Energy and Climate News

This page is of documents by Gordon Taylor

This page is of documents by Gordon Taylor

This page is of documents by Gordon Taylor

This page is of documents by Gordon Taylor

This page is of documents by Gordon Taylor

This page is of external news items, with comments by Gordon Taylor
The tabs above lead to pages with documents by Gordon Taylor

This site has his documents on energy saving and supply from renewable sources, the dangers of  nuclear power, and the climate impacts of energy.

It also has links to topical articles in the energy arena, with his comments.

I watched videos on climate change by Professors Johan Rockstroem and Stefan Rahmsdorf of the Potsdam Climatological Institute in Germany.
This prompted me to create the document ‘2024-10-12 A Note on Climate and Energy’.

Channel 4 made a multi-part series of programmes with this title.
The sub-title was: The dramatic, shocking story of Britain’s race for the nuclear bomb, the devastating fallout for the servicemen at the tests, and the veterans’ long fight for justice'.

I watched all the parts, and made notes.
Then I typed up the notes and followed up mentions and links to produce this document.

I found this presentation by Matthew Stocks et al and asked the permission of Professor Andrew Blakers to extend it with a section on the potential in the UK. He agreed, and Dr Matthew Stocks kindly provided extracts for the UK.

This shows that there are 195 sites in the UK, with a total potential capacity of 6047 GWh.
As the requirement for 100% renewable electricity is only about 1400 GWh, it would be possible to select the best, near to existing grid power lines, and with the greatest height difference between the upper and lower reservoirs.

However, the UK has several interconnectors to neighbouring countries, some with time differences. These should allow 100% renewable electricity to be achieved with somewhat less pumped storage in the UK and the neighbouring countries.

The UK government proposes to build nuclear power plants totalling 24 GW.
This implies Hinkley Point C, Sizewell C and about six more of similar size.
The Labour party proposes to include nuclear power in it’s new ‘green’ energy policy.
Yet nuclear power has no future, as shown in this document of 3 pages with 52 references.

The first section shows that nuclear fuel may be effectively exhausted before 2050, when the climate targets should be met.
The second section shows that the costs of nuclear power have risen over time, and are now uncompetitive.
So nuclear power must be replaced by sustainable and affordable options such as energy savings and renewables like wind, solar and storage.

The third section shows that nuclear power conflicts with energy savings and renewables, so impairing the business case and deterring investment.
So the UK should phase out nuclear power and join the rest of the world in deploying energy savings and renewables.

Although this document is published after the latest Government and Labour Party proposals,
I have published many earlier documents on nuclear power, dating from 2006-0-19. (See below).
Most notably, my report on the Fukushima disaster was published on 2012-04-11, with copies sent to several MPs and Ministers.

Options for low-carbon space and water heating include:
• Low-carbon Hydrogen replacing natural gas in the gas network.
• Individual Electric Heat Pumps using renewable electricity.
• District Heating (DH) with large Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plants and renewable heat.

Low-carbon Hydrogen and Electricity even for Heat Pumps are still poor exergy matches for space and water heating.
Modern District Heating networks have an annual average water flow temperature of about 70o C.
So by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, they give the best possible exergy match to space and water heat loads.
Compared with current gas boilers, large CHP plants give large savings in fuel consumption and CO2 emissions for heat.
They can be Combined Cycle, fuelled with gas or biomethane, or Steam Cycle, fuelled with Municipal Waste or Biomass.

Only District Heating can harness low-carbon renewable heat sources, such as solar and deep geothermal heat, as well as excess renewable electricity.

Unlike gas boilers and electric heat pumps, District Heating enables the central CHP and renewable heat plant to be halved in size, due to the Diversity of the individual heat loads.

Copenhagen, using District Heating with heat from large Combined Heat and Power plants and renewable sources, is on track to be zero-carbon by 2025.

The new UK government appears to support the previous government’s proposal of building new nuclear power plants.

The Labour party proposes to include nuclear power in it’s new ‘green’ energy policy.

However such nuclear proposals are nonsense, as shown in this 4-page due diligence assessment.

