China's emissions set for structural decline

From The Guardian

China’s carbon emissions could peak this year before falling into a structural decline for the first time from next year after a record surge in clean energy investments, according to research.

Emissions from the world’s most polluting country have rebounded this year after the Chinese government dropped its Covid restrictions in January, according to analysis undertaken for Carbon Brief.

However, this rebound in fossil fuel demand emerged alongside a historic expansion of the country’s low-carbon energy sources, which was far in excess of policymakers’ targets and expectations.

Beijing’s solar and wind installation targets for the year were met by September, according to the report, and the market share of electric vehicles is already well ahead of the government’s 20% target for 2025. [Update in January 2025: EVs and PHEVs now make up >50% of total car sales in China]

“These record additions are all but guaranteed to push fossil-fuel electricity generation and CO2 emissions into decline in 2024,” Lauri Myllyvirta, a lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and the author of the report.

The most striking growth has been in solar power, according to Myllyvirta. Solar installations increased by 210 gigawatts (GW) this year alone, which is twice the total solar capacity of the US and four times what China added in 2020.

The analysis, which is based on official figures and commercial data, found that China installed 70GW of wind power this year – more than the entire power generation capacity of the UK. It is also expected to add 7GW of hydro power and 3GW of nuclear power capacity this year, said the report.

Myllyvirta said the boom in clean energy generation could trigger a decline in China’s emissions from next year despite a wave of new coal plants across the country.

“This is because – for the first time – the rate of low-carbon energy expansion is now sufficient to not only meet, but exceed the average annual increase in China’s demand for electricity overall,” he said.

“If this pace is maintained, or accelerated, it would mean that China’s electricity generation from fossil fuels would enter a period of structural decline – which would also be a first. Moreover, this structural decline could come about despite the new wave of coal plant permitting and construction in the country,” Myllyvirta added.

China had 136GW of coal power capacity already under construction at the end of June, with a further 99GW with planning permits. Another 25GW has been permitted since then, according to the research, which would breach a policy pledge made by the country’s president, Xi Jinping, to “strictly control new coal-fired power generation projects”.

China has forecast that its coal power capacity will peak at 1,370GW in 2030, which would require either an immediate end to new coal power permits, or an accelerated shutdown of existing and planned coal plants, said Myllyvirta.

So, first off, how can Carbon Brief be so confident, given the surge in new coal power stations?  

During the 2022 extreme drought in China (ironically worsened by climate change) there were power shortages as hydro generation collapsed and demand for air-conditioning zoomed.  The Chinese authorities responded by unfreezing coal power station planning requests.  But these new coal power stations were to be back-ups for nuclear, hydro, wind and solar.  Capacity utilisation in coal generation in China is already below 50% (the norm is 70-90%) and the majority of coal power stations are loss-making.  But that doesn't matter in China's system.  Unlike power stations and the grid in other countries, China's power stations don't have to make a profit.  They're seen as a public service.  And widespread, lasting power failures are seen as unacceptable, more unacceptable than loss-making power stations.   For example, you could run the grid using solar during the day and coal at night (which, if you think about it, would halve emissions).  Of course, this makes coal power even more expensive, because the plants are only being used for half the day.  In Australia, that dynamic is pushing coal power stations towards bankruptcy; in China, it doesn't really matter.

Second, if China's emissions have peaked, that would mean that global emissions have peaked too.

Look at the chart below.   This includes all emissions except land use change (i.e., clearing forests for food.)  Europe's emissions peaked in 1990 and are back where they were in 1965.  US emissions peaked in 2006, and are back where they were in 1988.  But China's and India's emissions, by contrast, have exploded.  This is because they are rapidly growing economies, and until recently coal was the cheapest source of electricity.  Most of the rise in emissions over the last few decades has been because of China.  So, even if China's emissions only fall slowly, global emissions will have peaked.  (It would help if India's emissions also peaked, but that seems unlikely just yet.)  And if China's emissions start to fall, the excuse offered up by denialists that 'why should we do anything when China isn't?' will be invalidated.

This isn't unmitigated good news.  The rise in global temperatures is proportional to the level of global emissions.  To halve the decadal rise in emissions (currently 0.2 degrees, but showing ominous signs of having increased to 0.28 degrees) we need to halve emissions.  

Let's say global emissions fall by 3% a year.  This will reduce emissions by just 25% over the next 10 years, 45% over 20 years.  Not enough to prevent 2 degrees of warming.  5% a year would reduce emissions by 40% over 10 years, and 80% over 30 years.  That's a lot better, but still far from ideal.  The prospective decline in emissions, though very welcome, just isn't fast enough.  Yet. (To reduce emissions by 90% by 2050, they would have to fall by ~8% per annum.)

Source:  Our World in Data

Batteries + solar = grid stability

Note exponential curve.
Also, excludes household storage

From This is Not Cool (formerly ClimateCrocks)

Denton Record Chronicle (Texas):

With temperatures climbing over 100 [F; 38 C]  in much of the state, the Texas electric grid set an all-time record for energy demand Tuesday.

Despite the heat wave, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas has yet to ask people to conserve electricity. That’s a big change from 2023, when extreme weather and fear of low power reserves prompted ERCOT to issue 11 requests for conservation through the year.

Grid operators and energy experts are pointing to the rapid growth of solar power and grid-scale batteries as key reasons why residents haven’t been asked to conserve this month.

“We’ve seen significant additions of energy storage resources, solar resources and wind resources, with a few additions also on the gas side,” Pablo Vegas, CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said at an ERCOT board meeting Tuesday. “All of that has helped to contribute to less scarcity conditions.”

In fact, the growth of some of those energy sources has been downright record-breaking.

As the sun and heat bore down, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday brought the top three days for solar power production in the history of the state grid, according to the website Gridstatus.io, which tracks the performance of regional electricity transmission systems.

