ENERGY NEWS - TURKEY
Turkey to Invest Billion in Energy Efficiency

Turkey will invest $10.9 billion in line with the country's National Energy Efficiency Action Plan by 2023, Fatih Donmez, Turkey's energy and natural resources minister announced on Thursday.

The country has already achieved approximately 1 million tons of oil equivalent (Mtoe) energy savings in 2017 and 2018 with an investment of $1.2 billion, Donmez explained, and added that the country will reduce its primary energy consumption by around 14% and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 66 million tons by 2023.

To this end, the first phase of an energy efficiency project to transform public buildings into energy efficient ones will start in collaboration with the World Bank and the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization with a budget of $200 million.

"We will save $30 billion by 2033 through efficiency investments. We set the goal of providing 15% efficiency for public buildings by the end of 2023," Donmez said.

The Energy Efficiency Plan also involves the use of more domestic resources to cover Turkey's burgeoning energy demand, which he said was as a result of a expanding economy that has grown by 5% over the past 16 years.

"As a result of the National Energy and Mining Policy, we have achieved 50% domestic electricity production by the end of last year. In the first quarter of this year, this figure reached 60%," Donmez said.

The National Energy and Mining Policy includes the Energy Efficiency Plan, by which the country aims to promote the use of domestic resources.

Source: AA

Domestic and Renewables Add 445 MW in Turkey in 1Q19

Turkey added 445 megawatts of installed electricity production capacity from 100% domestic and renewable energy resources in the first quarter 2019, according to data of Turkey's Energy and Natural Resources Ministry. Turkey, in an effort to economically maximize the use of domestic and renewable energy resources, is gradually increasing its power generation capacity from these resources.

The country targets the creation of 10,000 megawatts each of solar and wind energy capacity in the coming 10 years. However, the government does not plan to give a green light to any new power plant from imported resources including imported coal or natural gas.

In this regard, the entire newly installed electricity generation capacity for the period January-March this year was generated from domestic and renewable energy resources.

For this January to March period, local coal held the biggest share of this new capacity at 57.3% creating 255 megawatts, and hydro electricity power plants followed with a 22.5% share generating 100 megawatts of additional capacity. Wind created 70 megawatts of installed capacity and 20 megawatts was derived from geothermal, biomass and waste resources.

A 255-megawatt coal power plant and a 20-megawatt geothermal power plant began electricity production in Manisa in the Aegean province while the biggest hydro electricity power plant with 33 megawatts became operational in Tokat, a Central Anatolian province.

The wind plant, with the highest capacity of 26 megawatts, began electricity production in the Canakkale province in the Marmara region. Consequently, Turkey's current installed capacity as at the end of March stood at 89,000 megawatts.

Hydro electricity created around 32% of total electricity production followed by natural gas plants with a 25.3% share. Local and imported coal plants had a 12% and 10% share, respectively of the total energy mix. Wind plants occupied around 8% and solar registered a 6% share in the total portfolio. The remaining capacity came from geothermal, biomass and other sources.

Source: AA

ENERGY NEWS - WORLD
GWEC Predicts More Than 300 Gigawatts of New Wind Capacity Over Next 5 Years

The Global Wind Energy Council published its Global Wind Report this week, in which it has predicted that the global wind industry will install more than 300 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity over the next five years.

The 2018 Global Wind Report is the 14th edition of the Global Wind Energy Council’s (GWEC) annual report, providing a comprehensive overview of the global wind industry. The report details how the global wind energy industry is now active in over 90 countries — 30 of which have over 1 gigawatt (GW) of wind installed, while 9 countries boast over 10 GW of installed capacity.

This year GWEC also completely redesigned its report, as Ben Backwell, GWEC CEO explains:

“We have changed the way we gather, analyse and share data,” explained Ben Backwell, CEO of GWEC. “This year’s Global Wind Report is built on our new and improved Market Intelligence function that offers unmatched exclusive data and insights. We are growing our team and are more dedicated than ever to steering the industry and supporting our members into new and exciting opportunities for wind energy.”

The lead finding from this 14th edition of the Global Wind Report is the prediction that the global wind industry will install in excess of 300 GW of new capacity over the next five years, requiring over 55 GW of new capacity each year through 2023. Further, in the short-term, the authors of the report point to auction and tender programs as the primary driver for new wind installations — in addition to government-led renewable energy targets.

