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UK Hydrogen Storage Caverns enable long-duration, low-carbon electricity balancing, storing surplus wind and solar power as green hydrogen in salt formations to enhance grid reliability, energy security, and net zero resilience by 2035 and 2050.

Key Points

They are salt caverns storing green hydrogen to balance wind and solar, stabilizing a low-carbon UK grid.

✅ Stores surplus wind and solar as green hydrogen in salt caverns

✅ Enables long-duration, low-carbon grid balancing and security

✅ Complements wind and solar; reduces dependence on flexible CCS

The U.K. government must kick-start the construction of large-scale hydrogen storage facilities if it is to meet its pledge that all electricity will come from low-carbon electricity sources by 2035 and reach legally binding net zero targets by 2050, according to a report by the Royal Society.

The report, "Large-scale electricity storage," published Sep. 8, examines a wide variety of ways to store surplus wind and solar generated electricity—including green hydrogen, advanced compressed air energy storage (ACAES), ammonia, and heat—which will be needed when Great Britain's electricity generation is dominated by volatile wind and solar power.

It concludes that large scale electricity storage is essential to mitigate variations in wind and sunshine, particularly long-term variations in the wind, and to keep the nation's lights on. Storing most of the surplus as hydrogen, in salt caverns, would be the cheapest way of doing this.

The report, based on 37 years of weather data, finds that in 2050 up to 100 Terawatt-hours (TWh) of storage will be needed, which would have to be capable of meeting around a quarter of the U.K.'s current annual electricity demand. This would be equivalent to more than 5,000 Dinorwig pumped hydroelectric dams. Storage on this scale, which would require up to 90 clusters of 10 caverns, is not possible with batteries or pumped hydro.

Storage requirements on this scale are not currently foreseen by the government, and the U.K.'s energy transition faces supply delays. Work on constructing these caverns should begin immediately if the government is to have any chance of meeting its net zero targets, the report states.

Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith FRS, lead author of the report, said, "The need for long-term storage has been seriously underestimated. Demand for electricity is expected to double by 2050 with the electrification of heat, transport, and industrial processing, as well as increases in the use of air conditioning, economic growth, and changes in population.

"It will mainly be met by wind and solar generation. They are the cheapest forms of low-carbon electricity generation, but are volatile—wind varies on a decadal timescale, so will have to be complemented by large scale supply from energy storage or other sources."

The only other large-scale low-carbon sources are nuclear power, gas with carbon capture and storage (CCS), and bioenergy without or with CCS (BECCS). While nuclear and gas with CCS are expected to play a role, they are expensive, especially if operated flexibly.

Sir Peter Bruce, vice president of the Royal Society, said, "Ensuring our future electricity supply remains reliable and resilient will be crucial for our future prosperity and well-being. An electricity system with significant wind and solar generation is likely to offer the lowest cost electricity but it is essential to have large-scale energy stores that can be accessed quickly to ensure Great Britain's energy security and sovereignty."

Combining hydrogen with ACAES, or other forms of storage that are more efficient than hydrogen, could lower the average cost of electricity overall, and would lower the required level of wind power and solar supply.

There are currently three hydrogen storage caverns in the U.K., which have been in use since 1972, and the British Geological Survey has identified the geology for ample storage capacity in Cheshire, Wessex and East Yorkshire. Appropriate, novel business models and market structures will be needed to encourage construction of the large number of additional caverns that will be needed, the report says.

Sir Chris observes that, although nuclear, hydro and other sources are likely to play a role, Britain could in principle be powered solely by wind power and solar, supported by hydrogen, and some small-scale storage provided, for example, by batteries, that can respond rapidly and to stabilize the grid. While the cost of electricity would be higher than in the last decade, we anticipate it would be much lower than in 2022, he adds.

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Iran Power Outage Protests surge as electricity blackouts, drought, and a looming heat wave spark unrest in Tehran, Shiraz, and more, with chants against leadership, strikes, and sanctions-driven economic pressures mounting.

