Lethal Heating: 02/12/18

12/02/2018

Australia's Solar Power Boom Could Almost Double Capacity In A Year, Analysts Say

The Guardian - Naaman Zhou

Last month was the biggest January on record for rooftop installation of solar panals, according to RenewEconomy and SunWiz. Photograph: Lucy Hughes Jones/AAP

A record-breaking month of rooftop installations and a flood of large-scale solar farms could almost double Australia’s solar power capacity in a single year, industry analysts say.
A massive solar energy boom is being predicted for 2018, after an unprecedented number of industrial solar farms were approved by the New South Wales and Queensland governments last year.
Last month also became the biggest January on record for rooftop installations, according to the renewables website RenewEconomy and industry analysts SunWiz.
With 111MW of new panels, it saw a 69% rise compared with the same month last year and became one of the top five months ever – largely driven by low installation costs and a boost in commercial uptake.
At the same time, nearly 30 new industrial solar farms are scheduled to come on line.

NSW approved 10 solar farm projects last year – twice as many as the year before – and has approved another in 2018. Queensland currently has 18 large-scale projects under construction, which is the most in the country.
The new farms could be operational within the year, according to John Grimes, the chief executive of the Clean Energy Council.
“These solar farms can be built within a matter of weeks,” he said. “They’re really quick and simple.”
Together, the new large-scale projects could add between 2.5GW and 3.5GW to the national grid and rooftop installations could add another 1.3GW, according to the Smart Energy Council’s estimates. This would nearly double the nation’s solar energy capacity, currently 7GW, in a single year.
“The train tracks are about to converge,” Grimes said. “Rooftop installations and utilities are both booming and could turbo-boost the solar numbers overall.”
In Queensland, residential solar panels are already the state’s largest source of energy, producing more combined than the 1.7GW Gladstone power station. Just under a third (30%) of residential homes in the state have solar installed – the most in the country.
With the completion of the new solar farms, solar will provide 17% of the state’s energy. “We’ve turned the sunshine state into the solar state,” Queensland’s former energy minister Mark Bailey said in October.
In New South Wales, the planning minister, Anthony Roberts, said the 10 new solar farms would generate 1.2GW of energy and reduce carbon emissions by more than 2.5m tonnes – the equivalent of taking about 800,000 cars off the road.
In January this year, NSW announced another plant – the 170MW Finley plant in the Riverina – as did Queensland, the 120MW solar farm at Munna Creek.
Grimes said the solar boom “was only going to grow” in future.
“Solar is the cheapest way to generate electricity in the world – full stop,” he said. “It’s not unusual for grid pricing to be north of 20c per kilowatt hour in a majority of jurisdicitions. A solar array, at an average size for an average home, if you amortise the cost over 20 years, the effective rate is 5c per kilowatt hour. That’s called an economic no-brainer.”
He said the rush to install rooftop panels could have been sparked by January’s warm weather and rising energy prices.
“I think people are acutely aware of energy prices. People are running air conditioning and thinking, ‘hooley dooley I’m going to get a bill’.”
2017 saw a record 1.25GW of solar power added to the grid nationally, counting both large-scale solar farms and rooftop panels. The predicted rate of rooftop panels alone in 2018 is expected to be 1.3GW.

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Could A Future Labor Government Really Stop The Adani Mine?

Environmental Justice Australia - Brendan Sydes

Bill Shorten’s statement last week that Adani’s proposed Galilee Basin mega coal mine would ‘absolutely not’ receive Labor’s support if it didn’t stack up commercially or environmentally gave the clearest indication yet that the ALP may be shifting its position on the controversial mine.
Significantly, Shorten’s remark came in answer to a question following a speech where the opposition leader said, “Any political party with an ounce of character will go to the people at the next election with a proper economic and environmental recognition of the reality of climate change…a proper demonstration that we have the courage to do what has to be done, even if that might be politically difficult.”
Until now the ALP has sought to navigate a complex middle road on Adani – neither for or against the project, which would be the biggest coal mine ever dug in Australia and would add a massive amount of climate pollution to the global atmosphere once the coal is burnt.
Shorten’s shift immediately prompted people to ask if and how the ALP could deliver on a promise to stop Adani and what if any legal pathway exist to stop the mine.
There are ample historical examples of incoming federal governments finding legal pathways to implement election commitments to protect environmental values.
The Whitlam government used its power to regulate exports to require an environmental impact assessment of sand mining and Fraser Island and eventually the combination of the Customs Act and new environmental laws led to the end of sand mining on the island.
The Hawke government famously intervened to prevent the Franklin Dam proceeding in Tasmania, with the subsequent High Court case confirming the breadth of Commonwealth legislative powers to intervene in areas hitherto thought to be solely the province of the States.
The Gillard government (when the current shadow environment Minister, Tony Burke, held the environment portfolio) intervened to introduce a permanent ban on super trawlers in Australian waters.
In the case of the Adani mine, suspending or cancelling approvals already granted under legislation is not straightforward, but pathways do exist.
Last year we wrote to the current Federal Environment Minister, Josh Frydenberg, on behalf of renowned coral scientist Dr Charlie Veron, asking the minister to use his power under section 145 of the Act to revoke an approval for Adani’s mine on the basis of new information about the impact of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef.
These provisions are complex and rarely used, so interpreting them and working out how they might be employed by a future Environment Minister to stop a project like the Adani mine is not straightforward.
From a legal perspective, it may be unwise for the ALP to be too specific in its commitment to use these powers. A very specific election commitment may be viewed as having brought a ‘closed mind’ to a matter of legislative discretion and may leave the decision vulnerable to future legal challenge.
It’s worth noting that Adani itself has asked the federal government to intervene with legislative approval of its mine, so it would be hypocritical of the company to suggest that Parliament could not intervene to stop the mine going ahead if that was the will of the Australian people.
So it does appear that with sufficient political resolve and public pressure, a legal pathway could be found to stop the Adani mine.
But expectations of a future government should not be limited to revisiting approvals under environment protection laws – the focus here should be on the depth of the political commitment and the broader expression of resolve, not just on Adani, but in relation to the whole question of coal exports.
The issue here is not just Adani but coal exports. Let’s start with prohibiting coal exports from the Galilee Basin. As the Fraser Island example demonstrates, the Commonwealth government clearly has the power to stop mining exports to achieve environmental protection goals.
We already regulate uranium exports and the Turnbull government last year moved to control gas exports using the same powers to protect the national interest.
So there is a clear legal pathway, not just to stop Adani, but to take action to stop the exploitation of more coal reserves in the Galilee Basin and elsewhere. This is the commitment we should seek from a future government.
As Mr Shorten himself said, “You can’t be serious about climate change and energy and have a bet every which way.”

