Scotland’s largest offshore wind farm is to be officially opened by Prince Charles later.

The Beatrice Offshore Wind Farm, located about eight miles (13km) off the coast of Wick in the far north, can generate enough energy to power 450,000 homes.

The £2.65bn project, which involves 84 huge turbines, came fully online in May and achieved 588MW of electricity.

It is Scotland’s single largest source of renewable energy.

The development, construction and operation were led by SSE Renewables in a joint venture with Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Red Rock Power Limited.

Construction started in May 2016 and SSE said it was completed on time and £100m under budget.

Part of the project involved redeveloping buildings in Wick, the Caithness town where about 90 staff will look after the operations and maintenance of the wind farm over its 25-year lifespan.

Prince Charles, who is known in Scotland as the Duke of Rothesay, will visit the offices of Beatrice Offshore Windfarm Limited and SSE Renewables in Wick to mark the official opening.

The two harbour-front buildings used for the Wick base were originally designed by renowned Scottish architect Thomas Telford for use in the herring industry.

Thriving doesn’t quite cover it. New data released quietly late last week underscores the staggering pace of growth of renewable energy across Australia.

Nearly 3.5 gigawatts of large-scale clean energy projects were built in 2018. In capacity terms, this is more than twice the scale of Hazelwood, the giant Victorian brown coal plant that shut abruptly a couple of years ago, and it more than tripled the previous record for renewable energy installed in one year, set in 2017.

In generation terms, the amount of clean electricity being sent into Australian homes and businesses is expected to increase 36% this year, and should grow another 25% next year.

The Clean Energy Regulator, which released the report, says this makes Australia the global leader in per capita renewable energy deployment.

In an outcome considered near impossible four years ago, the country already has enough projects committed to meet the national 2020 renewable energy target, roughly equivalent to about 23% of electricity required. The regulator says Australia will go close to generating a level of clean power next year that the parliament legislated to avoid in 2015, after the Abbott government considered trying to abolish the 2020 target altogether before settling on reducing it by about a fifth.

With the target surpassed and the incentives associated with it no longer available for new developments, analysts say large clean energy plants are being built based more on commercial factors. While state targets are playing a role, notably in Victoria, the dramatic fall in the cost of clean energy has driven businesses to sign direct contracts with new renewable energy suppliers to avoid high market prices, particularly in New South Wales and Victoria.

Hugh Saddler, an energy consultant and honorary associate professor at ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy, says the pace of growth is equivalent to the electricity boom of the 1950s, when new coal and hydro plants transformed the electricity system. In a new report for the progressive thinktank the Australia Institute, he says the most populous state, NSW, doubled the power it received from large-scale wind and solar plants in just 14 months.

“There are just heaps of projects in the pipeline,” Saddler says. “NSW has lagged behind South Australia and Victoria for windfarms in particular, and Queensland has been even worse, but that has changed.”

He says the new renewable projects in NSW should comfortably fill the gap that will arise when the Liddell coal-fired plant shuts in 2022, a planned event deemed so potentially disastrous a year ago that the Coalition under Malcolm Turnbull attempted to put pressure on the plant’s owner, AGL, into reversing its decision.

The surge in clean generation is creating conditions that would have been unimaginable not so long ago. For a brief period last weekend, so much energy was being captured from the wind and sun, and demand for electricity use dropped so low, that the spot price for wholesale electricity simultaneously fell to $0 in each of the five eastern states connected through the national grid. At that moment, 44% of the electricity being used across the market was from a renewable source, compared with 26% across the week.

In terms of power bills, the zero price was mostly inconsequential. It was brief – most electricity is sold at long-term contract prices and the wholesale cost is only a fraction of what people are ultimately charged. But Tristan Edis, a director and analyst with consultants Green Energy Markets, says it was a significant moment for what it points to. “I was surprised it happened, but what it tells us is it could soon end up happening on days when demand is not low,” he says. “We are adding so much solar on top of existing solar at the moment. It is making a real difference in the middle of the day.”

