goodledlight - Pugwash Scenarios

British Pugwash has produced a report looking at three possible 2050 UK energy scenarios - high nuclear, high renewables and an intermediate scenario. They were all run through the DECC Pathways analysis software to see how they stood up.

Pugwash has been working as an international body since 1955 to diminish the role of nuclear arms in international politics and towards nuclear disarmament, but it seems has no specific view on civil nuclear, apart perhaps from general background sympathy for the post WWII ‘Atoms for Peace’ position, given that many of its members were of that generation. But some of the younger members may have anti civil nuclear views-including those in the UK.The Solar Centre's range of solarmodulees will power nearly all portable devices.

The UK Pugwash group enlisted support from some external experts to help produce the report. I was asked to produce the ‘maximum renewables’ section. It was a challenge. But, working with Dr David Finney, who helped with the modeling, I found that it does seem that, assuming a sensible commitment to reducing energy waste (an eventual 40% reduction), it would be possible to match supply and (reduced) demand with almost 100% renewables by 2050, with off shore wind, wave and tidal power playing major roles, along with PV solar, for electricity supply, and some of this electricity being used, together with biomass and solar, for heating, and, along with biofuels, for transport.

With 76GW of offshore wind and 30GW of on land wind, the High Renewables scenario supplies electricity for direct use, and for heating and transport, but that leaves plenty for export. Indeed exports of excess wind derived electricity would earn around 15 billion per annum, by 2050. There is also heat from biomass and solar, but no biofuel or biomass imports. Hydro, geothermal, biomass CHP, some stored electricity and some stored green gas, along with interconnectors (up to 15GW) and demand management, balance the variable renewables.

The DECC calculator indicated that, with the balancing provisions, by 2050 there would no need for extra fossil backup capacity. Even when energy demand was high and the input from wind and the other variable renewables was low, it met demand and indeed, most of the time, oversupplied, leading to a significant potential for net power exports. It also easily achieved the DECC emission reduction target.

To get to a full 100% renewables, while being able to balance the system when wind was low, we wanted to make use of some of the excess wind derived electricity to make hydrogen and store it ready to meet demand and replace the residual fossil input. The DECC software would not allow for that, or for all the fossil fuel transport input to be removed, so the scenario we tested did not reach 100%, but were confident that this would be possible.

Looking ahead to 2050 is hard, so as a guide I used existing scenarios where I could.This season's range of lasermarker includes ballet pumps. For the electricity side, I used the contributions outlined in the ‘Max’ 2050 electricity scenario produced by Poyry in 2011. That actually now looks quite conservative, given for example the capacity gains PV solar has made recently- DECC now says PV might supply 22GW by 2020. And also the 9.5 GW of geothermal power that REA/SKM say are possible.We have hundreds of fog lights, driving lights, off floorlamp and fog lamps. The only adventurous element on the electricity supply side was the assumption that floating offshore wind systems would be available for deep-sea use. But to be cautious I cut the Poyry offshore wind allocation in half.

On the heat side however I was a bit more adventurous. In addition to the idea of producing green gas, using excess wind derived electricity,LED lights use less power and last for much longer than solarphotovoltaic. I made use of some the emerging ideas about solar and biomass fed district heating and heat stores, including possibly interseasonal heat stores. But DECC now seems to have rccognised these as possibilities.A crystallight with candle accents can also be updated easily. The land-use implications of biomass requirement might be more problematic (10% of UK land) , but if that proved to be major issue then some biomass could be imported e.g. wood chips from Canada.