3 Examples of Local and Shared Renewable Energy Systems

Photo: marketnewsaccess.com

by Shareable Staff, originally published by Shareable, Resilience: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-05-15/3-examples-of-local-and-shared-renewable-energy-systems/

The energy infrastructure that we inherited from the 20th century is one dominated by fossil fuels and uranium, mined in relatively few localities in the world. The distribution and refining of these fuels is tightly held by a few large corporations. Electricity generation typically occurs in plants that hold local or regional monopolies, with vast profit potential. While gasoline is burned in millions of vehicles, the distribution system remains within the control of a few corporations, which often have regional or national oligopoly or monopoly control. The environmental impacts of the energy industry are staggering. It is high time for change.

On the positive side, the need for change to a 21st century energy system based on renewable sources of energy is widely recognized, the necessary technologies exist (and are often cheaper than conventional forms of energy provision), and considerable progress has been made. We can build locally-based renewable energy infrastructures. Renewable energy from the sun, wind, water, organic waste, and geothermal heat can be found everywhere on the planet. Hence, every city and town can make use of available renewable energy sources that offer economic opportunity and enhance resilience in the face of global economic crises and environmental change. On a regional level, localities can exchange energy in order to even out seasonal or daily imbalances in supply and demand.

A locally based vision of renewable energy generation could eliminate global or national-level domination of the energy infrastructure by a few large players, and thus the concentration of profits in the hands of a very few. It could also reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to very low levels, comparable to the emissions before the industrial revolution. But the local orientation alone would not ensure that the benefits would be shared among all sectors of the local population, and therefore it would not guarantee widespread and active support. This is where sharing solutions come in. Shared energy infrastructure means that people together own and operate both the distributed energy generation facilities and the infrastructure to deliver that energy from where it is generated to where it is used.

In a sharing vision of a local renewable energy system, many households will generate their own renewable energy (as in solar photovoltaic or solar thermal systems on their rooftops), but many more, for whom this is not an option, will share in the ownership and operation of off-site renewable energy generation infrastructure such as wind turbines. The distribution systems by which energy is delivered to households will belong to cooperatives, municipalities, or trusts that are accountable to their customers and therefore do not take advantage of the potential of supply monopolies to generate economic rents (unearned income; extraordinary profits). The energy infrastructure is built by companies controlled by their employees, ensuring equitable sharing of the economic benefits. The construction and maintenance of this entire infrastructure is financed in such a way that it benefits the producers and consumers (and often prosumers — people who both produce and consume what they produce), rather than simply providing growth opportunities for the finance “industry.” Consumers use their buying power to ensure that they obtain renewable energy that is produced under fair conditions.

All the elements of this locally-based, sharing vision of a renewable energy infrastructure already exist. Some have even been brought to considerable scale, as for example in Denmark, where a large proportion of the wind energy generation is accomplished by local wind cooperatives. The challenge is to bring all these elements together into mutually supportive networks, and to establish such networks essentially everywhere.

In many countries, much of the grid is owned by municipal authorities, which is an excellent solution as long as democratic accountability of these authorities is ensured. Unfortunately, there has been a trend in recent years to privatize electric distribution grids, on the basis of the argument that private control is automatically more “efficient.” However, this argument is only valid if there is true market competition, which is not the case in most energy distribution systems.

In this context, the best way to ensure that a business serves its customers is for the customers to take over the business. There are different models to do this: in rural areas — as in much of the U.S. — rural electric cooperatives have long played a large role in running the local grids. In large urban areas, however, this model has not been as successful. At the urban scale, municipal ownership or trusts are more prevalent.

Finally, it is important that the workers installing all this equipment get a good deal – and this works best if they themselves own their own companies and make the important decisions. The challenge now is to bring all these elements together and help them to grow, in order to build an energy infrastructure that allows all of us to live well, while ensuring good living conditions for all the other species on this planet. —Wolfgang Hoeschele

1. SolarShare bond: Renewable energy investment cooperative for local commercial scale projects

Governments around the world still subsidize polluting, carbon-based energy projects, totaling hundreds of billions of dollars per year, according to The New York Times. In addition to this, the Financial Times has reported how these incentives are not yet offered to renewable energy systems at nearly the same scale. In response, entrepreneurs are creating alternative models to build distributed grids that derive power from clean energy sources and financial support directly from their local community members.

In Canada, residents of Ontario can invest in local solar power projects by buying SolarShare bonds. SolarShare is a renewable energy cooperative that enables anyone living in Ontario to invest in solar power projects in the area and become a voting member of the co-op. The minimum buy-in for SolarShare bonds is $1,000 Canadian dollars (around $740) for a 5-year term at 5 percent fixed interest, and CA$10,000 (just over $7,400) for a 15-year term at 6 percent fixed interest. Investors who purchase 5-year bonds receive an annual return through semiannual interest payments until the term of their investment ends, at which point they receive their entire principal investment. The 15-year bonds are self-amortizing, so each semiannual payment is made up of both principal and interest. The investor-members collectively vote in their board members, and can serve on one of the co-op’s many committees. SolarShare has completed 39 solar installation projects and is on track to build eight more through 2017. The cooperative will own solar assets worth more than CA$55 million (over $40 million) by fall 2017. —Emily Skeehan

2. Namasté solar: Solar worker cooperative shares economic benefits of the renewable energy transition with workers

The construction of sustainable infrastructure for renewable-energy projects is a source of immense economic opportunity. The workers who install these new systems, however, tend to gain relatively little from the creation of this wealth. Worker cooperatives are one way to ensure that the benefits of the renewable energy transition are shared more equally. Namasté Solar, based out of Colorado, began as an employee-owned benefit company when it was founded in 2005, but formally shifted to a cooperative structure in 2011. To become a worker-owner of the cooperative, candidates work with Namasté Solar for a year to determine whether they are the right match. If they are, employees buy a share in the cooperative and earn voting rights in their decision-making process. When business is going well, extra earnings are divided among the worker-owners. Namasté Solar has over 100 worker-owners across four offices in Colorado, California, and New York. The co-op has begun undertaking many big solar installations in Colorado, including a convention center, a hospital, and a museum. —Wolfgang Hoeschele

