The bravest recovery strategies will invest robustly in new yet-to-take-off clean energy technologies. If you are going to have to spend hundreds of billions to revive your economy isn’t it better to replace the old with the new rather than prop up what you’ll have to abandon soon anyway? In anticipation of that happening, new technologies are lining up. Here, Cédric Philibert at the IFRI Centre for Energy & Climate summarises their detailed … [Read more...]
IRENA’s Global Renewables Outlook and how Europe can lead the way
If the coronavirus slump has knocked everything off track IRENA’s first ever Global Renewables Outlook is a timely reminder of what that track should look like. It can help policymakers design stimuli packages that will get us back onto it, and even accelerate the transition. IRENA’s Gayathri Prakash, Nicholas Wagner and Ricardo Gorini run through the comprehensive report’s main recommendations. Annual investment, shares and GW targets to 2030 … [Read more...]
Designing the Covid-19 stimulus: what the 2008 crisis can teach us
Policy makers around the world are hearing a lot of advice on how to design their stimulus packages. This comes from the IEA where Fatih Birol lays out five fundamental lessons we can learn from the stimulus packages that came out of the 2008 global financial crisis. His main headings are: Build on what you already have – and think big (e.g. feed-in tariffs, production tax credits); Choose technologies that are ready for the big time (e.g. wind, … [Read more...]
Green Ammonia can replace fossil fuel storage at scale
What’s the best way to store energy, from industry scale to electric vehicles, replacing the widespread use of fossil fuels? Pure hydrogen is an energy dense alternative, but the gas takes up a lot of space. Liquid ammonia doesn’t, yet it contains the hydrogen and therefore the energy. Ian Wilkinson at Siemens explains the advantages of using ammonia, NH3. Already the world produces 180m tonnes a year, worth €80bn. It’s mainly for agricultural … [Read more...]
The outlook for Powerfuels in aviation, shipping
The development and commercialisation of powerfuels is in its very early stages. Powerfuels are synthetic gaseous and liquid fuels produced from green electricity. The plan is to use them when there is no viable alternative, like aviation and shipping. The big hurdle is cost, currently in the range of €3-5/litre, or five to ten times the price of fossil fuels. Dolf Gielen and Gabriel Castellanos at IRENA and Kilian Crone at the German Energy … [Read more...]
Germany’s drive to decarbonise its prized heavy industry: an overview
Sören Amelang at Clean Energy Wire runs through their collection of factsheets, analyses, reports and interviews that have tracked German industry’s attempts to grapple with decarbonisation. The very high energy intensity required by industries like steel, chemicals and cement makes a simple switch to clean electricity – short of a total redesign of processes – impossible. But Germany wants to maintain, even extend, its world leadership in … [Read more...]
New EU Industrial Strategy focuses on emissions, but is it enough?
This month the European Commission released its new EU Industrial Strategy to set the direction of travel for the EU economy in the context of the European Green Deal. Energy-intensive industries - like steel, cement, aluminium, paper and chemicals - account for roughly 17% of EU emissions and have struggled to reduce them in recent years. But Johanna Lehne at E3G doubts the strategy is enough to meet the ambition of becoming the first … [Read more...]
Coronavirus: economic stimulus plans open a door for clean energy
We’re facing an unexpected global economic slump thanks to the coronavirus sweeping across the world. In response, governments everywhere are tabling stimulus packages to get us through what is a temporary but severe drop in economic activity. That stimulus could be used, as it usually is, to get us back on the same path. But it should be used to steer us further and faster onto the new path of clean energy, says Fatih Birol, Executive Director … [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...]
UK to phase out petrol, diesel, hybrid car sales by 2035. Here’s how
This month the UK government promised to accelerate the phase-out of fossil-fuelled cars. From 2035 all new diesel and petrol car sales (including hybrids) are banned. Promises are one thing, realistic policies, plans and investment is another. Last year only 1.6% of new passenger vehicles sold were EVs and that has to rise to 100% in 15 years. Ashley Fly at Loughborough University sets out what needs to be done. First, skills and training; much … [Read more...]
Gas Switching Reforming: making Hydrogen to balance variable Wind, Solar
What is the best technology to balance the variable output of wind and solar? When there is little wind and sun the plant must produce power to compensate. When there’s too much wind and sun it must utilise that excess power. In other words, given the high capital cost of the new balancing technology it must do both profitably enough to cover the time sitting idle. A paper co-authored by Schalk Cloete looks at Gas Switching Reforming (GSR). The … [Read more...]
Oil & Gas’s future: diversify into clean electricity, new fuels, says IEA
The oil and gas industry is not doing nearly enough to meet Transition targets, says the IEA. Only 1% is invested in non-core activities. That needs to rise to 15% within 10 years. The IEA’s article summarises their comprehensive report “The Oil and Gas Industry in Energy Transitions”, released this month. It explains how the industry’s existing skills and “deep pockets” make them ideally placed to invest in low-carbon fuels (Hydrogen, … [Read more...]
CCUS, nuclear, industrial heat, hydrogen, smart grids: “large unit” innovation needs more support
How do we accelerate innovation across all technologies? Simon Bennett at the IEA breaks down the task into “small unit” and “large unit” challenges. The first is easier and moves faster. Thanks to their small size and unit cost, heat pumps, EVs and solar panels benefit from mass production, mass deployment (100,000 to 100m units/year globally) and large customer markets with fierce competition. They can also easily leverage other fast-evolving … [Read more...]
Hydrogen’s future: reducing costs, finding markets
Although 100Mt/year of hydrogen is produced globally and at scale, it’s overwhelmingly for the chemical industry. So there’s a long way to go for it to play a role in the energy transition. It’s not even clear whether hydrogen will be best used directly as a power source or through further conversion into other powerfuels. That's why Dolf Gielen and Emanuele Taibi at IRENA are scoping out the challenges of reducing production costs and finding … [Read more...]
UK rail: where are the electric-diesel hybrids, hydrogen, battery trains?
Cars and planes get much more attention than trains when it comes to emissions. That makes sense when, in the UK, transport accounts for 26% of all carbon emissions but only 1% of this comes from trains. Also, trains are already relatively emission-low: they release 0.046kg of CO₂/km/passenger while a diesel car is more than double that. Marcus Mayers and David Bamford at Manchester Metropolitan University explain that the crucial difference is … [Read more...]
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