On Sunday, the top day for solar production, Texas solar farms produced 20,832 megawatts of power. It’s worth noting that this number does not include energy produced by rooftop panels on homes and businesses.

According to ERCOT, 1 megawatt is enough to power about 250 homes at times of peak demand.

Texas also set new records Monday and Tuesday for the amount of power provided by big utility-scale batteries, something that could have made the difference between a normal day and a grid emergency.

“The previous storage record was shattered by 25%,” Doug Lewin, author of The Texas Energy and Power Newsletter, tweeted. We “almost certainly would have been rolling outages without it.”

The reason for the rapid uptick in solar and battery power on the state grid is pretty simple.

Energy demand has grown rapidly in Texas over the last few years, and frequent moments of energy scarcity have presented a business opportunity for solar farms and battery storage facilities that can quickly set up shop to fill the need.

Hot, sunny days — the very conditions that bring higher energy use — are also the conditions that produce solar power. That solar energy also can be used to fill large batteries that discharge power back to the grid when the sun sets over solar farms, but air conditioners are still running full blast.

San Jose Mercury News:

 

Four years ago this week, California’s power grid was so strained by a heat wave that rolling blackouts hit hundreds of thousands of residents over two days. It nearly happened again two years ago, when state officials issued 11 “flex alerts” asking businesses and homeowners to voluntarily reduce electricity use to avoid power disruptions.

But this year when a record heat wave scorched the state over three weeks from mid-June to July — sending temperatures across the Bay Area and the Central Valley soaring over 110 degrees — there was plenty of power. No warnings. No shortages. No flex alerts.

A big part of the reason, experts say, is a boom in the construction of giant battery projects.

California’s high-tech battery centers built with thousands of lithium-ion batteries similar to the batteries in cell phones and electric cars are solving the main shortcoming of the push for more renewable energy: the fact that the sun doesn’t shine at night.

Battery storage has increased sevenfold in the past five years in California, from 1,474 megawatts in 2020 to 10,383 megawatts now. A megawatt is enough electricity to run 750 homes.

Before, when the sun went down every summer evening, giant solar farms stopped producing electricity, sometimes leading to power shortages statewide in the early evening. Now, the growing number of battery storage plants across the state can store that solar power during the day when it is plentiful. The battery storage plants then release it back to the power grid in the evening as the sun goes down but hot weather keeps electricity demand high because millions of Californians are running air conditioners.

“Think of it like an energy bank account,” said Elliott Mainzer, president and CEO of California Independent System Operator, an agency in Folsom that manages the state’s power grid. “In the middle of the day, you are making big deposits. At the end of the day, we withdraw from that account.”

Wave power

About 2 billion people, or about one quarter of the world's population, live within 100 km of the coast.  So wave power could be a significant source of electricity.     Because it can be attached to existing structures such as piers and harbours, it would be cheap. Most likely not that useful for large cities (they wouldn't have a long enough coastline) it would be a handy source of electricity for smaller coastal communities.  However, because it would be quite uncorrelated to solar, and pro'bly not that correlated to wind (waves can be driven by storms hundreds of kilometres away), adding electricity from wave power to a grid would reduce the variability of the grid.  Output from distributed wave-power facilities along a continental coastline would produce output with a baseload profile, night and day, winter and summer.

Here is the website of Ecowave, which is pushing this technology, and the video below gives you a good idea of how it works.

De-carbonising electricity generation

1. We'll need both wind and solar, plus hydro, tidal, small hydro, and wave power, and any legacy nuclear.   The reason we'll need both wind and solar is that the wind blows at night, when the sun isn't shining, and also that they are negatively correlated.  In summer in high latitudes, the wind drops off, but solar is surprisingly strong.  In winter, the sun in high latitudes is dim, but the winds tend to be strong.  Together, wind and solar can produce much less variable output than either on its own, except in the tropics.
2. We'll need 4 hours of storage.  4 hours will be enough to handle the morning and evening peaks in demand, and to do some short-term smoothing of the random fluctuations in wind, though geographically diversified wind farms will help with this.  But 4 hours will not be enough to take wind and solar to more than 90% of total generation.  We'll need long-term storage for that.
3. We'll have built-in generation overcapacity.  Remember, that wind and solar variability can mean not just too little generation but also too much.  Up to now, when it's potentially too much, the grid operators curtail output of wind and commercial solar farms.  They're also getting the ability to curtail output of rooftop solar too, in many locations.  In future, this output will not be lost but used to generate green hydrogen.
4.  Storing hydrogen is hard.  Its atoms are very small and easily escape through the interstices between larger atoms, meaning the using hydrogen for seasonal storage will be much less effective than using methane.  It also makes pipelines brittle.  Green methane can be made from hydrogen using the Sabatier method, with a small additional loss of energy.  Methane is already routinely stored for months with minimal losses; there are already methane (natural gas) grids in most mid- to high-latitude developed countries, where seasonal storage will be needed; gas peaking plants will not need to be retro-fitted to handle hydrogen; methane is much easier to store and transport than hydrogen; and it can be used for heating, though electric heat pumps may be cheaper and more efficient.
5. It's possible, though I am not convinced, that we will need some small percentage (10- 20%) of nuclear in the grid.  But we are a long way from 80% wind and solar penetration in most global grids--the most recent data have the global average at 10%.  Setting aside legacy nuclear, new nuclear, if it happens, will tend to be smaller plants, because the giants are just so expensive.  I've talked about SMRs, micro nuclear and the great potential for hydrogen-boron fusion reactors, but these are all at least 5 to 10 years away from them being successfully deployed.
6. Micro-hydro, tidal power, wave power and electricity generated from incinerating/gasifying rubbish will all be handy additions to the grid, because they  are uncorrelated with wind and solar.  Even waves, which are driven by wind, can be created by winds hundreds of kilometres away.

OK, how does the actual transition happen?

