Tag Archives: Greentech

Energy, News

Solar power targets welcomed — but more action needed

UK-based solar energy specialist greentech today welcomed moves to triple the number of solar panels across the UK by 2030 — but said the Government must do more to make it happen.

Leaked details ahead of the publication of the Government’s energy security white paper suggest that official targets for solar power generation will soar from the current capacity of 14GW to 50GW over the next eight years.

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy says it also wants to see big increases in offshore and onshore wind power and a doubling of the country’s nuclear power capacity over the same period.

greentech managing director Yaw Ofori said the targets were a welcome recognition of the urgent need for the country to move towards developing a zero-carbon future that also safeguards energy security.

But he said Government policy needed to be fully joined up with other stakeholders, grid companies and planning authorities, if the targets were to be met.

“We very much welcome these figures and hope that they will be included in the energy strategy when it is revealed next week,” said Yaw.

“But there has to be much more to this than simply setting targets and hoping that the renewable industry will deliver on them.

“The Government must look at national planning policy to ensure that developments such as solar farms are given every opportunity to go ahead.  The electricity distribution and transmission systems must be upgraded if the Government’s targets are to be achieved as the industry is facing significant challenges securing economically-viable grid connections which limits our ability to deliver renewable energy projects.

“We would like to see a streamlined planning process, which gives us the opportunity to respond speedily to these targets by bringing new sites online urgently. All too often under the current development process, plans for new solar farms are becoming stalled and the environmental crisis continues.

“We are not asking for permission to build solar farms anywhere we like, but a recognition that we need to prioritise them — and the risk that climate change poses — in the system.

“We would also like to see more Government support for investment in renewable technology and incentives given to allow consumers, developers, industry and the public sector to take up green choices.

“If the Government can produce a truly integrated energy strategy inclusive of the key stakeholders, the net gains for the country could be huge. Not only could we meet our NetZero targets by 2050, we could create a thriving and future-proof green economy, become a world leader in the renewable technologies that will dominate our infrastructure for the rest of the century and also deliver national energy security at the same time.”

Yaw was speaking after reports that BEIS wanted major increases to the country’s renewable energy capacity in the Government’s new energy strategy, due to be published in the next few days.

The Prime Minister has already set out a 10-point plan, which includes a goal for the UK to get all its electricity from low-carbon sources by 2035.

greentech manages a portfolio of assets across 12 different countries, resulting in a combined output of more than 800 MWp.

It is currently working with landowners in this country to identify and develop suitable sites for solar farms to significantly increase the use of renewable energy.

Energy, Environment, Environment News, Environmental News, News

The role of SMA technology in the fight against climate change

Written by Dr. Kevin O’Toole, Managing Director and Co-founder of Exergyn

Shape memory alloys (SMAs) are a unique group of metals which have the potential to revolutionise the heating, cooling and air conditioning (HVAC) sector and more. The global HVAC sector is a multi-billion euro industry, which is growing annually by over 5 percent. However it currently has a big problem: traditional HVAC systems, such as your home air conditioning system, utilise special gases called ‘refrigerants’ to perform the heating and cooling work. Whilst these refrigerants are very efficient, they also come with a downside, namely their highly detrimental impact on the environment. The Rocky Mountain Institute, a thought leader in climate change policy, has identified refrigerant management as the number one problem which industry as a whole must address if we wish to arrest or reverse the global warming pattern [1]. 

To give some context; an indexing system measuring the global warming potential (GWP) of a refrigerant gas is used to classify and rank their impact on the environment. A GWP of 1, for example, equates to a single molecule of the refrigerant having the same impact as a single molecule of the already vilified CO2 molecule if released into the atmosphere. These refrigerants are gases, and their leakage either while being in use, or at end of life, is common and unstoppable. This is why your car needs to have its refrigerant topped up every so often, because it escapes into the atmosphere. It may surprise you to hear that almost all of the common refrigerants in use today have GWPs in the thousands! The workhorse of industry and air-conditioning is a refrigerant which goes by the name of ‘R134a’. This has a GWP of 1430. So, in effect it is one thousand four hundred and thirty times more potent than CO2 when released into the atmosphere. This is a major problem for the industry. 

