CleanTech has arrived. The phenomenal rise of clean technology is
revolutionizing the energy industry all around the globe. Both the
private sector and governments are pointing the way and leading the
transition away from fossil fuels.
CleanTech – Battery Costs Dropping to $100/KWH by 2019 A Better Battery
The cost of lithium-ion battery storage could be on track to fall
from $10,000 per kilowatt-hour in the early 1990s to $100/kWh in 2019
reports The Energy Mix. This dizzying cost reduction would make wind, solar and storage projects cost-competitive with coal and natural gas.
The Energy Mix refers to a University of California/TU Munich study published
in the journal Nature Energy which claims that the evolution of battery
technologies is still in its infancy. “There may be room for a number
of different battery chemistries that all provide different services on
an evolving grid, some providing voltage regulation and frequency
control, and others serving long duration outages and providing back-up
for buildings and communities,” the study stated.
Battery research and development is struggling to keep up to the
dizzying growth of cleantech. But in a recent announcement, Bill Joy of
Ionic Materials (a battery-tech company) claims to have found the “Jesus” battery that
“combines the advantages of the familiar alkaline batteries we buy at
the drugstore (cheap, safe, and reliable) with those of the more
expensive, fire-prone lithium batteries in our computers and phones
(powerful, rechargeable, and more earth-friendly).”
Ionic’s new approach is a big step to cheaper, safer, and more efficient batteries that will not only power our devices and vehicles, but also enable an “energy internet” based on renewable sources ~ Bill Joy.
Clean Tech – Electric Vehicles (EVs)
Photo source: Pixabay, CCO Public Domain
The growth trend for electric vehicles in Europe is remarkable, up 41 percent in July compared to the same month in 2016. The upturn is being led by the Renault Zoe, the Nissan Leaf and the BMWi3.
Zachary Shahan, writing for CleanTechnica, traces the evolution of the EV to its final stage
– the mass market stage. Other ground-breaking technologies such as
large screen televisions, cellular phones, washing machines went through
the “come on, get real”, “it could never be a practical option” and
“costs will never come down” phases on their way to take over the
market. With the Tesla Model 3 now being rolled out, “you can get a
Porsche-like car at an average car price… while cutting any guilt about
pollution, global warming and oil dependence,” says Shahan.
CleanTech – India Goes Viral on Solar
Image source : AdobeStock, Below2°C
The Indian government plans to reach 100 gigawatts of installed solar capacity
by March 2022. To date, more than 67 gigawatts of solar power projects
have been announced. This year alone (2017), the country will see an addition of 10.5 gigawatts of solar energy.
Worldwide, the solar sector continues its spectacular surge which will reach a global installed capacity of 390 gigawatts by the end of 2017
reports The Energy Mix. “At that point, writes Greentech Media, “solar
PV capacity will rival nuclear. By 2022, it could more than double
nuclear capacity. ”
India is in the midst of the “largest energy transformation project in the world” organizers of the Vienna Energy Forum declared,
while introducing the keynote speaker, India’s Energy Minister Piyush
Goyal, reports Stephen Leahy in his May 22 National Geographic article.
India’s solar and wind boom has pushed costs off a cliff,
falling from 12 cents a kW/hr to just 4 cents a kW/hr…This is cheaper
than coal ~ Stephen Leahy.
Our core ecological problem is not climate change. It is overshoot,
of which global warming is a symptom. Overshoot is a systemic issue.
Over the past century-and-a-half, enormous amounts of cheap energy from
fossil fuels enabled the rapid growth of resource extraction,
manufacturing and consumption; and these in turn led to population
increase, pollution and loss of natural habitat and hence biodiversity.
The human system expanded dramatically, overshooting Earth's long-term carrying capacity
for humans while upsetting the ecological systems we depend on for our
survival. Until we understand and address this systemic imbalance,
symptomatic treatment (doing what we can to reverse pollution dilemmas
like climate change, trying to save threatened species and hoping to
feed a burgeoning population with genetically modified crops) will constitute an endlessly frustrating round of stopgap measures that are ultimately destined to fail.
The ecology movement in the 1970s benefitted from a strong infusion of systems thinking,
which was in vogue at the time (ecology—the study of the relationships
between organisms and their environments—is an inherently systemic
discipline, as opposed to studies like chemistry that focus on reducing
complex phenomena to their components). As a result, many of the best
environmental writers of the era framed the modern human predicament in
terms that revealed the deep linkages between environmental symptoms and
the way human society operates. Limits to Growth (1972), an
outgrowth of the systems research of Jay Forrester, investigated the
interactions between population growth, industrial production, food
production, resource depletion and pollution. Overshoot (1982),
by William Catton, named our systemic problem and described its origins
and development in a style any literate person could appreciate. Many
more excellent books from the era could be cited.
