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The UK government announcement on incentives for small scale renewables has three unexpected features:
- The payments for renewable heat, such as the home burning of wood to replace gas or rooftop solar hot water, are much higher than predicted.
- The figures for wind have risen since the autumn consultation document. This means that well-located wind turbines of the 6-15 kW size are likely to produce returns above 13% per year.
- The payments for solar PV have been increased slightly, but do not offer returns as good as wind. Importantly, the government has also signalled that it will allow PV installed at any time over the next 28 months to capture the full feed-in tariff. Previously, the tariff declined for installations made after March 2011.
An earlier article on this topic which looks in more detail on the incentives to take up the new ‘feed-in tariffs’ is here.
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Tags: carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, housing, politics, power generation, renewables
A previous article covered the remarkable growth of Spanish wind and the success in incorporating this electricity into Spain’s grid. It focused on the periods in November when wind provided much of the country’s electricity, peaking at almost 54% in the early morning of 8 November 2009. Wind was almost 23% of the Spanish total electricity production during the month of November, beating nuclear for the first time. Solar also grew rapidly in 2009, up from 1% in 2008 to 3% of national output.
The effect on CO2 emissions from power generation was striking. Carbon dioxide output fell by over a sixth, largely as a result of the growth in renewables.
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Tags: CO2 emissions from electricity generation, power generation, REE, renewables, solar, Spain, UNESA, wind power
Image source: TreeHugger.com.
One of the frequent criticisms of wind energy is that national distribution systems (‘the grid’) cannot cope with large number of turbines because of the variability and unpredictability of their output. Grids need to match supply and demand precisely, the critics say, and because wind varies so much it causes huge problems. Recent data from two meteorologically unusual days in Spain – the world leader in the management of renewable energy supplies – shows this assertion is almost certainly false.
- During part of 8 November, Spain saw over 50% of its electricity come from turbines as an Atlantic depression swept over the country’s wind parks. (They are so big that no one seems to call them ‘farms’.) Unlike similar times in November 2008, when Spanish turbines were disconnected because the grid had an excess of electricity, the system accepted and used all the wind power that was offered to it.
- A very different event in January of this year saw unexpectedly high winds shut down most of the country’s turbines with little warning. The grid coped with this untoward incident as well. These two events show that a well run transmission system can cope with extreme and unexpected events even with a large fraction of power provided by wind.
Over the course of this year Spain will generate about 14% of its total electricity from wind and this number is likely to rise to the high twenties by 2020. Spain is showing the rest of the world that these figures are not incompatible with grid stability. Although wind is ‘variable’, ‘intermittent’ and ‘unpredictable’, a well functioning grid system can still use wind to help stabilise electricity costs, reduce carbon emissions and improve energy security.
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Tags: National Grid, power generation, Red Eléctrica de España, REE, renewables, Spain
The Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed stands in the sea off Kurumba to show the threat the islands face. Photograph: Chiara Goia. Source: Guardian.
Plans for a new windfarm are set to make the Maldives the country with the highest proportion of renewable power in the world.
The 30-turbine proposed windfarm, close to the capital Malé, will deliver 75 megawatts of electricity at full capacity, enough to provide electricity for the whole of the capital, the international airport and the surrounding resorts. Excess power will be used to run desalination plants that will produce bottled drinking water from the sea.
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Tags: biochar, Carbon Gold, carbon reduction initiatives, Falcon Energy, fossil fuels, GE, Mark Lynas, politics, power generation, renewables, STELCO, The Maldives
Until this week, we thought that Sizewell B was likely to be the most expensive nuclear power station built in the UK. Image source: World Nuclear Association.
