UK Hits Clean Energy Milestone: 50% of Electricity From Low Carbon Sources (theguardian.com)

Half of the UK's electricity came from wind turbines, solar panels, wood burning and nuclear reactors between July and September, in a milestone first. From a report on The Guardian: Official figures published on Thursday show low carbon power, which has been supported by the government to meet climate change targets, accounted for 50% of electricity generation in the UK in the third quarter, up from 45.3% the year before. The rise was largely driven by new windfarms and solar farms being connected to the grid, and several major coal power stations closing.

Comments

Re:Wood burning is not clean

[Andreas Mayer]

Wood burning can be considered clean in this context because the CO2 that is released was captured from the air in the first place.

So no additional CO2 is released when burning wood.

Wind/solar

[110010001000]

Um, no. According to the article the main driver was Natural Gas and Nuclear. Solar/Wind barely budged. Another mdsolar deceptive article.

Re:Wind/solar

[Mr D from 63]

Um, no. According to the article the main driver was Natural Gas and Nuclear. Solar/Wind barely budged. Another mdsolar deceptive article.

About 25% of Q3 power was from renewables. From the source document, about 4.5% was solar, 11% wind, 8% Biomass. Q3 is the best quarter for solar annually, it drops off significantly in the winter, so that annual averages are less than Q3. Wind production tends to be lower than average during Q3.

What is most interesting is that although the percentage increased, total consumption decreases significantly, allowing them to reduce coal burning. Natural Gas increased the most and Renewable's and Nuclear's percentages of the total increased more than their actual production percentages did.

https://t.co/WcF82BuKIu

Re:Wood burning is not clean

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that the coal/oil reserves underground came from tens of thousands of years (if not longer) sequestration process. We burn through it in a fraction of that time. So in the long-term it may return to equilibrium, but in the short term we are putting a shit ton more CO2 in the air than would be there otherwise.

Re:Wood burning is not clean

[hey!]

If I burn X amount of coal or gasoline, leading to one metric ton of CO2 entering the atmosphere, and then plant enough trees to recapture one metric ton of CO2... that is no less carbon neutral than the above.

Sure, if you did plant enough trees. But in fact globally forest extent is shrinking and nobody is talking about offsetting coal with re-forestation. That's because coal wouldn't be economically competitive if you had to pay for the cost of offsetting the pollution it emits. It's barely hanging on as is.

You can argue for anything if you imagined that we did things that (a) we aren't doing and (b) we aren't doing because they aren't economically practical.

Timescales don't matter.

Economists and financial analysts would beg to differ. So would chemists, physicists, ecologists and evolutionary biologists. Time is literally the most important factor there is in just about every calculation we make. There's a big difference between a 4% ROI in a month and a 4% ROI in a decade. There's a big difference between a 4 degree warming in a century and a 4 degree warming in ten thousand years.

It used to be believed that gas equilibrium with the oceans would prevent any increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration. That's why the anthropogenic greenhouse effect, which was proposed in the 1890s, wasn't believed by most scientists prior to the International Geophysical Year in 1958. In that year the oceanographer Roger Revelle demonstrated that the rate at which the oceans could absorb CO2 was physically limited. In other words the timescale of natural carbon sequestration was too long to prevent an increase in atmospheric CO2.