Last week, I told my dad I was going to speak outside the Indian high
commission at an anti-Adani rally against the proposed Carmichael mine.
Soon after, he called me up and he was not happy.
My parents are
Indian migrants and I am a young, second-generation, Indian-Australian
woman. My father reminded me that there are 300 million people living
without electricity in India, and of the times we ourselves were without
power in our ancestral village and our home in the coastal city of
Visakhapatnam.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull met India's Adani Group founder and chairman Gautam Adani in Delhi on Monday. Photo: Mick Tsikas
He's right: energy poverty is an obstacle to inclusive development in
India, and difficult to empathise with here in Australia, where we
generally have the privilege of energy security.
But the coal from
Adani's Carmichael mine is not the answer for those living without
electricity. It will further pollute the air they breathe and the water
they drink. It will cause dangerous climate change and extreme weather
that always affects the poorest first. Australia's coal will make their
lives harder in the long run.
A Stop Adani protest in Melbourne in December. Photo: Wayne Taylor
That's why I decided to speak out. I believe that, if the Australian
government or Adani were genuinely serious about extending our energy
security to India, they would be generous with technology transfer, or
provide untied funding to help India's renewables sector grow. Instead,
we face the potential construction of what would be Australia's largest
coal mine, and the prospect of irreversible environmental degradation to
our climate, groundwater and the Great Barrier Reef.
Adani's
project is a terrible idea. The company has a record of serious
environmental and human rights violations in several countries,
including India I don't trust it to keep the Australian environment
safe.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is offering Adani $1 billion of
public money as a subsidised loan for this project, though India doesn't
even want our coal! Just last week, India's Energy Minister, Piyush
Goyal, said India didn't want to keep buying foreign coal and wanted
instead to transition to a renewable-energy economy. This is the safer,
cleaner and more sustainable solution to India's energy deficit, and the
only one that doesn't harm the global environment.
Closer to
home, more than two-thirds of Australians polled say they don't want the
mine to be built either. This year alone, more than 140 "Stop Adani"
groups have formed, and the national Stop Adani roadshow sold out at
every major city along the east coast, gathering about 4000 passionate
people (500 in Canberra!) who are concerned about the mine and don't
want it to go ahead.
The Carmichael mine is bad for Australia, for
India and for the global climate. The rest of the world is getting
smarter about climate change and stepping away from coal. Australia
shouldn't embarrass itself by taking a huge step backwards.
Technologies that use gels, liquids, and molten silicon or salt could all claim a slice of the growing renewable energy storage market
Solar power plants don’t produce energy when the sun doesn’t shine, but
renewable energy storage batteries are becoming more competitive.
Photograph: Tim Phillips Photos/Getty Images
Between the political bickering following a spate of blackouts in South Australia and the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk tweeting that he had a fix, and then the South Australian government announcing that it will build a grid-connected battery storage facility, interest in renewable energy storage has never been higher.
While lithium ion batteries sold by Tesla and others are perhaps the
most widely known storage technology, several other energy storage
options are either already on the market, or are fast making their way
there.
All are hoping to claim a slice of what, by all indications, will be a
very large pie. The Australian Energy Market Operator forecasts that more than 1.1m new battery storage systems will be installed in Australian households by 2035. And, according to a 2015 report by the Climate Council, battery storage capacity is expected to grow 50-fold in under a decade.
“The market for storage is huge,” says Kevin Moriarty, the executive chairman of 1414 Degrees,
an Adelaide-based thermal storage company hoping to win South
Australia’s 100MW storage system tender. The South Australian system
will be the largest in Australia so far but Moriarty describes it as “a
drop in the ocean” compared with what will be needed as Australia
transitions away from carbon-dioxide emitting fossil fuels.
The need for energy storage solutions is the natural consequence of
an energy grid that has an increasing amount of renewable energy
sources. Solar power plants don’t produce energy when the sun doesn’t shine and windfarms grind to a halt when the wind doesn’t blow.
At the grid level, the resulting fluctuations in supply, combined
with demand that can rapidly spike during hot weather, for example, can
play havoc with the steady 50Hz electricity supply needed to power
everything from microwaves to factory production lines.
Traditionally, fossil fuel-powered turbines are used to rapidly respond to load changes. If switched on when needed, electricity output ramps up or down so that there is enough electricity, at the right frequency, to supply demand. Renewable energy
storage systems, which include batteries and thermal storage systems,
run from small household units to power plant and grid-scale
technologies. What they aim to do is enable electricity to be released
into the system when it is needed – so-called load shifting – rather
than only when solar collectors or wind turbines are operating.
“Storage
allows you to spread out the load and, if you can do that, you no
longer need the big so-called base-load generators,” Moriarty says.
