Posts Tagged ‘climate change’
climate change – we know what we should be doing
Here in Australia we have a national government that hates to mention human-induced climate change publicly, whatever their personal views are, and clearly they’re varied. I’ve long suspected that there’s a top-down policy (which long predates our current PM) of not mentioning anthropogenic global warming, lest it outrage a large part of the conservative base, while doing a few things behind the scenes to support renewables and reduce emissions. It’s a sort of half-hearted, disorganised approach to what is clearly a major problem locally and globally. And meanwhile some less disciplined or less chained members or former members of this government, such as former PM Tony Abbott and current MP for Hughes, Craig Kelly, are ignoring the party line (and science), and so revealing just how half-arsed the government’s way of dealing with the problem really is. The national opposition doesn’t seem much better on this issue, and it might well be a matter of following the money…
So I was impressed with a recent ABC interview with Australian climate scientist and leading member of the IPCC, Professor Mark Howden, also director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University, who spoke a world of good sense in about ten minutes.
The interview was preceded by the statement that the government is holding to its emission reduction targets – considered to be rather minimal by climate change scientists – while possibly ‘tweaking’ broader climate change policy. This is another example of ‘don’t scare the base’, IMHO. It was also reported that the government felt it might reach its Paris agreement without using ‘carry-over credits’ from the previous Kyoto agreement.
The issue here is that our government, in its wisdom, felt that it should get credit for ‘more than meeting’ its Kyoto targets. As Howden pointed out, those Kyoto targets were easy to meet because we’d have met them even while increasing our emissions (which we in fact did). Spoken without any sense of irony by the unflappable professor.
There’s no provision in the Paris agreement for such ‘carry-over credits’ – however the government has previously relied on them as an entitlement, and in fact pushed for them in a recent meeting in Madrid. Now, it’s changing its tune, slightly. The hullabaloo over the bushfire tragedies has been an influence, as well as a growing sense that reaching the Paris targets without these credits is do-able. Interestingly, Howden suggests that the credits are important for us meeting our Paris commitments up to 2030, as they make up more than half the required emissions reductions. So, if they’re included, we’ll need a 16% reduction from here, rather than a 26 – 28% reduction. But is this cheating? Is it in the spirit of the Paris agreement? Surely not, apart from legal considerations. It certainly affects any idea that Australia might play a leadership role in emissions reductions.
So now the government is indicating that it might scrap the reliance on credits and find real reductions – which is, in fact, a fairly momentous decision for this conservative administration, because the core emissions from energy, transport, waste and other activities are all rising and would need to be turned around (I’m paraphrasing Howden here). So far no policies have been announced, or are clearly in the offing, to effect this turnaround. There’s an Emissions Reductions Fund, established in 2014-5 to support businesses, farmers, landowners in reducing emissions through a carbon credit scheme (this is news to me) but according to Howden it’s in need of more public funding, and the ‘carbon sinks’ – that’s to say the forests that have been burning horrifically in past weeks – which the government has been partly relying upon, are proving to be less stable than hoped. So there are limitations to the government’s current policies. Howden argues for a range of additional policies, but as he says, they’ve rejected (presumably permanently) so many options in the past, most notably carbon pricing, that the cupboard looks pretty bare for the future. There’s of course a speedier move towards renewables in electricity generation – which represents about 30% of emissions, the other 70% being with industry, agriculture, transport and mining (see my previous piece on fracking, for example, a practice that looks to be on the increase in Australia). Howden puts forward the case that it’s in this 70% area that policies can be most helpful, both in emissions reduction and jobs growth. For example, in transport, Australia is well behind other nations in the uptake of EVs, which our government has done nothing to support, unlike most advanced economies. Having EVs working off a renewables grid would reduce transport emissions massively. Other efficiencies which could be encouraged by government policy would be reducing livestock methane emissions through feed and husbandry reforms, such as maintaining shade and other stress-reducing conditions. This can increase productivity and reduce per-unit environmental footprint – or hoofprint.
As to the old carbon pricing argument – Howden points out that during the brief period that carbon pricing was implemented in Australia, core emissions dropped significantly, and the economy continued to grow. It was clearly successful, and its rescinding in around 2015 has proved disastrous. Howden feels that it’s hard to foresee Australia meeting its 2030 Paris targets without some sort of price on carbon – given that there won’t be any deal on carry-over credits. There’s also an expectation that targets will be ramped up, post-2030.
So, the message is that we need to sensibly revisit carbon pricing as soon as possible, and we need to look positively at abatement policies as encouraging growth and innovation – the cost of doing nothing being much greater than the costs involved in emissions reduction. And there are plenty of innovations out there – you can easily look them up on youtube, starting with the Fully Charged show out of Britain. The complacency of the current Oz government in view of the challenges before us is itself energy-draining – like watching a fat-arsed couch potato yawning his way towards an early death.
References
https://iview.abc.net.au/show/abc-news-mornings
https://www.environment.gov.au/climate-change/government/emissions-reduction-fund/about
the SUV abomination, or when will we reach peak SUV?
I was amused by a recent rant from Robert Llewellyn of the highly-recommended Fully Charged vodcasts, regarding the rise and rise of petrol and diesel-fuelled SUV sales in this period of carbon emission concern and climate change. So I have to share an anecdote.
As a young perennially poor person in the seventies I hitch-hiked quite a lot. Hitch-hiking is barely a thing nowadays, and I suspect the hitch-hiking experience I’m about to describe, sometime in the eighties, was my last. It often comes back to annoy me.
I was picked up by an overweight middle-aged woman with a blaze of dyed blond hair and a dire Aussie accent, in an SUV. Obviously, it was a kind gesture.
This was my first experience of being in an SUV, and I’ve had very few since. It felt strange to be looking down at other cars on the road. I wondered if this created psychological effects. The woman, I think, tried to elicit conversation but I’m very shy with strangers and pretty hopeless at small talk. So she made her own, which soon developed into a rant against ‘small cars’, which she seemed to regard as death traps and a form of road litter. Certainly there was a strange, disproportionate rage that got to me, as I nodded with an air of non-committal sagacity.
At that point in my life I’d never driven a car – I didn’t get my licence until my late thirties – but I knew the kind of car I wanted to drive, and it was the precise opposite of an SUV, a ridiculous vehicle that was just starting to pollute city streets at the time of this awkward incident. Of course the environment was already a major public issue in the eighties, so I naively thought this woman was on the wrong side of history. The SUV would surely go the way of the dinosaur, in somewhat less than a couple of hundred million years.