Key Points

Protests across Iran over blackouts, drought, and economic strain challenge authorities and demand accountability.

✅ Rolling blackouts blamed on drought, heat wave, and surging demand.

✅ Chants target leadership amid strikes and wage, water shortages.

✅ Legitimacy questioned after low-turnout election and sanctions.

There have been protests in a number of cities in Iran amid rising public anger over widespread electricity blackouts.

Videos on social media appeared to show crowds in Shar-e Rey near Tehran, Shiraz, Amol and elsewhere overnight.

Some people can be heard shouting "Death to the dictator" and "Death to Khamenei" - a reference to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The government has apologised for the blackouts, which it has blamed on a severe drought and high demand.

Elsewhere, similar outages have had political repercussions, as a widespread power outage in Taiwan prompted a minister's resignation earlier this year.

President Hassan Rouhani explained in televised remarks on Tuesday morning that the drought meant most of the country's hydroelectric power plants were not operating, placing more pressure on thermal power plants, and that electricity consumption had surged as people used air conditioning to cope with the intense summer heat.

"I apologise to our dear people who have faced problems and suffering in the past few days and I urge them to co-operate [by cutting their electricity use]. People complain about power outages and they are right," Mr Rouhani said.

A video that has gone viral in recent days shows a woman complaining about the blackouts and corruption at a government office in the northern city of Gorgan and demanding that her comments be conveyed to "higher-ups like Mr Rouhani". "The only thing you have done is forcing hijab on us," she shouts.

The president has promised that the government will seek to resolve the problems within the next two or three weeks.

However, a power sector spokesman warned on Monday that consumption was exceeding the production capacity of Iran's power plants by 11GW, and said a "looming heat wave" could make the situation worse, as seen in Iraq's summer electricity crunch this year.

Iranians have also been complaining about water shortages and the non-payment of wages by some local authorities, while thousands of people working in Iran's oil industry have been on strike over pay and conditions, as officials discuss further energy cooperation with Iraq to ease supply pressures.

There was already widespread discontent at government corruption and the economic hardship caused by sanctions that were reinstated when the US abandoned a nuclear deal with Iran three years ago, even as Iran supplies about 40% of Iraq's electricity through cross-border sales.

Analysts say that after the historically low turnout in last month's presidential election, when more than half of the eligible voters stayed at home, the government is facing a serious challenge to its legitimacy.

Mr Rouhani will be succeeded next month by Ebrahim Raisi, a hard-line cleric close to Ayatollah Khamenei who won 62% of the vote after several prominent contenders were disqualified, while Iran finalizes power grid deals with Iraq to bolster regional ties.

The 60-year-old former judiciary chief has presented himself as the best person to combat corruption and solve Iran's economic problems, including ambitions to transmit electricity to Europe as a regional power hub.

But many Iranians and human rights activists have pointed to his human rights record, accusing him of playing a role in the executions of thousands of political prisoners in the 1980s and in the deadly crackdowns on mass anti-government protests in 2009 and 2019.

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Wisconsin Solar and Wind Energy advances as rooftop solar, utility-scale farms, and NREL perovskite solar cells improve efficiency; wind turbines gain via wake modeling, yaw control, and grid-scale battery storage to cut carbon emissions.

Key Points

It is Wisconsin's growth in rooftop and utility-scale solar plus optimized wind turbines to cut carbon emissions.

✅ Perovskite solar cells promise higher efficiency, need longevity

✅ Wake modeling and yaw control optimize wind farm output

✅ Batteries and bids can offset reliance on natural gas

Solar energy in Wisconsin continued to grow in 2019, as more homeowners had rooftop panels installed and big utilities started building multi-panel solar farms.

Wind power is increasing more slowly in the state. However, renewable power developers are again coming forward with proposals for multiple turbines.