3. Auckland Energy Consumer Trust: Exercising public oversight and profit sharing among electricity consumers

Public utilities require proper public oversight to ensure that the entities operating them do not exploit their monopoly positions to drive up costs for the communities they serve. In addition to regulatory oversight, another way to instigate public accountability is the creation of trusts, which put control over the utility in the hands of the people. In 1993, New Zealand established the Auckland Energy Consumer Trust (AECT) to own and oversee the companies that operate the electricity distribution networks. AECT was one of 30 energy trusts that the New Zealand government established following national reforms to its electricity system.

In 2016, it was renamed to Entrust. Entrust owns a majority share of Vector, the largest electricity distribution company in New Zealand. Entrust equally distributes profit dividends from Vector to all of its beneficiaries, over 320,000 households and businesses across the country. The beneficiaries, who are all customers of Vector, vote trustees into office. Two of Entrust’s trustees serve on Vector’s board of directors to monitor the company’s performance. This system ensures that the monopoly energy provider serves the consumer’s interests. If excessive bills were charged, the profits would ultimately be returned to the consumers. —Wolfgang Hoeschele

Header photo by Zbynek Burival on Unsplash

What's the Net Cost of Using Renewables to Hit Australia's Climate Target? Nothing

metering.com

by Andrew Blakers, Australian National University; Bin Lu, Australian National University, and Matthew Stocks, Australian National University, The Conversation: 
https://theconversation.com/whats-the-net-cost-of-using-renewables-to-hit-australias-climate-target-nothing-88021

Australia can meet its 2030 greenhouse emissions target at zero net cost, according to our analysis of a range of options for the National Electricity Market.

Our modelling shows that renewable energy can help hit Australia’s emissions reduction target of 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2030 effectively for free. This is because the cost of electricity from new-build wind and solar will be cheaper than replacing old fossil fuel generators with new ones.

Currently, Australia is installing about 3 gigawatts (GW) per year of wind and solar photovoltaics (PV). This is fast enough to exceed 50% renewables in the electricity grid by 2030. It’s also fast enough to meet Australia’s entire carbon reduction target, as agreed at the 2015 Paris climate summit.

Encouragingly, the rapidly declining cost of wind and solar PV electricity means that the net cost of meeting the Paris target is roughly zero. This is because electricity from new-build wind and PV will be cheaper than from new-build coal generators; cheaper than existing gas generators; and indeed cheaper than the average wholesale price in the entire National Electricity Market, which is currently A$70-100 per megawatt-hour.

Cheapest option

Electricity from new-build wind in Australia currently costs around A$60 per MWh, while PV power costs about A$70 per MWh.

During the 2020s these prices are likely to fall still further – to below A$50 per MWh, judging by the lower-priced contracts being signed around the world, such as in Abu Dhabi, Mexico, India and Chile.

In our research, published today, we modelled the all-in cost of electricity under three different scenarios:

• Renewables: replacement of enough old coal generators by renewables to meet Australia’s Paris climate target
• Gas: premature retirement of most existing coal plant and replacement by new gas generators to meet the Paris target. Note that gas is uncompetitive at current prices, and this scenario would require a large increase in gas use, pushing up prices still further.
• Status quo: replacement of retiring coal generators with supercritical coal. Note that this scenario fails to meet the Paris target by a wide margin, despite having a similar cost to the renewables scenario described above, even though our modelling uses a low coal power station price.

The chart below shows the all-in cost of electricity in the 2020s under each of the three scenarios, and for three different gas prices: lower, higher, or the same as the current A$8 per gigajoule. As you can see, electricity would cost roughly the same under the renewables scenario as it would under the status quo, regardless of what happens to gas prices.

Levelised cost of electricity (A$ per MWh) for three scenarios and a range of gas prices. Blakers et al.

Balancing a renewable energy grid

The cost of renewables includes both the cost of energy and the cost of balancing the grid to maintain reliability. This balancing act involves using energy storage, stronger interstate high-voltage power lines, and the cost of renewable energy “spillage” on windy, sunny days when the energy stores are full.

The current cost of hourly balancing of the National Electricity Market (NEM) is low because the renewable energy fraction is small. It remains low (less than A$7 per MWh) until the renewable energy fraction rises above three-quarters.

The renewable energy fraction in 2020 will be about one-quarter, which leaves plenty of room for growth before balancing costs become significant.

Cost of hourly balancing of the NEM (A$ per MWh) as a function of renewable energy fraction.

The proposed Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project would have a power generation capacity of 2GW and energy storage of 350GWh. This could provide half of the new storage capacity required to balance the NEM up to a renewable energy fraction of two-thirds.

The new storage needed over and above Snowy 2.0 is 2GW of power with 12GWh of storage (enough to provide six hours of demand). This could come from a mix of pumped hydro, batteries and demand management.

Stability and reliability

Most of Australia’s fossil fuel generators will reach the end of their technical lifetimes within 20 years. In our “renewables” scenario detailed above, five coal-fired power stations would be retired early, by an average of five years. In contrast, meeting the Paris targets by substituting gas for coal requires 10 coal stations to close early, by an average of 11 years.

Under the renewables scenario, the grid will still be highly reliable. That’s because it will have a diverse mix of generators: PV (26GW), wind (24GW), coal (9GW), gas (5GW), pumped hydro storage (5GW) and existing hydro and bioenergy (8GW). Many of these assets can be used in ways that help to deliver other services that are vital for grid stability, such as spinning reserve and voltage management.