Luckily, government bodies and regulators are aware of these issues. Today’s current batch of refrigerants are what we call HFCs and their GWPs range from the high hundreds to over 9000 in some cases. These came after CFCs, famously known for causing a hole in the ozone back in the 1980’s and 1990’s until their regulated removal. The GWPs of CFCs were in the tens of thousands. Regulators have laid out a roadmap over the next 10-15 years where the world will transition to the new generation of lower GWP refrigerants mostly made up of HFOs [2]. HFOs have a lower GWP (however they are still in the 10’s and 100’s), but come with the added penalty of increased toxicity, explosivity, lower efficiencies, or a combination of all three. Regulators have a tough decision as they either must choose between allowing people to live comfortable lives in air-conditioned spaces in an increasingly warm world, or potentially causing irreversible damage to the environment in the longer term, which in turn requires more cooling. It’s an impossible situation. 

Working in conjunction with our global HVAC partner, we have proven that SMA can match the performance of R134a as a HVAC material, and that viable alternative HVAC systems can be developed using SMA. Currently we have a 50kW demonstrator unit in operation. For reference, a 50kW system is large enough to provide heating and/or cooling to up to 20 standard 2-bed apartments. Crucially, SMA based systems have zero GWP, meaning they have no detrimental impact on the environment. They also offer other advantages such as silent, safe operation. They are non-toxic and non-flammable. Rudimentary calculations show that if all of the refrigerants in the world’s HVAC systems were replaced by SMA, we could knock up to 1oC off global temperatures. In a world where we are trying to limit temperature rises to less than 2oC as a best case scenario, this is huge! 

Using SMA for heating and cooling provides regulators with the ideal solution to their dilemma, one that allows for comfortable living combined, with efficiencies (and therefore costs) in line with current systems, and with zero environmental impact.  We haven’t even considered the possibilities for the technology in other related fields such as automotive, aerospace and power generation, all of which are suffering from similar environmental issues. The opportunities are numerous.

SMA’s themselves are a super interesting technology. They are metal alloys primarily made of Nickel and Titanium and which exhibit two distinct states – one called Martensite and the other, Austenite. From the outside both states look the same, but at a micro level, they are almost like two different metals. By applying and releasing an external load onto the material, we can force the material to cycle between these states. This causes the cyclical release or absorption of a huge amount of heat, which in turn results in a heating or cooling effect. So, in a lot of ways, they do what refrigerants do, only SMA does it as a solid, leak-free, zero GWP, clean material. 

We haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible with SMA yet. In many ways, the world of SMA is akin to the wild west. There are some well understood SMA blends, but there are many many more awaiting discovery. Our current systems and predictions of future performance are based solely on the few well understood blends available to us today. These already compete with the best performing refrigerant based systems today. However, who is to say that these are the most optimum blends? A minor change, for example, in the ratios of the metals in the SMA can have a profound impact on its behaviour. Our teams are actively scanning the blend landscape everyday, in doing so they are peering into the future. New blends are emerging all the time with unique advantages which can be retrofitted into the existing design, causing an uptick in efficiency. 

Our goal is to inspire industry to choose the cleaner, more environmentally friendly SMA option – not because they feel they must, but because it makes the most business sense to do so. My feeling is that this logical appeal to the pockets of global businesses, coupled with regulators realising they have options, will drive a cleaner environment as a by-product of its adoption. It’s a win-win for everyone.

 

[1] https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/refrigerant-management/technical-summary

[2] https://www.icscoolenergy.com/guide-to-f-gas-regulation-and-the-hfc-phase-down/

 

News

How SMA will knock a degree off global warming

Shape memory alloys (SMAs) are a unique group of metals which have the potential to revolutionise the heating, cooling and air conditioning (HVAC) sector and more. The global HVAC sector is a multi-billion euro industry, which is growing annually by over 5 percent. However it currently has a big problem: traditional HVAC systems, such as your home air conditioning system, utilise special gases called ‘refrigerants’ to perform the heating and cooling work. Whilst these refrigerants are very efficient, they also come with a downside, namely their highly detrimental impact on the environment. The Rocky Mountain Institute, a thought leader in climate change policy, has identified refrigerant management as the number one problem which industry as a whole must address if we wish to arrest or reverse the global warming pattern [1]. 

