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Professor Christian Breyer of LUT University in Finland and Jonathon Porritt will be speaking at a webinar on Friday September 3rd (noon start) on the subject of ‘100 per cent renewable energy in Europe’. This is in support of the effort to raise funds for the 100 per cent renewable energy model for the UK which is being organised by 100percentrenewableuk.

Register here!

Please donate to the fund to pay for the model to be done here! We still have a long way to go to pay for the study to be done!

After an introduction by Jonathon Porritt, Professor Beyer will talk about ‘100 per cent renewable energy in Europe’. Then he will answer some questions on the subject. After then we shall conduct a fundraising auction for the signed copy of  Jonathon Porritt’s book! Jonathon Porritt is founder of ‘Forum for the Future’ and is perhaps the leading British author on green politics. His latest book is called ‘Hope in Hell’.

Christian Breyer is leading the team that has been chosen by 100percentrenwable uk to do the 100percent renewableuk model.

Christian Breyer is Professor for Solar Economy at LUT University, Finland. His major expertise is the integrated research of technological and economic characteristics of renewable energy systems specialising in energy system modeling for 100% renewable energy, on a local but also global scale. His team published the most studies on 100% renewable energy systems for countries or major regions globally. Energy system transition studies are carried out in full hourly and high geo-spatial resolution. Publications cover integrated sector analyses with power, heat, transport, desalination, industry and negative CO2 emission options. Power-to-X investigations is a core research field for his team. He published more than 300 scientific papers, thereof more than 100 in scientific journals. He worked previously for Reiner Lemoine Institut, Berlin, and Q-Cells (now: Hanwha Q Cells). He is member of ETIP PV, IEA-PVPS, scientific committee of the EU PVSEC and IRES, scientific advisory board of CO2 Value Europe, academic council of Global Alliance Powerfuels, chairman for renewable energy at the Energy Watch Group, reviewer for the IPCC and a co-founder of the Desertec Foundation. His academic background is general business, physics and energy systems engineering and a PhD in electrical engineering. He communicates in Twitter @ChristianOnRE.

There’s been a story circulating recently about how Orsted’s plans for a big offshore wind park are clashing with BP’s plans to test under-sea storage of carbon dioxide. Big oil looks like it might take precedence over offshore wind. But in reality, things are even worse than this. Big oil are grabbing the best undersea storage resources for disposal of carbon dioxide and depriving renewable energy of potentially vital hydrogen storage options.

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100percentrenewableuk is now fundraising to build funds to commission a study on how 100percent renewable energy would work in the UK. Please donate to this cause and please spread the word to others to support this. To donate go to the GoFundMe website here

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There’s lots of information being pumped out by the anti-renewables lobby about how renewable energy causes great increases in the costs of upgrading electricity networks, but in fact there’s a lot of ways in which decentralised energy will actually REDUCE network costs. A recent study from California emphasizes how the cheapest path to clean energy is a mixture of large renewable energy projects and small decentralised renewables (mainly solar pv) linked to battery storage systems. Solar pv-battery systems can exist as a mixture of domestic systems and larger ground-mounted systems.

There isn’t yet a similar study for the UK (the big energy companies who fund these things won’t want the truth leaking out!), but there’s logic to suggest that much the same thing might be the case in the UK. Sure, the UK isn’t as sunny as California, although in winter there’s a lot of wind power. But in any case the untold secret of a decentralised solar-plus-battery system is that the batteries will soak up electricity produced from whatever sources so as to even out the pressures on the electricity network. By reducing pressure on the electricity network both transmission and distribution network costs can be reduced.

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Even-handed analysis of data from Germany and the UK indicates that it is still easily possible to dramatically reduce carbon emissions whilst greatly reducing the amount of energy coming from nuclear power.

One thing not usually appreciated in the arguments about the impact of nuclear power plant retirements in Germany is that in reality much the same process has occurred, for different reasons, in the UK. In both Germany and the UK the falling proportion of electricity coming from nuclear power has gone along with dramatic reductions in carbon emissions from electricity in both countries.

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The Government is discouraging the adoption of heat pumps through the very important ‘Energy Performance Certificate’ (EPC) system. The EPC system shows energy consumption for particular buildings and gives advice on how to reduce it. It is legally essential when selling properties. Incredibly, even when a property is entirely heated using ‘resistance’ electricity, and therefore especially suitable for heat pumps, the standard advice given for energy improvements fails to mention the most important single measure which is likely to be the conversion of the heating system to a heat pump. Various other piecemeal measures will be selected under the EPC system, but heat pumps are not explicitly promoted.

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There is a surge in capacity of onshore wind and solar projects with planning consent in anticipation of more Government-backed contracts being available later this year.

With public attention focussed on offshore wind the increasing amounts of onshore wind and solar projects awaiting commercial opportunities are being ignored. Yet (on top of those projects already under construction) already there is enough renewable energy projects with planning consent to supply over 3 per cent of UK electricity generation.

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Doug Parr, Chief Science Officer for Greenpeace, exposes how the Government is using unreasonably pessimistic assumptions about storing renewable energy to bolster the case for its scenarios which involve large amounts of nuclear power and fossil generation with carbon capture and storage

How is UK government continuing to justify continued emphasis on nuclear power development when the cost of renewables has fallen so far? The answer is about the weather – government will point out (although this will not be a shock to most people, or renewables energy experts) that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. In other words, what can manage the gaps in electricity supply when there isn’t enough solar or wind power? We can max out on electrical connection to other countries, demand response and batteries and there’s still a gap. So to fill that ‘gap’ we need some form of long term storage for renewable power.

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Centrica has announced that it is talking to the Government about using the UK’s largest natural gas storage facility to store hydrogen.

Although the stated purpose of the negotiations is to discuss the storage of blue rather than green hydrogen, this is nevertheless a good sign for using hydrogen to store renewable energy. That is because the discussions demonstrate the credibility of the hydrogen storage option.

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In its latest call for evidence on how to balance renewable energy, the Government wants to make windfarms and solar farms be responsible for assuring power delivery all the time. This is something that is not even required of fossil fuel and nuclear power plants. Apparently fixated on this notion, and also that of ending the current system of incentivising renewables through giving the long term contracts guaranteeing to pay them set electricity prices, the Government ignores the most practical options for balancing fluctuating renewables.

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