Why we need "Net zero"

[Beelbeebub]

1 hour ago, jack said:

 

Really? Have you lived in the UK for the last few decades?

argument to emotion

 

1 hour ago, jack said:

As an example, how about the ricidulous energy pricing paradigm discussed elsewhere in this thread, which has left us with insanely high energy prices?

Our insanely high energy prices are largely down to geopolitics and in particular our reliance on gas (which has got more expensive).  The marginal auction mechanism is a well founded approach, but it may well have put lived it's usefulness and be less able to pass on thr benefits of renewables to consumers. What we replace it with (and I would like to see a good discussion on that) is a much harder question. 

 

Your core argument (as I understand it) is that the government shouldn't be witholding licences and should let the companies decide if it is profitable or not.  Basically a very free market approach. 

 

But I would counter that the government has to put some regulation around licences, we can't obviously just let people drill and mine willy nilly. Things like environmental impact, health and safety, decommissioning etc all need to be regulated. 

 

So what is the functional difference between withholding a licence because the government considers drilling in an area might cause local nuisance and damage and withholding a licence because the government considers it will conflict with national and global priorities? 

 

There is a choice between renewables and oil and gas investment. There is a finite amount of money available for investors.  Banks and funds might choose to lend to an oil outfit or maybe a wind farm. Usually that voice will be dictated by returns (and the interest rates charged likewise on risks). We know oil and gas can be spectacularly profitable, so that is where the capital will flow.  If oil and gas isn't an option there will be more capital to flow to renewables. 

 

"cracking returns" is merely acknowledging that that the reason to allow more drilling is not

 

To lower bilks

To increace enrgy security

To reduce carbon footprint

 

The only reason to allow more drilking (to rephrase in a non emotional way) is for oil and gas firms to make larger profits. 

 

 

[jack]

1 hour ago, Beelbeebub said:

argument to emotion

 

You have a sense of humour, I'll give you that. 

 

[Beelbeebub]

40 minutes ago, jack said:

 

You have a sense of humour, I'll give you that. 

 

😁 

[Beelbeebub]

Re: fracking as a solution to UK oil production falls... 

 

Quote :

 

"... when we fly over some of these pump jacks and stuff like that, you'll be able to smell it... your eyes may burn just a little bit...." 

 

 

[SteamyTea]

1 hour ago, Beelbeebub said:

fracking as a solution to UK oil production falls... 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wytch_Farm

 

[Spinny]

On 12/04/2026 at 19:10, Beelbeebub said:

The flip side is the profits to be made from putting in renewables does encourage more to be put in. 

If renewables are so cheap and profitable then why are renewable investment funds doing so badly. Investment in renewables has been driven by profit - but that profit has come from subsidy, guaranteed pricing (itself another subsidy), and low interest rates (now gone). Already the government are trying to row back on previous guaranteed pricing and breaking contract law. This in an environment where few bid for renewables contracts now.

 

In an act of desperation, having already destroyed British industry to create renewable jobs in China, they now propose to use variable pricing to force the UK population to buy millions of batteries. The cost of these batteries being fully justified by the extremely high costs of UK electricity.

 

This is what happens when politicians meddle in markets - they generally make things worse.

[Roger440]

6 hours ago, Spinny said:

If renewables are so cheap and profitable then why are renewable investment funds doing so badly. Investment in renewables has been driven by profit - but that profit has come from subsidy, guaranteed pricing (itself another subsidy), and low interest rates (now gone). Already the government are trying to row back on previous guaranteed pricing and breaking contract law. This in an environment where few bid for renewables contracts now.

 

In an act of desperation, having already destroyed British industry to create renewable jobs in China, they now propose to use variable pricing to force the UK population to buy millions of batteries. The cost of these batteries being fully justified by the extremely high costs of UK electricity.

 

This is what happens when politicians meddle in markets - they generally make things worse.

 

Extends well beyond markets too.

 

They appear to be wilfully blind/stupid/corrupt (delete as appropiate) to "consequences" of decisions they make. Which everyone else can see right at the start.

 

70 million people to choose from, and we end up with 600 odd morons/crooks. (delete as appropiate)

[Beelbeebub]

On 07/05/2026 at 12:34, Spinny said:

If renewables are so cheap and profitable then why are renewable investment funds doing so badly.

Are they? They are obviously cheap enough that the strike prices of

 

£91/Mwh (offshore wind)

£72/Mwh (onshore wind)

£65/Mwh (solar)

 

Attracted over 14Gw of bids. 

