Lethal Heating: 04/08/18

08/04/2018

Consumers Are Sick Of Coalition’s Coal Fantasy: They Are Going Solar

RenewEconomy - Giles Parkinson

Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull may have done more for renewable energy in Australia than he is given credit for.
Turnbull’s refusal to tackle the climate deniers and the fossil fuel ideologues within his own Coalition government has helped spark the biggest rush to rooftop solar the world has seen, and a powerful economic force that will quickly unravel the business model of so-called baseload coal.
Since Turnbull came into power in late 2015 – after unseating Tony Abbott, but not his predecessor’s climate and energy policies – the rate of uptake of rooftop solar in Australia has more than doubled.
It is now running at record levels of around 120MW a month, with 18,000 new installations on households and businesses around the country in March, and a total of 55,000 installations, and a record 351MW of capacity installed on rooftops in the first three months of the year.

Photo courtesy Springers Solar

The boom is occurring around the country, which now has 6.8GW of rooftop solar (systems under 100kW) and a total of 1.85 million different homes and businesses.
At this rate, it will exceed even the most optimistic official forecasts of more than 21GW of rooftop solar by 2035, and will likely be closer to forecasts such as Bloomberg new Energy Finance, which sees 33GW by 2040, when it will provide 25 per cent of total demand.
Eddie Springer, the project manager at the family-owned Springers Solar in Brisbane, says the rush to solar is mostly economics, and partly driven by politics.
“The more the media talk about the pushback on renewables, the more people want it,” he tells RenewEconomy. “The more it is in the media, whether good, bad or indifferent, it’s all good publicity, because the economics stack up.”
Springer says a recent installation at a Brisbane furniture warehouse will deliver a three year payback, and even accountancy firms are getting in on the act.
“If you can sell solar to an accountant, you can sell it to anyone. They (the accountants) are starting to spread the word, tell their clients, and we are getting referrals from them.”
The shift should not be surprising. The political deadlock and the lack of any clear policy division has contributed to a huge surge in electricity prices since the Coalition scrapped the carbon price.
Households can comfortably get a four-to-six year payback, and they are looking to take a leaf out of Turnbull’s playbook and put as much solar as they can on the roof, with an eye to the future (storage and electric vehicles), and because it makes financial sense.
Even a top quality system translates into a cost of no more than 10c/kWh, while most consumers are paying close to 40c/kWh for their power, depending on the scale of fixed network charges and their level of consumption. So the purchase makes sense even when it is exporting most of the capacity to the grid.
The consequences are clear: the rapid and accelerating uptake of rooftop solar by Australian households and business will accelerate the very transition that the coal boosters and ideologues are trying to stop.

And that transition is the shift to distributed generation, where rooftop solar, battery storage, the ability to share energy and operate demand management becomes the dominant part of the energy system.
This shift to distributed generation has been a feature of recent landmark studies, such as those by the CSIRO and network owners, and by chief scientist Alan Finkel. It is now a major theme among even the conservative energy institutions that run Australia’s grid, and set the rules and regulate it.
The Australian Energy Market Operator, for instance, says that by 2050, up to 45 per cent of all demand in Australia will be served by distributed generation – primarily rooftop solar and battery storage but also demand response. Networks owners and generators agree. BNEF sees that level by 2040.