The transformation under way is posing serious questions for regulators and generating companies. Coal-fired power plants, which still provide more than 60% of grid electricity, have traditionally been considered inflexible and capable of operating around the clock. Some black coal plants in NSW are being turned off during periods when it is not profitable to run them. Others are coming under increasing pressure as the amount of renewable generation increases. While the government now requires electricity generators to give three years’ notice before they shut a power plant down – an attempt to avoid a repeat of the abrupt closure of Hazelwood – analysts believe it is highly likely some will stop operating sooner than currently planned.

A big question for the clean energy industry is: can the pace of investment last? As Guardian Australia reported last year, conventional wisdom has been that clean energy investment and the pace of change in the system would fall off once the renewable energy target stopped driving new projects unless there was a new national policy to replace it. The federal government has no plans to introduce one, beyond a shortlist of projects it is considering underwriting but is yet to develop. State targets have generally been considered not enough to fill the void.

That remains the most popular view. The Clean Energy Regulator says investment after 2020 remains uncertain. But the Australian Electricity Market Operator last year found that even a business-as-usual path, including Victoria’s target of 50% renewables, was likely to lead to about 46% clean energy by 2030. Analyses had found that Australia could and would need to do more to play its part in achieving the Paris climate agreement target goal of limiting global heating to as close to 1.5C as possible.

Edis points out that some of the clean energy investment decisions now coming through were made when wholesale prices were high. As more generation comes on, supply outstrips demand and prices fall, there is less incentive to build unless a government policy requires it.

“To be honest, I expected the investment would have slowed a fair bit earlier,” Edis says. “My feeling is it should drop away over the next six months or so. Investors will then be looking for the next coal plant to cark it.”

Saddler is less certain. He sees roadblocks to further investment, including the challenge of connecting clean energy plants on greenfield sites to the grid and the need to “firm” variable renewable generation with increased between-state transmission cables and energy storage. But he says analysts and bureaucrats increasingly think some spending may continue in a way that was not expected a year ago.

“It’s really just the commonwealth that’s a brake on things,” he says. “The question now is: how significant a brake are they?”

On a sunny day, Jason Carney’s home in the Whites Creek area sticks out.

“These are the solar panels,” Carney said, pointing to his rooftop solar array that went online in November of last year. “For the day, it has made 20.8 kWh.”

As our sister station, WTVF, reports Carney is no stranger to solar; he’s been around the industry for years. He currently runs his own clean energy company, Energy Electives . Still, as he was getting final approval for the grid, the Nashville native noticed something unusual: he didn’t know any other families of color with solar grids.

“Just looking when I drive around in communities of color, I don’t see it,” he said. Carney even asked a worker giving approval to his solar array if he knew of any other black families with a rooftop grid. The answer, Carney said, was vague.

It’s not the first time Carney has felt alone. He said during his years in the solar industry, he’s usually the only person of color in the room.

“I’m the only African-American that’s certified to design in the TVA region,” Carney said. After years in the industry, he’s grown to know many of his colleagues, but he said at first it was intimidating.

So his new grid led to a new mission to use solar power set-ups to empower minority communities. Carney said that starts with education.

“It became apparent as we went out into the community that people didn’t know about solar,” he said. “In minority communities and communities of color where there’s wage disparities and all kinds of safety issues, things that you have to look far in advance to do are hard to pay attention to.”

Carney said that, in many cases, minority communities are on the front line of climate change. Locally, he cited flooding issues in the Bordeaux area and a landslide not far from his home earlier this year . Carney said that, along with financial incentives, are why those communities need to put a focus on renewable energy.

Carney put together plans for community solar arrays that could go into minority communities. His first project started outside Whites Creek High School, where he helped students create a solar array to help power the school. The effort, he said, was a chance to introduce minority youth to solar power, and an opportunity to show students of color that jobs in the renewable energy industry are possible.

“It was a student let project,” Carney said. “They picked the location, they talked to the contractors, they went to the codes office.”

And, earlier this year, the students flipped the switch on the high school solar grid.

“It lights me up,” Carney said when asked about his reaction to the students’ solar success. But Carney hopes that was just a first step in bringing solar power to more minority communities, and bringing more people of color into the solar industry.

Carney said there are several things that can be done on the local and state level to add incentives to residential solar arrays.