Because a renewable electricity system comprises thousands of small generators spread over a million square kilometres, sudden shocks to the electricity system from generator failure, such as occur regularly with ageing large coal generators, are unlikely.

Neither does cloudy or calm weather cause shocks, because weather is predictable and a given weather system can take several days to move over the Australian continent. Strengthened interstate interconnections (part of the cost of balancing) reduce the impact of transmission failure, which was the prime cause of the 2016 South Australian blackout.

Since 2015, Australia has tripled the annual deployment rate of new wind and PV generation capacity. Continuing at this rate until 2030 will let us meet our entire Paris carbon target in the electricity sector, all while replacing retiring coal generators, maintaining high grid stability, and stabilising electricity prices.

Andrew Blakers, Professor of Engineering, Australian National University; Bin Lu, PhD Candidate, Australian National University, and Matthew Stocks, Research Fellow, ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science, Australian National University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

How Did Australia Get This Stupid About Clean Energy?

by Giles Parkinson, Renew Economy: http://reneweconomy.com.au/australia-get-stupid-clean-energy-99268/

Just when you thought that the public debate around clean energy in Australia could not possibly get any worse, any dumber, or any further divorced from reality, it did.

Conservatives have been railing against renewables and carbon pricing for at least a decade. So ingrained has it become in our national psyche that it is like a State of Origin contest between energy sources and their fans. “Queenslander”, shout the league fans. “Fossil fuels” screech the incumbents.

But it plumbed further depths this week. And it got really stupid and really nasty. Conservatives in the government and the media rebooted their attacks on wind and solar energy, and extended it to battery storage and vehicle emission standards, with the Murdoch media dubbing the latter as a “carbon tax on cars.”

Craig Kelly, the chair of Coalition’s energy policy committee, said renewable energy “would kill people”, a claim happily repeated by columnist Andrew Bolt.

Resources Minister Matt Canavan urged the Queensland government to “forget about climate change”, while the LNP in Queensland will this weekend consider a motion urging Australia to quit the Paris climate deal.

Worse, the conservatives started attacking individuals. The verbal assault on chief scientist Alan Finkel was launched way back in February when it was clear he would not toe the fossil fuel line. And even after delivering what many consider a “soft option”, the conservatives rekindled their attack.

“The Finkel report is a blueprint for destruction — of the Australian economy and destruction of the Liberal Party,” Murdoch columnist Piers Akerman wrote.

Then they added another target – the new head of the Australian Energy Market Operator, Audrey Zibelman. Broadcaster Alan Jones urged that “this woman”, who he accused of being a “global warming advocate and a promoter of wind turbines”, be “run out of town”.

On the same day, writing in Quadrant magazine, Alan Moran, the former head of regulation for the Institute of Public Affairs, described Zibelman as a “refugee from Hillary Clinton’s presidential defeat.” (Actually she worked for New York governor Andrew Cuomo).

“Alan Finkel’s otherworldly prognosis is bad enough. But toss in Malcolm Turnbull’s advocacy of renewables and then add an imported American chief regulator who would have been happier working for Hillary Clinton and where are you? The simple answer: thoroughly stuffed,” Moran wrote.

These attacks on Finkel, and now Zibelman, come in groups. It begs the question, are they co-ordinated? And if so, by whom?

But really, how did Australia get this stupid? And this ugly?

South Australia’s energy minister Tom Koutsantonis thinks it’s because the conservatives, or at least the Coalition, are in the pockets of the fossil fuel lobby.

“The only thing standing in the way of lower prices, improved grid security and meeting our carbon reduction commitments is a divided federal Liberal Party that is completely beholden to the coal lobby,” Koutsantonis said on Thursday.

He may have a point, because ideology alone does not explain the absurdity and ignorance of some of the remarks made this past week.

It seems there is nothing about the clean energy economy that these people like. The conservatives and the Murdoch camp has been relentless against wind farms for years now and this week they turned its target to battery storage and solar panels.

One story focused on fires from solar panels, claiming 40 such fires occurred over the last five years in Victoria.

Context: Victoria has around 3,000 house fires a year, mostly from heaters and clothes dryers and electric blankets. Fridges cause one fire a week in London, including the recent tragedy at Grenfell Tower in North Kensington that claimed 80 lives.

The Murdoch media’s campaign against Elon Musk’s “bulldust boutique batteries” was actually kick-started by energy minister Josh Frydenberg, who made some ridiculous remarks about how a single battery could not power the whole state, or store its entire wind output.

(But it was 20 times bigger than the 5MW battery storage “virtual power plant” he was hailing earlier in the year).

No one is suggesting that this battery storage array can provide all of the state’s power needs: It is designed to help make up any energy shortfall, which occurred last year when the biggest gas plants sat idle, or when they unexpectedly tripped, and to help ride through network faults and generator failures.

And battery storage would have prevented, or at least reduced, all three major outages that occurred in South Australia since November 2015. It would certainly be smarter and quicker than the dumb, slow responding fossil fuel generator that did the wrong thing and extended the blackout on that day last November.

Battery storage is a threat to the incumbents, and their defenders, because it and other storage will make wind and solar dispatchable, will make more expensive gas peaking plant redundant, and eventually – with the addition of pumped hydro and solar thermal – allow the coal fleet to be entirely replaced.

The attack on proposed vehicle emissions standards was extraordinary. Australia has become a dumping ground for inefficient and polluting vehicles because of its absence of any such standards.

That is causing health issues and higher prices (it means more fuel consumption), but the Murdoch media had no hesitation in calling it a “carbon tax” on cars, and epithet that even Fairfax used to lead its coverage.

“Hands off our cars, warmists,” warned Andrew Bolt in the Herald Sun, echoing the extraordinary push back by conservatives against the idea of autonomous driving. “Don’t try and steal my pick-up, I’ve got a gun.”

