System will include 3.4m solar panels and 1.1m batteries, with operations set to begin by end of 2017
Billion dollar solar farm and battery project will be 'significant stimulus' for South Australia.
Photograph: Arena
A huge $1bn solar farm and battery project will be built and ready to
operate in South Australia's Riverland region by the end of the year.
The battery storage developer Lyon Group says the system will be the
biggest of its kind in the world, boasting 3.4m solar panels and 1.1m
batteries.
The company says construction will start in months and the project
will be built whatever the outcome of the SA government's tender for a
large battery to store renewable energy.
A Lyon Group partner, David Green, says the system, financed by
investors and built on privately owned scrubland in Morgan, will be a
"significant stimulus" for South Australia.
"The combination of the solar and the battery will significantly
enhance the capacity available in the South Australian market," he said.
Green said the project, along with a similar one it plans to build
near Roxby Downs, would have gone ahead whether or not Port Augusta's
Northern power station had closed in 2016.
"We see the inevitability of the need to have large-scale solar and
integrated batteries as part of any move to decarbonise," Green said.
"Any short-term decisions are only what I would call noise in the
process." The premier, Jay Weatherill,
commended the Lyon Group for the Riverland initiative, which will
enable 330MW of power generation and at least 100MW of storage.
"Projects of this sort, renewable energy projects, represent the
future," he said.
The premier said the company was among several to express interest in
building a 100MW battery as part of the South Australia government's
power plan announced this month, to be financed by a new $150m renewable
technology fund.
Weatherill said the government would consider the bidders over the coming weeks.
One of the morbidly fascinating aspects of climate change
is how much cognitive dissonance it generates, in individuals and
nations alike.
The more you understand the brutal logic of climate change
— what it could mean, the effort necessary to forestall it — the more
the intensity of the situation seems out of whack with the workaday
routines of day-to-day life. It’s a species-level emergency, but almost
no one is acting like it is. And it’s very, very difficult to
be the only one acting like there’s an emergency, especially when the
emergency is abstract and science-derived, grasped primarily by the
intellect.
This psychological schism is true for individuals, and it’s true for nations. Take the Paris climate agreement.
In Paris, in 2015, the countries of the world agreed (again)
on the moral imperative to hold the rise in global average temperature
to under 2 degrees Celsius, and to pursue "efforts to limit the
temperature increase to 1.5 degrees." To date, 62 countries, including
the United States, China, and India, have ratified the agreement.
Are any of the countries that signed the Paris agreement taking the actions necessary to achieve that target?
The actions necessary to hold to 2 degrees, much less 1.5
degrees, are simply outside the bounds of conventional politics in most
countries. Anyone who proposed them would sound crazy, like they were
proposing, I don’t know, a war or something.
So we say 2 degrees is unacceptable. But we don’t act like it is.
This cognitive dissonance is brought home yet again in a new report
from Oil Change International (in collaboration with a bunch of green
groups). It’s about fossil fuels and how much of them we can afford to
dig up and burn, if we’re serious about what we said in Paris. It’s
mostly simple math, but the implications are vast and unsettling.
Let’s start from the beginning.
Staying beneath 2 degrees means immediately and rapidly declining emissions
Scientists have long agreed that warming higher than 2
degrees will result in widespread food, water, weather, and sea level
stresses, with concomitant immigration, conflict, and suffering,
inequitably distributed.
But 2 degrees is not some magic threshold where tolerable
becomes dangerous. A two-year review of the latest science by the
UNFCCC found
that the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees means heat extremes,
water shortages, and falling crop yields. "The ‘guardrail’ concept, in
which up to 2°C of warming is considered safe," the review concluded,
"is inadequate."
The report recommends that 2 degrees be seen instead as
"an upper limit, a defense line that needs to be stringently defended,
while less warming would be preferable."
This changing understanding of 2 degrees matters, because
the temperature target we choose, and the probability with which we aim
to hit it, establishes our "carbon budget," i.e., the amount of CO2 we
can still emit before blowing it.
Many commonly used scenarios (including the International Energy Agency’s)
are built around a 50 percent chance of hitting 2 degrees. But if 2
degrees is an "upper limit" and "less warming would be preferable," it
seems we would want a higher than 50-50 chance of stopping short of it.
So the authors of the Oil Change report choose two
scenarios to model. One gives us a 66 percent chance of stopping short
of 2 degrees. The other gives us a 50 percent chance of stopping short
of 1.5 degrees. Here’s what they look like:
This image should terrify you. It should be on billboards.
As you can see, in either scenario, global emissions must
peak and begin declining immediately. For a medium chance to avoid 1.5
degrees, the world has to zero out net carbon emissions by 2050 or so —
for a good chance of avoiding 2 degrees, by around 2065.
After that, emissions have to go negative. Humanity has
to start burying a lot more carbon than it throws up into the
atmosphere. There are several ways to sequester greenhouse gases, from
reforestation to soil enrichment to cow backpacks, but the backbone of the envisioned negative emissions is BECCS, or bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration.
