As the FT reports in an email this morning:
Renewables have overtaken coal as the world's largest source of power capacity and the sector is growing far faster than anyone thought, according to the International Energy Agency, with half a million solar panels installed every day last year.
This was, of course, the dream of the Green New Deal group, of which I am a member.
But just imagine what could happen in the UK now if we really committed to this process and used a National Investment Bank to fund it? Another economy and a stronger future would then be possible.
Instead we sit in the sidelines, no doubt discussing austerity, Brexit and the failings of our economy.
We never thought, way back in 2008 when we wrote the Green New Deal that eight tears later it wold still, without any real alteration, be the best alternative economic plan for the UK, but the fact is that it still is.
And we still don't have politicians who will explicitly pick it up and run with it.
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I can vouch for that.
Get this:
We install solar panels on all our properties including the new ones we build in limited numbers because it helps to reduce the cost of running a home for our tenants who are on low incomes (benefits, low pay, pensions).
The HCA (Homes and Communities Agency) funding – called Affordable Housing Grant (AHP) – is not allowed to be used to provide solar panels at the point of completion. So solar PV are not allowed to be part of the budget calculation which is used to work out the subsidy to the scheme by the AHG. The HCA say that they subsidise new homes – not energy use. Hmmmm…….
My organisation installs the panels as part of a separate existing programme which we do after completion funded by a separate investment budget. This budget has recently come under pressure because we were at one time able to use the savings from PV use to re-invest into solar PV and roll out the panels to even more low income homes. But a mixture of higher energy prices and Government intervention essentially made this harder for us to do and we have stopped it so solar PV roll out is now much more slow.
The HCA defines ‘affordable’ by the rent we charge only and NOT the living cost of the home we provide to the tenant going forward. We see the definition of affordable encompassing the rent plus living costs because we see the impact on people’s living standards. What’s the point of having a nice new home if you cannot afford to heat it or eat well?
The attitude of the HCA (whose masters are the Treasury) shows a distinct lack of imagination and joined up thinking. It’s as if they just want someone to live in a house, but do not give a damn about the sustainability of that occupation in terms of costs. And when you add in the stuff like the benefit cap, the bedroom tax, changes to Local Housing Allowances (all cuts to income really) this policy becomes more absurd and very unfair.
It is becoming increasingly hard to credit those who think of stuff like this (or is it that they do not think?) as decent human beings.
Thanks
Illuminating
But not electrifying
Well, now we can look forward to Hinckley Point nuclear generated electricity in the future, it may well be that we won’t be able to keep the lights on let lone heat our homes!
I suggest a quick look at the concept of: Energy Return On Investment (EROI)
Then a look at: Dispatchability of renewables.
And I will repeat this again; without a means of storing energy generated by renewables, and releasing that energy as and when wanted, renewables cannot, and will not, be a reliable source of energy provision without baseload power plant to provide power when the renewables are not.
AS I look at the current state of energy supply ( http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ ) I can see wind at 9.38% of load provision. Coal (the best EROI) at 11.16%….because coal is now just used as-and-when needed…and not for baseload.
And the current demand is 38.7 GW; not too bad. It COULD, when the demand is high, reach over 50GW. Which the grid would not, now, be able to meet without initiating short-term reserve and demand-side-management (some consumers would go offline to lower the load).
Short-term-operating-reserve is an interesting concept…the picture on the opening page of this website says it all: http://www.armstrongenergy.co.uk/what-we-do/assets/stor/
The price of STOR energy hovers around £250/MWhr (plus the availability payment…several tens of thousands)
Fortunately, people are using less power now…too expensive…otherwise, we would be in trouble.
But energy saving is the answer
Fortunately, we are losing large users. Steel is a basket case, the chem industry is shifting production to areas of low [energy/labour] cost.
And the energy generation sector is moving to “smart” energy demand regulation. Which, simply, means rapidly ramping the price of power up when demand is high to get consumers to drop demand. If all else fails, power cuts are also an option. Other industry, which HAS to have consistency of power, has its own generators (for which, if part of the STOR system, it gets paid for..by the consumer..well paid for: even if it is not being used for STOR). The use of generators in industry is rising…forward planning means they foresee problems with supply.
