***While you're here... REGISTER NOW for "REPowering the grid for Solar PV" with the Vice-President of Tauron, DG ENER C, Eurelectric and SolarPowerEurope - Online Wednesday September 20 from 11:00 to 12:15 CEST*** No amount of record sales and deployment in Europe of heat pumps, EVs, solar farms, wind turbines and all the rest will guarantee the region meeting its electrification targets if the grids aren’t ready to integrate them. As … [Read more...]
Germany: does the LNG infrastructure build-up deliver energy security or go too far?
A report out this month from the German government says it wants a significant “safety buffer” of new LNG import capacity, to ensure that the country - and neighbouring landlocked states - will receive sufficient supply of natural gas in the coming years. It says an overcapacity is needed in case of failures due to accidents, sabotage or other external factors not under German or EU control. Events have shown that unilateral dependencies in … [Read more...]
Green Hydrogen’s 6,000-fold scale-up by 2050 must far exceed Wind and Solar’s. Is it possible?
To scale “green” hydrogen to make its contribution to limiting warming to 1.5C, electrolyser capacity needs to grow 6,000-fold by 2050 from today’s levels of 600MW, according to the IEA’s Net-Zero emissions by 2050 scenario. Adrian Odenweller and Falko Ueckerdt at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, writing for Carbon Brief, summarise their study that concludes even if electrolyser capacity grows as quickly as wind and solar, it is … [Read more...]
Electricity Market Design: how can reforms accelerate the transition and help cut energy prices?
*** REGISTER NOW *** for our online panel discussion on Friday 24th March 09:30-10:45 CET, “Electricity Market Design: how can reforms accelerate the transition and help cut energy prices?” Our panellists are Catharina Sikow-Magny, Director, DG ENER; Wanda Buk, Vice-President for Regulatory Affairs, PGE; Leonardo Meeus, Director of the Florence School of Regulation; Jérôme Le Page, Director for European Electricity Markets, EFET; Michaela … [Read more...]
ELCC: for predicting how much storage a grid really needs
How much storage does a grid need? Too little leads to blackouts. Too much means money wasted. Getting the predictions wrong will skew policy priorities and investments, and slow the transition to a clean electric grid. Effective Load Carrying Capability (ELCC) measures a resource’s ability to produce energy when the grid is most likely to experience electricity shortfalls. Mark Specht at the Union of Concerned Scientists explains how it works. … [Read more...]
NW Europe’s Hydrogen targets: ambition must match reality
The IEA’s report released earlier this year, “Hydrogen in North-Western Europe: A vision towards 2030”, welcomes the fact that the six countries analysed - Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK – have the ambition to build a hydrogen economy. They are Europe’s major hydrogen producers and consumers, have major ports that already service this sector, have natural gas infrastructure that can be repurposed, and access … [Read more...]
Next generation Wind rotors: because “supersizing” is reaching its limit
A great deal of the cost reductions in wind energy have come, pure and simply, from bigger turbines. Their rotors have a greater swept area and access higher wind speeds at elevated heights. But there are practical limits to the size these blades can reach. Challenges include weight, fatigue, manufacturing, reliability, transport and logistics. To push the boundaries of design, teams from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy … [Read more...]
India: coal plummets, renewables stepping in
In 2018, 80% of India’s total energy lending went to renewables. Coal got the rest, a major fall compared to 2017. No wonder, given coal plants have been running at below 60% utilisation for two years with the operators suffering huge losses. Renewables are now undercutting coal and getting cheaper. And shortages in water – needed for plant cooling – just add to their woes. Vibhuti Garg at IEEFA catalogues the problems, then describes the … [Read more...]
