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Tag: hydropower

Floating solar: a small but vital role for India’s sunrise sector

Posted on by dishanth
Floating solar: a small but vital role for India’s sunrise sector

India’s G20 presidency next year offers a “golden opportunity” to accelerate the deployment of renewable energies, environment minister Bhupender Yadav told reporters on April 26 in a meeting with the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). This year is a litmus test for progress, representing a deadline for India’s renewable energy target of 175 gigawatts.

While floating solar photovoltaic (FSPV) was not originally envisaged as part of the mix, which only included terrestrial and rooftop solar, it has emerged as a small but not insignificant catalyst for the figures.

Despite later including large hydropower in the renewable category to help meet the target of 175 GW, which originally included only small hydropower, India is still set to miss the goal, with 156.6 GW of utility-scale renewables as of March 2022, plus an estimated 11 GW of rooftop solar.

The shortfall, due mostly to the slow development of rooftop solar, highlights the need to further diversify India’s portfolio of green energy sources.

 

Solar cookers designed by engineers of Barefoot College in Tilonia, Ajmer, Rajasthan, India tower over a woman. Image: Knut-Erik Helle, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Flickr.

 

An alternative to terrestrial solar

India’s journey with floating solar began in 2014 when it was approved by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), in Kolkata. S P Gon Chaudhuri, a veteran of the country’s renewable energy sector, told The Third Pole: “The organisation tasked with implementing this project was NBIRT [the NB Institute for Rural Technology], of which I was chairman at the time.”

 

When we start looking for a piece of land, it isn’t easy. In places with a lot of land, there are too many projects and hence, transmission is a challenge. Floating solar addresses so many problems

Manu Srivastava, commissioner for new and renewable energy, Madhya Pradesh

 

Once the project was completed, “officials from organisations such as the World Bank visited the site and examined how a floating solar plant is set up, how it works”, Chaudhuri recalls. “Basically, it was a study centre.”

Plants in Punjab, Kerala, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu followed, among others. India’s reservoirs cover 18,000 square kilometres with the potential to support 280 GW of floating solar, according to a report by think tank The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI).

High costs and design challenges are still holding back the deployment of the new technology, which as of November 2021 had an estimated cumulative installed capacity of just 2.7 megawatts, making it little more than a pilot project.

However, according to the think tank Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), India now has about 170 MW of operational floating solar capacity and another 1.8 GW under different stages of development. The steep increase, a CEEW spokesperson explained, is due to the fact that the first plants deployed were small, and India has only started implementing large-scale floating solar in recent years.

Terrestrial solar PV is land-intensive, and the TERI report recommends exploring alternatives such as floating solar to keep pace with India’s national target of 100 GW of additional solar capacity by the end of 2030. The state of Maharashtra, the authors say, has the most potential and could generate 57.9 GW on 3,173 sq km of its reservoirs’ surfaces.

“The FSPV addition is small in relation to the entire market for solar energy, but it could be a viable alternative for speeding up solar power deployment in India,” a 2021 study by researchers at Effat University in Saudi Arabia stated.

 

Floating solar milestones

Recent developments in the floating solar space hint at the sector’s promise. In August last year, government-owned NTPC, India’s largest integrated energy company, commissioned a 25 MW project on the reservoir of its Simhadri thermal power station, in the state of Andhra Pradesh.

The plant has the potential to generate electricity from over 100,000 solar PV modules, which could light around 7,000 households and avoid the emission of at least 46,000 tons of carbon dioxide every year over its lifespan.

In January 2022, the state-owned hydropower corporation NHPC signed a deal with a developer in the eastern state of Odisha to build a 500 MW floating solar plant. It will initially invest over INR 20 billion (USD 261 million) in 300 MW-worth of floating solar projects. The project will help the state to meet its renewable energy generation targets, besides creating investment and employment opportunities.

On March 10, 2022, Tamil Nadu’s chief minister MK Stalin inaugurated India’s largest floating solar power plant, which was constructed at a cost of INR 1.5 billion (USD 19.6 million).

 

Scarce land, more water

Most Indian states lack land, but have enough water for FSPV. Installing solar on water can increase the panels’ efficiency due to lower temperatures that prevent overheating, Chaudhuri explained.

Manu Srivastava, commissioner for new and renewable energy with the government of Madhya Pradesh, said: “When we start looking for a piece of land, it isn’t easy. In places with a lot of land, there are too many projects and hence, transmission is a challenge… Floating solar addresses so many problems.”

