The EU‘s Green Deal and its increasingly ambitious transition policies cannot be limited to its member states, writes Marc-Antoine Eyl-Mazzega at the IFRI Centre for Energy & Climate. For its emissions targets to be met in a meaningful way the EU needs to ensure its neighbours to the east and in North Africa follow. The danger is that carbon intensive industries simply shift to those neighbours, and their products get imported back in. … [Read more...]
Are national fossil fuel car bans compatible with EU laws, intra-trade, movement?
A growing number of EU nations are announcing laws to phase out the sale of new fossil fuel cars within the next 20 years. But are the proposed bans compatible with EU laws, or even workable given cross border trade and movement rights? If you are Dutch, why not buy your new petrol car in Belgium, then drive it back to the Netherlands? How do you enforce CO2 targets with foreign haulage fleets transiting through your nation? Eoin Bannon at … [Read more...]
Multi-energy “island” Microgrids can increase grid resilience
As the number of different technologies producing power and providing storage increases, the grid is getting complicated. The best way to make it resilient against outages is therefore changing. The traditional way is to shut down the failing plant, leaving the rest of the grid to cope as best as it can with the change in voltage and frequency. Xi Zhang at the Energy Futures Lab, Imperial College, describes the research looking at multi-energy … [Read more...]
Don’t blame Wind, Solar for Coal cycling. It’s everyday variable demand
Joseph Daniel at the Union of Concerned Scientists explains why variable renewables like wind and solar are not forcing coal plants to cycle (ramp up and down). He presents data from the U.S. that clearly shows it’s straightforward variable demand that’s doing it, because demand has always varied considerably throughout the day. So stop blaming the arrival and growth of wind and solar for this “inefficiency”, he says. These renewables have plenty … [Read more...]
Two new designs, GSR and MA-ATR, to make “blue” Hydrogen cheaper
What’s the best way to make clean hydrogen? Steam Methane Reforming (SMR) is the most common and cheapest way of producing hydrogen, but it also produces CO2 emissions. Capturing that CO2 is complex and costly. Schalk Cloete presents research on two new designs for “blue” hydrogen (blue = derived from natural gas/coal with carbon capture/CCS). He describes in detail Gas Switching Reforming (GSR) and Membrane-Assisted Autothermal Reforming … [Read more...]
Methane emissions underestimated by 25-40%, says new study
The methane in our atmosphere comes from natural biogenic (plants, animals) and fossil sources. By telling the difference we can know how much we humans are responsible for. It matters because methane is a potent greenhouse gas, second only to CO2. Previous “bottom-up” estimates came from multiplying the number of sources (livestock, natural gas operations, landfills) by their likely emissions. Robert McSweeney at Carbon Brief describes a new … [Read more...]
Pumped Thermal Electricity Storage: grid-scale, cheap materials, known tech, compact, install anywhere
We need to store the huge quantities of excess electricity generated by variable renewables. But what’s the best way? Currently, over 99% of large-scale electricity storage uses pumped hydro dams. But geography severely limits where you can build one. And the growth of grid-scale batteries is limited by raw material costs and short lifecycles. Antoine Koen and Pau Farres Antunez at Cambridge University review an important alternative, Pumped … [Read more...]
From Buildings to Solar Thermal: using electric charge to vary insulating properties tenfold
The insulating properties of a material don’t normally vary. Applying an electric charge to a material can vary its electronic and magnetic qualities, but not its thermal conductivity, normally. David Chandler at MIT says now a team of researchers there have found a way to do it. Their “electrical heat valve” can increase the thermal conductivity of thin-film strontium cobalt oxide (SCO) on demand by running a charge through it after adding … [Read more...]
“All new vehicles sold must be electric by 2030” but can your nation, state, city do it?
More and more nations, states and cities are announcing plans for the ramping up of EV adoption. Jim Conca takes a look at his home, Washington State in the U.S., where all new vehicles sold must be electric by 2030. He says the new rules imply his state will have 4 million EVs on the road by 2045, up from 52,000 today. He carefully crunches the numbers to see if this target is realistic. The good news is that grid capacity will only need to rise … [Read more...]
UK’s COP26 Presidency will be the first big test of its post-Brexit diplomatic skills
November’s COP26 will arguably be the most important since the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015. By then, all signatory nations are required to submit their new and improved nationally determined contributions (NDCs) that set a credible pathway towards reducing their emissions. So far only the Marshall Islands, Suriname, and Norway have done so. Lucien Chabason and Lola Vallejo at IDDRI ask whether the UK teams behind their new COP26 President, … [Read more...]
Pumped Storage Hydropower 2.0: steel dams, underground, or 1-10MW modular
Pumped Storage Hydropower (PSH) is one of the most cost-effective utility-scale options for grid energy storage. The U.S. has plants across the country, totalling over 20GW of capacity. Now the Dept of Energy (DoE) is backing four teams developing blue sky (water?!) ideas that should make the next generation of PSH even cheaper. In this article the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) tracks their progress so far. They include dams made of … [Read more...]
BP’s zero-carbon pledge: three major challenges
This month BP, one of the world’s largest oil and gas firms, announced its ambition to be a net zero emissions company by 2050. The promise extends to cutting the emissions of its customers too; after all, they’re the ones who are actually burning the fuel, not BP. So it aims to reduce the carbon intensity of its products by 50% by 2050 or sooner. Jules Kortenhorst, Tyeler Matsuo and Raghav Muralidharan at Rocky Mountain Institute take a look at … [Read more...]
Machine learning cuts new EV battery design testing times by months, years
Normally, battery prototype testing can take months and years to find the optimal design for fast-charging and battery life. Now scientists from Stanford, MIT and the Toyota Research Institute have developed a machine learning programme that can cut battery testing times by 98%. They’ve applied it to EV batteries. The faster a new and improved design is proven and taken to market the more rapid the uptake of EVs we’ll have. Matthew Vollrath at … [Read more...]
What if Germany wasn’t shutting down Nuclear? Modelling Coal, Gas, Renewables, emissions, prices
Germany plans to shut down its entire nuclear fleet by 2022. Right now, of the original 17, only 7 are still running. The Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan of 2011 was the trigger for Germany’s abandonment of emissions-free nuclear as part of its clean energy goals. Maximilian Auffhammer at the Energy Institute at Haas reviews a paper by his colleagues that has modelled the whole-system effects of the shutdowns, then compared the results with a … [Read more...]
Poland’s PGE: profits from Renewables can replace declining Coal’s
Poland’s PGE is one of Europe’s most fossil fuel intensive energy firms. Coal makes up around 90% of its electricity generation. It’s been investing around PLN 28bn ($7.2bn, €7bn) to build three new coal power plant units, acquire the Polish coal assets of France’s EDF, and upgrade its existing fleet to meet air quality standards. But a new and detailed report from IEEFA warns that the profitability of these investments will decline in the 2020s … [Read more...]
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