Basically, a low-energy-production country is one that is not really going anywhere.
The USA has low-cost energy…and, rather funnily, it is exporting its energy to us…via shale-gas imports.
The local hospital (soon to have no paediatric unit or A&E) installed power generators a few years ago…as an income earner…
And, since neither China nor India are going to lower their ambitions, or stop building cheap power stations, we could totally halt our energy system and make no difference at all; globally.
Even Germany, with its massive transition to green energy (not as massive as some like to make out) are building coal generators…their idea of using neighbours power dist systems as balancing for theirs didn’t quite work out…shame.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/03/idea-of-renewables-powering-uk-is-an-appalling-delusion-david-mackay
The only delusional stuff is Mackay & his daft assumptions on how much energy a household consumes – I have a good demolition of these core assumptions which underpin his “In Place of Hot Air”. Once these are shown to be false (& they are) then his main PoV “that the UK could not be 100% energy independent” is shown to be false & indeed the UK could be independent using renewables.
Nuclear? well you could go that route but it is very very expensive (Hinkley @ 100pounds/MWh) compared to low cost RES & of course energy efficiency. BTW: Nat Grid estimates that there is around 9GW of demand response available in the UK – very little of this has been tapped into – gov’ prefers to implement capacity markets – result = you & all other households will write a cheque for 18 pounds in 2018 to the big six for them to do…. exactly what they are doing now. Clever – not.
One last thing -old chestuts like EROI are exactly that – stuff wheeled out by fossil supporters in a desperate attempt to show that, somehow, RES kit needs lots of energy to make with slow pay back. False. Payback is measured in a couple of months both for PV & wind (not my view – that of GE).
Agreed
sorry I wrote a more detailed reply which seems to have vanished. I don’t think Richard deleted it.
I did not
I used to use Mackay’s Sustainable Energy without the hot air and his 2050 excel spreadsheet with Sankey diagrams as a teaching aid for 1st year students. His renewable assumptions were even then a bit dubious and now totally out of date. He was not well respected within the renewable community. It was a shock he died so young.
I have no problem in principle with Nuclear but it extraordinary expensive and can over-run dramatically. Finland’s Olkiluoto 3 reactor is an prime example of this; look for example at https://www.carbonbrief.org/new-nuclear-finlands-cautionary-tale-for-the-uk. And of course we have hardly had a glowing track record in the UK in disposing of nuclear waste.
Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) is great in theory but a bit like Thorium reactors and nuclear fusion seems to be a very difficult technologies to get working economically.
There is a tremendous amount of work going on on storage and battery technologies and my own money would be on that rather than CCS.
PV technology on the other hand is still powering ahead; it will never be as cheap as newsprint but may well be as cheap as wallpaper when thin film direct band-gap technology matures to the same point as silicon based PV is today.
Even Silicon based PV systems haven’t hit full maturity. When I designed and installed my domestic 3kWp PV system in 2009 it cost about 10k. A similar system is about 1/3 of the price today. The sad thing was that it consisted of Chinese Panels and a German Grid Tie Inverter which were 90+% of the cost of the system. I think the only thing made in the UK was some switch-gear.
I would say also that China is moving rapidly towards renewables: http://energypost.eu/chinas-electricity-mix-changing-fast-co2-emissions-may-peaked/ – the air quality is getting so bad in many of their cities that they need to act urgently. I’m more worried about India; it will be a country to watch over the next decade.
As Mike Parr says there is also a lot of misinformation about EROI – energy return on energy invested. I prefer total lifetime costing of product from cradle to grave. For Nuclear this would include proper waste disposal. For my PV system I think it worked out at 2 years energy and 8 years financial; I’m pleased it has come down to a couple of months in terms of energy. This is great news as it makes the “Energy Trap” less likely.
Sorry – this got into spam