1. We could leave it to the market.  Wind and solar are much cheaper than new coal and gas, and comparable to existing coal and gas in most places on the globe.  As existing fossil fuel power stations age, they will be replaced by renewables plus storage.  This will take decades, however, so, since we want to substantially reduce emissions from power generations as quickly as possible, we'll need to give this process a nudge.
2. We could set targets for renewables.  Each utility/electricity producer will be required to achieve an annual/quarterly percentage from renewables, rising steadily over time, aiming for 100% within a decade.   Those utilities which exceed this target will earn carbon credits, those utilities which don't reach this target will have to buy credits.  This carbon penalty will encourage utilities to build out more wind and solar farms, as well as other renewable supply, including nuclear.
3. We could run a reverse auction where individual power stations would offer to close down for a fee.  Let's say a decline of 10% a year in emissions from electricity generation is required.  Each year, the government would offer a lump sum payment to the power stations which would close down, choosing those with the lowest offers until the total reaches 10% for that year.  Conditions could be applied to any deals: redundancy payments to workers; requiring the output of the power station to be replaced with new "firmed" output from renewables; making sure the new wind and solar farms are located close to the communities where coal power stations are ceasing to operate.

Source: Our World in Data

Wave energy trial wraps up

From The ABC

A Melbourne-based company behind the country's first successful wave energy trial says it is unlikely to set up in Australia, thanks to a lack of political and financial support.

Wave Swell Energy chief executive Paul Geason said he was "delighted" with the results of the multi-million-dollar pilot project off the coast of King Island, and believed the technology would become an important part of future global electricity production.

However, Mr Geason said a lack of incentive from both state and national governments has meant the country will miss out on becoming home to the "world-leading" technology, adding the company would shop its designs on the international market.

"We are an Australian, a Tasmanian invention. Australia's an important market for us … we'd dearly love to set up here," he said.

"Ideally, Australia would become home to a world-leading manufacturing capability for these wave energy converters."

"But right now … there are other markets in the world that are further advanced. Frankly, it would be irresponsible for us not to participate in those opportunities."

In late 2020, Wave Swell Energy constructed a 1,000-tonne generator at Tasmania's Port of Bell Bay, with the aim of harnessing the relentless power of the Bass Strait near King Island.

The two-part structure, designed as a type of artificial blowhole, was then tugged for 40 hours over to waters near Grassy on King Island's east coast where it began harvesting electricity and feeding it into the local grid.

Its wave energy technology is based on the concept of an oscillating water column (OWC).

The OWC is an artificial blowhole consisting of a chamber that is open underneath the waterline. As waves pass through, the water rises and falls inside, forcing the air to pass by a turbine at the top of the chamber — this turbine generates electricity.

Electricity from the unit was delivered to shore by a subsea cable connected to King Island's 11-kilovolt distribution system.

After a year, the trial was declared a success, marking the first time in Australian history the chaos and power of the ocean had reliably generated electricity for homes.

It followed numerous failed projects including a wave generator that sank and rusted for seven years in South Australian waters, and a second generator made by the same company that sank near NSW's Port Kembla.

Only ever intended as a limited pilot run, the unit was decommissioned this week, kicking off with the complex task of floating the structure that has sat on the sea floor and towing it about 2 kilometres inshore.

"It's been sitting in that location on the seabed under its own weight for over two years now," Mr Geason said.

"It was important to be able to float the unit successfully … I can't tell you how my spirits were raised when we were informed by the local team it was floating. It was extraordinary."

He said the next step would be to build a 30-metre land bridge out to the unit, where a crew would spend the next three to four months disassembling and recycling all the components.

He said the electrical systems would be salvaged, while the concrete components would be crushed and used by King Island Council for road repairs.

"It was a pretty hectic couple of days," Mr Geason said, speaking on Tuesday evening.

"It's essentially a mobile power station that can be re-floated, so we're really excited to have proven that.

"When you think about the challenges in recycling solar … wind turbine blades … We also thought it was important to show that we could 100-per-cent recycle the kit."

Despite the success of the pilot in Australian waters, Mr Geason said the company would be setting its sights on the overseas market, meaning the technology is unlikely to be feeding Australian homes in the near future.

"The next step for us … it's really about scaling up, it's really about getting more units and bigger units into the water," he said.

He explained that while Australia's oceans were perfect for the technology, the political scene was not.

He said he had high hopes for the European market, where progressive policies and political funding made the market alluring for new energy technology.

A federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water spokesperson confirmed the government had contributed $4.03 million to the pilot.

The funding was part of a $63.8 billion commitment to 16 wave or marine energy projects worth $148 million in total.

The spokesperson said the government had also recently set aside $3 billion for renewables, including clean energy component manufacturing, but made no comment on the Wave Swell Energy generator seeking investment overseas.

Wave energy is unlikely to provide all our electricity, but it would be a useful addition, because it is more or less uncorrelated with other energy sources.  Waves can be created by winds a thousand kilometres away, so that even if the air is still, the wave energy generator will still produce power.

Will China build hundreds of new coal power stations?

From Carbon Brief

China’s 14th five-year plan (FYP), setting out its national goals for 2021-2025, will arguably be one of the world’s most important documents for global efforts to tackle climate change.

The overarching plan for economic and social development in the world’s largest emitter is to be finalised and approved in early 2021, followed by more detailed sectoral targets over the next year. A power sector plan can be expected around winter 2021-22.

Ahead of the FYP’s publication, powerful stakeholders, such as the network operator State Grid and industry body the China Electricity Council, are lobbying for targets that would allow hundreds of new coal-fired power stations to be built. And a recent update to the “traffic light system” for new coal-power construction signaled further relaxation of permitting.

This is all despite significant overcapacity in the sector, with more than half of coal-power firms already loss-making and with typical plants running at less than 50% of their capacity.

