The UK has experienced a significant surge in rooftop solar power installations in 2023, surpassing the total installations for the entire year of 2022, according to data from MCS.

The figures show that a total of 138,336 solar photovoltaic installations have been registered since December, slightly exceeding the 137,926 recorded throughout the previous year.

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The current trajectory suggests that the UK may surpass the all-time installation record of 203,120, established during the peak of the Feed-in Tariffs regime in 2011.

Wind and solar can provide significantly more energy than the highest energy demand forecasts for 2050 and nearly ten times current electricity demand (299 TWh/year). The research shows up to 2,896 TWh a year could be generated by wind and solar, against the demand forecast of 1,500 TWh/year.

These estimates are intentionally conservative, accounting for common concerns around land use and the visibility of installations, say the authors.

‘This is a question of ambition rather than technical feasibility,’ insists lead author Dr Brian O’Callaghan. ‘The UK is already lagging in the global green race. Instead of hitting reverse, we should be turbocharging on renewables with US-style incentives and gearing up our grid for the surge that is already underway.’

There are two big tensions in how, and how quickly, the UK gets to net zero. One was the main focus of Rishi Sunak’s speech last week in which the phasing out of sales of new petrol and diesel vehicles was delayed and gas boilers got a semi-reprieve. But the other aspect, only briefly referenced, deserves more attention: it is the reform of planning rules to allow the UK to build new electricity infrastructure, including hated pylons, at twice the pace we usually manage.

For a prime minister who says “consent” is “the only realistic path to net zero”, there is potential for more trouble. Net zero involves doubling the UK’s use of electricity, which plainly requires more kit, but not everybody wants to live near a new high-voltage transmission line suspended on 50-metre stilts. It is hard to see how the government’s target of decarbonising the power network by 2035 (a target that survived last week’s bonfire of deadlines) can be met without upsetting a few local interests.

The relevant passage in the speech came after the one about how we will be saved from the menace of seven recycling bins, so may have been lost in the laughter. Here’s what Sunak said: “The chancellor and energy security secretary will shortly bring forward comprehensive new reforms to energy infrastructure. We’ll set out the UK’s first ever spatial plan for that infrastructure to give industry certainty and every community a say.”

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Then consider the scale of what is being planned nationally. “In Great Britain, around four times as much new transmission network will be needed in the next seven years as was built since 1990,” said Nick Winser, the new electricity commissioner in his report to government last month.

It has to happen so quickly for several reasons. First, there’s already a queue of projects waiting to be connected to the grid – enough to generate more than half of our future electricity needs, Sunak said. Second, the planning nightmare is having to pay renewable generators to stand idle because the system can’t handle their output; such “annual constraint costs” could rise from £500m-£1bn in 2022 to £2bn-£4bn a year by about 2030, warned Winser. Third, the 2035 deadline looms, which is why Winser was tasked with finding a way to deliver major power projects in seven years rather than the usual 14.

Nice little watch, only a slightly annoying voiceover

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/2571878

Archived copy

The British government on Wednesday gave a go-ahead to develop a large offshore oil field known as Rosebank, a move that is expected to provide a modest boost to the country’s oil and gas industry but prompted outrage from environmental groups.

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Environmental groups, however, were dismayed by the decision.

“This is yet another colossal failure of leadership from a government that seems determined to ignore the scientific warnings on the climate crisis,” Friends of the Earth said in a statement.

Octopus Energy has announced it will be expanding its 'Fan Club' energy tariff to customers living on the Lincolnshire coastline between Grimsby to Skegness, linking the discounted energy offer to an offshore wind farm for the first time.

The move, announced by the energy company this morning, marks the first UK expansion of the scheme, which was launched in 2021 for households living near onshore wind turbines in Market Weighton and Halifax in Yorkshire and Caerphilly in Wales. The tariff has since been extended to Octopus customers living near wind farms in the US and Germany.

And now the tariff, which offers cheaper power to customers living close to wind turbines, will now be extended to customers living near an offshore wind farm part-owned by Octopus off the coast of Lincolnshire.

Customers who sign up to the Fan Club tariff could get up to 50 per cent off their electricity when their local offshore farm is producing high levels of clean power, Octopus confirmed.

A team from the University of Surrey discovered that a nanoscale “ink” coating could improve stability enough to make next-generation perovskite solar cells suitable for mass production.