Avnish Shukla is executive engineer at Rewa Ultra Mega Solar Ltd, a joint venture that has commissioned solar projects in Madhya Pradesh. Shukla told The Third Pole that a 600 MW floating solar plant in the state of Madhya Pradesh will be commissioned by August 2023, likely to be one of the largest in the world.

Shukla said that solar projects often occupy barren land, not used by agriculture, industry or people. “Since there is scarcity of such a type of land, we face trouble… In such a scenario, water bodies are perfect. Moreover, water will evaporate if we do not use it to install solar panels [to reflect the sun’s rays].”

Vinay Rustagi, the managing director of Bridge to India, a renewable energy consultancy, pointed out that some floating solar sites that are located near hydropower projects or in thermal plant reservoirs already have ready access to their transmission infrastructure.

 

Falling costs

Ground-based installations still form 93.1 per cent of India’s grid-connected solar PV, according to a 2020 report by TERI. Utility-scale solar costs fell 84 per cent between 2010 and 2018, making large-scale solar cheaper in India than anywhere else.

According to Chaudhuri, the cost of setting up a floating solar plant is currently INR 50-60 million (USD650,000-780,000) per MW, while conventional land-based solar projects cost the equivalent of USD 520,000 per MW, a difference that explains the slow take-off of the technology. However, he said, floaters and maintenance are becoming more cost-effective.

“India needs to meet certain targets it has committed to by 2030, which means states need to adopt more such [floating solar] plants, as they do not have so much land to spare,” he said.

According to Srivastava, transporting the lightweight but big floaters the panels sit on can be a challenge. However, these are low-tech components, so manufacturing plants installed near the development site could bring costs down further.

Floating solar projects do require longer due to the need for more detailed assessments of sites’ hydrography and water-bed topography. Furthermore, both the capital and operating costs are slightly higher due to the more complex design and risks of working in water, Srivastava added.

Rustagi, however, said the local governments and municipal agencies in charge of most inland water bodies must push for them.

Binit Das, deputy renewable energy programme manager at New Delhi think tank the Centre for Science and Environment, agreed but said there are other, more technical hurdles to overcome: “The solar floating system needs to hold solar panels on the water for over 25 years, so the racking system needs to be highly resistant to corrosion, must have a long lifespan and high load capacity.”

He added: “Since this is a relatively new solar power technology, it requires specialised solar power equipment and more niche solar panel installation knowledge.”

This story was published with permission from The Third Pole.

 

 

Source Eco Business

This dam simple trick is a big green energy win

Posted on by dishanth
This dam simple trick is a big green energy win

In November 2019 engineers switched on the 18th and final turbine at Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam: the final step in an odyssey of planning and construction that had started almost 50 years earlier. The vast hydroelectric complex—the fourth-largest in the world—completely upended the northern stretch of the Xingu River, one of the Amazon’s major tributaries. The waters held back by the main dam created a reservoir that flooded 260 square miles of lowlands and forests, and displaced more than 20,000 people.

Major hydroelectric dams can have catastrophic consequences—flooding homes and habitats and changing the flow, temperature, and chemistry of rivers for decades. Although few are quite as big as Belo Monte, there are a glut of new hydroelectric dams in the works all over the globe. In 2014 researchers estimated that there are at least 3,700 major hydroelectric dams in planning or under construction globally. Most of these new projects are located in low- and middle-income countries eager to fuel their growing economies with a crucial source of low-carbon power: In 2020, hydroelectric dams generated as much electricity as nuclear and wind power combined. But the race to tap the world’s rivers for renewable energy presents something of an environmental conundrum: Do the benefits outweigh the environmental chaos that dams can wreak?

Some researchers think there’s a smart way out of this dilemma. Rather than building more dams, why don’t we figure out a way to get more out of the ones that already exist? The majority of them aren’t generating electricity at all—they’re used for irrigation, water supply, flood control, or for fishing and boating. If we can figure out a way to put turbines into those dams so they also produce hydropower—a process known as retrofitting—we could unlock a huge renewable energy potential that isn’t being tapped.

In a retrofitted system, water falling through the dam would spin newly installed turbine blades connected to a generator—and that spinning would generate electricity that could be distributed to local homes or connected to a larger power grid. “How much more can we get out of revitalizing existing infrastructure, rather than expanding and building new infrastructure?” asks Ryan McManamay, an ecologist at Baylor University in Texas and coauthor of a paper exploring the untapped potential of non-powered dams. (McManamay’s own office in Waco is a short walk from one of these dams on the Brazos River. A wasted opportunity right on his doorstep, he points out.)

