Lethal Heating: 05/10/17

10/05/2017

Australian Push May Open More Doors For Batteries On Power Grids

Reuters - Sonali Paul

Battery makers worldwide are watching to see whether Australia's most wind power-dependent state can keep the lights on by installing grid-scale batteries by December, which could help drive the growth of renewable energy across Australia and Asia.
A decade-long political stalemate in Australia over energy and climate policy has effectively led to power and gas shortages and soaring energy prices threatening industry and households.
If batteries help solve Australia's problems by storing surplus electricity generated by wind and solar power, countries like Indonesia, the Philippines and Chile, could follow suit.
"I call South Australia the 'perfect storm' opportunity for energy storage," said Ismario Gonzalez, global sales director for AES Energy Storage, an arm of U.S. firm AES Corp, which has installed or is working on battery projects in seven countries, including Australia.

South Australia's ambitious energy plan
Premier Jay Weatherill announces a six-point plan to ensure South Australia's energy future. (Courtesy ABC News 24)

The more dependent the grid is on intermittent sources like wind and solar, the more flexible the back-up sources need to be. That's the appeal of battery storage. It can be switched on and off easily, responding faster than a gas peaking plant.
The state of South Australia, where wind and rooftop solar make up 44 percent of power sources, urgently needs to install big batteries after suffering blackouts over the past year.
It has little back-up as coal-fired power plants in the state have shut due to the rapid expansion of renewable energy. That has made it more dependent on power from neighboring Victoria, its only link to Australia's national electricity market.
The state government plans to spend A$150 million ($115 million) supporting the installation of 100 megawatt hours of battery capacity this year, which would be the world's second-largest battery system behind one installed by AES for California's San Diego Gas & Electric Co [SDGE.UL] in February.
South Australia has yet to name a shortlist of bidders, after having received 90 expressions of interest from more than 10 countries. So by the time it signs contracts, the winner or winners will have only six months to meet a December deadline.
At the same time, the state of Victoria is tendering to support construction of 100 MWh of battery capacity to be delivered in two stages by 2018.
AES says lessons learned in South Australia could be applied in Victoria, which is facing the loss some coal-fired power, and elsewhere, like Chile, where solar power is growing rapidly and will need to be combined with energy storage to avoid outages.

Costs dropping fast
Stiff competition for the two state battery projects, with all the big makers like South Korea's Samsung SDI and LG Chem, Elon Musk's Tesla Inc and U.S. firm Greensmith Energy in the running, will help drive down prices for energy storage, another factor that should speed the spread of batteries along with wind and utility-scale solar.

Elon Musk is in the running for the SA project. Photo: TED.com

"Combined renewable energy generation and storage solutions are becoming genuine competitors with fossil fuel base load generation. This will be the real game changer," said Josh Carmody, head of Australia for Equis Energy.
Equis Energy, a fund set up by former Macquarie bankers to invest in renewable energy projects around Asia, is building a large-scale solar farm in South Australia and is seeking state funding for batteries at the project.
Carmody said safety and performance problems as well as cost had limited the use of batteries in the energy supply system to date, but those challenges were being overcome rapidly.
For battery providers, the money making opportunity will come not only from energy storage but crucial extra services to manage voltage and frequency on grids, several energy storage executives said.
"Projects such as those in South Australia and California demonstrate that there is now significant growth to come in the grid support sector," said Bruce Cole, East Penn's senior vice president, industrial sales.
Costs have come down 90 percent over the past 10 years, AES Energy Storage vice president Brian Perusse said. Industry officials estimated 100 MWh of battery capacity could be supplied for $700 to $1,000 per kilowatt hour.
That's much higher than an offer made by Elon Musk on social media to supply batteries to South Australia for $250 per kilowatt hour. However that figure probably didn't include costs of equipment needed to hook the system up, like transformers, said AES's Gonzalez.
"The analogy I like to use is: that's a Tesla car with no wheels and no battery, no interconnection," Gonzalez said.
Asked for a response, a Tesla spokesman in Australia referred to the cost estimate tweeted by Musk and had nothing to add.

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Global Warming Could Accelerate Towards 1.5℃ If The Pacific Gets Cranky

The Conversation - Ben Henley | Andrew King | Malte Meinshausen

The tropical Pacific has a large say in how fast the world warms. GTS Productions/Shutterstock.com

Global warming is rapidly approaching 1.5℃, but according to our new research, conditions in the Pacific Ocean over the coming decades will determine how fast we get there.
In a paper published today in Geophysical Research Letters, we use climate model simulations to quantify how fast global average temperatures will reach 1.5℃ above the pre-industrial average – one of the crucial benchmarks of the Paris Climate Agreement.
The Paris deal calls for governments to pursue the aim of keeping global warming below 1.5℃. But our results suggest that we could hit that level before the end of the next decade if the Pacific Ocean moves into a state we have nicknamed the “cranky uncle” for its effects on global temperatures.

