Weekend press round-up: Johnson urged to match Biden’s clean energy goals

In our latest review of sector coverage across the national newspapers, five energy companies are lobbying the prime minister to commit to a date for a net-zero power system. The impact of Covid on household bills is discussed as is the true carbon impact of the proliferation of data centres.

Johnson urged to match Biden’s clean energy goals

Five of the UK’s biggest energy companies are lobbying Boris Johnson to “match” US president-elect Joe Biden’s clean energy ambitions and set a deadline to slash emissions from Britain’s power system to “net zero”.

BP, Royal Dutch Shell, National Grid, SSE and Drax want the government to set the target ahead of the UN COP26 climate summit in Glasgow next year, following Mr Biden’s pledge during the US election campaign to decarbonise his country’s electricity system by 2035.

While some in the sector believe a similar target would be very ambitious for the UK, many analysts argue the debate will be more about how it is achieved and at what cost.

“There’s not a technical problem of getting to net zero, there’s a policy problem,” said Tom Burke, chair of the think-tank E3G.

National Grid has forecast that the power system could surpass net zero as early as 2030, although it has yet to release analysis on the costs of such a rapid decarbonisation. The companies are hoping for a consultation on the best date before next year’s Budget.

“The electricity sector will be the backbone of our net zero economy,” they wrote in a letter to the prime minister and cabinet ministers on Monday, pointing out that Britain’s actions against climate change so far had encouraged “similar international actions”.

“To build on these and continue UK leadership on electricity sector decarbonisation, we call on the UK to commit to a date for a net zero power system ahead of COP26, to match the commitment of the US president-elect’s clean energy plan.” The letter is also back by the Singapore-headquartered energy group Sembcorp.

Alistair Phillips-Davies, SSE’s chief executive, said a target would help “focus industry and investors’ minds on the job in hand”.

The Financial Times

Energy bills to rise £80 this winter – but no commuting means households are better off

Energy bills are set to rise over the winter but savings on commuting will offset the costs for “working-from-home” households.

With the second lockdown still in place and the regional tiered system about to take effect, families could see bills rise by as much as £80 in November and December alone, according to price comparison website Compare the Market.

Nearly half of all households are worried about how they will afford this additional cost, the comparison site’s research found.

However, for those working from home, extra energy costs over the next month will on average be outweighed by the savings made from not commuting to work.

According to comparison site Money.co.uk the annual mileage of road users has reduced from 8,000 miles to just 3,000 this year thanks to successive lockdowns and regional tier restrictions. Much of this reduced mileage would have come as a result of the country’s move to home working.

As a result, motorists on average can expect to save £742 this year on fuel costs, or £61 a month, Money.co.uk said.

This would leave the average working home £23 up in November after extra energy costs are taken into account, and £20 in December.

Commuters by train who refunded season tickets will also make savings. The average annual train ticket costs £2,605, according to Sainsbury’s Bank. If this was partially refunded in March for £1,953, this would represent savings of £162.75 a month.

This would outweigh the extra spend on energy by £124.75 in November and £121.75 in December.

Daily Telegraph

Nuclear looks to hydrogen in a bid to secure its future

At the Salzgitter Flachstahl steelworks in the south-east German city of Salzgitter, engineers have been installing the “world’s largest” high-temperature electrolyser as they try to make their mark on global efforts to cut carbon emissions.

By the end of 2022, the equipment is expected to have produced around 100 tonnes of hydrogen, to be piped into steelworks instead of hydrogen produced from natural gas, slashing carbon emissions.

The €5.5m EU-backed demonstration project is being watched by more than just the steel industry; nuclear bosses are also looking at the project for lessons as they consider different methods for producing hydrogen from their plants.

Making hydrogen at scale from nuclear plants is yet to be done. But the prospect is attracting growing attention amid pressure to develop lower carbon sources of energy, and as the nuclear industry seeks to head off doubters and secure its place in a rapidly evolving energy system.

“The nuclear sector over the last 12 to 18 months has really cottoned onto the prospect of hydrogen from nuclear,” says Michelle Davies, head of clean energy and sustainability at Eversheds Sutherland, the law firm. “I think the general consensus is that ‘blue hydrogen’ [from gas or gas with CCS] will be a temporary solution during the energy transition, so then the question is: where do you want to get ‘green hydrogen’ from?

“At a time of debate around the benefits and costs of large-scale nuclear and how that will fit into a future energy system that is moving towards greater flexibility and smaller-scale generation, hydrogen has in some ways come to the rescue of the nuclear sector, giving it further reason to exist.”

In the US, the Department of Energy is providing funding to help nuclear owners Exelon, Energy Harbor and Xcel Energy explore producing hydrogen. Officials fear 10pc of nuclear capacity could shut down over the decade due to competitive pressures including cheap gas.