The Guardian newspaper of Monday 19 October broke the story that the UK government is preparing to guarantee a minimum price for carbon dioxide emissions to encourage the development of nuclear power stations. Putting a high cost on greenhouse gas emissions from power stations will force up the wholesale price of electricity, ensuring a better financial return for nuclear power stations (and for renewables such as wind). The decision to create a floor price for carbon demonstrates that the full costs of nuclear technology are probably well above today’s wholesale electricity prices. We may well need nuclear power but we are going to pay heavily for it. The government’s optimistic noises from 2006 to the middle of this year about the commercial viability of nuclear power have turned out to be wrong.
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Tags: Climate Change Committee, Drax, nuclear, politics, power generation, Powerfuel, Sizewell
Copyright: Next Energy and Resources Co.
Solar photovoltaics slowly lose their generating capacity. Although some solar panels are still working satisfactorily 40 years after installation, the conventional view is that most will dip below 80% of their rated capacity within about 20 years. This will vary slightly between manufacturers and between different types of silicon.
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Tags: power generation, renewables, technology
The hydro site on the River Thames at Osney. Image source: Oxford Times.
Many viable UK projects to generate renewable electricity are not being financed because of shortages of credit from banks. At the same time, individual savers are only able to get tiny returns on their savings. In recent days a number of schemes for linking the UK surplus from household savings to the deficit in renewable financing have surfaced.
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Tags: investments, power generation, renewables
15 kW Proven Energy wind turbine. Image credit: Aeolus Power.
This article refers to the UK proposals made in July 2009. The actual feed-in tariffs will be more generous and the new rates are discussed in a follow up article here.
After months of deliberation, the UK government has announced a range of illustrative figures for feed-in tariffs (FiTs). FiTs are fixed payments made to the owners of small generating stations for the electricity that they export to the grid. Micro-generators need high payments to justify their expensive investment in buying and installing green generation.
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Tags: carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, Goldman Sachs, politics, power generation, Proven Energy, renewables
Most governments in the developed world were elected on platforms that promised aggressive policies on greenhouse gas emissions. The reality has not matched the commitments made. The reasons for this are multitudinous and no one should ever underestimate the difficulties of weaning advanced societies off the use of cheap and convenient access to fossil fuels. But in addition to the standard reasons for slow progress we can see a large number of obstacles that spring from human psychology. In particular, some of the resistance to aggressive action on climate seems to spring from mental attitudes that may have helped us survive as a species in the past. Perhaps politicians intuitively recognise the existence of these barriers. So they continue to say that climate change is the most important problem facing humanity at the same time as adding new runways to the local airport or sanctioning the development of new coal-fired power stations.
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Tags: aviation, Bjørn Lomborg, carbon reduction initiatives, fossil fuels, Groucho Marx, Keith Joseph, Nigel Lawson, politics, power generation, public opinion, renewables, science, Stern Review
Ed Miliband, Minister for the Department of Energy and Climate Change. Photograph: David Levene/Guardian.
The government wants to emphasise the affordability of climate change mitigation. It produces low estimates of the cost of low-carbon technologies. In the recent 2009 budget documents, the government estimated a cost of 1% of GDP to meet the tough new 2020 targets. In his pronouncement on carbon capture at coal-fired power stations, energy and climate change secretary Ed Miliband later said that his proposals will add 2% to electricity bills.
Are these numbers reasonable? Professor Sir David King, the former chief scientific adviser, says no. In a BBC interview of 26 April, he indicates that he thinks that the cost of reducing the UK’s emissions is much higher than the government indicates but also that the financial implications of not dealing with the climate change threat are far higher than even Nick Stern suggests.
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Tags: carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, Climate Change Committee, Ed Miliband, fossil fuels, nuclear, politics, power generation, Professor Sir David King, renewables, Stern Review, technology
The Committee on Climate Change says the most important prospective source of cuts in greenhouse gases lay in the ‘decarbonisation’ of electricity generation. Photograph: Graham Turner/Guardian.
The budget confirmed the acceptance of the Committee on Climate Change’s recommendation for carbon emissions in 2020. The UK will have to reduce its CO2 output by about 110m tonnes by 2020, equivalent to a 21% reduction on actual emissions in 2005 (and 34% on the 1990 figure). The proposed rate of emissions reduction is far faster than the UK has achieved thus far and the chancellor’s budget shows the government has started to recognise the scale of the challenge.
