Offshore Wind Costs Hit Record Low

Climate Home - Megan Darby

Two 350MW arrays in the Netherlands will supply power at €87/MWh, beating the next cheapest project by miles

Cheap steel and favourable regulations are helping to cut offshore wind power costs. DONG Energy A/S

Dong Energy has set a record low price for offshore wind power in a winning bid to build two arrays off the coast of the Netherlands.
The Danish company committed to supply electricity at €72.70/MWh (US$80.40), not including transmission costs. The cables will add about €14/MWh, experts say.
That beats an industry goal of bringing costs below €100/MWh by 2020. The closest any rival had previously come was €103/MWh by Vattenfall in Denmark last year.
“It was a result that was well beyond anyone’s expectations,” said Oliver Joy, spokesperson for the European Wind Energy Association.
It brings a relatively expensive form of renewable energy a step closer to competing on cost with conventional power stations.
Joy credited the Dutch government for creating a favourable regulatory environment, helped by market and site-specific conditions.
The Netherlands has pledged to contract out 700MW of offshore wind a year to 2020, giving developers a big prize to aim for.
Steel to build the turbines is fairly cheap, while low oil prices mean developers can get a bargain on installation vessels that would otherwise serve drilling rigs.
Dong will build 700MW worth of turbines on the Borssele 1 and 2 sites, in a water depth of 14-38m with average wind speeds of 9.5m/s.
Future projects will not necessarily benefit from all the same circumstances, Dong’s head of wind power Samuel Leupold told Climate Home.
“You cannot compare two wind parks directly,” he said, but added: “You will never see us bid at a level which does not create value. The price reflects the rapid development which the offshore wind industry is going through.”
Since 2012, he claimed Dong had cut costs more than 40% by working with the supply chain and improving designs and processes.
Across the industry, companies are experimenting with floating turbines and bigger blades to drive further savings.
The next milestone is €80/MWh, which European developers have pledged to reach by 2025.

Links

• 10 EU countries ink offshore wind power agreement
• UK hits 1GW of installed offshore wind capacity
• World’s largest offshore windfarm opens off UK coast
• UK outlines strategy to be ‘world leader’ in offshore wind
• UK reveals plans for world’s largest offshore wind farm

How Indigenous Philosophy Could Help Us Understand Climate Change

The Guardian - Monica Tan

Cut the Sky draws on Indigenous Australian traditions to help audiences apply emotion, rather than cold logic, to climate change

Edwin Lee Mulligan stars in Cut the Sky, a new work by Broome-based dance company Marrugeku. Photograph: Marrugeku

The Goolarabooloo people have their own name for James Price Point: Walmadany.
It’s a spectacular bit of country in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, with soil the colour of burnt orange, and sapphire blue waters.
But Walmadany is also a site of contention, and Woodside Petroleum’s plans for a $45bn gas hub on the site were met by mass protests. While those plans were eventually abandoned in 2013, talk of drilling for liquified natural gas won’t go away.
This is not the first time the remote and pristine Kimberley has resisted the intrusion of a mining company. In 1980, then WA premier Charles Court gave the nod to a 45-strong convoy of mining trucks and exploratory drilling in Noonkanbah, on the Fitzroy river. The convoy’s police escort had to clear a blockade of protesters that included traditional landowners.

Locals protest a proposal by Woodside Petroleum to build a liquid natural gas plant at James Price Point in Broome, Western Australia. Photograph: Cortlan Bennett/AAP image

