This week we received an email from Bill McKibben telling us about the latest renewable energy auction in the UK. When the smoke cleared and all final bids were counted, over 7 gigawatts of new offshore wind energy will be added to the national grid over the next 5 years at £44 per MWh. That is a quarter of what is today electricity from gas-fired thermal generation Carbon slip. In addition, 2.2 gigawatts (GW) of new solar capacity also won contracts for an average of £55 per MWh and offered 0.9 GW of new onshore wind at £50 per MWh.
Offshore wind leads in UK auction
Carbon slip estimates that the new renewables from this year’s auction will generate 42 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity per year, which will be enough to meet around 13% of current UK demand. energy analysts estimates that electricity from these new renewable sources will save consumers an estimated £1.5 billion a year by the end of this decade, when all new generating capacity comes online and will reduce the annual average energy bill by £58. The price of electricity in the UK has risen nearly 50% lately as the supply of methane from Russia has been interrupted by Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine and is expected to rise even more as winter approaches.
Kingsmill Bond, a City of London energy analyst who has worked for the Rocky Mountain Institute for a long time, tells Bill McKibben that the numbers are the best possible news for a continent that fears Vladimir Putin: “We’re all just doing this and doing it a little faster, and we don’t need Russian gas. It really isn’t that hard. You don’t have to go cap in hand to foreign dictators asking for more gas. Just change your own policy regime to get these technologies online faster to get.”
Easier said than done. Many of the UK leaders competing to replace Boris The Clown as Prime Minister pledge to move away from the country’s embrace of clean renewable energy and start fracking again in the UK to unlock even more methane production. Clearly Johnson is not the only cuckoo clock in the British government.
The UK government has committed to 95% of the country’s electricity from low-carbon sources by 2030 and fully decarbonise the network by 2035. It also aims for “up to” 50 GW of offshore wind power by 2030, a figure that includes “up to” 5 GW of floating offshore projects. Floating solar is designed for installations further offshore in deeper water where wind speeds are more constant and predictable.
The nuclear option
The UK is building a new nuclear power plant known as: Hinkley C that will generate about 25 TWh of electricity per year when it comes into operation in 2026 – 10 years after construction starts. That electricity costs € 110 per MWh. The new renewable energy from this most recent auction will be online in less than 5 years, providing electricity at an average cost of around £41 per MWh. So let’s do the math, shall we? Half the cost in half the time versus nuclear. Which begs the question, why is Hinkley C being built at all?
The takeaway
The market for methane gas has been turned upside down this year since Russia decided to stop deliveries to much of Europe. Reactionaries are clamoring for more fracking, saying renewables are unreliable and taking too long to bring online. But fracking for new sources can also take years for the gas to hit the market. The transition to renewable energy should be faster because of the recent disruptions, not slower.
Thermal generation is a leading factor in making the earth hotter and hotter. Advocating for more of it is extremely shortsighted and borders on suicide. And yet reactionaries everywhere are embracing thermal regeneration because if it was good enough for their grandparents, it’s good enough for them. The big leveling factor is price. It’s hard to cling to something when it costs four times as much as the alternative. Ultimately, economics is perhaps the only instrument that can compensate for ideology. The US to take a page from UK renewable energy playbook and the sooner the better.
Jesse Jenkins of Princeton University tells Bill McKibben that if the US can make offshore wind as cheaply as the UK has done onshore, “it opens up enormous resource potential in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states, close to demand centers, that would be an alternative to expanding transmission to reach onshore wind in the Midwest or solar in the Southeast, which is currently the cheapest option for places like its home state of New Jersey.The opportunity is up for grabs. seize the day!
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