Storm Of Controversy Erupts Over AEMO Blackout Report

Renew Economy - Giles Parkinson

Another storm of controversy about the role of wind energy is certain to erupt after the latest report about the state-wide blackout in South Australia by the Australian Energy Market Operator.
In its second update, AEMO has pointed the finger at settings on certain wind farms and fossil fuel generators in the events immediately before and after the state-wide outage last month, but the handling of the report has also raised questions about the actions of the market operator itself – both before and after the event.
The report dismisses suggestions – mostly from the Coalition and mainstream media – that it was the intermittent nature of wind energy that was the cause of the blackout. But it also underlines the failure of the market operator to make any preparations for the storm that it could obviously see spreading across the state.
The AEMO makes clear that it was major voltage disturbances – six in 80 seconds – caused by the collapse of three major transmission lines that led to the blackout. "Five transmission line faults, resulting in six voltage disturbances on the network, led to the SA region black system," it writes.
But – not for the first time – AEMO's press release and executive summary differs in emphasis to the detailed report, and focuses on the role of the so-called "self protect mechanisms" in wind farms rather than major voltage collapse that followed the collapse of the transmission lines.
Even though these self protect mechanisms are just a matter of software and are easily fixed, AEMO's emphasis has horrified many in the wind industry, who suggest that the market operator is deliberately allowing wind to be blamed even though its report highlights a collapse of voltage that could have been the main cause of the outage. They also point to basic errors in its report, and its failure to take any preventative action as the storms approached.
"What we see in this report is a concerted effort to focus solely on the wind farms as if the system is perfect and the market perfect," said one wind farm operator. "I think we are now at war with the system operator."
In the summary, AEMO points to the role of wind farm self protect mechanisms as the straw that broke the grid's back, noting that many wind farms were designed to switch off after riding through as few as two voltage events. (This is disputed by some wind farms, who suggest their limit was actually three).
These so-called fault ride-through limits relate to factory settings – what South Australia energy minister Tom Koutsantonis describes as a "software issue" – and these have now been fixed at most of the wind farms. Those wind facilities without such limits rode through the events without any problems until the inter-connector closed.
AEMO was also careful to point out that the role of wind energy in the blackout had nothing to do with its "intermittency" or its ability to generate through high wind events, as many wind critics had suggested in the aftermath of the blackout. (See our separate story "Blackout report blows away big myths about role of wind energy").
"The most well-known characteristic of wind power, variation of output with wind strength (often termed 'intermittency'), was not a material factor in the events of 28 September 2016," it notes in the report.
However, the point of contention lies around AEMO's assertion that it was the role of the self protect mechanisms and the loss of 445MW of output that caused the Heywood inter-connector to overload and trip, separating South Australia from the rest of the grid and precipitating the system-wide blackout.
Energy experts point to the detail of the report and the collapse of voltage that occurred before two of the biggest wind farms switched off, suggesting that the system was unstable and would have tripped anyway.
As the AEMO report noted, voltage after the collapse of the last transmission line fell to 40 per cent of the line's rating. Given that most equipment, as the AEMO report notes, is designed to self protect if voltage falls by more than 10 per cent, they wonder why the market operator would expect a generator should ride through voltage collapse of such magnitude.
They point to this graph below, showing the voltage change immediately after a failed attempt to re-connect the third major transmission line to have collapsed after the storms. The energy experts say that this shows a massive voltage collapse that was happening anyway.
"To suggest that loss of generation is the final straw is misleading," said one. "When you see this graph it is clear that the whole system had become unstable, and nothing was going to ride through that voltage collapse."
"No power grid in the world is designed to manage the rapid consecutive collapse of three major transmission lines like the SA system sustained on 28 September," said Kane Thornton, the CEO of the Clean Energy Council.
The wind industry is angry and frustrated that while the exact cause is unlikely to be known until the final report is completed in six months time, wind energy has been left to take the rap in the interim – and for a technical issue that is easily fixed and may not even have been as significant a factor as AEMO is making out.
And while the report does make clear that the issues with the wind farms are technical, and easily fixed, there is no doubt that the political and ideological debate will be fierce, and won't be confined to the facts.
But the report also points to two other major problems.
The first is that fossil fuels are not a panacea as some would wish. The diesel and gas generators paid handsomely to provide black start services to the state both failed, one within 15 seconds, causing the blackout to last much longer than it would have done otherwise. AEMO refuses to name the failed generators, citing "confidentiality" agreements.
The three diesel generators that should have provided power to Port Lincoln also failed – two tripped almost immediately and the third had to be shut down.
And, as the report also notes, this is not the first time that the Heywood interconnector has been separated from the state. Three of the previous disconnections occurred when the main coal generator, the now closed Northern brown coal power station, tripped and caused the system to collapse. The other occurred when bushfires in Victoria caused multiple transmission line failures.
The other issue is one of culture. As grid operators in china, the US and Europe have noted on many occasions, the big issues with the transition to renewables are not really technical, but cultural. This will be a question asked of the AEMO, and an independent assessment of its own actions is now called for.
Its report basically admits that the market operator had no Plan B for the storm. Some suggest it didn't even have a Plan A.
It made no provision for extra back-up generation or for locally based ancillary services that could have stabilised the grid at its point of crisis and avoided the black-out. These ancillary services normally come from gas generators, but could in the future be provided by battery storage.
And it didn't scale down the amount of power coming through the interconnector. It meant, that like a central bank with interest rates close to zero, it had no levers left to pull in case something went wrong. Its report suggests it was more worried about price impacts than system security.
And it seems that AEMO simply didn't believe that the system was at risk. That approach seems extraordinary given its own admission that the winds of 120kmh were forecast, more than the rating of some wind farms in the state.
"Given the available evidence in advance of the storm hitting, one has to wonder why on Earth they (AEMO) didn't re-classify the risks of the loss of one or more transmission lines or generators as a credible contingency," says Andrew Stock, from the Climate Council and a former senior executive with coal and gas generator Origin Energy
"It would have been very unusual for senior management in a very high risk operation, in the face of evidence of a forthcoming storm, not to take precautionary actions to pre-emptively mitigate perceived risks.
"It's a bit like driving a performance car flat out into a storm, which most people would think would have been foolhardy. On what basis did they form those judgments?
"In my experience it is very unusual for senior management in a very high risk operation, in the face of evidence of a forthcoming storm, not to take precautionary actions to pre-emptively mitigate perceived risks."

