets of results was not analysed by Deloitte but the unfortunate conclusion may be that financial constraints are better at reducing resource-intensive consumption than improved sustainability, which is widely seen as an irrelevant luxury. Sadly, the straightened circumstances of many households will do more to cut greenhouse gas emissions than all this year’s sustainability initiatives. 
 
3, Whole county solar in China. A valuable Twitter thread looked at the impact of a recent Chinese policy development that encourages the installation of rooftop solar. It suggests that up to 600 GW of power could be added in this way. The thread suggests that ‘A national policy + a rich developer (often SOE, ‘state owned enterprise’) + an army of local-level hustlers, public AND private, (could be) a machine that will cover millions of rooftops with solar in just 2 yrs.

4, Carbon Capture. Climeworks, the Swiss leader in direct air capture (DAC) said that Microsoft had made one of the largest ever single purchase of captured CO2. It committed to buy 10,000 tonnes over the next ten years. This is more than twice the annual capture capacity of Climeworks’ major existing plant in Iceland. Climeworks rejected my requests for any information about the price paid by Microsoft but my guess is that the figure was about $500 a tonne, implying a total purchase value of about $5m. Of course Microsoft’s support is helpful to the DAC industry but I’m troubled by the fact that Climeworks now has a customer base of over 14,000 individuals buying carbon offsets from the company. After the new Microsoft purchase, the company would appear to be running the risk of not capturing and storing as much CO2 as its offset customers are paying for. (A much larger plant will be ready in 2 years time). 
 
5, More on carbon capture. The Energy Transitions Commission (the ETC) told us how much CO2 the world will need to store by 2050. This detailed and heavily researched report suggests a figure of 7-10 billion tonnes a year. Of this 2.5-4.0 billion tonnes will be derived from capturing CO2 from fossil fuel combustion and cement manufacture while most of the rest will come from Direct Air Capture. (Of course if the two companies in note 10 succeed, the volume of CO2 capture from cement will fall to a fraction of current levels). The captured CO2 will either be injected underground (4.4 billion tonnes or more) or used to make synthetic fuels for markets such as aviation (2.5 billion tonnes).  The scale of the challenge is truly enormous: 7 billion tonnes is almost 20% of current world emissions. So I found the subtitle of the ETC’s report – ‘Vital but Limited’ – to be a striking understatement. 

6, Soil carbon. It has taken a long time but policy makers around the world are now showing growing interest in working out how the world’s soils could be encouraged to store greater quantities of carbon. More carbon is in the top few metres of the planet than in vegetation and atmosphere combined. One route to greater storage is often said to be the adoption of ‘no-till’ agriculture, or cultivation without extensive ploughing. New research suggests, contrary to earlier findings, that no-till might actually result in lessened soil carbon sequestration for at least a decade. This will excite controversy around the world but there is much we still don’t understand about soils and carbon storage.
 
7, Renewables costs. Inflation and supply chain problems are expected to increase the levelised cost of new renewables in 2022 for the first time in well over a decade. However the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) pointed out that solar and wind had decreased in cost by between 13% and 15% in 2021. Bloomberg New Energy Finance produced projections suggesting that the construction cost of solar will rise by about 14% this year, wind 7% and batteries 8%. So the likelihood is that even after the inflation of 2021/22 renewables costs will still be lower at the end of this year than they were in 2020.
 
8, Battery recycling. US-based Redwood Materials is leading the race to provide near 100% recycling of the metals in lithium ion batteries. It claims it recycles more EV batteries than the rest of the US industry combined. This week it announced that VW USA was joining Toyota, Ford and Volvo as sources of supply for the business. Redwood says it can reclaim 95% of the valuable materials in car batteries at a cost lower than mining new minerals. Its target is recycling 5 million vehicle battery packs a year by 2050 or about 5% of the world’s annual car sales of all types of car. So far growth has been limited by the small number of lithium ion batteries returned for recycling but Panasonic already uses Redwood’s copper for incorporation into new Tesla car batteries.
 
