Weekend press round-up: Renewables prove a shining success during pandemic

In our latest review of sector coverage across the national newspapers, Ed Miliband sets out Labour’s vision for a green recovery from coronavirus; the success of UK renewables during lockdown is celebrated; BP boss Bernard Looney explains why the pandemic has strengthened his net-zero ambitions and James Dyson reveals his “huge sadness and disappointment” at abandoning his electric vehicle plan - after spending £500 million.

UK renewables prove a shining success during pandemic

At a time when huge swaths of the UK economy are suffering from the coronavirus downturn, one sector is having a relatively good crisis: renewable energy.

During the past month, records for clean energy have been broken repeatedly, as the combination of ample sun and wind, and low electricity demand has led to an unprecedented level of use of renewable power in the UK.

“We’ve been enjoying it,” said Steve Riley, chief executive of clean energy company Cubico, which owns 3.3GW of renewable assets, including 300MW in the UK. “We’ve had tremendous weather these last few weeks . . . the energy created and sold has been more than expected.”

A new record for sun power was set in April — with solar farms powering nearly 30 per cent of the grid at their peak, due to bright weather and low pollution.

The UK is also in the midst of setting a new record for the longest period the grid has ever operated without coal — 34 days as of May 14 and counting.

A big drop in electricity demand since lockdown started in March has pushed some traditional power plants off the grid entirely, but wind and solar have kept servicing the need as they have preferential access to the grid.

They accounted for nearly 30 per cent of power generation over the past two months, compared with 23 per cent of generation for the same period last year, according to data from Drax Electric Insights.

These conditions have created an unexpected glimpse of what the UK grid will look like in future as more clean energy comes online, according to National Grid.

“We have been planning for operational conditions like those we see at the moment . . . however, the lockdown has temporarily accelerated these conditions by several years,” said Roisin Quinn, head of control at National Grid Electricity System Operator.

In a sign of the unusual circumstances, National Grid Electricity System Operator recently took a nuclear reactor partially offline to maintain grid stability, paying EDF Energy to reduce output at its Sizewell B nuclear reactor.

“It is definitely an eye-popping moment for the energy business,” said Björn Ullbro, vice-president at Wartsila Energy Business, a Finnish infrastructure company with UK operations. “This is a level of renewable power, as a share of the total, that we were expecting maybe in 10 years’ time — and all of the sudden it is accelerating.”

Demand for electricity in the UK has dropped 14 per cent in the past month, while prices are 40 per cent lower, on average, than the same period in 2019.

Although low power prices typically hurt power producers, most UK wind and solar farms are protected from the volatility of the market price by subsidies or offtake agreements that guarantee a certain price.

“Power prices have come down significantly, and we are seeing those effects across market,” said Michael Bonte-Friedheim, chief executive of NextEnergy, one of the largest owners of solar power in Europe. The company has 720MW of solar operating in the UK and a further 2,000MW under development there.

However, Mr Bonte-Friedheim added that revenues had increased from across NextEnergy’s European assets this spring due to the sunny weather, as most of their solar providers sell their power through subsidised contracts.

The company is still pressing ahead with construction plans, announcing last week that it had secured funding for two large, unsubsidised plants in the UK.

The Covid-19 lockdown has, nonetheless, brought logistical challenges for new wind and solar projects in the UK — with delays in construction and in approvals, with supply chain challenges and higher financing costs.

The Solar Trade Association, which had been expecting 1GW of new solar construction this year, said some of that was likely to be pushed back.

The bit of the industry that is installing new systems has faced delays. A lot of the industry has had to pause,” said Chris Hewett, chief executive.

“It’s been an unprecedented challenge across the economy and energy sector, and I think renewable energy has held up pretty well,” said Nina Skorupska, head of the Renewable Energy Association. She pointed out that biomass power plants, which rely on wood pellets often shipped from overseas, have suffered from recent supply chain disruptions, while wind and solar plans have continued to produce power because they do not require a fuel supply.

“The tricky elements will be around the roles of the regulators, and local authorities, in being able to give timely assurance on planning, and various regulatory permissions,” she added.