McManamay and his colleagues estimated that retrofitting dams and upgrading existing hydroelectric plants could boost their maximum output by an extra 78 gigawatts. That’s roughly the power generated by seven Belo Monte Dams, or more than double the average electricity demand in the whole of the United Kingdom. And in parts of the world where new dams are being planned and constructed, the change could be huge. Retrofitting and upgrading dams in the Amazon River basin could unlock 1.6 gigawatts of new electricity production. That’s roughly the amount of energy produced by a natural-gas-fired power station and enough to avoid the construction of 17 new smaller dams altogether. Upgrading and retrofitting dams in the Mekong River basin in Southeast Asia could generate so much power that all the new ones slated for construction in the region would be surplus above what’s required.

Some countries are already making use of this potential. Since 2000, 36 dams in the US have been retrofitted with turbines, adding more than 500 megawatts of renewable generation capacity. There is even more potential out there: A 2016 US Department of Energy report found that an additional 4.8 gigawatts of electricity could be generated by retrofitting non-powered dams over the next three decades. In places like the US and Western Europe, where the dam-building boom of the mid-20th century has long since faded, retrofitting may be the only option left for governments looking to eke out a little more hydropower. “If there are dams that are going to remain in place, let’s try and find solutions and work together to the most optimal solution,” says McManamay.

But before anyone starts upgrading all these dams, they might want to take another look at the numbers. It’s not easy to accurately predict how much electricity a retrofitted facility will actually produce, because it turns out not every dam is a good fit for conversion. Say someone wants to fit turbines in a dam that was built to hold back water so it can be used to irrigate farmers’ fields. During the growing season, a lot of that water would normally be directed toward crops, instead of flowing over the dam to generate electricity. Or perhaps it’s in an area where the water is only high enough to generate electricity for part of the year. Suddenly those retrofitted dams might not seem like such a smart idea.

 

One recent study on retrofitted dams in the US, also commissioned by the Department of Energy, found that projections of their power output veered toward the optimistic side: On average, those projections were 3.6 times greater than the actual output. The study found that the most successful retrofits tended to be concrete dams initially built to aid navigation. (Dams are often used to widen or deepen waterways to make it easier for boats to pass through.) “This is a complex issue. It’s not an easy fix,” says McManamay.

But in countries such as Brazil, big dams are still very much on the agenda. “If they’re going to develop and really raise the standard of living in the country as a whole, they need energy. That’s the long and short of it,” says Michael Goulding, a senior aquatic scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society. The country’s most recent 10-year energy plan outlines nine new large dams scheduled to be completed before 2029. Rather than hoping these dams won’t be built, it’s important to make sure that proper studies are carried out to make sure that they’re built in a way that minimizes environmental destruction, says Goulding: “Often the environmental impact frameworks aren’t very good. They’ll define an area of interest close to the dam and that area of interest doesn’t include all the downstream impacts and upstream impacts as well.”

The Belo Monte Dam is a good example of just how much of an effect large dams have on the surrounding environment. The dam complex redirected 80 percent of the Xingu’s flow away from a 62-mile stretch of the river known as Big Bend. This section of the Xingu also happens to be the only known wild habitat of the Zebra Pleco—an eye-catching striped catfish beloved by aquarists. “There is a huge risk that this species will go extinct,” says Thiago B. A. Couto, a postdoctoral researcher at Florida International University’s Tropical Rivers Lab. The impact of dams on fish species is well-documented elsewhere in the world. In Washington state, the Elwha Dam disconnected the upper and lower Elwha watersheds, reducing the habitat available to salmon by 90 percent. Some species local to the river disappeared altogether, while the populations of others—such as Chinook—fell to a fraction of their previous levels.

Eventually, however, even large dams may outlive their usefulness. In 2014, the last remnants of the Elwha Dam were removed forever. The Chinook salmon that for decades had remained locked behind two dams are now slowly making their way back upstream. A full recovery is expected to take decades. “Dams don’t last forever,” says Couto. “There are many that are abundant, but are not providing the minimum benefits that they are supposed to.”

 

 

Source Wired

Agriculture ministry to give one million farms in Thailand solar panels

Posted on by dishanth
Agriculture ministry to give one million farms in Thailand solar panels

Thailand’s agriculture ministry plans to install solar panels on at least one million of Thailand’s farms in a new pilot project aiming to reduce farms’ electricity bills by 20-30% in 15-20 years. The ministry plans to issue a non-fungible token named “Solar Panels NFT for Thai Farmers” worth around 697 billion baht to legally trade with international investors in Singapore.

