I am constantly on the lookout for new applications of renewable energy, and this particular article caught my attention. The basic idea is that floating solar panels can be put on top of waterbodies in order to expand the area we can put solar arrays on. This is particularly useful for countries with high population densities, such as the UK, as the issue of a lack of space becomes less critical.
These innovations, combined with the rapidly reducing price of renewable energy projects - the cost of solar panels is quoted to have diminished by 9 times over the last 5 years, offer a positive future for renewables. Combined with new production methods, from companies such as Rayton Solar, who claim to produce much less wasteful silicon for use in solar panels, making it cheaper, solar power could easily start heating up.
Tuesday 18 October 2016
Sunday 16 October 2016
Weekly conversations: Renewable energy in the UK - Energy Providers
Every week, I am going to try to post one interesting conversation I have had over the week which involves renewable energy.
This week I was talking to a friend about renewable energy companies. We recently swapped to a renewable energy provider (Green Star) for our gas and electricity and were surprised by how little we had heard about them beforehand. You would expect a company providing 99% of its electricity renewably would want to brag about it but they don't seem to, at least to the general public.
This made me think about the customer side of renewable energy in the UK. In some ways, the ease of swapping from a traditional energy provider to a renewable one seems to facilitate the renewable drive in UK society at the moment. However, having changed to a renewable provider, we feel no different. No fireworks, no overwhelming feeling of pride, nor has it made us any more inclined to pursue a renewable way of life elsewhere. If anything, we use more energy! We no longer feel bad about burning up the planet by leaving a single TV standby light on.
In fact, I don't think we would have chosen to swap if it wasn't going to make our utilities bill cheaper. The effect of changing just seems like, nothing. London still looks like daylight at 2am with all the streetlights and car headlights. Our small student flat buying their energy from a renewable supplier just seems so minute in comparison.
Perhaps then this is one reason why renewable energy hasnt taken over in the UK yet. Renewable energy companies don't get themselves known to the public in the same way as suppliers like British Gas. Even then, changing to a renewable supplier has such a small impact on the consumer that people must think (we know we have) - why bother? The electricity still goes through the same cables and grids, and still comes from the same place. Perhaps until changing to a renewable supplier gives direct benefits to consumers (such as a lower price, as we found), the renewable industry just won't gain enough consumer support to start competing with traditional, fossil fuel based energy providers.
But maybe we're just cynical students.
This week I was talking to a friend about renewable energy companies. We recently swapped to a renewable energy provider (Green Star) for our gas and electricity and were surprised by how little we had heard about them beforehand. You would expect a company providing 99% of its electricity renewably would want to brag about it but they don't seem to, at least to the general public.
This made me think about the customer side of renewable energy in the UK. In some ways, the ease of swapping from a traditional energy provider to a renewable one seems to facilitate the renewable drive in UK society at the moment. However, having changed to a renewable provider, we feel no different. No fireworks, no overwhelming feeling of pride, nor has it made us any more inclined to pursue a renewable way of life elsewhere. If anything, we use more energy! We no longer feel bad about burning up the planet by leaving a single TV standby light on.
In fact, I don't think we would have chosen to swap if it wasn't going to make our utilities bill cheaper. The effect of changing just seems like, nothing. London still looks like daylight at 2am with all the streetlights and car headlights. Our small student flat buying their energy from a renewable supplier just seems so minute in comparison.
Perhaps then this is one reason why renewable energy hasnt taken over in the UK yet. Renewable energy companies don't get themselves known to the public in the same way as suppliers like British Gas. Even then, changing to a renewable supplier has such a small impact on the consumer that people must think (we know we have) - why bother? The electricity still goes through the same cables and grids, and still comes from the same place. Perhaps until changing to a renewable supplier gives direct benefits to consumers (such as a lower price, as we found), the renewable industry just won't gain enough consumer support to start competing with traditional, fossil fuel based energy providers.
But maybe we're just cynical students.
Tuesday 11 October 2016
Setting the Scene - Common Knowledge and Misinformation
Hi, welcome to my blog on renewable energy. In our modern world, it is hard to escape from the looming pressure of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. Newspapers and websites are full of reminders that we are consuming to excess, and causing global changes to our planet. Fossil fuels are seen as the weapon of destruction, pumping harmful greenhouse gases into our ever warming planet, and are widely regarded as, in Douglas Adams’ words, A bad move. Renewable energy on the other hand seemingly offers a beacon of hope in this world of destruction. Renewable energy sources, as the name implies, are highly sustainable over extremely long periods of time, and don’t rely on the burning of fossil fuels.
Great! Let’s swap to renewables then!
Not so fast.
You see, renewable energy is much better for the environment, but it relies on typically high commitments by governments to actually produce a significant portion of the country’s energy mix through renewables. This leads to the rather depressing current proportion of energy produced renewably.
This is where opinion and fact start to blur. A range of different actors, from oil firms to green movements, each have a stake in the renewable sector. This produces a lot of bias concerning public information. Greenpeace’s website offers an example of this:
Whilst the statistics presented are all true, they are not the entire truth. The 6 myths of renewable energy are posed as the main issues of changing our energy source. This is a drastic understatement. Whilst an effective marketing campaign, solving socio-economic issues by focusing on single examples e.g. Wind power being cost effective in India, does not mean the issues no longer exist. Moreover, it demonstrates an oversight of the campaign to expect that every country is homogenous and will respond to renewable energy in the exact same way.
This is not to say Greenpeace are incorrect, or that they should abandon this marketing. However, it does start to highlight fact selection within the renewable sphere. Greenpeace partially acknowledge this with ‘Myth 6: Greenpeace wants to turn off all coal and nuclear power plants today’. This is a recognition of the gravity of the task to produce all of our energy renewably and offers a (albeit oversimplified again) 3 step method of switching to renewables.
In this increasingly confusing topic, the aim of this blog is to take a more balanced and complete look at how viable renewable energy is going into the future. I intend to focus on the socio-economic issues that need to be overcome in order for renewables to be feasible, which will be achieved by looking at specific renewable energy sources and specific countries and their respective merits and drawbacks. This aims to then produce a detailed overview of which energy sources can be used, and in which different contexts they are best applied.
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