FT Weekend

Labour to plan green economic rescue from coronavirus crisis

Labour is drawing up ambitious proposals to rescue the post-coronavirus economy with a radical green recovery plan focused on helping young people who lose their jobs by retraining them in green industries.

Seeking to seize the initiative on the country’s future direction once the pandemic abates, Ed Miliband, the shadow business secretary, has called for the plans to include creating a “zero-carbon army of young people” doing work such as planting trees, insulating buildings and working on green technologies.

Miliband told the Guardian that the combination of the economic damage caused by the virus and the imperative to tackle issues such as the climate emergency and pollution required ambition on the scale of Clement Attlee’s postwar Labour government.

“It’s a contemporary equivalent of what happened after 1945,” Miliband said. “It’s never too early to start thinking about the future, to think about what kind of world we want to build as we emerge from this crisis. I think we owe it to have a sort of reassessment of what really matters in our society, and how we build something better for the future.”

Under a timetable coordinated by Miliband and the shadow chancellor, Anneliese Dodds, Labour will this week start a rapid consultation with businesses, workers, unions and others on how a green recovery could happen. Proposals will then be put to the government.

“I think we should be aiming for the most ambitious climate recovery plan in the world,” Miliband said. “That should be nothing less than the government’s ambition. The old argument that you can have economic success or environmental care is just completely wrong.”

Miliband predicted that such an approach would be welcomed by a population already living through a period of significant change, and where many people had welcomed side-effects of the lockdown such as better air quality.

The fact that people had grown used to seeing ministers defer to scientists on coronavirus meant they might now expect the same approach on the climate emergency, Miliband argued.

“I do think that there’s a public mood about this,” he said. “Yes, people want to get out of lockdown as soon as it is safe to do so, but also, having been through what they’ve been through, they want something better.

“We need a new deal for our healthcare workers and essential workers, obviously. But we also need a new deal around the quality of people’s lives. That’s what this is about.”

The plans would build on elements of Labour’s “green industrial revolution” plan, put together under Jeremy Corbyn, which calls for a zero-carbon economy by 2030, but with an urgency and focus reflecting the post-Covid-19 economic situation.

Citing forecasts from the Resolution Foundation that more than 600,000 more young people could become unemployed this year because of coronavirus, Miliband said one policy should be a scheme in which the government would pay the wages of young workers in green industries for a period.

This could also involve retraining older people, Miliband said, saying that there should be an ambition to “leave no worker behind” in any transition towards a different economy.

He added: “But we know that the longer young people stay out of work, the more it blights their future prospects. We need a sort of zero-carbon army of young people doing the things that we know we need to do anyway.

“My first priority would be to say to young people, ‘We’re going to find you fulfilling, decently paid work which is going to make a contribution to this absolutely vital cause that we face.’ I think that’s step one in the emergency.”

A lot of the plans could be adapted by particular regions, for example if there were areas such as the south-west of England where significant numbers of people had lost jobs in tourism and hospitality and needed retraining.

There had been concern among some parts of the party that the shadow cabinet had failed to highlight the benefits of a radical green recovery – and its job-creating capacity – in the initial stages of the coronavirus crisis.

However, Miliband said the initial focus had been on “the rescue phase” of coronavirus on the economy, such as scrutinising the furlough scheme, with planning for a subsequent “recovery and renewal phrase” starting now.

The Labour for a Green New Deal group welcomed Miliband’s announcement, but said a just green transition must be at the heart of the party’s economic policies. It called on Labour to push for public ownership of failing carbon-intensive industries.

“With the oil and aviation industries in freefall, Labour should be pushing now for climate bailouts, using public ownership to wind down air routes and fossil fuel extraction,” said the group’s Lauren Townsend. “Keir Starmer pledged to ‘hardwire the Green New Deal into everything we do’ – that has to mean taking on the big polluters.”

The Guardian

Surplus electricity from wind farms to make hydrogen for cars and buses

Surplus power from wind farms will be used to run a network of giant electrolysers to make hydrogen for vehicles, under plans drawn up by a green energy company.