Nationally, researchers are working on ways to get even more energy from solar and wind, with the U.S. moving toward 30% electricity from wind and solar in coming years, as states like Wisconsin aim to reduce their carbon emissions over the next few decades.

One reason solar energy is growing in Wisconsin is due to the silicon panels becoming more efficient. But scientists haven't finished trying to improve panel efficiency. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Col., is one of the research facilities experimenting with brushing a lab-made solution called perovskite onto a portion of a panel called a solar cell.

In a demonstration video supplied by NREL, senior scientist Maikel van Hest said that, in the lab anyway, the painted cell and its electrical connections called contacts, produce more energy:

"There you go! That's how you paint a perovskite solar cell. And you imagine that ultimately what you could do is you could see a company come in with a truck in front of your house and they would basically paint on the contacts first, dry those, and paint the perovskite over it. That you would have photovoltaic cells on the side of your house, put protective coating on it, and we're done."

Another NREL scientist, David Moore, says the new solar cells could be made faster and help meet what's expected to be a growing global demand for energy. However, Moore says the problem has been lack of stability.

"A solar cell with perovskites will last a couple years. We need to get that to 20-25 years, and that's the big forefront in perovskite research, is getting them to last longer," Moore told members of the Society of Environmental Journalists during a recent tour of NREL.

Another part of improving renewable energy is making wind turbines more productive. At NREL's Insight Center, a large screen showing energy model simulations dominates an otherwise darkened room. Visualization scientist Nicholas Brunhart-Lupo points to a display on the screen that shows how spinning turbines at one edge of a wind farm can cause an airflow called a wake, which curtails the power generation of other turbines.

"So what we find in these simulations is these four turbines back here, since they have this used air, this low-velocity wake being blown to their faces, they're only generating about 20% of the energy they should be generating," he explains.

Brunhart-Lupo says the simulations can help wind farm developers with placement of turbines as well as adjustments to the rotor and blades called the yaw system.

Continued progress with renewables may be vital to any state or national pledges to reduce use of fossil fuels and carbon emissions linked to climate change, including Biden's solar expansion plan as a potential pathway. Some scientists say to limit a rise in global temperature, there must be a big decline in emissions by 2050.

But even utilities that say they support use of more renewables, as why the grid isn't 100% renewable yet makes clear, aren't ready to let go of some energy sources. Jonathan Adelman of Xcel Energy, which serves part of Western Wisconsin, says Xcel is on track to close its last two coal-fired power plants in Minnesota. But he says the company will need more natural gas plants, even though they wouldn't run as often.

"It's not perfect. And it is in conflict with our ultimate goal of being carbon-free," says Adelman. "But if we want to facilitate the transition, we still need resources to help that happen."

Some in the solar industry would like utilities that say they need more natural gas plants to put out competitive bids to see what else might be possible. Solar advocates also note that in some states, energy regulators still favor the utilities.

Meanwhile, solar slowly marches ahead, including here in southeastern Wisconsin, as Germany's solar power boost underscores global momentum.

On the roof of a ranch-style home in River Hills, a work crew from the major solar firm Sunrun recently installed mounting brackets for solar panels.

Sunrun Public Policy Director Amy Heart says she supports research into more efficient renewables. But she says another innovation may have to come in the way regulators think.

"Instead of allowing and thinking about from the perspective of the utility builds the power plant, they replace one plant with another one, they invest in the infrastructure; is really thinking about how can these distributed solutions like rooftop solar, peer-to-peer energy sharing, and especially rooftop solar paired with batteries how can that actually reduce some of what the utility needs?

Large-scale energy storage batteries are already being used in some limited cases. But energy researchers continue to make improvements to them, too, with cheap solar batteries beginning to make widespread adoption more feasible as scientists race to reduce the expected additional harm of climate change.

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Canada Manufacturing Policy prioritizes affordable energy, trims carbon taxes, aligns with Buy America, and supports the resource sector, PPE and plastics supply, nearshoring, and resilient supply chains amid COVID-19, correcting costly green energy policies.