Perovskite is cheaper and lighter than conventional silicon-based cells, as well as far more efficient, however the emerging technology currently suffers from a drop in efficiency and energy output during the manufacturing process.

“Performance limits of traditional solar cells are why researchers are switching to examining perovskite as the next-generation solar technology, especially as applications both terrestrial and in space are rapidly growing,” said Dr Imalka Jayawardena from the University of Surrey’s Advanced Technology Institute (ATI).

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The breakthrough was made when the researchers identified an aluminium oxide that minimises the drop in efficiency during the conditioning of perovskite solar cells.

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Recent advances have seen it used to create self-healing solar panels that can recover 100 per cent of their efficiency after being damaged by radiation in space, as well as break new efficiency records when combined with silicon to form tandem cells.

If the cheap-to-produce perovskite cells can be manufactured at scale while retaining their durability and reliability, then the cost of solar panels would plummet.

Sun beating down on the Egyptian desert could help to power British homes under plans being drawn up to help bolster energy security in a net zero world.

Plans to install subsea cables connecting Egypt and Europe across the Mediterranean will see power from solar farms and wind turbines in North Africa exported to the UK and Europe.

Exports will flow during times when low wind or poor sunshine reduce output from North Sea wind farms and onshore solar farms. Details of the project will be set out at an energy summit in London next week.

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The Egyptian project will run in parallel with another separate scheme to lay four cables directly between Morocco and the UK – a distance of about 2,400 miles.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/8734610

Plans for a large offshore wind farm off north Wales have been given the green light by the UK government.

Awel y Môr is described by its developer as "Wales' largest renewable energy investment this decade".

With the number of solar and wind farms increasing all the time, our electricity grid is more complex than ever.

But sometimes more power is produced in one part of the country than can be used, so they are ordered - and paid - to shut down.

This is known as "constraint" and cost £1.2bn in 2021, which ultimately goes on to customers' bills. It is also a waste of low-carbon power.

That is why one grid operator and one power supplier are trialling the free electricity scheme. But is it fair?

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Balancing supply and demand on the electricity grid falls to operators including UK Power Networks. Its director of innovation, Ian Cameron, said the pilot Mr Bradley took part in aimed to see if customers could "soak up excess generation" rather than "turning down" renewable generators.

He said the grid needed consumers to "step forward and engage with the energy system".

The peak period for electricity demand is between 17:00 BST and about 21:00 BST, Mr Cameron added, and that drawing 15% to 20% away from that period "makes a significant difference".

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The "Power-Ups" are announced around a day before the free window. Customers living in certain postcodes and who have pre-registered, can take part.

Rosie Robison, a professor of social sustainability at Anglia Ruskin University, said it was important such schemes did not leave those on low incomes "doubly disadvantaged" because they could not make the most of them.

Those "with more resources" and "technical know-how" may find it easier to access the scheme and save money immediately, she said.

In August, 213,000 electricity smart meter installations were reported, reflecting a 9% increase from August 2022.

This figure surpassed the previous high for the year in March, which stood at 212,000 installations.

The growing trend of smart meter adoption is attributed to rising energy costs, as households use these devices to manage consumption and monitor bills.

To date, 1.576 million electricity smart meter installations have been completed in 2023, with East England, East Midlands and Southern England leading in installations.

The number of fires involving solar panels has soared after a boom in their use driven by energy bill rises, The Independent can reveal.

Data obtained under freedom of information rules show that there were six times the number of fires involving solar panels last year compared with 10 years ago.

The rate has increased sharply with 66 fires already recorded up until July this year compared with 63 for the whole of 2019, prompting concern from safety experts who are worried about a lack of regulation on who can install them.

However, new data from 45 of the UK’s 52 fire authorities, suggests that the first wave of solar panels installed under the government’s Feed in Tariff (FiT) subsidies introduced in 2010, are increasingly at risk of catching fire.

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Safety experts say there was a “gold rush” to install solar panels when the FiT was introduced and that many of these installations may have not since been tested.

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Anyone can install a solar panel in the UK but the work has to be cleared by the local council. The government recommends homeowners use a registered electrician but critics say installers are often unaware of the regulations and that panels are forgotten about and left to deteriorate over time.

In the past, in order to qualify for the FiT scheme, both the installers and the PV components had to be accredited as safe by the Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS). However, it has never been a legal requirement and the scrapping of the subsidy means there is less incentive to use an accredited installer.