 

On 07/05/2026 at 12:34, Spinny said:

guaranteed pricing (itself another subsidy) 

CfDs are sort of a subsidy but only in the sense that any fixed price deal can be a subsidy if your costs are low enough.  Unlike a guarenteed price, the CfD also allows payback when the price rises above the strike price, so it's a two way bet. The supplier know they will never get less than the strike and the buyer knows they will never pay more than the strike price. This massively derisks the investment. 

 

 

[LnP]

When people say renewables are cheap, they are saying they are cheap compared to other types of generation - CCGT and nuclear. But the way renewables CfDs work, it's not a fair comparison for two reasons.

 

Renewables are intermittent, CCGT and nuclear are firm power. A MWh of intermittent energy is worth less than a firm one. If the renewables generators had to provide the facilities to deliver electricity when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine (batteries, back-up CCGT etc), they wouldn't be so cheap.

 

And they are in far flung corners of the country, distant from consumers, with a grid which does not have the necessary capacity. This results in curtailment where we pay them for electricity we do not consume, or incur capital costs to increase the grid capacity to connect the far flung places.

 

The costs are there, it's just that the renewables generators don't have to pay them. Consumers and tax payers pay them. Renewables are a good thing but we need an honest discussion about what they cost. 

[JohnMo]

43 minutes ago, LnP said:

costs are there, it's just that the renewables generators don't have to pay them

Who do you think pays for nuclear? Then managed for the next 1000 years post decommissioning - the tax payer

Edited 11 hours ago by JohnMo

[JohnMo]

45 minutes ago, LnP said:

Renewables are intermittent,

Yes but offshore wind is pretty reliable, seems to generate power most the time. It's dead still here currently - no wind, but the current energy mix is wind and solar, in NE Scotland 

[SteamyTea]

1 hour ago, JohnMo said:

dead still here currently - no wind

Is it dead still 200m high?

 

[saveasteading]

33 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Is it dead still 200m high?

Rhetorical, or do we expect our man in the field to check this by drone or trained eagle?

Perhaps the more advanced met maps tell us?

A good point anyway.

[SteamyTea]

49 minutes ago, saveasteading said:

do we expect our man in the field to check this by drone or trained eagle

No.

But windspeed surveys are done at potential sites over a few years.

Weather satellites use lasers/radar to measure windspeed to a fine granularity at varying heights and air pressures. 

Air pressure is a key component in working out windspeed and the lower the pressure, the less energy extracted.

[Beelbeebub]

2 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Weather satellites use lasers/radar to measure windspeed to a fine granularity at varying heights and air pressures. 

Air pressure is a key component in working out windspeed and the lower the pressure, the less energy extracted.

I don't thing the air pressure/density makes much difference over 200m.  May r if we were sticking our wind turbines at 4,000m we'd have to account for that but the difference over 200m is about 1%

[Beelbeebub]

1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

Is it dead still 200m high?

 

Isn't one of the advantages of the new generation of mega turbines that the windspeed becomes stronger and more consistent as you move up out of the boundary layer above the land/sea 

[Beelbeebub]

On 14/04/2026 at 12:52, -rick- said:

The argument has been we've been moving up the value chain. But not sure that holds. Brexit has done a number on manufacturing (which was previously tightly integrated with EU supply chain) and the previous low cost producer is now galloping up the value chain:

This always happens, when I was a kid "made in Taiwan" was code for cheap plastic crap.

 

About 20 years ago I was working with Hong Kong tool makers (injection moulding tools) for clients. We were the interface and "prime contractor" pulling different disciplines into the process. 

 

At first they would make stuff to the drawings you sent them. We had to do all the jar calculations about shrinkage, ejector pin placement, demoulding, split lines. 

 

But each time they would offer more services, they could sort the split lines, they would handle the shrinkage allowances etc. About 10 years later and thwy were bidding direct to the clients for the full services and starting to offer design of the actual part as a service.... 

 

That said, the UK is still a pretty good (albeit niche) manufacturer. 

 

The thing is we can't be anything other than that now.  Not every country can be the "workshop of the world".  We don't have the population size to sustain it. 

 

Even all of Europe will struggle against China and India and Africa. With their much bigger populations. 

 

I did see an interesting thought. 

 

Low cost energy is an important economic advantage. 

 

Solar power is the cheapest power you can get, even more so in places with more reliable day to day and season to season sun.... Like the equator. 

 

Africa is poised to be able to offer the cheapest energy possible and, u like oil where we can nick it from the locals and bring it home, it's a hell of a lot harder for us to steal it or compete at home.  Africa also has huge resources and massive population.  Once (or if) they get going it's going to make China look lackluster. 

 

Maybe 100 years or will be poor Northern Europeans floating across the med to get to Africa.... 