Links

• Update to preliminary operating incident report into the South Australian state-wide power outage
• Blackout report blows away big myths about role of wind energy
• South Australian windfarms revise safety settings after statewide blackout
• SA weather: Safety settings caused wind farms to reduce output during SA's blackout, regulator says

Super Typhoons And A Soaking For Australia: Weird Weather Explained

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

As the Philippines braces for its second major typhoon in just five days, a Canadian glacier spawns a giant iceberg and eastern Australia mops up from a record wet spell, climate scientists can pick from a world of weird weather to highlight evidence of global warming under way.
Just days after nations agreed to curb production of greenhouse gases 10,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide and a fortnight before the Paris climate agreement comes into force on November 4, many regions are experiencing bizarre conditions.
September continued the run of exceptional global warmth, with last month narrowly edging last year as the hottest September on record, NASA, the US space agency, said overnight.
After data adjustments, NASA said 11 of the past 12 months had set monthly high-temperature records. (See chart below). This year is on course to smash previous records for annual heat set in 2015 and in the year before that.
Climate scientists, such as NASA's Gavin Schmidt, emphasise that while individual weather events and even monthly rankings may be newsworthy, "they are not nearly as important as long-term trends"
Here, though, there are many worrying pointers.
The Philippines is facing the potential for a category 5-strength typhoon Haima just days after typhoon Sarika blew through, leaving a trial of death and destruction that has now extended to neighbours Vietnam and China.

Typhoon Haima is expected to reach category 5 strength by Wednesday. Photo: The Weather Channel

Recent research indicates the western Pacific is experiencing stronger cyclones with the frequency increasing as much as four-fold.

