Coal To Be Kaput In Australia By 2050, As Renewables, Batteries Take Over

RenewEconomy - Sophie Vorrath

 Australia’s coal-fired generation capacity could be little more than a twinkle in Tony Abbott’s eye by as early as 2050, when it will have been all but snuffed out by cheap renewables and battery storage, and household energy investments.
The latest National Energy Outlook from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, predicts Australia will generate all but 8 per cent of its electricity from renewable energy sources by 2050, as dramatic reductions in battery storage costs boost solar and wind uptake.
The report, published on Tuesday night in Australia, neatly pole-vaults over the current national energy policy mire to forecast a six-fold growth in renewable capacity for Australia over the next 30-odd years, as technology and economics take over.

In fact, according to the NEO, renewables overtake fossil fuels as the major source of energy generation in Australia as early as 2031, before supplying 92 per cent of the total in 2050.
Renewables and storage make up 87 per cent of all new capacity additions to 2050, representing a $US138 billion ($A187 billion) investment opportunity.
By then, the report says, utility- and small-scale PV will have surged to 75GW, and wind to 48GW, while battery storage capacity will boom to at least 27GW in 2050 – the vast majority of which (23GW) will be installed by households and businesses behind-the-meter.
This behind the meter investment is significant and represents a reshaping of the grid. Together with demand response, behind-the-meter PV and storage will make up 44 per cent of total power capacity in Australia in 2050.
The solar capacity on household and business premises will supply more energy than coal in 2035, and nearly one quarter of Australia’s energy needs in 2050. Australia’s power system will be one of the two most decentralised in the world,
And by 2050, electric vehicles make up around 76 per cent of all new car sales in Australia, and 75 per cent of the total car fleet. Some 47TWh (14 per cent) of national electricity production will be used to charge EV batteries, but this also represents a flexible resource.
“Australia’s power sector is rapidly reorienting itself based on the economics of clean energy,” said Kobad Bhavnagri, head of BNEF in Australia. “New technology has set a path for Australia to achieve near-zero emissions power by 2050.
“The future grid will be underpinned by cheap wind and solar, with batteries and pumped hydro helping to smooth out the variability, and with more expensive gas acting as a fail-safe.”
For its part, BNEF says gas capacity will need also to increase, rising from 18GW today to 23GW in 2050, “to provide reliable supply in the rare periods when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining.”

For coal, however, the news is all bad. Bloomberg NEF sees its share of the generation mix falling from 25GW in 2017 – when it was the source of 65 per cent of the country’s electricity – to 23GW in 2025.
And from there on, it’s on a slippery slope, as capacity diminishes to 18GW in 2030, and to just 6GW in 2040.
By 2050, BNEF expects coal to be gone almost completely from Australia’s generation mix – although the report does stress that this is “assuming there are no government attempts to save it with subsidies;” something certain Coalition members are currently working so hard to do.
“This year’s NEO confirms that cheap renewables combined with improved battery storage will eventually mean the demise of Australia’s coal-fired power plants,” said Leonard Quong, senior associate at BNEF.
“New coal will not be able to compete with increasingly cheap electricity from wind and solar, balanced with battery storage and other flexible technologies like hydro and gas,” he said.
“As existing coal generators reach end of life, they will not be life-extended or replaced.”
All this happens against a global backdrop where BNEF sees wind and solar surging to almost “50 by 50” – 50 per cent of world generation by 2050 – also largely due to the advent of cheaper and cheaper batteries, enabling electricity to be stored and discharged to meet demand and supply.
Indeed, the key focus of the report – which is based on eight months of analysis and modelling by a 65-person Bloomberg NEF team – is the huge impact of falling battery costs.
This is particularly pronounced for lithium-ion battery prices which, already down by nearly 80 per cent per megawatt-hour since 2010, are expected to continue to tumble.

“We see $US548 billion being invested in battery capacity by 2050, two-thirds of that at the grid level and one-third installed behind-the-meter by households and businesses,” said Seb Henbest, the lead author of the NEO 2018, and head of BNEF in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
“The arrival of cheap battery storage will mean that it becomes increasingly possible to finesse the delivery of electricity from wind and solar, so that these technologies can help meet demand even when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.
“The result will be renewables eating up more and more of the existing market for coal, gas and nuclear.”
NEO 2018 sees $US11.5 trillion being invested globally in new power generation capacity between 2018 and 2050, with $US8.4 trillion of that going to wind and solar and a further $1.5 trillion to other zero-carbon technologies such as hydro and nuclear.
This investment will produce a 17-fold increase in solar photovoltaic capacity worldwide, and a sixfold increase in wind power capacity.