The push for more coal power also appears at odds with China’s climate goals, including a target to peak its CO2 emissions no later than 2030. To reach this goal, low-carbon sources will need to cover any increases in energy demand, meaning less need for additional electricity generation from coal.

As the country grapples with the coronavirus pandemic, however, controls on overcapacity may be vulnerable to the political priority of propping up economic growth. As a result, the restraints on another coal power boom are likely to be financial and economic, rather than regulatory.

China’s coal-power overcapacity dates back to the 12th FYP. This was formulated in the early 2010s as part of the largest economic stimulus programme in history, launched in response to the global financial crisis. It targeted a huge expansion in coal mining and coal-fired power generation.

Then, from 2014, the authority to approve new coal-fired power plants was transferred from the central government to the provincial level, in a drive to cut red tape.

Many local governments jumped at the opportunity to prop up [local] GDP and create demand for locally mined coal with new power projects, leading to around 210 projects with a total capacity of 169GW being rubber-stamped in less than a year.

China’s economic system is based on abundant and cheap capital being made available to the state-owned sector with little concern for economic viability, as long as the investments made are broadly aligned with the five-year plans.

This system can mobilise vast amounts of resources, but is prone to over-investment, as companies and local governments use capacity expansion to boost GDP and gain market share. The planning machinery limits overcapacity with control policies – with varying levels of success.

Many experts and industry bodies argue for a move away from top-down targets and controls, to investment driven by market forces. However, the spending needed to fuel a new stimulus program can only be mobilized if investment is directed at the behest of the state, rather than the market – as a rule, China does not fund stimulus with on-budget spending, but by directing state-owned enterprises and commercial banks to spend more. In these circumstances, lack of controls on capacity additions runs a high risk of over-investment.

While the planning machinery appears to lean towards another wave of coal-power expansion, the industry itself seems more cautious, given the current economic and institutional situation.

Moreover, CO2 emissions depend on coal consumption, not the amount of generating capacity. This means that even if there is a surge of new coal-plant construction, there is no guarantee that China’s coal-power CO2 emissions will rise.

China’s coal-fired capacity currently stands at around 1,050GW, so the targets being pushed by some imply a net increase of 150-250GW. At least 100GW of capacity built before 2000 can be expected to retire by 2030, putting the amount of new capacity being proposed at 250-350GW.

There is already 100GW of new coal power under construction, meaning that another 150-250GW of capacity would have to secure permits and financing and go into construction.

Yet even before the economic havoc wreaked by efforts to contain the coronavirus, Beijing was expected to freeze regulated electricity prices for the next year or two, to help the manufacturing industry and other economic sectors, but undermining the profitability of power generation.

Meanwhile, the annual operating hours of coal power are expected to decline further over time, due to competition from renewable energy and severe overcapacity of the whole system.

With coal plants averaging around 4,000 hours of operation per year, less than half of the 8,760 theoretical maximum, the profitability of major power companies is already extremely low. Last year saw the first bankruptcies in the sector, with pressure from wind and solar one of the key factors.

Electricity market reforms, due to be implemented over the next few years, make the profitability of new coal plants even lower and more uncertain, as the power system moves away from guaranteed operating hours and prices.

The need for capacity to meet peak demand will also be substantially reduced when cross-region transmission and flexibility increases, instead of every province building capacity as if it was an island. Many of the proposed capacity targets and projections appear to ignore these changes.

Chinese energy data published in late February made it clear that clean-energy investment will need to accelerate substantially to meet China’s climate goals. CO2 emissions increased for the third year in a row in 2019, by around 2%, and only 35% of the increase in energy demand was covered by low-carbon sources.

This share will have to reach 100% or more for emissions to peak and decline, especially as the focus on energy security limits the scope for switching from coal to gas and oil.

Taken together, the evidence points to multiple reasons why some of the major state-owned coal power developers are hesitant to commit to new coal. This is fundamentally different from the assumptions of the policymaking bodies and lobby groups mentioned above.

In a recent magazine interview [no longer online, but cached in summary], a researcher within China’s official thinktank, the Energy Research Institute (ERI), argued that new coal-power development should cease and that coal power should be phased out altogether by 2050. This interview appeared on Chinese social media site WeChat only a few hours before it disappeared, exposing the sensitivity of the issue.

China and coal are key to preventing global temperatures from rising 2 degrees C or more.

New coal capacity in China is trending lower (note that the chart shows gross new capacity not net—globally, net additions are close to zero)  However, there should prob'ly be no new capacity given how low current capacity utilisation is.  And since this year, and going forward, the cost of new-build solar has reached "grid parity", i.e.,  its cost is now below the wholesale price of a predominantly coal-powered grid, it makes no sense.   However, bureaucratic institutions like to do things the way they always have done.  But if China and the world are to cut emissions to zero by 2050, the rate at which new coal capacity is installed in China needs to fall faster than it is.

Most powerful tidal turbine ever starts generating

 

From The BBC

A tidal-powered turbine, which its makers say is the most powerful in the world, has started to generate electricity via the grid in Orkney. The Orbital O2 has the capacity to meet the annual electricity demand of 2,000 homes for the next 15 years.

In May, it was sailed out of Dundee, where it was assembled over 18 months.

The 680-tonne turbine is now anchored in the Fall of Warness where a subsea cable connects the 2MW offshore unit to the local onshore electricity network.

Orbital Marine Power said its first commercial turbine, which will be powered by the fast-flowing waters, is a "major milestone".

It is also providing power to an onshore electrolyser to generate green hydrogen.

The turbine's superstructure floats on the surface of the water, with rotors attached to its legs which extract energy from the passing tidal flow.

 

It is held on station by a four-point mooring system with each mooring chain having the strength to lift over 50 double decker buses.

Electricity is transferred from the turbine via a dynamic cable to the seabed and then through a static cable to the local onshore electricity network.