One of America’s oldest power companies is going carbon free

July 28, 2019 By News Team (Edit)

PSEG has relied on fossil fuels to keep the lights on for the past 116 years. Now, New Jersey’s largest and oldest power company is pledging to deliver carbon-free electricity to fight climate change.

The $30 billion utility provider announced Thursday that it’s on track to slash carbon emissions by 80% by 2046, compared with 2005 levels. And PSEG (PEG), which also serves more than a million customers on Long Island, is setting an ambitious goal of getting down to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

To get there, the power company is shutting down its coal plants, betting big on offshore wind and working hard to keep its existing nuclear plant alive. PSEG said it won’t build or acquire any new fossil-fueled power plants, including those running on dirt-cheap natural gas.

PSEG is joining a growing list of power companies going all-in on the clean energy revolution. The movement reflects the rapid decline in renewable energy costs and a growing push by households, businesses and state governments to respond to the threat of climate change.

“We believe climate change is real. There is this crescendo that’s building,” PSEG CEO Ralph Izzo told CNN Business.Izzo noted that PSEG’s main market, New Jersey, is a coastal state, making it vulnerable to the rising sea levels caused by climate change.”Climate change represents the pre-eminent challenge of our generation,” he wrote in a letter to stakeholders announcing the goals. “It’s far past time we moved beyond simply ‘heeding warnings’ to acting on them.”Last month, PSEG announced an agreement to sell its stake in a pair of coal plants in western Pennsylvania. The company plans to shut its final coal-powered unit, located in Connecticut, within 18 months.

‘The writing is on the wall’

The renewable energy movement has celebrated a series of recent milestones that demonstrate the momentum behind it.In April, the renewable energy sector narrowly surpassed the installed capacity of coal for the first time in history.Late last year, Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy (XEL), once a coal-first company, became the first largest American power company to set the challenging goal of delivering zero-carbon electricity by 2050.

The developments have come in the face of a concerted push by the Trump administration to prop up the coal industry byslashing environmental regulations and exploring controversial bailouts.”The writing is on the wall in terms of what’s going to happen in this energy transition,” said Luke Lewandowski, director of Americas Power & Renewable research at Wood Mackenzie. “Even though we have an administration that is trying to support the fossil fuels industry, most utilities understand it will be short-lived. It’s like a last gasp.”President Donald Trump has repeatedly promised to save coal jobs and in April claimed that windmills cause cancer — even though there is no evidence to support that.

States embrace clean energy

However, many US states have moved in the opposite direction of Washington.In March, New Mexico enacted a bold plan that aims to source half the state’s power from renewable energy by 2030. New Mexico plans to be 100% carbon-free by 2045. California and Hawaii have also passed 100% clean energy targets.In New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy released a blueprint last month to get the state to 100% clean energy by 2050.The centerpiece of that plan is taking advantage of New Jersey’s vast coastline by developing massive offshore wind facilities.Last month, New Jersey named Denmark’s Orsted as the winning developer to build an 1,100-megawatt wind project off the coast of Atlantic City. The project, dubbed Ocean Wind, is the state’s first large-scale offshore wind farm. PSEG has an option to be an equity investor in the wind farm, which is scheduled to be completed in 2024.

PSEG’s plan not to open new fossil fuels comes just after it recently expanded its footprint in that space, capitalizing on the abundance of natural gas in the United States. The company has finished three natural gas plants over the past year-and-a-half, but now it’s planning to shut down some of the less efficient gas plants.PSEG also supplies natural gas to customers in New Jersey, and it will continue that business. The carbon-free goal is for its power business.The goal of going carbon-free is hardly a slam dunk.The company said getting there “assumes advances in technology and public policy.”Izzo said that the “absence of a consistent national policy that recognizes the damage caused by carbon” has resulted in a less efficient system that varies state-by-state. He reiterated his call for the federal government to enact a carbon tax.”We’re hopeful that by putting a price on carbon and unleashing the power of the market place, these technologies will develop,” Izzo said.