The electrolysers will be linked to nearby offshore wind farms and split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen will initially be used in buses powered by fuel cells that emit only water, helping the UK achieve its climate change targets. It could also be used for fuel cells in trucks, cars, trains and ships. The scheme would stop the excess power being wasted, which increases household energy bills.

Most hydrogen used in the UK is made from natural gas, meaning it still contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. Ryse, the company planning to build the electrolysers, intends to overcome this problem by using power from wind farms when it is not needed by the grid.

Wind farms are sometimes paid to switch off because the grid cannot take their power. The cost of these “constraint payments” is rising and reached almost £140 million last year.

Ryse has submitted a planning application to build the UK’s biggest electrolyser at Herne Bay in Kent, capable of producing up to ten tonnes of hydrogen a day, enough to power 500 buses. If it is approved, the hydrogen will be sent to London to supply a new fleet of fuel cell buses.

Ryse is planning to build at least four more large electrolysers in Aberdeen, Northern Ireland, Runcorn and south Wales. Jo Bamford, chairman of Ryse and son of Lord Bamford, the billionaire owner of JCB diggers, also owns Wrightbus in Co Antrim, which is making the world’s first hydrogen-electric double-decker buses.

Mr Bamford dismissed concerns that compressed hydrogen posed an explosion risk, saying there were stringent safety regulations. About ten fuel cell buses have operated safely in London for more than a decade and there are about 200 fuel cell cars in the UK.

The potential uses for hydrogen as a replacement for fossil fuels are growing rapidly, with test flights due to begin in the UK this year of a hydrogen-powered six-seat plane. Trials are under way at Keele University of replacing up to 20 per cent of the natural gas in the campus pipe network with hydrogen to heat buildings.

A small electrolyser on Eday, one of the Orkney islands, already produces hydrogen from tidal and wind turbines. It is used in a fuel cell to power ships while they are docked at Kirkwall Harbour.

Electrolyser production will increase this year when ITM Power opens the world’s biggest factory making them, in Sheffield.

The company is working on a government-funded project looking at the feasibility of linking electrolysers to Hornsea, the world’s largest offshore wind farm off the Yorkshire coast.

The Times

Sir James Dyson’s electric car hoovers up £500m

Sir James Dyson may be the nation’s richest person but even his pockets were not deep enough to make it in the unforgiving electric car game.

The vacuum cleaner entrepreneur, who is worth £16.2 billion, according to The Sunday Times Rich List, spent £500 million on a failed attempt to compete with carmakers such as Tesla.

Sir James, 72, revealed his “huge sadness and disappointment” that a project to develop a seven-seater electric SUV had to be abandoned. The project was deemed “too risky” because of a struggle to make it cost effective, he told The Sunday Times.

The car needed to sell for £150,000 to break even. Dyson would have been competing with Tesla, which has spent $19 billion of investors’ money to develop its cars, as well as established carmakers who are willing to sell electric cars at a loss to allow them to meet European emissions rules. “We try things and they fail. Life isn’t easy,” Sir James, whose fortune rose by £3.6 billion last year, said.

He said that the electric car would have had a range of 600 miles on a single charge. The size of the battery resulted in a hefty weight — a prototype car weighs 2.6 tons and is five metres long, two metres wide and 1.7 metres high. Its wheels are bigger than on any production car on the market. The car was to have a top speed of 125 mph and could achieve 0-62mph in 4.8 seconds.

The battery Dyson developed for it could be sold to other carmakers.

Sunday Times

BP chief says Covid has deepened commitment to net-zero emissions

BP’s new chief executive said the impact of the coronavirus pandemic has deepened his commitment to shrinking the oil giant’s carbon footprint to zero.

Bernard Looney, who took the helm of the oil firm in February, said he was “more convinced than ever” that BP must embrace the energy transition following the collapse of global oil markets.

He told the Guardian that his commitment to steering BP towards its net-zero carbon ambitions, set out earlier this year, is “deeper” due to the impact of the Covid-19 outbreak.

“I am more convinced than ever that this is the right thing to do, and we need to crack on with it,” he said. “The pandemic only adds to the challenge that already exists for oil in the medium to long term.”