In thermal storage systems, renewable electricity or electricity
purchased from the grid at off-peak rates is used to heat a material to a
high temperature. 1414 Degrees uses molten silicon – an abundant and
cheap element that is the main component of sand – that is heated to its
melting point of 1414 degrees. The stored heat can then be used at a
later time to generate electricity – using turbines – that is fed back
into the grid. It can also release heat to be used in district heating
systems for hot water or space heating.
The company has developed 10MW or 200MW systems, which can store heat
for up to two weeks, although they are designed to be able to
constantly charge and discharge according to demand. Unlike batteries,
which have a finite number of charge/discharge cycles, the molten
silicon can be used indefinitely and can be recycled when the units
reach the end of their 20-year service life.
Other thermal storage systems take heat directly from the sun to heat
storage materials. In these systems, concentrating solar collectors –
rather than photovoltaic cells – are used to heat a liquid that can then
heat a storage medium. Pilot scale facilities in Jemalong and Lake
Cargelligo, both in central west NSW, use molten salt or graphite, respectively, to store heat.
According to Prof Frank Bruno, leader of the Thermal Energy
Storage Group at the University of South Australia, one of the
advantages of thermal storage is the ability to operate at high
temperatures, unlike batteries, whose components suffer once
temperatures go above about 50 degrees.
The other advantage is price. “Storing energy as thermal energy is
much cheaper that battery storage,” says Bruno, although photovoltaic
power plants currently out compete concentrated solar collectors.
The Australian Solar Thermal Research Initiative,
of which Bruno is a member, is trying to bring the cost of concentrated
solar collectors down, which would make integrated solar thermal
storage systems more price competitive overall.
Battery makers are concentrating on trying to solve some of the key
limitations of lithium ion batteries. One of those is the scant supply
of raw materials required to make them, a supply that is unlikely to
meet future energy storage demands, according to Prof Thomas Maschmeyer,
co-founder of the University of Sydney spin-off company Gelion.
Gelion batteries use zinc and bromide, elements with more stable and
abundant supplies than the lithium and cobalt of lithium ion batteries.
Unlike lithium ion batteries, which will become more costly as demand
for raw materials outstrips supply, the price of Gelion’s batteries will
only decrease with increased production scales.
Gelion’s technology is based on a tweak of zinc/bromide chemistry – which is already used in Redflow
batteries – that means the battery operates with a gel rather than a
liquid. The resulting batteries look and work much like a lithium ion
battery, but with greater heat tolerance. Gelion is currently raising
funds to get their prototype into commercial production.
While there’s currently no front-runner to replace lithium ion
batteries, according to those working across the range of storage
devices available, there will be plenty of options ranging from
household electricity storage, to grid-level systems like that proposed
for South Australia.
“The market’s big enough and the needs are varied,” says Moriarty, so “there’s a place for all of them.”
A Sydney housing estate is streets ahead when it comes to energy efficiency.
Fairwater is a new geo-thermal cooled mini-suburb near Blacktown. Photo: Wolter Peeters
During the peak of last summer's heat, an energy experiment the size
of a mini suburb involving hundreds of new homes in western Sydney was
under way.
With temperatures reaching 45 degrees for three days in
a row, residents of the Fairwater estate going up at Blacktown relied
on pipes to pump excessive heat as much as 90 metres under their homes
to stay cool.
The geothermal technology itself is not revolutionary but Fairwater
is the first housing estate to introduce it at scale in Australia.
Working
much like modern airconditioners that can warm and cool, the
Australian-made heat pumps use the temperature difference between the
air and the ground to extract or reject heat.
Since the temperature below that area of Sydney's west barely budges
from about 22 degrees all year round, the earth can serve as a heat dump
during summer or a source of warmth in winter. The challenge is to make
it at least as efficient as standard products on the market.
A $1
million drill, more commonly found on a mining site, drills a simple
hole before any of the other construction work begins on the homes.
Later, a copper loop containing refrigerant is added, with developers
Frasers Property promising energy savings of as much as 60 per cent
compared with regular airconditioning.
"We're hoping it will exceed that total [saving]," Ray Baksmati, the Fairwater development director, said. "The payback is about five years."
The
extra engineering required adds about $3000-$5000 to costs to houses
ranging from about $650,000 to more than $1 million. Geothermal costs
for two-bedroom houses are lower because pipes only go down 60 metres
through the mudstone compared with 90 metres for four-bedders.
Mini suburb cooled by geothermal technology Homes in Blacktown's Fairwater estate rely on pipes to pump excessive heat deep underground to stay cool.