BECCS — raising, harvesting, and burning biomass for
energy, while capturing and burying the carbon emissions — is unproven
at scale. Thus far, most demonstration plants of any size attaching CCS
to fossil fuel facilities have been over-budget disasters. What if we can’t rely on it? What if it never pans out?
"If we want to avoid depending on unproven technology
becoming available," the authors say, "emissions would need to be
reduced even more rapidly."
You could say that. This is from climate researcher Glen Peters, based on a scenario with a 66 percent chance of avoiding 1.5 degrees.
Check out that middle graphic. If we really want to avoid
1.5 degrees, and we can’t rely on large-scale carbon sequestration,
then the global community has to zero out its carbon emissions by 2026.
Ten years from now.
There’s no happy win-win story about that scenario, no
way to pull it off while continuing to live US lifestyles and growing
the global economy every year. It would require immediate, radical
shifts in behavior worldwide, especially among the wealthy — a period of
voluntary austerity and contraction.
That seems unlikely. So instead, let’s assume copious
negative emissions technology will be available in the latter half of
the century, just to give ourselves the most room possible.
In those scenarios, how much of the world’s fossil fuels can we burn? How much more can we find and dig up?
That math is daunting.
Staying beneath 2 degrees means ceasing all new fossil fuel development
First, a quick tour of terminology. There are fossil fuel
resources (what is ultimately recoverable), reserves (what is known and
economically recoverable), and developed reserves (what is known and
recoverable in currently operating mines and fields). Here’s a handy
guide:
Now let’s compare some numbers. It’s pretty
straightforward. Roughly 95 percent of the carbon contained in fossil
fuels gets released into the atmosphere, so a ton dug up means a ton
emitted, more or less. [Correction 10/6/2016: This was
misleadingly phrased. To clarify: 95 percent of the carbon in fossil
fuels end up being burned; each ton of carbon burned yields roughly 3.6
tons of CO2.]
How do our carbon budgets compare with our fossil fuel reserves?
(Oil Change International)
Another terrifying image.
On the left is global developed fossil fuel reserves. Remember the terminology: That’s what we can likely get out of currently operating fields and mines.
On the right are our carbon budgets, for the 2 degree and 1.5 degree
scenarios respectively. Existing developed reserves exceed the 2 degree
budget, and oil and gas alone break the 1.5 degree budget.
If we are serious about what we said in Paris, then no
more exploring for new fossil fuels. No new mines, wells, or fossil fuel
infrastructure. And rapid, managed decline in existing fossil fuels.
We are betting our species’ future on our ability to bury carbon
An important note: The analysts at Oil Change assume that there will be BECCS from midcentury onward, but assume that CCS will not come online fast enough to substantially delay the decline of fossil fuels before then.
Obviously, that assumption could be wrong on either end.
CCS could develop faster than expected or turn out to be utterly
impractical and too costly on any time scale. It’s too soon to know.
What is clear is that we are betting our collective
future on being able to bury millions of tons of carbon. It’s a huge and
existentially risky bet — and maybe one out of a million people even
know it’s being made.
Humanity is in a desperate situation
There are modeling scenarios that show us hitting our
climate targets. But we should take no comfort from them. The fact is,
we have waited until perilously late to act on climate change, and our
range of options has narrowed. We face three choices:
1) In the event that massive carbon sequestration proves
infeasible, avoiding dangerous climate change will require an immediate
and precipitous decline in global carbon emissions over a decade or two.
Given that most present-day economic activity is driven by fossil
fuels, it would mean, at least temporarily, a net decline in economic
activity. No one wants to discuss this, except climate scientist Kevin
Anderson:
2) The second option is to immediately begin driving net
global emissions down, hitting zero some time midcentury or shortly
thereafter, and in the meantime develop the technology and
infrastructure to bury millions of tons of carbon from biomass. Anderson
explains just what that means:
The sheer scale of the BECCS assumption underpinning the [Paris]
Agreement is breathtaking – decades of ongoing planting and harvesting
of energy crops over an area the size of one to three times that of
India. At the same time the aviation industry anticipates fuelling its
planes with bio-fuel, the shipping industry is seriously considering
biomass to power its ships and the chemical sector sees biomass as a
potential feedstock. And then there are 9 billion or so human mouths to
feed.
3) The third option is to allow temperatures to rise 3 or even 4 degrees, which Anderson has called
"incompatible with an organized global community." Such temperatures
would bring suffering to hundreds of millions of people and
substantially raise the probability of runaway global warming that can’t
be stopped no matter what humans do. Runaway warming would, over the
course of a century or so, serve to render the planet uninhabitable.
Quite a legacy.
All of these are desperate options.