Porcupine spike
In Canada, the Porcupine Glacier in British Columbia retreated more than two kilometres "in one leap", when a major iceberg broke off during the summer, The Globe and Mail reported recently. (See their chart below:)

Haitians, hard hit by Hurricane Matthew, await aid from a US helicopter earlier this month. Photo: Rebecca Blackwell

Mauri Pelto, professor of environmental science at Nichols College in Massachusetts, said he couldn't identify a bigger iceberg carved from a Canadian glacier in a quarter century of work.
"It's just a highlight example of what's happening [from climate change]," Dr. Pelto was quoted as saying. "I have worked on over 200 glaciers just in that area, and all but one have been retreating."
The behaviour of ice of a different kind caught the attention of  Andy Pitman, director of the ARC Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of NSW.
After rivalling previously lows in 2007 and 2012, this year's recovery of Arctic sea ice as winter approaches has slowed sharply, placing it again at record low levels. (See chart below, supplied via Zack Labe, from the University of California, Irvine.)
With less sea ice, more of the sun's energy is absorbed by the Arctic seas rather than reflected back to space, accelerating the pace of warming in an area that's warming faster than almost anywhere else.
"It's moving outside it's normal operating range," Professor Pitman said of the sea ice trend. "Climate extremes are emerging much faster than climate scientists thought."

Rain extremes
While major weather events can't all be attributed to climate change rather than natural variability, a warming world makes them more likely.
Scientists, for instance, estimate that the atmosphere can hold 7 per cent more moisture for each degree of warming - and we've had at least that since the Industrial Revolution triggered a rapid increase in greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels and land-clearing for agriculture.
Hurricane Matthew, which scrapped along the east coast of the US earlier this month, is estimated to have dumped as much 52 trillion litres on the US, triggering widespread flooding, according to Ryan Maue, a US-based meteorologist.
Typhoon Sarika, which left at least 25 dead in the Philippines last week, is now expected to bring flooding rains to south-east China.
Behind Sarika, though, looms a more powerful storm, super typhoon Haima, which is likely to generate peak gusts of more than 300 km/h by Wednesday as it nears the northern Philippine island of Luzon.
"[A]long with the dangers of storm surge flooding and damaging winds, rainfall flooding and landslides would also be major threats in Luzon, given saturated ground from Sarika," the weather.com website said in a report. "More than a foot of rain could fall over northern portions of Luzon as Haima moves through."
Much of eastern Australia has copped its drenching in recent weeks, although the rains have fortunately been more spread out.
As the Bureau of Meteorology said in a special climate statement last week, the Murray Darling Basin had its wettest September on record, continuing a string of wet months.
"The May to September period was Australia's wettest on record, with each of the five individual months ranking in the 10 wettest in the last 117 years," the report said.

'Off the charts'
"You're seeing more extreme events and in most of the parts of climate that affect people," Professor Pitman said.
Heatwaves, for instance, that used to last typically three days, might be stretching in some places out to 10 days.
"It's like Usain Bolt doing a 4-second,100-metre run," he said. "It's completely off the charts."
Professor Pitman's centre will shift more of its focus to the study of climate extremes after securing funds from the Australian Research Council last month.
"There is some emerging evidence that the system is redefining itself," Professor Pitman said.

Links

• 'Half a degree avoided': Breakthrough in talks to limit global warming
• The rise of the super-typhoon
• 'Half a degree avoided': Breakthrough in talks to limit global warming
• Australian bushfires on the rise, new research finds

We’re Placing Far Too Much Hope In Pulling Carbon Dioxide Out Of The Air, Scientists Warn

Washington Post - Chelsea Harvey

In this July 1, 2013 photo, smoke rises from the Colstrip Steam Electric Station, a coal-burning power plant in Colstrip, Mont. (Matthew Brown/Associated Press)

In  the past decade, an ambitious — but still mostly hypothetical — technological strategy for meeting our global climate goals has grown prominent in scientific discussions. Known as “negative emissions,” the idea is to remove carbon dioxide from the air using various technological means, a method that could theoretically buy the world more time when it comes to reducing our overall greenhouse-gas emissions.
Recent models of future climate scenarios have assumed that this technique will be widely used in the future. Few have explored a world in which we can keep the planet’s warming within at least a 2-degree temperature threshold without the help of negative-emission technologies. But some scientists are arguing that this assumption may be a serious mistake.
In a new opinion paper, published Thursday in the journal Science, climate experts Kevin Anderson of the University of Manchester and Glen Peters of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research have argued that relying on the uncertain concept of negative emissions as a fix could lock the world into a severe climate-change pathway.
“[If] we behave today like we’ve got these get-out-of-jail cards in the future, and then in 20 years we discover we don’t have this technology, then you’re already locked into a higher temperature level,” Peters said.
Many possible negative-emission technologies have been proposed, from simply planting more forests (which act as carbon sinks) to designing chemical reactions that physically take the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The technology most widely included in the models is known as bioenergy combined with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS.
In a BECCS scenario, plants capture and store carbon while they grow — removing it from the atmosphere, in other words — and then are harvested and used for fuel to produce energy. These bioenergy plants will be outfitted with a form of technology known as carbon capture, which traps carbon dioxide emissions before they make it into the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide can then be stored safely deep underground. Even more carbon is then captured when the plants grow back again.