They reckon ten nuclear reactors could produce about 2m tonnes of hydrogen per year (one-fifth of current US demand), which could be sold to local manufacturers, adding to the plants’ core role of providing clean electricity to the grid.

“This new revenue stream could also help build an economic case to keep the nation’s at-risk reactors up and running,” officials from the US Office of Nuclear Energy wrote in the summer.

Amid growing interest over the prospects for nuclear and hydrogen in the UK, a report by The Royal Society in October explored how future nuclear power stations could use excess heat and power to provide local heating systems, hydrogen and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (direct air capture). That would have the added benefit of making nuclear plants a more flexible source of energy, which is key when it is hoped they will support a growing proportion of intermittent sources of power, such as wind turbines and solar panels.

In recent weeks, ministers have announced up to £170m funding to help develop next-generation advanced modular reactors that could operate at 800 degrees centigrade, producing hydrogen more efficiently, as well as funding for small-modular reactors (SMRs), an emerging technology that is being developed by Rolls-Royce and others.

Tom Greatrex, chief executive of the Nuclear Industry Association, says interest in nuclear’s role beyond just feeding low-carbon power to the grid has increased in recent months as the “reality of the wider challenge” around eliminating carbon emissions starts to sink in.

“There is a lot to do and it is quite difficult,” he says. “There are all sorts of areas where, when we think about it, nuclear can make a contribution. There are not that many ways to produce hydrogen, so it becomes an obvious option.”

Paul Stein, chief technology officer for Rolls-Royce, says SMRs could also be particularly effective in developing synthetic fuels to replace fossil fuels in aviation.

“The first thing we have to do is we have to decarbonise the grid and increase grid capacity for electric vehicles,” he says. “So that in itself is a big challenge and a solid business case for SMRs. Once we have the base case done, SMRs are a brilliant unit of zero-carbon energy for a number of different applications, and export markets as well.”

As for hydrogen, he adds: “I think the amount we are going to need as we decarbonise is going to open up markets for a variety of different ways of producing it.

“Mankind’s ability to innovate is often under-estimated.”

Daily Telegraph

Silicon Valley’s dirty data centre secret: carbon

In September, workers in hard hats hauled a 40ft metal cylinder out of the waters off the Orkney Islands in northeast Scotland. These were not oil and gas engineers used to braving the North Sea — they were staff from Microsoft. With the help of marine specialists, the team pulled up from the seabed a data centre decorated in the American tech giant’s instantly recognisable logo.

Under a programme dubbed Project Natick, Microsoft wanted to assess whether data centres — big racks of servers — might operate more reliably underwater than on land, where the presence of humidity and oxygen corrodes components (the submerged cylinder was filled with dry nitrogen gas).

However, this was more than an exercise in efficiency. Microsoft, one of the world’s largest companies, also wanted to address a problem plaguing the image-conscious tech industry: its carbon footprint. Part of Microsoft’s aim was to assess whether submerged data centres use less energy than those on land. Servers generate heat while operating but work best at low temperatures, so land-based centres demand energy-guzzling cooling systems. However, the cold water 120ft below the sea’s surface allowed Microsoft to opt for the sort of energy-efficient heat-exchange plumbing more normally found on submarines. As a bonus, all Orkney’s electricity comes from wind and solar, making it the ideal location for the experiment. The centre had spent two years underwater.

Cindy Rose, Microsoft’s UK chief executive, said: “Creating solutions that are sustainable is critical for Microsoft, and Project Natick is a step towards our vision of data centres with their own sustainable power supply.”

Concern is mounting about the environmental impact of digital services, ranging from office-working tools to Netflix and the humble email. Though only a small part of the overall equation, estimates suggest that if each person in the UK sent one fewer email a day, it could cut the country’s carbon output by 16,000 tons a year — the equivalent of flying 80,000 people from London to Madrid.

Although the exact numbers are disputed, data centres are estimated to emit as much carbon as the entire airline industry — the traditional villain of the climate crisis. Vast amounts of energy are needed to power the thousands of servers stacked high in warehouses for companies such as Amazon and Facebook, and to run their hi-tech cooling systems.

Despite a push into renewable energy, many data centres are still powered by electricity generated from fossil fuels; preventing outages caused by unreliable power sources remains their number-one priority. A cluster of data centres in northern Virginia — often referred to as “data centre alley” because it hosts 70% of the world’s internet traffic — are largely powered by electricity generated from fossil fuels because of a lack of renewable energy in the area. Nearly a third of the power is estimated to come from coal.

Dr Rabih Bashroush, global head of IT infrastructure adviser the Uptime Institute and a professor at the University of East London, said: “This reminds me of plastic bottles a few years ago. You think, ‘What [harm] could a plastic bottle do?’, but then you quickly realise that if there are seven billion people throwing them away, it could be a disaster for the environment. It’s the same thing with mobile and social media adoption.”

The Sunday Times

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.