9, Green ammonia. Yara, one of sthe world’s largest ammonia producers, committed to buy the output from a large new plant to be built in Oman. The green ammonia factory will be constructed by Norway’s Scatec, a leading renewables developer, and India’s Acme, a specialist in solar power development and green hydrogen. The press materials say that the eventual capacity of the plant will be about 1 million tonnes of ammonia a year, about half a percent of the current world output. I calculate about 4 gigawatts of solar capacity will be needed to make the hydrogen for the ammonia. (Wind may be used as well). This would make it larger than any solar farm existing at the end of 2021. Because ammonia is relatively easy to ship by sea, my guess is that global production of this commodity will move to the areas of lowest cost solar energy, such as Oman.
 
10, Low carbon cement. Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), founded by Bill Gates, has made two recent investments in low carbon cement. Brimstone in California grinds silicate rocks very finely. The rock contains calcium which can then be leached out and turned into calcium oxide, the key ingredient in Portland cement. Normally, calcium oxide is produced by using high temperature to drive off CO2 from calcium carbonate. If it works, and details are scarce, the process will be inherently very low carbon. The founders also claim that a by-product of its technology will be a magnesium compound that naturally reacts with CO2 in the atmosphere, potentially making the product carbon negative. Last week BEV also put money into Terra CO2, a company that makes a cement containing a much lower percentage of calcium oxide. This avoids a large percentage of the CO2 emissions from the production process. The other key ingredient can be several types of widely available silicate rocks, including waste products. Decarbonising cement (about 8% world CO2) is one of the most difficult challenges the world faces.

11, Lastly, Net Zero Insights (NZI) in Lisbon announced it had raised seed funding for further development of its market intelligence service covering all climate tech companies in Europe and the US. NZI already covers 20,000 businesses in Europe alone, far more than any other supplier. (I made a small investment in the business).

Swan_Valley

UK launches biggest electricity market reform in a generation

REMA is a major review into Britain’s electricity market design, set to ensure cost benefits of cheaper energy trickle down to consumers in the long term.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-launches-biggest-electricity-market-reform-in-a-generation

Press Release today. Lets hope they decide to de-couple the cost of electricity from the price of gas.

Coastalwatch

Swan_Valley said:

UK launches biggest electricity market reform in a generation

REMA is a major review into Britain’s electricity market design, set to ensure cost benefits of cheaper energy trickle down to consumers in the long term.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-launches-biggest-electricity-market-reform-in-a-generation

Press Release today. Lets hope they decide to de-couple the cost of electricity from the price of gas.

 

     Amen!

michaels

How does it work though, is most electricity bought at spot or is the majority purchased forward with only any on the day balancing payments being at the (gas determined) price?

QrizB

michaels said:

How does it work though, is most electricity bought at spot or is the majority purchased forward with only any on the day balancing payments being at the (gas determined) price?

I think most is forward-purchased. That's certainly what Ofgem expect when setting the cap.

But beware of unintended consequences. Meddling with markets doesn't always give the expected results.

70sbudgie

QrizB said:

michaels said:

How does it work though, is most electricity bought at spot or is the majority purchased forward with only any on the day balancing payments being at the (gas determined) price?

I think most is forward-purchased. That's certainly what Ofgem expect when setting the cap.

But beware of unintended consequences. Meddling with markets doesn't always give the expected results.

My understanding is that suppliers only forward purchase for fixed rate tariffs. Which is why they have disappeared recently.

Currently, there are two main ways the suppliers buy electricity - PPA (power purchase agreement) and the market. The former is a contract agreed between the generator and the supplier. These are outside the market, but tend to loosely follow the market at agreement. They are becoming more popular and the suppliers that use them a lot tend to be promoting strong ethics, which is why they follow the market, so the generator doesn't lose out.

The market is sort of like a reverse auction. The generators bid with their price and this keeps going up until demand is met. Then all the generators get the same price. There is a post (either above or in a different discussion) about prices from recent auctions (though I think it might have referred to CfD auctions).

I think it will be interesting to see what the review comes up with.

Solarchaser

I was sitting thinking earlier, the wind farm operators must be sitting pretty right now.
Able to make a profit last year, their costs have not risen, but their sell price has almost trippled this year to 20p/kwh.
Cha ching!

Scotland sent around £1B of power to England last year, but is already over £1.5B this year.