A study from the energy departments of Stanford University, from where Kara Glenwright writes, lays out a pathway for California to capture and store up to 60 Mt (million tonnes) of CO2 a year. 76 site locations have been identified where work could start immediately to store 20 Mt/yr profitably under the existing low carbon rules. But first a raft of clarifications on the laws is needed, showing that the success of CCS doesn’t just depend on the … [Read more...]
Solar is displacing Coal in India’s electricity market
India is the world’s third largest electricity market and as a fast-growing economy can, according to the IEA, lead the recovery of global energy demand out of the pandemic for the coming decade. Kashish Shah at IEEFA runs through solar’s prospects in India, which hopes to build 450GW of renewable energy by 2030. Solar is getting cheaper. A 2GW auction in June delivered India’s lowest-yet renewable energy tariff at US$31/MWh. That figure could … [Read more...]
Only giving tax breaks to zero-emission company cars will accelerate e-mobility
Subsidies and tax breaks for company cars in Europe cost €32bn a year, a hangover from the days when governments were happy to encourage driving. Chris Bowers at T&E reviews a study that explores the issue in a wide range of European nations and reveals that 96% of company cars are petrol and diesel. As an indicator of the scale of emissions, the study says Europe’s 10 largest leasing companies alone – which include BMW’s Alphabet and … [Read more...]
Which sectors need Hydrogen, which don’t: Transport, Heating, Electricity, Storage, Industry?
Which sectors are most suited to hydrogen, and which are not? For the answer, six academics from the UK and the Netherlands - Tom Baxter, Ernst Worrell, Hu Li, Petra de Jongh, Stephen Carr, and Valeska Ting – use their areas of expertise to neatly summarise hydrogen’s pros and cons in Road and Rail, Aviation, Heating, Electricity and Energy Storage, and Heavy Industry. Their general message seems clear: hydrogen is still very expensive, so it can … [Read more...]
5 charts show the rapid fall in costs of renewable energy
Plenty in the energy sector already know about the impressive declines in renewable energy costs since 2010, particularly solar (down 82%), concentrated solar (47%), onshore (39%) and offshore wind (29%). For those of you putting together presentations to people whose buy-in you need - citizens, public officials, investors, customers, etc. - these graphics should come in useful. It looks like a tipping point is being reached, says Douglas Broom … [Read more...]
The benefits of Peer-To-Peer Electricity Trading for communities and grid expansion
The adoption of peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity trading will turn individual consumers from passive to active managers of their networks. Such a marketplace can relieve constraints on the growing system and offer an alternative to costly grid reinforcements. Arina Anisie and Francisco Boshell at IRENA run through the benefits, including investment costs, bills, resilience, congestion, mini-grids, energy access, and more. They note that very few … [Read more...]
Rooftop Solar: economies of scale can challenge the centralised grid
One of our recent articles explained how rooftop solar PV is more expensive that a centralised supply, and that the transmission and distribution cost savings of the rooftop system, on their own, do not make up for this cost difference. Here, Javier LĂłpez Prol at the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change, University of Graz, responds to those challenges. First, the economies of scale of distributed rooftop solar are yet to be realised. … [Read more...]
Waste-to-Energy is underperforming. Whole-energy-system simulator can uncover the bottlenecks
The potential for Waste-to-Energy (WTE) in the U.S. is 674 TWh/year, roughly 8% of the energy used by the transportation sector. However, for reasons not easily understood, many WTE technologies struggle to make it to commercial scale. Researchers at NREL have built a first-of-a-kind simulation model, WESyS, to create scenarios and understand where the bottlenecks are. The whole-energy system is always complex. The WESyS simulation modules … [Read more...]
Rural America needs investment, jobs. $82bn/yr of Wind and Solar can deliver it
The build out of wind and solar in the U.S. – to rise from 165GW today to over 500GW in 2035 – will overwhelmingly happen in the open spaces of rural America, explains Kevin Brehm at RMI. It should result in a major boost to stagnating communities. The $82bn/year of clean energy investment will take second spot to the current three big rural spends: highways ($90bn), water utilities ($57bn) and mass transit ($45bn). By 2030 rural clean energy … [Read more...]
Green or Blue Hydrogen: cost analysis uncovers which is best for the Hydrogen Economy
Blue hydrogen is created from fossil sources, where the carbon emissions are captured and stored. Green hydrogen is made from non-fossil sources and favoured by policy makers who are wary of keeping the fossil economy going, even with CCS. As more regions commit to hydrogen, finding the right cost-optimal mix is crucial to its success. Schalk Cloete summarises his paper that models the whole system based on Germany. Integrating hydrogen will … [Read more...]
Chinese energy institutes present new net-zero scenarios for 2050
It was just one sentence, in September, from China’s President Xi Jinping: “We aim to have CO2 emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.” Already, leading Chinese energy institutes have presented two scenarios that lay out what needs to be done to meet that goal. Writing for Carbon Brief, Lauri Myllyvirta reviews the plans. Both aim for over 85% of all energy and more than 90% of electricity coming from non-fossil … [Read more...]
Battery innovation must drive the 50-fold increase in storage capacity needed by 2040
The IEA has set the storage sector a challenge. It says the world will need 10,000 GW-hours of batteries and other forms of energy storage by 2040, a 50-fold increase on today. The good news is that a joint study by the European Patent Office and the IEA reveals electricity storage patenting activity has grown 14% a year over the past decade. Here the IEA summarises the findings of its comprehensive report. It explains that Japan and Korea lead, … [Read more...]
Analysis shows Wind and Solar costs will continue to fall dramatically throughout the 2020s
Michael Taylor at IRENA has summarised its latest studies that show how the cost of renewables are set to continue declining dramatically through to 2030. We all know how those costs declined in the last ten years. Going forward, the weighted average cost of electricity in the G20 countries from offshore wind could fall by almost 50% by 2030 from 2019 levels, onshore wind by around 45%, utility-scale solar PV by up to 55% and concentrated solar … [Read more...]
How will China build its Hydrogen economy?
What are China’s hydrogen prospects? That’s the question Kevin Tu at the IFRI Center for Energy & Climate attempts to answer in a report that he summarises here. He points at the growing number of policies that show China is taking hydrogen very seriously. China wants to expand production as well as build up end uses in transport, steel and cement manufacturing, and storage. The main drivers are the Covid pandemic, energy security, the … [Read more...]
WEO 2020 means updated price predictions to 2040: Oil, Gas, Coal, Renewables, Power
The combined effect of the global lockdown, more ambitious climate policies and the rise of renewables will have a significant effect on European power prices up to 2040, as well as the sales revenues of renewable energies. Carlos Perez-Linkenheil at Energy Brainpool uses their Power2Sim model to look at the data in the IEA’s latest World Energy Outlook 2020 and make quantitative forecasts. The pandemic has caused structural distortions to the … [Read more...]
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