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Paris, Inspired By New York City, Considers Climate Suit Against Oil Companies

Climate Liability News - Ucilia Wang

Paris experienced extreme flooding in 2016 and early in 2018.Paris, which experienced extreme flooding in 2016 and early 2018, may pursue a climate liability case against the oil industry. Photo credit: Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images

Paris could become the first city in Europe to try to defray the cost of climate change by taking fossil fuel companies to court.
The City Council passed a resolution this week to examine suing oil and gas companies to pay for the costs of climate impacts. It also wants to explore lobbying other major cities to pull their investments from fossil fuel producers, which have historically generated good returns for investors.
In its resolution, Paris cited New York City as one of its inspirations for considering more aggressive actions to build momentum toward reaching the goals of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. That agreement was signed in 2015, with nearly 200 countries agreeing to hold global warming within 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times.
Last month, New York City announced it was suing five major oil companies in federal court and developing a plan to divest the $5 billion its pension funds have invested in fossil fuel businesses. The lawsuit seeks billions of dollars from oil companies including ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips to help pay for construction projects designed to protect the city from rising seas and extreme weather.
The city is already gradually rolling out projects that are part of a grand, $20 billion plan announced in 2013 to prepare New York City for climate change impacts, such as building flood-control walls and requiring utilities to improve their ability to restore power quickly after a big storm.
Paris, which experienced major floods — including one just a week ago that had curators moving art out of the lower levels of the Louvre — and heat waves in recent years, is in the early stages of exploring a potential lawsuit against oil and gas companies. The City Council will now wait for the city’s attorneys to make their recommendations, said a city government official.
There doesn’t appear to be a deadline for making a decision.
“It’s great to see Paris joining this movement and helping the city to strengthen its climate resilience,” said Maxime Beaugrand, a French lawyer and a law fellow with the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development, a nonprofit advocacy group that works on environmental legal issues around the world. “Paris is taking a leadership role in Europe.”
Other advocacy groups had been working to bring liability cases to Europe.
“It’s fantastic news that cities like New York and Paris are stepping up to protect their citizens and hold fossil fuel corporations accountable for the harm they cause,” Clémence Dubois, a campaigner in France for the advocacy group 350.org, said in a statement. Paris’s resolution cited the group for its mission to nudge public and private organizations toward divestment from fossil fuel companies.
Paris could be the first city in Europe to go after fossil fuel companies if it decides to sue, said Sophie Marjanac, an attorney of the climate litigation team at ClientEarth, a London-based legal advocacy group.
A climate lawsuit from Paris would land in a French court, not a European Union court, since the EU lacks the tort law to provide a good legal avenue for this type of case, Marjanac noted. Tort law allows individuals or organizations to sue for harm they suffered.
If Paris does file a suit, it would face similar hurdles as New York City and other communities that are taking oil and gas companies to court, including proving that any individual fossil fuel company directly caused the impacts of climate change, such as sea level rise and super storms, that devastated local communities, Marjanac said.
In some of the previous cases in the United States and elsewhere, oil and gas companies successfully argued that they couldn’t be held responsible for climate impacts when global warming is a complex problem caused by so many other businesses and people.
That argument may start to lose steam, however. In Germany, a regional court in November reversed a lower court decision and agreed to hear a case filed by Saul Luciano Lluiya, who sued utility giant RWE in 2015 for the power company’s role in a glacier melt that increased the likelihood of floods in his city of Huaraz, Peru.
The case is groundbreaking for seeking to hold a major contributor of carbon emissions responsible for the impact of climate change, regardless of where the impact is taking place. RWE doesn’t operate in Peru.
“That was a significant finding by the court that a German company can cause harm outside of Germany,” Marjanac said.
Legal experts often cite a lawsuit in the Netherlands as the best case law for recognizing the connection between emissions and climate change. In Urgenda Foundation v. The State of Netherlands, the court said in 2015 the government must cut the country’s emissions more aggressively because the Netherlands shared the blame for the rising global temperatures, even if its carbon footprint wasn’t as great as other countries’.
New York City isn’t the first American city to file climate lawsuits against oil and gas companies. Eight other cities and counties, all in California, have filed similar lawsuits. Los Angeles and Boulder in Colorado have talked about doing the same.

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