To give some context; an indexing system measuring the global warming potential (GWP) of a refrigerant gas is used to classify and rank their impact on the environment. A GWP of 1, for example, equates to a single molecule of the refrigerant having the same impact as a single molecule of the already vilified CO2 molecule if released into the atmosphere. These refrigerants are gases, and their leakage either while being in use, or at end of life, is common and unstoppable. This is why your car needs to have its refrigerant topped up every so often, because it escapes into the atmosphere. It may surprise you to hear that almost all of the common refrigerants in use today have GWPs in the thousands! The workhorse of industry and air-conditioning is a refrigerant which goes by the name of ‘R134a’. This has a GWP of 1430. So, in effect it is one thousand four hundred and thirty times more potent than CO2 when released into the atmosphere. This is a major problem for the industry. 

Luckily, government bodies and regulators are aware of these issues. Today’s current batch of refrigerants are what we call HFCs and their GWPs range from the high hundreds to over 9000 in some cases. These came after CFCs, famously known for causing a hole in the ozone back in the 1980’s and 1990’s until their regulated removal. The GWPs of CFCs were in the tens of thousands. Regulators have laid out a roadmap over the next 10-15 years where the world will transition to the new generation of lower GWP refrigerants mostly made up of HFOs [2]. HFOs have a lower GWP (however they are still in the 10’s and 100’s), but come with the added penalty of increased toxicity, explosivity, lower efficiencies, or a combination of all three. Regulators have a tough decision as they either must choose between allowing people to live comfortable lives in air-conditioned spaces in an increasingly warm world, or potentially causing irreversible damage to the environment in the longer term, which in turn requires more cooling. It’s an impossible situation. 

Working in conjunction with our global HVAC partner, we have proven that SMA can match the performance of R134a as a HVAC material, and that viable alternative HVAC systems can be developed using SMA. Currently we have a 50kW demonstrator unit in operation. For reference, a 50kW system is large enough to provide heating and/or cooling to up to 20 standard 2-bed apartments. Crucially, SMA based systems have zero GWP, meaning they have no detrimental impact on the environment. They also offer other advantages such as silent, safe operation. They are non-toxic and non-flammable. Rudimentary calculations show that if all of the refrigerants in the world’s HVAC systems were replaced by SMA, we could knock up to 1oC off global temperatures. In a world where we are trying to limit temperature rises to less than 2oC as a best case scenario, this is huge! 

Using SMA for heating and cooling provides regulators with the ideal solution to their dilemma, one that allows for comfortable living combined, with efficiencies (and therefore costs) in line with current systems, and with zero environmental impact.  We haven’t even considered the possibilities for the technology in other related fields such as automotive, aerospace and power generation, all of which are suffering from similar environmental issues. The opportunities are numerous.

SMA’s themselves are a super interesting technology. They are metal alloys primarily made of Nickel and Titanium and which exhibit two distinct states – one called Martensite and the other, Austenite. From the outside both states look the same, but at a micro level, they are almost like two different metals. By applying and releasing an external load onto the material, we can force the material to cycle between these states. This causes the cyclical release or absorption of a huge amount of heat, which in turn results in a heating or cooling effect. So, in a lot of ways, they do what refrigerants do, only SMA does it as a solid, leak-free, zero GWP, clean material. 

We haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible with SMA yet. In many ways, the world of SMA is akin to the wild west. There are some well understood SMA blends, but there are many many more awaiting discovery. Our current systems and predictions of future performance are based solely on the few well understood blends available to us today. These already compete with the best performing refrigerant based systems today. However, who is to say that these are the most optimum blends? A minor change, for example, in the ratios of the metals in the SMA can have a profound impact on its behaviour. Our teams are actively scanning the blend landscape everyday, in doing so they are peering into the future. New blends are emerging all the time with unique advantages which can be retrofitted into the existing design, causing an uptick in efficiency. 

Our goal is to inspire industry to choose the cleaner, more environmentally friendly SMA option – not because they feel they must, but because it makes the most business sense to do so. My feeling is that this logical appeal to the pockets of global businesses, coupled with regulators realising they have options, will drive a cleaner environment as a by-product of its adoption. It’s a win-win for everyone.

 

[1] https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/refrigerant-management/technical-summary

[2] https://www.icscoolenergy.com/guide-to-f-gas-regulation-and-the-hfc-phase-down/