The ministry’s deputy minister told reporters money raised from the cryptocurrency will be used to buy high-quality solar panels, and give them to farmers. In addition to helping reduce farms’ electricity bills, the project will also help reduce Thailand’s greenhouse emissions. The project might even expand across Thailand’s homes and businesses.

 

Some solar farms have already taken off in Thailand. One ‘floating farm‘ in Ubon Ratchathani, a northeastern province, started generating power in November. Solar panels cover 720,000 square meters of water surface, and use a hybrid system that converts sunlight to electricity by day and generates hydropower at night. The project includes a ‘Nature Walkway’ shaped like a sun ray.

Thailand currently still relies heavily on fossil fuel. The country’s Energy Policy and Planning Office said in October 2021, 55% of power came from natural gas. It said 11% came from renewables and hydropower. At the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland last year, PM Prayut set the carbon neutrality goal for 2050, as well as a goal to have net-zero greenhouse emissions by 2065.

 

 

Source Thaiger

Electric truck hydropower, A flexible solution to hydropower in mountainous regions

Posted on by dishanth
Electric truck hydropower, A flexible solution to hydropower in mountainous regions

Electric Truck Hydropower & Mountain Regions

Mountain regions have a large potential for hydropower that cannot be harnessed effectively by conventional technologies. IIASA researcher Julian Hunt and an international team of researchers developed an innovative hydropower technology based on electric trucks that could provide a flexible and clean solution for electricity generation in mountainous regions.

 

Electric truck hydropower: a flexible solution to hydropower in mountainous regions. (Image: Hydropower might be an old dog. But it can still be taught new tricks. Hydropower Prizes are helping innovators come up with those tricks to modernize hydropower for its next century. Photo from Karl Specht, U.S. Department of Energy)

 

In our transition towards a more sustainable future, hydropower will likely grow in importance as a renewable energy source. Despite its potential, innovation in hydropower technology has been slow in the last century. Conventional methods used today rely on two connected reservoirs with different water levels where the potential energy of the water is converted into electricity.

In steep mountain regions, the potential for generating electricity from a small stream of water is high, however, the hydropower potential of these regions remains untapped as it requires storage reservoirs, which have environmental and social impacts. IIASA researcher Julian Hunt and an international team of researchers developed a new technology called Electric Truck Hydropower that could become a key method for electricity generation in steep mountainous regions. The results of the study have been published in the journal Energy.

Electric Truck Hydropower would use the existing road infrastructure to transport water down the mountain in containers, applying the regenerative brakes of the electric truck to turn the potential energy of the water into electricity and charge the truck’s battery. The generated energy could then be sold to the grid or used by the truck itself to transport other goods. Electric Truck Hydropower could also generate electricity in combination with solar and wind resources or provide energy storage services to the grid.

“The ideal system configuration is in mountainous regions with steep roads, where the same electric trucks can be used to generate hydroelectric power from different locations. This increases the chances that water will be available,” says Hunt.

 

Figure: Schematic description of the system where the empty truck moves up the mountain to collect the containers filled with water at the charge site and the truck with the full container goes down the mountain generating electricity. The water is then unloaded at the discharge site.

 

The proposed technology is an innovative, clean source of electricity that is competitive with solar, wind, and conventional hydropower. Cost estimates show that the levelized cost of Electric Truck Hydropower is US$30–100 per MWh, which is considerably cheaper than conventional hydropower at US$50–200 per MWh.

The environmental impacts of Electric Truck Hydropower are also significantly smaller than that of conventional hydropower.

 

“This technology does not require dams, reservoirs, or tunnels, and it does not disrupt the natural flow of the river and fish passage. The system requires only roads, which already exist, charging and discharging stations similar to small car parks, a battery facility connected to the grid, and the trucks,” explains Hunt.

When looking at the global reach of this technology, the research team estimated that Electric Truck Hydropower could generate 1.2 PWh electricity per year, which is equivalent to about 4% of global energy consumption in 2019. The technology could harness the previously untapped potential for hydropower on steep mountain ranges. The regions with the highest potential are the Himalayas and the Andes.

“It is an interesting electricity generation alternative due to its high flexibility. For example, if a country is in an energy crisis, it can buy several electric trucks to generate hydropower. Once the crisis is over, the trucks can be used to transport cargo,” Hunt concludes.

