Government Unveils 36,000 New Solar Panels At Williamsdale

Fairfax - Steven Trask

The ACT government put the finishing touches on its mammoth "solar highway" project on Thursday afternoon with the unveiling of 36,000 solar panels at Williamsdale.
Climate Change Minister Shane Rattenbury said the long-awaited Williamsdale Solar Farm, about 20 kilometres south of Canberra's city centre, could on its own generate enough electricity to power 3,000 homes.

Impact investment Group's Lane Crockett at the opening of the new Williamsdale Solar Farm. Photo: Rohan Thomson

Solar farms in Mount Majura, Mugga Lane and Royalla complete the "solar highway", which now totals a combined 177,000 panels along a 50 kilometre stretch.
"The future is here and it is clean, green and renewable," Mr Rattenbury said as the Williamsdale Solar Farm was officially opened.
"The clean power generated by the Williamsdale Solar Farm takes us another significant step towards achieving our target of 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2020 in the ACT."

The four solar farms were capable of generating 85,500 megawatt hours of electricity every year, enough to power more than 11,000 homes.
According to ACT government estimates, the solar farms could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1.4 million tonnes over the next 20 years.
"The ACT is establishing itself as a world leader when it comes to investment in renewable energy and action on climate change," Mr Rattenbury said.
"Already, renewable energy has driven around $500 million of investment into the local economy."
The ACT government has faced its share of challenges to get the solar highway project over the line.
Elementus Energy began the project in 2013 on the back of a 20-year government commitment to provide tariff support payments worth a maximum of $2.3 million every year.
But Elementus encountered fierce resistance to its planned site near Uriarra Village, eventually leading to the announcement in 2015 that it would move to blocks at Williamsdale.
The Impact Investment Group then took over the project in 2016, agreeing to acquire and develop it for "up to $35 million".
Lane Crockett, the fund manager's head of renewable energy, said on Thursday that the Williamsdale project would deliver environmental and economic benefits.
"The smartest investors and developers in the country aren't trying to eke another few years out of old unreliable, polluting coal-fired infrastructre," he said.
"They are building the clean generators that will deliver reliable electricity, crucial environmental benefits, health benefits and attractive financial returns.
"Meanwhile, our investors have confidence knowing that the ACT government has committed to buying the farm's electricity for 20 years."
The opening of the Williamsdale Solar Farm was announced on the same day the Climate Council think tank released a report on Australia's renewable energy sector.
The report found that political inertia was the only barrier preventing Australia from revamping its ageing power grid with renewable energy.
"The nation's leading energy experts, scientists and major authorities are all in agreement - Australia is ready to switch to a modern grid, powered by renewables and storage," Climate Council chief executive Amanda McKenzie said.
In another report released on Thursday, the International Energy Agency found that the uptake of solar power had grown faster than any other source of fuel for the first time ever.
The ACT government has legislated a target of generating 100 per cent of the territory's electricity through renewable sources by 2020.
"By 2020 that ACT will produce 100 per cent of our electricity from renewable sources like wind and solar and, by 2050 at the latest, our city will produce zero net greenhouse gas emissions," Mr Rattenbury said.

Links

• Solar grows faster now than all other forms of power
• Clean energy target: how the states might make it work
• Most Australians want renewables to be primary energy source, survey finds
• Turnbull says own rooftop solar not inconsistent with 'clean-coal' message
• This summer was greenest ever for energy, says National Grid
• Wind power is now cheaper than nuclear – the energy revolution is happening
• Greens propose new energy storage target to drive switch to renewables 
• 'A no-brainer': small businesses can be part of a renewables revolution too 
• World's first solar panel road opens in Normandy village

Carbon Emissions From Warming Soils Could Trigger Disastrous Feedback Loop

The Guardian - Fiona Harvey

26-year study reveals natural biological factors kick in once warming reaches certain point, leading to potentially unstoppable increase in temperatures

Researchers examined plots of soil in the Harvard Forest, Massachusetts. They heated some of the plots with underground cables to 5C above normal levels, leaving others as a control. Photograph: Audrey Barker Plotkin/Science

Warming soils are releasing more carbon into the atmosphere than previously thought, suggesting a potentially disastrous feedback mechanism whereby increases in global temperatures will trigger massive new carbon releases in a cycle that may be impossible to break.
The increased production of carbon comes from the microbes within soils, according to a report in the peer-review journal Science, published on Friday.
The 26-year study is one of the biggest of its kind, and is a groundbreaking addition to our scant knowledge of exactly how warming will affect natural systems.
Potential feedback loops, or tipping points, have long been suspected to exist by scientists, and there is some evidence for them in the geological record. What appears to happen is that once warming reaches a certain point, these natural biological factors kick in and can lead to a runaway, and potentially unstoppable, increase in warming.
Other tipping points posited by scientists include the disappearance of ice in the Arctic, which creates areas of dark water that absorb more heat, and the release of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from thawing permafrost.