The company is now aiming to commercialise its technology in a move it says will deliver a jobs boost to coastal communities.

Mr Scott said: "We believe pioneering our vision in the UK can deliver on a broad spectrum of political initiatives across net zero, levelling up and building back better at the same time as demonstrating global leadership in the area of low-carbon innovation that is essential to creating a more sustainable future for the generations to come."

The construction of the O2 turbine was enabled by public lenders through the ethical investment platform, Abundance Investment.

It also received £3.4m from the Scottish government's Saltire Tidal Energy Challenge Fund.

Energy Secretary Michael Matheson said: "With our abundant natural resources, expertise and ambition, Scotland is ideally-placed to harness the enormous global market for marine energy whilst helping deliver a net-zero economy.

"The deployment of Orbital Marine Power's O2, the world's most powerful tidal turbine, is a proud moment for Scotland and a significant milestone in our journey to net zero."

On my calculations, this tidal generator will provide about 2% of Scotland's power, meaning that just 5 of these will provide 10% of Scotland's electricity.  Scotland uses roughly 10% of the UK's power, so 50 of these machines could provide 10% of the UK's electricity.   We can get to ±90% renewables in the grid, with around 4 hours of storage.   Larger percentages of wind and solar will require exponentially more storage, so the remaining 10% will need to come from more stable generation sources.  For now, that will likely be gas, but tidal power, wave power, and micro hydro, though each will be relatively small on their own, could fill the gap.  Tidal power is more expensive than wind because it is a relatively new technology.  But the question is: is it more expensive than the exponential jump in battery storage we'll need to get to 100% without it?  And is it more expensive than nuclear?

Pakistan pushes renewables, but ...

Tarbela Dam, Pakistan

 From Reuters.

Pakistan this week set in motion a plan to boost the share of its electric power that comes from renewables to 30% by 2030, up from about 4% today, government officials said.

“The targets in the newly announced policy are a 20% share of renewables in installed capacity of Pakistan’s power mix by 2025 and 30% by 2030,” said Syed Aqeel Hussain Jafry, policy director for the government’s Alternative Energy Development Board.

That will include mainly wind and solar power, but also geothermal, tidal, wave and biomass energy, he said.

With boosts in hydropower capacity expected as well, the shift could bring the share of clean energy in Pakistan’s electricity mix to 65% by 2030, said Nadeem Babar, head of a task force on energy reforms in Pakistan.

But the legislation leaves in place plans to build seven more coal-fired power plants as part of the second phase of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor project - something that could impede scale-up of renewable power, warned Zeeshan Ashfaq, a solar and wind energy developer in Pakistan.

“A coal pipeline of around 4,000-5,000 megawatts will not provide much space for renewables,” said Ashfaq, managing director of SOWITEC (Solar Wind Technology) Pakistan.

New investment in renewable energy is expected to come from private investors, with potential suppliers bidding in annual auctions and low-tariff proposals winning, said Babar, chair of the energy task force and now special assistant to the prime minister.

Jafry, of the alternative energy board, said the policy represented a significant shift from the past, when investors approached the government with individual projects.

One big potential roadblock to scaling renewables is the focus of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project on building new coal-fired power plants, Ashfaq said.

“Nearly 70% of generation capacity of CPEC power projects is coal fired. With CPEC coal-power projects, coal-fired generation capacity will increase from 3% in 2017 to 20% in 2025,” he said.

Achieving the country’s renewable energy aims will require rethinking those plans, he said.

But Babar said “pre-authorized fossil fuel projects under CPEC will continue execution - they will go into construction”.

That suggests Pakistan will continue with plans to build all seven new CPEC coal-fired power plants by 2024.

China has recently strongly objected to Pakistan's attempt to cancel some of the planned coal power stations.  This is unfortunate, to say the least, given that to meet even the 2 degree target of the Paris Agreement, no new coal power stations should be built anywhere.  

China should stop funding coal power stations in the rest of the world, not just because of the climate impact but also because these new power stations will certainly become stranded assets.  

The good news is that a system of reverse auctions will rapidly demonstrate just how much cheaper than coal wind and solar are, and will make the construction of new coal power stations much more awkward.  

Pakistan can easily integrate wind and solar into her grid because of the high percentage of electricity coming from hydro.

The concentrated solar power phoenix

A few years ago, concentrated solar power (CSP) looked as if it was going to be an immensely valuable resource to increase the share of renewables in the grid.   

CSP used mirrors to concentrate the rays of the sun on a central "receiver" which got so hot it melted sodium salts.  These molten salts (at ±600 C) could be used immediately to boil water to create steam and drive conventional turbines to generate electricity, or they could be stored to be used later, typically overnight.  The molten salts in their special reservoirs lost heat very slowly, so could be stored for days or even weeks.   

The cost of the CSP power station lay mostly in the mirror array and the receiver, not the storage, so adding storage was much cheaper than adding storage via batteries to solar panels is.  In principle, CSP could provide baseload power more cheaply than coal and much more cheaply than nuclear.   The only problem was ..... the storage tanks kept on cracking, leaking the molten salts and reducing or stopping output.  And so, the CSP dream ended.   

Except it didn't.

An Australian company, Vast Solar, developed storage tanks which were flexible enough not to crack, with a modular system which allowed bigger CSP plants.  I talked about it before, here.

Well, Vast Solar is going from strength to strength.  It's being listed on the NYSE, and has expanded its development pipeline to 3700 MW, with 230 MW of projects under development.

Now that the technology works efficiently, the potential to scale is dramatic. The total addressable market for CSP by 2050 will be between 700 and 1,800 gigawatts (GW), with a revenue potential of over $3.5 trillion, according to a top tier international management consulting firm. The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts deployment of up to 430 GW of new CSP capacity globally by 2050 for on-grid applications alone.