One wonders: Do any of these people use modern technologies? Or are they still riding a horse and cart, sending telegrams and listening to the wireless, storing their beers in an ice box.

Of course, the clean energy industry doesn’t help itself – either too brow-beaten by the media or scared to offend the government. When I started writing about clean energy a decade ago, I was astonished by the circular nature of the mutual put-downs from the wind, solar, geothermal and biomass industries.

Last week, when the Murdoch media got their “scoop” on an issue well reported in RenewEconomy, the draft standards that may effectively ban lithium-ion batteries from the inside of homes, and bring a halt to the nascent household battery storage industry – a major threat to incumbent utilities.

The response from some of Australia’s leading battery storage developers? The promoters of vanadium and zinc bromine flow batteries hopped on to their soap-box and crowed about how their product was not affected.

No sense of a common purpose there. Sauve qui peux! Every man for themselves. The story of Australia’s energy industry.

Meanwhile, the fossil fuel push continues unrelenting. The Minerals Council producing yet another report claiming that “High efficiency, low emissions” coal plants could meet climate targets. To understand how preposterous that claim is, read this.

“Low emissions” is just another marketing lie. “High emissions, low efficiency” might be a more accurate description of HELE coal plants compared to the alternative smart technologies.

It is an absurd situation we find ourselves in. The public support for these new technologies is overwhelming, as it is in business (apart from those seeking to protect stranded assets), and among most politicians – even many in the Liberal Party, as NSW energy minister Don Harwin revealed late last month.

Yet here we are: Short-term policies; a patchwork of rules on energy efficiency; the worst building stock in the world; the most inefficient and polluting cars; and the world’s most expensive and dirty grid, soaring emissions, and rising temperatures.

And two years after obtaining power, prime minister Malcolm Turnbull is still defending policies he once describes as “bullshit,” too afraid to call out the nonsense spread by those keeping him in power.  

China Now Top in Renewables

(energydesk.greenpeace.org)

by Guillaume Pitron, Le Monde Diplomatique: https://mondediplo.com/2017/07/11china

Donald Trump’s 1 June announcement of US withdrawal from the 2015 Paris climate agreement coincided with the 19th bilateral EU-China summit in Brussels, giving China’s prime minister, Li Keqiang, an opportunity to reaffirm China’s intention to implement the accord. The success of COP21 (the UN Climate Change Conference) owed much to China’s role in the negotiations.

The main hurdle in Paris was the major divergence between the group of developing countries — the G77— and the developed countries over the funding of energy transition and the division of labour to contain climate change. China’s chief negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, used China’s hybrid status as both a developing nation and an economic power to position himself as the mediator who could win the trust of all participants. He won agreement that the North’s annual contribution of $100bn to the Green Climate Fund for the South would no longer be obligatory from 2020.

But China also won acceptance for the idea of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ from the 195 signatory nations. Under this principle of international environmental law, the efforts demanded of industrialised nations will be scaled according to their economic size and historical responsibility for global warming.

The signing of the Paris agreement was considered a diplomatic success for China: its leaders had been angry that the western media blamed them for the failure of COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009 — a minimal, non-binding agreement considered a retreat from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. In Paris, China demonstrated what environmental diplomacy might look like, and since then, it has rarely missed a chance to make clear the role it intends to play, highlighting the leadership void left by the US.

China’s stance is all the more necessary since its development model now looks unsustainable; since the 1980s it has been based on an economic policy that used social and environmental dumping to gain competitive advantage over western nations. China is now the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases (28% of global CO2 emissions) and is producing alarming environmental data — 10% of its arable land is contaminated with heavy metals; 80% of underground well water is unfit to drink (1); and fewer than 1% of the 500 largest cities have air quality that meets international standards. Air pollution causes up to a million deaths a year, according to the World Health Organisation.

‘The state has grasped the urgency of the environmental problem and given a sincere undertaking to protect the environment,’ says Chloé Froissart, director of the Franco-Chinese Centre at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. In 2013 President Xi Jinping declared that an ‘ecological civilisation’ — a hazy concept whose ultimate aim is nonetheless clear — was emerging to produce a sustainable development model that reconciles robust growth with a better quality of life. The 13th five-year plan, approved in 2016, projects reducing coal consumption as part of the energy mix from 64% in 2015 to 58% in 2020, and increasing the proportion of non-fossil fuels to 15%. The government wants to reduce reliance on traditional heavy industries, which are major contributors to pollution, and strengthen its economic leadership in renewables.

This policy has already achieved notable successes. Despite China’s image as polluted and polluting, it is now the world leader in green energy production, photovoltaic equipment, hydroelectric power generation and investment in wind power. It is also the largest market for cars that run on clean energy. Though China’s economy grew by 6.7% in 2016, its CO2 emissions fell by almost 1%, to 8.768m tonnes, a better performance than in Europe, where emissions remained the same while the economy grew by just 1.7% (2). China’s ambitious green transition, besides easing tensions over the public’s environmental concerns, is a response to the challenge of modernising its engines of growth and greening its international image.

Guillaume Pitron

Journalist

Wind Farms are Hardly the Bird Slayers They're Made Out to Be: Here's Why

The potential to harm local birdlife is often used to oppose wind farm development. But research into how birds die shows wind farms should be the least of our concerns. from www.shutterstock.com

Simon Chapman, University of Sydney

People who oppose wind farms often claim wind turbine blades kill large numbers of birds, often referring to them as “bird choppers”. And claims of dangers to iconic or rare birds, especially raptors, have attracted a lot of attention.

Wind turbine blades do indeed kill birds and bats, but their contribution to total bird deaths is extremely low, as these three studies show.

