04/04/2018

Malcolm Turnbull Pressures AGL To Sell Liddell To Alinta

AFR - Phillip Coorey


Malcolm Turnbull is stepping up pressure on AGL Energy to sell its ageing Liddell power station to Chinese owned Alinta. Alex Ellinghausen
Malcolm Turnbull is stepping up pressure on AGL Energy to sell its ageing Liddell power station rather than redevelop the site after Alinta Energy expressed interest in taking over the coal-fired facility.
The Prime Minister rang AGL chairman Graeme Hunt on Tuesday night following confirmation from Alinta chief executive officer Geoff Dimery that his company was interested in prolonging the life of the Hunter Valley power station for up to seven years.
Delta Electricity, which has previously expressed interest in Liddell, also renewed its interest again on Wednesday.
AGL remained unenthusiastic, indicating it would fulfil its legal obligation to consider an offer but no more.
"AGL is relying on Liddell to generate power for our customers until 2022 and we will require its infrastructure for our replacement plans into the future," it said in a statement.
"AGL received an approach from Alinta last night expressing an interest in entering negotiations to acquire the Liddell Power Station. No formal offer has been received.
"Should a formal offer for Liddell be received, it would be given consideration in order to meet our obligations to customers and shareholders."
Mr Turnbull told reporters on Wednesday there was no reason why Liddell could not be kept operating for a few more years.
"We know that there is going to be a shortage of dispatchible power, electricity, in NSW between Liddell closing and the Snowy 2.0 coming online which is to be 2024, 2025," he said.
" So there's at least two, three years where there is a risk of a shortfall in dispatchible electricity in NSW.
"I spoke to the chairman of AGL again last night, and...I said to him, 'look, it's in the public interest, it's in the community's interest...it's in AGL's interests to be seen to be a responsible player in the electricity market to keep this power station going for a few more years to make sure there isn't a shortfall'.
"Then if they choose to close it, then they can do so. But it's really a timing issue.
" AGL should do the right thing by the - their customers, by the community, and I think by their own shareholders, and either keep this plant going for another four or five years and - or sell it to somebody who is prepared to do so."
AGL has been resisting demands from the government it either sell the power station or prolong its life in the interests of providing cheaper, more reliable power for a few years more.
Instead, it wants to decommission the power station and replace it with a clean energy plan.
Last month, the Australia Energy Market Operator said closing Liddell in 2022 in accordance with AGL's plans would leave an initial generation capacity shortfall of 850 megawatts, which could mean blackouts for about 200,000 homes in NSW.
But if all three stages of AGL's proposed post-Liddell plan were delivered "the resource gap will be eliminated".
Simultaneously, Mr Turnbull is under pressure from a growing group of backbenchers for the government to invest up to $4 billion to build a so-called clean coal power plant in Victoria, on the site of the old Hazelwood power station.
The government is refusing to do so, saying its proposed National Energy Guarantee provides ample scope for the private sector to build such a facility. The private sector has no desire to invest in coal.
Mr Turnbull's renewed pressure in AGL has momentarily eased some of the pressure from the backbench group known as the Monash Forum.
Monash Forum member Eric Abetz welcomed Mr Turnbull's intervention over Liddell and told Sky News that "hopefully it would" negate the need for a new coal plant. But he cautioned all options should be left on the table.
Alinta, a Chinese-owened generator, was encouraged by both the government and lobby group Manufacturing Australia.
In a statement, Mr Dimery said his company had "been approached about our interest in buying and running Liddell for five-to-seven years past AGL's current closure date of 2022".
"We are open to that proposal; it fits with our strong desire to maintain reliability and affordability for customers as we transition to a lower emissions energy sector," he said.
"Manufacturing Australia has raised concerns with us about the impact of the closure of the Northern and Hazelwood stations on energy prices. Businesses are anxious about the impact the closure of a bigger station like Liddell could have on them – and we are sympathetic to those concerns.
"While it is an aging facility, and we would need to do due diligence, we think it could survive a little longer in the marketplace.
"Of course we recognise the need to transition to a lower emissions energy sector, but it has to be pragmatic. We must be mindful of the impact taking large and affordable chunks of capacity out of the market could have, not only on businesses but on everyday Aussies who are finding it hard to meet the rising cost of energy.
"We are absolutely open to discussing it further with AGL."