Reference: Hunt, J., Jurasz, J., Zakeri, B., Nascimento, A., Cross, S., Schwengber ten Caten, C., de Jesus Pacheco, D., Pongpairoj, P., Leal Filho, W., Tomé, F., Senne, R., van Ruijven, B. (2022). Electric Truck Hydropower, a Flexible Solution to Hydropower in Mountainous Regions. Energy DOI:  10.1016/j.energy.2022.123495

News originally published by International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).
By Julian Hunt, Research Scholar & Ansa Heyl Press Officer & Editor

 

 

Source CleanTechnica

How AI could help bring a sustainable reckoning to hydropower

Posted on by dishanth
How AI could help bring a sustainable reckoning to hydropower

Hydropower has been stirring up controversies since the early 2000s. Despite being promoted as a solution to mitigate climate change, the hydropower bubble burst when researchers discovered in 2005 that hydropower dams are responsible for huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions.

Hydropower dams’ walls restrict the flow of rivers and turn them into pools of stagnant water. As these reservoirs age, organic matter like algal biomass and aquatic plants accumulates and eventually decomposes and sinks. That oxygen-poor environment stimulates methane production.

Reservoir surfaces and turbines then release methane into the atmosphere. Methane makes up approximately 80 percent of the greenhouse gases emitted from hydropower dams, peaking in the first decade of the dams lifecycle.

Methane is infamous for lingering around in the atmosphere for 12 years and is at least 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Researchers estimate that at least 10 percent of the world’s hydropower dams emit as much greenhouse gases per unit of energy as coal-fired power plants. In the Amazon basin, several existing dams are up to ten times more carbon-intensive than coal power plants.

Despite this, there is still an aggressive push for constructing new hydropower dams in the Brazilian Amazon and the Himalayas. “​​In light of this expected boom in construction of new hydropower dams, it is critical to identify whether future dams will produce low-carbon energy,” an international team of researchers wrote in a 2019 Nature Communications study.

 

Using AI to plan a more sustainable dam

To identify environmentally-friendly sites for new hydropower dams, the 2019 team harnessed data from a sophisticated computational model that uses artificial intelligence (AI). They observed that lowland dams in Brazil (a predominantly lowland country) tend to have large reservoir areas which yield significantly higher carbon intensities. The Brazilian Amazon has the highest number of carbon-intensive dams as compared to the mountainous parts of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. Higher elevation and steep topography, they found, make for less carbon-intensive hydropower.

New projects have been proposed at least 351 sites spread across the Amazon, which already is home to 158 hydropower dams. To find solutions for minimizing the environmental consequences of these projects, researchers are continuing to harness data with AI.

In a recent study published in the journal Science last week, a team of researchers utilized AI to scale the Amazon basin. They found that uncoordinated hydropower expansion resulted in forgone ecosystem benefits. Additionally, effective dam arrangements in other locations could generate four times more power.

“AI is being used by Wall Street, by social media, for all kinds of purposes – why not use AI to tackle serious problems like sustainability?” study author Carla Gomes, a computer scientist at Cornell University, said in a press release.

Various environmental criteria, like river flow and connectivity, greenhouse gas emissions, fish diversity, and sediment transport, of the entire Amazon basin, must be considered while selecting sites for new projects, the researchers argue.

While implementing policies based on such scientific evidence is vital for building sustainable hydropower dams, researchers are also looking for ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from existing projects via methane extraction.

 

Extracting—and using—reservoir methane

The idea to extract the methane accumulating in lakes and dam reservoirs for energy production is not new. In East Africa, saltwater-filled Lake Kivu holds 60 cubic kilometers of methane and another 300 cubic kilometers of dissolved carbon dioxide. The methane is extracted from the lake’s deep waters with a gas separator for producing electricity at the KivuWatt power plant in Rwanda.

Inspired by this possibility, Maciej Bartosiewicz, a geophysicist from the Polish Academy of Sciences, and his colleagues propose using solid mineral absorbents called zeolites for separating methane from reservoir sediments. In a study published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, they designed a model mechanism to deploy zeolites coupled with activated carbon that could be placed at the bottom of reservoirs.

So far, scientists have been unable to extract methane from freshwater bodies such as lakes and reservoirs because the gas is available at far lower concentrations. This has previously made methane extraction in smaller quantities far too expensive. But Bartosiewicz says zeolites are cheap and widely available, which could offer a viable solution.