A 2009 study using US and European data on bird deaths estimated the number of birds killed per unit of power generated by wind, fossil fuel and nuclear power systems. It concluded:

wind farms and nuclear power stations are responsible each for between 0.3 and 0.4 fatalities per gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity while fossil-fuelled power stations are responsible for about 5.2 fatalities per GWh.

That’s nearly 15 times more. From this, the author estimated:

wind farms killed approximately seven thousand birds in the United States in 2006 but nuclear plants killed about 327,000 and fossil-fuelled power plants 14.5 million.

In other words, for every one bird killed by a wind turbine, nuclear and fossil fuel powered plants killed 2,118 birds.

A Spanish study involved daily inspections of the ground around 20 wind farms with 252 turbines from 2005 to 2008. It found 596 dead birds.

The turbines in the sample had been working for different times during the study period (between 11 and 34 months), with the average annual number of fatalities per turbine being just 1.33. The authors noted this was one of the highest collision rates reported in the world research literature.

Raptor collisions accounted for 36% of total bird deaths (214 deaths), most of which were griffon vultures (138 birds, 23% of total mortality). The study area was in the southernmost area of Spain near Gibraltar, which is a migratory zone for birds from Morocco into Spain.

Perhaps the most comprehensive report was published in the journal Avian Conservation and Ecology in 2013 by scientists from Canada’s Environment Canada, Wildlife Research Division.

Their report looked at causes of human-related bird deaths for all of Canada, drawing together data from many diverse sources.

The table below shows selected causes of bird death out of an annual total of 186,429,553 estimated deaths caused by human activity.


Mark Duchamp, the president of Save the Eagles International is probably the most prominent person to speak out about bird deaths at wind farms. He says:

The average per turbine comes down to 333 to 1,000 deaths annually which is a far cry from the 2-4 birds claimed by the American wind industry or the 400,000 birds a year estimated by the American Bird Conservancy for the whole of the United States, which has about twice as many turbines as Spain.

Such claims from wind farm critics generally allude to massive national conspiracies to cover up the true size of the deaths.

And in Australia?

In Australia in 2006 a proposal for a 52-turbine wind farm plan on Victoria’s south-east coast at Bald Hills (now completed) was overruled by the then federal environment minister Ian Campbell.

He cited concerns about the future of the endangered orange-bellied parrot (Neophema chrysogaster), a migratory bird said to be at risk of extinction within 50 years. The Tarwin Valley Coastal Guardians, an anti wind farm group that had been opposing the proposed development.

Interest groups have regularly cited this endangered bird when trying to halt a range of developments.
These include a chemical storage facility and a boating marina. The proposed Westernport marina in Victoria happened to also be near an important wetland. But a professor in biodiversity and sustainability wrote:

the parrot copped the blame, even though it had not been seen there for 25 years.

Victoria’s planning minister at the time, Rob Hulls, described the Bald Hills decision as blatantly political, arguing the federal conservative government had been lobbied by fossil fuel interests to curtail renewable energy developments. Hulls said there had been:

some historical sightings, and also some potential foraging sites between 10 and 35 kilometres from the Bald Hills wind farm site that may or may not have been used by the orange-bellied parrot.

Perhaps the final word on this topic should go to the British Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. It built a wind turbine at its Bedfordshire headquarters to reduce its carbon emissions (and in doing so, aims to minimise species loss due to climate change). It recognised that wind power is far more beneficial to birds than it is harmful.

---

Simon Chapman and Fiona Crichton’s book, Wind Turbine Syndrome: a communicated disease, will be published by Sydney University Press later this year.

Simon Chapman, Emeritus Professor in Public Health, University of Sydney

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

China Turns On the World’s Largest Floating Solar Farm

Floating on a lake over a collapsed coal mine, the power station in Anhui province can produce 40 megawatts of energy

image: https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/DyKp30C2u8W7M-ufeGMDl3HADeg=/800x600/filters:no_upscale()/https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/d5/4c/d54ca68d-b6a0-4416-8ca1-8be6e994ae65/solar_farm_floating_china_power_plant_sungrow_10.jpg

The floating solar power station in Anhui province (Sungrow)

By Jason Daley

SMITHSONIAN.COM JUNE 7, 2017
Last week, workers switched on a solar energy plant capable of producing 40
megawatts of power, which floats on a manmade lake in China’s Anhui province
near the city of Huainan, reports Sarah Zheng at the South China Morning Post.
The array is the largest floating solar project in the world, though at the
brisk pace China is building new renewable projects it’s unlikely to hold that
title very long.

Built by the company Sungrow Power Supply, the power plant will produce enough energy to power
15,000 homes, Zheng reports. While the company has not revealed the exact size of the operation, it
produces twice as much energy as the previous holder of the largest-floating-solar-plant title, which is
located in the same area and was launched by the company Xinyi Solar in 2016.

Anhui province is a coal-rich region, and the Sungrow plant is located on a lake that was once the site of intensive mining. Heavy rains filled the area with water. As Zhen reports, the depth of the lake varies from 12 feet to 30 feet. 

So why build solar plants on top of lakes and reservoirs? Fiona Harvey at The Guardian explains that building on bodies of water, especially manmade lakes that are not ecologically sensitive, helps protect agricultural land and terrestrial ecosystems from being developed for energy use. The water also cools the electronics in the solar panels, helping them to work more efficiently, reports Alistair Boyle for The Telegraph. For similar reasons Britain built a 23,000-panel floating solar farm on the Queen Elizabeth II reservoir near Heathrow airport in 2016 to help power the Thames Water treatment plant.

The Sungrow solar farm is just one tiny piece in China’s push towards renewable energy. According to Irina Slav at Business Insider, the country recently announced it would invest $361 billion in renewable power by 2020, and by 2022 could produce 320 gigawatts of wind and solar power and 340 gigawatts of hydropower. Zheng reports that currently renewables are responsible for 11 percent of China’s energy and may reach 20 percent by 2030.