But SUV sales are soaring worldwide, in spite of a greater recognition of climate change and anthropogenic global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. I suppose there’s some excuse for them in Australia, this land of sweeping plains (and sleeping brains), but given our apparent indifference to the EV revolution and the phobia re climate change issues of our federal government, we’re just going to have to put up with these tanks continuing to proliferate in our suburbs. And it’s going on everywhere – there’s currently a huge spike in SUV sales worldwide. I mean, WTF?
So, instead of a pox on SUVs, how about a tax on them? It worked with cigarettes here….
Of course I’m joking. Western governments are more likely to subsidise the manufacture of SUVs than to tax them. This US business website presents in graphic detail the surge in SUV sales:
48% of car sales in the United States last year [2018]’were SUVs, which was the highest percentage worldwide, but other countries are catching up. Large cars can be seen as a status symbol, and sales are rising in countries like China and India where the middle class is growing.
The website cites a study which found that the number of SUVs on the road has increased about six-fold since 2010, and SUVs alone were the second largest contributor to the global increase in carbon emissions during that period. So, I wonder, when will we reach peak SUV?
fish deaths in the lower Darling – interim report
Jacinta: We wrote about this issue in a piece posted on February 11, so it’s time to follow up – an interim report came out on February 20, and a final report is due at the end of March, but my feeling is that the final report won’t differ much from this interim one.
Canto: Yes I get the feeling that these experts have largely known about the situation for a long time – unusual climatic conditions plus an increasing lack of water in the system, which would make the remaining water more susceptible to extremes of weather.
Jacinta: So here’s some of what they’re saying. There were three separate events; the first on December 15 involved tens of thousands of fish deaths over a 30km stretch of the Darling near Menindee, the second on Jan 6-7, over 45kms in the same area, involved hundreds of thousands of deaths, even millions according to some residents, and the third on Jan 28, with thousands of deaths. Likely effects on fish populations in the Darling will last for years.
Canto: And they warn that more deaths are likely to occur – though no major events have been reported since – due to low inflows and continued dry conditions in the catchment area. Monitoring has shown that there are problems of low dissolved oxygen and ‘high stratification’ at various points along the river. I presume ‘high stratification’ is self-explanatory, that the water isn’t mixing due to low flows?
Jacinta: Yes, but I think the issue is thermal stratification, where you have a warm surface layer sitting above a cooler, oxygen-depleted sub-surface layer. These are excellent conditions for algal blooms apparently. And the low flows are a natural feature of the Darling. It’s also very variable in flow, much more so than the Murray, due to its low relief, the more variable rainfall in the region, and the tributaries which create a large catchment area. I don’t know if that makes sense.
Canto: Neither do I. I note that they’ve been carefully critical of the NSW government’s ‘Barwon-Darling Water Sharing Plan 2012’, because between the draft and final implementation of the plan the number of high-flow Class C shares was reduced and the number of Class A (low flow) and Class B (medium flow) shares increased, which meant more extraction of water overall, and at lower flows. They recognise that there have been recent Federal moves to reverse this, but clearly they don’t consider them sufficient.
Jacinta: Yes and the problem goes back a way. They refer to an analysis from almost two decades ago:
The flow regime in the lower Darling has changed significantly since the completion of the Menindee Lakes storage scheme in 1968, and as a result of abstractions in the Barwon–Darling and its tributaries. It is estimated that the mean annual flow in the Darling River has been reduced by more than 40% as a result of abstractions in the Barwon–Darling (Gippel & Blackham, 2002).
Presumably ‘abstractions’ means what I think it means – though elsewhere they use the term ‘extractions’ which is confusing.
Canto: We should point out the immense complexity of the system we’re dealing with, which we can see from detailed maps that accompany the report, not to mention a number of barely comprehensible charts and graphs. Anyway the effect of ‘water management’ on native vegetation has been dire in some regions. For example, reduced inundation of natural floodplains has affected the health of the river red gums, while other trees have been killed off by the creation of artificial lakes.
Jacinta: And returning to fish deaths, the report states that ‘the influence of upstream extractions on inflows to the Menindee Lakes is an important consideration when assessing the causes of fish deaths downstream’. What they point out is that the proportion of extractions is higher in times of lower inflow, which is intuitively obvious I suppose. And extractions during 2017-8 were proportionally the second highest on record. That’s in the Northern Basin, well above the Menindee Lakes.
Canto: And the extractions have been mainly out of the tributaries above the Barwon-Darling, not those principal rivers. Queenslanders!
Jacinta: No mention of Queenslanders, but let’s not get bogged down..
Canto: Easily done when there’s hardly any water…
Jacinta: Let’s go to the provisional findings and recommendations. There are 18 briefly stated findings in all, and 20 more expansive recommendations. The first two findings are about extreme weather/climatic conditions amplified by climate change, with the expectation that this will be a continuing and growing problem. Findings 3 and 4 focus on the combined effects of drought and development. There’s a lack of updated data to separate out the effects, but it’s estimated that pre-development inflows into the Menindee Lakes were two or three times what they are now. Further findings are that the impact of diversions of or extractions from flows are greater during dry years, that extractions from tributaries are more impactful than extractions from the Barwon-Darling Rivers.
Canto: The findings related directly to fish deaths – principally findings 10 through 15 – are most interesting, so I’ll try to explain. The Menindee Lakes experienced high inflows in 2012 and 2016, which caused greater connection through the river system and better conditions for fish spawning and ‘recruitment’ (I don’t know what that means). So, lots of new, young fish. Then came the bad 2017-8 period, and releases from the Menindee Lakes were less than the minimum recommended under the water sharing plan, ‘with the intent to prolong stock and domestic requests to meet critical human needs’. So by the end of 2018, the high fish biomass became trapped or restricted between weirs, unable to move upstream or downstream. As the water heated up, significant algal blooms developed in the areas where fish had accumulated. Thermal stratification also occurred, with hypoxic (low oxygen) or anoxic (no oxygen) conditions in the lower waters, and algal blooms proliferating in the surface waters, where the fish were forced to hang out. Then conditions suddenly changed, with lower air temperatures and stormy conditions causing a rapid destratification. The low oxygen water – presumably more voluminous than the oxygenated water – dominated the whole water column and the fish had no way out.
Jacinta: Yes, you can’t adapt to such sudden shifts. The final findings are about existing attempts at fish translocation and aerating water which are having some success, about stratification being an ongoing issue, and about lack of knowledge at this preliminary stage of the precise extent of the fish deaths.