In the Science study, researchers examined plots of soil in the Harvard Forest in Massachusetts, a mixed hardwood forest in the US. They experimented by heating some of the plots with underground cables to 5C above normal levels, leaving others as a control.
The long-term study revealed that in the first 10 years there was a strong increase in the carbon released from the heated plots, then a period of about seven years when the carbon release abated. But after this second calmer period, which the scientists attribute to the adjustment of the soil microbes to the warmer conditions, the release of carbon resumed its upward path.
In the last three years, the release of carbon has once again dropped back, which scientists attribute to another reorganisation of the microbes present. They suggest an increase in the number of microbes that can feast on the hard-to-digest organic matter, such as plant-based lignin, which gives clues to the possible cyclical nature of the process.
From 1991, when the experiment began, the plots subjected to 5C warming lost about 17% of the carbon that had been stored in the top 60cm of the soil, where the greatest concentration of organic matter is to be found.
Scientific understanding of the complexities of soil microbial activity is still limited, but the long-term nature of the study provides valuable insights into what might be happening, and is likely to happen in future, to vast swaths of forest soils across the world.
While deforestation has been the focus of most research into forests’ effects on climate change, with a recent study suggesting tropical forests are turning into carbon sources rather than carbon stores as a result, the impact of warming soils has remained much of a mystery. Soils are one of the world’s biggest natural carbon sinks, along with trees and the oceans.
Daniel Metcalfe, of Sweden’s Lund University, said: “If these findings hold more widely across major terrestrial ecosystems, then a much greater portion of the global soil carbon store could be vulnerable to decomposition and release of carbon dioxide under global warming than previously thought.”
The study was carried out by scientists at the US Marine Biological Laboratory, led by Jerry Melillo, with contributions from the universities of Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
Melillo, who holds the position of distinguished scientist at the MBL, said: “Each year, mostly from fossil fuel burning, we are releasing about 10bn metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere. The world’s soils contain about 3,500bn tons of carbon. If a significant amount of that is added to the atmosphere, due to microbial activity, that will accelerate the global warming process. Once this self-reinforcing feedback begins, there is no easy way to turn it off. There is no switch to flip.”
He added: “The future is warmer. How much warmer is the issue.” While emissions from fossil fuels can be cut back, the reactions of the natural world to a warming climate may be impossible to control.
Some recent work has suggested that the warming of the globe may be progressing at a slightly slower rate than the upper range of previous studies estimated. However, feedback loops and tipping points have the potential to create sudden disruptions that are hard to take account of in standard climate modelling, and these could mean much greater changes and far higher rates of warming in the future.
Separately, research from Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and other institutions, published in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics, and Global Change Biology, called for more work on how soil could be used as a carbon store. When agricultural soils are well-managed, they can store more carbon than they emit, which would allow them to be used as potential carbon sinks.
But the scientists warn that “we still don’t have a strong understanding of the interactions among biological, chemical and physical processes regulating carbon in soils”. They say much more research is needed, particularly as there are dangers in soils in Siberia that are rapidly warning, and could release vast quantities of carbon. They also warn that there may be 25-30% less organic matter in some soils than previously estimated.
“Soil has changed under our feet,” said Jennifer Harden, a visiting scholar at Stanford. “We can’t use the soil maps made 80 years ago and expect to find the same answers.”