Nuclear isn’t going away

In the meantime, PSEG’s is advocating for policymakers to preserve its two NJ nuclear plants, noting that they provide more than 90% of the state’s zero-carbon electricity and a third of its total power.”It would be crazy to think we could get an 80% reduction in carbon while our existing nuclear fleet retired,” Izzo said.PSEG is not, however, trying to open new nuclear facilities.Lewandowski, the Wood Mackenzie analyst, said that while nuclear is “clean-burning” and provides high-paying jobs, there are questions about safety and nuclear waste.”There is the risk of catastrophe,” Lewandowski said.Those risks have been brought back to the forefront by “Chernobyl,” the gripping Emmy-nominated HBO miniseries on the worst nuclear disaster in history. (HBO, like CNN, is owned by AT&T.)It’s also becoming expensive to maintain and refurbish existing nuclear plants, let alone build new ones.”Nuclear is an attractive piece of the puzzle, but it’s not as cost competitive,” Lewandowski said.

Finding cheap and practical ways of removing salt from seawater could potentially help some of the 844 million people worldwide without regular access to clean water – and scientists just found a new nanoscale method for doing just that.

Using a tiny disc made of super-hydrophilic filter paper, layered with carbon nanotubes for light absorption, the new technique runs on nothing but sunlight, but is able to remove almost 100 percent of the salt in the original liquid.

The new approach is based on a traditional method: heat water until it steams and capture that, leaving the salt and other impurities behind. To turn water into steam using energy from our Sun, one needs to use solar thermal materials to efficiently convert that energy into heat.

But if these materials are covered by salt crystals from the evaporating water, the whole thing can grind to a halt. The new method successfully addresses this problem by maintaining a steady rate of water evaporation as the salts are harvested and removed from the process, to avoid them reducing efficiency.

So, what we have here is a desalination method that’s cheap, practical, and effective. Because it’s powered by sunlight, devices using this technique could be particularly useful in places without reliable access to electricity.

“Our study results advance one step further towards the practical application of solar steam generation technology, demonstrating great potential in seawater desalination, resource recovery from wastewater, and zero liquid discharge,” says chemical engineer Xiwang Zhang, from Monash University in Australia.

“We hope this research can be the starting point for further research in energy-passive ways of providing clean and safe water to millions of people, illuminating environmental impact of waste and recovering resource from waste.”

The new system uses a 1 millimetre (0.04 inch) diameter cotton thread to transport salty water to the evaporation disc, where the pure water is trapped and the salts are pushed out towards the edges.

This is all powered by sunlight, and in tests the researchers measured light absorbance of over 94 percent across the entire solar spectrum – so it makes good use of whatever sunlight happens to be available.

As Zhang told New Atlas, the innovative new device is capable of producing 6-8 litres (or 1.6-2.1 gallons) of clean water per square metre (10.8 square feet) of surface area per day. Next, the scientists want to up that production rate.

It’s not the only interesting desalination approach we’ve seen lately; last year, a team from the US produced a hydrogel-based, solar-powered technique for removing salt from seawater that is powerful enough to work on water taken from the Dead Sea.

The challenge now is to scale up such methods to make them practical – both in terms of putting the systems in place and in terms of how much water they can process.

“Water security is the biggest challenge the world faces in the 21st century, especially as population grows and the effects of climate change take shape,” says Zhang. “Developing and under-resourced communities feel the effects of these factors the most.”

“Utilising solar energy for water treatment has been widely considered as one of the sustainable solutions towards addressing the scarcity of clean water in some communities, without sacrificing our environment or resources.”

What if we wanted to generate all the primary energy that the US uses for everything with wind generation? That’s all the energy the US uses for everything: industry, heating, cooling, shipping, Instagram, and driving to work? How many wind turbines would that take? How much of the US would be covered in big white pinwheels?

Obviously wind energy wouldn’t be the only form of primary energy in the US. Solar, hydro, geothermal, and biofuels will also play roles, with solar being at least equal to wind generation. But like the patch of sand in the Sahara covered in solar panels, it’s interesting and informative. No one is suggesting using wind or solar alone to generate all of the United States’ energy needs unless they are constructing a useful thought experiment such as this one or erecting a straw man to fire at with flamethrowers that tend to blow up in their hands.