This is not a market in which coal-fired generation, new or old, can prosper. Not only is coal fired generation dirty and increasingly expensive, it is hopelessly inflexible.
“These changes in the load profile result in an economic and operating challenge for continuous baseload,” AEMO notes in a recent report, adding that what is needed to accommodate this transition is highly flexible capacity, and new rules to encourage it.
The fact that the coal boosters are scoring a massive own goal should not be surprising.
Their push for new coal generation, or even extending the life of existing coal generators, is based on a stunning mix of lies, ignorance and ideology.
There is a refusal to accept the basic economics of renewables versus fossil fuels, and an inability to comprehend how this can be integrated into the system and ultimately deliver a smarter, cleaner and cheaper grid.
And of course, climate change and other environmental impacts are completely ignored. It is what what Ian Dunlop, the former chair of the Australian Coal Association, laments as “pigheaded arrogance and failure of imagination.”
Consumers, large and small, now know better – whether it be the new owners of the Whyalla steelworks, the biggest telco company in the country, the biggest brewer, or owners of zinc refiners, massive greenhouses, or smaller manufacturing facilities.
Still, the right wing rails against battery storage, against demand management, and even electric vehicles, even as AEMO’s own conclusions suggest a smarter, faster and cheaper grid, if the rules can be adapted.
It’s somewhat ironic that households are taking a leaf out of Turnbull’s own playbook. Systems are getting larger – they now average 7kW, and the 10kW to 20kW sector is the fastest growing in the country, and these are going on households, farms and small businesses.
According to Warwick Johnston from SunWiz, around one in eight new solar systems were accompanied by battery storage in 2017, and one in six will add battery storage in 2018.
A total of 33,000 battery storage systems are expected in 2018, but this number will surge in coming years as costs fall, an inevitable result of the support being shown for large scale rollouts of storage and virtual power plants.

Turnbull has installed 14kW of rooftop solar on his Point Piper home and also has about 14kWh of battery storage, masterminded by his son. Many households are going a similar route, not just because the economics are clear, but ahead of new technologies such as storage and electric vehicles.
Were does this rush to rooftop solar leave us? With a highly distributed grid and less room for inflexible coal plants. The business model for coal is being destroyed faster than the Coalition and the fossil fuel industry can think of ways to prop it up.
And the public has lost faith – in the politics, and its stench of ideology and vested interests, and they are rapidly losing faith in big corporations, represented in this industry by the big utilities, and their overpowering greed.
The biggest risk is highlighted by the network owners themselves. If the market does not adapt, and embrace renewables and change the rules to allow for this smarter, faster, cleaner technology, and deliver the cost reductions it promises, then the current trend of load defection will translate into grid defection.

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How A Fossil Fuel Geoscientist Joined The Fight Against Climate Change

ABC Science

Imagine walking away from a promising and well-paying career as a geoscientist in the fossil fuel industry to join the fight against climate change.
That's what Dimitri Lafleur did.
He started working for Shell in his home country of the Netherlands before he ended up in Australia in 2008 to help the company search for gas on the North West Shelf.
"My job was to map out the structure of the gas fields and work out how to get the most gas out of them," says Dimitri.
But soon after he arrived in Perth, Dimitri found himself at a briefing on climate change science, and things would never be the same.
Looking at graphs of increasing carbon dioxide levels, he could not see how climate change could be solved with continued use of fossil fuels.
"That was the real trigger for me to think this was not the way to continue," says Dimitri
He became acutely aware of the need for humans to take action.

Dimitri started agitating for the company to shift more of its core business towards renewables. But change wasn't going to happen fast enough for him.
"You start to wonder, 'What am I doing here?'"
So, after years of geophysics and geology study, including a master's degree in earth sciences, and 11 years in the oil and gas industry, Dimitri took the plunge and resigned.

Using your skills to a different end
Dimitri soon enrolled in a PhD at the University of Melbourne's Climate and Energy College, which cultivates interdisciplinary work by experts in energy and climate to find solutions to climate change.
He started off with the idea of studying renewable energy but then the thought of giving up years of scientific expertise in geoscience stuck in his craw.
"I wasn't prepared to let go all this knowledge I had," he says. "I just couldn't do it."
So that's when he decided to study the environmental impacts of "unconventional gas".

This includes shale gas, although Dimitri's main focus has been on coal seam gas (CSG).
While natural gas emits less CO2 than coal for the same amount of energy obtained, there is a question over whether this advantage could be affected by stray methane emissions leaking into the atmosphere during the CSG extraction process.
Dimitri wanted to investigate — and soon found himself a player in an ongoing controversy.