Beyond these main drivers, the GWEC report also identified three further global trends driving global wind growth, including changing business models of industry participants, unlocking further volume through corporate procurement outside of mature markets, and how value-focused solutions — such as hybrid generation plants — are unlocking more opportunities for the wind industry as a whole.

“2018 was a good year for the global wind industry, with installations remaining above 50 GW,” said Karin Ohlenforst, Director of Market Intelligence at GWEC. “The dominance of onshore wind power is not surprising given continued and growing investment, with market-based mechanisms like auctions, tenders and Green Certificates being the main drivers of new onshore installations, accounting for 35% of total installations. 2018 was also a pivotal year for the offshore industry, particularly in Asia. If governments remain committed, offshore wind will become a truly global market in the next five years.”

The report builds on GWEC’s annual figures published in late February which showed that 51.3 GW of new wind capacity in 2018, led by China which installed 21.2 GW of new onshore wind capacity, and 1.8 GW of offshore wind.

Source: Clean Technica

UK Combined Cycle Plant Approved

The UK government has green-lit a new combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power station in Middlesborough, making it the third UK project of its kind to be approved in 2019.

The planned £700 million Tees combined cycle power plant (Tees CCPP) is expected to have a maximum generating capacity of up to 1,700MW, and will generate enough power for up to 1.5 million UK households.

The new plant would make use of existing grid connections on the site of a retired site at Teesside Power Station. Approximately 1000 jobs will be created in the area during the construction pphase, and a further 150 operational staff on a permanent basis

Source: Smart Energy International

Cheap Renewables Shave $10 Trillion off Cost to Curb Warming

The cost of reaching global climate goals is falling rapidly as wind and solar prices plummet and policy makers push electrification as the main tool to cut pollution, the International Renewable Energy Agency said. The group known as Irena revised down its estimates for global investments needed by 2050 in clean energy to meet targets under the Paris Agreement on climate change. The Abu Dhabi-based group now says $115 trillion is needed, down from $125 trillion a year ago, reflecting lower costs to build wind and solar farms. The global energy shift needs significant investments but they will more than pay off in curbing emissions and in health and environmental benefits, Irena’s new Director-General Francesco La Camera said by email. Green energy costs are falling rapidly, he said.

The agency cut its estimate for the additional costs needed to meet Paris Accord goals by 40 percent in the last year, according to the report. Some 174 states and the European Union signed up to the Paris deal in 2015 pledging to keep global warming from rising above 2-degrees Celsius since the industrial revolution by 2050.

The group is advocating greater use of electricity to cut the fossil-fuel emissions that are damaging the atmosphere. That would require putting 1 billion new electric cars on the road, increasing the use of power to provide heat and to make industrial gases. Electricity’s share of total energy consumption may grow from 20 percent share now to almost 50 percent in 2050, the report said.

Source: Bloomberg

What Makes a Grid "Smart"?

In February, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., revealed the outline of the Green New Deal, a long-awaited bill describing a policy platform to mitigate the effects of climate change. The outline refers many times to “smart grids” as an essential step toward the development of sustainable, eco-conscious, and even carbon-neutral city infrastructure. But what is a smart grid? And what do you need to know about it?

A green new grid

Researchers and engineers in American cities from Boulder to San Antonio have begun the work of transforming their traditional utility grids into self-monitoring, demand-responsive digital networks. The remaking of the electric power grid for optimum sustainability has been a part of American pro-environment legislation for more than a decade.

In the world of high-tech hardware, the term “smart” can refer to anything from a digital whiteboards to a piece of personal technology with an internet connection. But among the engineers and urban planners updating the remote infrastructures (like water and electricity) that make up the grid, the definitions are a bit more consistent.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, a smart grid is a grid with digital technology that allows for two-way communication between the utility and its customers.

“The smart grid will consist of controls, computers, automation, and new technologies and equipment working together,” according to the office, which says the smart grid “represents an unprecedented opportunity to move the energy industry into a new era of reliability, availability, and efficiency that will contribute to our economic and environmental health”.

Independent energy and environmental sustainability researcher Kenneth Zame characterizes a smart grid as one that functions like a communications network between utilities distributors and consumers.

Features like “smart meters,” which measure and monitor consumption on the consumer side and share information across all layers of the grid, allow utilities to be delivered according to consumers’ needs, rather than distributed uniformly across a population. With a smart grid, consumers play an active role in the management of their energy usage — they can make decisions based on pricing, which can be adjusted by utility companies according to demand.

“There is a lot of communication and sensing, from generation to transmission and distribution to the end user and back to the utility,” Zame said. “Physically, this involves a lot of components and stakeholders: generators, utilities, monitors.”