Broome-based dance company Marrugeku has devised a new work called Cut the Sky, which draws on these stories and seeks to give an Indigenous perspective on climate change.
Marrugeku’s co-artistic director, Dalisa Pigram, says it has been “quite heartbreaking” to watch her people be torn in half by the creeping industrialisation of the land.
The proposed gas hub placed an ultimatum on the community to protect one of Australia’s last remaining wildernesses or pay the price – “how to maintain that care for country and make life for our people better? Those traditional owners were forced to make those decisions.”
While the work draws from the struggles of the Kimberley people, it is a much larger treatise on how Indigenous people around the world process the issue of climate change.
The diverse cast and crew not only features Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, others hail from afar as India, Burkina Faso and Belgium.
Together they share the difficult task set by Marrugeku: how to artistically engage with the issue of climate change. Pigram says the climate change discussion is dominated by “a lot of people coming from logic and science.”
Cut the Sky attempts to access a very complex, global problem using a different language, of theatre and dance. And at its core the work is about “valuing an Aboriginal perspective of looking at country”.
It becomes clear that it’s no easy feat to condense in just a few sentences the complicated and varied ways in which care for the land is embedded in Indigenous Australian social structures, philosophy and spirituality.
“You’re born with this responsibility to manage the balance of country,” says Pigram. These responsibilities are not forced upon but hang over every aspect of their culture and life, and they are always thinking “if we don’t keep that balance, there will be consequences.”
Alongside Pigram sits Rachael Swain, Marrugeku’s other co-artistic director, who adds that climate change is essentially about balance, or more accurately, an environmental imbalance. “A big part of Indigenous knowledge systems is around the balance of the seasons,” says Swain, “and weather patterns changing.”
The pair mention cast member Edwin Lee Mulligan, a custodian of Noonkanbah whose five poems make up the spoken element of the work. Mulligan’s descendants were some of the last Indigenous Australians to walk out from the Great Sandy Desert and their stories seem to illustrate how deeply attuned they were to a changing environment.

Since the coming of time the spirits of the skies have been painting their pictures, telling the story of changing season. They reached to the earth choosing individual vibrant colours to paint the universal giant canvas. Calculating the mathematics of day and night, of rotating cosmos with our sun, stars and the moon. Second by second in an endless equation.
– An excerpt from Cut the Sky, by Edwin Lee Mulligan

“There’s a lot more to it than a few dreaming stories,” says Pigram. “Our culture is the oldest living culture for a reason. There are things to value there.”

There’s a lot more to it than a few dreaming stories. Our culture is the oldest living culture for a reason.

Swain says the piece is split into five mediations on “what happens if we don’t listen to country”, and zig-zags through time. “We did that to break up the tyranny of some kind of lineal progression to climate change. Because that was killing us, artistically, having to carry the weight of that idea.”
The non-linear storytelling also shakes the audience free from their default mode of logic, instead opening up their ability to feel. “That’s the way Indigenous performance functions,” says Swain. “They engage with an audience from a place of feeling: feeling a different point of view, feeling a way of dealing with this information. Rather than understanding it in the way Western theatre operates where information is much more spoon-fed: ‘you will think this now’, ‘you will feel this now’.”
In her choreography work, Pigram set about creating a space in which the audience must actively enter. “To not be observing what’s going on over there, but to really come to us.”

Cut the Sky examines climate change through the framework of an indigenous culture. Photograph: Marrugeku

Pigram doesn’t seem optimistic about the immediate future for Walmadany, which she predicts will be forced to come to the negotiation table and choose between a royalty agreement or compulsory acquisition. “WA laws say you can’t say ‘no’ to anything that’s going on.”
And just as they did Noonkanbah over 30 years ago, such discussions cause a painful riff in the community. “There’s still so much divide in the community with fracking and people’s opinions on water contamination. Sometimes you just want to hide away and not think about any of it.”

Links

• Cut The Sky review: Dystopian vision of climate refugees an elegant Indigenous parable
• Science and art collide as performers tackle climate change
• Climate change - An Aboriginal perspective