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An Alarming 10 Percent Of Antarctica’s Coastal Glaciers Are Now In Retreat, Scientists Find

Washington Post - Chris Mooney

Map showing rates of grounding-line migration and their coincidence with ocean conditions around Antarctica between 2010 and 2016. (Credit: Hannes Konrad et al, University of Leeds.)
Antarctica’s ocean-front glaciers are retreating, according a new satellite survey that raises additional concerns about the massive continent’s potential contribution to rising sea levels.
Antarctica, which contains enough ice to raise the oceans by about 200 feet, is a continent of ice that flows outward to the ocean at numerous large glaciers. These mostly submerged glaciers rest deep on the seafloor at a point called the “grounding line,” where ocean, ice and bedrock meet.
But at 10.7 percent of these glaciers, the ice masses are moving at a significant speed back toward the center of the continent as they melt from below, often because of the incursion of warm ocean water, which causes the grounding line to retreat. Only about 1.9 percent of glaciers were growing at a significant speed, suggesting a net retreat.
And the more glaciers are retreating, the more one worries about sea-level rise. Retreating grounding lines can expose more ice to the ocean, allowing it to flow outward more rapidly.
Here’s a brief video of the process provided by the authors of the new study, which was published in Nature Geosciences:



The research used satellite techniques to infer changes to glacier grounding lines based on changes in the height of the glacier’s surface. Scanning one-third of Antarctica’s marine-based glaciers along a roughly 10,000-mile stretch of coastline, the work presents a more comprehensive look than other studies of Antarctic glaciers, which have tended to focus on grounding lines in just one key region.
“We were able to quantify more or less all around Antarctica,” said Hannes Konrad, the lead author of the research. Konrad works at the University of Leeds in Britain, along with a number of co-authors of the study. Other authors worked at University College London.
The research found that from 2010 through 2016, about 80 square miles per year of ice is being lifted off of the seafloor and going afloat as grounding lines retreat. That’s about four times the size of Manhattan every year.
At the same time, the 10.7 percent of Antarctic grounding lines were retreating at a rate faster than 25 meters per year, which the study takes as a benchmark because that rate of retreat is believed to have occurred at the end of the last ice age. Just 1.9 percent of Antarctic grounding lines were advancing faster than 25 meters per year.
The sea-level implications of the research are troubling, if not direct — researchers cannot precisely quantify sea-level rise just based on the retreat of grounding lines, although they are certainly related.
“We find that 10 percent of the Antarctica ice sheet significantly retreating, but we can’t somehow extrapolate sea level rates that come from that,” Konrad said. “But to say 10 percent of Antarctica, this massive ice body, is retreating, still should be some sign of warning. It’s large.”
A key factor driving the retreat of Antarctic grounding lines is the incursion of warm, deep ocean water which melts glaciers at their bases and causes the grounding line to retreat.
The situation is the worst in West Antarctica, something that has been widely known and that the new research confirms. The enormous Thwaites glacier — which has the potential to unlock several meters of sea-level rise if it retreats entirely into the center of West Antarctica — was found to be retreating at 300 to 400 meters per year along a 25-mile central section of the glacier. The study also found that Thwaites’s retreat had increased between 1996 and 2011.
“Imagine other coastlines changing at an equal speed, that’s really massive,” Konrad said of what’s happening to Thwaites.
Science agencies in the United States and Britain are mobilizing an urgent mission to study Thwaites up close, because of the belief among scientists that it could be the one glacier with the greatest potential to remake world coastlines in coming decades and centuries.
“We focus especially on Thwaites because sufficiently large retreat there could evacuate the entire central region of the West Antarctic ice sheet, perhaps raising global average sea level more than 3 m through that one outlet,” Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State University, said in an emailed comment on the study.
In West Antarctica, more than 20 percent of grounding lines were retreating faster than 25 meters per year. In East Antarctica, which contains massively more ice, the percentage was considerably lower — and some areas, which are receiving more snowfall, are seeing grounding lines advance.
But the largest East Antarctic glacier, Totten, is an exception and is indeed showing a fast rate of retreat, the study confirmed.
Finally, in the Antarctic peninsula, which contains the least ice, 10 percent of grounding lines were retreating faster than the 25 meter-per-year rate.
Eric Rignot, an Antarctic expert at the University of California at Irvine, who has also documented grounding-line retreat in key parts of the continent, said by email that “the grounding line is an essential indicator of glacier change in Antarctica, and this study brings important information about the rates of changes and geographic distribution.”
Penn State’s Alley, who was also not involved in the research, added that the new work “generally confirms our understanding — increased snowfall is contributing to locally small, slow advances of grounding lines in some places, and increased temperature of offshore ocean water is contributing to large, rapid retreats of grounding lines.”
He said the next step will be for scientists to plug data such as these into simulations that will let them better calculate precisely how much the sea-level-rise risk is from Antarctica going forward.
“This new study thus is an important step in the long-term effort to learn the future of the ice sheet,” Alley said.