Some energy economists believe demand for oil may never recover to its levels before the pandemic if changes to business travel and commuting remain after the lockdown ends. This raises serious questions over the business models of major oil companies, which are already under pressure due to tougher climate action and the rise of renewable energy.

“We’re all living and working differently right now. Not all of that will stick, but some of it will stick for sure. The question I have is whether consumers will consume less, and I think there is a possibility that they will,” Looney said.

The world’s oil demand has fallen to 25-year lows following the outbreak of Covid-19, which has severely limited demand for transport fuels, causing global oil prices to fall by two-thirds. The oil market crisis has wiped billions from major oil companies, including BP which reported a loss for the first quarter of this year.

“I think this will remind people of the fragility of the ecosystem that we work in; people are looking up at the skies and seeing less pollution, and I do hope that there will be an even greater appreciation for nature as we move forward, which should keep the climate at the forefront of public debate,” he added.

Looney began his tenure as BP boss by promising that the oil company would invest more in clean energy and less in fossil fuels over the next three decades as part of an ambition to become a carbon neutral business by 2050. The plan will use carbon offsets, such as tree-planting and emissions capture technology, to mitigate the fossil fuels it will continue to produce by the middle of the century.

“Do the near-term issues cause us to be able to invest a little less than I would have liked in these next couple of years? Possibly,” he said. “But I do believe that we will remain true to what we said on 12 February; that over time, we will invest more into non-carbon businesses and less into hydrocarbon businesses.”

The pressure facing oil producers has increased as investors begin to turn their backs on fossil fuels in favour of green energy, which is cheaper and offers more predictable returns.

This year, US oil prices plunged below zero for the first time, while BP’s solar energy business, Lightsource, struck new US solar power contracts totaling 400MW, Looney said, which underlines the resilience of the business.

“This is a sector which continues to attract investment and I think that’s because it is what society wants,” Looney said. “These are the reasons why my commitment [to net zero] remains as deep, if not deeper than it has been.”

The Guardian

Scottish eco warrior Chris Stark fights the battle from his bedroom

Chris Stark is trying to save the world from his bedroom. Each day, once the children — Chloe, 8, and Arthur, 5 — are up and safely in the care of his wife, Marianne, Stark returns to bed at the couple’s home in the leafy West End of Glasgow to calculate ways to prevent a climate- change catastrophe.

“We’ve been trying various rooms,” says Stark. “We started in the kitchen, but I’ve ended up in my bedroom, because it’s the only place I can lock the door and block off the sound of my howling kids. Zoom calls, which I’m on every day, are pretty unforgiving.”

As chief executive of the Committee on Climate Change, the independent organisation charged by parliament with holding the British government to account on greenhouse gas emissions, Stark is attempting to prevent a future global catastrophe in the middle of a global catastrophe. “On one hand, this is the most stimulating moment you can imagine — and simultaneously I’m having this totally odd feeling of wondering if I’ll ever go back to London.”

The Covid-19 pandemic and the global lockdown has cleared traffic from the roads, planes from the skies, introduced hundreds of millions of people to the pleasure and pain of teleconferencing on Zoom, Skype and FaceTime, and reintroduced city residents to an unfamiliar scent: unpolluted fresh air. Twitter and Instagram are crammed with pictures of fish repopulating the canals of Venice or goats roaming small towns, to the point where a pastiche went viral: a picture of a cow nervously dipping a hoof into the frothy foam of a shingle beach and the caption: “The Earth is healing. Cows are returning to the sea.”

For years environmentalists have urged the public to fly less and reduce car journeys, and the coronavirus has appeared to have achieved their goal in just weeks, but at a staggering cost in lives, jobs, mental health and economic carnage. Yet, as Winston Churchill said, “never let a good crisis go to waste” — and Stark says “the question of the age” is how to use the circumstances in which we find ourselves to set out on a new, more sustainable path.

“We have pulled off — as a result of the toughest possible sanctions — an utterly remarkable thing in terms of carbon emissions. What we care about is the problem of greenhouse gas emissions. We know what causes them. It turns out that halting the economy causes emissions to drop like a stone.