However, in recent decades, as climate change has come to dominate
environmental concerns, there has been a significant shift in the
discussion. Today, most environmental reporting is focused laser-like on
climate change, and systemic links between it and other worsening
ecological dilemmas (such as overpopulation, species extinctions, water
and air pollution, and loss of topsoil and fresh water) are seldom
highlighted. It's not that climate change isn't a big deal. As a
symptom, it's a real doozy. There's never been anything quite like it,
and climate scientists and climate-response advocacy groups are right to
ring the loudest of alarm bells. But our failure to see climate change
in context may be our undoing.
Why have environmental writers and
advocacy organizations succumbed to tunnel vision? Perhaps it's simply
that they assume systems thinking is beyond the capacity of policy
makers. It's true: If climate scientists were to approach world leaders
with the message, "We have to change everything, including our entire
economic system—and fast," they might be shown the door rather rudely. A
more acceptable message is, "We have identified a serious pollution
problem, for which there are technical solutions." Perhaps many of the
scientists who did recognize the systemic nature of our ecological
crisis concluded that if we can successfully address this one
make-or-break environmental crisis, we'll be able to buy time to deal
with others waiting in the wings (overpopulation, species extinctions,
resource depletion and on and on).
If climate change can be
framed as an isolated problem for which there is a technological
solution, the minds of economists and policy makers can continue to
graze in familiar pastures. Technology—in this case, solar, wind and nuclear
power generators, as well as batteries, electric cars, heat pumps and,
if all else fails, solar radiation management via atmospheric
aerosols—centers our thinking on subjects like financial investment and
industrial production. Discussion participants don't have to develop the
ability to think systemically, nor do they need to understand the Earth
system and how human systems fit into it. All they need trouble
themselves with is the prospect of shifting some investments, setting
tasks for engineers and managing the resulting industrial-economic
transformation so as to ensure that new jobs in green industries
compensate for jobs lost in coal mines.
The strategy of buying
time with a techno-fix presumes either that we will be able to institute
systemic change at some unspecified point in the future even though we
can't do it just now (a weak argument on its face), or that climate
change and all of our other symptomatic crises will in fact be amenable
to technological fixes. The latter thought-path is again a comfortable
one for managers and investors. After all, everybody loves technology.
It already does nearly everything for us. During the last century it
solved a host of problems: it cured diseases, expanded food production,
sped up transportation and provided us with information and
entertainment in quantities and varieties no one could previously have
imagined. Why shouldn't it be able to solve climate change and all the
rest of our problems?
Hello Humanity, it's me, Technology. We need to talk.
Of course, ignoring the systemic nature of our dilemma just means
that as soon as we get one symptom corralled, another is likely to break
loose. But, crucially, is climate change, taken as an isolated problem,
fully treatable with technology? Color me doubtful. I say this having
spent many months poring over the relevant data with David Fridley of
the energy analysis program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Our resulting book, Our Renewable Future, concluded that nuclear power is too expensive
and risky; meanwhile, solar and wind power both suffer from
intermittency, which (once these sources begin to provide a large
percentage of total electrical power) will require a combination of
three strategies on a grand scale: energy storage, redundant production
capacity and demand adaptation. At the same time, we in industrial
nations will have to adapt most of our current energy usage (which
occurs in industrial processes, building heating and transportation) to
electricity. Altogether, the energy transition promises to be an
enormous undertaking, unprecedented in its requirements for investment
and substitution. When David and I stepped back to assess the enormity
of the task, we could see no way to maintain current quantities of
global energy production during the transition, much less to increase
energy supplies so as to power ongoing economic growth. The biggest
transitional hurdle is scale: the world uses an enormous amount of
energy currently; only if that quantity can be reduced significantly,
especially in industrial nations, could we imagine a credible pathway
toward a post-carbon future.
Downsizing the world's energy
supplies would, effectively, also downsize industrial processes of
resource extraction, manufacturing, transportation, and waste
management. That's a systemic intervention, of exactly the kind called
for by the ecologists of the 1970s who coined the mantra, "Reduce, reuse
and recycle." It gets to the heart of the overshoot dilemma—as does
population stabilization and reduction, another necessary strategy. But
it's also a notion to which technocrats, industrialists, and investors
are virulently allergic.
The ecological argument is, at its core, a
moral one—as I explain in more detail in a just-released manifesto
replete with sidebars and graphics ("There's No App for That:
Technology and Morality in the Age of Climate Change, Overpopulation,
and Biodiversity Loss"). Any systems thinker who understands overshoot
and prescribes powerdown as a treatment is effectively engaging in an
intervention with an addictive behavior. Society is addicted to growth,
and that's having terrible consequences for the planet and,
increasingly, for us as well. We have to change our collective and
individual behavior and give up something we depend on—power over our
environment. We must restrain ourselves, like an alcoholic foreswearing
booze. That requires honesty and soul-searching.
In its early
years the environmental movement made that moral argument, and it worked
up to a point. Concern over rapid population growth led to family
planning efforts around the world. Concern over biodiversity declines
led to habitat protection. Concern over air and water pollution led to a
slew of regulations. These efforts weren't sufficient, but they showed
that framing our systemic problem in moral terms could get at least some
traction.
Why didn't the environmental movement fully succeed?
