I can’t think of how many times, often when you least expect it, that I have found myself in a debate with someone about whether we shall always need fossil fuels. Michael Liebrich now supplies five easy answers to end any bar room argument, see below.
COMPANY NEWS
Polestar raises almost $1 bln, sees margins improving in 2024
The three-year loan facility from 12 international banks is intended to help Polestar achieve its goal of cash flow break-even in 2025. In the auto industry, a carmaker can spend $1 billion to develop a single model.
Polestar had previously said it would need $1.3 billion in external funding to break even in 2025.
Banks extending the loan to Polestar include BNP Paribas, Natixis, Standard Chartered, BBVA, HSBC, and SPDB.
Polestar said it expected volume growth this year that would support its target for 2025 of more than 155,000 vehicles annually. (reuters)
UK NEWS
Capacity Market Auction breaks records
The T-4 Capacity Market auction for the delivery year 2027-28 concluded on February 27th, 2024, revealing a clearing price of £65/kW/year, exceeding the previous record set in last year’s auction.
Notably, certain new-build gas assets did not participate, resulting in a combined 700MW of capacity not securing contracts. Neither Killinholme not Eggborough, new CCGT plants made the cut.
Additionally, approximately 250MW of capacity from smaller assets also exited in the first two rounds.
Almost 1000MW of new-build battery assets secured 15-year contracts at this all-time high price. (energylivenews)
Unilever launches first UK regenerative agriculture project
Unilever has unveiled its first regenerative agriculture project in the UK, working with farms that grow ingredients used in Colman’s products.
The project will initially roll out across mustard and mint farms around Norwich and Peterborough over a four-year period, with the first crop of the programme due to be sown next month.
The farms will trial new regenerative agriculture practices, including low carbon fertilisers, innovative crop nutrition strategies, planting cover and companion crops to reduce pesticide usage, implementing new digital water irrigation scheduling systems, and reducing cultivation. (sustainability/beat)
photo: Colmans
Scrap subsidies to Scotland’s conifer forests, urges report
The report from the Royal Society of Edinburgh said the tens of millions of pounds in subsidies given to the timber industry should instead be spent on longer-living native forests, which have greater and clearer climate and biodiversity benefits.
It said the Scottish and UK governments are wrong to argue that public subsidies are needed to help plant more, larger conifer forests. These plantations are largely monocultures using a single species that have a relatively short lifespan.
Instead, public subsidies should be diverted to planting millions of native broadleaf trees, including in urban areas, which capture and keep more CO2, support more plant and animal species, store more carbon in the soil, and have a far longer lifespan. (guardian)
Download the report HERE
Tata to build Britain’s biggest battery factory in Somerset
Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) owner Tata Group has announced that its Agratas global battery business is to build an EV battery gigafactory in Somerset.
Preliminary works on the site, at the Gravity Smart Campus site in Puriton near Bridgwater, have begun, and battery production is due to start in 2026.
JLR and Tata Motors will be the first customers but Agratas also plans to make batteries for other applications, including two-wheelers and commercial vehicles, as well as commercial energy storage solutions.
A £4 billion investment, the Agratas factory is expected to create up to 4,000 jobs and many more as part of the supply chain. (theenergyst)
Oomph launches new mobile rapid charger called Powerstream
Powerstream is an out of the box solution with zero installation requirements. It is a rapid charging solution that is being aimed at sectors where fixed chargers are not the solution. It also provides an immediate and flexible solution to those facing long installation times for fixed charging infrastructure, high utility and groundwork costs and significant disruption to site.
Cambridge-based Oomph says that Powerstream will deliver the ultimate in convenience and flexibility for the rapid charging of electric vehicles. It can be mounted in the back of LCVs or can be wheeled around manually in workshops and on forecourts and is available both for temporary and permanent deployment.
Powerstream also has the ability to recharge as fast as it can discharge energy, meaning that the product is ready for action many hours per day. GPS tracking and remote monitoring enables users to quickly locate their units, monitor performance and keep an eye on essential parameters. (renewableenergymagazine)
photo: Oomph
Report predicts surge in demand for hydrogen in NW England
The North West of England could see demand surge for low-carbon hydrogen to around 2GW by 2030, a new study has found.
Conducted by the North West Hydrogen Alliance (NWHA), an association looking to promote hydrogen’s role in the decarbonisation of the North West, the North West Hydrogen Demand Side study concludes there is a strong belief that both industry and power generators will be the first movers to adopt hydrogen.
Although the study narrows this down to the North West, the same can be said about the rest of the UK. (current-news)
Volkswagen UK joins forces with Ecobat to recycle EV batteries
Volkswagen UK is joining forces with battery recycling company Ecobat to collect and recycle electric vehicle batteries. The deal helps VWG UK close the loop to promote a circular energy economy and ensures the UK’s largest automotive Group is doing all it can to boost sustainability.