This is prompted by the Energy Hierarchy of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.
From the most to the least sustainable,

Tier 1 is Energy Demand Reduction,

Tier 2 is Energy Efficiency,

Tier 3 is Utilisation of Renewable, Sustainable Resources,

Tier 4 is Utilisation of Other, Low-GHG-Emitting Resources, and

Tier 5 is Utilisation of Conventional Resources as we do now.

The Manhattan Project in the US covered every stage of the production of nuclear weapons. This included the mining and refining of uranium, enrichment to 80 to 90% U235 for uranium bombs, fuelling nuclear reactors with uranium to produce plutonium, and reprocessing the spent fuel to extract the plutonium for plutonium bombs. It was recognised from the beginning that these processes and plants would give rise to radioactive releases that would be harmful to the plant operators and the general public, yet they were never informed. This continues to the present day, when the nuclear weapon and power industry does everything in its power to deny and understate the many and extensive harms done to all living things. To this has been added the use of uranium in bunker-breaking bombs and tank-busting shells, that spread the dust so formed over their own forces, the enemy forces, and innocent bystanders, harming them all for generations to come. The human harms include many and extensive cancers, and also non-malignant diseases such as stillbirths, deformities and mental impairment and heart disease. With so much harm already done to humans that will take up to lifetimes to express, and so much nuclear debris laying in wait to harm even more humans, it is essential to identify every strategy and measure that can reduce the total harm.

This document covers the first warnings of nuclear harms in the 1950s and - following studies beginning in the 1960s - five books of evidence by Dr Ernest Sternglass in 1981, Mr Harvey Wasserman et al in 1982, Dr John Gofman in 1990, Mr Paul Zimmerman in 2009, and Professor Chris Busby et al in 2010.

A Select Committee of the House of Lords invited submissions on the Role of Hydrogen in Achieving Net Zero.

Here is my submission.

New fuels and accompanying hikes in ticket prices will be essential to clean up air travel and avoid the worst effects of climate change, according to a new report.
Aviation is responsible for 5 per cent of global warming, and it is on track to power through a quarter of the planet’s annual carbon budget by 2050.
Despite some fledgling efforts to develop electric aircraft for short-haul flights, air travel is proving one of the most difficult sectors to decarbonise.In its analysis, European green transport group Transport and Environment (T&E) found that replacing fossil fuels in planes with “electrofuels” is the “only technically viable solution that would allow aviation to exist in a world that avoids catastrophic climate change”.

This will present a challenge to consumers as well as the industry, as the expense of these fuels means the cost of a plane ticket is projected to rise 58 per cent if they replace kerosene in all aircraft.

“The good news is that radically cleaner aviation is possible even with today’s technology,” said Andrew Murphy, aviation manager at T&E.
“Getting to zero starts with properly pricing flying and progressively increasing the use of sustainable synthetic fuels.
“There is a cost to this, but in light of how cheap subsidised air travel has become, and the incalculable cost of runaway climate change, it’s a price worth paying.”

As I noted in earlier posts about the Danish government’s plan to phase out diesel and gas cars by 2030, a full plan for emission reductions over the next 12 years would be revealed this week. And indeed it was. The plan is called “Together for a greener future.” This plan is the second of two parts. The first part was the “Energy — for a green Denmark” which was boosted considerably in the rare consensus by all parties in parliament in July where for instance the plans for adding 8 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind power was tripled to 24 GW.

While Denmark is a pretty insignificant country in the scale of things, it was actually quite an achievement to reach bipartisan agreements on upping the game as opposed to the more common dismantling. I remember that Thomas L. Friedman played with an idea in his 2008 book “Hot, Flat and Crowded” where he imagined the US being China for just one day and how that could make so many rules come into effect, fast. Well, the current president is trying to do just that, but unfortunately he has yet to push rules on avoiding catastrophic climate change. My point is that it was very refreshing to witness this consensus in July, and it should serve as an example to countries with much bigger impact.

Joshua S Hill

Growth in Japan’s solar power sector is predicted to slow over the coming decade, according to a new analysis from the Fitch Group, but not before the industry adds 17 gigawatts (GW) worth of new solar capacity between the end of 2017 and the end of 2020.