The idea sounds like a win-win on paper, allowing for both the removal of carbon dioxide and the production of energy. But while more than a dozen pilot-scale BECCS projects exist around the world, only one large-scale facility currently operates. And scientists have serious reservations about the technology’s viability as a global-scale solution.
First, the sheer amount of bioenergy fuel required to suit the models’ assumptions already poses a problem, Peters told The Washington Post. Most of the models assume a need for an area of land at least the size of India, he said, which prompts the question of whether this would reduce the area available for food crops or force additional deforestation, which would produce more carbon emissions.
When it comes to carbon capture and storage, the technology has been used already in at least 20 plants around the world, not all of them devoted to bioenergy. In fact, carbon capture and storage can be applied in all kinds of industrial facilities, including coal-burning power plants or oil and natural gas refineries. But the technology has so far failed to take off.
“Ten years ago, if you looked at the International Energy Agency, they were saying by now there would be hundreds of CCS plants around the world,” Peters said. “And each year the IEA has had to revise their estimates down. So CCS is one of those technologies that just never lives up to expectations.”
This is largely a market problem, according to Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer and carbon capture expert at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“There’s no doubt you can do it,” he said. “We have coal plants that do CCS, you can have biomass that can do CCS — the technology’s not a big deal. The question is the economics.”
Because it’s more expensive to produce energy with carbon capture than without it, there’s little incentive for the private sector to invest in the technology without a more aggressive policy push toward curtailing emissions, he pointed out. A carbon price, for instance, would be one way of creating a market for the technology.
It’s not that the modelers have no reason for incorporating BECCS so heavily, though. Over a long enough time period, and at the scale needed to make a dent in our global climate goals — especially assuming a high enough carbon price in the future — it may be the cheapest mitigation technology, Peters said. But this may not be enough for policymakers to invest in its advancement now.
“Decision-makers today don’t optimize over the whole century,” he said. “They’re not asking: What technology can I put in place now to make a profit in 100 years? So the sort of strategic thinking in the model is different from strategic thinking in practice.”
Additionally, the models that are commonly relied on to project future climate and technological scenarios assume that the CCS technique works perfectly within the next few decades, when it’s only just emerging.
“The models don’t have technical challenges; they don’t run into engineering problems; the models don’t have cost overruns,” Peters said. “Everything works as it should work in the model.”
The bottom line, he and Anderson note in their paper, is that all these assumptions make for a huge gamble. If policymakers decide we’re going to meet our climate goals only with the aid of negative-emission technologies, and then these technologies fail us in the future, we will already be locked into a high-temperature climate scenario.
In this light, the authors write, “negative-emission technologies should not form the basis of the mitigation agenda.” Indeed, they conclude, nations should proceed as though these technologies will fail, focusing instead on aggressive emissions-reduction policies for the present, such as the continued expansion of renewable energy sources.
Other scientists agree. Daniel Kammen, an energy professor at the University of California in Berkeley and director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, has published several recent papers on BECCS technology, and agrees that it is “nowhere near ready to be considered a component of a viable carbon reduction strategy.”
“The paper is right,” he continued in an emailed comment to The Washington Post. “A run to endorse BECCS as a key component of the needed 80 percent or greater decarbonization we need by 2050 is unproven, premature and potentially costly. It is worth research, but has a ways to go before it can enter the realm of a solutions science for climate change.”
Herzog also agreed that “the focus of today should be on mitigation as opposed to worrying about negative emissions sometime in the future.” In the future, he said, as we approach the end of our decarbonization schemes, negative emissions could still have a place when it comes to offsetting carbon from those last activities it’s most difficult or most expensive to decarbonize.
But Herzog added that, in his opinion, we’ve likely already overshot a 2-degree temperature threshold, to say nothing of the more ambitious 1.5-degree target described in the Paris climate agreement. At the very least, he noted, a reliance on renewables alone would be unlikely to get us there, if it were still possible. Indeed, multiple recent analyses have suggested that the combined pledges of individual countries participating in the Paris Agreement — very few of which have even considered negative emissions — still fall short of our temperature goals.
“I think what you’re going to see in the long run is a mix of technologies coming in to help solve the problem,” he said. “You need a mix of renewables, efficiency, nuclear, CCS, lifestyle changes — just a whole litany.”