[LnP]

38 minutes ago, JohnMo said:

Who do you think pays for nuclear? Then managed for the next 1000 years post decommissioning - the tax payer

I think consumers pay it, not the tax payer, but can you link me to a source for this? As far as I know, e.g. for Hinckley Point C, these costs are for EDF. That's according to the  Hinckley Point C Funded Decommissioning Programme, which "sets out EDF’s arrangements for managing and disposing of the plant’s waste and the decommissioning of the site". EDF will build up a dedicated fund during the station's operational life to ensure taxpayers do not bear the cost. All explained here.

 

So as far as I can tell, EDF took this on when they agreed the strike price, which is currently £135/MWh.... which might look expensive when compared to £91/MWh for off-shore wind, but maybe it isn't if renewables generators had to pay the full system costs.

56 minutes ago, JohnMo said:

Yes but offshore wind is pretty reliable, seems to generate power most the time.

 

Generating power "most of the time" is not good enough. We expect our electricity to be delivered all of the time. It's the gap between most of the time and all of the time which is expensive and should be taken into account when comparing renewables with fossils and nuclear.... as well as the grid costs of course.

[Oz07]

1 hour ago, Beelbeebub said:

 

 

Maybe 100 years or will be poor Northern Europeans floating across the med to get to Africa.... 

🤣 Magic soil theory incoming 🤣

sorry I couldn't help myself

[-rick-]

2 hours ago, Beelbeebub said:

That said, the UK is still a pretty good (albeit niche) manufacturer. 

 

Yeah, that for a lot of things relied on being one of a small number in the niche across the EU single market. We left that and those manufacturers suddenly have a much harder time competing with the other EU companies, while at the same time Chinese companies are also coming in to compete in the same areas.

 

2 hours ago, Beelbeebub said:

The thing is we can't be anything other than that now.  Not every country can be the "workshop of the world".  We don't have the population size to sustain it. 

 

No, though I think there is opportunity with modern, low labour, manufacturing methods that we will likely mostly miss because other western countries are just more attractive.

 

2 hours ago, Beelbeebub said:

Africa is poised to be able to offer the cheapest energy possible and, u like oil where we can nick it from the locals and bring it home, it's a hell of a lot harder for us to steal it or compete at home. 

 

Theres still a plan to get HVDC setup to Morocco to get access to cheap solar exports though.

 

https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/

 

2 hours ago, Beelbeebub said:

Africa also has huge resources and massive population.  Once (or if) they get going it's going to make China look lackluster. 

 

Africa is a long long way away from being able to compete there. Too many different countries, too much inter country strife.

 

India is the next China.

 

2 hours ago, Beelbeebub said:

Maybe 100 years or will be poor Northern Europeans floating across the med to get to Africa.... 

 

Not sure about Africa but with the more recent AMOC data seems quite likely this country will become much less plesant to live in within that timescale meaning that even if future governments do everything right we are still likely to be poorer and less populated than now. Hope that mainly bites after I'm dead though.

[SteamyTea]

45 minutes ago, -rick- said:

India is the next China

Or Brazil.

 

(Who remembers the BRICS)

[Beelbeebub]

5 hours ago, LnP said:

I think consumers pay it, not the tax payer, but can you link me to a source for this?..... 

Ultimately the tax payer is the decomissioner of last resort though. You can write all the contracts you want but if EDF go bust what are we going to do?

 

5 hours ago, LnP said:

.... if renewables generators had to pay the full system costs.... 

A fair enough point. I would be good to see the cost of backup included, though it is surely just the cost of running on gas/imports. 

 

Which does mean we definitely need to also include the cost (climate change impacts) of carbon emissions for fossil fuel plants. That means (at a minimum) the carbon costs that are already factored in 

[SteamyTea]

Australia is getting free electricity - will other countries follow?

As one of the most advanced solar nations in the world, Australia is well placed to experiment with giving people free power - and if it succeeds, other countries may look to copy its approach

By James Woodford

7 November 2025

Solar panels in Sydney, Australia

Stephen Dwyer/Alamy

 

Australians received a welcome surprise this week with the news that every household will soon receive 3 hours of free electricity every day, as part of a world-first initiative to share the benefits of solar power. If successful, it could be a model for other to follow in a future that will increasingly be powered by sunshine.

The Australian electricity grid is zinging with excess capacity during the day thanks to solar power, but it is strained at night when people return from work and use most of their appliances. To address this, the Australian government says its “Solar Sharer” scheme will be rolled out from July 2026 in three states – New South Wales, South Australia and the south-east corner of Queensland – with the rest of the country joining in 2027.