 The levellised cost of electricity, or LCOE, from new PV plants is forecast to fall a further staggering 71 per cent by 2050, while that for onshore wind drops by a further 58 per cent.
As BNEF notes, these two technologies have already seen LCOE reductions of 77 per cent and 41 per cent respectively between 2009 and 2018.
As for coal, it is forecast to be “the biggest loser” on the global stage, too.
“Beaten on cost by wind and PV for bulk electricity generation, and batteries and gas for flexibility, the future electricity system will reorganise around cheap renewables – coal gets squeezed out,” said Elena Giannakopoulou, head of energy economics at BNEF.
Conversely, the role of gas generation “will evolve” with the greater energy market, BNEF says, when it will be increasingly built and used to provide back-up for renewables rather than to produce “base-load” electricity.
BNEF sees $US1.3 trillion being invested in new capacity to 2050, nearly half of it in ‘gas peaker’ plants rather than combined-cycle turbines. Gas-fired generation is seen rising 15% between 2017 and 2050, although its share of global electricity declines from 21% to 15%.

AAP Image/Mick Tsikas

And what does all this mean for emissions? Bloomberg NEF says the bad news for coal is good for global pollution levels – although not good enough.
BNEF now sees global electricity sector emissions rising 2 per cent from 2017 to a peak in 2027, and then falling 38 per cent to 2050, the report says.
But this would still see the global electricity sector fall short of its part in the effort to keep global CO₂ levels below levels consistent with limiting the rise in temperatures to less than two degrees Celsius.
“Even if we decommissioned all the world’s coal plants by 2035, the power sector would still be tracking above a climate-safe trajectory, burning too much unabated gas,” said BNEF energy economics analyst Matthias Kimmel.
“Getting to two degrees requires a zero-carbon solution to the seasonal extremes, one that doesn’t involve unabated gas.”

Links

• Australian car fleet could be 90% EVs by 2050
• Tasmania may double size of hydro plant, in first step of big battery plans
• Five ways the NEG works against consumers, and solar
• Clean energy investment ‘must be 50% higher’ to limit warming to 1.5C
• NEG: Irrelevant at best, harmful at worst
• A 228MW Victorian wind farm to go ahead as big business snaps up cheap green power
• Who should control household rooftop solar and batteries?

Ex-NASA Scientist: 30 Years On, World Is Failing 'Miserably’ To Address Climate Change

The Guardian - Oliver Milman

James Hansen, who gave a climate warning in 1988 Senate testimony, says real hoax is by leaders claiming to take action

James Hansen: ‘All we’ve done is agree there’s a problem.’ Photograph: Ali Smith for the Guardian

Thirty years after a former NASA scientist sounded the alarm for the general public about climate change and human activity, the expert issued a fresh warning that the world is failing “miserably” to deal with the worsening dangers.
While Donald Trump and many conservatives like to argue that climate change is a hoax, James Hansen, the 77-year-old former NASA climate scientist, said in an interview at his home in New York that the relevant hoax today is perpetrated by those leaders claiming to be addressing the problem.
Hansen provided what’s considered the first warning to a mass audience about global warming when, in 1988, he told a US congressional hearing he could declare “with 99% confidence” that a recent sharp rise in temperatures was a result of human activity.
Since this time, the world’s greenhouse gas emissions have mushroomed despite repeated, increasingly frantic warnings about civilization-shaking catastrophe, from scientists amassing reams of evidence in Hansen’s wake.
“All we’ve done is agree there’s a problem,” Hansen told the Guardian. “We agreed that in 1992 [at the Earth summit in Rio] and re-agreed it again in Paris [at the 2015 climate accord]. We haven’t acknowledged what is required to solve it. Promises like Paris don’t mean much, it’s wishful thinking. It’s a hoax that governments have played on us since the 1990s.”
Hansen’s long list of culprits for this inertia are both familiar – the nefarious lobbying of the fossil fuel industry – and surprising. Jerry Brown, the progressive governor of California, and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, are “both pretending to be solving the problem” while being unambitious and shunning low-carbon nuclear power, Hansen argues.