Links 

• The suddenly urgent quest to remove carbon dioxide from the air
• Greenland’s ice is melting from both above and below — and scientists say they’re connected
• Al Gore and Hillary Clinton just strongly linked Hurricane Matthew to climate change
• How the Earth will pay us back for our carbon emissions with … more carbon emissions

Climate Change Is Burning Up Australia: Are We Losing The Battle?

Engineering and Technology - Amy Spurling

We may ‘muddle through’ and adapt to climate change, but the latest disturbing news from Australia shows that it may be too late to save some of its ancient wonders, like Tasmania’s prehistoric forest and Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef.

On  28 September, the entire state of South Australia lost power. Severe storms brought down pylons, lightning hit generators, wind turbines had to stop and the whole SA power system, including back-ups, went into auto shut-down, leaving 1.7 million people in the dark. Then another struggle began. Australia’s climate change policies came under the spotlight and it seemed they were diverging. South Australia’s impressive 41 per cent power generation from renewables was called into question by the federal government. Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull spoke of the intermittency of solar and wind power and said that although emission targets were important, energy security should come first.
This was echoed by the environment and energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, who wants to bring other states’ “unrealistic” renewable-generation targets into line with the federal one: from 15 per cent to 23.5 per cent by 2020; compared to Victoria - from 12 per cent to 40 per cent by 2025, Queensland - from 4.5 per cent to 50 per cent by 2030 and SA’s target of 50 per cent by 2025.
Meanwhile,  SA’s Labour-party premier Jay Weatherill said that the blackout was due to weather and not renewables; any source of energy would have failed.
Frydenberg has conceded that renewable energy was probably not to blame, but has called for an inquiry.
Earlier in September, two board members from the advisory Climate Change Authority criticised a report produced by their colleagues, saying that stronger measures were needed to cut emissions than the  government target of 26-28 per cent by 2030. Frydenberg responded that others on the board agreed with the report and there would be five-year reviews in order to keep within the 2°C target agreed at the 2015 Paris climate conference.
In August, well-known scientist Professor Brian Cox came face-to-face with Queensland senator Malcolm Roberts on Australia’s ABC television ‘Q&A’ panel programme. Roberts, who represents the nationalist, right-wing One Nation party, has a background in coal mining and is a climate change sceptic. When Cox produced a global-warming graph to show temperature increase and its human correlation, the senator blamed  manipulated data, citing Nasa as a culprit. “Nasa?” exclaimed an incredulous Cox.
Before that, a new and controversial chief executive of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) - the federal government agency for scientific research in Australia - downsized CSIRO’s climate science group. About a week before the ‘Q&A’ broadcast, the new science minister reinstated CSIRO’s climate change focus and some of the jobs, but the balance has still not been fully redressed.
In January, around 11,000 hectares (110km2) of Cretaceous World Heritage Area forest was lost to fires in Tasmania. “The survival of these ecosystems is truly in doubt, just like the Barrier Reef is under threat from climate change,” warns Professor David Bowman of the University of Tasmania. So can the Great Barrier Reef survive, what is the future for Tasmania’s prehistoric forest, how is Australia being affected by climate change in general and how should it cope?
According to a 2011 Climate Change report by CSIRO, temperatures in Australia have risen by 1°C from 1910 to 2009 and 2000-2009 was the warmest decade on record. CO2 is increasing by two parts per million (ppm) per year, due to the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and industrial activity.
Yet in 2013, Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s government (a conservative Liberal-National Party coalition) abolished the Climate Commission. Like a phoenix out of the global-warming flames, the commission crowd-funded itself and is still alive today as the Climate Council.
Commission chairman Tim Flannery now heads the Council. Flannery is former director of the South Australian Museum and is involved in conservation, sits on sustainability boards and writes and broadcasts for the world’s press. He is unenthused about Australia’s emission reduction targets. “I’ve lost interest and lost track,” he says. “All the indications are that we won’t make even modest targets. Policies are not adequate.”
In 2014, the same Tony Abbott abolished Labour’s carbon tax, which had been having an effect, says Flannery. However, Abbott’s successor, Malcolm Turnbull, has reversed a plan to disband the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.