Natural versus man-made methane leaks
In recent years, for example, arguments have flared over a methane gas leak in Queensland's Condamine River, in the Surat Basin, which is one of Australia's largest coal seam gas regions.
In 2016, the Greens released a dramatic YouTube video, in which they set methane bubbling into the river on fire, blaming CSG mining for the build up of gas.

Others, including the CSIRO, have argued the methane bubbles are likely due to a natural "seep".
Dimitri argues, however, that there is a lack of data and CSG mining could have a bigger contribution to methane emissions than many think.
Only by measuring emissions before, during and after CSG wells are sunk will it be possible to work out whether its extraction is increasing methane emissions by making natural methane leaks worse, or creating new leaks, he says.
But Dimitri's PhD research found that published scientific measurements of these stray methane emissions was relatively scarce — given the extent of CSG development in Australia.
These findings were published online in two reports prepared by the Melbourne Energy Institute.
At a conference in Sydney earlier this year, Dimitri reported some preliminary experimental findings from his PhD study of methane emissions in another area of the CSG fields near Condamine.
In this work, he combined his previous experience as a geoscientist with knowledge from the fields of atmospheric and soil science to demonstrate a method of studying methane leaks from the ground.

Looking to the future
Dimitri says he'd like to follow up, over time, to see if there is any change in emissions as CSG operations continue.
He argues that any research project like this will need good access to industry geological data, have a broad enough scope to answer the question at hand, and to be done in a way that engenders public trust.
"It's important that it is transparent and done in an independently verifiable way."
CSIRO currently has a project with industry that, among other things, is measuring methane seepage in the Surat Basin.
"This is critical as the information can then be used to compare against future methane emissions as CSG production in the Surat Basin increases, providing a guide as to what portion of methane belongs to the CSG industry," states a fact sheet on the project website.
Dimitri is watching the research with interest.

... and looking back
As Dimitri prepares to submit his PhD, he looks back on the six years since he made the tough decision to leave his job with Shell.

Dimitri says Shell was otherwise a very good company in terms of job satisfaction and opportunities. Among other things, it was hard to leave behind the financial security.
"You get a nice salary, there's no denying that," he says.
"It made me very aware of how difficult it would be for people to quit who had big mortgages or had become accustomed to the quality of life.
"There were plenty of times I wondered if this was the right decision.
"But in the end, the idea that I have a more an active role in contributing to solutions for climate change makes me a much happier person ... I feel really good."
Dimitri is also passionate about the "moral responsibility" of fossil fuel producers to help pay for climate change mitigation and adaptation, even if it is not in their backyard.
"There is a lot of wealth creation with these fossil fuels," he says.
"It can help pay for mitigation and adaptation in countries that don't have those funds available."

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The Nationals Should Support Carbon Farming, Not Coal

The Conversation - Andrew Hopkins

National Party MP George Christensen has invited other Nationals to join the recently formed pro-coal “Monash Forum”. But is coal in the best interests of their rural constituents, particularly farmers?

The carbon farming initiative gives pig farmers the opportunity to earn carbon credits for reducing methane emissions from manure. The proposed change to this government policy may stall, or even end, this market. Alan Skerman/AAP

Farmers stand to lose from any weakening of the government’s climate change policies. That is why farmers and their political representatives should be concerned about a current review of the government’s greenhouse gas reduction policy.
What is at stake here is the strange-sounding idea of carbon farming. To explain this idea takes several steps, so bear with me.
The policy under review is a legacy of the Abbott era. As prime minister, Tony Abbott abolished the carbon tax and replaced it with an Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF). The ERF was to be used to pay businesses to reduce their carbon emissions, or to capture and sequester (store) carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.
As it turns out, most of the funding has gone to rural enterprises that have developed various farming projects that qualify for funding – hence the term, carbon farming.
For example, these projects include:

regenerating native forest on previously cleared land
changed farming practices to allow for crop stubble retention
capturing and destroying the methane from effluent waste at piggeries.