“The system contains a gasification component that is a membrane in a box. Then zeolites could capture methane after removing carbon dioxide,” says Bartosiewicz. Installing a pumping system could further boost extraction.

Still, methane extraction from reservoirs’ sediments is not devoid of ecological consequences. The process could result in a significant disruption in the ecosystem’s biological composition by affecting the growth of bacteria that process methane in sediments—eventually impacting the food web productivity. In reservoirs and lakes where bottom methane levels are high, these bacteria are a vital source of food and energy for microscopic marine animals. Still, water bodies have the remarkable ability to self-regulate, argues Bartosiewicz.

“We still need to develop the next generation of solutions for renewable energy production. This could be a possibility,” he says. “Methane extraction will not be possible in all hydropower reservoirs. But if we can produce even five percent of energy from this methane, it will add to the quota of renewable energy.”

 

 

Source Popsci

Onshore renewables could boost UK economy by £29bn

Posted on by dishanth
Onshore renewables could boost UK economy by £29bn

Investor Thrive Renewables claims removal of local planning barriers could unlock multi-billion pound potential of onshore wind, solar, and hydropower sectors.

Easing planning barriers for onshore renewable energy projects could unlock 45,000 new jobs and pump almost £29bn into the UK economy over the next 15 years, as well as saving money on consumer energy bills, according to a new analysis by Thrive Renewables.

The clean energy investment firm – which manages £93m of renewable energy assets – claims that, based on Committee on Climate Change estimates for achieving net zero emissions by 2050, the UK will need to build 5.5GW of onshore renewable energy capacity every year between now and 2035.

That, it said, would require £4.75bn annual investment – including £2.75bn in onshore wind projects alone – amounting to a £66.5bn investment opportunity over the next 15 years. Unlocking that potential could deliver 45,000 new jobs, provide a £28.9bn economic boost, and save billpayers up to £1.5bn a year by 2035, according to the firm, which operates 15 renewables projects across the UK.

Echoing arguments from across the renewables industry, the report highlighted how onshore renewables were now both quicker to build and cheaper than nuclear projects and gas-fired power generation capacity, with onshore wind now considered to the lowest cost form of new electricity generation available.

Meanwhile, the same two years spent laying only the foundations for Hinkley Point C saw enough renewable power generation capacity installed in the UK to match the total planned generation of the flagship Somerset nuclear power project, the report said.

The analysis also stressed how giving existing onshore solar, wind, and other such projects a new lease of life by upgrading them with the latest, most efficient technologies offered yet another cost-effective means of delivering zero carbon energy.

“Renewables are the obvious choice for the government to take in driving our economic recovery, helping to ‘Build Back Better’ and deliver a net-zero carbon emission society,” said Matthew Clayton, managing director of Thrive Renewables. “We don’t need to reinvent the wheel or – in this case – the wind turbine and solar panel. UK renewables have enormous potential that can be unlocked, fast. We already have what we need: abundant natural resources, proven technology, lowest ever costs and the right skills.”

However, Clayton warned that in order to maximise the opportunities on offer a clear, long-term and investible clean energy policy platform was required in the UK, and that planning barriers to new renewables projects needed to be torn down.

Firstly he said more policy certainty was needed over price stability in Contracts for Difference auctions, distribution network connection planning, and cost structures, as long-term investment decisions remains challenging for developers.

Moreover, Clayton said new onshore wind projects continued to face automatic blocks from many local planning authorities, as too often councils have failed to update their local plans – in some cases for decades – to reflect their myriad climate emergency declarations.

“By providing policy certainty and creating a more positive environment for onshore renewables, the government can unleash huge private sector investment, create thousands of jobs and deliver a greener, cleaner UK for us all,” he said.

There have long been calls for the UK’s national planning policy to be amended to remove barriers to new onshore wind projects, although earlier this year the government did unveil plans to allow onshore renewables projects to compete for in upcoming CfD auction rounds, providing a major new potential route to market for new projects.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has also touted plans to reduce red tape in order to “build, build, build” as part of his strategy to stimulate the economy in the wake of the recession sparked by the coronavirus crisis.

However, it remains unclear whether the PM’s proposed planning changes could be used to accelerate rollout of renewables and clean technologies, given long-standing opposition to such projects from a vocal minority of the public.

Mewanwhile, some green groups have raised concerns that moves to dilute planning rules could lead to less democratic oversight of local planning decisions and green building standards being compromised.

 

By Michael Holder

Source: Business Green