 

Australia is already leading the world in solar deployment per capita, with the installation of 42 gigawatts of solar capacity, equivalent to more than 1500 watts per person or about five times the global average, says Bin Lu at the Australian National University in Canberra. Another 40 GW of new renewable capacity will be installed by 2030.

“As a result, there’s abundant solar power injecting into the grid in the middle of the day,” says Lu. “If it isn’t effectively used, it’ll simply be wasted.”

But while four million Australian households have their own solar panels, the vast majority of which feed into the grid, people who live in apartments or can’t afford an installation are locked out – something this new policy solves, says Marnie Shaw, also at the Australian National University.

 

“It gives everybody access to solar power in a very simple way,” she says. “You don’t need to buy a share in a solar farm. You don’t need a battery. You just use the solar power that’s already being produced by others. When you’re using power in the middle of the day, you’ll be using the excess power produced by your neighbour’s rooftop solar.”

The idea for offering consumers cheaper or even free power isn’t entirely new. Several Australian power suppliers already have similar schemes that operate at certain times where there is excess renewable energy, as do many in European countries. What makes the Solar Sharer scheme unprecedented is its scale and blanket implementation, and that it is led by a national government instead of industry.

Some wonder, however, whether the new policy will work in practice or if it risks introducing perverse outcomes. For example, Dylan McConnell at the University of New South Wales says it may disincentivise new solar installations.

“You sharpen your pencil and start doing the calculations when you’re thinking about putting solar on your house,” says McConnell. “Then someone says ‘hey its free power for 3 hours in the middle of the day’, you might reconsider that decision.”

He says some people might instead buy a battery and use the free power to charge that up. Others might be upset because the expensive solar system they have just installed no longer has the same value proposition. Administering the policy will also prove complex, and the government will need to make sure that electricity suppliers don’t simply hike the price at other times to compensate for the free hours, says McConnell.

Another unknown is what would happen if there is a lengthy run of bad weather, says Alexandr Akimov at Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia. “There is a risk,” he says, “that during rainy days, particularly when wide weather fronts cover the eastern states, that high daytime consumption combined with low solar generation could lead to spikes in daytime grid demand.”

Because Australia is so advanced in its solar journey, its policies will be widely watched by other countries. Glenn Platt at the University of Sydney says that, as other nations get deeper into their solar rollout journeys, they will “definitely” have to confront some of the same issues.

 

The big question, he says, is whether householders will actually change their ways as a result of the free power and move some of their energy-intensive habits like washing and drying clothes to the middle of the day. Evidence from existing free schemes in Australia is that shifting behaviours can be very difficult, especially for energy intensive heating and cooling.

The greatest potential beneficiaries of free electricity are lower-income earners, but these are also the people least likely to own the smart appliances needed to take advantage of the free power in the middle of the day.

“It means huge change, and we’re assuming that energy consumers will do certain things,” says Platt. “It’s less about the electrons and the dollars and more about the social experiment, much more about the behavioural change.”

Article amended on 12 November 2025

We have updated this article to reflect that Australia leads the world in solar deployment per capita.

 

Solar energy is going to power the world much sooner than you think

Solar electricity is growing rapidly, but can it really dominate the global energy system? Here is what it will take for us to power the planet on sunshine

By Madeleine Cuff

23 October 2025

The future of solar is looking bright

fuyu liu/Shutterstock

 

Is solar power going to take over the world? The past few years have seen a frankly astounding acceleration in the rate of its deployment, with total generation capacity doubling between 2022 and 2024 to supply a full 7 per cent of the world’s electricity. Just how high can that figure go?

The first six months of 2025 saw wind and solar together pass a historic milestone, generating more power than coal for the first time and making renewables the world’s leading source of electricity. The driving force behind this “crucial turning point” in the energy transition, as the UK-based think tank Ember described it, was the growth of solar. It accounted for 83 per cent of the total increase in the world’s electricity demand in 2025, Ember’s analysis indicates, and has been the largest source of new electricity globally for three years in a row.

 

Solar’s secret weapon? How cheap it is. It is the world’s lowest-cost electricity, with the cost of installing a solar system dropping in price by 90 per cent over the past 15 years. “Right now, silicon panels themselves are the same cost as plywood,” says Sam Stranks at the University of Cambridge.

In other words, we have a plentiful and cheap source of electricity that can be built quickly, almost anywhere in the world. Is it fanciful to imagine that solar could one day power everything?

At the most fundamental level, the supply of solar energy to Earth is almost limitless. Even once you factor in the efficiency rates of modern solar panels, supplying all of the world’s energy needs with the sun’s power would require around 450,000 square kilometres of land, a 2021 report from the UK think tank Carbon Tracker estimated. That’s just 0.3 per cent of global land area.