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Tags: Alistair Darling, budget, carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, Climage Change Committee, energy efficiency, fossil fuels, Kingsnorth, London Array, motoring, nuclear, politics, power generation, renewables
The existing Kingsnorth power station. Image source: E.ON.
E.ON’s £1bn plan for a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth is waiting for approval from the UK government. Other generators have shifted away from coal. Drax, which owns by far the largest coal power station in the UK, is investing in biomass. Other companies have focused on new gas plants. Why is the world’s largest investor-owned utility pushing ahead with a project to burn coal without carbon capture?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is that burning coal to generate electricity is extremely profitable. Very low prices for emissions permits and tumbling coal costs mean that a profit-seeking management team is highly incentivised to try to push for permission to use coal in power stations. This article provides the background calculations for an estimate that the new Kingsnorth will generate an operating profit of about £300m a year if current fuel and carbon prices persist. Additionally, it also tries to show that the cost of fitting CCS equipment and running the plant to capture the large majority of all carbon emissions is likely to add no more than about 1.5p per kilowatt hour to the cost of generating electricity at current coal and carbon prices. This means that a new coal fired power station with CCS may have operating costs only marginally above gas power plants
Nevertheless, E.ON has just asked for government subsidy to install CCS at Kingsnorth from day one. The purpose of this article is to offer an estimate of the maximum the government ought to offer E.ON in order to get it to invest in CCS prior to opening the new power station.
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Tags: biomass, carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, CCS, Climate Change Committee, corporate emissions, Drax, E.ON, electricity demand, fossil fuels, Kingsnorth, politics, power generation, RWE
The Maldives. Image source: Primetravels.com.
The Maldives will be the first country to be overwhelmed by the effect of climate change. The republic is a collection of coral atolls with maximum heights of one or two metres above sea level. Climate change is increasing worldwide sea levels and the atolls will probably go underwater by the end of the century.
The 300,000-400,000 people who live on the Maldives are not responsible for global warming. Their emissions per head (even including aviation fuels for incoming international tourism) are less than a seventh of typical European levels.
Many countries have set ambitious targets for the reduction of carbon emissions. The government of the Maldives seeks to encourage this trend by going one step further with a plan for near carbon neutrality within ten years.
This is an immensely challenging target. Chris Goodall (author of this blog) and Mark Lynas, the prize-winning climate change author, were asked to provide a short outline of how it might be achieved and what it might cost.[1]
In the rest of this note, we show our calculations. We will be the first to acknowledge that this work is incomplete. Although it was tempting to conduct fieldwork in some of the most attractive island resorts, we did our analysis using publicly available information and with help from officials attached to the Maldives government.
Our work shows that near neutrality is possible, but expensive. It will take at least $1.1bn for this small island state. The Maldives imports almost all its fuels in the form of refined oil products. Rates of financial return to the investment therefore depend largely on the price of oil. If expectations of future oil prices exceed $100 a barrel, we judge that the plan is sufficiently attractive to be financeable by international institutions such as the World Bank.
Comments on this work will be very gratefully received.
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Tags: agriculture, aviation, biofuels, carbon reduction initiatives, electricity demand, emissions trading, fossil fuels, Mark Lynas, politics, power generation, renewables, The Maldives, Valence
Power Station 571 aka the solar panels on my roof.
People like me who buy solar panels tend to become unreasonably fond of them. Many homeowners come to regard these silent blocks of silicon on our roofs as part of the family. I’m also particularly proud that our panels are registered at Ofgem, the utilities regulator, as Power Station 571. The reason for going through the cumbersome process to convince Ofgem that my silicon should be listed alongside Drax and Sizewell B was to benefit from the government incentive scheme for renewable electricity generation.