Under this latest agreement, Ecobat will collect EV batteries to recycle lithium-ion battery materials. The company will collect high-voltage batteries from dealers, distributors, and end-of-life recycling centres using Ecobat’s ADR compliant vehicles. Batteries will be processed at Ecobat’s new UK lithium-ion recycling centre. This is Ecobat’s third lithium-ion recycling facility, in addition to facilities operating in Germany and Arizona. (electriccarsreport)
EV OF THE WEEK
Eagerly anticipated Renault 5 revealed
Most car watchers have become jaundiced about concept cars. Almost invariably the production version, when and if it follows, is so much more prosaic. So, the excitement that greeted the first sightings of the Renault 5 this week were tempered with caution. However, now that the car is finally revealed, the reality looks almost exactly like the much admired retro-futuristic concept.
The good news does not stop there. Renault seem to have worked hard at addressing some of the bugbears of the EV industry; namely cost, weight and sustainability. The car looks fabulous, it will be offered in sexy colours, it is extraordinarily light for an EV, so should handle well and the interior nods towards the old boy-racer favourite R5 Turbo, but made from largely recycled materials. All of the suppliers are local to the factory, so as to reduce the carbon footprint of production.
And the specs look good on paper: Two battery options, 40kWh city car and 52kWh boasting a range of up to 245 miles and prices starting at under £25,000. What more do you need from this French treat? Oh yes, a complementary basket for holding your baguette!
Photo: Renault
EUROPEAN STORIES
Ireland’s DSO adopts AI to mitigate weather-related power outages
ESB Networks, Ireland’s distribution system operator (DSO), has partnered with AI infrastructure modelling platform Neara to help prevent weather-related power outages.
The frequency and intensity of storms across Ireland have been increasing, causing events such as falling trees on powerlines to disrupt the energy supply of the DSO’s 2.4 million customers.
To help mitigate this, ESB Networks will leverage Nara’s AI technology to create a digital twin model that maps the DSO’s energy infrastructure – including individual structures such as poles as towers – using high-accuracy Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology as well as geospatial data and imagery.
Using this digital twin, asset and risk managers, as well as contractors, planners and engineers, can analyse and stress-test key parts of the network in granular detail. (current-news)
ABB and CERN Identify 17.4% Energy-Saving Opportunity in Heating and Ventilation Motors
The research, conducted between 2022 and 2023, followed an agreement between ABB and CERN. This saw the partners developing a roadmap for reducing the energy consumption of the site’s cooling and ventilation system via data-driven energy efficiency audits. It has identified potential annual energy savings of up to 31GWh.
Energy efficiency audits work by evaluating the performance and efficiency of motors based on their operational data. Audits help large facilities like CERN to identify the most significant energy saving opportunities across whole fleets of motors.
CERN and ABB experts assessed a wide variety of data from motors in various cooling and ventilation applications. They combined data from multiple sources, including digitally-connected motors, CERN’s SCADA system and data gathered directly from their pumps, piping, and instrumentation. The experts analyzed the efficiency of the whole system to provide insights to pinpoint the motors with the best business case for energy efficiency upgrades. (renewableenergymagazine)
photo: CERN
FOCUS ON: MICHAEL LIEBRICH
For those who don’t know him, Michael Liebrich is one of the world’s foremost thought leaders on the energy transition and founder of what became Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Amongst many achievements he has been influential in clarifying peoples’ views on hydrogen thanks to his “Hydrogen Ladder” depicting use cases (see HERE)
Last year he published on BNEF the “Five Horsemen of the Transition” detailing the five key obstacles to the energy transition: Cost, Grid, Materials, Political inertia, Corruption/predatory delay (see HERE). Now comes the more optimistic flip side:
Five Superheroes of the Transition
What a difference a year makes: this year Michael proposes five reasons why the horsemen are being tamed, at least enough to give us a chance to hit the Paris goals by 2070 of “well below 2C”
Superhero 1: Exponential Growth
The combination of falling costs, improved efficiency and super rapid roll out has created the fastest growing energy source in history. Batteries are following suit such that all models for “saturation” of renewables have been long since bypassed.
Superhero 2: Systems Solutions
Filling in the gaps that renewables plus batteries can’t reach was a horseman, but even within a year much progress has been made: The answer to variability, however, is not batteries. It is a system solution – a combination of demand response, interconnections, excess generating capacity, pumped storage, nuclear power, CCS, hydrogen and biogas long duration storage, integrated by means of an extensive grid and managed using the latest digital technologies. The good news is that each of these constituent technologies is seeing remarkable growth and investment, and they are slowly being knitted together by successive iterations of regulation.
Superhero 3: Great Power Competition
How to deal with the hard-to-abate sectors such as aviation, steel, fertiliser, cement, marine? The answer is that there are now no such thing. Solutions are appearing for all of the above, although in some cases the help of carbon pricing will be required to make them cost competitive. But even there, the required carbon price is considerably lower than predicted (max $250 per ton rather than $1,000 per ton).
Superhero 4: Disappearing Demand
Estimates of the future demand for critical minerals are proving to be way too high. Even the best models have failed to properly consider the impact of materials substitution, technology improvement and recycling. The statistics confuse collection with recovery. Suggestions that only 5% of EV batteries are recycled are far too pessimistic. The figure is closer to 90% and if you factor in the improving efficiency over time the materials will keep performing the same storage services for ever.