Before the Solar World Congress 2011 in Kassel, Germany, I submitted the Abstract of a paper: 'Measuring the Heat Losses and Solar Gains of Buildings via a Novel Analysis of the Data'.
This was accepted for oral presentation.
To complete the paper, I had to process three years' data and subject it to my novel analysis. However, this went well and I was very pleased with the results.

Around September 2021, the European Commission considered the inclusion of nuclear power in the taxonomy for future investments in energy.

This was based on a single report from the European Joint Research Centre, which still has close links with the nuclear industry and is widely perceived as playing a promoting role for nuclear energy within the European Union.

The JRC Report ignored the report of the German Ethics Commission for a Safe Energy Supply of 2011, which had lead to Germany phasing out nuclear power by 2023.

The European Commision also ignored 'Sustainability at risk, A critical analysis of the EU Joint Research Centre technical assessment of nuclear energy with respect to the "do no significant harm" criteria of the EU Taxonomy Regulation, of 2021-09 by Dr. Christoph Pistner, Dr. Matthias Englert and Dr. Ben Wealer, for the Heinrich Boell Foundation.

This short presentation on Saving Electricity in Industry and Homes was given to an engineering society.

The data was valid at the time, but there have been considerable changes in some end-uses, especially lighting.

Jonathan Watts

Urgent changes needed to cut risk of extreme heat, drought, floods and poverty, says IPCC

Topic 1) emphasises the urgency of energy transition.

Topic 2) is the main focus of the document, with the paper by Sgouridis et al, 2016.
This identifies the relationship between the remaining fossil fuel emissions cap, the transition time, and the required investment in Renewable Energy (RE) supply plant.

Topics 3) and 4) refer to the initial conditions prior to the energy transition.

Topic 5) compares the Energy Return on Investments (EROIs) of Renewable Energy (solar and wind power) supply measures with the weighted average value of 20 assumed by Sgouridis et al.
Topic 6 is concerned with the global limits of renewable power sources.
Where Topics 3) and 4) deal in UK quantities, Topic 6) deals in Global quantities. However, the UK must expect to use only a proportionate share - e.g. equal per capita.

Topics 7) and 8) consider energy demand measures as complements of the supply measures assumed by Sgouridis et al. They refer to two papers by Cullen and Allwood et al, 2010 and 2010.
Including energy demand measures will greatly ease an energy transition within the constraints, such as 2 C global warming.

Nuclear fusion power on earth poses extreme technical challenges.
One is the attainment of at least 100 million degrees C for long enough to produce net energy.
Another is that any power plant fuelled with Deuterium and Tritium must 'breed' enough Tritium to sustain itself.

Yet fusion power is futile because it cannot be deployed at a meaningful scale before 2050.
This is the target date for Zero Carbon - hopefully limiting Global Warming to less than 2 C.
So by this date all energy must be supplied from proven renewable sources such as Solar Photovoltaics, Wind Power, Hydro Power, sustainable Biomass and Solar and Deep Geothermal Heat.

We’re getting there, aren’t we? We’re making the transition towards an all-electric future. We can now leave fossil fuels in the ground and thwart climate breakdown. Or so you might imagine, if you follow the technology news.

So how come oil production, for the first time in history, is about to hit 100m barrels a day? How come the oil industry expects demand to climb until the 2030s? How is it that in Germany, whose energy transition (Energiewende) was supposed to be a model for the world, protesters are being beaten up by police as they try to defend the 12,000-year-old Hambacher forest from an opencast mine extracting lignite – the dirtiest form of coal? Why have investments in Canadian tar sands – the dirtiest source of oil – doubled in a year?

The answer is, growth. There may be more electric vehicles on the world’s roads, but there are also more internal combustion engines. There be more bicycles, but there are also more planes. It doesn’t matter how many good things we do: preventing climate breakdown means ceasing to do bad things. Given that economic growth, in nations that are already rich enough to meet the needs of all, requires an increase in pointless consumption, it is hard to see how it can ever be decoupled from the assault on the living planet.