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Tags: domestic, Drax, microgeneration, Ofgem, power generation, renewables, Sizewell, Southern Electric
Photograph: Christopher Whalen.
George Monbiot rightly observes that the earth’s resources of biomass are limited and cannot be simultaneously claimed for multiple uses: liquid biofuels, fuel for heating, biogas, and biochar. This presentation (available for download in PowerPoint or PDF) looks at the globe’s land and biomass production to assess how much space can be given over to non-food uses and how much energy this can generate. This is one of the crucial questions facing the world: how much energy can we use from biomass before this affects the ability of the world to provide enough food for nearly 7bn people, rising to at least 9bn by 2050?
Ten Technologies to Save the Planet was listed as one of the Financial Times Science Books of the Year 2008.
Tags: agriculture, biochar, biofuels, biogas, biomass, file, fossil fuels, George Monbiot, land use, PDF, power generation, PowerPoint, renewables
In today’s Independent newspaper (London, Monday 23 February) I argue that we may need to accept some new nuclear power stations. I put forward the view that the trench warfare between the pro-nuclear groups and those that support renewables means that progress towards ‘decarbonising’ electricity generation in the UK is too slow. We probably need to invest in many different types of non fossil-fuel generation as rapidly as we can if we are to meet the tough targets for UK emissions reduction so painfully won by groups such as Friends of the Earth. We no longer have the luxury of ruling out nuclear expansion.
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Tags: Areva, Areva EPR, carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, Climate Change Committee, corporate emissions, Council for the Protection of Rural England, EDF, electricity demand, emissions trading, energy efficiency, FGD, fossil fuels, LCPD, Mark Lynas, National Grid, nuclear, politics, power generation, renewables, ROCs, RWE, Sizewell
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| Photograph: Christopher Thomond. Source: Guardian. |
The new Conservative policy document on energy is keen to emphasise how smart it is. At its core are proposals for smart meters, smart grids, and smart battery charging. The enthusiasm for these technologies is almost palpable. On one page, the word ’smart’ occurs eight times. But readers of the policy proposals are largely left in the dark about what all these intelligent devices will do. David Cameron’s comments about building ‘an electricity internet’ didn’t shed much light either.
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Tags: carbon reduction initiatives, Conservatives, David Cameron, domestic, electricity demand, Frontier Economics, Landis and Gyr, National Grid, Ofgem, politics, power generation, renewables, technology
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| The Vattenfall CCS power station under construction at Schwarze Pumpe, Germany. The main power station can be seen in the background. Image credit: Vattenfall AB. |
A powerful US coalition of large industrial companies, power producers, and environmental defence organisations has produced the first sensible plan for incentivising the early introduction of carbon capture at solid fuel electricity plants. The scheme proposed by the US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) addresses the most important environmental issue in the world – the burning of coal to generate electricity – in a plausible and coherent way. Coal, which is almost exclusively burnt in power stations or in steel-making, is responsible for about 36% of US emissions. If we can find a way of cheaply capturing the CO2 from power stations and storing it underground, we can then also provide the technology to Chinese and Indian generators.
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Tags: carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, CCS, corporate emissions, fossil fuels, IGCC, power generation, USCAP
Government officials are searching for policies that will meet the twin aims of providing jobs and meeting the UK’s climate change targets. It is proving a difficult task. The easiest ways of reducing fossil fuel use will probably not create many new jobs in the UK. All large wind turbines are built abroad and although the construction work on a nuclear power station will generate a few thousand jobs, most of the key components will need to come from Europe and Japan. So where are the opportunities? I think two major areas stand out as excellent ways of generating jobs quickly without also dragging in expensive imports or sharply raising prices.
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Tags: argriculture, carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, energy efficiency, fossil fuels, housing, offices, politics, power generation, renewables
The UK government’s enthusiasm for the construction of nuclear power stations is based on a May 2007 consultation document[1] published by the Department of Trade and Industry (now BERR). This paper argued that nuclear offered a financially viable way of generating electricity, broadly competitive with fossil fuels. It correctly pointed out that the cost of nuclear energy is largely determined by how much a plant costs to build, not by uranium prices or by the price of disposing of nuclear waste.