Canto: So now to the 20 recommendations. They’re grouped under 3 headings; preventive and restorative measures (1-9), management arrangements (10-13), and knowledge and monitoring (14-20). The report noted a lack of recent systematic risk assessment for low oxygen, stratification and blackwater (semi-stagnant, vegetation-rich water that looks like black tea) in the areas where the fish deaths occurred. There was insufficient or zero monitoring of high-risk areas for stratification, etc, and insufficient planning to treat problems as they arose. Flow management strategies (really involving reduced extraction) need to be better applied to reduce problems in the lower Darling. Reducing barriers to fish movement should be considered, though this is functionally difficult. Apparently there’s a global movement in this direction to improve freshwater fish stocks. Short term measures such as aeration and translocation are also beneficial. Funding should be set aside for research on and implementation of ecosystem recovery – it’s not just the fish that are affected. Long-term resilience requires an understanding of interactions and movement throughout the entire basin. Fish are highly mobile and restriction is a major problem. A whole-of system approach is strongly recommended. This includes a dynamic ‘active event-based management’ approach, especially in the upper reaches and tributaries of the Barwon-Darling, where extraction has been governed by passive, long-term rules. Such reforms are in the pipeline but now need to be fast-tracked. For example, ‘quantifying the volumes of environmental water crossing the border from Queensland to NSW…. would increase transparency and would help the CEWH [Commonwealth Environmental Water Holdings] with their planning, as well as clear the path to move to active management in Queensland’.
Jacinta: Right, you’ve covered most of the issues, so I’ll finish up with monitoring, measuring and reporting. The report argues that reliable, up-to-date accounting of flows, volumes in storage, extractions and losses due to seepage and evaporation are essential to create and maintain public confidence in system management, and this is currently a problem. Of course this requires funding, and apparently the funding levels have dropped substantially over the past decade. The report cites former funding and investment through the Co-operative Research Centre, Land and Water Australia and the National Water Commission, but ‘by the early 2010s, all of these sources of funding had terminated and today aggregate levels of funding have reduced to early 1980s levels, at a time when water was far less of a public policy challenge than it is today’.
Canto: We await the government’s response to that one.
Jacinta: And on fisheries research in particular, it has been largely piecemeal except when their was a concerted co-ordinated effort under the Native Fish Strategy, but the issue right now is to know how many fish (and other organisms) of the various affected species survived the event, which involves multi-level analyses, combined with management of Basin water balances, taking into account the ongoing effects of weather events due to climate change, in order to foster and improve the growth and well-being of fish stocks and freshwater habitats in general. Connectivity of the system in particular is a major concern of the report.
Canto: Right, so this has been a bit of a journey into the unknown for us, but a worthwhile one. It suggests that governments have been a bit dozey at the wheel in recent years, that extractions, especially in the upper reaches and tributaries, haven’t been well monitored or policed, and the connectivity of the system has suffered due to extractions, droughts and climate change. Funding seems to have dried up as much as some of the rivers have, and we’ll have to wait and see if this becomes an election issue. I suspect it’ll only be a minor one.
the battle for and against electric vehicles in Australia, among other things
Toyota Camry hybrid – hybrids are way outselling pure EVs here, probably due to range anxiety and lack of infrastructure and other support
I’ve probably not been paying sufficient attention, but I’ve just learned that the Federal Energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, is advocating, against the naysayers, for government support to the EV industry. An article today (Jan 22) in The Australian has Frydenberg waxing lyrical about the future of EVs, as possibly being to the transport sector ‘what the iPhone has been to the communication sector’. It’s a battle the future-believers will obviously win. A spokesman for the naysayers, federal Liberal Party MP and AGW-denier Craig Kelly, was just on the gogglebox, mocking the idea of an EV plant in Elizabeth here in South Australia (the town I grew up in), sited in the recently abandoned GM Holden plant. His brilliantly incisive view was that since Holdens failed, a future EV plant was sure to fail too. In other words, Australians weren’t up to making cars, improving their practice, learning from international developments and so forth. Not exactly an Elon Musk attitude.
The electric vehicles for Elizabeth idea is being mooted by the British billionaire Sanjeev Gupta, the ‘man of steel’ with big ideas for Whyalla’s steelworks. Gupta has apparently become something of a specialist in corporates rescues, and he has plans for one of the biggest renewables plants in Australia – solar and storage – at Whyalla. His electric vehicle plans are obviously very preliminary at this stage.
Critics are arguing that EVs are no greener than conventional vehicles. Clearly their arguments are based on the dirty coal that currently produces most of the electricity in the Eastern states. Of course this is a problem, but of course there is a solution, which is gradually being implemented. Kiata wind farm in Western Victoria is one of many small-to medium-scale projects popping up in the Eastern states. Victoria’s Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change (an impressive mouthful) Lily D’Ambrosio says ‘we’re making Victoria the national leader in renewable energy’. Them’s fightin words to we South Aussies, but we’re not too worried, we’re way ahead at the moment. So clearly the EV revolution is going hand in hand with the renewable energy movement, and this will no doubt be reflected in infrastructure for charging EVs, sometimes assisted by governments, sometimes in spite of them.
Meanwhile, on the global scale, corporations are slowly shuffling onto the renewables bandwagon. Renew Economy has posted a press release from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which shows that corporations signed a record volume of power purchase agreements (PPAs) for clean energy in 2017, with the USA shuffling fastest, in spite of, or more likely because of, Trump’s dumbfuckery. The cost-competitiveness of renewables is one of the principal reasons for the uptick, and it looks like 2018 will be another mini-boom year, in spite of obstacles such as reducing or disappearing subsidies, and import tariffs for solar PVs. Anyway, the press release is well worth a read, as it provides a neat sketch of where things are heading in the complex global renewables market.
Getting back to Australia and its sluggish EV market, the naysayers are touting a finding in the Green Vehicle Guide, a federal government website, which suggested that a Tesla powered by a coal-intensive grid emitted more greenhouse gas than a Toyota Corolla. All this is described in a recent SMH article, together with a 2016 report, commissioned by the government, which claimed that cars driven in the Eastern states have a “higher CO2 output than those emitted from the tailpipes of comparative petrol cars”. However, government spokespeople are now admitting that the grid’s emission intensity will continue to fall into the future, and that battery efficiency and EV performance are continuously improving – as is obvious. Still, there’s no sign of subsidies for EVs from this government, or of future penalties for diesel and petrol guzzlers. Meanwhile, the monstrous SUV has become the vehicle of choice for most Australians.