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Coalition Back-Bench’s Crazy Last Gasp Attempt To Save Coal

RenewEconomy - 

Alpha Males and the Lump of Coal.
Facing certain defeat in the next election, the hard right rump of the governing Coalition government (that’s more than half the party), are making a last ditch attempt to reverse the course of technology and have the government fund new coal-fired generators.
A newly-named “ginger group” known as the Monash Forum has burst from the bleechers to put the case for coal, arguing – despite all evidence to the contrary – that new coal-fired generation is the key to restoring low power prices.
Newspaper reports suggest more than half of the Coalition back bench are behind this move for more coal – which is consistent with other estimates that put the percentage of Coalition MPs and Senators who don’t accept climate science at around the same level.
The push for more coal, and the rejection of climate evidence, goes hand in hand.
This new push – announced across the spectrum of Murdoch media (Sky News, the front pages of The Australian, The Daily Telegraph and in other News Ltd tabloids) is designed to put pressure on prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and is led by the usual noisy group of climate science deniers and coal industry boosters – Craig Kelly, Tony Abbott, Barnaby Joyce, George Christensen, Eri Abetz, Kevin Andrews et al.
It comes amid a major new advertising campaign from the coal industry on television and other media, and comes as the Energy Security Board prepares its latest version of the proposed National Energy Guarantee that will be presented to COAG energy ministers in a fortnight.
That’s the interesting part of this push. The NEG was designed specifically with the Coalition back-bench in mind, as we reported (again) last week in our story Who is Turnbull trying to fool with the NEG.
The NEG’s official modelling promised to extend the life of the coal fired power stations, bring investment in renewables to an effective halt, and lock in an emissions reduction target for the electricity sector that would actually be worse than doing nothing.
The emergence of the Monash Forum – named after John Monash, the former Gallipoli commander and the man credited for helping develop coal-fired generation in Victoria – appears deliberately timed to ensure that the Coalition doesn’t flag from its endeavours to ensure the NEG is a “do nothing”, or even a “do less” policy.
Kelly, the chairman of the backbench committee on energy and climate who has led the Hard Right’s  demonisation of everything modern – wind and solar farms, battery storage, demand management and electric vehicles – is once again at the forefront.
His appearances on Sky TV on Monday night and ABC Radio National on Tuesday sought to justify the Monash Forum’s nostalgia for coal on two lies that neither media organisation challenged: the level of subsidies for renewables in Australia and the push for new coal generation around the world.
Kelly, indeed the Coalition as a whole and the Murdoch media in particular, continue to prosecute the line that renewable energy depend on $60 billion in subsidies, and Kelly said this amounted to $3.6 billion this year alone.
Of course, this is pure fiction, and has been repeatedly disproved. As is the claim, made by Kelly again, that 40 new HELE (high emissions, low efficiency) coal generators are being built in Japan, and 600 around the world.


