22/08/2017

Australian Wind Delivers More Record Low Prices, As Private Sector Piles In

RenewEconomy - 

Just three months after Origin Energy stunned the renewables industry with a record low power off-take deal for the 530MW Stockyard Hill Wind Farm in Victoria, AGL Energy has delivered more of the same, securing an off-take price of below $60/MWh through the sale of its 453MW Coopers Gap Wind Farm, between Kingaroy and Dalby in Queensland’s south-east.
AGL said on Thursday it had reached financial close on the Sunshine State wind farm – which will be one of Australia’s biggest, once completed in 2019 – with the $22 million sale of the project to the Powering Australian Renewables Fund.
The deal includes AGL writing a PPA for electricity and associated renewable energy certificates of less than $60/MWh for an initial five years, with an option to extend the agreement for another five years at the same – or even lower – price.
AGL Macarthur Wind Farm. Source: AGL Blog
In a media statement, AGL said it expected the project to cost a total of around $850 million, funded through a combination of PARF partners’ equity and a lending group including Westpac, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Societe Generale, DBS Bank, Mizuho Bank and ABN Amro.
The result is undoubtedly a good one for AGL, which created PARF just one year ago, in partnership with the Queensland Investment Corporation, with the goal of using it to underwrite 1,000MW of large-scale renewables to be operated and managed by AGL.
After making its first acquisition in November 2016, buying up the 102MW Nyngan and 52MW Broken Hills solar farms as seed assets, it has managed to keep growing its portfolio, adding the 200MW Silverton NSW wind farm in January 2017.
“More than 800 MW of projects have now been vended into PARF in its first 12 months of operation,” said AGL CEO Andy Vesey in comments on Thursday.
“The strong support we have received from our equity partners and lenders for these projects is testament to the readiness of the private sector to invest in Australia’s energy transformation.”
But Vesey – who recently attended a meeting of energy retail chiefs in Canberra to discuss the problem of Australia’s world-topping electricity prices – was keen to stress that public policy settings remained vital to maintain investor momentum.
“Certainty on energy policy, including the implementation of the recommendations of the Finkel Review, will enable more projects of this kind to go ahead and help place downward pressure on energy prices by increasing supply,” he said.
AGL COO Brett Redman said the Coopers Gap deal has demonstrated the effectiveness of the investment model, the falling price and increasing efficiency of renewables technology and the key role it had to play in Australia’s future energy market.
The project, which will be developed by GE and Catcon, will use 123 specially designed GE turbines to produce around 1,510,000MWh of energy annually – enough to power more than 260,000 average Australian homes.
For GE, the Coopers Gap contract will bring the global giant’s total installed wind capacity to almost 1.4GW in Australia by 2019, when the wind farm is expected to be completed. It is GE’s first wind project in Queensland.
“That’s the largest number of megawatts in a single year by any GE onshore wind country outside the United States, ever,” said Pete McCabe, GE’s global president and CEO of GE Renewable Energy’s Onshore Wind business.

McCabe, too, took the opportunity of this week’s news to call for strong and stable renewable energy policy in Australia.
“Australia is a great market for wind, and today is GE’s second largest region globally for our Renewables business. While we see lots of opportunities in Australia, we need to continue to have policy certainty to drive investment.”
GE said the successful formula for its bid for Cooper’s Gap included custom-designed 115-metre towers for the 3.8MW turbines, to get the optimal wind speed.
The engineering team – which included German wind engineering “boffin” Dr Joerg Winterfeldt – had to ensure that the design of the taller tower avoided vibration when the blades turn and also fit within the logistical puzzle of not being too heavy or wide to cross all the roads and bridges from port to site.

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The Trump Administration Just Disbanded A Federal Advisory Committee On Climate Change

