Now UK needs plan B for electricity
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: to lose one proposed nuclear power plant may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose three in two months looks not so much like carelessness as a complete collapse of a government’s energy policy.
This is the UK, of course, where any notions of medium-, let alone long-term planning, are taking a back seat to unicorn-chasing visions of leaving the European Union on terms of its own making, together with quixotic leadership challenges, votes of no confidence, and record-breaking defeats of government policy.
Normal service shows no signs of being resumed any time soon.
But the cancellation of those three nuclear projects leaves a 9.2GW hole in the UK’s future electricity-generation plans (roughly 15% of current demand), and that’s before the imminent closure of a number of ageing nuclear and coal-fired plants is added.
According to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit think tank, the gap could be plugged with 14GW of extra offshore wind power.
That sounds intimidating, but none of those nuclear projects was expected to be online until 2030 at the earliest.
Offshore wind is already cheaper than new nuclear. By 2030, when 12MW-plus turbines will be the norm, costs will have fallen much further.
We can also assume much-improved, cheaper storage solutions. And while the UK offers 35-year support for nuclear projects under the contracts for difference scheme, this is limited to 15 years for offshore wind.
New onshore wind (and solar PV) could also take up much of the slack, but that would require the UK government to reverse its knee-jerk decision in 2015 to slash all support for both.
It is clear that the post-Brexit dust will have to have settled before the administration will address its energy policy failures. It is rather less clear when that is likely to happen.
Melbourne runs on wind
Melbourne has become the first Australian city to power all its council-owned infrastructure with renewable energy.
The switch was made on 1 January, with power supplied by the 80MW Crowlands wind farm in western Victoria, equipped with 39 2.05MW Senvion MM92 turbines.
The city of Melbourne has signed a power purchase agreement with Crowlands developer Pacific Hydro to buy 88GWh of electricity a year, roughly half the output of the project.
It will buy 40% of the power at a fixed price and the rest at a market-based price that will be renegotiated every two years. All council-run buildings and the city’s street lights are now running on renewables.
US electricity mix figures and facts
242 GW Total coal-fired electricity-generating capacity in the US at the end of 2018, down from more than 317GW in 2011
23.4 GW Capacity of coal-fired generation that was shut in 2017-18 under the Trump administration
8.4 GW Coal-fired capacity scheduled to close in 2019, together with 1.5GW of nuclear power
10.9 GW Capacity of new wind power forecast to be added to the US generating mix in 2019, together with 8.2GW of solar PV
Source: US Energy Information Administration, Thomson Reuters
Quote of the month
"People have been working on carbon capture and storage gas for 20 years and nobody has got within a mile of it yet. People will tell you the technology works, but that doesn’t mean it can be done on a budget"
Peter Atherton, energy analyst
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