Lethal Heating: 02/09/17

09/02/2017

Macquarie Group Reaffirms Commitment To Climate Change

Fairfax - Tony Boyd

Tim Bishop, Group Head, Macquarie Capital, revealed his division's "secret sauce" during an annual operational briefing. Supplied

US President Donald Trump might have expunged all mention of climate change from US government websites but that has not stopped Macquarie Group from trumpeting the $US1 trillion of investment banking opportunities in green energy.
One of the highlights of Macquarie's annual operational briefing was the gung ho attitude to green energy shown by the group head of Macquarie Capital, Tim Bishop.
In keeping with Macquarie's direct communication strategy, Bishop's enthusiasm for everything green was first revealed to the market in a YouTube video released on Tuesday morning.
In an short and sharp interview with former ABC journalist Monica Attard, Bishop tried to explain the "secret sauce" behind the success of Macquarie Capital and why he thinks it will do well out of the greening of the global economy.

Bishop said the combination of traditional investment bankers with people having deep operational and technical expertise is something unique to Macquarie Capital.

His presentation for the operational briefing says Macquarie's in-house specialists include civil engineers, geologists, project managers, surveyors, green energy operational staff, green energy commercial managers, electrical engineers and experts in procurement.
Bishop was asked what would drive the profitability of Macquarie Capital in the future and responded by singling out real estate and green energy.
"What is going on in green energy globally is quite an exciting story through Europe and now increasingly in Asia," Bishop said.
"And whether that is solar in Japan, or offshore wind farms in Taiwan or waste plants in Korea, we're big believers in that and we have the expertise to be able to pursue those opportunities.

"Macquarie Capital claims it can play in every aspect of green energy from the development of battery, solar and waste businesses to the construction of these projects as well as offshore wind development. Also, it can operate green energy assets.
Bishop said the expected $US1 trillion in green energy investment expected over the next five years includes $US20 billion in Australia, $US150 billion in Europe, $US240 billion in the Americas and $US600 billion in Asia.
He did not mention the bank's troubled progress toward acquiring the Green Investment Bank in the United Kingdom.
This has been the subject of vehement opposition from UK politicians and activists.

Macquarie's recent track record in green energy investment includes Micheon, Mumbida, 8minuteenergy, Advanced Microgrid Solutions, Baltic2, Japan solar , MGT Power, Galloper, Taiwan Wind and Racebank.
Bishop says Macquarie has in the past and will continue to use its balance sheet to get deals done in the green energy space. He says green energy has the advantage of utilising a range of skills within Macquarie Capital including M&A Advisory, principal investment, technical and operational expertise.

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Michael Mann, Climate Scientist In The Crosshairs, Says Fake News Must Be Fought

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Climate change has long been the target of so-called fake news and its researchers can offer lessons for the wider society in how to handle deliberate misinformation, a leading US scientist said.
Michael Mann, a professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University who has been attacked by climate change deniers for developing in 1998 the so-called hockey stick graph revealing sharply higher global temperatures after 1900, said the spread of social media made it harder to tackle falsehoods before they gained traction.

Professor Michael Mann, a frequent target of US climate change deniers, is on a speaking tour of Australia. Photo: Steven Siewert

"It's not new to us but it's nonetheless alarming," Professor Mann said. "We're seeing the same opposition to facts and logic and objective discourse, and we're seeing that challenged in our entire body politic."

Dr Mann cited the weekend attack on climate science, a Daily Mail UK article claiming to have uncovered a whistleblower inside the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as one example. The person questioned the validity of the agency's 2015 finding there had been no pause in global warming in the 1990s onwards, a result that other scientists have recently confirmed.
The UK article drew rapid praise and dissemination from the Republican-controlled House Committee on Science, Space and Technology and other climate denier groups. But it also sparked a speedy debunking from leading scientists such as Gavin Schmidt, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who identified muddled use of timelines meant to support the notion of data manipulation.
Others, including a former colleague of the named "whistleblower", John Bates, outlined at length online why the attack on NOAA was flawed. Another report found NOAA's data closely matched other major agencies.
"This time you've seen a very rapid and concerted pushback against the disinformation and misinformation," said Professor Mann, who is on an Australian speaking tour including with the Sydney Environment Institute.