 

Kingsmill Bond, one of the report authors and now at Ember, says that, while there are “trade-offs” when it comes to land use – solar may compete with agriculture, for example – “for most countries, there is plenty of space to deploy these technologies”.

A new generation of panels

The question, then, is what is stopping solar power from taking over the global electricity supply entirely? The first issue is that of efficiency. Silicon photovoltaic panels, which make up the bulk of the global solar market, currently convert about 20 per cent of the sun’s energy into electricity. By comparison, hydropower plants convert 90 per cent of the potential energy into electricity, wind turbines about 50 per cent and fossil fuel plants 30 to 40 per cent.

In real terms, this means you need many more solar panels to provide the same amount of power that you could harvest from other sources. That’s why solar firms and scientists are hard at work trying to unlock more efficiency gains from solar panels, in the hope that an efficiency boost will deliver a double win for solar: even lower system costs and less demand for land.

However, crystalline silicon panels are nearing the limits of the efficiencies they can achieve, with best-in-class cells now at about 25 per cent efficiency. “The practical limit for crystalline silicon is probably about 28 per cent,” says Jenny Nelson at Imperial College London.

Pushing efficiencies above that will require a shift to what is known as a tandem solar cell, which introduces a second semiconductor to increase the amount of energy a cell can extract from the solar spectrum. Tandem silicon-perovskite cells are seen as the most promising option, with a theoretical efficiency limit of about 50 per cent. Real-world tandem panels won’t achieve anything like that level of efficiency, but could reach 35 to 37 per cent efficiency, says Stranks.

After years of research, the first tandem silicon-perovskite solar panels are just starting to enter commercial production, and they need to be tested by industry to see how long they maintain their performance under real-world conditions. But Stranks is optimistic about their potential. He estimates that in 10 years’ time, they will become the dominant technology on the market. “On the face of it, they wouldn’t actually look that different from the roof or on the street, but they are producing 50 per cent more power than today’s panels,” says Stranks. “It’s a big change.”

Not only would greater efficiency cut costs even further, but it could also unlock new deployment opportunities, says Stranks. For example, high-efficiency panels could enable solar roofs on electric cars, allowing their batteries to charge during the day. The stored power could then either be used for transport or discharged to the home for use during the evening, he suggests.

Solving storage

Such innovation could help to untangle one of the other major issues with solar power – its fickleness. The sun, of course, doesn’t shine all the time. For countries in the “sun belt”, including India, Mexico and many African nations, this is less of a problem, as the sun shines almost all year round and batteries can be used to store excess energy during the day for use in the hours after dark. This solar-plus-storage set-up is becoming increasingly cost-effective, with the cost of lithium-ion batteries dropping 40 per cent in the past two years alone, according to BloombergNEF.

“Ultimately, the only advantage that fossil fuels have over sunshine as a source for electricity is their storability,” says Bond. “And, suddenly, that storability issue has been solved for 90 per cent of the time by a single technology, which is the battery.”

 

But for countries further north, where winter days are short and grey, it is a different story. “[Solar] is an unbelievably, amazingly good energy source, with zero pollution, rapid payback of energy investment – it just ticks every single box,” says Andrew Blakers at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. “Unless you live in northern Europe, north-east Asia or the north-east United States, where you have plenty of sun in summer and not much in winter, [solar] is simply the best.”

For countries that suffer long, dark winters, wind power can step in to fill much of the gap, says Blakers. But energy storage solutions that can bank power for weeks or months at a time will also be needed. Such “interseasonal storage” is still in its infancy, with few solutions operating at commercial scale. But pumped hydro, hydrogen and compressed air storage could all provide an answer to this conundrum. Blakers’s prediction? “Batteries take care of the short term, pumped hydro takes care of the long term.”

Political headaches

If anything, efficiency and storage are the easy problems to solve. “I think the bottlenecks probably lie in politics, consistency in policy, regulation, vested interests of other industries,” says Nelson.

The climate-sceptic Trump administration in the US is a case in point. Earlier this month, federal officials cancelled a huge proposed solar project in Nevada that would have been one of the largest schemes in the world, just the latest in a series of actions to curtail solar funding programmes and block projects.

But Bond believes the transition to renewable power is now all but unstoppable given its economic advantages over traditional generation sources. “Incumbents can hold back the tide for solar in individual countries and individual projects and individual years,” he says. “The current Trump administration is doing its very best to slow down the current deployment of renewables. But all it really means is that they then fall behind in the global race to deploy superior technology.”

Blakers agrees, adding that solar energy may be the only way to meet fast-growing power demand from AI data centres. “Even in the US, it’s difficult to see solar being turned off even by a determined federal government, because many states like it, and it’s by far the quickest way to get large amounts of energy,” he says.