Superhero 5: Primary Energy Demand
This is the popular metric used to understand whether our economies can keep the lights on. But in the Transition a number of virtuous circles will appear to undermine this metric. Here is an example:
Say you light your hallway with a 75-Watt incandescent lightbulb, illuminated 2,000 hours and consuming 150 kWh per year. Power it with electricity from a coal plant with 35% efficiency, add 10% grid loss, and you create Primary Energy Demand of 476 kWh.
You could, however, deliver the same amount of light with a single 10W LED bulb. Allow the same 10% grid loss, and it uses just 22kWh. Run that LED on wind, solar or hydro power and you have reduced your Primary Energy Demand by 95% and eliminated its CO2 emissions – with no reduction in lighting use.
The same metric applies when switching from say a VW Golf to an ID.3 or replacing gas heating with heat pumps. Mix clean technology substitution with improved efficiency and you get a double whammy of reduced demand and cleaner society. (BNEF)
GLOBAL STUFF
Shell must clean up pollution before it leaves Niger delta
Shell cannot be allowed to withdraw from the Niger delta before it takes responsibility for its toxic legacy of pollution and the safe decommissioning of abandoned oil infrastructure, a report says.
Shell plc is preparing to divest from the delta but a report warns that it must remain until it has cleaned up its legacy of pollution.
The report, by the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (Somo), says historical pollution remains a serious issue in the area and accuses Shell of trying to avoid responsibility despite the billions of dollars it has earned from the oil.
The report says there is a big transparency gap around the issue of funding for decommissioning. Nigeria has legal requirements for companies to set aside funds for decommissioning, but there is no means to establish how much funding companies have – or have not – set aside, the report said.
Researchers for Somo could not find any confirmation that Shell has set up a fund or funds to cover the decommissioning of the oil mining leases it has sold. (guardian)
Read the SOMO report HERE
photo: SOMO
A Startup’s Technology Takes Aim at Lithium-Ion Batteries’ Fire Problem
A battery startup has raised $20 million in Series A financing, which it will use to scale its proprietary technology that has the potential to address one of the industry’s biggest issues: fire risk.
Anthro Energy Inc. — which includes the Department of Defense in its customer base — has developed a polymer electrolyte that it says can make batteries safer and more energy-dense, both key attributes as the batteries become a bigger part of the energy transition.
Today, most lithium-ion batteries are made using a highly flammable liquid electrolyte, which can be an issue if the battery fails or overheats. Anthro’s alternative solid electrolyte material isn’t flammable and also imparts mechanical strength to the cell. Those properties help prevent short circuit incidents that may cause battery fires, while helping the battery also achieve improved cycle life. (bloomberg)
TRí Launches Its Next Generation Electric 3-Wheeler In Tanzania
Internal combustion 3-wheelers are one of the main modes of transport in Tanzania. There are an estimated 250,000 ICE 3-wheelers in Tanzania, and TRí wants to lead the transition of this 3-wheeler sector to electric. TRí started commercial operations in October 2022 after spending a lot of time doing research on which type of 3-wheeler would make sense in this environment, market, and specific use cases.
TRí started with its first generation electric 3-wheeler, which they named the E1. Building on the operational learnings from the E1, Tri noticed that factoring in the highest mileage users that go for up to 200km per day, users were quite comfortable with a 2.5 hour charge per day to realize their usual daily range per day. The E2 has a range of 100km+/- range at 40km/h average speed and therefore with a full charge in between their rounds, users could still get close to 200km per day. Therefore, the next generation 3-wheeler comes fully configured with an onboard charger. Tri has not gone for the common battery swapping approach we have seen from other players, especially in the 2-wheeler sector.
Charging at TRí’s charging stations costs 2,500 shillings to charge to full, which is approximately $1, plus a 1,000 shilling charger access fee. This works out to $1.50 for a full charge, which is way lower than the $10 one would need to spend on petrol to get the same range on an ICE 3-wheeler. (cleantechnica)
photo: Tri
TECHIE CORNER
How to transform glass windows into energy storing devices
Researchers at Bengaluru-based Centre for Nano and Soft Matter Sciences (CeNS) have developed a battery that can transform glass windows into affordable energy storing devices. They have successfully engineered an affordable and high-performance aqueous transparent battery with colour modulation capabilities that can be used in smart windows.
According to the Department of Science and Technology, “Such windows remain transparent in a fully charged state during the day time, thus allowing sunlight into the room while simultaneously functioning as an energy storage system. During the night, the stored energy can power electronic devices within the room, and the electro-chromic battery transitions to a dark blue state, ensuring privacy.”
The transparent battery features a distinctive design employing aluminium-ion battery technology.
The design integrates a cathode material composed of thickness-optimized (170 nm) electro-chromic tungsten oxide (WO3) and aluminium as the anode, showcasing the charging and discharging process through visible transitions. (thehindu)