That leaves room for many players to succeed but Vast Solar is a first mover [and owns the copyright to the flexible tanks] – and [is] already getting a piece of the pie. The company has 230 megawatts of projects under development, with a total pipeline of 3.7 GW, as of February 2023.

Large governments around the world are firmly backing the business. Up to A$ 215 million of funding has been committed by the Australian and German governments.

Importantly, the technology is tried and true, with CSP v3.0 already piloted for over five years and de-risked through a grid-synchronized demonstration plant that’s operated for nearly three years. The modular tower modality and sodium-based heat transfer technology provide a design that increases reliability and efficiency, while reducing complexity, cost and construction time.

To accelerate deployments in the US, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is expected to materially improve project economics through the 30+% investment tax credit. The partnership between NETC and Vast Solar represents an attractive entry point for some of the most topical energy transition macro themes: dispatchable power, storage, process heat and green fuels.

Traditional storage solutions come with many compromises such as cost, safety and supply chain issues. CSP offers a variety of key features, including carbon-free, dispatchable power and heat, lower cost technology for sun-belt countries, highly efficient systems with minimal losses, integrated energy storage with thermal batteries that charge themselves with daylight, and a low-risk supply chain consisting primarily of glass and steel.

CSP solves two problems that wind and solar photovoltaics (PV) cannot. Wind and solar PV are intermittent generators. Adding battery storage allows wind and solar PV to be dispatched, but only with limited duration, at a high cost and with significant trade-offs. CSP provides efficient long-duration storage which makes it comparable to traditional fossil generation.

Decarbonizing manufacturing is challenging because many industrial processes require heat that can only be efficiently generated by burning fossil fuels. CSP can generate process heat equivalent to burning fossil fuels, allowing manufacturers to decarbonize.

Vast’s Modular Tower is a new and innovative approach to CSP that seeks to address the challenges facing conventional CSP. The Modular Tower utilizes molten sodium as its heat transfer fluid, which enables a modular tower design that unlocks benefits that collectively drive down costs and de-risk the operation.

These provide a variety of advantages, including reduced construction time, locational flexibility, lower operational risk through better thermal process control, higher operating temperatures delivering improved plant economics in both salt storage and turbine efficiency, and the ability to alter dispatch to meet changes in grid circumstances.

Additionally, modular towers offer a safer and cheaper way to conduct maintenance on a smaller tower and receiver, increasing the ability to meet customer requirements for both power and heat.

Turning to deployment goals, the company has a focus on several sunny regions, including stretches of North America, Europe/Middle East, APAC, Latin America, Central and South America, and Africa.

One proof point is Vast Solar’s 50-megawatt Mount Isa solar thermal plant, located in northern Queensland state, which is also a testament to the growing demand for renewable energy. The isolated mining community will benefit from the plant, which incorporates technology that allows heat from the sun to be stored for up to 16 hours.

[From Yahoo!Finance] 

Because CSP enables longer storage than batteries, it will play a key part in the renewable grid, and it will reduce the need for gas peaking.   The grid of the future will have wind, solar, CSP, and other lesser sources of green electricity (micro hydro, wave power, tidal power).  The greater the variety of generation sources, the more stable the output.

In addition, Vast Solar has also signed a LOI (Letter of intent) to build a green methanol plant co-located with its CSP plant at Port Augusta in South Australia.  Green methanol (CH₃OH) is much more useful than green hydrogen, because it can be stored and transported at room temperature.  See this article and this one about green methanol.  I wrote about methanol here, and you can read other pieces I wrote here. 

Methanol is another way of storing surplus electricity indefinitely.    So both these initiatives will make it easier to get to zero carbon.

Ukraine's secret weapon: solar

 From Climate Denial Crock of the week.   I highly recommend this blog.

I’ve been talking about clean, distributed energy as a national security strategy for years. See my interview with General Richard Zilmer conducted in 2019, below.

Washington Post:

Russian airstrikes on Ukraine’s power grid plunged many parts of the country into darkness last fall, but one water company was able to keep its pumps going. Its field of solar panels, installed as an environmentally friendly measure before the war, turned into a tool to resist the Kremlin’s attacks.

Now a growing number of Ukrainian hospitals, schools, police stations and other critical buildings are racing to install solar power ahead of what many expect will be another hard winter later this year.

A less carbon-intense, decentralized energy system is emerging as a key element of Ukraine’s reconstruction efforts. Seven months of Russian attacks on the energy grid have left it severely damaged. Ukrainian doctors, teachers and others have discovered that efforts to boost sustainability can also improve security by making it harder to knock power offline. Ukrainian policymakers, meanwhile, are setting ambitious clean energy goals, trying to shake off their prewar reputation as lagging on climate issues.

Ukrainian deputy energy minister Yaroslav Demchenkov said renewable energy, along with small modular nuclear reactors, are among the country’s priorities for its rebuilding effort. Both would help distribute power generation away from the heavily centralized system the country had before the war, making it more resilient in addition to lowering emissions.

 

 

Renewable advocates want solar power to be a sizable chunk of the new capacity. Although solar panels can’t easily rival the power generation of a nuclear plant, proponents say they are cheaper, faster to install and more useful as a quick solution to Ukraine’s immediate energy and security needs than nuclear power, which can take years to build and install.

If the efforts to spread renewable power are successful, advocates hope that they can speed Ukraine’s green future far faster than had been expected before the war. Some hope that installing solar panels might be the impetus for some Ukrainians to take even more actions to reduce their carbon footprint, strengthen their self-sufficiency and improve their ability to resist Russian attacks.

“It will be much more difficult to destroy this kind of decentralized system,” said Kostiantyn Krynytskyi, the head of the energy department at Ecoaction, a leading Ukrainian environmental organization. “You cannot bomb all the installations. And bringing self-sufficiency will help. We saw now what centralization in our energy system means.

