The wider world

11
Nov
2016

CFD news

Two men in suits shaking hands across a large amount of money

Photo: Pixabay user Geralt; CC0 public domain.

Amidst all the attention that has been (rightly) focused on the US presidential election, the UK government has published something that has been long-awaited by the renewable energy industry: Details of the next round of Contract for Difference (CFD) subsidies. For anybody who wants to read the details themselves, they are here.

The first thing to note is that this is a very short-term measure; while the previous round, in 2014, covered the six-year period of 2015-2021 (that is only six – they’re financial years), this round is for just two more years of support from 2021-2023. So after all the uncertainty leading up to this announcement, we’ll still be begging for info again in not all that long.

In terms of technologies, onshore wind is gone as expected (and as per the Conservative manifesto commitment). There had been talk of making an exception for Scottish islands, and this hasn’t been totally abandoned, but it has been kicked into the long grass with another consultation. Offshore wind is in, with a strike price of £105/MWh that reduces to £100 later. That’s good – it’s the price that the offshore wind industry has been publicly aiming at, and they show every sign of meeting or exceeding it.

Tidal is in there as well, at £300/MWh (reducing to £295), which is probably a reasonable price… but there’s a catch. In the earlier round there had been a certain amount of capacity that was reserved for the more expensive, less-developed, technologies, but this time that is gone. There’s a total budget for payments of £290m/year, and if sufficient generators apply to use this up then the contracts will be auctioned off to the lowest bidders; and there’s no way that a tidal scheme can hope to complete with offshore wind on price right now.

I’m not sure exactly how this calculation is done, given that the subsidy costs of a development will depend both on the amount of energy generated and the market price for electicity at the time (remember that the government only pays the difference between the market price and the agreed price, not the whole lot), but in a very rough back-of-an-envelope sort of way I reckon that around 2-3GW of offshore wind capacity could use up that annual pot and leave nothing for tidal. That eventuality would be bad news, but even that possibility is probably bad news – because it means that rather than tidal developers and investors having certainty from the announcement date, they won’t know whether they have viable projects until the auction is held. I’m not sure whether any date for that has yet been announced.

Posted by simon in The wider world
21
Oct
2016

Renewable liquid fuels – No silver bullet, but perhaps important.

Over the last few days I’ve seen a number of tweets appear like this

and like this

The story is one about a paper in Science which goes way over my head, but which appears to talk about a new catalysed method of sucking CO2 out of the air and using it to produce ethanol. A number of people have reacted as though this will solve all our problems. They are wrong. This is not a clean fuel source that will solve all our energy problems, because the process will require an energy input greater than that which is released by burning the ethanol. I’m no organic chemist, but if that wasn’t the case it would be bucking some of the most fundamental principles of physics. This isn’t free energy, and it isn’t going to make climate change go away.

However, it may still be important. If the round-trip efficiency is good enough, it may provide a useful means of long-term storage of energy. Even if the efficiency is relatively poor, it may still be important as a sustainable way of producing an energy-dense liquid fuel for those transport applications, such as aircraft, ships, or heavy trucks, that don’t show any prospect of being electrified any time soon. In this way the new technology is in competition with other ideas for producing methanol, ammonia, or (beloved of many) hydrogen. If the new catalyst makes this more efficient, all the better.

Posted by simon in The wider world
17
Sep
2016

Japan is not afraid of infrastructure

I’m writing this as a lay visitor; I have no insight into the Japanese planning processes.

A mess of overhead power cables meeting at a street junctionBut travelling around the country, it struck me that infrastructure in Japan is visible, and they don’t seem to be ashamed of it. Streets have their power lines overhead, rather than buried – like much of America, but strange and messy-looking to a European eye. In areas suitable for heavy industry, there is heavy industry. One sees large power plants, chemical plants, gas storage tanks, etc., close to populated areas, with no attempt to disguise them. Plans for any of these facilities would cause uproar in the UK.
Most towns, even agricultural ones in pristine valleys, have one or two large radio masts, painted red and white, rising out of a municipal building (often one belonging to the former state telecoms company, or sometimes a post office). Some of these are festooned with microwave dishes, but most just have cellphone antennae now; I suspect that they are the relic of an extensive microwave network that has since been replaced, but they haven’t been torn down. Contrast to the arguments in the UK that led to some cellphone masts being disguised as metallic trees.

Communications tower rising from a municipal telecoms building in Japan

Photo: Wikimedia commons, user Prosperosity. Licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.

There isn’t much onshore wind power, and I don’t know why that is – but I don’t think it’s likely to be about visual impact, since everywhere one sees electricity transmission lines “marching across the landscape”, with the towers once again painted bright red and white. It’s notable that – in a way that will be familiar to everybody who has lived near such things – after a few days they stop being obtrusive, and become a part of the landscape that is largely filtered out of conscious perception.
The shinkansen, built from the 1960s to the 2000s, zooms across the whole country on elevated tracks, visible for miles in every direction. Recently there have been complaints about noise from high speed trains, and as a result the latest line has noise barriers – which help with the noise but make the tracks themselves more visually obtrusive. Contrast with the “debate” about HS2.

I’m not praising or criticising the British or Japanese attitude here, and I don’t feel that I understand enough to hazard any guesses in public as to the reasons behind the differences, but I found them very striking.

 

Posted by simon in The wider world, Working in Japan
04
Jun
2016

Farewell to Pelamis

One of the perks of living in Stromness, just a few minutes walk from EMEC‘s offices, is that I get to see some of what’s going on behind the headlines. Right now, something that’s going on is the decommissioning of one of the Pelamis P2 machines (the one belonging to Highlands & Islands Enterprise).

This most famous of wave energy machines was divided into its five sections, and each section lifted onto a barge. They were then cut into small enough pieces for road transport, and taken from barge to workboat and workboat to truck. I was able to grab a few photos of the last part of this process.

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I perceived Pelamis as the “poster boy” for marine renewables, and I think many others did too. It was the machine that my friends, and sometimes even my mum’s friends, had heard of. The industry was always going to have to deal, at some point, with one of the big companies failing, and there’s no reason to extrapolate from this to the fate of wave energy as a whole. However, it did feel very poignant.

Posted by simon in The wider world