Category: Climate change innovation

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Green projects in the UK are being endangered because of unfair transmission pricing

Transmission charges are paid when transporting electricity from where it is made to where it is used.

This is quite normal, and it is the way that the power grid has worked for centuries. This will become ever more important, as the distance between generation and consumption of electricity increases.

Why is this distance increasing? When you build a coal or gas powered power station, it does not need anything in particular to be able to make power. So long as it has a ready supply of what ever it uses to power its generators, electricity continues to flow.

Renewables are different. Wind turbines need to be erected in places where there is a lot of wind – this is why the UK has built so many off the coast. Solar power is generally either placed on large roofs (factories and such) or out in fields. We need to have more roofs filled and fewer fields – It would be possible to power all the UK power needs if all rooftops were covered, but that is a different subject). Fields are generally expensive near cities and cheap far away.

This is where the problem arises. The UK is capable of generating more than enough power for the British population. However, if electricity generated in Netherlands France and Germany are all let off transmission charges – as they currently are, but our own power generation has to pay it, this is the equivalent of giving all foreign electricity a significant discount. This is obviously insane, as it means that we discourage our own power generation, at a time where we should be investing billions in green power generation.

Analysis shows that on average EU power firms pay 48p per megawatt hour in the transmission system. In Scotland the average is £6.42 – more than 13 times the price. In the windiest parts of Scotland it is £736 per MWH

OFGEM needs to bring in rules that encourage the UK net zero target. This must happen fast. Without, we are likely to end up not building the tens of thousands of wind turbines necessary as it will cost more to export than it is worth.

Right now, we are essentially subsidizing imports and heavily taxing domestic power. This is a quick way for the government to kill off this entire industry.

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Easyjet continues to make progress towards its zero carbon planes due in the sky 2030

One of the most complex issues to address in decarbonization is that of air travel. It is all very well for people to suggest that simply nobody should travel. This is not a long-term solution, not least because the vast majority of conservation relies on tourism to raise the funds for it to take place.

Long-haul flight is a problem to be fixed in the future, however easyjet is working on finding a solution to short haul flight of up to 500km.

Wright electric, the company which is developing the planes has announced that it has created an electric propulsion motor at 2MW. The aim would be to use 10 of these motors – which would add up to a similar amount of power as the aircraft the fly today. 2MW for an hour at full capacity would be 20MWH

Whether Wright electric has identified batteries that can supply enough power to run these motors for long is not yet known.

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Coal power stations could cut coal use, and therefore emissions by 50%

Coal power plants have to be a thing of the past as soon as possible. This is because no matter how efficient they are, they are powered by digging up carbon and releasing it into the air.

However for the time being, there are many coal power stations across the world. Vishwanath Haily Dalvi of the institute of Chemical technology in Mumbai India has been looking at how we could assist this process with the suns energy.

By collecting the suns heat energy, and using this to heat the water, the amount of coal needed is reduced by 50%.

This could therefore be a more economic way of reducing emissions from power generation. Given that coal power emits 0.85 pounds of carbon per kwh (about 380g), cutting this in half would make carbon far cleaner. While this may well be expensive to set up, it might allow coal power plants to operate for a few years longer and therefore be worthwhile, as well as offsetting some of the damage from the large number of coal powered stations being built across countries such as India and China.

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In 2020, for the first time the UK got more energy from renewable sources than from fossil fuels

In 2020, renewable electricity accounted for 43% of the UK electricity, while fossil fuels accounted for just 38%. The remaining generation came from nuclear. Unfortunately, that proportion was reversed in 2021.

Never-the-less the British prime minister announced in October at the Conservative conference, that the aim is to reach 100% renewable electricity by 2035 (I would suggest that they need to decide if nuclear is a green generation or not – I would suggest it is, but it should therefore be included in the figures, in the long-term it is not likely to be needed, we should be able to generate all our electricity from solar and wind).

It is encouraging to think that by 2035 all our electricity will come from green sources. In addition as no ICE cars should be sold after 2030, by 2035 the proportion of clean propulsion should be rapidly moving towards 100%

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It looks like Oil companies are looking at the future beyond oil. They are definitely not all in

While there are still many right-wing networks that deny the truth to global warming – or increasingly admit the world is warming but suggest that humans have nothing to do with this (a hard thing to argue as the only thing that has changed is us and our carbon emissions- and the change is happening faster than anything we can find in the last few million years), fossil fuel companies do not seem to be making the Investments necessary to move their business in the timescale available.

Proportion of oil capitol investment in non- fossil fuel sources. This is over 2010-2018
Continue reading “It looks like Oil companies are looking at the future beyond oil. They are definitely not all in”
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Leading fracking company taken over by green energy group

Fracking is a problem. In many parts of the world (including in the UK) it only emerged as a means of getting oil out of the ground, after we should have stopped doing this.

It is known that most of the known reserves of oil and gas must be left in the ground. it is therefore insane to start a whole new industry extracting oil and gas in new ways.

There was a lot of people saying that if we need oil and gas, why not find it under Britain, but this fails to recognize that oil and gas use is falling fast and needs to fall faster.

If you look at graphs of petrol and diesel over the last few decades, the combination has remained pretty steady. Let demand is expected to fall off a cliff over the next decade.

This is as a result of dual threats, which could undermine most of the market for these damaging fossil fuels.

Firstly, each petrol or diesel car consumes on average about 2.3 tonnes of fuel. This means that each electric car sold reduces demand by 2.3 tonnes per year. Currently only 11% of cars in the UK are electric, but as the government has stated that new fossil fuel car sales will be banned in 2030, this should rise quickly. When surveyed, most drivers say they hope their next car will be electric. If new car sales are banned at this point, it will take a while for all fossil fuel cars to disappear from the roads.

However, there is likely to be an unpleasant feedback loop, where the more electric cars there are on the road, the fewer people want to buy.

In a similar way, fossil fuel free heating methods will replace gas boilers

As the number of consumers of a product reduces the savings from working in large quantities will be lost. This will push up prices for the remaining holdouts -which in turn will push more people to adopt electric alternatives.

By having a green energy company take over a fracking company, these changes are likely to happen as fast as possible. The new owners are not interested in holding on to fracking as long as possible – to the contrary, they will end its use as soon as possible.

This can only be good news in the world

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DHL has ordered 12 all electric Alice cargo planes

While there is not yet a battery that can power a passenger jumbo jet, aviation is looking more and more likely to go electric at some point.

The Alice plane is a plane that when carrying passengers can sit around 20. In cargo mode it can fly around 500 miles. It can be flown by a single pilot, and can fly about 1200kg. Travelling at just short of 300 miles per hour, and taking roughly 30 minutes of charging for every hour in the air (it can only stay up for about 100 minutes) it is thought that using these planes will save about 70% of the cost.

DHL electric cargo plane

Also, being simpler engines with far fewer moving parts, the planes are expected to have higher reliability and lower costs for maintenance.

Even more exciting, these ranges are doable on current batteries. As there is huge amounts of money going into battery research it is highly likely that in the future, the range of these planes will be able to be increased.

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Building new renewable power generation is cheaper than continuing to burn fossil fuels

For decades, many in the fossil fuel industry and plenty of politicians argued that we cannot move to renewables unless they are cheaper than fossil fuels. Now of course this ignores the fact that they have been for decades if we made fossil fuel users pay all the cost of their use (clean-up, health problems and others).

However, a new report shows that across much of the world, it is cheaper to abandon coal and gas power stations and replace them with renewables – and then run them, than it is to keep using the coal or gas PowerStation.

Continue reading “Building new renewable power generation is cheaper than continuing to burn fossil fuels”
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