Australia has high per capita energy use. Fossil fuel is cheap and transport distances are large, so how much of Australia’s energy comes from it? About 77 per cent, thinks Flannery, though a number of mines have shut down or are in receivership. However, a giant new coal mine could still be built in Queensland, which will produce enough coal for 100 million people to have electricity. Yet he is cautiously optimistic that coal will become less dominant, saying that economic forces are changing its profitability.
Jeff Angel heads The Total Environment Centre (TEC) lobbying and campaign group. Part of a recent TEC campaign showed a battered plastic bottle lounging in a fishtank. It is labelled ‘Kindergratus abandoni’. The label goes on to detail its lifespan of 100-1,000 years, its behaviour - washed out to sea - followed by a list of its pollutants. You could even be ingesting some of those pollutants in the fish you eat. The campaign, Ocean Action Pod, was made to raise awareness in schools.
Angel thinks it is important to control land clearing if we want to keep emissions under control. A Labour government tends to put more rigorous controls in place, he says, whereas the current coalition of conservative Liberals and the farmer-representing National Party winds them back. He agrees with Flannery that fossil fuels will have diminishing influence and thinks climate sceptics are dwindling, too.
Amongst the 11,000 hectares of World Heritage Area that was burnt down this year was “a temperate wilderness with plants and animals that were more widespread in geological time,” including living fossil species and whole ecological communities. Professor Bowman describes it as a region of extraordinary beauty with “a cultural history dating over 35,000 years”.
Bowman is professor of environmental change biology at the School of Plant Science at the University of Tasmania. He describes himself as a pyrogeographer - someone who studies the geographical spread of fire - with an interest in “how people use and abuse fire and how this affects the environment.”
Tasmania is particularly vulnerable to climate change, Bowman says, because it has unique vegetation that depends on moist, cool conditions. Yet, he warns, “the climate is becoming increasingly variable with more extreme floods, winds and droughts...fires are increasingly destructive due to strong winds and dryness.” He goes on to say that floods on burnt ground then cause “erosion and destructive flooding - with bridges and roads being washed away.” So how much longer can Tasmania’s prehistoric forest survive under current trends?
Seven years ago, a former chief scientist of Australia’s Institute of Marine Science, Dr John Charlie Veron, gave a talk in London, where he was introduced by David Attenborough as a modern-day Charles Darwin. His talk was called ‘Is the Great Barrier Reef on Death Row?’
In fact, Veron was first nicknamed Charlie after Darwin when he was six years old. More recently, he has been called the godfather of coral. In between, Veron has done a lot of diving (about 6,000 hours) and got higher degrees in reptilian physiology, insect neurobiology and coral taxonomy. He was the first full-time Great Barrier Reef researcher, has named about a quarter of the world’s coral species and has mapped them all.
Why are the corals on death row? As it stands, the main threats to them are mass bleaching caused by warming temperatures, more crown-of-thorns starfish consuming coral (because of increased nutrients and decreased predators) and sediment in the water. When sea temperatures rise and the water quality is low, marine algae called zooxanthellae start to deplete. It is these that gives the coral its energy and colour - so now the coral begins to starve.
This is our last chance, as reefs cannot be artificially conserved elsewhere. Veron says they are ecosystems. Although about A$1bn of government money is being invested over the next 10 years, mainly for clean energy, improving water quality and tackling the starfish threat, Veron says that climate change was completely omitted from the coalition’s election platform.
Flannery dived on the Reef earlier this year. “Catastrophe,” he comments. “It was still bleaching in July [Australian winter] - the temperature was 27°C and it was supposed to be 25°C.”
The CSIRO report states it is “increasingly likely that the level of global warming will exceed that 2°C threshold of ‘dangerous’ climate change.”
For Australia, Dr David Jones, manager of climate monitoring and prediction at the Bureau of Meteorology, says the amount of future warming will depend on greenhouse gas emissions, with low emissions producing a rise of 1-2°C by 2100, while high emissions could potentially result in warming of more than 4°C. The warming trend will be faster inland than nearer the coast, he adds.
Yet the coast will have other problems. John Church, a sea-level expert and one of the senior scientists let go from CSIRO, said in The Sydney Morning Herald that “with unmitigated emissions we will be in for metres of sea-level rise in the longer term...The only issue is how quickly we get there.” As he points out, Australia has a population concentrated along the coast.