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Tags: Areva, carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, economy, fossil fuels, nuclear, politics, power generation, renewables, TVO
We didn’t make much progress reducing emissions when times were good. Will the looming depression makes things worse or better? The discussion of this issue, at least in the UK, tends to be superficial. The only question asked seems to be ‘will people buy less eco-bling when times are hard?’
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Tags: aviation, carbon footprint, carbon reduction initiatives, corporate emissions, domestic, energy efficiency, food and grocery retailing, fossil fuels, housing, investments, motoring, politics, power generation
The funnel of water between the north-east tip of Scotland and the Orkney Islands contains some of the most powerful tidal energy in the world. The exploitable resource at the time of the fastest running tides may be as much 8 gigawatts. One source I have talked to suggests the figure could even be as high as 20 gigawatts. As I write this note, the National Grid’s website gives an estimate of the electricity use at this moment – about 55 gigawatts at peak-time on a winter evening. Be in no doubt, the Pentland Firth is the single most important source of renewable energy in the UK. The power concentrated in this narrow stretch of water could comfortably provide London’s electricity need. And it is entirely predictable to within a few percent every minute of every day. The tidal power will peak twice every 24 hours in a cycle that the Grid will be able to plan for decades in advance.
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Tags: Crown Estate, electricity demand, National Grid, power generation, renewables
I’ve just been lucky enough to see Gordon Brown’s notes for a speech he will give in a few weeks time at the Walter Mitty Institute. It may be worth sharing some of his thoughts.
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Tags: Areva, EDF, Gordon Brown, Japan Steel Works, nuclear, politics, power generation
As with other great popular causes, such as improving access to public libraries, reducing the use of plastic bags, and the protection of urban hedgehogs, everybody is in favour of ‘feed-in tariffs’ for renewable energy. Widely used in other parts of Europe, these tariffs guarantee a high price for every unit of electricity exported to the grid from very small generating stations. Put some solar panels on your roof in Germany and you get paid 40p for every kilowatt hour that you produce and don’t use yourself.
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Tags: carbon reduction initiatives, domestic, feed-in tariffs, London Array, politics, power generation, renewables
Community-owned wind farms are a rarity in the UK, despite their popularity in other parts of northern Europe. So should we welcome an opportunity for individual investors to invest in a newly built wind project in northern Scotland? Yes and no. The prospectus promises reasonable returns. But the protections to investors are limited and the information about the mechanism by which shareholders get their returns is sadly lacking. Even enthusiasts for individual investments in wind power need to be very cautious about investing in the Great Glen Energy Co-operative.
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Tags: Energy4All, Falck Renewables, Great Glen Energy Co-operative, investments, Millenium, power generation, renewables, ROCs
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Offshore location map of the London Array. Click on the image to see a more detailed map from the London Array website (opens as a PDF).
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Shell backed out of its commitment to provide the financing for one third of the world’s largest offshore wind farm off the Kent coast. The London Array, expected to cost about £2bn, now needs to find a new investor. What about tapping the public? The project has reasonable economics, and private individuals could benefit from 40% tax relief by putting shareholdings into pension plans. Perhaps as importantly, such a move would raise understanding of renewable energy generation among the wider community.
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Tags: DONG Energy, E.ON, investments, London Array, power generation, renewables, ROCs, Shell
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| Sizewell B nuclear power station |
In the past three months, John Hutton, the UK government minister in charge of industry, has publicly backed an expansion of both nuclear and of offshore wind. Is this good for the UK’s climate targets? Possibly not.
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Tags: National Grid, nuclear, power generation, renewables, Sizewell
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| The new Finnish nuclear reactor at Olkiluoto (OLK3) |
Nuclear power may or may not be an unfortunate necessity. But a look at Finland should temper any optimism about construction costs.