The on-site generation of electricity and heat from renewables – often called microgeneration - has been proposed in the U.K. for saving carbon – reducing carbon emissions – in the buildings sector.

Gordon Taylor & Richard Pearson

I met Dr Richard Pearson when I attended a talk he gave on biofuels and synthetic liquid fuels for road transport. In this he mentioned with approval the paper 'The Future of the Hydrogen Economy: Bright or Bleak?'. I therefore proposed that we collaborate - to which he agreed.

The Fukushima disaster was aggravated by the personnel being responsible for multiple reactors under emergency conditions.

There had been no testing or drills of Station Blackouts and Loss of Cooling Accidents in the 40 years since the reactors were built.

Once reactor meltdowns and radioactive releases had occurred, they had no means of mapping the fallout to guide evacuation.

The later Abe government coerced ‘voluntary’ evacuees to return by stopping their housing subsidies after only six years. Many still resist returning, despite the hardships.

The Abe government also sought to restart the 39 remaining operable nuclear power plants, but succeeded with only a few. Nuclear power is still strongly resisted by most Japanese.

Joshua S Hill

Offshore wind turbine giant MHI Vestas unveiled on Tuesday the world’s first commercially-available 10 megawatt (MW), marking the first time a “commercially-available” wind turbine has broken the double-digit barrier.

The offshore wind turbine capacity arms race has been driven into overdrive of late, with MHI Vestas breaking its own records, one after another, while GE Renewable Energy sits on the sidelines, safe in the knowledge that, when its 12 MW Haliade-X is installed in demonstration form sometime next year, it will have the world’s largest feet-wet offshore wind turbine.

MHI Vestas has been leading the way through 2018, however. The world’s most powerful currently operational wind turbines are the 8.8 MW v164 turbines installed at the European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre (EOWDC) in Aberdeen, Scotland, which was officially opened earlier this month. MHI Vestas has also been the owner of the world’s most powerful commercially available wind turbine thanks to its V164-9.5 MW turbines that passed their final certifications in June and have already been ordered and are expected to be installed by the end of 2019.

The on-site generation of electricity and heat from renewables – often called microgeneration - has been proposed in the U.K. for saving carbon – reducing carbon emissions – in the buildings sector.

Companies hoping to build new windfarms, solar plants and tidal lagoons, have been dealt a blow after the government said there would be no new subsidies for clean power projects until 2025 at the earliest.
The Treasury said it had taken the decision to “protect” consumers, because households and businesses were facing an annual cost of about £9bn on their energy bills to pay for wind, solar and nuclear subsidies to which it had already committed.
The revelation that there will be no more money for projects before 2025 could dash hopes for pioneering projects such as the proposed £1.3bn tidal lagoon in Swansea, which has a mooted launch date of 2022.
In a Treasury document on carbon levies published on Wednesday, officials said: “On the basis of the current forecast, there will be no new low-carbon electricity levies until 2025.

Environmental groups criticised the Treasury move. The WWF said it was a huge disappointment, while Greenpeace claimed Wednesday’s budget was one of the least green ever.
Business groups also reacted with dismay. The pro-environment Aldersgate Group, whose members include BT, Ikea and Marks & Spencer, said the lack of clarity on low-carbon power investments was disappointing.
James Court, head of policy at the Renewable Energy Association, said: “The UK government seem to be turning their back on renewables by announcing no new support for projects post-2020 and a freeze on carbon taxes.”

David Wallace-Wells

'Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think.

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century'.

Christiana Figueres and colleagues set out a six-point plan for turning the tide of the world’s carbon dioxide by 2020.

In the past three years, global emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels have levelled after rising for decades. This is a sign that policies and investments in climate mitigation are starting to pay off. The United States, China and other nations are replacing coal with natural gas and boosting renewable energy sources. There is almost unanimous international agreement that the risks of abandoning the planet to climate change are too great to ignore.

Update for 2017: the IEA is once again predicting the solar industry will stop growing. As you can see in the updated graph, yearly additions are still increasing rapidly but again the prediction of the IEA is flat. Fortunately many sources are noticing this or using “my” method for showing how far the IEA is off the mark. Examples here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. I hope the criticism will grow exponentially until the IEA learns.