Flannery predicts rainfall increase in the north-west of Australia, with decrease in the south and east. CSIRO predicts more extreme rainfall, storms and floods, more fire, more coastal erosion and loss of plant and animal species. There will also be less water security and wheat quality and quantity. So what are the choices? Adaptation or reduction?
The CSIRO report says that adaptation could include urban greening, heat-resistant transport, drought-tolerant crops, coastal defence, flood-and-fire-tolerant architecture and species management. Energy solutions could be in this order: solar energy, followed by wind (although as this is intermittent, storage options will have to keep up), carbon capture and storage, and biofuels.
Angel says that there is a lot of scope to reduce. “Our most potent weapon is a new energy target, if there is no new fossil fuel baseload.” He describes adaptation as “things get bad and people live with it”. In other words, “people will die, be less healthy and prosperous”. What does he think about carbon capture sinks? Not much, is his brief answer. “Ridiculous expense. Pipelines are needed, energy is required to pump, then online monitoring, ridiculous add-ons etc.”
What about solar panels? Angel says the public has realised that their neighbours with panels aren’t sitting in the dark, but he adds that feed-in tariffs from the Australian government are ending this year. If it is no longer cost-effective to sell to the grid, then on-site storage, i.e. batteries, will have to become more affordable. Angel calls that “the next big energy challenge.”
Flannery gets all his home energy from solar panels. “The cost of solar has reduced 10 per cent per annum year on year,” he notes. But is it too late for individual lifestyle choices? Flannery doesn’t think so, and it’s good to be a conscientious citizen, he says. He urges people to carry on recycling and using ‘bags for life’ and ‘keep cups’.
Angel agrees that it’s always good to change, but he argues that it takes too long to ‘mainstream’ green-conscious behaviour. “I’ve never been a fan of the boutique approach,” he says. “It will take centuries.” Most people are passive supporters “and not everyone has the capacity.” We don’t have that much time, he insists. “Instead, it’s down to the government, and even solar panels are a ‘boutique exercise’ until the government makes them mainstream.” So onward with the vigorous campaigns.
Flannery seems to think that we will adapt somehow. Unbridled growth has slowed. “In the last two years, emissions have flat-lined - that’s the first time that has happened without a recession,” and the ‘population bomb’ has also defused, with birth rates reducing. “I expect that we’ll muddle through, at greater social cost than required.”
While we are adapting or muddling through, what do the experts predict for Tasmania’s ancient forest and Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef?
On an island with weather not unlike that of Great Britain, Bowman predicts that “temperature rise is certain and I expect the intensity of climate variation will increase. Sea level rise will become a bigger issue, with storm surges destroying infrastructure on the coast.”
It is too late for response and recovery, he says. “In reality, the only way to save the wilderness is to decarbonise and stabilise the climate, but I am not optimistic that we can do this quickly enough.” Bowman has three solutions. Firstly, to control invasive plant growth through native or exotic animals (elephants have been suggested). Another idea is the ancient practice of “Aboriginal patch burning”, where fires are deliberate and controlled rather than random, spontaneous and out of control. His last solution is a massive ecological restoration programme, “building repositories, where we save as many of the valuable plants and animals as possible.” This could include husbandry, translocation and storage.
Meanwhile, over in tropical Queensland, what chance is there for the Reef algae to adapt to harsher conditions?
Veron says temperature-tolerant zooxanthellae have adapted in the past, but it has taken thousands of years.  He mentions the same solution over and over: “drastically reducing global CO2 emissions...warming can only be counteracted by lowering CO2... reducing Australia’s role in CO2 emissions”. This does not foresee new coal mines being built. “If [the Carmichael coal mine] goes ahead, which seems increasingly unlikely, it will be the worst thing Australia could possibly do to the Great Barrier Reef.”
Veron believes the Great Barrier Reef is dying and will eventually perish. Mass extinction will be “in full swing by the end of the century,” he believes.
Flannery describes adaptation as natural selection, genetic diversity or death - “mass mortality with only a few surviving species”. Whilst the southern end of the reef has minor bleaching, he says that the Northern Great Barrier Reef is devastated, and this will spread to every reef on the planet “The era of reefs as we know them is finished.”
Only time will tell whether more adverse weather and climate change will defeat this climatically-diverse continent or whether it will win the battle to reduce emissions.