The other major bottleneck for clean energy is logistical. Existing electricity networks need to be rewired to cope with huge, fluctuating supplies of electricity coming from new areas. A more flexible grid, which can cope with surges in generation and even tweak power demand in response, will help to maximise the use of green power. But delivering these grids of the future costs money. In the UK alone, energy companies plan to spend £77 billion over the next five years refitting the transmission network to cope with the shift to wind and solar.

In lower-income nations, where grid networks aren’t yet so comprehensive, countries can move more quickly to build renewable-friendly infrastructure from the get-go, allowing renewables to penetrate further into grid supply. The 10 so-called BRICS nations – Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates – now collectively account for more than half of the world’s electricity generation from solar, according to Ember.

A wider challenge for countries is to electrify greater chunks of their energy demand, from heating to transport. Such progress is crucial to cut fossil fuel use in other parts of the global economy. As Nelson puts it: “If we want to decarbonise the planet, then we need to electrify first.” Here too, lower-income nations are racing ahead of higher-income ones. China’s share of electricity in final energy consumption hit 32 per cent in 2023, far outstripping the 24 per cent electrification rate of the US and richer European nations, says Ember.

A solar future?

Despite the success this year, the technical, logistical and political challenges outlined above may slow the rollout of solar in some countries in the short term. Earlier this month, the International Energy Agency predicted that renewable power will more than double by the end of the decade, but is set to fall short of an international goal to triple capacity by the same date. The agency said policy changes in the US and the challenges of integrating solar into grid systems were headwinds to the expansion in renewables capacity.

But energy market experts are confident that, by mid-century and beyond, solar will dominate global energy supply. “By the end of this century, it is pretty clear that we will be getting all of our electricity from renewable sources, of which the vast majority will be solar,” says Bond, estimating that as much as 80 per cent of the world’s electricity supply will be generated by solar by 2100. Added to that, at least 80 per cent of the world’s total energy demand will be electrified, he expects.

Roadblocks from politics, energy storage and infrastructure will all be cleared out of the way to usher in the green power revolution. “The human condition is to turn energy into stuff,” says Bond. “We use energy for everything. And now, suddenly, we found this cheap, universal energy source – of course, we are going to figure it out.”

 

Electric vehicle owners could earn thousands by supporting power grid

Electric vehicles could store renewable energy when there is excess supply and give it back to the grid when demand peaks, but car companies disagree on the best way to do that

By Alec Luhn

17 April 2026

Electric cars could make their owners money while they sit idle

Maskot Bildbyrå

 

At least 90 per cent of the electricity generation being built today is renewable. But solar and wind farms produce electricity only when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, so the power supply will fluctuate more. A pilot project in the US state of Delaware has shown that owners of electric vehicles (EVs) could make thousands of dollars each year by allowing their parked cars to serve as part of a giant collective battery that stores electricity when there is high supply and distributes it when there is high demand.

Some data suggests that the average EV is driving as little as 5 per cent of the time. Otherwise, it is often parked and plugged into the grid. This means that, rather than building giant battery farms, electric companies could balance the grid by drawing power from these cars when usage peaks in the morning and evening, then recharging them during the day, says Willett Kempton at the University of Delaware, who led the project. EV owners could sell electricity at a premium while still saving the grid money.

 

“An electric vehicle plugged in 95 per cent of the time that it’s not driving can provide storage for the grid at about one-tenth the cost of building batteries,” says Kempton. “[That could] help increase the reliability of any electric system and increase the capability of us to put more and more renewables on the system.”

In the project, four Ford EVs owned by energy company Delmarva Power were retrofitted to supply electricity back to the power system through vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charging. Kempton and his colleagues monitored their V2G charging throughout 2025. Given the amount of electricity the cars supplied to the grid, each EV could have earned as much as $3359 annually if that energy was sold at the market price.

When Kempton became one of the first to investigate V2G back in 1997, it made so much sense that he thought it would become a commercial reality within a few years. But almost 30 years later, V2G largely exists in a handful of test programmes in the US, Europe, Japan and China.

 

A key reason for this is that reversing the flow of energy from the grid to the car turns out to be surprisingly complex, because it requires vehicle-makers, utility companies and governments to change how they approach EVs, says Kempton.

The biggest issue is that power grids run largely or exclusively on alternating current (AC) electricity, while some household devices, including EVs, convert that AC to direct current (DC) electricity when they draw energy from an outlet. For an EV to supply the grid, the energy needs to be converted back to AC.

Doing that without electrocuting anyone requires V2G components to be built to a safety standard. The simplest way to set up V2G currently is to install a wall charger that converts DC to AC under standards designed to allow solar panels to feed into the grid. A few car companies, including Volkswagen and Nissan, have been offering wall chargers that do this in some markets.

