UK Energy

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.

Octopus Energy has signed a deal with Shell to buy its UK energy arm, meaning one of Britain’s most popular suppliers will now power almost one in four homes.

The deal will require regulator approval and Shell customers were advised to “sit tight” for now, with it hoped to be formalised in the final quarter of the year.

Octopus has the highest approval rating of any UK energy supplier according to a Bain & Company survey recently, and has been Which?’s Recommended Energy Supplier for six years running.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/4314753

The cable will run from the 49.9MW Willows Green Solar Farm near Felsted will the built mainly under roads for 5.3km east of the proposed solar farm to Braintree Substation near Galleys Corner.

At full capacity, 50MW is enough to power ~60,000 homes! That's enough for nearly 10% of all of Essex. Glad these are getting connected even though there's plenty of North Sea oil and gas. UK! UK! UK!

Britain’s Northern Gas Networks has reported that the proposed Redcar Hydrogen Village in northeastern England could bring significant benefits to the area.

These include over £300 million ($381 million) of investment over the next ten years and at least 300 engineering and other high-quality jobs in what the company states as a historically underfunded region.

Northern Gas Networks is currently in discussions with government about the go-ahead of the proposed hydrogen village, which would see around 2,000 homes in the Yorkshire coastal town of Redcar converted to run on hydrogen.

Unfortunately, the cap is still considerably higher than it was before the energy crisis began and is unlikely to help households in real terms all that much. “The situation for millions of households is still incredibly desperate,” says Smith. “When the price cap takes effect in October, we estimate that 6.3m UK households will be living in fuel poverty. That’s 2m more [than] at the start of this crisis.”

Will the price cap make much of a difference?

The average household that is paying by direct debit should be seeing a fall of about £150 a year in their bills, however, as the government has withdrawn its financial support over the course of the summer, millions of households could end up paying more than they did last winter. This is particularly concerning as record numbers of households already have significant energy debt as they head into the colder months. “They’re going to be carrying that financial burden as they try to pay off their existing usage at the same time,” Smith says.

Then there are standing charges, the fixed daily amount on your bill, which have increased significantly in recent years. They are expected to rise to more than £300. According to the NEA, standing charges for the typical customer have increased by two-thirds since the introduction of the 2019 Ofgem price cap as a way for energy companies to recover costs.

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Are there any alternatives?

The point of the energy price cap is not to keep bills affordable for consumers – it is designed to limit the profits of energy companies. Even Ofgem’s chief executive has questioned whether the price control mechanism is adequate, pushing the government to rethink the “very broad and crude” framework. Jonathan Brearley added that the price cap made sense in a more stable market, but the volatility of the current market has rendered it less effective.

Charities, campaign groups, experts and even some energy suppliers are calling on the government to create a social energy tariff, a discounted energy bill targeted at low-income and vulnerable households. Smith says that social tariffs existed in the 2000s on a voluntary basis; he attributes its limited success to the fact that it was not well targeted. “We believe it would be possible to learn from those previous mistakes,” he says. The NEA argues that this tariff must be additional to existing protections.

The government has announced that it is “developing a new approach” to protect customers from rising bills, but have seemingly abandoned any pledges to put a social tariff in place.

Ofgem said: “By raising the EBIT allowance, Ofgem is taking the next step in its drive to make the retail energy sector more resilient, as we move into another difficult winter when price volatility remains a risk.

“At the height of the energy crisis around 30 suppliers failed because they did not have enough capital in the reserve to stay in business – and the cost was shared among all energy consumers, adding £83 to bills.

“With suppliers only now starting to recoup a portion of their multi-billion pound losses over the past four years, a small increase in permitted profit margins will allow companies to better cover their costs, attract investment and retain financial stability protecting consumers into the future.”

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Simon Francis, coordinator of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, commented on the matter, expressing his concerns.

Mr Francis said: “When you look at the details of this price cap, the reality is that every unit of energy a customer uses costs double what it did a few years ago. The daily standing charges customers pay have also increased – doubling in the case of electricity.

“The Energy Bills Support Scheme has also been taken away this winter, while energy firms have been allowed to increase the profits they make per customer and vulnerable households have been left wondering what will happen this winter and beyond.

“Ministers had promised to consult on tariff reform to help the households most in need and who most rely on energy to keep themselves safe. Sadly, they have abandoned plans for a social tariff consultation.

“The government seems to be running out of enthusiasm to help people get through the energy bills crisis, and it is also now running out of time to act to keep people warm this winter.”