James Hansen: ‘Promises like Paris don’t mean much, it’s wishful thinking. It’s a hoax that governments have played on us since the 1990s.’ Photograph: Arrizabalaga/REX Shutterstock

There is particular scorn for Barack Obama. Hansen says in a scathing upcoming book that the former president “failed miserably” on climate change and oversaw policies that were “late, ineffectual and partisan”.
Hansen even accuses Obama of passing up the opportunity to thwart Donald Trump’s destruction of US climate action, by declining to settle a lawsuit the scientist, his granddaughter and 20 other young people are waging against the government, accusing it of unconstitutionally causing peril to their living environment.
“Near the end of his administration the US said it would reduce emissions 80% by 2050,” Hansen said.
“Our lawsuit demands a reduction of 6% a year so I thought, ‘That’s close enough, let’s settle the lawsuit.’ We got through to Obama’s office but he decided against it. It was a tremendous opportunity. This was after Trump’s election, so if we’d settled it quickly the US legally wouldn’t be able to do the absurd things Trump is doing now by opening up all sorts of fossil fuel sources.”
Hansen’s frustrations temper any satisfaction at largely being vindicated for his testimony, delivered to lawmakers on 23 June 1988.
Wearing a cream-coloured suit, the soft-spoken son of Iowan tenant farmers hunched over the microphone in Washington to explain that humans had entered a confronting new era. “The greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now,” he said.
Afterwards, Hansen told reporters: “It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.” He brandished new research that forecast that 1988 was set to be the warmest year on record, as well as projections for future heat under three different emissions scenarios. The world has dutifully followed Hansen’s “scenario B” – we are “smack on it” it, Hansen said last week – with global temperatures jumping by around 1C (1.8F) over the past century.
These findings hadn’t occurred in a vacuum, of course – the Irish physicist John Tyndall confirmed that carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas in the 1850s. A 1985 scientific conference in Villach, Austria, concluded the temperature rise in the 21st century would be “greater than in any man’s history”. The changes in motion would “affect life on Earth for centuries to come”, the New York Times warned the morning after Hansen’s testimony.

James Hansen testifies before a Senate transportation subcommittee on 8 May 1989, a year after his history-making testimony regarding climate change. Photograph: Dennis Cook/AP

Three decades of diplomacy has blossomed into an international consensus, albeit rattled by Trump, that the temperature rise must be curbed to “well below” 2C (3.6F) above pre-industrial times. But in this time emissions have soared (in 1988, 20bn tons of carbon dioxide was emitted – by 2017 it was 32bn tons) with promised cuts insufficient for the 2C goal. Despite the notable growth of renewable energy such as solar and wind, Hansen believes there is no pathway to salvation without a tax on carbon-producing fuels.
“The solution isn’t complicated, it’s not rocket science,” Hansen said. “Emissions aren’t going to go down if the cost of fossil fuels isn’t honest. Economists are very clear on this. We need a steadily increasing fee that is then distributed to the public.”
Hansen faced opposition even before his testimony – he recalls a NASA colleague telling him on the morning of his presentation “no respectable scientist” would claim the world is warming – and faced subsequent meddling and censorship from George HW Bush’s administration.
He eventually retired from NASA in 2013 and promptly reinvented himself as an activist who was arrested, wearing his trademark hat, outside the White House while protesting against the Keystone oil pipeline.

James Hansen is arrested outside the White House for protesting on 27 September 2010. Photograph: Alamy

The dawdling global response to warming temperatures means runaway climate change now looms. The aspirational 1.5C (2.7F) warming target set in Paris could be surpassed by 2040. Huge amounts of ice from western Antarctica are crashing into the ocean, redrawing forecasts for sea level rise. Some low-lying islands fear extinction.
“It’s not too late,” Hansen stressed. “There is a rate of reduction that’s feasible to stay well below 2C. But you just need that price on carbon.”
John Holdren, who was Obama’s chief science adviser, told the Guardian that the Paris agreement achieved what was possible without support from Congress and that legally binding lawsuits would be “problematic”.
However, he added that while he had reservations about Hansen’s policy ideas he was one of the “true giants” of climate science.
“Poor Jim Hansen. He’s a tragic hero,” said Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard academic who studies the history of science. “The Cassandra aspect of his life is that he’s cursed to understand and diagnose what’s going on but unable to persuade people to do something about it. We are all raised to believe knowledge is power but Hansen proves the untruth of that slogan. Power is power.”
That power has been most aggressively wielded by fossil fuel companies such as Exxon and Shell which, despite being well aware of the dangers of climate change decades before Hansen’s touchstone moment in 1988, funded a network of groups that ridiculed the science and funded sympathetic politicians. Later, they were to be joined by the bulk of the US Republican party, which now recoils from any action on climate change as heresy.
“Obama was committed to action but couldn’t do much with the Congress he had,” Oreskes said. “To blame the Democrats and Obama is to misunderstand the political context. There was a huge, organized network that put forward a message of confusion and doubt.”
Climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, who testified at the same 1988 hearing about sea level rise, said the struggle to confront climate change has been “discouraging”.
“The nasty anti-science movement ramped up and now we are way behind.”
“I’m convinced we will deal with the problem,” he said. “[But] not before there is an amount of suffering that is unconscionable and should’ve been avoided.”