While the floating solar plant is the largest in the world, it pales in comparison to some of China's non-floating solar projects. The Longyangxia Dam Solar Park on the Tibetan plateau hosts 4 million solar panels that produce 850 megawatts of energy. Even that will soon be eclipsed by a project in the Ningxia Autonomous Region, which will have 6 million solar panels and produce 2 gigawatts of power.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/china-launches-largest-floating-solar-farm-180963587/#Dmmk5tcFL70VswX0.99
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Fossil Fuel Industry Holding Australian Economy to Ransom

Illustration by Greg Foyster, greg.foyster@gmail.com

by Giles Parkinson, Renew Economy: http://reneweconomy.com.au/2016/fossil-fuel-industry-holding-australian-economy-to-ransom-58128

 

How often do we hear it? Australia, with its world-leading renewable energy resources, particularly wind and solar, and its technological know-how, has the opportunity to become a global energy superpower in a global economy committed to rapid decarbonisation.

 

Is it an opportunity the country is likely to seize? Probably not.

 

Australia has an opportunity to accelerate that shift at a critical meeting of the federal and state energy ministers on Friday, but it is highly unlikely that the status quo will be troubled. There are still too many powerful vested interests at play.

 

Take, for instance, the situation in South Australia. This so-called “energy crisis” - July’s big spike in prices that used to be common before the advent of wind and solar - was predicted, hoped for, and possibly even confected in the hope of illustrating the limitations of renewable energy.

 

Instead, it has simply proved that the fossil fuel industry is holding Australia’s transition to a clean energy economy to ransom, and that consumers are being gouged at every level of the energy industry.

 

Numerous reports have pointed to the market manipulation by a few powerful interests. The Melbourne Energy Institute outlined how a few generators “gamed” the system, exploiting their unusual market power to charge “monopoly rents”, with parallels to the energy crisis confected by Enron in California more than a decade ago. 

 

The Clean Energy Council has complained about stratospheric prices extracted by fossil fuel generators in the name of “energy security,” while RenewEconomy’s own David Leitch and the MEI have pointed to the huge lift in margins.

 

A new study to be released tomorrow by Bruce Mountain of research group CME will show that one-third of capacity was “deliberately” withheld at the peak of the south Australian energy “crisis”, at a time when the generators knew that they could cash in on high prices.

 

The first part of his report, released on Tuesday, showed how the big three retailers - pretty much the same companies that own the state’s gas generators - were price gouging in South Australia, charging $650 more than the cost of generation and delivery, just to act as a go-between for wholesalers and network companies.

 

And, of course, there are the network costs, the gold plating of which has seen consumer bills skyrocket in recent years. Even as regulators attempt to crack down on spending plans for yet more poles and wires, the network owners - and particularly the NSW government - is taking the regulator to court to enable them to spend more and pass those costs on to households and businesses.

Little wonder, then, that the ministers’ meeting in Canberra on Friday is being asked to look beyond more fossil fuel solutions - i.e. drilling for more gas - to solve the NEM’s problems, and to open the markets to more competition. Such measures might include new interconnectors, encouraging more battery storage and “complementary” renewables such as solar towers with storage. In short, they want more competition for the incumbents.

“The future of the national energy market is 100 per cent renewable,” says Tom Quinn, the CEO of the Future Business Council. “The grid must be re-imagined with this reality in mind and built to enable diversified generation and simple import and export throughout the national energy market.”

Quinn says Australia needs to rapidly transition from to its “dumb grid” to an “adaptive grid” and embrace those new technologies, which could include solar, storage, electric vehicles, pumped hydro and ocean energy. “The country has the world’s richest renewable energy resources and the opportunity to create the lowest cost base of energy for industry in the world,” he notes.

The Labor states appear to recognise this. South Australia’s Labor government says its economic future depends on transitioning to a clean energy economy. It is already nearly half way there, a benchmark that the incumbents and ideologues are keen to demonise rather than celebrate.

The ACT is half-way to its 2020 target of sourcing the equivalent of all its electricity from renewable energy, a remarkably canny and visionary strategy that will provide its homes and businesses with an effective hedge against volatile fossil fuel prices and price manipulation in the market.

Victoria and Queensland are keen to follow, and Tasmania is keen to use its massive hydro resources as a clean-energy battery for the mainland. Even Western Australia realises that the future lies in solar and storage.

But there is no sign of this transition at the federal level. Our interview with Josh Frydenberg last Thursday confirmed the worst fears of many in the industry. Frydenberg understands some of the dynamics that are working in the industry, but there is no sign that the Abbott era policies on climate and renewable energy are about to change.

Frydenberg may be less willing than some of his coalition colleagues to blames renewable energy for soaring electricity prices, but he shows he is not about to accelerate the push – ARENA will be stripped of funds; next year’s review of climate targets will be a stocktake, rather than a launch-pad; and there will be no long-term setting of targets, be they for renewable energy or for the decarbonised economy that the Coalition signed up for in Paris last year. The answer for everything appears to be: more gas.

This is depressing stuff. Everyone knows that the transition to new technologies is unavoidable, the question is over the shape, the pace and the cost of that change. The federal government’s role is critical: it can seize the moment and work towards becoming a world leader and renewable energy super-power, or it can be dragged along as it hits the brakes on change to suit the narrow business interests of a few powerful players.

It would, of course, be unfair to blame only Frydenberg for this mess. He, and Turnbull, are constrained by the right wing of the party who, far from wanting to accelerate the transition to clean energy, are reluctant to even accept the science of climate change. The actors may have changed, but the script remains the same.

The role of mainstream media is also important. In short, it has been appalling. Since when has the media considered its role to turn a blind eye - as it has done, quite literally - to the abuse of power of a few key players in the energy market.

