How FIT cuts killed plans for UK solar manufacturing hub. With the European Commission claiming its €100 billion ‘Just Transition’ fund will ease EU coal mining regions into a post-fossil-fuel future energy system, Adam Smith considers what happened in one deprived area of Britain when government policy failed to support talk of clean energy ambitions. The sun was shining on the U.K. solar industry in 2012 when one deprived town in the English West Midlands was promised its future lay in PV. Module manufacturer Sunsolar Energy Ltd secured a £5 million (€5.97 million) government grant towards a £10 million solar panel factory intended to create 500 jobs in Oldbury, in the district of Sandwell. It was expected feeder companies would spring up nearby as a consequence of the new fab. Greg Barker, U.K. minister for energy and climate change at the time, said: “This announcement is fantastic news for Oldbury, bringing new jobs and investment and a huge vote of confidence in the outlook for the solar industry in the U.K.” Eight years on, Sunsolar has gone bust, the £10 million factory was never built, no feeder companies opened and there is still high unemployment in Oldbury after the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government headed by David Cameron which had backed the proposed the factory in April 2015 slashed feed-in tariffs (FITs) for PV just weeks before a general election which swept Cameron’s Conservatives to outright control. Local authority Sandwell Council had backed the government grant awarded for the factory and bought into the vision of Oldbury being turned into the U.K.’s first solar manufacturing hub. Former Sandwell councillor John Tipper told pv magazine: “We were all so excited about Sunsolar’s plans for Oldbury. The town is suffering from classic post-industrial decline and any long-term jobs created are seen as a success.

PV Magazine 26th Feb 2020 read more »

Communities, councils and businesses in Norfolk and Suffolk are trying to balance efforts to go green with a determination to protect the countryside. It comes as plans are considered for a series of new wind farms and extra turbines, which would be connected to the National Grid using dozens of miles of underground cables. Residents fear it will mean years of construction work, overwhelming roads that can’t cope and damaging wildlife.

ITV 26th Feb 2020 read more »

Peterborough City Council has unveiled a plan to host the UK’s largest smart, low-carbon city energy system including renewable electricity generation, energy storage and heat networks. Supported by the UK Government’s UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) arm, the £2m scheme will see additional solar and energy-from-waste electricity generation capacity installed across the city-region. To help overcome the variable outputs of these generation methods, the scheme, called the Peterborough Integrated Renewables Infrastructure project (PIRI), will also see battery storage capacity installed and businesses and households encouraged to flex their energy demands. A more flexible energy system will not only enable more renewable generation on the local grid but support the shift to electric transport, which will increase electricity demand, the Council claims. To that end, the PIRI plans include measures for businesses and households looking to install electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure to do so at cost parity with the costs associated with driving a petrol or diesel vehicle. As for heat, PIRI includes plans for a “next-generation” heat network to be installed to serve businesses and flats in the city centre. Heat networks fed by ground-source or air-source technology are not intrinsically “net-zero” and do produce emissions but are considered less carbon-intense than individual gas boilers. The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) has consistently claimed that heat networks should deliver up to 18% of UK heating demand by 2030. Peterborough City Council claims that by making “integrated” changes to heat, electricity and transport, households and businesses will see their energy bills decrease by up to one-quarter. The local authority will offer an integrated billing service for heat, electricity and mobility to enable easier tracking of savings. Once PIRI is up and running, Peterborough City Council has said it will provide other local authorities with details of the plan, that they may use it as a “blueprint” to deliver against their own climate and energy commitments. More than half of the UK’s councils have declared a ‘climate emergency’, with many having set net-zero targets more ambitious than the national Government’s 2050 framework.

Edie 26th Feb 2020 read more »

Increasing grid flexibility and maintaining access to EU energy markets to support clean power development should be top government priorities in 2020, according to the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC), which today called for a clear plan to deliver the “world class infrastructure that the UK needs”. The NIC – the UK’s independent infrastructure advisory body – set out a number of recommendations today in its annual assessment of government progress towards key infrastructure priorities, including boosting transport connectivity and decarbonising the energy system. The Commission said there had in recent years been “decidedly mixed” progress on infrastructure development, but that the government had an opportunity in 2020 to “avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and to meet the challenge of climate change”.