The government’s decision in early January 2007 to support (or, more precisely, not oppose) the construction of nuclear power plants in the UK prompted strongly felt responses from all sides. To the electricity generating industry, nuclear power represents an attractive way of reducing emissions. To most – but by no means all – environmentalists, the push for more nuclear power is both a mistake and a missed opportunity: a mistake because no country has yet shown that nuclear waste can be stored effectively, and a missed opportunity because nuclear baseload generation reduces the incentive to develop wind and tidal power.
This article looks at what we can learn from the building of the nuclear power station at Olkiluoto (OLK3) on the western coast of Finland. The ground works started here in early 2004 and the plant is now due to open in 2011. Does this project give us confidence that nuclear power stations can be constructed at a reasonable cost and to a reliable timescale?
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Tags: Areva, Greenpeace, nuclear, power generation, Sizewell, TVO
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| E.ON’s planned Kingsnorth supercritical coal plant |
E.ON’s plan to install supercritical coal-burning technology on its Kingsnorth site in Kent was (unsurprisingly) supported by the planning authority. A more interesting question is why E.ON persisted with the application in the first place. Even carbon efficient power stations emit far more carbon than gas plants. A high price of carbon would make the Kingsnorth coal plant uneconomic. The answer to the question must be that E.ON is confident that supercritical coal plants can be economically retrofitted with carbon capture technology (CCS). So even if the carbon price increases dramatically, coal will still be competitive.
E.ON’s US operation is closely aligned with the co-operative FutureGen venture, which plans to build a coal gasification plant in the US within five years. This power station will then capture CO2 and store it in sandstone. FutureGen gasification carbon capture technology is ‘pre-combustion’, unlike the ‘post-combustion’ focus in Europe. US electric utilities are now assuming that coal plants without CCS will not be allowed. But in both the US and Europe there seems to be a prevailing assumption that a $30 per tonne CO2 price is sufficient to cover the cost of CCS technology, meaning coal will eventually be back in the power station mix.
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Tags: carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, corporate emissions, E.ON, fossil fuels, FutureGen, Kingsnorth, power generation
The UK government has announced an intention to allow offshore wind farm development around most of the UK. John Hutton suggested that about 33 GW capacity could be added by 2020. This would provide about 25% of current UK electricity demand (which is itself rising by 1 to 2% per year).
Simple calculations suggest that this change may add about 15-25% to UK electricity bills. Offshore wind is more expensive to construct and operate than onshore wind farms. The announcement may suggest that the government believes that offshore wind can be pushed through but that onshore farms are likely to be successfully opposed. The big push for offshore wind seems to mean that the government is losing faith in nuclear.
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Tags: electricity demand, London Array, power generation, renewables, ROCs, Siemens, Vestas
The Conservative Party published a policy paper in early December on decentralised production of energy. It argues for heavy subsidy for small-scale generation of electricity. The report is useful in focusing on the need to minimise the finance and administrative burdens on small generators. However, it omits any consideration of the costs of the scheme it proposes. It is woefully ill-informed about developments in other countries. The Conservatives have subscribed to a romantic view about micro-generation and are choosing to ignore the huge costs of subsidising inefficient local generators. If they want large-scale low-carbon generation they should either back nuclear, remove the planning problems with wind, subsidise tidal or biomass power, or invest in CO2 capture.
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Tags: Drax, London Array, politics, power generation, technology
The environmental community tends to think that Gordon Brown doesn’t understand the complexity and size of the climate challenge. His first speech on the subject gave more detail than expected and reassured some that the prime minister does recognise the severity of the challenge. He moved towards an 80% reduction in GHGs by 2050, but even under optimistic assumptions his plans will not result in emissions reductions on the scale required. All his proposals were pain-free. He does not yet believe that the electorate is ready to face the real challenges of emissions reduction.
