Though the UK is a leader in grid electrification it is a poor performer when it comes to the electrification of heating. In May the UK government proposed a clean heat policy to support the switch away from gas heating for 12,500 homes a year for two years. Jan Rosenow and Samuel Thomas at RAP say that looks like business as usual: for every one new low-carbon heating system, more than 120 gas boilers will be installed as normal. In 2019, 1.7m … [Read more...]
Tipping Points reached for Solar, Wind, Batteries, EVs. What of the other Clean Energy techs?
History shows a disruptive technology’s tipping point can be under 5% of market share, that’s all it takes. The number of horses in use peaked in the U.S. once car ownership reached 3%. Gas lighting in the UK peaked with electric lighting at just 2% of the market. Landline phones in the U.S. fell precipitously after mobiles captured 5% of the market. Ji Chen and Koben Calhoun at RMI argue the tipping point has already been passed for solar, wind, … [Read more...]
Developing nations: Efficiency is cheaper than Coal in Indonesia
Developing economies face a particularly big challenge in reducing emissions. Their economies are growing rapidly, industrialising and urbanising. Their populations surely deserve the same rewards of wealth that the rich countries – the historical and per capita big emitters - have experienced. Can they get there without all the emissions? Indonesia believes so, committing itself to 29% unconditional emissions reductions by 2030. Virginie … [Read more...]
Investing for tomorrow, because Energy subsidies will decline 25% by 2050 – analysis
IRENA has modelled energy subsidies to 2030 and 2050 for their pathway to meet the Paris targets. Here, Michael Taylor summarises their findings. Firstly, they estimate today’s global direct energy sector subsidies to be $634bn/year (2017 figures). The vast majority, $447bn, went to fossil fuels. (By the way, he points out that none of these figures include the externality costs - pollution, healthcare, environment - which equate to trillions and … [Read more...]
Accelerate EV infra, buildings refits to use electricity’s looming spare capacity
How do we turn the pandemic downturn into an executable opportunity, above and beyond targets and promises? Chris Nelder at RMI presents data on how electricity load has dropped during the lockdown in the U.S. That load will return when the economy recovers. In the interim capacity will go unused. New capacity in the pipeline could be delayed. Nelder suggests policy makers grasp the opportunity to fill that gap and use that capacity by directing … [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...]
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...]
No Energiewende without Wärmewende: making Germany’s Heating emissions climate neutral (…nearly)
In Germany, space and water heating in buildings accounts for almost a third of total final energy consumption. Because over 90% of its 22m buildings are fuelled by oil and gas, that makes the sector emissions very intensive. The government’s ambition is to have a "nearly climate neutral building stock" by 2050. But although those emissions have fallen by 44% since 1990, progress has largely stagnated since 2011. Freja Eriksen at Clean Energy … [Read more...]
Predicting global air conditioning demand, by nation
Predicting future energy demand is difficult, more so when you must account for the choices made by individual households spread all across the globe. Air conditioning is a case in point. To tackle this, Lucas Davis led a team at the Haas School of Business to quantify each nation’s need for air conditioning, and rank them (219 countries and 1,692 cities). To get a nation’s “total CDD exposure” they, in essence, worked out their average cooling … [Read more...]
Will the German Climate Protection Programme 2030 miss its own targets?
On Friday, 20 September, the German Climate Cabinet agreed on the guidelines for German climate policy for the coming decade, set against the backdrop of EU targets. The core topic was additional CO2-pricing in the mobility and heating sectors. From 2021 a CO2-price of €10/ton will apply to the German transport and buildings sectors. The price will rise to €35/ton until 2025. But Simon Göss says the national emission trading system and new … [Read more...]
Developing world urbanisation: a great opportunity for smartgrids, buildings efficiency
Rapid urbanisation in the developing world means millions of new buildings are going up. Now is the time to make sure they are energy efficient from the start, avoiding the major “rich world” headache of retrofitting. Given most of the developing world exists in hotter climates, cooling – unchecked - could account for as much as 40% of final electricity demand in some countries by 2050. To keep a cap on that, efficient buildings and air … [Read more...]
Gas v Electric new buildings: U.S. standards agency backs gas with out-of-date data, says RMI
Official reports matter. That’s why the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) is taking to task the U.S.’s National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) which published a paper stating that all-electric systems are more carbon intensive and more costly than gas-fired systems in new buildings. The NIST paper assumed a high reliance on coal as the primary source for electricity generation in their Maryland case study. Those stats are out of date, … [Read more...]
District Heating: heat-as-a-service and sector coupling
Space heating and hot water account for around 70% of energy consumption in residential buildings. Any progress in buildings efficiencies will see overall energy consumption decline. But that presents a serious challenge to the existing business model: why invest in a sector that’s selling less energy? The answer is to change that business model, says Oskar Kvarnström, Energy Policy Analyst at the IEA. In doing so new doors are opened. At the … [Read more...]
India aims for competitively priced superefficient ACs
Cooling represents over 6% of the world’s total final energy consumption, and growing. Of the 2.8bn people living in hot tropical regions only 8% have air conditioners (ACs) - it’s 90% in the US and Japan. With growing affluence, most will buy cheap entry-level ACs, with their low efficiency and polluting refrigerants. To cope, India will need 600GW of new power generation capacity by 2050 – equivalent to the installation of 1,200 coal power … [Read more...]
36bn GWh: the “limitless” Geothermal from old UK coal mines
The Earth gets hotter by 2.5C to 3.5C with each 100m depth. It’s what makes geothermal energy possible, anywhere. In the UK geothermal could meet the nation’s heat demands for at least 100 years, say Jon Gluyas, Andrew Crossland and Charlotte Adams of the Durham Energy Institute. Properly managed it could last indefinitely. Given that heat does not travel well, geothermal must be developed locally. Fortunately, accessible heat lies beneath or … [Read more...]
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