Key Points

A policy to boost industry with affordable energy, lower carbon taxes, resource ties, and aligned U.S. trade.

✅ Cuts energy costs and carbon tax burdens for competitiveness

✅ Rebuilds resource-sector linkages and domestic supply chains

✅ Seeks Buy America relief and clarity on plastics regulation

By Jocelyn Bamford

Since its inception in 2017, the Coalition of Concerned Manufacturers and Businesses has warned all levels of government that there would be catastrophic effects if policies that drove both the manufacturing and natural resources sectors out of the country were adopted.

The very origins of our coalition was in the fight for a competitive landscape in Ontario, a cornerstone of which is affordable energy and sounding the alarm that the Green Energy Policy in Ontario pushed many manufacturers out of the province.

The Green Energy Policy made electricity in Ontario four times the average North American rate. These unjust prices were largely there to subsidize the construction of expensive and inefficient wind and solar energy infrastructure, even as cleaning up Canada's grid is cited as critical to meeting climate pledges.

My company’s November hydro bill was $55,000 and $36,500 of that was the so-called global adjustment charge, the name given to these green energy costs.

Unaffordable electricity, illustrated by higher Alberta power costs in recent years, coupled with ever-more burdensome carbon taxes, have pushed Canadian manufacturing into the open arms of other countries that see the importance of affordable energy to attract business.

One can’t help but ask the question: If Canada had policies that attracted and maintained a robust manufacturing sector, would we be in the same situation with a lack of personal protective equipment and medical supplies for our front-line medical workers and our patients during this pandemic?  If our manufacturing sector wasn’t crippled by taxes and regulation, would it be more nimble and able to respond to a national emergency?

It seems that the federal government’s policies are designed to push manufacturing out, stifle our resource sector, and kill the very plastics industry that is so essential to keeping our front-line medical staff, patients, and citizens safe, even as the net-zero race accelerates federally.

As the federal government chased its obsession with a new green economy – a strange obsession given our country’s small contribution to global GHGs – including proposals for a fully renewable grid by 2030 advocated by some leaders, it has been blinded from the real threats to our country, threats that became very, very real with COVID-19.

After the pandemic has passed, the federal government must work to make Canada manufacturing and resource friendly again, recognizing that the IEA net-zero electricity report projects the need for more power. COVID-19 proves that Canada relies on a robust resource economy and manufacturing sector to survive. We need to ensure that we are prepared for future crises like the one we are facing now.

Here are five things our government can do now to meet that end:

1. End all carbon taxes immediately.

2. Create a mandate to bring manufacturing back to Canada through competitive offerings and favourable tax regimes.

3. Recognize the interconnections between the resource sector and manufacturing, including how fossil-fuel workers support the transition across supply chains. Many manufacturers supply parts and pieces to the resource sector, and they rely on affordable energy to compete globally.

4. Stop the current federal government initiative to label plastic as toxic. At a time when the government is appealing to manufacturers to re-tool and produce needed plastic products for the health care sector, labelling plastics as toxic is counterproductive.

5. Work to secure a Canadian exemption to Buy America. This crisis has clearly shown us that dependency on China is dangerous. We must forge closer ties with America and work as a trading block in order to be more self-sufficient.

These are troubling times. Many businesses will not survive.

We need to take back our manufacturing sector.  We need to take back our resource sector.

We need to understand the interconnected nature of these two important segments of our gross domestic production, and opportunities like an Alberta–B.C. grid link to strengthen reliability.
If we do not, in the next pandemic we may find ourselves not only without ventilators, masks and gowns but also without energy to operate our hospitals.

Jocelyn Bamford is a Toronto business executive and President of the Coalition of Concerned Manufacturers and Businesses of Canada

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EECBG Program Funding empowers states, Tribes, and local governments with DOE grants to deploy clean energy, energy efficiency, EV infrastructure, and community solar, cutting emissions, lowering utility bills, and advancing net-zero decarbonization.

