Coal-Fired Power Stations Face Closure To Meet Emissions Target, Says Government Agency

The Guardian - Michael Slezak

Australian Energy Market Operator also finds this would push wholesale energy prices up, but reduce consumption 

Yallourn coal-fired power station in Victoria. The Australian Energy Market Operator says such stations face closure to meet emissions targets. Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

 Australia’s coal-fired power stations will face early closure to meet 2030 emissions reduction commitments, according to assumptions made by a government agency that runs the national electricity grid.
The Australian Energy Market Operator (Aemo) also found such closures would push wholesale energy prices up, but that would be offset by reduced energy consumption and greater energy efficiency, leaving consumers’ energy bills relatively unaffected.
The findings come from the Aemo’s annual 20-year forecast for the country’s electricity consumption, released on Thursday.
Since the last version of the report in 2015, Australia signed an agreement in Paris, committing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to up to 28% below 2005 levels.
According to the latest report, the Council of Australian Governments (Coag), which created Aemo, decided the energy sector needed to be consistent with those targets.
But in modelling future energy use, Aemo found the Coalition’s current Direct Action policies would not achieve those reductions, and so made further assumptions about carbon abatement policy required in the electricity sector.
The report said “detailed policy measures are yet to be announced”, and so it “assumed the achievement of this target will be supported by energy efficiency trends, electricity pricing trends, and coal-fired generator retirements”.
Many environmentalists, thinktanks, academics and even energy giant AGL – which operates some of the country’s biggest coal-fired power plants – have been urging the government to design policy that would force the early closure of coal power stations.
Neither the Coalition nor Labor has a policy of early closure, although Labor said it would initiate an “electricity modernisation review” after the election to ensure an orderly transition to renewable energy. The Greens policy is to incrementally close coal power plants, starting with the most polluting ones.
According to AGL and other groups, the constant cheap supply of coal power, in addition to being Australia’s biggest producer of carbon emissions, had created an oversupply of electricity, making it hard for renewable energy to enter the market.
A Climate Institute report from April found the regulated and orderly closure of coal power plants was needed to avoid major economic disruption in 2030, when the country would need to rush to meet its international commitments.
Olivia Kember from the Climate Institute said the assumption was revealing. “It’s a recognition that if you’re going to reduce electricity emissions by that amount, there are only so many ways you can do it,” she said.
Kember said it was interesting the market operator had to make such significant assumptions about future policy. “What this points to is a need for more clarity for what kind of changes in the policies and the regulatory framework are going to be necessary to manage the emissions reduction and growth of clean energy in a way that works for everybody,” she said.
The report also found that partly as a result of carbon abatement commitments, energy use would remain roughly stable for the next 20 years, despite a growing population, a growing economy and increasing use of electrical appliances.
There would be a slight increase to 2020 due to the liquified natural gas boom in Queensland, where vast amounts of electricity would be used to compress and chill gas, but as rooftop solar and energy efficiency improvements accelerate, electricity use would flatten after that.
The Aemo chief executive, Matt Zema, said new and improved appliances were replacing energy-intensive appliances such as halogen lights, plasma televisions, desktop computers and stereos.
“Maximum demand is forecast to remain flat across the outlook period, despite increased use and capacity of heating and air conditioning as growth is offset by energy efficiency and rooftop PV.
“Projected energy efficiency savings by the year 2035–36 are expected to total around 27,000 GWh. This translates to an equivalent of close to 15% of current grid-supplied electricity use.”

Links

• Greg Hunt commits to Direct Inaction to preserve carbon tax scare campaign
• Carbon price needed to avoid economic disruption from Paris climate goals – analysis
• Australia's dirtiest power station may be closed or sold, French owner says
• Climate change: Australia's big banks urged to reject new loans for coal projects
• Dozens arrested as anti-fossil fuel protesters join Australian coal blockade
• Labor proposes two emissions trading schemes costing $355.9m
• Australia urged to shut coal-fired power plants urgently as analysis reveals huge emissions
• Australia could increase emissions 26% and still meet Kyoto pledge, says climate group
• Tony's Abbott's 'coal is good' line is familiar, and troubling
• New coal power stations threat to EU's emissions target

12,000 Years Ago, Humans and Climate Change Made a Deadly Team

New York Times - Tatiana Schlossberg

An illustration from the 19th century of a giant ground sloth, which was among the many megafaunal species that went extinct in Patagonia during a rapid warming phase that followed the Antarctic Cold Reversal. Researchers found that the combination of human encroachment with the warming contributed to the extinctions. Credit Science Source 

Climate change, habitat destruction, extinctions — the Earth has seen it all before, thousands of years ago. And humans may have been partly to blame for many of those changes in nature, too.
A new study published Friday in Science Advances shows that the arrival of humans in Patagonia, combined with a changing climate, led to the extinction of many species of megafauna about 12,000 years ago in the southern portion of what is now South America. The research offers a significant moment in the natural history of the continent: a definitive date of the mass extinction of megafauna — large or giant animals, like mammoths and giant sloths — in this part of the world. It also suggests a potential relationship between threatened species and climate change in our own time.
The authors of the study from the University of Adelaide in Australia, with help from scientists from South America and elsewhere, found that the presence of humans in Patagonia was not enough to drive extinction, but the one-two punch of humans and a warmer climate led to the collapse of many species.
The scientists sequenced the mitochondrial DNA from 89 megafaunal bone and teeth samples that had been excavated from caves and rock shelters in Patagonia. They were able to date 71 of those samples, and then looked into whether the extinctions of those species were associated with other known events — ice ages or warming periods, for example — in the annals of either climate change or human existence.
Humans had been in Patagonia for at least 1,000 years before this mass extinction, and they overlapped with megafauna during a cold period known as the Antarctic Cold Reversal. After that climatic period, a rapid warming phase followed, and much of the ice that carpeted the region began to melt, allowing for a beech tree forest to creep across the land, reducing their original habitat.
According to this study, the extinction began soon after Patagonia began to heat up. Humans played an important role, too: Their presence put pressure on the animals, through hunting and a smaller habitat range, scattering the megafauna throughout the region.
And it all happened pretty quickly: The scientists found that the extinction of these big animals occurred within a relatively narrow time frame — about 300 years. Of the area's large mammal species, 83 percent died out, including some that the scientists discovered in the course of their work. The researchers also identified a species of puma related to some cats still around today.
The scientists concluded that the extinctions of these Patagonian megafauna were initiated by an environmental change, but it became an ecosystemwide change because of mankind.
For Alan Cooper, one of the authors of the study, the results help put our modern climate change and extinction dilemmas into context.
Over the last 100 years, he said, the earth's atmosphere has warmed enormously, largely because of the emissions of greenhouse gases from human activity. Some modern megafauna have become extinct or are now "in a great bit of trouble," Dr. Cooper said, because of human action — deforestation or hunting — but warming may be a cause, too, directly and indirectly.
Periods of warming and the collapse of megafauna seem to happen at the same time over much of history, Dr. Cooper said.
He paused before asking, "What is it about warming that amplifies humans' destructive instinct?"

Links

• After a Mass Extinction, Only the Small Survive
• In Fragmented Forests, Rapid Mammal Extinctions
• 'The Sixth Extinction' Looks at Human Impact on the Environment
• Wildfires, Once Confined to a Season, Burn Earlier and Longer
• Environmental Activists Take to Local Protests for Global Results
• How Much Warmer Was Your City in 2015?
• The Marshall Islands Are Disappearing
• Short Answers to Hard Questions About Climate Change
• Naomi Oreskes, a Lightning Rod in a Changing Climate