How does carbon farming work?
To make it all work, the government first created the system of Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs). This system commodifies the outputs of carbon farming, so these can be traded.
In this system, a carbon farmer must show either a reduction in emissions, or carbon sequestration (or ideally both), according to clearly specified criteria. The government will then issue (free of charge) one credit for every tonne of carbon dioxide (CO₂) – or CO₂ equivalent – abated in this way. Farmers can then sell these credits, thus receiving a direct financial return for their efforts.
The primary buyer of ACCUs at the moment is the government, via its Emissions Reduction Fund. Farmers (individually or as collectives) who want to embark on carbon farming projects are asked to nominate a price they would need to make it profitable for them to go ahead with the project. Through a reverse auction, the fund selects the lowest-price proposals.
In this way, the government gets the greatest carbon abatement for the least money. Successful bidders embark on their projects knowing that they have a guaranteed price for their carbon abatement outcomes. There is nothing magical or mystical about it. It is simply the price at which the buyer and sellers of carbon credits find it mutually advantageous to do business.
The average price paid at the last auction round was A$12 per tonne of CO₂ abated. This is the current carbon price in this particular market.

The Safeguard Mechanism
A second potential set of buyers of carbon credits was created by the Safeguard Mechanism, introduced by the Abbott government. This caps emissions from big industrial emitters in order to to ensure that abatement achieved by the ERF is not offset or cancelled out.
The cap is set at whatever the maximum emission rate from the emitter has been. So it is not designed to reduce emissions from these big emitters, but simply to hold them to current levels.
The scheme covers just over 150 facilities, which are responsible for about half of Australia’s emissions. Emitters that go over their limit can remain in compliance by buying enough carbon credits to compensate for their “excess” emissions and surrendering these to government.
This policy is now beginning to bite. The government has just announced that in the first period for which the policy has been in effect, some 16 large emitters were in excess and had to buy 448,000 carbon credits to remain in compliance. Among the biggest buyers were:

Anglo Coal’s Capcoal mining operations
Glencore’s Tahmoor Coal
Rio Tinto’s Alcan Gove aluminium operations
BHP Billiton Mitsubishi Coal/BM Alliance.

These companies bought their credits from carbon farmers who abated more carbon then they had calculated, and so had a surplus left over for sale.
But what is most interesting is the price that excess emitters were willing to pay for the surplus credits. Most of the sales were in the region of $14-15 per tonne (T), but the price rose to $17-18/T as the deadline approached.
This means that the price spiked at 50% higher than the most recent ERF auction price of $12/T.
Commentators describe this as a secondary market, and the price in this market is exciting news for carbon farmers. According to Australian Carbon Market Institute CEO Peter Castellas, “Australia now has a functioning carbon market.” Carbon farmers – who make up an increasing proportion of the Nationals’ constituency – will do well if this market expands.
One way to develop the market would be to slowly lower the caps on big emitters so they must either buy more carbon credits or find ways to reduce their own emissions.
From this point of view, there is good reason to progressively and predictably reduce the emissions allowed under the Safeguard Mechanism.

The current review
Here’s where we get to the current review. As already noted, the Safeguard Mechanism does not seek to reduce emissions from big emitters. In fact, it allows for an increase in emissions to accommodate business growth. Nevertheless, big emitters are still unhappy.
The government’s review is a response to business concerns. An initial consultation paper has proposed making it easier to raise the cap on a company’s emissions as its activity grows.
If the rules are altered in this way, the demand for carbon credits may stall, and even decline, bringing to an end to this promising new source of revenue for farmers.
That is why members of parliament with rural constituencies should take note. Rural MPs should not sit by and allow the government to respond to the interests of the coal industry and other lobby groups.
Carbon farming depends on reducing the caps under the Safeguard Mechanism, not raising them. This would also be a step in the direction of achieving the emissions reduction target to which Australia agreed at the Paris meetings in 2015.

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