In fact, none has been completed since Fukushima, according to Simon Holmes a Court, from the Energy Transition Hub. Global data suggests the pace of new coal fired generation is slowing dramatically, for economic and environmental reasons.
But even the so-called moderates are being caught up with this: The Nationals deputy leader,  Bridget McKenzie, who sought to justify the Monash Forum’s position this way: “We’re not going to get ideological about this … we are going to let the science inform our policy, that’s a real change for us.”
Trumpian indeed.


Of course, if the Coalition had not become ideological, and if it had respected the science, then Australia would still have a carbon price, and not celebrated its demise with such glee (photo above).
The country would also be on downward trend on emissions, would not have stuffed around with the renewable energy target and would now have a workable plan to usher in the enery transition, and would have significantly lower energy prices than it has now.
And it would be on a path to content to deal with the other emissions impact of coal fired generators, such as the huge increase of dangerous fine particle pollution (PM2.5) from the largest power stations. (McKenzie is minister for Rural Health, so should be concerned).
But, because of its ideology, and its demonisation of climate science and climate scientists, and modern technology, Australia has no policy, but a “backbone” of a new idea that appears to serve no other purpose than to bow to the hard right.


Kelly’s comments on the NEG were interesting – he supported it in principle, but conceded there was actually no flesh (or “parameters”, as he put it) on the backbone. But he wanted it to ensure that new coal fired generators were built.
Indeed, according to Sky News, the Monash Forum’s demands are based on a new $4 billion coal fired generator in the Latrobe Valley, a Hazelwood 2.0. If the government wants Snowy 2.0, then why not Hazelwood 2.0?
It’s true that there is no flesh on the bone with the NEG, but Kelly’s insistence that it should be of a certain colour was quickly heeded by energy minister Josh Frydenberg, who said that the NEG was “an opportunity that’ can’t be missed …. to get the best investment signals at the right place and the right time.”
This has been the line of the lobby groups supporting the NEG since it was hurriedly unveiled late last year – that this is the best policy that can be expected given the majority of one of the two big mainstream parties simply does not accept climate science or modern engineering.
The ultimatum to Labor, and the Labor states is clear – accept this, or the Coalition will continue to accept nothing that even looks like clearing the path for lower emissions and new technologies.
“I’m not pro coal, not anti coal,” Frydenberg insisted. “I’m not pro renewables, I’m not anti renewables …. What I am in favour of is lower energy prices and a more reliable energy system.”
But he then went on to say that the NEG would provide opporutnituies for coal oupgrades, and for coal to be important part of the energy mix.
“It puts a premium on reliable dispatchable power and that is something that coal does provide,” he told journalists. “I’d be please to see coal continue and for more investments in coal fired power stations – whether they be upgrades or others.”
Turnbull on Tuesday said the NEG would put a premium on 24/7 power – and coal could provide that. He said the NEG was a “real breakthrough” that would deliver affordable, reliable power. He said it had received strong support from industry and government.
But as the submissions from more than 100 industry players have made clear – the NEG as currently envisioned will deliver neither lower energy prices nor a more reliable energy system. There are massive questions, and not just because there is no flesh.
Turnbull said the NEG would put a premium on 24/7 power – and coal could provide that. He said the NEG was a “real breakthrough” that would deliver affordable, reliable power.
“This is a test of Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership, but given his track record of failing to stand up to the hard right of his party room and caving in on two energy policies, no one should be surprised if he caved into the hard right fossils again,” Labor energy spokesman Mark Butler said.
“Malcolm Turnbull’s inability to rein in his party room exemplifies the chaos which has surrounded his leadership over the energy crisis.
“All while household and business power bills continue to skyrocket, while pollution under this out of touch government continues to go up, and up, and up.”
His comments were echoed by John Grimes, of the Smart Energy Council, who noted the NEG was a recipe for delay and inaction on renewable energy and climate change.
“We need smart national energy policy – strong support for solar, storage and renewable energy and strong action on climate change,” he said in a statement.
“If you are aggressively supporting coal, you are not supporting smart energy policy – and Australia is not meeting its international climate change commitments.”

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