While there are many many honourable exceptions, and so many exciting clean green projects up and running or waiting in the wings, the bulk of Australians aren’t getting the urgency of climate change. CO2 levels are the highest they’ve been in 15 million years (or 3 million, depending on website), and the last two years’ published recordings at Mauna Loa (2015 and 2016) showed increases in atmospheric CO2 of 3PPM for each year, for the first time since recording began in 1960 (when it was under 1PPM). This rate of CO2 growth, apparently increasing – though with variations due largely to ENSO – is phenomenal. There’s always going to be a see-saw in the data, but it’s an ever-rising see-saw. The overall levels of atmospheric CO2 are now well above 400PPM. Climate Central describes these levels as ‘permanent’, as if humans and their effects will be around forever – how short-sighted we all are.
The relationship between atmospheric CO2 and global warming is fiendishly complex, and I’ll try, with no doubt limited success, to tackle it in future posts.
Mustn’t forget my update on Trump’s downfall: the Mueller team has very recently interviewed A-G Sessions, who’s been less than honest about his meetings with Russians. Nobody knows what Sessions was asked about in in his lengthy session (haha) with the inquirers, but he’s a key figure when it comes to obstruction of justice as well as conspiracy. Word now is that Trump himself will be questioned within weeks, which could be either the beginning of the end, or just the end. Dare to hope.
all renewable energy by 2050? Hang on a tick
Sir David McKay, who died in 2016 of stomach cancer, aged 49. A great loss.
The late Sir David McKay, physicist, engineer, sustainable energy expert, Cambridge professor and Royal Society Fellow, has just become known to me through his 2012 TED talk and a lengthier exposition of the same ideas presented at Harvard. These talks were designed, to ‘cut through some of the greenwash’ and provide a realistic account of what can be done, on both the supply and the demand side, to reduce fossil fuel consumption and transform our energy economy.
As I need to keep saying, I’m far from an expert on this stuff, and I’m always impressed by the ingenious developments in the field and the promise of new technology, in batteries and other storage systems – like the compressed air underwater energy storage system being trialled in Lake Ontario, Toronto. But McKay’s contributions are helping me to think more realistically about the enormity of the problem of weaning ourselves from fossil fuels as well as to think more practically about my own domestic usage and the demand side more generally.
While McKay was no renewable energy sceptic or climate change denier, his ‘arithmetical’ view of the future poured a lot of cold hydro on the rosy idea that we’d be living in an all-renewables-powered biosphere within x decades. So I want to take a closer look at some aspects of what he was saying (he also wrote a highly-regarded book, Sustainable energy – without the hot air, available free online).
I particularly want to look at two forms of renewable energy that he talked about; wind and solar. He also talked at some length about two other energy sources, biofuels and nuclear, but I’ve never been much keen on biofuels, which in any case seem to have been largely taken off the menu in recent years, and nuclear, as McKay admits, has a popularity problem – a massive one here in Australia, unfortunately. What I say here about wind and solar will be gleaned largely fromMackay’s Harvard talk, but I’ve downloaded and plan to read his book in the near future.
Mackay has calculated that the current energy production of wind turbines in windy Britain is about 2.5 watts per square metre, and by multiplying per capita energy consumption by population density, you get power consumed per unit area, which for Britain is about 1.25 watts per square metre. This suggests that to cover the consumption of Britain solely by wind, you’d need an area, on land or sea, half the area of Britain. This is clearly not feasible, though of course nobody in Britain, I hope, was ever expecting to have all their energy needs provided by wind. The situation is vastly different for South Australia, two thirds of which is currently powered by wind. SA has vastly more land than Britain and vastly less people.
Though I’m sure it’s possible to quibble with Mckay’s figures and calculations, what he brings to the issues, I think, is a global, as well as a particular perspective that can be lost when you focus, as I have, on local success. For example, South Australia has been very successful in its deployment of wind power over a short period of time, and it’s easy to get carried away and think, if we can do it, why not state x or country y? But SA is a state with a small population and a very large area, and plenty of wind to capture. This just can’t be replicated in, say, Massachussetts, with more than three times the population, a thirtieth of the area, and little wind.
So McKay wasn’t offering global solutions, nor was he dismissing local ones. He was simply pointing out the complexity of the problem in physical and arithmetical terms of weaning ourselves from fossil fuels, as well as getting us thinking about our personal responsibilities on the demand side. Solar isn’t much of a national solution in Britain, though it could be in Australia, which could be a net exporter of renewables, as Elon Musk has suggested, but to which countries, and how exactly do you export solar energy? You’d need conversion and transmission and bilateral agreements. All of this while fighting entrenched interests and upsetting long-standing arrangements. Having said this, more people are hopping on the renewables bus and it’s almost becoming unfashionable, in most western countries outside of Australia, to be dismissive of them, a noticeable change in the last decade.
So what’s the point of this post? It’s to heed McKay’s advice that we need to recognise the complexity of the problem, to keep all possible reasonable solutions on the table, to become more aware, as individuals, communities and states, of our energy consumption, and to recognise that there’s never going to be a one-type-fits-all fix. Environments and needs vary widely, so we need to find particular solutions and we also need to find ways of joining and mixing those solutions together in effective networks. It all sounds pretty daunting, but the fact is, we’re already moving in the right direction, and there’s much to be positive about. Technology and engineering are international, and those in the business are hunting out solutions across the globe and thinking of harnessing and adapting them to their own region, in the process building communication, sharing information and expertise and raising consciousness about energy supply and consumption. And another positive is the endless innovation that comes with thinking about energy solutions in new ways, like small, cheap solar panels to provide energy in developing regions, backyard or small-scale wind-turbines in suitable locations, processing waste to fuel, new developments in batteries and EVs, and so on. So, while there aren’t major, mind-blowing solutions to our fossil-fuel dependence in the offing, we are making progress, incrementally, and the effects of climate change, as they become more impactful, will no doubt accelerate our progress and innovation. We have no option but to think and act positively.
portable solar panels can be surprisingly useful, and cheap
In a future post I’ll look at the demand side, following McKay and many others. Having just moved house, and sadly leaving solar panels behind, it’s time to find out where my meter is, and check our consumption.
