Dave Elliott:The UK’s Autumn Budget may have backed Electric Vehicles, but it wasn’t too helpful in terms of providing extra support for the green electricity they ought to use, if we want carbon emissions to be reduced. Tucked away in the Budget details was a plan for replacing the Levy Control Framework, which caps spending on green energy projects, with a new ‘Control of Carbon Levies’ system. It will cover the Renewables Obligation (RO), Feed-in Tariffs (FiTs) and the Contracts for Difference (CfD) systems as before, but the bad news is that, to keep future costs down, on the basis of current forecasts, ‘there will be no new low carbon electricity levies until 2025’. If on-shore wind and PV were put back fully on board, then, along with more offshore wind, the UK could be on the way to getting at least 50% of its power from renewables in the next decade, and possibly much more later. The UK may be out of it, but a 61% EU-wide target has been suggested as possible for 2030, up from the 49% planned. Looking further ahead, Germany’s Energy Watch Group and Finland’s LUT (Lappeenranta University of Technology) have produced ‘100% renewable power by 2050’ scenarios for 9 global regions and some countries within them, including a 100% renewables scenario for the UK/Ireland. In the latter, wind energy, on and offshore, increasingly drives most of the system.
Environmental Research Web 25th Nov 2017 read more »
In one of the fastest and most astonishing turnarounds in the history of energy, building and running new renewable energy is now cheaper than just running existing coal and nuclear plants in many areas. A widely-used yearly benchmarking study — the Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis (LCOE) from the financial firm Lazard Ltd. — reached this stunning conclusion: In many regions “the full-lifecycle costs of building and operating renewables-based projects have dropped below the operating costs alone of conventional generation technologies such as coal or nuclear.”
Think Progress 20th Nov 2017 read more »
