ARUP Scenarios: Renewables 'could provide 35% of energy capacity by 2020'

A new report by Arup for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) suggests there is huge potential to expand the use of renewable energy technology across the country.

The research looks at three scenarios for the future operation of renewables – low, medium and high – based on the maximum capacity that could be built per year between now and 2030.

The study looks at a range of technologies including wind, solar, hydro, biomass, geothermal and energy from waste, but does not highlight the benefits of one particular renewable technology.

Arup said that it will be up to government, industry and the public to decide how to overcome the barriers to greater use including planning issues and the costs of connection to the grid.

The study provides a detailed picture of generation costs and deployment potential for a wide range of technologies.

Catalina Turcu, UCL
17 June 2011

2011 NESS Part 1 – The 10th Nordic Environmental Social Science Conference, Stockholm

Climate change and the story of two planets

Two planets meet in outer space. One is a beautiful blue marble planet, while the other is a very sad planet, in a poor shape.  The beautiful blue planet asks the other:

-          What ‘on Earth’ has happened to you?

The other says wearily:

-          I’ve got Homo Sapiens!

The beautiful blue marble planet answers back:

-          Don’t worry it will pass quickly!

by Johan Rockstrom, Stockholm Resilience Centre and Stockholm Environment Institute

Catalina Turcu, UCL

17 June 2011

Carbon Capture and Storage event at UCL

You might be interested in the following:

IEEP in collaboration with the Energy Research Centre in the
Netherlands, Cambridge University, the Tyndall Centre, the Fraunhofer
Institute, and CIEMAT are organizing a workshop investigating the public
perception of carbon capture and storage. The conference will be held at the University College of London on June 23rd . For more information, please see:
www.communicationnearco2.eu
or contact Richard Foulsham on:
t. +44 (0)207 679 1511
e. r.foulsham@ucl.ac.uk

Yvonne Rydin

Bavarian Renewables!

Just back from one week holiday to Bavaria, in Germany! I was really impressed by the amount of solar panels (both PV and thermal) pepper-potted in the Bavarian landscape - they were everywhere and sometimes covering HUGE areas!!! - on houses, sheds or temporary roofs, everywhere! Almost every house in certain towns had solar panels on them - and in considerable quantities - and they all FED IN! We also came across two or three really big solar farms (near Wurzburg and Nurnberg from what I remember), big plastic containers for biofuels (usually adjacent to bigger farms) and many wind turbines. However, I couldn't notice the same 'activity' in bigger towns or cities. It seemed to me that the 'renewables deployment' was considerably more advanced in rural and semi-urban areas than in urban areas. Why?

The farmer we stayed with explained that the government has very strong financial incentives in place for solar energy generation: the unit of generated solar electricity was almost double the price of traditional energy. In addition, farmers were offered a 20-year deal during which the 'double' price was fixed and on average the first 10 years paid for the investment while the next 10 made a healthy profit for the farmer. He thought (and this is interesting for the CLUES project) that it is more difficult to make it profitable or apply the same scale of deployment to urban areas where roofs were smaller and more compact, or it might prove difficult to agree a deal in multi-occupancy buildings (where more than one household lived under the same roof) where homeowners had to agree a common ground. He also told us that the wind turbines were mainly the enterprise of energy companies and were somehow unpopular with the general public because of altering the landscape (heard it before!) and that many farms were generating biofuel!

Catalina Turcu, UCL
6 June 2011