For Chris Campbell, the senior director of grid modernization services at the Salt River Project in Arizona — a community-owned enterprise and one of the largest public power utilities in the U.S. — the responsive sharing of usage data is a central trait of a smart grid.

Unlike the conventional energy grid, where resources move from utility to consumer in a uniform pattern, a smart grid is responsive and flexible enough to incorporate alternative energies from multiple other sources, like wind and solar, and redistribute them according to demand.

The “smart” factor lies in the grid’s ability to adapt to variable supply and demand. “An integrated grid supports resource diversity, which is a key requirement due to the variability of renewable energy resources,” Campbell said.

In other words, the smart grid is the missing link between renewable energy options and in-home energy consumption. Will smart grids benefit consumers?

On the consumer side, the cash benefits seem to depend on the level of engagement with the new-age grid. Some smart grid models rely on participants to moderate their own energy demands, using a combination of demand monitoring, education, and financial rewards to incentivize pro-environmental behavior, which can translate to consumer savings. One smart grid pilot project in Turkey estimated that participants saved an average equivalent to one monthly electric bill per year.

The infrastructure investment necessary to support a smart grid in the U.S. amounts to a substantial expense, but leaving the old grid in place could be even more costly.

According to a 2011 technical report from the Electric Power Research Institute, deploying a fully functioning smart grid system by 2050 would increase consumers' electric bills by as much as 50 percent.

But maintaining a conventional grid structure in its current state would require an increase of up to 400 percent by the same year.

Integrating utilities is complicated

Smart grids have the added challenge of integrating the flow of usage data between sources, distributors and consumers, as well as a multiplicity of energy sources that don’t have a role in the conventional grid.

Compared to the utilities in the conventional model, passive energy sources — like wind and solar, as well as the energy collected from regenerative breaking in electric cars — are difficult to regulate. Unlike energy that comes from fuel, which can be increased or decreased on command, the power that comes from most renewable energies relies on variable factors, like weather or car usage.

At Austin’s Pecan Street energy initiative, sustainability researchers have studied the electricity usage of residents over time to determine how a smart grid can meet energy demands without overloading the grid or distributing extra energy that goes to waste.

Finding a way to manage these resources is what Pecan Street's director of communications, Colin Rowan, calls the “storage riddle.”

Pecan Street has identified several possible strategies to solve the riddle, the most promising of which is an in-home storage unit, a “microgrid” that would collect energy from household renewable resources: electric cars, solar panels, and wind turbines. The unit is still in beta testing.

Things get even trickier when you consider all the potential conflicts of interest among the various players with a stake in the operation of the average grid. Individual consumers may be most interested in savings and convenience, city and state governments in meeting sustainability goals, while private utilities and hardware manufacturers tend to be concerned with maximizing shareholder dividends.

Arizona’s Salt River Project works around these conflicts in part due to its unique role as a public utility company with elected boards.

Unlike other municipally owned utilities, SRP operates with minimal oversight from the state’s public utilities commission, allowing the project to prioritize both the long-term (like sustainability) and short-term (like savings) needs of residents. “There are no shareholders to satisfy, so all revenue is reinvested into the grid,” Campbell explained.

Aging grids are inefficient

As challenging as the transition might be, the U.S. power system has little choice but to change. The existing energy infrastructures within our borders are in notoriously poor shape. According to research by author and cultural anthropologist Gretchen Bakke, the state of the American grid is dire even without the tremendous pressure of offsetting the effects of climate change.

The average age of an American power plant is 34 years; one expert Bakke interviewed estimated that this aging infrastructure forces the country to use twice the number of power plants it would with maximum efficiency. America's blackouts — where grids fail and leave a significant portion of the country without power — are longer and more frequent than they are in most other industrialized countries.

In addition to catastrophic effects on the economy and the dangers for those dependent on electrical support in hospitals, for example, these outages create a national security risk, leaving the grid open to attacks from terrorists and hackers and hobbling federal defense systems.

As extreme weather events increase in intensity and frequency in the changing climate, a grid that can recover from blackouts, draw on alternative energy sources, and respond flexibly to consumer demand may become a matter of survival. Zame said that successful smart grid projects could use energy storage to mitigate the impact of environmental disaster.

He warned that consumer buy-in to the smart grid will be essential. “You have to have the people motivated on the ground level,” he said. Otherwise, he suggested, the interests of those who oppose change will continue to lead the way.

Source:  Market Place

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