The world is moving closer to catastrophic peril, scientists say
Scientists have moved the hands of their metaphorical 'Doomsday' clock closer to midnight, warning of the increasing threats of nuclear weapons and climate change.

Such a response, though, may become more difficult in the US if new President Donald Trump and his advisers followed up on early signs they would be far more anti-science than the previous Republican president George W. Bush.
"What's different is the total antipathy towards both science and the environment that we see in the incoming administration," he said. "It takes courage to stand up when you have the biggest bully of them all with the pulpit of the White House. threatening scientists with findings he doesn't like."
Professor Mann, a pugnacious 51-year-old who has fronted numerous congressional hearings and faced death threats, said there was little point trying to break through "the politically partisan filter" in which about one-quarter to one-third of Americans screened out the reality and threat of human-triggered global warming.
"No amount of facts or evidence is going to change their views because fundamentally it comes from a place of ideology," he said. On the other hand, efforts should be directed to those who were genuinely confused by the debate stirred up by sceptics but who still had open minds.
One outcome of the attacks on science, though, was that scientists were more reluctant to speak out about the seriousness of the risks, or accepted censorship from state or federal governments in the thrall of vested interests, such as the fossil fuel industry.
"We have to resist them because otherwise the forces of denial prevail, and it grants them success in this effort to cow any voices they don't like into submission," he said.
Among the reasons for optimism were the growth of corporate technology giants, such as Google and Tesla, that increasingly underpin the US and wider economy.
"If you give into the pessimism and gloom too early, you don't have the chance to prevail in the end," Professor Mann said.

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Why Coal-Fired Power Handouts Would Be An Attack On Climate And Common Sense

The Guardian - Michael Slezak

The evidence suggests the push for government help is an attempt to squeeze money out of unwise investments made at the end of the mining boom

According to the International Energy Agency, OECD countries such as Australia need to shut down almost all of their coal-fired power stations by about 2035. Photograph: Dan Himbrechts/AAP

The recent coordinated push for new coal-powered electricity generators in Australia comes as the industry is on its last legs.
The intensified push for government handouts can be seen as a last-ditch attempt for the coal industry to squeeze some money out of the unwise investments it made at the end of the mining boom.
Here are the facts and figures that point towards that conclusion.
Australia joined 174 countries and the European Union in 2015, signing the Paris agreement. In doing so, Australia agreed to do its part in keeping the global temperature rise “well below” 2C.
It also commits countries to achieving net-zero emissions “in the second half of this century”.

That agreement, designed to stop runaway climate change, requires that all of Australia’s coal-fired generators close.
According to the International Energy Agency, OECD countries such as Australia need to shut down almost all of their coal-fired power stations by about 2035.
And the rest of the world will need to phase out coal power by 2050, it says.

With coal-fired power stations taking up to a decade to build, and designed to last 30 or 40 years, building new ones now is obviously inconsistent with those commitments.
In particular, Australia has committed to reducing its emissions by 26% below 2005 levels by 2030 – a commitment that is not strong enough to limit global warming at 2C and will need to be “ratcheted up”.
But the Australian government recently released projections of the country’s carbon emissions showing that current policies are going to cause emissions to rise to 2030, not drop, leaving Australia overshooting that commitment by a long way.

In producing those projections, the Department of Environment and Energy assumed that 2,000MW of coal capacity would retire between 2020 and 2030, and that the generation would be taken up by existing coal and some gas. (That’s equivalent to about two large power stations.)
If, instead, even more coal is built, the already rising emissions would get even worse.