The Murdoch press splashed a front page “scoop” about the absence of wind power at critical moments in early July, part of its long and intense campaign against renewable energy. Apart from being wrong - and sourced from the Coalition - it completely missed the point. Yet it has written nothing of the market manipulation and “economic” withdrawal of nearly 1,000MW of fossil fuel generation. The price gouging of retailers has barely got a mention.

Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry does as it pleases: demonising renewables, withholding capacity, exploiting market holes to push prices higher, pleading for subsidies to help fossil fuel generation leave the market, pleading for other subsidies to “guarantee” the retention of other fossil fuel generators, fighting rule changes that could open the market to new competition, and taking the regulator to court in an effort to further gold plate the grid.

That is what they are able to do. They have a majority share of the market operator, extraordinary influence over the policy maker and federal and state regulators, and a stranglehold over conservative politicians. And as long as the Coalition refuses to translate its Paris commitment to practical policy, they will continue to run amok. 

More EU Countries Are Giving Coal the Boot

© Guerito 2005 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

by Taylor Hill, Take Part: http://www.takepart.com/article/2016/04/07/quarter-european-countries-ditch-coal 

Taylor Hill is an associate editor at TakePart covering environment and wildlife Bio

The final lumps of coal were burned last week at the last remaining coal-fired power plant in Belgium, signaling an end to the coal power era in yet another European country.

Just last month, Scotland’s 115-year-long dependence on the dirty, carbon emission-spewing power source came to an end as the Longannet Power Station - once the largest coal plant in Europe - was switched off on March 24.

With plants idled all over the continent, now more than a quarter of European Union nations have quit coal, with Belgium and Scotland’s shutdowns bringing them in line with coal power-free countries Cyprus, Luxembourg, Malta, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. They will be joined by larger EU nations come 2025, when Portugal, Austria, Finland, and the rest of the U.K. have promised to rid their power grids of one of the dirtiest forms of energy production.

While fossil fuels such as natural gas are still part of these nations’ energy equations, clean renewable power from wind and solar farms is meeting record levels of their electricity needs.

“Belgium going coal free is yet another proof that the golden days of the coal industry are over,” Joanna Flisowska, policy coordinator at Climate Action Network Europe, said in a statement. “This is good news for the climate. To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, the EU has to ensure that carbon emissions from its coal power plants are cut down much faster than their current rate.”

Now, for the first time, the argument for cutting carbon emissions in favor of the environment - but at the expense of economic growth - isn’t holding up.

Annual global C02 emissions stayed flat - at 32.1 billion tons - for the second year in a row despite the global economy growing by more than 3 percent in back-to-back years, according to the latest data from the International Energy Agency.

In the 40 years the agency has been providing C02 emissions data, there have been four times when emissions stood still or dropped, three of which were associated with global economic weakness: the 1970s oil crisis, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the recession in 2009. But for 2014 and 2015, the economy didn’t take the hit that typically comes in tandem with stagnating emissions.

“We now have seen two straight years of greenhouse gas emissions decoupling from economic growth,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol said in a statement March 16. “Coming just a few months after the landmark COP21 agreement in Paris, this is yet another boost to the global fight against climate change.”

Keith Anderson, chief corporate officer at energy company Scottish Power, said carbon taxes and a government-wide push for cleaner and cost-competitive renewable energy sources is what drove the ouster of Scotland’s Longannet plant, stating that keeping it in operation would be “uneconomic.” Now, the company is banking heavily on renewable energy systems, having invested nearly $1 billion in six onshore wind farms under construction.

“For the first time in more than a century no power produced in Scotland will come from burning coal,” Hugh Finlay, Scottish Power generation director, said in a statement. “Although Scottish Power is at the forefront of renewable energy development, we will be reflecting today on the important contribution that Longannet has made in keeping the lights on for millions of homes and businesses for nearly half a century.”

Beginning of the End for Fossil Fuels? Panic Sweeps Global Markets

by Giles Parkinson, Renew Economy: http://reneweconomy.com.au/2015/beginning-of-the-end-for-fossil-fuels-panic-sweeps-global-markets-11700

Well, we can’t say we weren’t warned. Panic selling swept major global stock-markets on Tuesday in what could be a foretaste of things to come, as investors suddenly woke up to the fact that the game has changed.

Fossil fuels and their associated investments are in decline, and the world is heading rapidly towards new and cleaner technologies.

A bunch of big stories this week highlight what is going on: VW, Shell, Glencore, BHP, Origin Energy and AGL. All linked by a common thread - their exposure to fossil fuels. It prompted a warning on the financial risks of climate change by Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England.

The biggest news, of course, was VW. As we reported on Monday, the VW cheating scandal, where it sought to defraud regulators and millions of consumers on a massive scale over the level of its diesel car emissions, could likely signal the demise of the diesel engine.

But it could go further than that: it could see the rapid demise of the petrol engine too, and the use of fossil fuels in passenger vehicles altogether.

As more diesel car manufacturers came under scrutiny overnight, Fitch Ratings, an international credit agency, said the dominance of the internal combustion engine could come under pressure from a fundamental change in consumers and regulators’ attitude toward emissions and fuel efficiency.

“The Volkswagen scandal could therefore accelerate the underlying growth of vehicles with alternative powertrains, including fuel cells, electric and hybrid engines,” it said in a new report. That means the demise of both petrol and diesel cars, and the emergence of electric vehicles.

This is what the stock market is already telling us: Overnight, VW - a bastion of the Germany economy and the “made in Germany” brand, lost another 4% of its value, taking its total decline in the past fortnight to 44%, or more than $A50 billion.

The world’s biggest car-maker is still worth around $A72 billion, but as Alex Pollak writes in the SMH, it has $200 billion in liabilities, backed by the value of their vehicles. Those values are now under question.