When climate activists say, "We have the technology; all we need is the political will," they act like that’s good
news. But think about the political will we need: to immediately cease
fossil fuel exploration, start shutting down coal mines, and put in
place a plan for managed decline of the fossil fuel industry; to double
or triple the global budget for clean energy research, development, and
deployment; to transfer billions of dollars from wealthy countries to
poorer ones, to protect them from climate impacts they are most
vulnerable to but least responsible for; and quite possibly, if it comes
to it, to limit the consumptive choices of the globe’s wealthiest and
most carbon-intensive citizens.
That level of political will is nowhere in evidence, in any country.
“World water use is already more than ten trillion tonnes a year.
While the human population has tripled since 1950, our water use has
grown sixfold,” says Julian Cribb, author of ‘Surviving the 21st
Century’ (Springer International 2017). The book focusses on the ten
greatest threats to the human future – one of which is resource scarcity
– and what we can do about them.
“Rising demand from megacities, mining, agriculture and the fossil
fuels sector in particular is combining with climate change to threaten
major water scarcities across the world’s subtropical, arid and
semi-arid regions. When this affects the food supply there will be vast
migrations of people – like the world has never seen before.”
Mr Cribb says that scientific studies show:
groundwater is
running out in practically every country in the world where it is used
to grow food, posing risks to food security in northern India, northern
China, Central Asia, the central and western US, and the Middle East.
Most of this groundwater will take thousands of years to replenish.
the icepack on high mountain chains is shrinking, emptying the rivers it once fed in practically every continent.
around the world, large lakes are drying up, especially in Central
Asia, China, sub-Saharan Africa and the South American Andes.
50,000 dams break up the world’s major rivers, sparking increased disputes over water between neighbouring countries
most of the world’s large rivers are badly polluted with chemicals, nutrients and sediment.
“The water crisis is sneaking up on humanity unawares. People turn on
the tap and assume clean, safe water will always flow. But the reality
is that supplies are already critical for 4.2 billion people - over half
the world’s population. During times of drought, megacities like Sao
Paulo, La Paz, Los Angeles, Santiago, 32 Indian cities and 400 Chinese
cities are now at risk.”
Among world leaders, Pope Francis recently warned that we could be
moving toward “a major world war for water”. He deliberately altered his
prepared speech to issue this caveat when addressing an international
seminar on the human right to water, hosted by the Vatican’s Pontifical
Academy of Sciences on Feb. 23 and 24, 2017.
Each of the last three UN secretaries-general – Ban Ki-Moon, Kofi
Annan and Boutros Boutros-Ghali – has warned of the dangers of world
water scarcity and of ‘water wars’ in the future. The world’s leading
scientific journal, Nature, issued a sobering warning of water scarcity
under climate change in December 2013.
“Other than in water circles, these warnings seem to have passed
largely unheeded by governments and the population at large,” Cribb
says. “The sense of urgency necessary to prevent a world water crisis is
not there.”
“Especially overlooked is the impact of water scarcity on the world
food supply. As cities and energy corporations combine to rob farmers of
the water needed to grow crops, the global irrigation sector is
stagnating at a time when it needs to double food output to meet rising
global demand for food. This will directly impact the availability and
price of food to city people everywhere.
“We commonly assume that the natural hydrological cycle of
evaporation and rainfall means there will always be ample water. In
reality, we pollute and misuse water so badly, it is often not safe for
drinking, domestic use or food production. Meanwhile rainfall, effluent
and wastewater in cities everywhere is wasted or discharged to the
ocean.
“The average citizen of Planet Earth uses 1,386 tonnes of water per
year, and the demand continues to rise every year, stressing supplies in
many cases to their limits,” Cribb says.
A study by NASA (2015) shows that a third of the world’s major
groundwater basins are stressed, and people are using the water without
knowing when it will run out.
A timeline maintained by Professor Peter Gleick of the World Water
Institute reveals the increasing frequency and tempo of disputes and
conflicts over water globally.
“The evidence points to serious trouble for the world over water
within the next ten years. The world focus of attention has been on
climate – rightly so, as it is an integral factor in water scarcity –
but the massive water crises that will disrupt food supplies and
dislodge huge populations are much more imminent than other major
climate impacts. Present policy does not reflect this.”
Mr Cribb says it is time to put world water science, technology and
management on a war footing, if the crises are to be averted. “Currently
humans spend US$1.8 trillion a year on new weapons. If we spent a tenth
of that on clean water technologies, fixing leaky supplies, recycling
city water, measuring availability, agricultural water efficiency,
effective water markets and controlling demand we could avoid the
conflicts which the Pope and UN heads foresee.
“Current evidence suggests most countries prefer war to water.”
"Surviving the 21st Century" (Springer International Publishing 2017)
is a powerful new book exploring the main risks facing humanity:
ecological collapse, resource depletion, weapons of mass destruction,
climate change, global poisoning, food crises, population and urban
overexpansion, pandemic disease, dangerous new technologies and
self-delusion – and what can and should be done to limit them.