Race To Save Hidden Treasures Under Threat From Climate Change

New Scientist - Aisling Irwin

Defrosted and about to disappear. Courtesy of Anne Jensen

THOUSANDS of ancient relics unearthed by climate change could soon be lost forever, destroyed by weathering and pests.
The crisis is so acute that some archaeologists are urging colleagues to abandon their current field sites and focus instead on these newly exposed treasures before they vanish.
Rising seas, raging storms, melting ice and forest fires are exposing artefacts that have much to tell us about our history on Earth – from sunken shipwrecks in Svalbard to the ancient waste dumps filled with bones, shoes and carvings that are emerging all over the Arctic and further south, including in Scotland.
"This material is like the library of Alexandria. It is incredibly valuable and it's on fire now," George Hambrecht, at the University of Maryland, College Park, told New Scientist at the Anthropology, Weather and Climate Change conference in London last month.
"Archaeology provides the longest record of humans on Earth," Robert Kelly, at the University of Wyoming, Laramie, told the meeting. "These sites matter because they contribute to understanding how ancient societies coped with climate change."
. In Norway's Svalbard archipelago, receding sea ice has opened up previously inaccessible areas. This has enabled Øyvind Ødegård at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim to start investigating the estimated 1000 shipwrecks in the region, dating from 1596 to the mid-20th century. Only one wreck had been examined before.
But in January, Ødegård was alarmed when a piece of driftwood was pulled out of Rijpfjorden Bay. It was infested with what he thinks is shipworm (Teredo navalis), a mollusc that is voracious in its consumption of wood but was thought to be absent from such cold waters.
"We don't know if this is climate-related," he says. "It's kind of a race now because if the shipworm is suddenly present due to climate change, it is a new threat to the cultural heritage on the seabed. It would be a complete disaster if we came too late."
Recent advances in archaeological techniques mean that we can now extract immense detail from old artefacts about the lives and environments of ancient peoples. For example, the isotopes found in dental plaque can reveal an individual's diet and where they travelled. And ancient DNA can uncover the genetic histories of crops and livestock – information that could help us adapt the species we rely on to climate change.
"This material is like the library of Alexandria. It is incredibly valuable and it's on fire now" "The archive is being destroyed just as we are able to read it," says Thomas McGovern, an archaeologist at the City University of New York. Take Walakpa Bay in northern Alaska, he says, where a frozen collection of artefacts, spanning 4000 years, of the native Alaskan Iñupiat people is thawing, its contents crumbling into the sea.
In 2014, a single storm washed away half the site. Archaeologists are now racing to retrieve a 3000-year-old frozen walrus stored for food. Isotope studies of lead in the animal's teeth could reveal its diet and foraging routes, and help build a picture of the ecosystem that existed at the time.
The ability to track ancient animals' distributions has only been possible in the past year, says McGovern. This ancient data can help us better understand creatures that are economically important today, such as cod, and how they lived before Earth's habitats were hugely affected by human activity.
Some archaeologists are now calling on their peers to postpone their work on better preserved sites and focus on these disappearing treasures before it is too late. Efforts are under way to collaborate on retrieving as much of the material as possible and storing it in warehouses to be studied by future archaeologists.
"We should concentrate our efforts in the places where we are losing the evidence," says Tom Dawson at the University of St Andrews, UK, who has fought to save thousands of crumbling sites along the coasts of Scotland. "It's a no-brainer."

Links

• Perfect storm hits Taiwan as China sees worst floods in 20 years
• UK will struggle to meet climate target if fracking goes ahead
• Face to face in the Arctic with a terrifying new sublime
• Billion-dollar vows to save Barrier Reef are too little too late

How China Could Peak CO2 Emissions By 2022

Climate Home - Megan Darby

Detailed policy proposals by influential Chinese and US researchers show potential to speed up low carbon shift

Joe Hunt/Flickr

China could speed up its climate plans to peak carbon dioxide emissions in six years, under proposals presented to policymakers this week.
Two Beijing-based government advisory groups – the National Center for Climate Change and International Cooperation and the Energy Research Institute – drew up an "accelerated low carbon scenario" with American consultancy Energy Innovations.
It would see coal's share of primary energy use fall to 47% in 2030 (down from 64% in 2015), and non fossil fuel sources rise to 22%.
Based on analysis of some 10,000 policy combinations, the report offers details on how to transform key sectors.
"There have been questions about how these recommendations can translate into specific actions for the next five year plan," Sonia Aggarwal of Energy Innovations told Climate Home by phone from the Chinese capital. "That is very encouraging."

China's future CO2 emission scenarios. NCSC/EI/ERI report

The recommendations go beyond China's commitment to halt and start to reverse CO2 emission rates by 2030 – the "low carbon" line on the graph above.
For context, the analysts also sketch out a scenario under which emissions start declining immediately, based on a combination of the strongest policies seen worldwide.
That puts a theoretical upper limit on ambition, explained Aggarwal: "No country in the world has adopted all of those policies at the highest setting."
Carbon pricing is "the single strongest policy available", the report states, although Aggarwal emphasises it is not enough on its own.
Renewable electricity targets and efficiency standards for cars, appliances and buildings are also critical, as is an economic restructuring away from heavy industry into service sectors.
Beijing is preparing to open a nationwide carbon market next year, building on seven regional pilots.
Today, prices range from 10-40RMB a tonne (US$2-6/t). On the fast-track green pathway, researchers see this rising to 252RMB ($38) by 2030.
To make it more effective, policymakers should avoid handing out free pollution permits and apply pricing widely, they recommend.

Links

• China could hit emissions peak by 2025 – study
• China's emissions could peak by 2023 with introduction of ETS
• China releases climate plan, targets emissions peak pre 2030
• China's carbon emissions 'could peak' in 2025