On Trump’s downfall: Fire and Fury, the overly-discussed tell-all book about Trump and the White House, is unlikely to affect Trump’s base though it will hopefully toughen the opposition. Trump’s rating remains below 40% and nothing much has happened so far this year. There’s talk of Oprah Winfrey standing for the Presidency in 2020 – please no! – but Trump will be in jail by then and Americans will have lost their appetite for ‘celebrity’ candidates. I’m looking out for Elizabeth Warren.
the battery, Snowy Hydro and other stuff
Let’s get back to batteries, clean energy and Australia. Here’s a bit of interesting news to smack our clean-energy-fearing Feds with – you know, Freudenberg, Morrison and co. The Tesla Big Battery successfully installed at the beginning of summer, and lampooned by the Feds, turns out to be doing a far better job than expected, and not just here in South Australia. Giles Parkinson reported on it in Renew Economy on December 19:
The Tesla big battery is having a big impact on Australia’s electricity market, far beyond the South Australia grid where it was expected to time shift a small amount of wind energy and provide network services and emergency back-up in case of a major problem.
Last Thursday, one of the biggest coal units in Australia, Loy Yang A 3, tripped without warning at 1.59am, with the sudden loss of 560MW and causing a slump in frequency on the network.
What happened next has stunned electricity industry insiders and given food for thought over the near to medium term future of the grid, such was the rapid response of the Tesla big battery to an event that happened nearly 1,000km away.
The Loy Yang brown coal fired power station is in south eastern Victoria, so why did South Australia’s pride and joy respond to a problem in our dirty-coal neighbouring state? It surely wouldn’t have been contracted to, or would it? Parkinson also speculates about this. Apparently, when a power station trips, there’s always another unit contracted to provide back-up, officially called FCAS (frequency control and ancillary services). In Loy Yang’s case it’s a coal generator in Gladstone, Queensland. This generator did respond to the problem, within seconds, but the Tesla BB beat it to the punch, responding within milliseconds. That’s an important point; the Tesla BB didn’t avert a blackout, it simply proved its worth, without being asked. And it has been doing so regularly since early December. It seems the Tesla BB has cornered the market for fast frequency control. Don’t hold your breath for the Feds to acknowledge this, but they will have taken note, unless they’re completely stupid. They’ll be finding some way to play it (or downplay it) politically.
As Parkinson notes in another article, the energy industry has been slow to respond, in terms of regulation and accommodation, to the deployment of battery systems and their rapid charge-discharge features. Currently, providing FCAS is financially rewarded, which may have to do with costs involved but the cost/reward relationship appears to be out of kilter. In any case, battery response is much more cost-effective and threatens the antiquated reward system. The AEMC is planning to review frequency control frameworks, but it’ll no doubt be a slow process.
This is an incredibly complex area, combining new, barely-understood (by me) technologies of generation and storage, and the transformation of long-standing energy economies, with a host of vested interests, subsidies and forward plans, but I intend to struggle towards enlightenment, as far as I can.
Neoen’s Hornsdale Wind Farm
Regardless of regulation and grid problems, renewable energy projects keep on popping up, or at least popping into my consciousness through my desultory reading (NY resolution: inform myself much more on what’s going on, here and elsewhere, in clean energy). For example, the Murra Warra wind farm’s first stage will have an output of 226MW, which has already been sold to a consortium of Australian corporations including Telstra and ANZ. The farm is near Horsham in western Victoria, and will finally have a capacity of up to 429MW, making it one of the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere. And of course there are many other projects underway. Back in August, the Renewable Energy Index, a monthly account of the renewable energy sector, was launched. Its first publication, by Green Energy Markets, was a benchmark report for 2016-7, all very glossy and positive. The latest publication, the November index, shows that rooftop solar installations for that month broke the monthly record set in June 2012 when subsidies were twice to three times what they are today. The publication’s headline is that the 2020 RET will be exceeded and that there are ‘enough renewable energy projects now under development to deliver half of Australia’s electricity by 2030’. The Clean Energy Council, the peak body for Australian dean energy businesses, also produces an annual report, so it will be interesting to compare its 2017 version with the Renewable Energy Index.
Hydro is in fact the biggest clean energy provider, with 42.3% of the nation’s renewable energy according to the 2016 Clean Energy Australia Report. Wind, however, is the fastest growing provider. This brings me to a topic I’ve so far avoided: The $4 billion Snowy Hydro 2 scheme.
Here’s what I’m garnering from various experts. It’s a storage scheme and that’s all to the good. As a major project it will have a long lead time, and that’s not so good, especially considering the fast growing and relatively unpredictable future for energy storage. As a storage system it will be a peak load provider, so can’t be compared to the Hazelwood dirty coal station, which is a 24/7 base load supplier. There’s a lot of misinformation from the Feds about the benefits, eg to South Australia, which won’t benefit and doesn’t need it, it’s sorting its own problems very nicely thanks. There’s a question about using water as an electricity supplier, due to water shortages, climate change and the real possibility of more droughts in the future. There are also environmental considerations – the development is located in Kosciuszko National Park. There’s some doubt too about the 2000MW figure being touted by the Feds, an increase of 50% to the existing scheme. However, many of these experts, mostly academics, favour the scheme as a boost to renewable energy investment which should be applied along with the other renewables to transform the market. In saying this, most experts agree that there’s been a singular lack of leadership and common-sense consensus on dealing with this process of transformation. It has been left mostly to the states and private enterprise to provide the initiative.
With each post I’ll add something on the projected Trump downfall.
Just watched a CNN special report: The Trump Russia Investigation. It suggests to me that the notorious Trump Tower meeting, while nothing much in itself, is but a small piece of the growing case against Trump. It filled me in muchly on the much-discussed ‘dossier’ released just before Trump’s inauguration, the commandeering of Facebook by Russian operatives for a disinformation campaign, stirring up issues on immigration, gays, guns, etc, and much more. I still maintain that he won’t be in office by year’s end.
the tides – a massive potential resource?
A floating tidal turbine, Orkney islands, as seen on Fully Charged
A recent episode of Fully Charged, the Brit video series on the sources and harnessing of clean energy, took us again to the very windy Orkney Isles at the top of Scotland to have a look at some experimental work being done on generating energy from tidal forces. When you think of it, it seems a no-brainer to harness the energy of the tides. They’re regular, predictable, unceasing, and in some places surely very powerful. Yet I’ve never heard of them being used on an industrial scale.
