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It was a bad year for fossil fuels in the UK. In May, Britain spent two weeks without burning coal to produce electricity – the longest period of coal-free electricity since the first coal-fired power station was commissioned in 1882. Enditem By June, the National Grid had confidently predicted that by 2019 fossil fuels would represent for the first time less than half of the total electricity mix.
It seems that fossil fuels are entering their twilight. In 2009, 75% of Britain's electricity was produced by burning coal or gas. In the first five months of 2019, this share fell to 44%. During the same period, wind energy increased from 1% to one-fifth of total electricity.
But the decline in high-carbon energy might not be as imminent as the title seems to indicate. In the United Kingdom, heating still depends mainly on fossil fuels. With regard to electricity, the UK is expected to lose seven of its eight nuclear power plants over the next decade, leaving a deficit of energy production in the context of increasing electricity demand due the rise of electric vehicles.
Are fossil fuels really endangered in the UK? Not quite. While electricity generation is evolving relatively rapidly towards renewable energy, heating, which accounts for 40% of UK energy consumption, has fallen behind, said Martin Freer, director of the Birmingham Energy Institute. About 85% of UK households are still heated with natural gas based on fossil fuels. To clean the home heating, it would be necessary to switch to heat pumps, which run on electricity and draw heat from the environment to heat homes or burn bio waste.
But heat pumps are only useful if the houses are so well insulated that they require little heating. And the UK is not doing well on this front either. According to the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the 29 million existing homes in the UK are not isolated fast enough to save on unnecessary carbon emissions.
In order to push the government towards cleaner heating, the CCC – an independent body that advises the British government in the fight against climate change – set a deadline of 2025, after which any new house should no longer be connected to the grid. gas distribution. But the houses are not heated with gas, they will have to be heated with electricity, and there is no guarantee that electricity will come from renewable sources.
Although the UK's dirtiest form of electricity generation – coal – is in decline, this gap has been largely filled by the burning of natural gas, which still releases about half the amount of coal produced. While coal dropped from 25% to 3% of the energy mix between 2015 and 2019, gas went from 28% to 41%. "You can not build a low-carbon energy strategy into gas," says Freer.
And nuclear is about to emerge from the energy mix too. Nuclear power plants – which consume very little carbon than solar panels – currently supply 18% of UK energy. But by 2030, only one of the UK's currently operating nuclear power plants will still be in operation: Sizewell B, which currently supplies about 3% of UK energy. Hinkley Point C, which is currently under construction and is scheduled for commissioning in 2031, is expected to provide 7% of the United Kingdom's electricity needs.
For Freer, it signals a big problem. Even though wind energy continues to gain popularity – and all indications are that it will, the United Kingdom will still need backup power plants. "Wind energy is intermittent," he says. "Nuclear power always generates electricity."
The batteries could provide a solution to our need for permanent energy production. The large-scale storage of batteries would allow suppliers to supply renewable energy and release it when the wind is not blowing. "Once you have cheap storage, you can use all that variable power all the time," says Catherine Mitchell, professor of energy policy at Exeter University.
In January, the Department of Energy and Industrial Business Strategy announced a £ 20m initiative to finance large scale energy storage solutions, but it is not clear whether the storage capacity of the Kingdom United will grow fast enough. Mitchell could point out that this situation could be partly solved by a more flexible electricity demand that would reduce the amount of waste energy generated, but that does not completely solve the storage problem.
Whatever happens, Mitchell is confident that our global energy mix is only going in one direction. "It's always cheaper to take wind and solar energy because their marginal cost is zero. So you always want to use wind and solar energy, "she says. "The system as a whole, because of the economy, is decentralizing and it's good for the environment and society: the price will be cheaper for everyone."
Will things happen quickly enough to meet the UK's clean energy goals? In a Swansong piece of legislation, Theresa May urged the United Kingdom to reach the UK's net carbon emissions by 2050. Given our current trajectory, this could be a bit of an exaggeration. In the United Kingdom, of the 38.4 million cars registered, only 226,000 are rechargeable electric vehicles. The decarbonization of the heating is also far from being solved.
For Mitchell, this suggests that leaving things alone to market forces is not enough to ensure a zero carbon future fast enough to meet the demands of climate change. A little – or a lot – of government nudging will be needed. "The system is evolving inexorably, but it is not doing it fast enough to achieve these goals. So he needs more help from the government than we have. "
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