Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

70sbudgie

gefnew said:

Some news on carbon capture from National grid.
Humber: Consultation begins on carbon capture pipeline - BBC News

Are there any articles on the technology that's being developed to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere? I feel like I'm missing a big piece of the "how" amongst all these proposals for the good things that it is being said will be done. It currently all feels a bit like it is just hot air! 😉

2nd_time_buyer

Hopefully a positive change of direction in Brazil. At least now, economics are generally on the side of being green, so maybe the battle will be against corruption:

'Let's fight for zero deforestation': Lula promises bolder climate action after Brazil election win 
Brazil's new president-elect Lula Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has promised to end deforestation and place climate action front and centre of his administration, after narrowly defeating far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in an election regarded worldwide as critical for the future of the Amazon rainforest.

Martyn1981

70sbudgie said:

gefnew said:

Some news on carbon capture from National grid.
Humber: Consultation begins on carbon capture pipeline - BBC News

Are there any articles on the technology that's being developed to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere? I feel like I'm missing a big piece of the "how" amongst all these proposals for the good things that it is being said will be done. It currently all feels a bit like it is just hot air! 😉

I'm assuming, because it mentions Drax, that this will be BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage). I'm a huge sceptic of DAC (direct air capture) ever being economic, whereas capturing CO2 from vastly higher concentrations in flues has greater potential.*

I don't want to play up the benefits of BECCS too much, as bio-mass is a hot topic, with many negatives. However, a massive advantage of BECCS is that it's not just carbon neutral, but in theory it's carbon negative.** But the time needed for growth when slower growing trees are used, mucks up a lot of the maths, since we are now have a relatively short deadline to reach net zero.

*FF + CCS is an economic joke. It takes the costs of FF generation, then adds additional CAPEX and OPEX to operate the CCS part, plus about 20% more FF use to run it all, with the hope of catching some of the CO2 that was already safely and permanently stored in the ground.

**Carbon negative as atmospheric CO2 is captured by the bio-mass, and then that CO2 is captured and stored in the ground via BECCS, rather than being re-released when the trees/plant life finally dies and rots.

michaels

Martyn1981 said:

I thought this article was very interesting. Not just the new milestone of RE (briefly) hitting 2/3rds of Australia grid demand, but the info on how fast this has risen, a 4% increase on the previous high in Sept, and 5yrs ago the high was 30%.

Astonishing how quickly they seem to be turning things around, now that they've embraced cheap RE. The coal loving nation is ending coal generation by 2035, with many power stations shutting earlier.

Renewable energy contributes record 68.7% of power to Australia’s main grid for brief period

Renewable energy generation hit a new record on Friday, briefly contributing more than two-thirds of the power in Australia’s main grid.

According to the Australian Energy Market Operator (Aemo), the milestone was set at 12.30pm, with a contribution of 68.7%, or 18,882MW, from renewable sources.

The figure is 4.6 percentage points higher than the previous record, which was set on 18 September.
Of total power in the grid on Friday, 34% came from distributed solar, which outstripped black coal’s contribution of 22%.

A July report by the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) found Australia was now among the world leaders in cheap solar energy.

Behind China and India, in 2021 Australia had the third-lowest utility-scale solar cost in the world, of $0.042 USD/kWh (AU$0.065). This represented a 21% year-on-year drop in price.

According to Irena data, the average cost of electricity from utility-scale solar has dropped by 90% in Australia since 2010.

On the subject of Australia, some recent analysis has shown that the amount of storage needed, for a ~100% RE grid, may be far smaller than I'd thought possible. Perhaps as low as 5hrs of storage. [But tbc, this is for the Aussie grid, where highly predictable, and cheap PV is possible.]

Rather than an endlessly reheated nuclear debate, politicians should be powered by the evidence

David Osmond, a Canberra-based engineer with the global energy developer Windlab, is among those with a markedly different, evidence-based take. For more than a year, he has been posting weekly results from a live simulation tracking what would happen in Australia’s main electricity grid if it relied primarily on renewable energy.

Using a live stream of electricity data from Opennem, he adjusted inputs to see what would happen if there was enough wind and solar energy to supply 60% and 45% of demand respectively. He added enough short-term storage, likely to be in the form of batteries, to supply average demand for five hours.

The results are encouraging. They suggest close to 100% of demand – 98.9% over a 61-week period – could be delivered by solar and wind backed by existing hydro power and the five hours of storage. Nearly 90% of demand was met directly by renewable energy and 10% had to pass through storage. Achieving it would require a major expansion of transmission, as proposed by Labor under its Rewiring the Nation policy.

So basically, just a 5% overbuild?  Sounds amazing.

However this may be a situation where the first 98.9% is easy but the last 1.1% is very hard?  Shame he didn't model what was needed for 100% success.

Plus of course as those of us with Defined Contribution know, just because an asset allocation and drawdown strategy would have worked for every historic period, doesn't mean it will work in the future - 61 weeks is not very long given how variable the weather can be.

Apologies for discussion on this thread.