Faster warming
Global temperature records have tumbled in recent years: 2016 was the world’s hottest year on record, the third record-breaking year in a row.
Although human emissions of greenhouse gases are the primary driver of these rising temperatures, there are other factors at play. The climate system is an unwieldy beast, containing a variety of erratic feedbacks and complex mechanisms.
One mechanism with which many people are familiar is El Niño and La Niña, a see-sawing of warm waters across the tropical Pacific every two to seven years. Climate scientists were not at all surprised to see record global temperatures in 2015 and 2016, because of the large El Niño that ended last year.
Another, lesser-known cycle in the Pacific Ocean is the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO). Since El Niño and La Niña are Spanish for the “the boy” and “the girl”, we have nicknamed their slower-moving relatives the “cranky uncle”, El Tío, and the “kind auntie”, La Tía.
Like El Niño, warm phases of the IPO provoke a temporary acceleration in global temperature, but over much longer periods, lasting between 10 and 30 years.
The cool La Tía phase of the IPO since around 2000, and its associated slowdown in the rate of global warming, may have lulled us into a false sense of security.
Scientists are now concerned that the next El Tío phase could be on its way, which might sustain the relatively rapid global warming seen over the past few years.

Our research
With this in mind, we decided to investigate how soon we are likely to surpass the 1.5℃ level, both with and without the influence of the IPO.
We used climate model simulations to project global temperatures. The models show temperatures varying significantly from year-to-year and decade-to-decade, as we see in the real world. The centre point of the model projections indicates that the 1.5℃ level would be reached just before 2030, with 75% of the model projections crossing 1.5℃ before 2032.
With the recent slowdown period in mind, we wondered how the next IPO phase, El Tío or La Tía, would influence global temperature. We found that the rate at which global average temperature approaches the 1.5℃ level is influenced significantly by the IPO.

The influence of the IPO on global temperatures towards 1.5°C. Author supplied

El Tío phases are responsible for an acceleration in global temperature. The centre point of the El Tío projections passes the 1.5℃ level in around 2027, and a quarter of our projections pass 1.5℃ as early as 2024.
For La Tía, the projected rate of warming is reduced, and the centre year is 2031 – the kind auntie gives us a little more breathing space.

So, is the Paris agreement a failure?
No. The Paris agreement is a critically important step in the right direction.
Although we will soon surpass the 1.5℃ warming benchmark, we still have a chance to turn around and head back down the hill. But to reduce global temperatures, we need not only to reduce our net emissions to zero, but to move swiftly into net negative carbon emissions territory. That means that overall we will need to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, not add more.
But we are a very long way from that point. There is a lot of work to do.
The implications of swiftly rising global temperature are many and varied. Our group and other scientists have quantified the changing likelihood of extreme events such as heatwaves, coral bleaching, droughts and floods.
For the next few decades we have to accept that we are likely to see more extreme events as the effect of continued rising global temperatures takes its toll.
We can’t hide from our cranky uncle, but we can limit climate change and its impacts. Although the political will for evidence-based climate policy seems to be waning in some quarters, the message from climate scientists has not changed:
We need swift global cooperation to dramatically reduce atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.

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Planet Could Breach 1.5c Warming Limit Within 10 Years, But Be Aware Of Caveats

The Guardian - Graham Readfearn

A new study shows how a switch in a major climate system could accelerate global temperatures to a 1.5C limit, but some scientists are challenging the assumptions

The 2015 United Nations climate talks in Paris delivered a historic climate agreement. Photograph: Francois Mori/AP

In the Brazilian city of São Paulo, more than 80 experts, including dozens of climate scientists, gathered back in March for a giant planning meeting
As part of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the group from 39 different countries were starting their work on a major report that will tell governments and policy makers what kind of impacts they can expect when global warming reaches 1.5C.
That report is scheduled to be ready in late September 2018 and will assess in detail what’s known about the impacts 1.5C of global warming could have on societies, ecosystems and how it will affect efforts to reduce poverty.
But new research just published in a leading scientific journal is suggesting that just eight years after that report is published, the world might have already reached that 1.5C target – or at least one definition of it (some senior scientists disagree with some of the assumptions in the paper - read on for those important caveats).
Published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the research looks closely at the influence of a mechanism in the climate known as the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO).

