An overview of the electrification of residential and commercial heating and cooling and prospects for decarbonisation

Heating and cooling are responsible for over 50% of the world’s final energy consumption, and over 40% of global CO2 emissions. With an increasingly decarbonised electricity grid, the electrification of heating offers one potential alternative to the incumbent, heavily fossil-fuel dominated heating system. However, the high penetration of renewables, the high seasonality and hourly variability of heat demand, and an increasing domestic demand for energy services, including cooling, pose significant balancing challenges for both hourly system operation and the long-term investment decision planning of electricity systems. The combination of both demand-response measures and the integration of flexible systems will be required to deliver low carbon heating and cooling, while integrating an increasing share of renewable electricity, and managing peak load. We provide a global overview of the technical, economic and policy challenges and opportunities to decarbonise heating demand through electrification, in the context of rising demand for cooling services

Recognizing the value of collaboration in delivering carbon dioxide removal

In delivering the Paris climate target, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is likely to play an important role, both as a climate mitigation and a carbon dioxide removal technology. However, regional drivers of BECCS sustainability and cost remain broadly unknown and the regional attribution of a global CO2 removal burden remains largely undetermined. This study explores the mechanisms behind cost-optimal BECCS deployment with evolving regional CO2 removal targets and energy sectors to provide insights into the ways in which different regional players will interact as a function of their bio-geophysical endowments and their ability to trade these assets. An important finding is that inter-regional cooperation—in choosing the right burden-sharing principle to establish regional targets—and collaboration—in trading negative emissions credits and biomass—are central to sustainably and affordably meeting these targets. This multilateralism in biomass and carbon credits trading constitutes important value creation opportunities for key providers of CO2 removal.The authors thank Imperial College London for the funding of a President's PhD Scholarship, as well as the Greenhouse Gas Removal (GGR) grant, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), under grant NE/P019900/1. The authors also thank Solène Chiquier from Imperial College London for curating the CO2 storage capacity dataset

The case of 100% electrification of domestic heat in Great Britain

Unlike power sector decarbonisation, there has been little progress made on heat, which is currently the biggest energy consumer in the UK, accounting for 45% of total energy consumption in 2019, and almost 40% of UK GHG emissions. Given the UK’s legally binding commitment to "Net-Zero" by 2050, decarbonising heat is becoming urgent and currently one of the main pathways involves its electrification. Here, we present a spatially-explicit optimisation model that investigates the implications of electrifying heat on the operation of the power sector. Using hourly historical gas demand data, we conclude that the domestic peak heat demand is almost 50% lower than widely-cited values. A 100% electrification pathway can be achieved with only a 1.3-fold increase in generation capacity compared to a power-only decarbonisation scenario, but only, by leveraging the role of thermal energy storage technologies without which a further 40% increase would be needed

The impact of 100% electrification of domestic heat in Great Britain

Britain has been a global leader in reducing emissions, but little progress has been made on heat, which accounts for almost one-third of UK emissions and the largest single share is domestic heat, which is responsible for 17% of the national total. Given the UK’s 2050 “Net-Zero” commitment, decarbonizing heat is becoming urgent and currently one of the main pathways involves its electrification. Here, we present a spatially explicit optimization model that investigates the implications of electrifying domestic heat on the operation of the power sector. Using hourly historical gas demand data, we conclude that the domestic peak heat demand is almost 50% lower than widely cited values. A 100% electrification pathway can be achieved with only a 1.3-fold increase in generation capacity compared to a power-only decarbonization scenario, but only by leveraging the role of thermal energy storage technologies without which a further 40% increase would be needed

Bio-Energy with CCS (BECCS) performance evaluation: Efficiency enhancement and emissions reduction

In this study we evaluate the feasibility of the recovery of waste heat from the power plant boiler system of a pulverised fuel power plant with amine-based CO2 capture. This recovered heat can, as a function of fuel type and solvent selection, provide up to 100% of the heat required for solvent regeneration, thus obviating the need for withdrawing steam from the power plant steam cycle and significantly reducing the efficiency penalty imposed upon the power plant by the CO2 capture process. In studying the thermochemistry of the combustion process, it was observed that co-firing with low moisture biomass achieved higher adiabatic flame temperatures (AFT) than coal alone. The formation and emission of SOX reduced as biomass co-firing proportion increased, whereas NOX emissions were observed to be a function of AFT. The power generation efficiency of a 500 MW 50% co-firing BECCS system increased from 31%HHV with a conventional MEA solvent, to 34%HHV with a high performance capture solvent. The heat recovery approach described in this paper enabled a further efficiency increase up to 38%HHV with the high performant solvent. Such a system was found to remove 0.83 MtCO2 from the atmosphere per year at 90% capacity factor

CO2 removal and 1.5 °C: what, when, where, and how?