Key Points

EECBG Program Funding is a $550M DOE grant for states, Tribes, and governments to deploy clean energy and efficiency.

✅ Supports EV infrastructure and community solar deployment

✅ Cuts emissions and lowers utility costs via efficiency

✅ Prioritizes Justice40 benefits for underserved communities

The Biden-Harris Administration, through the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), today released a Notice of Intent announcing $550 million to support community-based clean energy in state, Tribal, and local governments — serving more than 250 million Americans. This investment in American communities, through the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant (EECBG) Program, will support communities across the country to develop local programming and deploy clean energy technologies to cut emissions, advance a 90% carbon-free electricity goal nationwide, and reduce consumers’ energy costs, and help meet President Biden’s goal of a net-zero economy by 2050. 

“This funding is a streamlined and flexible tool for local governments to build their electricity future with clean energy,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “State, local, and Tribal communities nationwide will be able to leverage this funding to drive greater energy efficiency and conservation practices to lower utility bills and create healthier environments for American families.”   

The EECBG Program will fund 50 states, five U.S. territories, the District of Columbia, 774 Tribes, and 1,878 local governments in a variety of capacity-building, planning, and infrastructure efforts to reduce carbon emissions and energy use and improve energy efficiency in the transportation, building, and other related sectors. For example, communities with this funding can build out electric vehicle infrastructure and deploy community solar to serve areas that otherwise do not have access to electric vehicles or clean energy, particularly through a rural energy security program where appropriate.  

The $550 million made available through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) represents the second time that the EECBG Program has been funded, the first of which was through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. With this most recent funding, communities can build on prior investments and leverage additional clean energy funding from DOE, other federal agencies, and the private sector to achieve sustained impacts, supported by a Clean Electricity Standard where applicable, that can put their communities on a pathway to decarbonization. 

Through the EECBG Program and the Office of State and Community Energy Programs (SCEP), DOE will support the many diverse state, local, and tribal communities across the U.S., including efforts to revitalize coal communities through clean energy, as they implement this funding and other clean energy projects. To ensure no communities are left behind, the program aligns with President’s Justice40 initiative and efforts toward equity in electricity regulation to help ensure that 40% of the overall benefits of clean energy investments go to underserved and overburdened communities. 

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Sub-Saharan Africa Energy Access faces critical deficits; SDG7, clean energy finance, off-grid solar, and microgrids drive electrification for health, education, and economy amid World Bank and IEA efforts to expand reliable, affordable power.

Key Points

Reliable, affordable power in sub-Saharan Africa via renewables, off-grid solar, and SDG7-led electrification.

✅ SDG7 targets universal, modern energy access by 2030

✅ Off-grid solar and microgrids boost rural electrification

✅ Health, education, and business depend on reliable power

Sub-Saharan Africa has an electricity problem. While the world as a whole has made great strides when it comes to providing access to electricity and moving toward universal electricity access worldwide (the world average is now 90 per cent with access, up from 83 per cent in 2010), southern and western African states still lag far behind.

According to Tracking SDG7: The Energy Progress Report, produced by a consortium of organisations including the World Bank, the International Energy Agency and the World Health Organization, 759 million people were without electricity in 2019 and threequarters of them were based in sub-Saharan Africa. At just seven per cent, South Sudan had the lowest access figures; Chad, Burundi and Malawi were only marginally higher. What’s more, due to a combination of factors, the situation is getting worse. In total, the region’s access deficit increased from 556 million people in 2010 to 570 million people in 2019.

These days, being without electricity has an impact on every sphere of life. The Covid-19 pandemic only served to put this into sharper relief. Intermittent electricity meant vaccination doses that rely on cold storage were impossible to deliver and, as more than 70 per cent of the health facilities in sub-Saharan Africa have no access to reliable electricity, the problem was vast. But even without a global pandemic, having no power stymies opportunity in every field, from education to economics.