“The IPO is like the long-term version of El Nino – it’s like El Nino’s uncle,” says Dr Ben Henley, of the University of Melbourne and the lead author of the research.
When heat gets trapped in deeper layers of the Pacific Ocean, this is known as a negative phase of the IPO.
Since about the year 2000, the IPO hit this negative phase, which tends to slow down the rise in global temperatures that’s being caused by humans burning too many fossil fuels and cutting down forests.
But around 2014, scientists say that this IPO started to shift, possibly towards a positive phase that would act like an accelerator on global warming.
Henley and his colleague Dr Andrew King, also at the University of Melbourne, wanted to know how quick global temperatures might reach 1.5C, relative to where they were between 1850 and 1900.
According to the paper, the “rate that global temperatures approach the 1.5C level is likely to be significantly quicker, or slower, depending on the IPO.”
After using the latest computer models of the climate and allowing for the added greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, Henley and King looked to see what the coming decades have in store depending on the phase of the IPO.
If the IPO turns positive, then the average across the models shows that global temperatures hit 1.5C in around 2026. If the IPO was to turn negative, then this delays the 1.5C threshold by five years or so.
Henley told me: “Policy makers have to aware of just how quickly we are approaching this level. But that doesn’t mean that the target is not a sensible thing to have.
“While we might overshoot 1.5C, stabilising global temperatures at that level still remains a worthwhile goal.”

Past inaction means we will exceed 1.5C no matter what we do. The key issue, however, is what we do next.
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg

The paper also gives other projections for breaching 1.5C based on different assumptions and different models.
For example, if you wait until global temperatures go above 1.5C over a five-year average period, then some models suggest that if the IPO stays negative for longer, the 1.5C breach doesn’t happen until around the year 2040 (but this is an outlier in the paper).
Associate Professor Julie Arblaster, a climate scientist at Monash University, and who was not involved in the research, told me the research “highlights the role of natural or internal variability in the climate system in hitting climate targets.”
Arblaster pointed to one study published last year in the journal Nature Communications that suggested the switch to a positive phase of the IPO might have already happened.
She added: “Other things also may also impact the timing of course, such as a large volcanic eruption, but this study helps by providing an estimate of the contribution of the climate system’s internal variability in hitting that target.”
Henley told me a key motivation for doing the sums on the 1.5C target was to help policymakers understand what kind of timeframe they have to work with.
When countries were negotiating for a new global deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions and slow the impacts of climate change, many smaller and less developed countries were worried that a 2C global warming target was setting the bar way too high. Some scientists also shared this concern.
So, there was a push to have a 1.5C target included in the text of the deal.
Article 2 of the Paris Agreement states that countries agree to keep global warming “well below 2C above pre-industrial levels” but to also pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C… recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.”

Wrong assumptions?
Dr Bill Hare is an Australian climate scientist and founder of scientific consultancy group Climate Analytics. Hare is a veteran of the United Nations climate talks.
In an email, Hare said the paper showed “that very ambitious near-term mitigation is required to limit warming to 1.5°C and this analysis underscores this.”
But Hare and his colleagues also had some reservations about the paper’s conclusions.
Hare said the IPCC’s interpretation of when you can say that 1.5C target is breached was based on much longer time periods than the Henley and King paper.
He also said the assumption in the paper that greenhouse gas emissions would continue to rise under a “business as usual” scenario didn’t reflect how countries were taking action under the Paris agreement. Using more optimistic scenarios could bring temperatures down by as much as 0.2C by 2030.
Dr Joeri Rogelj, of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, also pointed out that the convention in UN climate negotiations was to refer to targets in terms of longer time frames of 20 or 30 years.
He thought the paper’s assumptions that emissions would remain high were “not compatible” with the agreements countries had made in Paris, but he did agree that the paper demonstrated how urgent the issue was.
Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, is a senior lead author on a chapter of the special report that will look at the impacts of 1.5C global warming on humans and natural environments.
Hoegh-Guldberg, who was not speaking from an IPCC perspective, told me the research would “wake some people up to the fact that exceeding 1.5C will happen within the next decade, give or take a couple of years.”
“One unknown that’s associated with the study is the effect that anthropogenic climate change might be having on these long-term climate patterns themselves. Some research groups have provided compelling evidence that patterns associated with El Nino, for example, may actually be amplified by warming.”
He added: “Many scientists have increasingly pointed to the unmanageable ecological and human impacts as average global surface temperatures exceed 1.5°C, and great economic and environmental costs that are likely to be associated.
“Unfortunately, past inaction means that we will exceed 1.5C no matter what we do. The key issue, however, is what we do next.
“People speak of overshoots as being one of the scenarios that we are likely to face. This is not an escape clause as the overshoot is likely to be catastrophic.”

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