“The interesting thing is that, while that is true, even in a moment as tough as this, it does almost nothing at all for climate change. The problem is that you have a chronic cumulative problem. It’s like water in a bath and, even this year, we are adding water to the bath. The CO2 in the atmosphere is being added to. We are still making climate change worse this year — we have just turned the tap down a bit.

“This doesn’t crack the problem. What you need is long-term structural change that guides those emissions down permanently. We will see those emissions rebound immediately as economic activity restarts, but there are interesting questions about what may or may not last after this period.”

Stark believes working from home will rise, commutes to London for business meetings will radically reduce, and international travel, for the foreseeable future, will be severely curtailed.

“In the middle of this lockdown, we have had a glimpse of a different type of society. There will be things in that that we remember and that we learn from.

‘First of all, on the experience, we are witnessing what it is to have genuinely clean air in cities. We are all appreciating the green spaces in cities for the first time in a long time — green spaces that are shrinking. This will have an impact.

“On remote working, we have been forced into a world where we have to work remotely if we are able to, and that will have an impact. I don’t think we will return to patterns of travel after this that are the same as they were pre-Covid.”

Stark believes environmental benefits gleaned from the pandemic are in danger of being lost in the recovery. Public transport, the cornerstone of environmental policy, is rendered less appealing in a prolonged age of social distancing.

“What lies ahead makes it more difficult to make the arguments for addressing the issues of climate change and making the investments we are talking about. It’s not just Scotland, it’s the whole of the world that has to make that transition.”

As a loyal Glaswegian, Stark was delighted that the UN’s Climate Change Conference (COP 26) would take place in the city. Although it has been rescheduled for next year, he believes it will be a great opportunity for the UK to display global leadership.

“A lot of people think we should turn over COP to an online meeting, but I don’t think it would work. For those big climate summits, I think there is no replacement for face-to-face meetings.”

The Observer

White House official urges Britain not to hand China control of its electricity

A senior US official has delivered a stark warning to Britain not to continue to let a Chinese state-run nuclear energy company control a large part of our electricity supply.

Dr Christopher Ford, the US State Department’s assistant secretary for non-proliferation and international security, warned that China General Nuclear (CGN) is closely linked to the Communist regime’s military. Any involvement in UK power generation would jeopardise our political independence for many decades, he said.

One of the company’s top engineers has previously been convicted and jailed in the US for running a spy network at the behest of Beijing. Speaking exclusively to The Mail on Sunday, Dr Ford said: ‘We are trying to discourage our friends and partners from engaging with a Chinese nuclear company that is known for such acts.’

In an appeal to the British Government – whose relationship with Washington has already been damaged by the decision to allow Huawei, another Chinese firm, into the UK’s telecoms network – he asks: ‘Would I make my critical infrastructure dependent on a company with that reputation? No, I’d look for an alternative if I could.’

It is highly unusual for a serving US official to intervene so forcefully about an ally’s policy decisions but it shows how seriously the Trump administration views the Chinese threat.

Earlier this year, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Huawei poses a ‘real risk’ and added that Washington was evaluating the consequences for intelligence sharing with London.

Dr Ford’s fears are echoed by many senior figures in Britain, including Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6.

He told The Mail on Sunday that if CGN was allowed a key role in building two vast nuclear power plants – at Sizewell in Suffolk and Bradwell in Essex – there would be a grave threat to national security.

An analysis by this newspaper shows that the Chinese could have total or partial control over more than a quarter of Britain’s electricity needs.

Dr Ford said this could result in ‘manipulation or coercion’, explaining: ‘China has not been shy about using economic levers as a political tool. Economic entanglements are being used for political purposes with greater frequency.’

He added that if Britain became dependent on CGN, China ‘could threaten to turn the switches on and off – and that can be a very powerful tool of influence.’

For his part, Sir Richard said: ‘Our whole relationship with China needs a total, strategic rethink. That includes everything that relates to critical national infrastructure.

‘We must put any decisions that involve letting China be part of our nuclear industry on hold.’

Mail on Sunday

Utility Week’s weekend press round-up is a curation of articles in the national newspapers relating to the energy and water sector. The views expressed are not those of Utility Week or Faversham House.