Mr Baksmati
said Frasers worked for more than four years with QPS Geothermal, the
drillers, and local airconditioner maker Actron Air to hone the process.
The developer is now doing "real life testing" to see how systems
performed.
Early response
A straw poll by Fairfax Media earlier this month found experiences ran hot and cold.
Fairwater construction manager Adam Chymiak with the rig that drills the geothermal pipelines. Photo: Wolter Peeters
Sid and Nimarta Banga said they were "mostly positively exuberant"
since moving into Fairwater before summer's height. Their electricity
bill came in at $260 for about eight weeks.
"You can't even feel
like the airconditioning is working" because it's so quiet, Mr Banga
said, adding "it works really quickly".
Fairwater residents have mixed views of the success of geothermal so far. Photo: Peter Hannam
Around the corner, Manvinder and Deepti Verma were also glad their
three-month electricity bill came in at $450 for their four-bedroom
house. "We were expecting a lot more," Ms Verma said.
The
geothermal unit "should pay for itself in three or four years," Mr Verma
said, adding that "very few people know about this system".
Fairwater development residents Sid and Nimarta Banga in front of their new home. Photo: Wolter Peeters
The equipment, though, has not been without glitches, with a portion
of the Vermas' street tripping for several days. The fault left them –
and their 15 month-old child – without cooling for two "unhappy" nights
and a day during the heat peak.
Marc Crook, who rents in another
street, is not happy, either. His summer's power bill came to $1385 and
the system struggled so much to keep his house cool he resorted to
spraying water on the coolant pipes to try to cool them.
"They
really don't cope at all" once the mercury climbs above the low-30s, he
said. "We'd be lucky to get it 24 degrees inside" even with the
thermostat turned down to 16 degrees.
Mr Crook, who works in the
boiler industry, said it stood to reason that "the harder and further
you have to pump something, the more heat you're going to generate at
the pump", reducing efficiency and effectiveness.
'Great achievement'
Adam Chymiak, Fairwater's construction manager, said that while there
may be teething troubles at individual sites the overall outcome was "a
great achievement".
The energy efficiency of the homes, which
include fans in most rooms and LED lightning, meant the estate "lessened
the demand on the overall grid" especially at peak times, he said.
Fairwater is also the first community in NSW to be awarded a 6 Star Green Star Rating for sustainability.
Fairwater is planning to monitor and make public the performance of the geothermal systems, Mr Baksmati said.
Graham
Morrison, an emeritus professor at the University of NSW said that
geothermal could be an attractive option provided it delivered the
promised energy savings: "Sixty per cent is quite OK – technically, it's
close to the average of competing products."
Frasers is examining
rolling out geothermal at its Edmondson estate near Liverpool, and says
other developers are looking at the technology for their large sites
too.
Professor Morrison said geothermal may work better for cooler
climates, such as Melbourne, where heating is a bigger part of the
annual energy bill. "Generally, the colder the climate is worse for
solar [energy] but better for heat pumps," he said.
For Nimarta
Banga, the benefit of installing geothermal in new homes may be that
residents of a whole community start with lower energy use that may
otherwise have been the case – whether they are aware of it or not.
"For us, it was a blanket package," she said. "No one will pay out of their pocket for [geothermal]."
'Living building'
Frasers Property is involved in another pioneering venture, the $115 million Burwood Brickwoods project in Melbourne's east.
The
centrepiece of the mixed retail and housing project over 20.5 hectares
on a former industrial site is the shopping centre. The developers are
seeking the first "Living Building" certificate issued for a retailer by
the International Living Future Institute.
The US-based group,
which has certified about 360 projects worldwide, demands projects
achieve at least net-zero energy, waste and water, and avoid a range of
harmful "red-listed" materials from lead and cadmium to chemicals that
don't break down in the environment.
Frasers will aim to generate
105 per cent of the energy used by the site, deploying as much as 3
megawatts of solar panels and batteries to meet its own needs and to
export to neighbours or recharge customers' electric cars. Geothermal
technology is not being considered as part of the project.
A
2000-square-metre farm, the largest of its kind in Australia, will
supply vegetables and even poultry from within the retail site.
"It's called a challenge for a reason," Amanda Sturgeon, chief executive of the institute, said.
Peri
Macdonald, executive general manager for retail at Frasers, said
meeting the building's ambitious sustainability goals will boost the
retail portion's cost by about $12 million to $60 million.
"It's
really going to push the envelope," Mr Macdonald said, adding the extra
outlay is worthwhile because shoppers would be expected to linger longer
– and spend more – in the more sustainable setting.
Tenants, such as Woolworths, have indicated a willingness to meet the higher energy and other standards.
"We don't expect it will change the tenant mix," Mr Macdonald said.