Business Green 26th Feb 2020 read more »

Two British energy firms have successfully trailled a new ‘heat-as-a-service’ approach to heating homes, based on smart heating systems that charge consumers per hour of warmth rather than unit of energy. The trials, run by the Baxi Heating and Bristol Energy, were coordinated by the governmen-backed Energy Systems Catapult. It ran the trials in 100 homes across Newcastle, Manchester, the West Midlands, Gloucestershire, and Bridgend, where it fitted smart heating systems providing room by room temperature control and a wealth of data on consumer behaviour and the thermal performance of the home.

Business Green 27th Feb 2020 read more »

Electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure company Pivot Power has ordered two 50MW battery storage arrays to be located in Oxford and Kent respectively. The company, which was acquired by EDF’s renewables arm last November, is aiming to develop a portfolio of 2GW of grid-scale energy storage arrays within the next decade. The batteries will be used to facilitate rapid EV charging, both in the form of co-located EV charging points and supporting local grids to cope with increasing electricity demand as more EV infrastructure comes online. Wärtsilä, the multinational battery manufacturer and service provider, is providing the batteries to Pivot Power and will provide services to them for ten years.

Edie 26th Feb 2020 read more »

It promises to provide unlimited clean, green energy to some of Scotland’s most remote communities while also generating much-needed cash for local projects. Hopes are growing that ambitious proposals for a £37 million community-owned windfarm on Lewis will make good progress after groups within the Stornoway Trust area started collaborating in talks to build seven turbines on the Arnish moor. They organised negotiations because massive costs to link into the electricity network ruled out their own individual plans. It is thought major savings can be gained by working together on a joint wind scheme close to the grid substation. The overarching issue is whether a subsea cable will be built between Lewis and the mainland, without which no new turbines can be built on the island. If successful, profits would be shared out amongst the community consortium, with a view to allocating a certain percentage of the funds for other local groups which were unable to join initially.

Herald 25th Feb 2020 read more »

UK energy companies Bristol Energy and Baxi Heating have completed year-long trials funded by the Department of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) to explore whether offering heat as a service could drive demand for low-carbon heating solutions in the UK’s domestic building stock. The two energy companies partnered with Energy Systems Catapult to trial Living Labs, whereby 100 homes across Newcastle, Manchester, the West Midlands, Gloucestershire and Bridgend in Wales were fitted with smart heating systems. The aim of the trial was to garner how the public would interact with the systems, due to many prioritising comfort and cost over whether or not the heat source is low carbon. In response, the companies trialled selling “heat-as-a-service”, offering a “Heat Plan” where consumers purchased ‘hours of warmth’ rather than units of energy (kWh). This enabled the households to schedule and budget for heating and was offered a fixed price based on data about the thermal efficiency of their home and the number of hours of warmth needed by the customer each week. According to Energy Systems Catapult, the accessibility and ease of the smart heating systems could lead to more willingness amongst the public to adopt low-carbon heating.

Edie 26th Feb 2020 read more »

The effect that fossil fuels are having on the climate emergency is driving an international push to use low-carbon sources of energy. At the moment, the best options for producing low-carbon energy on a large scale are wind and solar power. But despite improvements over the last few years to both their performance and cost, a significant problem remains: the wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine. A power grid that relies on these fluctuating sources struggles to constantly match supply and demand, and so renewable energy sometimes goes to waste because it’s not produced when needed. One of the main solutions to this problem is large-scale electricity storage technologies. These work by accumulating electricity when supply exceeds demand, then releasing it when the opposite happens. However, one issue with this method is that it involves enormous quantities of electricity. Existing storage technologies like batteries wouldn’t be good for this kind of process, due to their high cost per unit energy. Currently, over 99% of large-scale electricity storage is handled by pumped hydro dams, which move water between two reservoirs through a pump or turbine to store or produce power. However, there are limits to how much more pumped hydro can be built due to its geographical requirements. One promising storage option is pumped thermal electricity storage. This relatively new technology has been around for about ten years, and is currently being tested in pilot plants. Pumped thermal electricity storage works by turning electricity into heat using a large-scale heat pump. This heat is then stored in a hot material, such as water or gravel, inside an insulated tank. When needed, the heat is then turned back into electricity using a heat engine. These energy conversions are done with thermodynamic cycles, the same physical principles used to run refrigerators, car engines or thermal power plants.

The Conversation 25th Feb 2020 read more »

Hydrogen stocks jump — but is this another ‘hype cycle’? Hydrogen-linked stocks have raced to their strongest levels in more than a decade, as investors bet that efforts to cut emissions will make.

FT 26th Feb 2020 read more »

Energy Voice 26th Feb 2020 read more »