Meanwhile, the share price of Tesla, the upmarket electric vehicle manufacturer that has become one of the world’s most valuable brand names, despite producing a fraction of the number of vehicles than its bigger rivals, is now worth $A44 billion.

The market is telling us a similar story about the coal industry. The plunge in the value of the world’s biggest non-government coal miner, Peabody Coal, has been well documented. It is down more than 90% in the past year, but even this fact hadn’t quite registered with the mainstream investor.

That was until this week, with the release of an Investec analyst’s report on Glencore that suggests that its equity value could be nil, and its Australian coal export business worthless. Others pointed to Glencore as potentially the commodity equivalent of Lehmann Bros.

Glencore and Peabody are particularly vulnerable because, like other companies, they are essentially financial constructs. Glencore in particular is a corporate put together by some very clever financiers. But when finance is leveraged at the top of the market, collapsing commodity prices can prove terminal for highly geared global structures.

As Greenpeace analyst Marina Lou writes in EnergyDesk, when Glencore purchased Xstrata two years ago in the biggest mining merger ever, chief executive Ivan Glasenberg commented,  “To really screw this up, the coal price has got to really tank.”

Well it did. And many had predicted exactly that.

“Most coal companies did top of the cycle peak priced multi-billion dollar debt funded acquisitions, including Peabody, Glencore, Adani Enterprises,” adds Tim Buckley, from IEEFA. “These strategic errors have come back to haunt their shareholders with crippling share price declines.

The dramatic fall in Glencore - already down 77% in a year - in turn triggered a slump in energy stocks, in which Australian gas companies such as Origin Energy and Santos were hit particularly hard. Why? Because there is a real question - following the fall in international oil prices - about whether the $200 billion invested in LNG export projects will ever deliver suitable  returns.

Origin Energy, whose share price has slumped more than half in less than a year, announced it would raise $2.5 billion in a heavily discounted share offer (25%), to shore up its balance sheet. It said it had to act quickly to ensure debt remained at sustainable levels.

As if on cue, Shell abandoned its search for oil in the Arctic. As Karel Beckman writes today, Shell is dumping the idea because of the “high costs” of the project, and the chance that regulators and governments might crack down on the idea.

As Beckman points out, neither of these can have come as a surprise. Critics have been warning for a long time that the costs of Alaskan drilling are prohibitive, and the “regulatory environment” in this part of the world will inevitably be unpredictable. Still, Shell went ahead and dropped $A2 billion on the idea.

And as HSBC and others have pointed out, it is not the only asset that is likely to be stranded. At current prices, trillions of dollars ($30 trillion in fact) of fossil fuel reserves will not be economic, and not exploited. The market has been given the numbers, it just seems that it is only now that it is paying attention.

Far from being peopled by “lefties” and “greenies”, many of these think-tanks have hired leading financial analysts and investment bankers, dumped by their international institutions because green research wasn’t making them enough money.

Their research has been ridiculed by vested interests in the mining industry, particularly the Minerals Council of Australia, and the ideologues within Australia’s Coalition government.

But last night they were endorsed by the Bank of England’s Carney, who warned that investors face “potentially huge” losses from climate change action that could make vast reserves of oil, coal and gas “literally unburnable”.

Carney focused on the “carbon budget” - a concept promoted by Australia’s Climate Change Authority, Carbon Tacker and others, but ignored by the Coalition government and most in the fossil fuel industry. It suggests that only one fifth to one third of the world’s proven reserves of oil, gas and coal could be safely exploited.

“If that estimate is even approximately correct it would render the vast majority of reserves ‘stranded’ - oil, gas and coal that will be literally unburnable without expensive carbon capture technology, which itself alters fossil fuel economics,” Carney said, pointing to the upcoming Paris climate talks as a catalyst.

“A wholesale reassessment of prospects, especially if it were to occur suddenly, could potentially destabilise markets,” he said.

Emma Herd, the new head of Australia’s Investor Group on Climate Change, says: “The need to evaluate investments against a commitment to limit warming to two degrees Celsius must now be embedded in mainstream financial decision making”.

Which is why other companies considered to be in the firing line are busy shoring up their defences. Origin did this by announcing a $2.5 billion equity raising, while BHP, whose share price is at the lowest level since the global financial crisis, is insisting that its portfolio will withstand any great move away from fossil fuels, even “extreme” and sudden shifts that could be precipitated by Paris.

BHP said its portfolio would remain robust if emissions decline to levels consistent with a 2°C world after 2030, as well as in a stress test that models the implications of more rapid change. But it is assuming higher demand for uranium, and for gas, at least in the short term, and carbon capture and storage.

It also describes the UN’s ability to get the world on course to meet the 2°C target by 2030 as a “shock event” that is “unlikely and extreme”. But it insists that its portfolio is strong enough to resist that too.

This “shock event,” BHP says, describes an initial delay in coordinated climate change action followed by a faster than expected move to a largely decarbonised world.

“It simultaneously considers the impacts of several significant technology developments, such as rising renewables and battery penetration, increasing energy efficiency and ambitious climate policies to put the world on an accelerated track to achieve the 2°C goal.”

That may come as a “shock” to BHP, but some would say that is the most likely outcome.

AGL, too, under new leadership, is trying to convince investors that it has matters in hand. On Wednesday, its chairman was forced to defend the multi-billion buying spree in the last few years that has made AGL the largest owner of coal-fired generation in Australia.

Gerry Maycock said the handsome profits from the coal generators would be used to invest in renewables “if and when” the investment climate for renewables improved. Of course, AGL had been the country’s biggest investor in renewable energy before those coal purchases, but such investments have slowed dramatically since AGL and other utilities pushed the Coalition government to cut or even remove the renewable energy target altogether. You reap what you sow.