Australia: Five things that have changed

1. More days of extreme fire weather - Australian householders are supposed to have a fire evacuation plan in place.
2. In schools, children aren’t supposed to go out in the hotter months without sun hats. They also wear ‘rashies’, rather like wetsuit T-shirts, on the beach.
3. Sunscreen is often available free at public events. However, all this ‘slip-​slap-slopping’ and covering up means Vitamin D supplements are often needed.
4. During the hotter months, different stages of water use can be imposed state by state - e.g. restrictions on garden-watering, topping up pools and sometimes even showering if drought is severe.
5. Plants are flowering earlier and creatures nesting earlier.

Links

• Software apps to help combat climate change
• Tesla and Panasonic team up to mass-produce solar cells
• Paris climate change treaty to enter into force as EU approves ratification
• Obama and DiCaprio join forces to fight climate change

World's Largest Solar Project Would Generate Electricity 24 Hours a Day, Power 1 Million U.S. Homes

EcoWatch - Lorraine Chow

The race to build the world's largest solar power plant is heating up. California-based energy company SolarReserve announced plans for a massive concentrated solar power (CSP) plant in Nevada that claims to be the largest of its kind once built.

The 110 MW Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Plant near Tonopah, Nevada was the first utility-scale facility in the world to feature advanced molten salt power tower technology. The developer wants to build 10 more of these at an undisclosed location in Nevada. SolarReserve

SolarReserve CEO Kevin Smith told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the $5 billion endeavor would generate between 1,500 and 2,000 megawatts of power, enough to power about 1 million homes. That amount of power is as much as a nuclear power plant, or the 2,000-megawatt Hoover Dam and far bigger than any other existing solar facility on Earth, the Review-Journal pointed out.
"It's a big project," Smith told the publication. "It's an ambitious project."
SolarReserve's Sandstone project involves at least 100,000 mirrored heliostats that capture the sun's rays and concentrates it onto 10 towers equipped with a molten salt energy storage system. The molten salt, heated to more than 1,000 degrees, then boils water and creates a steam turbine that can drive generators 24/7.
Compared to photovoltaic arrays, the appeal of CSP systems is that solar power can be used after sunset.
"It's really the ability to provide renewable energy that's available on demand 24 hours a day," Smith told NPR.
SolarReserve already operates a CSP plant near Tonopah, a revolutionary 110-megawatt Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Plant that's now powering Nevada homes. The company says on its website that this "completely emission free" CSP plant runs without the requirement for natural gas or oil back up.
"Energy storage provides a firm, reliable electricity product on-demand, day and night," SolarReserve says, adding that the plant "helps meet growing demand for clean, renewable energy sources."
Smith told the Review-Journal that Sandstone construction probably won't begin for another two or three years. Once construction begins, Smith estimated the project should create about 3,000 jobs for about seven years.
He said the company will also have to build a new transmission infrastructure to carry the energy to market, and the generated power will likely will be "exported to the California market."
SolarReserve is narrowing down project sites for its 6,500-hectare project. Smith said two potential sites on federal land in Nye County have been shortlisted. However, as NPR reported, environmentalists such as Solar Done Right's Janine Blaeloch are concerned about the environmental impact of such a project.
"It transforms habitats and public lands into permanent industrial zones," she told the radio station.
Listen here:
Links

• World's First Farm to Use Solar Power and Seawater Opens in Australia 
• Nuclear Power Rapidly Losing Race With Renewable Energy
• Dubai to Build World's Largest Concentrated Solar Power Plant
• World’s First 24/7 Solar Power Plant Powers 75,000 Homes