Links

• Slow-freezing Alaska soil driving surge in carbon dioxide emissions
• Ultimate bogs: how saving peatlands could help save the planet
• Third of Earth's soil is acutely degraded due to agriculture
• Who is wilt-free? Farmers with organic-rich, water-holding soils, that's who
• Why meat eaters should think much more about soil
• Loss of soil carbon 'will speed global warming'
• Soil carbon storage not the climate change fix it was thought, research finds
• Our best shot at cooling the planet might be right under our feet

Queensland Tree Clearing Wipes Out Federal Emissions Gains

The Guardian - Michael Slezak

Accelerating rates of land clearing in Queensland are undermining Australia’s Direct Action greenhouse gas cuts

Almost half of recent Queensland land clearing is in the Great Barrier Reef’s catchment, and causing coral stress. Photograph: Bette Willis/Arc Centre Coral Reef Studies/EPA

Accelerating rates of tree clearing in Queensland are wiping out any cuts to greenhouse gas emissions the federal government has made through its $2.55bn Direct Action fund, according to the latest data released by the Queensland government.
The results also point again to apparent holes in the federal government’s greenhouse gas accounting, as its official figures maintain that land clearing in Queensland is reducing, and that changes in land use across the whole country are cutting emissions rather than adding to them.
About 40% of the clearing in the state identified in the latest figures occurred in catchments that drain water into the Great Barrier Reef, which will increase pollution affecting the struggling coral, sparking further calls for the environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, to use his powers under federal law to stop some of the clearing.
On Thursday the Queensland government released figures showing 395,000 hectares of bush had been cleared in 2015-16, according to its statewide landcover and tree study (Slats). That was up a third compared with the previous year and almost 50% compared with two years earlier.
The state environment minister, Steven Miles, said the clearing in one year in Queensland alone caused 45m tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.

The centrepiece of the federal government’s Direct Action policy on climate change is its $2.55bn Emissions Reduction Fund, under which it pays companies to pollute less.
In the last auction of the ERF, the government paid an average of $11.82 for each tonne of carbon abated, meaning the emissions from Queensland’s land clearing cancelled out more than half a billion dollars of abatement paid for by the taxpayer – a fifth of the total fund in one year.
“Deforestation has a major impact on climate change,” said Lyndon Schneiders, national director of the Wilderness Society. “Ending deforestation would be a fast, cheap and effective way to cut Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.”
Meanwhile, the federal government’s national greenhouse gas inventory, which is the country’s official source of climate change accounting, continues to find that across the whole country, changes in land use – which includes land clearing – amount to a carbon sink rather than a source.
In the latest federal government figures, for the year to March 2017, changes in land use are counted as an abatement of 0.1% of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. The report on the figures says Queensland’s land sector emissions have been “reducing over time”.
Changes in the way the federal government measures greenhouse gas emissions have led to revisions of historical reports, with significant amounts of emissions disappearing. Explanations given for the revisions do not fully explain the reduced emissions.
The environment department said in a statement Queensland data was used to prepare the national figures and informed the national inventories.
“Each year, we update land clearing estimates based on latest satellite data. Where applicable, we also revise estimates to reflect improvements in remote sensing and estimation methods,” a spokesperson said.
The large amount of clearing occurring in the Great Barrier Reef catchments has led to renewed calls for Frydenberg to use his powers under the federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act to stop some of the clearing.
Frydenberg has previously stated that clearing activities require approval under the act if they “have, will have or are likely to have a significant impact on a matter of national environmental significance under federal environment law”.
He told the ABC in July the government had powers to enforce those laws and would continue to do so.
But a WWF report from July found 99.2% of properties where land had been cleared that appeared to need approval under the act, had failed to gain it. The only time the federal government forced a property owner to gain approval, it led to fighting within the federal Coalition.
“The amount of clearing in reef catchments should be ringing alarm bells with minister Frydenberg,” said Martin Taylor, a conservation scientist at WWF-Australia.
“When the Queensland parliament rejected tougher laws the commonwealth was the last line of defence. Minister Frydenberg’s department has the power under the EPBC Act to rein this in. But the EPBC protections only work if they’re used and that’s not happening,” Taylor said.
Frydenberg’s office did not respond to questions about the matter.

Links

• For the love of Queensland, this land clearing has got to stop
• Ending land clearing would compete with renewables for carbon abatement, analysis finds
• 'Alarming' rise in Queensland tree clearing as 400,000 hectares stripped
• Unapproved land clearing an unfolding environmental crisis, green groups say
• Conservationists crowdfund drones to capture land clearing
• Lack of tree clearing reforms a roadblock to saving Great Barrier Reef
• Great Barrier Reef: Unesco pushes for tree-clearing controls
• Greg Hunt's approval of Adani's Queensland mine upheld by federal court
• 'Alarming' trend in Queensland tree clearing figures spurs call for tighter laws