Even though Ukraine recently approved resuming electricity exports to its neighboring countries — a sign that its ability to generate power has recovered, for now, from the wintertime bombardment on the energy system — the solar work still has intense urgency, officials say. Ukrainian and allied officials warn that the cold months later this yearcould be even harder than the winter that just ended, since the grid will be starting from a more damaged level than last year. Getting enough diesel to power all the backup generators is also a challenge.

“The situation in the energy sector is still very fragile,” Demchenkov said in an interview. “It’s a very important challenge for us right now, during this period of time, to have enough equipment and allow a fuel stock, because we have information that Russia will use winter as a weapon again. For us, it is really important to have the physical protection of energy facilities.”

The European Union has pledged to ship thousands of solar panels to Ukraine. Ukrainians are also hoping for help from the United States and elsewhere.

In the meantime, advocates hope the current solar installations can serve as examples that build interest in a greener future.

At a small hospital in the Kyiv suburb of Horenka, the medical staff learned the difficulty of operating without electricity in the first hours of the war last year. Horenka is next door to Hostomel, whose military airport was one of the first targets that Russian paratroopers attempted to capture. The town faced heavy Russian shelling. The hospital never closed its doors, but it lost power on the second day of the invasion and didn’t regain it for more than two months. Without power, its heating system partially failed. And then a shell landed on the street just outside the building, blowing out its windows and damaging the front facade.

Now the hospital has been rebuilt. This winter, along with much of Ukraine, it used diesel generators to keep going during blackouts. But diesel generators consume vast quantities of fuel, they are prone to breaking down, and their noise and fumes make them inconvenient for long-term use at places like hospitals. [If you are already using diesel, adding solar is a win-win: diesel becomes the back up, and you save money by installing solar]

Natalia Tsipura performs an ultrasound on a patient at a health clinic powered by solar energy in Horenka. (Ed Ram for The Washington Post)

Next winter, the medical personnel in Horenka hope to avoid them. In February, workers screwed solar panels onto its steeply pitched roof, completing a project that is expected to cover about half the hospital’s typical power needs — enough to ensure that critical equipment stays online even if the grid fails. A battery will extend the reach of the solar panels into the night. And an electric-powered heat pump can keep the hospital warm even if it gets cut again from the grid. The solar panels and battery cost $11,700 for a 12.6 kilowatt system — comparable in size to what might go on a house. [The average Ozzie house has about 7 kilowatts of solar panels]

“We need long-term solutions for such hospitals,” said Denys Tsutsaiev, who works for Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe in Kyiv and, along with Krynytskyi, helped organize the hospital’s solar project.

One of the first questions Tsutsaiev gets from foreigners, he said, is whether it makes sense to push forward with renewable projects at a time when Russia is still shelling the country. But, he said, that misunderstands the need.

“People are back,” he said. “People cannot live at the moment without hospitals. They can’t live without schools.”

Nor did he and others expect solar panels to become targets. Given the small scale of the projects, it would not make sense for Russian to use one of its expensive and scarce missiles to go after solar panels on roofs, he said.

“It’s much more expensive to hit it with a missile than for us to rebuild it if it’s damaged,” he said.

Large-scale renewable projects have proceeded despite the war, including a wind farm in the southern Mykolaiv region that just completed its first phase of construction in March.

The effort to expand solar power isn’t always straightforward. Winters in Ukraine can be long, and the country is far enough north — roughly the same latitude as southern Canada and the northern United States — that daylight hours get short in December and January. Solar advocates say the panels still generate enough electricity during those months to be useful.

Ukraine doesn’t have a net-metering law, which would allow owners of solar panels to sell their excess power back into the system, although the parliament is working on legislation and Demchenkov, the deputy energy minister, said he hoped it would be finalized by autumn.

German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck visited the hospital in Horenka last month to announce his government would offer $1.1 million toward eight similar solar pilot projects around Ukraine, and he urged German companies and philanthropies to follow suit. Ukrainian environmental organizations have identified dozens more hospitals, schools and public buildings where administrators would like to install solar panels or find other ways to be more self-sufficient.

The community where the municipal water utility installed solar panels already proved the value of renewable energy in a time of war, said Sakalyuk, who met with Habeck during his visit. After the power went out for more than a week across much of the southern Mykolaiv region late last year [i.e., mid-winter], the utility in the town of Voznesensk was able to keep water flowing even though most other activity ground to a halt. The waterworks had installed a 50 kilowatt solar power plant in 2020 as part of a green initiative.

“People have changed how they think about solar power,” Sakalyuk said. The resilience of the pumping station inspired a wave of new inquiries from businesses and homeowners who want their own solar panels, he said.

If the solar advocates are successful, they hope to make an impact that will last long beyond the war. Solar panels on schools, for instance, could make climate-friendly practices an ordinary part of children’s lives, said Anastasiia Vereshchynska, the international development manager at Energy Act for Ukraine, a group that installed solar panels on a school in the Kyiv suburb of Irpin late last year and has lined up 15 more projects this year across Ukraine.

“Our big goal is to change the culture in this country,” she said. “We want kids to be part of the sustainable development of Ukraine in the future, especially in the postwar period.”

This chart of Ukraine's solar resources comes from SolarGis

Dirt cheap solar + storage

Daily & weekly load shape in different seasons
Demand peaks between 3 and 5 on hot days, and is highest in summer
(Source)

From IEEFA:

U.S. utilities seeking new sources of peak power are turning to solar farms integrated with battery storage systems that save energy for later use, offsetting their reliance on conventional fossil fuel-fired generators, often at lower prices.

This trend is most apparent in Hawaii and the western U.S., where multiplying solar-plus-storage power purchase agreements, or PPAs, reflect a maturing class of competitively priced peak-power assets, according to an S&P Global Market Intelligence review of state regulatory filings, publicly available contracts and independent analysis.

Though project configurations and contract conditions vary, prices for large-scale solar farms coupled with big lithium-ion batteries, typically offering four hours of energy storage, have fallen to between $30/MWh and $40/MWh in several recent deals and contracts under negotiation.