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Tags: carbon capture, carbon reduction initiatives, Gordon Brown, London Array, politics, power generation, Stern Review, technology
In Denmark and Germany, large numbers of individuals own shares in local wind farms. If the government encouraged this in the UK, a large part of the local opposition would disappear. Onshore wind farms in windy locations are good investments which could form an effective part of many people’s pension plans.
One of the few co-operatively owned wind farms in the country has almost finished raising its funds. Investors have put up £3m to buy two existing turbines in the Fens. Locally owned wind farms should be encouraged as a cost effective means of cutting emissions.
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Tags: BT, Co-operative Bank, EDF, politics, power generation, public opinion, renewables, ROCs, Siemens
BT uses over half of 1% of the UK’s electricity and is the single largest purchaser of green electricity in the UK. It buys over 10% of the country’s total supply of renewable electricity. It now seeks to develop wind turbines on some of its own sites. It intends to invest in about 120 2MW turbines to produce about a quarter of its own electricity or between 0.1 and 0.2% of the UK’s total need.
This is an impressively large plan. The cost is about £250m. The financial return will depend on how much of the electricity replaces power BT would have bought from other suppliers and how much is ‘exported’. Assuming very little is used by BT itself, the return will be approximately £50m a year, yielding a return of about 20% on the initial investment. These figures assume that BT gets a yield of about 28% of the rated capacity of the turbines, which is about the UK average.
These figures depend entirely on finding sites. I think that BT may well have substantial difficulties finding as many 120 places where it can capture enough wind to average 28%. Perhaps more importantly, at many of those sites which do have enough wind, I think it will have problems getting connections to the local distribution network. Two of the three initial sites identified by BT are in the Scottish Islands. Although a typical 2MW turbine is not a huge generator to add to the local network, the islands have quite limited electricity needs. Scottish and Southern may not easily be able to add these turbines to their network.
When I asked BT whether it had approached the local distribution companies to check on this point, I was not given an affirmative answer. This raises the possibility that BT announced these plans before detailed consideration of whether its aspirations are technically feasible. So it may be a great idea to erest wind turbines, but it looks like it will be much more difficult than BT realises. Companies like Ecotricity have been developing wind turbines on industrial sites for years. Though planning permission is easier, there are still huge obstacles to overcome. BT needs Ecotricity’s expertise immediately, but it will still struggle to meet its aspirations to grow its wind power capacity.
Tags: BT, corporate emissions, news, power generation
It is adventurous of E.ON to decide to invest in tidal stream generator farm. The announcement in the last few days confirmed that the company intended to put a tidal plant off the coast of Wales in a partnership with Lunar Energy.
The Severn barrage scheme (see Carbon Commentary Newsletter #3) is a ‘tidal range’ scheme. The electricity is generated by damming the river at high tide and then letting the water flow out through turbines as the tide falls. Tidal stream technology captures the energy of the tide as it flows through constricted channels. The UK has many potential sites for tidal stream power stations, but the best locations are off the north coast of Scotland and around Alderney in the Channel Islands.
Why then has E.ON chosen Wales? Perhaps the company doesn’t want to test the technology in the toughest conditions. An attempt to use similar underwater turbines in New York’s East River has been frustrated by the breaking off of the tips of the turbine blades in the fast flowing tides. The UK’s offshore conditions will be far tougher. Or it might be that E.ON knows that it would be expensive or impossible to connect the turbines to the distribution grid in the locations of highest energy potential (see the news story in this section on BT’s plans for wind turbines in Orkney and Shetland). Previous rumours have suggested that the eventual site chosen will either be off the coast of Pembrokeshire or off Anglesey.
The recent report into the Severn barrage noted that there at least 24 different technologies for capturing tidal stream energy in the UK. The device promoted by Lunar Energy sits on the sea floor, is about 20m long and has a turbine diameter of about 12m. The blades sit within a case which focuses the tidal flow. As a Venturi device, the speed of the water flow within the case is greater than the flow outside, adding to the amount of energy that can be captured.