Some theorists now calling themselves "bright greens" or
"eco-modernists" have abandoned the moral fight altogether. Their
justification for doing so is that people want a vision of the future
that's cheery and that doesn't require sacrifice. Now, they say, only a
technological fix offers any hope. The essential point of this essay
(and my manifesto) is simply that, even if the moral argument fails, a
techno-fix won't work either. A gargantuan investment in technology
(whether next-generation nuclear power or solar radiation
geo-engineering) is being billed as our last hope. But in reality it's
no hope at all.
The reason for the failure thus far of the
environmental movement wasn't that it appealed to humanity's moral
sentiments—that was in fact the movement's great strength. The effort
fell short because it wasn't able to alter industrial society's central
organizing principle, which is also its fatal flaw: its dogged pursuit
of growth at all cost. Now we're at the point where we must finally
either succeed in overcoming growthism or face the failure not just of
the environmental movement, but of civilization itself.
The good
news is that systemic change is fractal in nature: it implies, indeed it
requires, action at every level of society. We can start with our own
individual choices and behavior; we can work within our communities. We
needn't wait for a cathartic global or national sea change. And even if
our efforts cannot "save" consumerist industrial civilization, they
could still succeed in planting the seeds of a regenerative human
culture worthy of survival.
There's more good news: Once we
humans choose to restrain our numbers and our rates of consumption,
technology can assist our efforts. Machines can help us monitor our
progress, and there are relatively simple technologies that can help
deliver needed services with less energy usage and environmental damage.
Some ways of deploying technology could even help us clean up the
atmosphere and restore ecosystems.
But machines can't make the key
choices that will set us on a sustainable path. Systemic change driven
by moral awakening: it's not just our last hope; it's the only real hope
we've ever had.
Australia’s overall greenhouse gas emissions last financial year were
the highest since 2011, despite the closure of the Hazelwood coal-fired
power plant
Australia’s most polluting generator, the Hazelwood power station in Victoria, may have closed, but overall emissions in 2016-17 were the highest since 2011. Photograph: Scott Barbour/Getty Images
Emissions from the electricity sector in the three months to June
dropped by the biggest amount on record, as the effect of the Hazelwood
coal-fired power station closure is seen for the first time in quarterly
projections produced exclusively for the Guardian.
But even that drop wasn’t enough to stop Australia’s overall
greenhouse gas emissions from continuing to rise. Emissions from almost
every other sector – industrial energy, transport, industrial heat and
agriculture – all rose. They are the highest levels seen since before
the carbon tax was repealed, according to projections by consultants at Ndevr Environmental.
The results mean Australia has now consumed 24% of its carbon budget set by the government’s Climate Change Authority
– the total amount of carbon it can release from 2013 while doing its
fair share to keep global warming under 2C. Once a certain amount of
carbon goes into the atmosphere, warming over 2C will be inevitable.
The report replicates the government’s methodology for its National Greenhouse Gas Inventory quarterly reports, which the government traditionally delays releasing for up to nine months, and has in the past saved up and released quietly in a batch just before Christmas.
Australia’s overall greenhouse gas emissions over the year to June
2017 were the highest since 2011, with emissions rising steadily since
the carbon tax was repealed in 2014.
The most recent quarter – the three months to June 2017 – also had
the highest emissions for any June quarter since 2011, rising to 3m
tonnes more than the same quarter last year.
However, emissions from electricity dropped significantly, by about
4.3m tonnes compared with the previous quarter, or about 2m tonnes
compared with the June quarter last year. The drop was mostly due to the
closure on 1 April of the Hazelwood power station, which was Australia’s most polluting generator.
Increased generation from Snowy Hydro in the quarter also contributed
to the lower emissions from the electricity sector, said Stephen
Christos from Ndevr Environmental.
But that reduction was overwhelmed by other sectors, which all increased or stayed stable.
The most notable increase was in the “stationary energy” sector,
which includes fuel burned for heat and energy in industry other than
electricity. Emissions for stationary energy were the second-highest on
record in the most recent quarter’s projections, having risen steeply
over the past year.
Among the significant factors pushing up the emissions in stationary energy are the three huge LNG production and export facilities in Queensland, which are also responsible for Australia’s tight and expensive domestic gas market. The liquefying and exporting of huge volumes of Australia’s gas has left the domestic market with relatively little gas, pushing up costs for consumers.
The
drop in emissions from electricity over the past 12 months was
cancelled out by the increase in emissions from stationary energy, with
electricity dropping by 5.3m tonnes and stationary energy growing by
5.8m tonnes.
Transport emissions also rose significantly – by more than 2.2m tonnes above the same quarter last year.
The results are drawing Australia further from its carbon reduction targets made after the Paris climate agreement, which was adopted in December 2015.
Compared with a hypothetical situation where Australia cut its
emissions linearly from when they were made according to its commitment,
Australia’s most recent quarterly emissions are now exceeding its Paris
commitments by 5.53m tonnes, and exceeding the science-based cuts
recommended by the Climate Change Authority by 14.74m tonnes.