Of course, I’m still new to this business, so the learning curve continues steep. Tide mills have been used historically here and there, possibly even since Roman times, and tidal barrages have been operating since the sixties, the first and for a long time the largest being the La Rance plant, off the coast of Brittany, generating 240 MW. A slightly bigger one has recently been built in Korea (254 MW).
But tidal barrages – not what they’re testing in the Orkneys – come with serious environmental impact issues. They’re about building a barrage across a bay or estuary with a decent tidal flow. The barrage acts as a kind of adjustable dam, with sluice gates that open and close, and additional pumping when necessary. Turbines generate energy from pressure and height differentials, as in a hydro-electric dam. Research on the environmental impact of these constructions, which can often be major civil engineering projects, has revealed mixed results. Short-term impacts are often devastating, but over time one type of diversity has been replaced by another.
Anyway, what’s happening in the Orkneys is something entirely different. The islanders, the Scottish government and the EU are collaborating through an organisation called EMEC, the European Marine Energy Centre, to test tidal power in the region. They appear to be inviting innovators and technicians to test their projects there. A company called ScotRenewables, for example, has developed low-maintenance floating tidal turbines with retractable legs, one of which is currently being tested in the offshore waters. They’re designed to turn with the ebb and flood tides to maximise their power generation. It’s a 2 MW system, which of course could be duplicated many times over in the fashion of wind turbines, to generate hundreds if not thousands of megawatts. The beauty of the system is its reliability – as the tidal flow can be reliably predicted at least eighteen years into the future, according to the ScotRenewables CEO. This should provide a sense of stability and confidence to downstream suppliers. Also, floating turbines could easily be removed if they’re causing damage, or if they require maintenance. Clearly, the effect on the tidal system would be minimal compared to an estuarine barrage, though there are obvious dangers to marine life getting too close to turbines. The testing of these turbines is coming to an end and they’ve been highly successful so far, though they already have an improved turbine design in the wings, which can be maintained either in situ or in dock. The design can also be scaled down, or up, to suit various sites and conditions.
rotors are on retractable legs, to protect from storms, etc
Other quite different turbine types are being tested in the region, with a lot of government and public support, but I got the slight impression that commercial support for this kind of technology is somewhat lacking. In the Fully Charged video on this subject (to which I owe most of this info), Robert Llewelyn asked the EMEC marketing manager whether she thought tidal or wave energy had the greatest future potential (she opted for wave). My ears pricked up, as wave energy is another newie for me. Duh. Another post, I suppose.
As mentioned though in this video, a lot of the developments in this tidal technology have come from shipbuilding technology, from offshore oil and gas technology, and from maritime technology more generally, as well as modern wind turbine technology, further impressing on me that skills are transferable and that the cheap clean energy revolution won’t be the economic/employment disaster that the fossil fuel dinosaurs predict. It’s a great time for innovation, insight and foresight, and I can only hope that more government and business people in Australia, where I seem to be stuck, can get on board.
fixed underwater tidal turbine being tested off the Orkney Islands
stand-alone solar: an off-grid solution for Australia’s remote regions (plus a bit of a rant)
According to this article, Australia is leading the world in per capita uptake of rooftop solar, though currently South Australia is lagging behind, in spite of a lot of clean energy action from our government. The Clean Energy Regulator has recently released figures showing that 23% of Australians have installed rooftop solar in the last ten years, and this take-up is set to continue in spite of the notable lack of encouragement from the feds. South Australia is still making plenty of waves re clean energy, though, as it is continually lowering its record for minimum grid demand, through the use of solar PV. The record set a couple of days ago, interestingly on Sunday afternoon rather than in the middle of the night, was 587MW, almost 200MW less than the previous record set only a week or so before. Clearly this trend is set to continue.
It’s hard for me to get my head around what’s happening re disruptive technologies, microgrids, stand-alone solar, EVs, battery research and the like, not to mention the horribly complex economics around these developments, but the sense of excitement brought about by comprehensive change makes me ever-willing to try. Only this morning I heard a story of six farming households described as being ‘on the fringe of Western Australia’s power network’ who’ve successfully trialled stand-alone solar panels (powered by lithium-ion batteries) on their properties, after years of outages and ‘voltage spikes’*. The panels – and this is the fascinating part – were offered free by Western Power (WA’s government-owned energy utility), who were looking for a cheaper alternative to the cost of replacing ageing infrastructure. The high costs of connecting remote farms to the grid make off-grid power systems a viable alternative, which raises issues about that viability elsewhere given the decreasing costs of solar PV, which can maintain electricity during power outages, as one Ravensthorpe family, part of the trial, discovered in January this year. The region, 500 kilometres south of Perth, experienced heavy rain and flooding which caused power failures, but the solar systems were unaffected. All in all, the trial has ‘exceeded expectations’, according to this ABC report.
All this has exciting implications for the future, but there are immediate problems. Though Western Power would like to sign off on the trial as an overwhelming success, and to apply this solution to other communities in the area (3,000 potential sites have been pinpointed), current regulation prevents this, as it only allows Western Power to distribute energy, not to generate it, as its solar installations are judged as doing. Another instance of regulations not keeping up with changing circumstances and solutions. Western Power has no alternative but to extend the trial period until the legislation catches up (assuming it does). But it would surely be a mistake not to change the law asap:
“You’d be talking about a saving of about $300 million in terms of current cost of investment and cost of ongoing maintenance of distribution line against the cost of the stand-alone power system,” Mr Chalkley [Western Power CEO] said.
Just as a side issue, it’s interesting that our PM Malcolm Turnbull, whose government seems on the whole to be avoiding any mention of clean energy these days, has had solar panels on his harbourside mansion in Point Piper, Sydney, for years. He now has an upgraded 14 kW rooftop solar array and a 14kWh battery storage system installed there, and, according to a recent interview he did on radio 3AW, he doesn’t draw any electricity from the grid, in spite of using a lot of electricity for security as Prime Minister. Solar PV plus battery, I’m learning, equals a distributed solar system. The chief of AEMO (the Australian Energy Market Operator), Audrey Zibelman, recently stated that distributed rooftop solar is on its way to making up 30 to 40% of our energy generation mix, and that it could be used as a resource to replace baseload, as currently provided by coal and gas stations (I shall write about baseload power issues, for my own instruction, in the near future).