Washington Post - Juliet Eilperin

President Trump speaks about the U.S. role in the Paris climate change accord in the Rose Garden of the White House in June. (AP)
The Trump administration has decided to disband the federal advisory panel for the National Climate Assessment, a group aimed at helping policymakers and private-sector officials incorporate the government’s climate analysis into long-term planning.
The charter for the 15-person Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment — which includes academics as well as local officials and corporate representatives — expires Sunday. On Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s acting administrator, Ben Friedman, informed the committee’s chair that the agency would not renew the panel.
The National Climate Assessment is supposed to be issued every four years but has come out only three times since passage of the 1990 law calling for such analysis. The next one, due for release in 2018, already has become a contentious issue for the Trump administration.
Administration officials are currently reviewing a scientific report that is key to the final document. Known as the Climate Science Special Report, it was produced by scientists from 13 different federal agencies and estimates that human activities were responsible for an increase in global temperatures of 1.1 to 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit from 1951 to 2010.
The committee was established to help translate findings from the National Climate Assessment into concrete guidance for both public and private-sector officials. Its members have been writing a report to inform federal officials on the data sets and approaches that would best be included, and chair Richard Moss said in an interview Saturday that ending the group’s work was shortsighted.
“It doesn’t seem to be the best course of action,” said Moss, an adjunct professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Geographical Sciences, and he warned of consequences for the decisions that state and local authorities must make on a range of issues from building road projects to maintaining adequate hydropower supplies. “We’re going to be running huge risks here and possibly end up hurting the next generation’s economic prospects.”
But NOAA communications director Julie Roberts said in an email Saturday that “this action does not impact the completion of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, which remains a key priority.”
While many state and local officials have pressed the federal government for more concrete guidance on how to factor climate change into future infrastructure, President Trump has moved in the opposite direction. Last week, the president signed an executive order on infrastructure that included language overturning a federal requirement that projects built in coastal floodplains and receiving federal aid take projected sea-level rise into account.
Seattle Mayor Ed Murray (D) said in an interview Saturday that the move to dissolve the committee represents “an example of the president not leading, and the president stepping away from reality.” An official from Seattle Public Utilities has been serving on the panel; with its disbanding, Murray said it would now be “more difficult” for cities to participate in the climate assessment. On climate change, Trump “has left us all individually to figure it out.”
Richard Wright, the past chair of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Committee on Adaptation to a Changing Climate, has been working with the committee to convey the importance of detailed climate projections in next year’s assessment. The society establishes guidelines that form the basis of building codes across the country, and these are based on a historical record that may no longer be an accurate predictor of future weather extremes.
“We need to work on updating our standards with good estimates on what future weather and climate extremes will be,” Wright said Saturday. “I think it’s going to be a serious handicap for us that the advisory committee is not functional.”
The committee was established in 2015, but its members were not appointed until last summer. They convened their first meeting in the fall. Moss said members of the group intend to keep working on their report, which is due out next spring, even though it now will lack the official imprimatur of the federal government. “It won’t have the same weight as if we were issuing it as a federal advisory committee,” he said.
Other Trump Cabinet officials have either altered the makeup of outside advisory boards or suspended these panels in recent months, though they have not abolished the groups outright. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt decided to replace dozens of members on one of the agency’s key scientific review boards, while Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is “reviewing the charter and charge” of more than 200 advisory boards for his department.

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Coral Bleaching: Researchers Struggle To Find Anywhere In Pacific Ocean Untouched

ABC News - Nadia Daly

The vessel Tara is studying how coral reefs in the Pacific are adapting to climate change. (Supplied: Tara expedition)
Scientists aboard a French research ship say they have been shocked to see the extent of coral bleaching across the Pacific Ocean, just halfway through their two-year voyage around the world.
The vessel Tara has been sailing around the globe for more than a decade to study the effects of climate change on the ocean.
Its current expedition will cross 11 time zones and span 100,000 kilometres from Europe to Asia and back again, and the group claims it is the biggest study of this scale across coral reefs.
The focus is how coral reefs in the Pacific are adapting to climate change, and on a stopover in Sydney, captain Nicolas De La Brosse said the extent of damage is already deeply troubling.
Captain Nicolas De La Brosse said there was even coral bleaching in areas far from heavy pollution. (ABC News: Nadia Daly)
"What we've seen in really isolated spots like Samoa for example, even though it's very far away from [developed] countries with pollution, we struggled to find any coral life," he said.
Mr De La Brosse said nowhere was immune to the effects of global warming.
"It doesn't matter where you are in the Pacific, coral is starting to bleach."
He said data was still being collected and analysed and the final results would be released at the end of 2019.
The ship is not just a floating science lab — it is a temporary home for 16 people, including engineers, scientists, sailors, crew and, of course, a cook who whips up French dishes and sometimes, local favourites.
"When we arrived in Australia I made a banana cake because I know in Australia you have this cake," chef Dominique Limbour said.
Spending months at a time at sea together in the 26-metre vessel can be a challenge.
"We have to work all together. You can't argue with someone else — you have to be pretty easygoing," Mr De La Brosse said.
After its Sydney stop the ship will head north to study the extent to which coral in the Great Barrier Reef is adapting to climate change.
The vessel, which has been sailing around the globe for more than a decade, docked at Darling Harbour. (ABC News: Nadia Daly)
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