Coastalwatch

I hadn't previously come across this project below and while initially believing it to be ready to take to the water I then realised it's still in the design stage so will be some time before anything materialises. With previous wave energy schemes having debatable outcomes then suspect it could be a long wait before any form of commercialisation becomes viable. But who knows!

Innovative wave energy device set for Orkney

A €19.6 million project billed as a stepping stone towards large scale wave energy commercialisation will see the world’s largest capacity floating wave energy device tested in Orkney.

https://www.orkney.com/news/ocean-energy-device-emec

zeupater

Hi

Looked at it and thought I'd seen it before .... bit of web-search later & it seems that my memory is still sound as they've supposedly had the OE35 on test around Hawaii since ~2019 and have secured EU & UK funding for even more testing, so I guess that this is the latest test project in a string of failed/failing test projects going back well into the '70s ...It's getting really boring now, with yet another pet project wave-power 'research' failure likely being cancelled when the test phase funding dries up ...

.... when will it finally sink in that wave-power is effectively a product of wind-power therefore the intermittency of wave & wind have a pretty high correlation whilst what is needed are disparate renewable energy solutions that can be relied upon to support each other without the risk of losing multiple generation sources at the same time depending on variable weather conditions ...

I know that the argument would revolve around developing a global solution to suit almost anywhere with a coastline, because that's where the maximised 'profit' element for the developers comes into play, but here in the UK we have ample potential sites where tidal flow systems which are far more supply dependable are possible and could easily tie into a limited size dedicated energy storage capacity to effectively guaranty continuous energy supply as flow rates change, so why waste more money?, why not apply logic correctly and build the renewables solution that suits what we have in the UK ... after-all, we may not have the insolation of an equatorial country, but we do have some of the largest tidal ranges in the world! ..

HTH - Z       

Martyn1981

Looks like the wind record has been broken again. I thought it might edge over 20GW today, but Energy Numbers is currently at 21.1GW. Nice.

And the dial only goes to 20GW.

silverwhistle

zeupater said:

.... when will it finally sink in that wave-power is effectively a product of wind-power therefore the intermittency of wave & wind have a pretty high correlation whilst what is needed are disparate renewable energy solutions...

Well, yes.. but as any sailor will tell you and as you probably know there is a fair bit of difference to waves based on current weather and an Atlantic swell based on a long fetch. The latter is a bit like storage of previous winds whereas wind turbines are current weather.

Having said that I do tend to share your scepticism, particularly in its application to the UK.

Here on the south coast I've just walked back, downwind, from aged parent and there is no doubting the power of the wind! I'll be down to the foreshore in the next couple of days to collect seaweed for my asparagus beds..

zeupater

silverwhistle said:

zeupater said:

.... when will it finally sink in that wave-power is effectively a product of wind-power therefore the intermittency of wave & wind have a pretty high correlation whilst what is needed are disparate renewable energy solutions...

Well, yes.. but as any sailor will tell you and as you probably know there is a fair bit of difference to waves based on current weather and an Atlantic swell based on a long fetch. The latter is a bit like storage of previous winds whereas wind turbines are current weather.

Having said that I do tend to share your scepticism, particularly in its application to the UK.

Here on the south coast I've just walked back, downwind, from aged parent and there is no doubting the power of the wind! I'll be down to the foreshore in the next couple of days to collect seaweed for my asparagus beds..

Hi

Agree, however, I'm unsure whether the solution is suited to swell as opposed to waves ...

Looking at various articles it seems that generation is achieved through wave height variation causing water to displace air in what is effectively an upturned box, thus creating a variance in internal air pressure which is captured by a high flow air turbine driving a generator ... pretty simple concept really, but ....

... if the unit is allowed to free-float it effective needs the wave frequency to be close to or shorter than the length of the unit, so in low frequency swell conditions it would simply ride the swell with little effect on the internal air to water ratio, so poor/no generation .. what it needs to perform efficiently is short frequency, high amplitude waves ....

... if the unit is tight tethered to the seabed in order to constrain it's ability to free-float then any change in the surface level of the sea, including swell, could create conditions for generation, however, this creates additional complexity for the system in needing to continuously vary the tether lengths to match current mean sea level as well as stressing the seabed anchoring points and the associated cables with every surface lift, especially so in storm conditions ... this would describe the kind of failure that has plagued so many previous test units ...

Anyway, as the unit is described as a floating 'wave energy converter buoy' I'd tend to lean towards it being anchored in position, but not tight-tethered which leads to the conclusion that it needs the kind of short frequency high amplitude waves that are more in keeping with local(ish) weather conditions as opposed to the North Atlantic swell ... don't know & could be completely wrong, but that's what my thoughts were when I first came across it and it may be a potential reason for (re)testing in coastal shelf Atlantic waters as opposed to the deep Pacific waters off Hawaii ...

HTH - Z

QrizB

Martyn1981 said:

Looks like the wind record has been broken again. I thought it might edge over 20GW today, but Energy Numbers is currently at 21.1GW. Nice.

On a related topic, is Electric Insights (the Drax-sponsored site) down fror everyone, or just for me?

https://electricinsights.co.uk

It's been dead for me all week; historic data is still there but nothing later than Sunday morning.