Contracting activity for what one project developer, AES Corp., has called “PV peakers” has taken off in the southwestern U.S., for both PPAs and utility-owned projects.

“These types of arrangements are repeatable…despite people telling me storage was not cost-effective yet,” Monterey Bay Community Power CEO Tom Habashi said in an interview. The competitively priced projects help reduce the public agency’s exposure to expensive short-term peak-power purchases, he added, and the energy storage component represents less than $10/MWh of the total contract price.

[Read more here]

4 hours of storage for $10/MWh?   Very cheap.  And way below other estimates.  That would imply $30/MWh for 12 hours of storage, enough to take us to 90% renewables, if the grid is a mixture of wind and solar (wind blows at night when it's dark, solar peaks during the day when demand peaks, so the average requires less storage than either individually)  The remaining 10% could be hydro, legacy nuclear, biomass, wave power or some combination of these.  And there will likely be a need for seasonal storage, though for much of the US (for example) demand peaks in summer/hot days, when solar is also producing peak output.  By comparison, the average total cost of new coal is $102/MWh, and the average operating cost of existing coal is $36.

China still aggressively expanding coal power

From The South China Morning Post

China’s aggressive expansion of coal power projects last year set back global efforts to phase out existing plants, which is crucial in the fight against climate change, according to a new study.

Coal-powered capacity in operation in developed and developing countries fell in 2022 as existing plants were retired and proposed projects were cancelled, except in China where new projects are coming up as local governments heed Beijing’s call to ensure energy security.

New coal capacity under development in China increased 38 per cent to 366 gigawatts (GW) last year, while it decreased 20 per cent elsewhere, which drove global projects under development to 537GW, up 12 per cent after hitting a record low in 2021, according to the annual survey released on Thursday by San Francisco-based Global Energy Monitor (GEM) and 12 other climate non-profit organisations.

Globally, 45.5GW of coal capacity was commissioned in 2022, with nearly 60 per cent coming from China, according to the report. And although 26GW of coal capacity was retired globally last year, the world’s coal-powered fleet grew by 19.5GW, an increase of less than 1 per cent compared with 2021.

“The more new coal projects come online, the steeper the cuts and commitments need to be in the future,” said Flora Champenois, lead author of the report and project manager for GEM’s global coal plant tracker. “At this rate, the transition away from existing and new coal isn’t happening fast enough to avoid climate chaos.”

The GEM report came as the United Nations’ climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warned in its latest report last month that current plans and pace of climate actions are insufficient to meet the Paris climate agreement of limiting global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century

China’s aggressive expansion of coal power projects last year set back global efforts to phase out existing plants, which is crucial in the fight against climate change, according to a new study.

Coal-powered capacity in operation in developed and developing countries fell in 2022 as existing plants were retired and proposed projects were cancelled, except in China where new projects are coming up as local governments heed Beijing’s call to ensure energy security.

New coal capacity under development in China increased 38 per cent to 366 gigawatts (GW) last year, while it decreased 20 per cent elsewhere, which drove global projects under development to 537GW, up 12 per cent after hitting a record low in 2021, according to the annual survey released on Thursday by San Francisco-based Global Energy Monitor (GEM) and 12 other climate non-profit organisations.

Globally, 45.5GW of coal capacity was commissioned in 2022, with nearly 60 per cent coming from China, according to the report. And although 26GW of coal capacity was retired globally last year, the world’s coal-powered fleet grew by 19.5GW, an increase of less than 1 per cent compared with 2021.

“The more new coal projects come online, the steeper the cuts and commitments need to be in the future,” said Flora Champenois, lead author of the report and project manager for GEM’s global coal plant tracker. “At this rate, the transition away from existing and new coal isn’t happening fast enough to avoid climate chaos.”

The GEM report came as the United Nations’ climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warned in its latest report last month that current plans and pace of climate actions are insufficient to meet the Paris climate agreement of limiting global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century.

In an “Acceleration Agenda” released along with the IPCC report, the UN urged that all existing coal plants must be retired by 2030 in the world’s richest countries, and by 2040 everywhere, and there is no room for any new coal plants.

To meet the UN’s requirement of phasing out coal power by 2040, the pace of retiring coal fleet needs to move four and half times faster than last year, which means retiring an average of 117GW per year, according to GEM.

OECD countries need to retire an average of 60GW of coal power each year to meet their 2030 phase-out deadline, and for non-OECD countries, 91GW each year for their 2040 deadline. For the 537GW of coal capacity under construction and consideration, the required pace of retirement would have to be even steeper, the report said.

The report also raised the alarm over China’s rapid coal power expansion, which could single-handedly reverse progress being made across the rest of the world on coal plant retirements.

China, the world’s largest coal producer and consumer, has embarked on a rapid expansion of its coal fleet since an initial wave of power outages closed factories and homes across half the country in 2021. A drought-induced power shortage in China’s hydro-rich regions such as Sichuan province last year further prompted officials in Beijing to order provincial authorities to ramp up coal production to ensure power security.

Although the country has committed to phase down coal use from 2026 to reach its 2060 carbon neutrality goal, coal is likely to remain at the core of China’s energy infrastructure to ensure stable power supply, former premier Li Keqiang signalled in a speech at the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress last month.

China curbing the use of coal is crucial to the global fight against climate change, analysts said.

“Outside China, the response to the energy crisis was dominated by investments in clean energy. However, that progress urgently needs to be accelerated,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, the lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

“China pulled in the opposite direction, sharply increasing planned coal power capacity, showing the need to deploy clean solutions and better enforcement of existing policies that should restrict new coal power projects,” he said.

Source: Statista
Global emissions continue to rise.  To have any chance of limiting the rise
in the global average temperature to 1.5 degrees C,
emissions need to start falling.