The international community aims to limit global warming to 1.5 °C, but little progress has been made towards a global, cost-efficient, and fair climate mitigation plan to deploy carbon dioxide removal (CDR) at the Paris Agreement's scale. Here, we investigate how different CDR options—afforestation/reforestation (AR), bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), and direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS)—might be deployed to meet the Paris Agreement's CDR objectives. We find that international cooperation in climate mitigation policy is key for deploying the most cost-efficient CDR pathway—comprised of BECCS, mainly (74%), and AR (26%)—, allowing to take the most advantage of regional bio-geophysical resources and socio-economic factors, and time variations, and therefore minimising costs. Importantly, with international cooperation, the spatio-temporal evolution of the CDR pathway differs greatly from the regional allocation of the Paris Agreement's CDR objectives—based on responsibility for climate change, here used as a proxy for their socio-economically fair distribution. With limited, or no international cooperation, we find that the likelihood of delivering these CDR objectives decreases, as deploying CDR pathways becomes significantly more challenging and costly. Key domestic bio-geophysical resources include geological CO2 sinks, of which the absence or the current lack of identification undermines the feasibility of the Paris Agreement's CDR objectives, and land and biomass supply, of which the limited availability makes them more costly—particularly when leading to the deployment of DACCS. Moreover, we show that developing international/inter-regional cooperation policy instruments—such as an international market for negative emissions trading—can deliver, simultaneously, cost-efficient and equitable CDR at the Paris Agreement's scale, by incentivising participating nations to meet their share of the Paris Agreement's CDR objectives, whilst making up for the uneven distribution of CDR potentials across the world. Crucially, we conclude that international cooperation—cooperation policy instruments, but also robust institutions to monitor, verify and accredit their efficiency and equity—is imperative, as soon as possible, to preserve the feasibility and sustainability of future CDR pathways, and ensure that future generations do not bear the burden, increasingly costlier, of climate mitigation inaction

Delivering carbon negative electricity, heat and hydrogen with BECCS – Comparing the options

Biomass can be converted into a range of different end-products; and when combined with carbon capture and storage (CCS), these processes can provide negative CO2 emissions. Biomass conversion technologies differ in terms of costs, system efficiency and system value, e.g. services provided, market demand and product price. The aim of this study is to comparatively assess a combination of BECCS pathways to identify the applications which offer the most valuable outcome, i.e. maximum CO2 removal at minimum cost, ensuring that resources of sustainable biomass are utilised efficiently. Three bioenergy conversion pathways are evaluated in this study: (i) pulverised biomass-fired power plants which generate electricity (BECCS), (ii) biomass-fuelled combined heat and power plants (BE-CHP-CCS) which provide both heat and electricity, and (iii) biomass-derived hydrogen production with CCS (BHCCS). The design and optimisation of the BECCS supply chain network is evaluated using the Modelling and Optimisation of Negative Emissions Technology framework for the UK (MONET-UK), which integrates biogeophysical constraints and a wide range of biomass feedstocks. The results show that indigenous sources of biomass in the UK can remove up to 56 /yr from the atmosphere without the need to import biomass. Regardless of the pathway, Bio-CCS deployment could materially contribute towards meeting a national CO2 removal target and provide a substantial contribution to a national-scale energy system. Finally, it was more cost-effective to deploy all three technologies (BECCS, BE-CHP-CCS and BHCCS) in combination rather than individually

Comparing HLA Shared Epitopes in French Caucasian Patients with Scleroderma

Although many studies have analyzed HLA allele frequencies in several ethnic groups in patients with scleroderma (SSc), none has been done in French Caucasian patients and none has evaluated which one of the common amino acid sequences, 67FLEDR71, shared by HLA-DRB susceptibility alleles, or 71TRAELDT77, shared by HLA-DQB1 susceptibility alleles in SSc, was the most important to develop the disease. HLA-DRB and DQB typing was performed for a total of 468 healthy controls and 282 patients with SSc allowing FLEDR and TRAELDT analyses. Results were stratified according to patient’s clinical subtypes and autoantibody status. Moreover, standardized HLA-DRß1 and DRß5 reverse transcriptase Taqman PCR assays were developed to quantify ß1 and ß5 mRNA in 20 subjects with HLA-DRB1*15 and/or DRB1*11 haplotypes. FLEDR motif is highly associated with diffuse SSc (χ2 = 28.4, p<10−6) and with anti-topoisomerase antibody (ATA) production (χ2 = 43.9, p<10−9) whereas TRAELDT association is weaker in both subgroups (χ2 = 7.2, p = 0.027 and χ2 = 14.6, p = 0.0007 respectively). Moreover, FLEDR motif- association among patients with diffuse SSc remains significant only in ATA subgroup. The risk to develop ATA positive SSc is higher with double dose FLEDR than single dose with respectively, adjusted standardised residuals of 5.1 and 2.6. The increase in FLEDR motif is mostly due to the higher frequency of HLA-DRB1*11 and DRB1*15 haplotypes. Furthermore, FLEDR is always carried by the most abundantly expressed ß chain: ß1 in HLA DRB1*11 haplotypes and ß5 in HLA-DRB1*15 haplotypes