Climate Change Committee: UK Decarbonisation is Off-Track…
The Climate Change Committee reported on 28th June that the UK’s decarbonisation strategy is off-track. There is a lack of urgency and a loss of the country’s leadership role. Recent increases in fossil fuel generation go in the wrong direction, and household-level reductions are way behind schedule.
…And So May Be the EU
The entire EU also endured an up-tick of emissions early this year, though (despite the dash for gas and coal due to Putin’s war in Ukraine) emissions still reduced by 4% overall. The commitments are still all there, so we hope it will prove only to be a blip on an ongoing downwards trend. America remains behind, though the present government is trying hard to catch up.
Tighter Emissions Limits
The government announced tighter emissions limits on many sources of emissions, which can only be a positive move.
Black Start on the Electricity Grid
National Grid has announced “the successful energisation of the SP Energy Networks distribution and transmission network assets, with multiple distributed energy resources (DERs) contributing to the distribution restoration zone (DRZ)” using storage with a grid-forming inverter as the anchor generator.
But this seems to be rather exaggerating to say that it’s energised the transmission grid. It energised a transformer, but nothing on the grid at a voltage level above it, let alone the entire grid section at the higher voltage – which is necessary before it can claim to have energised any grid at higher voltage. Mark’s previous blog from three years ago still hasn’t been disproved: according to National Grid’s own previous work, Black Start must be top-down, by synchronous plant like Storelectric’s.
Mark’s Blog
This month Mark analyses National Grid’s Future Energy Scenarios and finds that it falls as far short as ever. It only models half the energy system, and that inadequately.
