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Daily Briefing |

TODAY'S CLIMATE AND ENERGY HEADLINES

Briefing date 22.08.2017
Saudi Arabia issues rules for small-scale solar energy generation, London-Scotland passengers opt for rail over air

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News.

Saudi Arabia issues rules for small-scale solar energy generation
Reuters Read Article

Saudi Arabia has issued a regulatory framework to allow households to produce solar energy and export unused power to the national grid, the government said on Monday. Excess electricity will be offset against future consumption and after a year people will receive cash payments at a tariff approved by the authority. “What has been achieved is an essential step forward towards the realisation of the deployment of renewable energy in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” said Fayez al-Jabri, director-general of technical affairs at the country’s Electricity and Cogeneration Regulatory Authority.

Green boost for London-Scotland travel as passengers opt for rail over air
BusinessGreen Read Article

Growing numbers of people are travelling from London to Edinburgh and Glasgow by train rather than air, according to a new report from Transform Scotland. Excluding road travel, the market share for rail between London and Scotland has increased from 20% to 33% between 2005 and 2015, while the share of air travel has fallen from 80% to 67%. The move has helped to avoid hundreds of thousands of tonnes of CO2 emissions over the past decade, the research found. Further emissions savings are also expected after Virgin Trains introduces its planned ‘Azuma’ trains on London to Edinburgh routes, promising to cut journey times down from five hours to around four. “Transform Scotland said rail travel was around five times ‘greener’ than air travel, and that the planned Azuma trains would emit 84 per cent less CO2 per passenger than a plane.” Energy Live News and the Scotsman also cover the report.

US power grid passes a test as eclipse reduces solar generation
Financial Times Read Article

Last night’s eclipse tested a US electric grid increasingly reliant on solar power, in a “dress rehearsal” for a future in which intermittent solar sources have a bigger role in the power supply, reports the Financial Times. In California, where the sun was partially obscured, about 3,400 megawatts of output rapidly disappeared after 9am Pacific time, the California Independent System Operator (ISO) said. As solar production declined, the California grid manager tapped more supplies from natural gas-fired power plants and hydroelectric dams, and imported power from neighbouring states executing plans they have been crafting for months. “We were really pleased with how smoothly everything went,” an ISO spokeswoman said. “It bodes wells for renewable energy on the grid during an event like this.”

World has missed chance to avoid dangerous global warming – unless we start geo-engineering the planet
Independent Read Article

Average temperature will overshoot Paris Agreement targets but be brought back down again by the end of this century, according to a new analysis of the chances of the world meeting the globally agreed goals. Scientists used computer models to assess what needs to be done to restrict global warming to between 1.5 and 2C, the limits adopted by the Paris Agreement. While their findings shows the world was likely to overshoot this temperature, the research showed the could be brought down to 1.2C by the end of this century by using techniques to remove carbon dioxide from the air. Writing in the journal Climatic Change, researchers from Switzerland said: “We find that, with our modelling assumptions, limiting global temperature to 1.5C is only possible when using direct air capture (DAC)….A deep decarbonisation of the energy system and a strong reduction of final energy demands without complementary carbon dioxide removal are not enough to realise this Paris target.” Carbon Brief last year published a detailed explainer on some of the most prominent options for negative emissions technologies, including DAC.

Alaska's Grizzly Bears Drop Salmon for Berries as Climate Changes
Inside Climate News Read Article

Kodiak Island’s iconic bears have changed their diet as elderberries started ripening earlier – another ecological shift amid climate change, according to new research. During an unusually warm summer in 2014 the bears were found to be absent from the island’s shallow freshwater streams. At the peak of the annual salmon run, the bears were busy feasting on berries instead, according to a study published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Carbon Brief also covers the story.

BHP bows to activist pressure to exit US shale
Energy Live News Read Article

BHP Billiton is “actively pursuing options” to exit the US shale industry following calls by activist investors to sell off its US shale oil unit, the Financial Times reports. The division has become a lightning rod for broader dissatisfaction with the company’s strategy, with BHP under pressure from investors to spin out the division as oil prices struggle to recover above the $50-a-barrel level. BHP said on Tuesday that it deemed the shale business “non-core” and was exploring options to offload the assets, the BBC reports. The firm will also will delay a move into potash after months of public skirmishes with activist investors led by Paul Singer’s Elliott Management Corp, according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile French oil giant Total has agreed to buy Danish exploration and production firm Maersk Oil in a move will make Total the second largest operator in the North Sea, reports Energy Live News. The takeover will see Total take control Maersk’s assets in the UK sector of the North Sea, including the Culzean gas field, the BBC reports.

Comment.

UK eyes rethink after high cost of nuclear plant
Andrew Ward & Nathalie Thomas, Financial Times Read Article

Scheduled to open in 2025 at a cost of almost £20bn, Hinkley is a central part of Britain’s faltering efforts to replace the one-third of its electricity generating capacity that is expected to be lost by 2035 as ageing power stations shut down, write Andrew Ward and Nathalie Thomas in a feature looking at the prospects for new energy infrastructure in the UK. But with construction running years later than originally envisaged, several further proposed reactors struggling to secure financing, and new gas-fired power stations having faced similar hold-ups have raised “concerns about Britain’s ability to maintain energy security”. “The energy landscape is changing so fast that the government is scared of backing the wrong technology,” says the UK head of a global energy group.

The World Eyes Yet Another Unconventional Source of Fossil Fuels
Nicola Jones, Yale Environment 360 Read Article

“In May of this year, China claimed a breakthrough in tapping an obscure fossil fuel resource: Researchers there managed to suck a steady flow of methane gas out of frozen mud on the seafloor,” writes Nicola Jones in a feature looking at prospects for the fossil fuel, frozen deposits of natural gas on the sea floor. “The idea of exploiting this quirky fuel source would have been considered madness a couple of decades ago — both wildly expensive and dangerous.” However, studies of the frozen gas have quelled some of the bigger fears. “But there are still concerns about the wisdom of mining this unexplored corner of the fossil fuel landscape, including the possibility of triggering underwater landslides, unleashing tsunamis, disturbing ocean ecosystems, and — most important of all — more than doubling the planet’s natural gas supplies and the planet-warming emissions that go along with them.”

Science.

Negative Emissions from Stopping Deforestation and Forest Degradation, Globally
Global Change Biology Read Article

Stopping deforestation and allowing secondary forests to grow would yield negative global emissions of about 120 petragrams of carbon (120bn tonnes) from 2016 and 2100, new research suggests, which is around 12 years of fossil fuel use at today’s rate. ‘If greater negative emissions are to be realised, they will require an expansion of forest area, greater efficiencies in converting harvested wood to long-lasting products and sources of energy, and novel approaches for sequestering carbon in soils,’ the researchers say. ‘That is, they will require current management practices to change.’

Enhanced warming of the subtropical mode water in the North Pacific and North Atlantic
Nature Climate Change Read Article

Ocean temperatures beneath the surface in subtropical parts of the North Pacific and North Atlantic oceans have been significantly affected by climate change in the last six decades, a new study finds. Compiling historical measurements of the subsurface ocean for the last 60 years — some available for the first time, researchers analysed the warming of “mode waters”, important bodies of water that are a few hundred metres thick and are evenly distributed across subtropical oceans. They find that the rate of warming is twice as large in mode waters than at the surface. ‘[The] change has clear implications for predicting biogeochemical responses to climate warming,’ the researchers say.

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