The UK heat pump price wars just cranked up a gear, after Octopus Energy unveiled a new clean heating package which it claims can be delivered at zero cost for some customers that redeem the government's £5,000 grant for low-carbon boiler upgrades.

Revealing its latest offering at a tech summit in London this afternoon, the energy company said its new Cosy Octopus package - which includes a 6kW heat pump, controls, room sensors, service package, and energy tariff - would be available for homes from December.

Installation of the clean heating system would be 'free' for households that do not need any additional work to fit the system in their homes after they have availed themselves of the Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant, Octopus Energy said.

However, homes that need adjustments, such as new radiators, piping, or hot water tanks, would need to pay around roughly £3,000 to complete the installation, it said.

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Launching the package at the WIRED & Octopus Energy Tech Summit, he added that the Cosy 6 heat pump was "British designed, British manufactured [and] optimised for British homes".

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The heat pump was designed by Jason Cassells, CEO of Octopus Heating, and is the first built entirely in-house by Octopus Energy at a manufacturing site in Northern Ireland.

Sustainable materials specialist, EMR, rare earth magnetic materials recycling company, HyProMag, Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult, Magnomatics, and the University of Birmingham have formed a partnership which will focus on extracting the rare earth magnets from end-of-life wind turbines and enabling their use in new wind turbines, both onshore and offshore.

Named Re-Rewind, the partnership, partly funded by Innovate UK, aims to establish the UK’s first circular supply chain for the rare earth magnets used in wind turbines.

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Looking only at the UK, it is anticipated that there will be a 240,000-tonne shortfall of rare earth magnets in 2040 and there is no consistent route to recycle these materials, due to safety, economy and technical challenges in extracting and recycling the magnets, according to Re-Rewind partners, who say their project is set to combat this impending shortage.

The agreement enables closer liaison, information sharing and joint planning, and is a result of feedback gathered through public consultation, which has shown a preference for more cooperation and coordination between the two projects on the landfall location, onshore corridor route, substation location and stakeholder engagement.

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Under the now-signed “good neighbour agreement”, each project has reduced the maximum number of export cable circuits it will include from four to two, which will result in the reduction of impacts both onshore and offshore, particularly during the construction phase, according to the North Falls joint venture.

Furthermore, the combined construction corridor is now proposed to be 90 metres wide, rather than the previous width of up to 250 metres.

North Falls also recently decided on the location of its landfall construction compound, which is now planned to be closer to Five Estuaries announced preferred landfall.

The Five Estuaries offshore wind project has also recently selected its preferred substation search area which now overlaps with North Falls’ substation search area.

The first two wind turbines have been installed at Dogger Bank A, the first of the three phases of the UK’s 3.6 GW Dogger Bank Wind Farm, the world’s biggest offshore wind farm under construction.

According to a Notice of Operations from the project, the first wind turbine was installed on the 29th of August and the second one was in place a few days ago.

The work on installing the project’s 95 GE Haliade-X 13 MW wind turbines is being performed by Jan De Nul’s jack-up vessel Voltaire which left the Able Seaton Port with the first batch of components and headed to the offshore site at the beginning of last month.

Major offshore construction work, besides the wind turbine installation, continues at the Dogger Bank A site, located 130 kilometres off the east coast of Yorkshire, with the installation of all 95 monopile foundations now completed.

Four green energy tidal stream projects have been given the green light. Marine Energy Wales has welcomed today’s announcement that tidal stream projects based in waters off Anglesey. They will provide electricity to the National Grid.

It comes as part of the latest round of the UK Government’s renewable auction. Over 22 megawatts (MW) of tidal stream capacity has been contracted in Wales and will be deployed at Morlais Tidal Demonstration Zone on Anglesey. The projects include:

• Hydrowing: 10MW
• Verdant: 4.9MW
• MOR Energy: 4.5MW
• Magallanes: 3MW

No energy companies have submitted bids in the government’s offshore wind auction, sources have said, in what would be a significant blow to Rishi Sunak’s plans to meet climate targets and drive down energy bills.

Industry insiders suggested not a single firm had taken part in the auction for financial support contracts after the government ignored warnings that the offer was too low to reflect soaring costs.

The latest announcement, expected on Friday, could have brought an extra 5 gigawatts of power – enough to power 5m homes. Instead, consumers will miss out on savings of up to £1bn every year in annual energy usage, relying on more expensive gas instead.