 

But those wall chargers can cost thousands of dollars. So companies including Tesla, BYD and Renault have started developing EVs that convert DC to AC inside the car itself, and Kempton and others have been working on new safety standards for AC chargers. If that technology becomes widespread, it could enable V2G while adding only a few hundred dollars to the cost of the car, says Kempton.

As things stand, there is a rivalry between DC V2G like Volkswagen’s and AC V2G like Tesla’s. This is similar to the format war between VHS and Betamax videotapes in the 1980s, according to Alex Schoch at UK electricity retailer Octopus Energy. Betamax offered better quality, similar to DC chargers, which are more efficient. But VHS players were far cheaper, like AC chargers, and VHS eventually dominated the market.

“Our view is there’s a period of time where the market can deal with two different standards, but to really scale and get to mass-market, you’ve got to align on one,” says Shoch. “We’re firmly team … AC.”

But for drivers to want to spend even a few hundred extra dollars on a V2G setup, there needs to be a buyback tariff that will allow them to make money supplying energy to the grid. In 2024, Octopus launched the UK’s first V2G tariff, although for now there are few car owners that can take advantage of it. To that end, it has also partnered with BYD to allow consumers to lease a charger and electric vehicle equipped for AC V2G.

“Many manufacturers, the EVs they’re putting on the road are V2G capable, or the next generation that are hitting the road today or tomorrow will be,” says Schoch. “And you [will] suddenly have gigawatts of capacity that’s distributed all over the country.”

 

 

V2G adoption could help balance the demand and supply on the grid in real time. But as more EVs with V2G chargers start plugging in, it will also put more strain on the existing electricity system. As a result, V2G will probably force countries to upgrade their power grids.

A recent study calculated that it would be more cost-effective for countries to upgrade their grids all in one go, rather than upgrading them little by little as V2G gradually increases. Nations should “prepare the power system at a very early stage” for the coming V2G revolution, according to the study’s lead author, Liangcai Xu at the National University of Singapore.

“I was surprised because I thought V2G can be a silver bullet, it can solve everything,” says co-author Ziyou Song, also at the National University of Singapore. “[But] the gap is kind of significant. We have to upgrade our power system decently [so] we can facilitate so much electrical-charging demand.”

Article amended on 29 April 2026

We have updated this article to reflect that some household devices convert AC to DC.

[SteamyTea]

19 minutes ago, Beelbeebub said:

You can write all the contracts you want but if EDF go bust

They have, bailed out by the French Government.

 

There will not be enough cash in the pot to pay for decommissioning, let alone long term storage.

We still, as the first country to have nuclear power, do not have a repository.

They latest scheme is to tunnel out into the Irish Sea and store in the mudstone.  That is after decades of the Cumbrian repository getting nowhere.

 

We don't even need an 'accident' to have problems.

 

Fire is spreading in the Chernobyl exclusion zone after drone crash

A drone has crashed in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, causing a fire that has spread to 12 square kilometres of land. Dry weather, strong winds and the presence of land mines are complicating efforts to bring the blaze under control

By Matthew Sparkes

8 May 2026

A forest fire is burning in the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine

Associated Press / Alamy Stock Photo

 

A large forest fire is spreading through the Chernobyl exclusion zone after a drone struck the area yesterday. Though the fire is serious, those on the ground say the risk of radioactive contamination outside the area is minimal.

The Chornobyl Radiation and Ecological Biosphere Reserve (CREBR) wrote in a Telegram post that around 12 square kilometres of land, located to the south-east of the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl and the nuclear plant’s former cooling ponds, are burning due to a drone crash – but didn’t give details on the type or origin of the device. As of Friday afternoon, some 331 people and 75 pieces of equipment are involved in the emergency response.

“It’s really big. Guys who are working on [the] fire line are breathing air with high concentration of radionuclides,” says Denys Vyshnevskiy at the CREBR. “After the shift, they check concentration radionuclides in the body.”

Vyshnevskiy says that 5 to 10 kilometres from the fire, the radiation levels are normal, and there is little risk of contamination outside the exclusion zone.

Other estimates using satellite images seen by New Scientist suggest that the area of the fire has actually grown to 24.4 square kilometres.

Olena Burdo at the Institute for Nuclear Research in Kyiv, Ukraine, was near the site when the fire started, but saw only smoke because the affected area was closed to scientists at the time by the military. She also thinks there is very little risk of radioactive contamination outside the zone.