Of course Turnbull isn’t exactly spruiking the benefits of renewable energy, having struck a Faustian bargain with his conservative colleagues in order to maintain his prestigious position as PM. We can only hope for a change of government to have any hope of a national approach to the inevitable energy transition, and even then it’ll be a hard road to hoe. Meanwhile, Tony Abbott, Turnbull’s arch-conservative bête noir, continues to represent the dark side. How did this imbecilic creature ever get to be our Prime Minister? Has he ever shown any signs of scientific literacy? Again I would urge extreme vetting of all candidates for political office, here and elsewhere, based on a stringent scientific literacy test. Imagine the political shite that would be flushed down the drain with that one. Abbott, you’ll notice, always talks of climate change and renewable energy in religious terms, as a modern religion. That’s because religion is his principal obsession. He can’t talk about it in scientific terms, because he doesn’t know any. Unfortunately, these politicians are rarely challenged by journalists, and are often free to choose friendly journalists who never challenge their laughable remarks. It’s a bit of a fucked-up system.
Meanwhile the ‘green religionists’, such as the Chinese and Indian governments, and the German and Scandinavian governments, and Elon Musk and those who invest in his companies, and the researchers and scientists who continue to improve solar PV, wind turbine and battery technology, including flow batteries, supercapacitors and so much more, are improving their developments and disrupting traditional ways of providing energy, and will continue to do so, in spite of name-calling from the fringes (to whom they’re largely deaf, due to the huge level of support from their supporters). It really is an exciting time not to be a dinosaur.
electric vehicles in Australia, a sad indictment
Toyota Prius
I must say, as a lay person with very little previous understanding of how batteries, photovoltaics or even electricity works, I’m finding the ‘Fully Charged’ and other online videos quite addictive, if incomprehensible in parts, though one thing that’s easy enough to comprehend is that transitional, disruptive technologies that dispense with fossil fuels are being taken up worldwide at an accelerating rate, and that Australia is falling way behind in this, especially at a governmental level, with South Australia being something of an exception. Of course the variation everywhere is enormous – for example, currently, 42% of all new cars sold today in Norway are fully electric – not just hybrids. This compares to about 2% in Britain, according to Fully Charged, and I’d suspect that the percentage is even lower in Oz.
There’s so much to find out about and write about in this field it’s hard to know where to start, so I’m going to limit myself in this post to electric cars and the situation in Australia.
First, as very much a lower middle class individual I want to know about cost, both upfront and ongoing. Now as you may be aware, Australia has basically given up on making its own cars, but we do have some imports worth considering, though we don’t get subsidies for buying them as they do in many other countries, nor do we have that much in the way of supportive infrastructure. Cars range in price from the Tesla Model X SUV, starting from $165,000 (forget it, I hate SUVs anyway), down to the Toyota Prius C and the Honda Jazz, both hybrids, starting at around $23,000. There’s also a ludicrously expensive BMW plug-in hybrid available, as well as the Nissan Leaf, the biggest selling electric car worldwide by a massive margin according to Fully Charged, but probably permanently outside of my price range at $51,000 or so.
I could only afford a bottom of the range hybrid vehicle, so how do hybrids work, and can you run your hybrid mostly on electricity? It seems that for this I would want a (more expensive) plug-in hybrid, as this passage from the Union of Concerned Scientists (USA) points out:
The most advanced hybrids have larger batteries and can recharge their batteries from an outlet, allowing them to drive extended distances on electricity before switching to [petrol] or diesel. Known as “plug-in hybrids,” these cars can offer much-improved environmental performance and increased fuel savings by substituting grid electricity for [petrol].
I could go on about the plug-ins but there’s not much point because there aren’t any available here within my price range. Really, only the Prius, the Honda Jazz and a Toyota Camry Hybrid (just discovered) are possibilities for me. Looking at reviews of the Prius, I find a number of people think it’s ugly but I don’t see it, and I’ve always considered myself a person of taste and discernment, like everyone else. They do tend to agree that it’s very fuel efficient, though lacking in oomph. Fuck oomph, I say. I’m the sort who drives cars reluctantly, and prefers a nice gentle cycle around the suburbs. Extremely fuel efficient, breezy and cheap. I’m indifferent to racing cars and all that shite.
Nissan Leaf
I note that the Prius has regenerative braking – what the Fully Charged folks call ‘regen’. In fact this is a feature of all EVs and hybrids. I have no idea wtf it is, so I’ll explore it here. The Union of Concerned Scientists again:
Regenerative braking converts some of the energy lost during braking into usable electricity, stored in the batteries.
“Regenerative braking” is another fuel-saving feature. Conventional cars rely entirely on friction brakes to slow down, dissipating the vehicle’s kinetic energy as heat. Regenerative braking allows some of that energy to be captured, turned into electricity, and stored in the batteries. This stored electricity can later be used to run the motor and accelerate the vehicle.
Of course, this doesn’t tell us how the energy is captured and stored, but more of that later. Regenerative braking doesn’t bring the car to a stop by itself, or lock the wheels, so it must be used in conjunction with frictional braking. This requires drivers to be aware of both braking systems and how they’re combined – sometimes problematic in certain scenarios.
The V useful site How Stuff Works has a full-on post on regen, which I’ll inadequately summarise here. Regen (in cars) is actually celebrating its fiftieth birthday this year, having been first introduced in the Amitron, a car produced by American Motors in 1967. It never went into full-scale production. In conventional braking, the brake pads apply pressure to the brake rotors to the slow the vehicle down. That expends a lot of energy (imagine a large vehicle moving at high speed), not only between the pads and the rotor, but between the wheels and the road. However, regen is a different system altogether. When you hit the brake pedal of an EV (with hand or foot), this system puts the electric motor into reverse, slowing the wheels. By running backwards the motor acts somehow as a generator of electricity, which is then fed into the EV batteries. Here’s how HSW puts it:
One of the more interesting properties of an electric motor is that, when it’s run in one direction, it converts electrical energy into mechanical energy that can be used to perform work (such as turning the wheels of a car), but when the motor is run in the opposite direction, a properly designed motor becomes an electric generator, converting mechanical energy into electrical energy.
I still don’t get it. Anyway, apparently this type of braking system works best in city conditions where you’re stopping and going all the time. The whole system requires complex electronic circuitry which decides when to switch to reverse, and which of the two braking systems to use at any particular time. The best system does this automatically. In a review of a Smart Electric Drive car (I don’t know what that means – is ‘Smart’ a brand name? – is an electric drive different from an electric car??) on Fully Charged, the test driver described its radar-based regen, which connects with the GPS to anticipate, say, a long downhill part of the journey, and in consequence to adjust the regen for maximum efficiency. Ultimately, all this will be handled effectively in fully autonomous vehicles. Can’t wait to borrow one!
