Second Update of June 2019 – An overview of last week’s Energy news

Below is this week’s summary. It should be a one minute read relevant to UK energy with links to documents for those who wish to read more.

(Click a bullet point to open the relevant article)

Monday – 10th June

• UK supplier Scottish Power is installing the most powerful battery so far in the UK in order to store surplus electricity from 215 turbines at Whitelee wind farm south of Glasgow Scotland. The company suggests this will be the first of six wind farms to get similar lithium-ion batteries over the following 18 months.

• ‘Waste’ renewable energy in California: ‘Curtailments’ are handled by companies bidding to reduce production which means consumers pay to switch off excess energy.

Tuesday – 11th June

• Oh dear! This article raises the point that, while UK was switching off coal-fired electricity generation for several weeks recently, imported electricity from mainland Europe included coal-fired generation. UK Carbon pricing is making UK coal power not competitive compared with Netherlands and Germany. Article makes the case for better storage particularly pumped hydro-storage.

• The biggest floating vessel in the world is processing gas to Liquid Natural Gas at the site of production offshore Australia (rather than using pipeline to onshore LNG processing), in order to ship to Asian gas markets. Wood Mackenzie estimates cost of construction of ‘floating LNG’ vessel to owner Shell as $17 billion.

• Another option for storing surplus power from excess renewable energy and therefore attempting to balance intermittent generation is proposed in this article: This time from Norway and hydro-power, the surplus energy is stored as hydrogen. This is not new but is fairly large scale relative to many other example.

Wednesday – 12th June

• UK Government accepts the findings of the Committee for Climate Change report, published in March 2019, proposing UK is net-Carbon neutral by 2050. This would bring into law an amendment of the Climate Change Act (2008) which targeted 80% reduction of Greenhouse Gas emissions compared with 1990 levels.

• Japan has announced policy to achieve net-zero Carbon emissions by 2050 on the same day as the UK with a different approach. Plan assumes continuous use of coal but with commercially-viable carbon capture, usage and sequestration technology and reducing cost of hydrogen production by 90%. Article states Japan has 30 new coal plants in planning or construction stages.

• The pattern continues of USA Liquid Natural Gas feeding into regions otherwise supplied by Russian pipeline. Poland is more than doubling its take of US LNG. USA exported no gas by LNG before 2016.

Thursday – 13th June

• … and then there were five (UK coal-fired power stations). Another plant is closed.

Friday – 14th June

• The option to switch from natural gas for heating and cooking to hydrogen received a lot of coverage. The report recommends producing hydrogen from natural gas and capturing carbon dioxide for storage centrally.