The State Emergency Service of Ukraine (SES) said in a Telegram post that tackling the fire is complicated by dry weather, strong winds and the presence of land mines. “The fire is rapidly spreading across the territory,” it wrote. Vyshnevskiy says the hope on the ground is that rain expected this evening will aid firefighters.

The SES said that some areas are too dangerous for firefighters to access because of land mines, so are being left temporarily while efforts are concentrated elsewhere.

 

The Chernobyl exclusion zone is frequently overflown by Russian drones en route to Kyiv and other targets within Ukraine. Last year, a Russian drone struck the New Safe Confinement shelter, which protects the highly radioactive remains of the 1986 disaster, blasting a hole all the way through its multi-layer construction.

Footage from that night shows fire and smoke billowing from a gaping hole – luckily, it was far enough towards the edge of the building that debris didn’t fall onto the fragile reactor or sarcophagus below, which could have caused collapse and stirred up dangerously radioactive material.

 

Extreme weather in 2025 drove record wildfire emissions in Europe

Europe, the fastest-warming continent, saw unprecedented wildfires and heatwaves in 2025, including a three-week hot spell that hit 30°C inside the Arctic circle

By Alec Luhn

29 April 2026

A firefighter battles the flames in Fundão, Portugal, in August 2025

DA SILVA/EPA/Shutterstock

 

Europe suffered unprecedented wildfires and heatwaves in 2025, impacts that are expected to worsen on the world’s fastest-warming continent.

Last year was the hottest year on record in the UK, Iceland and Norway and one of the three hottest years in Europe as a whole, according to an annual report by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). More than 95 per cent of the continent experienced above-average annual temperatures. Scandinavia, Finland and north-western Russia saw their worst-ever heatwave, 21 days of simmering temperatures that reached 30°C (86°F) even at the Arctic circle.

 

This extreme heat probably stunted animal and plant growth while encouraging the spread of invasive species and pests, showing how the climate crisis is contributing to a crash in biodiversity, Celeste Saulo at the World Meteorological Organization said at a press conference.

“This region would [typically] see zero to two days of strong heat stress, and we are speaking about 21, so this had a major impact on ecosystem health,” she said. “Since 1980, Europe has been warming twice as fast as the global average, [and] heatwaves are becoming more frequent and severe.”

Climate warming set the stage for record wildfires in Portugal and Spain in August, making the extremely hot, dry, windy conditions there at least 40 times more likely. More than 10,000 square kilometres burned, and at least three people were killed. Fires approached Madrid, and authorities had to shut down parts of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route. Smoke drifted as far as the UK.

 

Across Europe, wildfires emitted 47 million tonnes of carbon, a record amount. Spain, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Cyprus all topped their previous fire-emissions records.

Soil conditions were the driest in 33 years of observations, with more than a third of Europe suffering extreme agricultural drought, especially the UK, Turkey and Ukraine. While parched soils probably encouraged wildfires in many countries, it was increasing fluctuations in the weather that supercharged the blazes in Portugal and Spain, according to Samantha Burgess at ECMWF. An extremely wet spring that boosted vegetation growth was followed by record summer heat, which dried out those plants and shrubs, creating a tinderbox.

“If you have a very high fuel load in addition to the wildfire weather, so hot, dry winds in particular, that’s when we get these catastrophic conditions where wildfires spread very quickly,” Burgess said at the briefing. “National parks need… firebreaks around them to make sure if there is a fire, it doesn’t spread.”

The ocean around Europe was also abnormally hot, breaking the record for annual sea surface temperature for the fourth year in a row. A record 86 per cent of these seas suffered strong, severe or extreme marine heatwaves. The most extreme hotspots occurred west of Ireland, south of Iceland and south-east of Spain.

For the past three years, heatwaves have struck 100 per cent of the Mediterranean Sea, which is warming up faster than the global average. Waters in Italy and Spain reached 30°C, warmer than a typical swimming pool, raising the risk of fish death, as well as the spread of bacteria and algae. Past marine heatwaves in the Mediterranean have killed off huge amounts of coral, seagrass beds and shellfish.

 

To limit future damage, Europe needs to lead the way on slowing climate change, Dušan Chrenek of the European Commission said at the briefing. In 2025, solar power generated a record 12.5 per cent of the continent’s electricity, with a total 46 per cent coming from renewables.

European countries are also among those taking part in the first summit on transitioning away from fossil fuels in Colombia this week, which was organised after the COP30 climate summit in Brazil failed to agree on a roadmap to end oil, gas and coal emissions.

At the same time, Europe should adapt to future climate risks, such as multi-year megadroughts similar to the one already gripping the western US, according to officials.

“We need to address these risks,” Chrenek said. “The cost of inaction is significantly higher than the cost of tackling negative impacts.”