Smart Electric Drive, a cute two-seater
I’m still learning all this geeky stuff – never thought I’d be spending an arvo watching cars being test driven and reviewed. But these are EVs – don’t I sound the expert – and so the new technologies and their implications for the environment and our future make them much more interesting than the noise and gas-guzzling stink and the macho idiocy I’ve always associated with the infernal combustion engine.
What I have learned, apart from the importance of battery size (in kwh), people’s obsession with range and charge speed, and a little about charging devices, is that there’s real movement in Europe and Britain towards EVs, not to mention storage technology and microgrids and other clean energy developments, which makes me all the more frustrated to live in a country, so naturally endowed to take advantage of clean energy, whose federal government is asleep at the wheel on these matters, when it’s not being defensively scornful about all things renewable. Hopefully I’ll be able to report on positive local initiatives in this area in future, in spite of government inertia.
the SA government’s six-point plan for energy security, in the face of a carping Federal government
South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill, right, with SA Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis
The South Australian government has a plan for energy, which you can take a look at here. And if you’re too lazy to click through, I’ll summarise:
- Battery storage and renewable technology fund: Now touted as the world’s largest battery, this will be a storage facility for wind and solar energy, and if it works, it will surely be a major breakthrough, global in its implications. The financing of the battery (if we have to pay for it!) will come from a new renewable energy fund.
- New state-owned gas power plant: This will be a 250 MW capacity gas powered facility designed initially for emergency use, and treated as a future strategic asset when (and if) greater energy stability is achieved at the national level. In the interim the state government will (try to?) work with transmission and distribution companies to provide 200 MW of extra generation in times of peak demand.
- Local powers over the national market: The government will legislate for strong new state powers for its Energy Minister as a last-resort measure to enable action in South Australia’s best interests when in conflict with the national market. In addition, all new electricity-generation projects above 5 MW will be assessed as to their input into the state electricity system and its security.
- New generation for more competition: The SA Government will use its own electricity contract (for powering schools, hospitals and government services) to tender for more new power generators, increasing competition in the market and putting downward pressure on prices.
- South Australian gas incentives: Government incentives will be given for locally-sourced gas development (we have vast untapped resources in the Cooper Basin apparently) so that we can replace all that dirty brown coal from Victoria.
- Energy Security Target: This new target, modelled by Frontier Economics, will be designed to encourage new investments in cleaner energy, to increase competition and put downward pressure on prices. The SA government will continue to advocate for an Emissions Intensity Scheme (EIS), contra the Federal government. It’s expected that the Energy Security Target will morph into an EIS over time – depending largely on supportive national policy. Such a scheme is widely supported by industry and climate science.
It’s an ambitious plan perhaps but it’s definitely a plan, and definitely actionable. The battery storage part is of course generating a lot of energy already, both positive and negative, as pioneering projects tend to do. I’m very much looking forward to December’s unveiling. Interestingly, in this article from April this year, SA Premier Jay Weatherill claimed 90 expressions of interest had been received for building the battery. Looks like they never stood a chance against the mighty Musk. In the same article, Weatherill announced that the expression of interest process had closed for the building of SA’s gas power plant, point two of the six-point plan. Thirty-one companies from around the world have vied for the project, apparently. And as to point three, the new powers legislation was expected to pass through parliament on April 26. Weatherill issued a press release on the legislation in late March. Thanks to parliamentary tracking, I’ve found that the bill – called the Bill to Amend the Emergency Management (Electricity Supply Emergencies) Act – was passed into law by the SA Governor on May 9.
Meanwhile, two regional projects, one in the Riverland and another in the north of SA, are well underway. A private company called Lyon Group is building a $1 billion battery and solar farm at Morgan, and another smaller facility, named Kingfisher, in the north. In this March 30 article by Chris Harmsen, a spokesperson for Lyon Group said the Riverland project, Australia’s largest solar farm, was 100% equity financed (I don’t know what that means – I’ll read this later) and would be under construction within months. It will provide 300MW of storage capacity. The 120 MW Kingfisher project will begin construction in September next year. Then there’s AGL’s 210MW gas-fired power station on Torrens Island, mentioned previously. It’s worth noting that AGL’s Managing Director Andy Vesey spoke of the positive investment climate created by the SA government’s energy plans.
So I think it’s fair to say that in SA we’re putting a lot of energy into energy. Meanwhile, the Federal Energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, never speaks positively about SA’s plans. Presumably this is because SA’s government is on the other side of the political divide. You can’t say anything positive about your political enemies because they might stop being your enemies, and then what would you do? The identity crisis would be intolerable.
I’ve written about macho adversarial systems in politics, law and industrial relations before. Frydenberg, as the Federal Minister, must be well aware of SA’s six-point plan (found with a couple of mouse-clicks), and of the plans and schemes of all the other state governments, otherwise he’d be massively derelict in his duty. Yet he’s pretty well entirely dismissive of the Tesla-Neoen deal, and describes the other SA initiatives, pathetically, as ‘an admission of failure’. It seems almost a rule with the current Feds that you don’t mention renewable, clean energy positively and you don’t mention the SA government’s initiatives in the energy field except negatively. Take for example Frydenberg’s reaction to recent news that the Feds are consulting with the car industry on reducing fuel emissions. He brought up the ‘carbon tax’ debacle (a reference to the former Gillard government’s 2012 carbon pricing scheme, repealed by the Abbott government in 2014), declaring that there would never be another one, as if the attempt to reduce vehicle emissions – carbon emissions – had nothing to do with carbon and its reduction, which was what the carbon pricing scheme was all about. This is the artificiality of adversarial systems – where two parties pretend to be further apart than they really are, so that they can engage in the apparently congenial activity of trading insults and holier-than-thou tirades. It’s so depressing. Frydenberg was at pains to point out that the government’s interest in reducing fuel emissions was purely to benefit family economies. It would’ve taken nothing but a bit of honesty and integrity to also say that reduced emissions would be environmentally beneficial. But this apparently would be a step too far.
In my next post I hope to get my head around battery storage technology, and lithium-ion batteries.
References/links
http://ourenergyplan.sa.gov.au/
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-13/sa-gas-fire-power-station-gains-international-interest/8442578
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-13/sa-gas-fire-power-station-gains-international-interest/8442578
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-30/new-solar-project-announced-for-sa-riverland/8400952
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/equityfinancing.asp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Australia