What is primary energy? Well, the electricity coming out of our wall sockets is a mix of primary and secondary energy. The electricity that’s generated with renewables is primary energy. The electricity that’s generated from fossil fuels is secondary energy. Natural gas that we burn for heat or cooking is a primary energy source because we don’t do much to it except pump it and grade it. The gasoline and diesel that drives our cars and trucks is a secondary energy source, because it’s transformed extensively from the primary petroleum energy source. In general, it’s easy to say that the closer to primary energy we get, the more efficient energy use is because every step along the way has inefficiencies.

Let’s make some basic assumptions:

• We are going to replace all primary energy sources in the US.
• We are going to do it only with wind energy.
• We are only going to talk about the land that’s actually consumed by a wind farm, which is to say mostly the bases of the wind turbines. We can do lots of productive stuff with land right up to the base of the turbine, so it’s mostly irrelevant that they are spread out.
• We aren’t going to worry about grid balancing, as that’s going to be done in reality mostly by all the other forms of generation, continent scale HVDC and a bit of storage. What if, remember?

How much primary energy does the US use annually?

This energy flow chart from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is crucial to understanding this. A lot of people have a very mistaken idea of how much energy we have to replace, the 101.2 quads at the top. They do the equivalent of counting up all the boxes on the left side of this diagram and come up with a huge number. But the actual number is closer to the small box on the right. The large grey box above that is rejected energy, mostly in the form of waste heat from burning fossil fuels.

Actually useful energy is “only” 32.7 quads. A quad is to 1.055 × 10^18 joules or 1.055 exajoules. For context, a quad is equivalent to about 172 million barrels of oil. That’s what we really have to actually replace, about 35 exajoules.

Electricity generation from wind energy is vastly more efficient at being generated and at being used than fossil fuels. There are a lot fewer steps between generation and use, and moving it around is a lot more efficient. That’s a big part of the reason the future for all energy is electricity. Of course, electricity isn’t 100% efficient either. We take some losses for transmission, battery storage losses for EVs, waste heat from LEDs (much less than incandescents and fluorescents, but still) and the like. When it’s used as heat, it turns into heat very efficiently, so that’s a wash.

Let’s call it a 20% increase required to cover efficiency losses. That gets us to about 41.4 exajoules.

Of course, we don’t measure electrical generation in exajoules, but in terawatt-hours (TWh). There are about 278 TWh in an exajoule. That means we need to generate about 11,500 TWh from wind farms in a year.

Yeah, that’s a lot. New wind farms average about 40% capacity factors, meaning the ratio between the actually generated electricity in a year vs the amount they could make if they generated at full nameplate capacity every hour of the year. For comparison, the US coal fleet is running around 54%, nuclear is running around 90% and solar is running around 20% these days. Nothing generates its hypothetical maximum year over year.

So we need enough wind generation capacity, running at a 40% capacity factor to generate 11,500 TWh over the course of a year. To get that, we need 3.3 terawatts (TW) of wind generation capacity.

The average wind turbine installed in the US in 2018 was 2.6 megawatts (MW) in capacity. Using this average size as our baseline, we would need about 1.26 million of them.

That’s a lot, of course. The US consumes a great deal of energy every year.

But each wind turbine only takes up about a quarter acre of land at the base, so that’s only about 470 square miles of land that would actually have a wind turbine on it. The US is about 3.8 million square miles, so that’s only about 0.01% of the land mass. I think the US could afford that much. After all, it’s only a little bigger than Delaware.

US map of states courtesy of the National Parks Service

This is all hypothetical, of course. No grid can work on a single form of generation. We need a mix of generation sources and a bunch of ancillary services.

The US will end up with a continent-scale grid with lots of high voltage DC, a bunch of excess wind and solar because they are so cheap to build, a lot of hydro backfilling energy around the country and then a bunch of gap fillers such as geothermal, biofuels and tidal. Mark Z. Jacobson and his team at Stanford  have the numbers for each state in the US (and 139 countries globally) in their 100% renewables by 2050 material.

But make no mistake about it. All primary energy will be supplied by renewable sources in a few decades. Petroleum, coal, and natural gas won’t be used as primary energy sources except in rare and tiny cases. The Age of Fossil Fuels is coming to an end, and there will still lots of fossil fuels left when it does.