Links

• Americans 'under siege' from climate disinformation – former NASA chief scientist
• NASA full of 'fear and anxiety' since Trump took office, ex-employee says
• It's 50 years since climate change was first seen. Now time is running out
• We have every reason to fear Trump’s pick to head Nasa
• Americans 'under siege' from climate disinformation – former Nasa chief scientist
• The Guardian view on climate change: good news – but not yet good enough
• US emissions set to miss 2025 target in Paris climate change deal, research finds
• Nasa scientist: climate change is a moral issue on a par with slavery
• Climate change: the world looks to Washington
• Climate change policies failing, Nasa scientist warns Obama

Climate Change To Overtake Land Use As Major Threat To Global Biodiversity

Phys.org - University College London

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Climate change will have a rapidly increasing effect on the structure of global ecological communities over the next few decades, with amphibians and reptiles being significantly more affected than birds and mammals, a new report by UCL finds.
The pace of change is set to outstrip loss to vertebrate communities caused by land use for agriculture and settlements, which is estimated to have already caused losses of over ten per cent of biodiversity from ecological communities.
Previous studies have suggested that ecosystem function is substantially impaired where more than 20 per cent of species are lost; this is estimated to have occurred across over a quarter of the world's surface, rising to nearly two thirds when roads are taken into account.
The new study, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows that the effects of climate change on ecological communities are predicted to match or exceed land use in its effects on vertebrate community diversity by 2070.
The findings suggest that efforts to minimise human impact on global biodiversity should now take both land use and climate change into account instead of just focusing on one over the other, as the combined effects are expected to have significant negative effects on the global ecosystem.
Study author, Dr. Tim Newbold (UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment), said: "This is the first piece of research looking at the combined effects of future climate and land use change on local vertebrate biodiversity across the whole of the land surface, which is essential when considering how to minimise human impact on the local environment at a global scale.
"The results show how big a role climate change is set to play in decreasing levels of biodiversity in the next few decades and how certain animal groups and regions will be most affected."
Dr. Newbold's research has found that vertebrate communities are expected to lose between a tenth and over a quarter of their species locally as a result of climate change.
Furthermore, when combined with land use, vertebrate community diversity is predicted to have decreased substantially by 2070, with species potentially declining by between 20 and nearly 40 per cent.
The effect of climate change varies around the world. Tropical rainforests, which have seen lower rates of conversion to human use than other areas, are likely to experience large losses as a result of climate change. Temperate regions, which have been the most affected by land use, stand to see relatively small biodiversity changes from future climate change, while tropical grasslands and savannahs are expected to see strong losses as a result of both climate change and land use.

Links

• Climate change to become ‘greatest pressure on biodiversity’ by 2070
• The double threat of climate and land use change enhances risks to biodiversity
• Biodiversity suffers as climate warms
• Study shows one third of world's protected areas degraded by human activities
• Climate change to cause dramatic drop in Persian Gulf biodiversity and fisheries potential
• Australia’s Biodiversity And Climate Change
• Save Our Bugs! How To Avert An Insect Armageddon
• 'Going Backwards': A Third Of Protected Land At Risk As Australia Lags
• Urgent Climate Action Required To Protect Tens Of Thousands Of Species Worldwide, New Research Shows
• Will Our Beloved Waratahs Survive Climate Change?
• As Biodiversity Declines, So Does Public Attention
• Climate Change Driving Birds To Migrate Early, Research Reveals
• Australian Scientists Found The Gene Trees Use To Adapt To Climate Change
• Tree Of Life Faces Deep Cuts From Climate Change
• An American Tragedy: Why Are Millions Of Trees Dying Across The Country?
• Study Identifies Key Species Which Act As Warning Signs Of Ecosystem Collapse
• Politics For The Planet: Why Nature And Wildlife Need Their Own Seats At The UN
• Proceedings of the Royal Society