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Ed Miliband, the shadow climate change secretary, told the Guardian: “If confirmed, this will be an energy disaster and a £1bn Tory bombshell that will push bills up for hardworking families.

“The Conservatives have now trashed the industry that was meant to be the crown jewels of the British energy system … they broke the onshore wind market by banning it, they undermined the solar industry, and they caused chaos in the home insulation market.

“Every family and business is paying the price for these failures in higher energy bills, and our country remains exposed.”

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The auction uses a mechanism known as contracts for difference, which guarantee consumers will pay a fixed price for the energy generated by the bidder. When wholesale prices are lower, subsidies added to customer bills top up the difference; when wholesale prices are higher, developers backpay the difference.

In recent decades, the price of offshore wind power has fallen steeply. For this year’s auction, the government set a maximum price of £44 a MW hour, a similar level to the previous round.

But the maximum seems to have been too low to attract bids. Offshore wind developers face soaring construction costs, owing to rising inflation and higher borrowing costs.

This summer such inflationary pressures caused work to stop on a large-scale offshore windfarm off the Norfolk coast. The Swedish energy firm Vattenfall said it would cease working on the multibillion-pound Norfolk Boreas windfarm, designed to power the equivalent of 1.5m British homes, because its costs had increased by more than 40%, so it was no longer profitable.

At the time, industry experts told ministers that unless the government’s financing approach was changed to take into account the steep increase in costs, developers would be forced to scrap or delay their plans.

The offshore works are kicking off with the laying of the first section of high voltage direct current (HVDC) export cable which will be done by Prysmian’s Leonardo da Vinci vessel.

Prysmian’s 170-metre-long vessel will operate out of the Middlesbrough Port and will lay two 130-kilometre sections of cable in parallel.

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Leonardo da Vinci will then move away from the coast, laying the full length of cable along its set route towards the offshore wind farm, located 195 kilometres from the nearest point on the UK’s northeast coast.

Installation of two remaining 90-kilometre sections of marine export cable is planned for next year. By late 2024, Leonardo da Vinci will have laid four sections of ±320kV HVDC marine export cables with XLPE insulation, totalling 440 kilometres plus the accompanying communications cables.

UK households could collectively lose up to £5bn a year if a law blocking large-scale solar farms on productive agricultural land is passed, energy analysts have said.

Tabled as an amendment to the Energy Bill, the proposed legislation would stop projects over 500 acres in size from being built when at least 20 per cent is classified as “best and most versatile agricultural land”.

If approved, it would leave each UK household up to £180 a year worse off because the equivalent electricity would be produced by using more expensive gas instead, analysts from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) said.

The Bristol Energy Cooperative (BEC), a community-owned energy enterprise which has brought 17 clean energy projects into fruition since 2011, including two solar farms, has been an influential force in establishing several locally-managed projects including the ‘Water Lilies’ project in Lawrence Weston – a community ‘microgrid’ which enables citizens to power their own homes, reducing their reliance on the National Grid.

The UK risks becoming a dumping ground for the products of forced labour from Xinjiang province in China if it rejects reforms proposed by members of the foreign affairs select committee with cross-party support, ministers have been warned.

An amendment to the energy bill, due to be debated on Tuesday, would require solar energy companies to prove that their supply chains are free of slave labour. The Xinjiang region is the source of 35%-40% of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon, the key raw material in the solar photovoltaic supply chain.

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It would require the Planning Inspectorate in England to ban any nationally significant infrastructure project over 50MW if it could not be proven beyond doubt that slave labour had not been involved.

The Scottish National Party (SNP) is calling for the UK Government to reintroduce a £400 energy bill rebate.

Energy bills have skyrocketed, with the average cost nearly doubling from 2021 levels.

Recent hikes in standing charges have only exacerbated the problem, adding up to £300 to annual bills.

Energy consultancy Cornwall Insight has issued warnings of further energy bill increases this winter.

A few days ago, Ofgem announced the energy price cap that will stand at £1,923 from 1st October.

Last month, a report by Investec Bank Plc estimated that the average household energy bill would remain at £1,900 per year throughout the third quarter of 2024.

A recent report by the Resolution Foundation indicates that this winter, over a third of households in England, approximately 7.2 million homes, are poised to experience higher energy bills than the previous year, with nearly half of the poorest families affected.