Demand for coal for electricity has been dropping
Meanwhile, even before coal generators begin to close, the demand for their power has been dropping as renewables enter the mix.
According to data from the Office of the Chief Economist, the demand for coal-generated electricity has dropped by more than 15% in the past eight years.

Moreover, New South Wales budget papers show that the state government has recently downgraded its projections for domestic consumption by a whopping 20%.
Last year it estimated domestic consumption would be 30m tonnes a year for the next five years. This year it changed that estimate to just 24m tonnes each year.
In response to the new figures, the NSW Greens’ energy spokesman, Jeremy Buckingham, said: “Coal power has been in decline for nearly a decade and it is clear that no one is going to build a new coal-fired power station anywhere in Australia.
“Coal is the whale oil of the 21st century and should be phased out as rapidly as possible for the sake of the climate.”

New coal is the most expensive form of energy
While the proponents of coal talk about coal power being “cheap and reliable”, they are wrong on both fronts.
Coal is now the most expensive form of new power.
According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the cost of energy from a new coal power plant would be $134-$203/MWh.
That’s more expensive than wind, solar or highly efficient combined-cycle gas (costing $61-$118/MWh, $78-$140/MWh and $74-$90/MWh, respectively).

Levelised cost of new energy sources in Australia in 2017. (AUD/MWh) Photograph: Bloomberg New Energy Finance

Coal is not ‘reliable’ anymore
Whether or not an energy source is “reliable” depends on what you’re relying on it for.
The only people who still think we need the old-fashioned sort of “baseload power” that coal provides – power that is always running regardless of whether you need it – are those in the coal industry.
Coal power stations are slow to start up and so can’t respond efficiently to fluctuations in supply and demand.
Old energy systems were built assuming coal would always be running. It was the “baseload” energy and other forms of energy such as gas would switch on to satisfy the peaks in demand.
In a world where wind and solar energy can produce a lot of energy, but not constantly, baseload needs to be replaced with flexible power that can smooth out the spiky energy supply created by variable sources of renewable energy.
In the short term, that can be gas. But, in the longer term, to stop runaway climate change, that service will need to be supplied by renewable sources such as battery storage, hydro, solar thermal with storage or geothermal.
When competing with renewables, coal generators end up burning costly fuel, even when they are giving the electricity away for free.
Leonard Quong from Bloomberg New Energy Finance said when releasing a recent report: “In the grid of the not-too-distant future coal’s baseload operation becomes a curse, not a blessing.”
And Steven Holliday, the chief executive of the UK’s National Grid, recently said: “The idea of baseload power is already outdated.”

The coalmining industry has a backlog of projects it can’t get off the ground
According to the Office of the Chief Economist’s most recent Resources and Energy Major Projects Report, there are 37 major coalmining projects that are currently in the works.
However, that number has dropped since the last report a year ago and, in that time, no new projects have moved from along the pipeline from being “committed” to “completed”.
If all the projects still listed as being actively pursued were to reach completion, they would produce almost 300m tonnes of coal each year.
Adam Walters from Energy & Resource Insights said that list is a “salient reminder, if one is needed, that vast amounts of proposed new coal capacity, much with most approvals in place, remains waiting for a favourable market”.
He said most of those projects were begun during the mining boom, when commodity prices were high. With prices depressed, they’ve stayed on the books but are not progressing.
The push for rejuvenating the coal industry with government subsidies is the sort of thing that could help the industry get some of these projects back on track, Walters said.
The global coal industry recently saw its biggest player, Peabody, go bankrupt in the US. If companies are forced to take write-downs for these projects by admitting they will never go ahead, it could mean the end for some of the companies.
At his National Press Club address last week, Malcolm Turnbull appeared to point to this as the reason he is now looking to subsidise the most expensive and dirtiest form of energy, saying that it could help our mining industry. He said: “As the world’s largest coal exporter, we have a vested interest in showing that we can provide both lower emissions and reliable baseload power with state-of-the-art, clean, coal-fired technology.”

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