French photojournalist Pascal Maitre, who has spent much of his career writing about sub-Saharan Africa, wanted to document the problems faced by people in areas with no electricity. He thought particularly carefully about the location for his project. ‘First, I was thinking I could take images in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,’ he says. ‘But then I thought that if you chose a place that has war, it’s logical that electricity won’t really work. So, instead, I wanted to find a place that is quite stable. I decided to go to Benin, where they have a democracy. It is a good example of a country that’s not in really bad shape but where they still have this problem. Also, I didn’t want to go to a place that is very remote, where it is normal not to have good service. So I decided to go to a place around 50 kilometres from the capital that you can get to by road.’

Maitre visited several villages in the region, as well as making trips to Chad and Senegal, and encountered the full range of limitations engendered by the power shortage. From teachers struggling to conduct lessons in the dark to midwives forced to work with only the weak light from a phone, the situation was clearly unacceptable. ‘People were very, very, very upset,’ he says. ‘I conducted a lot of interviews in different villages and lack of electricity touches education, economy, business, security and also emigration, because people have to move to big cities or maybe to Europe to get jobs.’

Where once the situation might have been accepted as the norm, people today are fully aware of the ways in which they are held back by the lack of power. As Maitre remembers: ‘A guy said to me one day, “Do you think it is normal that last time my wife delivered a baby, the midwife had to hold her phone between her teeth in order to see what she was doing?” You feel very frustrated.’ He adds that the fact that most people now have mobile phones only highlights the hardship. ‘Before, maybe it was not so frustrating. But now, most of these people have cellphones. The cellphone company puts antennae everywhere so the phones work, but people cannot recharge their phones. They have to go to the market, where someone will come with a generator to recharge.’

Governments and global organisations are very aware of the problem across the world as a whole. Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7) – one of the 17 goals set out in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly – was designed to ensure universal access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy by 2030, underscoring the push for clean, affordable and sustainable electricity for all by 2030. As part of this goal, international financial flows to developing countries in support of clean energy reached US$17 billion in 2018. As a result, some areas have seen huge improvement. According to the Energy Progress Report, in Latin America and the Caribbean, and in Eastern and South-Eastern Asia, the advance of electrification has been enough to approach universal access. By 2019, in Western Asia and North Africa, and Central and South Asia, 94 and 95 per cent of the population respectively had access to electricity.

But these statistics only serve to emphasise just how bad the situation is in sub-Saharan Africa, where electricity systems are unlikely to go green this decade according to several analyses. As the report states: ‘While renewable energy has demonstrated remarkable resilience during the pandemic, the unfortunate fact is that gains in energy access throughout Africa are being reversed: the number of people lacking access to electricity is set to increase in 2020, making basic electricity services unaffordable for up to 30 million people who had previously enjoyed access.’

The small silver lining is that if the situation is dealt with properly, the region could build a renewable-energy system from the ground up, rather than having to undergo the costly and complex transitions underway in developed countries. In rural areas, small-scale or off-grid renewable systems (mostly solar) are expected to play an important role, as highlighted by a recent IRENA report on decarbonisation, in increasing access. In fact, solar panels are already used in many areas. In 2019, 105 million people had access to off-grid solar solutions, up from 85 million in 2016, and almost half lived in sub-Saharan Africa, with 17 million in Kenya and eight million in Ethiopia.

Rachel Kyte is currently serving as the 14th dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University in the USA, but her CV is long. She was previously CEO of the UN-affiliated Sustainable Energy for All (SeforALL), as well as the World Bank Group vice president and special envoy for climate change, leading the run-up to the Paris Agreement. According to her, a focus on renewables is absolutely essential, both for wider efforts to tackle climate change, with some advocating a fossil fuel lockdown to drive a climate revolution, but also for the people of sub-Saharan Africa. ‘The fossil fuel industry has said it will just extend the centralised fossil-fuel power systems that we have today to reach these people,’ she says.

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