In focus: Battle to accelerate green energy programs continues

Winter is almost here and concerns over the security of energy supplies are on the rise. Governments and industries are trying to find ways to tackle both energy and climate crises at the same time. The never-ending battle with new regulations to accelerate green energy programs and address high prices also continues.

Earlier this week, German state-owned investment and development bank KfW launched the world’s first financing platform for tailored financing of infrastructure for green hydrogen and its derivatives.

Together with the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK), KfW will establish two new hydrogen funds with €550 million.

The announcement of the establishment of the PtX Platform was made at the UN Climate Change Conference COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh.

Another important milestone – Finnish company Wello signed a contract with Sin Mao Group to deploy a 12MW wave energy park in Taiwan a couple of days ago.

According to the companies, there are currently several wave energy sites being considered and under development in Taiwan, with a number of companies developing projects.

The goal of the cooperation of Sin Mao Group and Wello is to supply the technology and wave energy converters to most of these projects.

Wello will provide the technology and the expertise developed in over a decade of operation in wave energy sector, while Sin Mao Group will be responsible for developing the sites and providing wave energy converters based on Wello’s technology for other site developers.

UK-based Aquaterra Energy has unveiled a new CO₂ management platform for long-term monitoring and sustained integrity of underwater carbon capture and storage (CCS) sites.

The integrated solution is said to provide monitoring of both sub-surface fiber optic seismic arrays, as well as dissolved CO₂ gas detection via solar- or wave-powered remote data transmission nodes between the seabed and surface.

According to Aquaterra, permanently installed shallow borehole fiber optic arrays, deployed in remote locations within the injection site block, allow repeat seismic surveys to be completed and this process provides evidence that the storage site is performing as expected against the baseline engineering and seismic data, during and post CO₂ injection.

On Monday, November 14, shipping organizations and initiatives across the shipping value chain, joined by the largest producers of green hydrogen, signed on to a joint statement at COP27, committing to the rapid and ambitious production and use of low-carbon fuels based on green hydrogen to accelerate shipping’s decarbonization.

The Joint Statement on Green Hydrogen and Green Shipping, facilitated by the UN Climate Change High-Level Champions and nonprofit RMI, was signed by representatives of the Aspen Shipping Decarbonization Initiative, the Getting to Zero  Coalition, the Green Hydrogen Catapult, the Green Hydrogen Organization (GH2), ACWA Power, A.P. Moller – Maersk, CWP Global, Fortescue Future Industries,  InterContinental Energy, and MAN Energy Solutions.

Achieving full decarbonization of the shipping sector will require large-scale and rapid growth in the use of zero-emission fuels, notably green hydrogen-derived fuels.

Also, first power has been produced from the first turbine at Equinor’s Hywind Tampen floating offshore wind farm in the Norwegian part of the North Sea.

The power from the first turbine, which was installed in June, was delivered to the Gullfaks A platform in the North Sea on 13 November.

The Hywind Tampen floating offshore wind project is the first wind farm that will supply electricity to oil and gas platforms.

The project has a system capacity of 88 MW and is expected to meet 35 per cent of the electrical power demand on the Gullfaks and Snorre fields. This will cut CO2 emissions from the fields by about 200,000 tonnes per year, according to Equinor.

With COP27 in full swing, governments have set out an action plan to make clean technologies cheaper and more accessible in a bid to scale up decarbonisation efforts, says the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).

This builds on the progress made since COP26 and the intergovernmental organisation anticipates that investments in wind and solar projects are on their way to exceeding those in oil and gas.

As COP27, which is taking place in the Egyptian coastal city of Sharm el-Sheikh, pushes climate action to the forefront, seeking to deliver on the Paris Agreement, IRENA disclosed last week that countries representing more than 50 per cent of global GDP have set out a 12-month action plan to speed up decarbonisation.