Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981

silverwhistle said:

On my feed The Daily Telegraph typically came up with a headline about adding up to £1.1bn to bills due to wind. The shadow energy secretary was complaining about 20 year contracts etc etc.. Does she not know how long and how much has been promised for new nuclear..?

Article in the Guardian explains a lot, I think.

You have ex-Conservative Prime Ministers (so they don't need to win votes now) saying that we should stick with renewables and green targets, in very strong words.

We need to move to lower carbon and green energy, there are more jobs in it, almost certainly cheaper energy, lower expenditure on importing FF's, and you get energy indepedence (possibly even net export for the UK, given our vast offshore wind potential).

But, it's a potential vote winner for some parties at the moment, to pretend that the move is damaging, or to blame the problem on developing nations growing their energy supply/demand.

All seems a bit silly ..... or at least it would be, if it wasn't so important. Maybe by 2030 or 2035, the 'fuss' will have moved on to the next great hyped hoax scare vote winning issue.

Boris Johnson tells Tories to stop ‘bashing green agenda’ or risk losing next election

The former prime minister said he had not seen the Conservatives “soaring in the polls as a result of saying what rubbish net zero is”.

Johnson’s intervention comes after Theresa May and John Major criticised the Tories for speaking out against net zero, making him the third former prime minister to step in on this issue.

Coastalwatch

UK service station solar could generate 124GWh annually

The installation of solar PV panels above car parking spaces at 151 UK service stations would generate about 124GWh a year, a £19 million opportunity.

This was the conclusion of a study carried out by RenEnergy, finding that 46,153 car parking spaces at service stations would be suitable for solar carport installation. 

Solar carports sit above parking spaces and generate energy from solar panels on the canopy, which can be fed back into the business or used for EV charging at every space while providing shelter and shade for vehicles.

https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/solar-technology/uk-service-station-solar-could-generate-124gwh-annually

Martyn1981

A subject I follow with a lot of interest is wave energy technology. Here's yet another attempt.

And whilst I'm quite negative about any given scheme succeeding, I stay a teeny bit positive about one eventually making it. Hopefully if one makes it, then it can be deployed worldwide (dependant on the severity of waves it's designed for).

Of course, it has to be economically successful too.

Loads of energy in waves, energy that tends to destroy any technology trying to harness it. And waves/wave energy also correlates closely with wind energy, if already deployed, so loads of negatives, but a nice tool to have 'IF' it ever works well.

Checkmate wins £750k grant to advance wave energy

Checkmate Flexible Engineering has secured a £750,000 grant from Innovate UK to accelerate development of its Lobe-Tendon Anaconda wave energy converter, a technology designed to harness clean power from ocean waves.

The 18-month project, named Môr Neidr — Welsh for “sea snake” — builds on two years of in-house innovation and will strengthen Southwest Wales’ position as a hub for marine renewable energy.

The Anaconda captures wave energy through a patented bulge-tube design comprising a reinforced natural rubber outer tube and hundreds of internal tendons made from high-performance rubber.

As waves travel along the flexible structure, they generate pressure bulges that move toward a power take-off system at the end of the tube, converting energy into electricity. The internal wave speed can be adjusted to maximise power production or survivability in rough conditions.

zeupater

Hi

Sea-snakes, ducks, flaps, paddles, floating chains & other such failure prone nonsense ... 

Well, when the reality of wave forms meets the ambition rooted in poor forethought, the reality of material science comes into play ..... however flexible the structure, the fact remains that whatever the material is, it will continually be prone to the sea's surface area changes creating alternating compressive and tensile forces, particularly related to whatever linkages have been tried, which have through the 6 decades that I'm aware of have resulted in catastrophic failure or financial abandonment of almost all projects at the test phase after a dose of reality has been applied ....

Effectively, big waves cause big failure & no open water which is suitable for wave power harvesting is safe from the occasional (whatever that definition covers!) system destroying waves ... yes, you can over-engineer to cope with most conditions in order to reduce the failure frequency, but that simply increases the solution cost, which reduces it's financial viability, which inevitably leads to project cancellation..

I can certainly see the business case for pushing wave generation over alternatives like tidal flow, especially so as the potential market would be anywhere with waves, ie almost every large expanse of open water, however, just like when the wind doesn't blow, waves don't always 'wave', so the long-time argument against renewables is simply - renewed!

When there are so many existing renewable hydro-power alternatives that can provide almost guaranteed generation in suitable locations, I, for one, cannot understand why we continually fund and champion something that has so small a chance of success .... isn't it better to do than talk? ... at least that way something will finally get done!

HTH - Z

Martyn1981

At least the FF industry is and was an equal opportunities deceiver.

Exxon funded thinktanks to spread climate denial in Latin America, documents reveal

Exxon funded rightwing thinktanks to spread climate change denial across Latin America, according to hundreds of previously unpublished documents that reveal a coordinated campaign to make the global south “less inclined” to support the UN-led climate treaty process

The documents, which include copies of the actual cheques Exxon sent, consist of internal documents and years of correspondence between the Texas-based fossil fuel company and Atlas Network, a US-based coalition of more than 500 free-market thinktanks and other partners worldwide.

The money Exxon sent to Atlas Network helped finance Spanish and Chinese translations of English books denying that human-caused climate change is real; flights to Latin American cities for American climate deniers; and public events that allowed those deniers to reach local media and network with politicians.

Stoking confusion and doubt about climate change among developing nations, as Exxon and Atlas Network sought to do during critical early moments of climate diplomacy, exacerbated geopolitical faultlines and economic fears that still persist to this day, according to Kert Davies, director of special investigations at the non-profit Center for Climate Integrity.

“That’s a pretty ugly history,” he said. “Exxon seemed to think that if you could make developing nations, and all nations, sceptical that climate change was a crisis then you’d never have a global climate treaty.”

Martyn1981

Bigly BESS news, as the UK pipeline grows ever larger. Have to admit, it seems to be happening faster than I expected, perhaps it's the rapidly falling cost of batts. But I ain't complaining.

Article is a premium one, so only the start can be read (for free), but you get the gist of it.

UK’s approved BESS pipeline grows to 162GWh, nearly 22GWh under construction

Grid-scale BESS projects totalling nearly 4GWh were awarded planning consent in the UK during October, while there is now nearly 22GWh under construction.

The figures come from Solar Media Market Research’s Battery Storage: UK Pipeline & Completed Assets Database report. 

Projects totalling 1,358MW of power and 3,700MWh of capacity were given the green light by local and national government to go-ahead in October, bringing the total approved pipeline to 77.9GW/162.5GWh

michaels

Hmm - 78GW - peak UK demand is what - 45GW?  Does that big a pipeline in that configuration make sense?

greenbee

michaels said:

Hmm - 78GW - peak UK demand is what - 45GW?  Does that big a pipeline in that configuration make sense?

Maybe they are taking into account all those AI data centres that were promised by the US tech companies recently?

NedS

michaels said:

Hmm - 78GW - peak UK demand is what - 45GW?  Does that big a pipeline in that configuration make sense?

But it's an average 2h duration, so would only last around 3.5h at peak demand. In that context it doesn't seem so excessive to me.

michaels

NedS said:

michaels said:

Hmm - 78GW - peak UK demand is what - 45GW?  Does that big a pipeline in that configuration make sense?

But it's an average 2h duration, so would only last around 3.5h at peak demand. In that context it doesn't seem so excessive to me.

Yeah - I guess just because your car has a top speed of 120 doesn't mean that you won't average 60.  I did think though that such storage become less efficient if discharged more slowly or perhaps it is just the economics works best if the peak hourly discharge is about half the capacity?