Is wave power economic? It is probably too early to say. The UK has excellent tidal streams around the country, but even this advantage may not be enough. Lunar Energy optimistically quotes figures of around 2.5p to 5p per kilowatt hour, which would make the technology extremely attractive, but these figures appear only to be based on some guesses made in the US. The Carbon Trust’s recent report suggested figures at least three times as much for the first implementations of tidal stream power plants. On the other hand, informal figures from the New York project have suggested figures close to the Lunar Energy estimates.
E.ON has been working with Lunar Energy for some time. It had been thought that the generator would not commit until after sea trials of the first Lunar device in Scotland next year. Last week’s announcement suggests that E.ON’s confidence in the technology and Lunar Energy is high.
Tags: E.ON, Lunar Energy, news, power generation
Nobody expects a Severn barrage to be built soon. But government opinion appears to be swinging in favour of the idea. The independent Sustainable Development Commission has just brought out a report that broadly supports a barrage. Though the environmental costs will be high, it says that mitigation measures will counterbalance some of the damage.
We now also have a better feel for the economics of the scheme or, more correctly, for both of the two main options for blocking the Severn. The bigger scheme blocks the estuary between Cardiff and Weston-super-Mare. It will cost about £15bn and deliver just under 5% of the UK’s electricity. The smaller – just downstream of the Severn bridges – will cost a tenth as much, or £1.5bn, but will provide a sixth as much power as the bigger project.
£15bn to build a barrage that decarbonises less than 5% of the UK’s electricity supply is a high price to pay. Scaled up to the whole of the electricity business, this is about 20% of one year’s GNP to replace coal and gas power stations. Even over twenty years, this cost is similar to Stern’s estimate of the cost of reducing the UK’s emissions for the economy as a whole. The smaller barrier delivers much less electricity, but at a capital cost per kWh of little more than half its larger cousin.
The Sustainable Development Commission acknowledges that private financiers are unlikely to put up the cash for the bigger scheme. The report doesn’t really discuss the viability of the smaller barrage but it is much more financially attractive. In terms of total capital cost and expected yearly output, the upstream barrage is very similar to the huge wind farm development called the London Array. The Array will be constructed with private capital. I believe that if the current renewable electricity support scheme remains in place a barrage across the upper Severn can be built with risk capital.
The Sustainable Development Commission thinks that the bigger scheme should be built with public funds. I am not convinced by this. The offshore wind resources around the UK are orders of magnitude greater than the useful energy of Severn tides. If the larger Severn barrage has construction costs of nearly twice the typical figures for offshore wind, wouldn’t it be better simply to speed up the licensing of wind farms?
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Tags: London Array, power generation, Stern Review
Do dedicated biomass electricity generating plants make financial sense?
E.ON UK has recently announced a plan to build a second power station using 100% energy crops as fuel. The first investment – a £90m power plant at Lockerbie in Scotland – will open within the next few months. The second plant, still only in the planning stage, will be in Sheffield on the site of a previous generating station. Both power plants will use wood from forestry and specially planted willow but Sheffield will also burn waste wood from other sources, such as industrial pallets. These are the first two large-scale plants in the UK if we exclude the ill-fated Arbre plant of several years ago. (Arbre was an extremely advanced wood chip gasification plant built in Yorkshire. It was never fully commissioned.)
By the standards of the electricity industry, the E.ON investments are tiny. The proposed Sheffield plant has a price tag of £44m compared to £1bn for E.ON’s intended investment in the new super-critical low(ish) emissions coal power plant at Kingsnorth in Kent. Nevertheless, Lockerbie and Sheffield do appear to make good financial sense, at least in part because of the revisions to the renewable energy subsidy scheme announced in the government’s June 2007 Energy White Paper.
This article looks at the prospective financial return from operating a power plant burning wood and other energy crops.
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Tags: carbon capture, Drax, E.ON, Kingsnorth, power generation, ROCs
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