The French and the Chinese may be celebrating the UK's decision to press ahead with the Hinkley C 'nuclear white elephant', writes Oliver Tickell. But the deal is a disaster for the UK, committing us to overpriced power for decades to come, and to a dirty, dangerous, insecure dead end technology. Just one silver lining: major economic, legal and technical hurdles mean it still may never be built.

'Planning the appropriate renewable energy (RE) installation rate should balance two partially contradictory objectives: substituting fossil fuels fast enough to stave-off the worst consequences of climate change while maintaining a sufficient net energy flow to support the world’s economy. The upfront energy invested in constructing a RE infrastructure subtracts from the net energy available for societal energy needs, a fact typically neglected in energy projections. Modeling feasible energy transition pathways to provide different net energy levels we find that they are critically dependent on the fossil fuel emissions cap and phase-out profile and on the characteristic energy return on energy invested of the RE technologies. The easiest pathway requires installation of RE plants to accelerate from 0.12 TW p yr –1 in 2013 to peak between 7.3 and 11.6 TW p yr –1 in the late 2030s, for an early or a late fossil-fuel phase-out respectively, in order for emissions to stay within the recommended CO 2 budget’.

So the early fossil-fuel phase-out requires the installation of RE plants to accelerate by 7.3/0.12 = 61-fold and the late phase-out by 11.6/0.12 = 97-fold. Further delay would mean that there is no solution.

Four of Britain's major unions are big supporters of nuclear power, writes Ian Fairlie - all because of the jobs. Now Labour's shadow energy minister has joined them in backing Hinkley C - even though renewable energy is a far better job-creator than nuclear, and already employs three times more people.

“Overall we see a great future for offshore wind in the UK for the right type of projects,” a DONG Energy spokesperson told Renewable Energy World. “At DONG Energy we currently have four projects under construction in the UK, which will provide another 2.7 gigawatts of offshore wind power.”

When a drum containing radioactive waste blew up in an underground nuclear dump in New Mexico two years ago, the Energy Department rushed to quell concerns in the Carlsbad desert community and quickly reported progress on resuming operations.

But the explosion ranks among the costliest nuclear accidents in U.S. history, according to a Times analysis. The long-term  cost of the mishap could top $2 billion, an amount roughly in the range of the cleanup after the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.

Ulf Bossel, Baldur Eliasson, and Gordon Taylor

I found on the Internet an early version of this paper, authored by Ulf Bossel and Baldur Eliasson. I had been doing desk research in the same general area, and offered a number of comments and contributions over a period of some months. Eventually I became a co-author of the final version, dated 2003-04-15.

The cost of offshore wind power in the North Sea is 30% lower than that of new nuclear, writes Kieran Cooke - helped along by low oil and steel prices, reduced maintenance and mass production. By 2030 the sector is expected to supply 7% of Europe's electricity.

A Japanese court on Wednesday turned down a class action lawsuit seeking damages from nuclear plant makers Toshiba, Hitachi and GE over the Fukushima meltdown disaster, the plaintiffs, one of the companies and a report said. About 3,800 claimants in the suit, hailing from Japan and 32 other countries including the United States, Germany and South Korea, had sought largely symbolic compensation from the nuclear power plant manufacturers.

Under Japanese liability law, nuclear plant providers are usually exempt from damage claims in the event of an accident, leaving operators to face legal action. The plaintiffs' lawyers, however, had argued that that violated constitutional protections on the pursuit of happy, wholesome and cultured livelihoods.

A provisional estimate from the British government shows the amount of electricity generated from renewable energy set a record last year.

A monthly update from the British Department of Energy and Climate Change finds the share of electricity generated from renewable energy was a record 24.7 percent last year, which marked an increase of 5.6 percent from the previous year.

On a quarterly basis, the DECC said fourth quarter data show the share of renewables increased year-on-year by 5 percent.

"The increase reflects increased capacity, particularly in solar photovoltaics and onshore and offshore wind," the government's report said.

Koide Hiroaki has spent his entire career as a nuclear engineer, and has become a central figure in Japan's movement for the abolition of nuclear power plants.