Lethal Heating: 09/17/18

Nature - Adam Morton

Scientists say the country will now struggle to meet it commitments to the Paris agreement.

Large parts of Australia are enduring a crippling drought. Credit: David Gray/Reuters

Australia’s new prime minister has abandoned the country’s policy for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. Climate scientists say the move means the government has effectively dropped its commitment to the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
“They’ve walked away from Paris without saying it, hoping no one would notice,” says Lesley Hughes, a climate-change scientist at Macquarie University in Sydney. Without a policy to cut carbon dioxide pollution, the government is dropping its international commitment by default, she says.
Australia now becomes the second advanced economy after the United States to drop emissions-reduction policies since the 2015 Paris climate conference. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to start removing climate regulations in March 2017 and pulled the US out of the Paris agreement in June 2017.
Australia’s effective abandonment of Paris can be traced back to late August, when the ruling conservative Liberal Party abruptly replaced former leader Malcolm Turnbull with Prime Minister Scott Morrison. The leadership change came after some party members objected to a policy that would have required electricity companies to meet emissions targets. Morrison subsequently said that he was abandoning the policy, called the National Energy Guarantee (NEG), and would instead focus on reducing the cost of energy for the public.
The NEG is the fourth national climate policy rejected by Australia’s conservative government since it was elected in 2013, and comes as large parts of country feel the effects of global warming — a crippling drought grips the eastern states and dozens of bushfires have erupted unseasonably early in those regions.
Some government members have even suggested that the country should join the Trump administration in officially withdrawing from the Paris agreement. Morrison has rejected this idea. He says Australia is on track to meet the target it announced before the Paris conference: to cut emissions by 26–28% below 2005 levels by 2030.
But there is little evidence to suggest the government will be able to meet this target without new policies. In August, government advisers said it was unlikely that the electricity sector, responsible for one-third of Australia’s emissions, would reduce its emissions by 26% unless a policy was introduced to drive cleaner energy generation over the next decade.
National emissions have risen each year since 2014, when the government repealed laws requiring big industrial emitters to pay for their emissions. There are also no significant policies to reduce the other major sources of pollution, such as transport, agriculture, heavy industry and mining, which together generate nearly two-thirds of Australia’s carbon emissions.
Although the NEG was a modest policy, proposed after several more effective schemes failed to win political support, it had the potential to win the backing of the centre-left opposition Labor Party, says John Church, a specialist in sea-level rise at the Climate Change Research Centre (CCRC) at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. That would have enabled the policy to pass through parliament and into law. The policy also had the support of the business community, which has been calling for climate and energy strategies that encourage investment in new and cleaner power plants, he says. “Walking away from it was a disaster.”
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, an authority on heatwaves, also at the CCRC, says government motivation to do something about climate change seems to have disappeared altogether. When she briefed senior officials on the latest climate-change science in August, she left the meeting feeling optimistic that more policies were coming. “People were trying to get things done, but now that’s not the case at all,” she says. “I’m extremely frustrated.”

Public concern
The decision to drop the policy also goes against the public’s support for action on climate change, says Hughes. A poll of 1,756 people, published on 12 September by research and advocacy organization the Australia Institute, found that 73% of respondents were concerned about climate change and 68% wanted domestic climate targets in line with the country’s Paris commitment.
But Australia’s lack of climate policy could be short-lived. A national election is due by May 2019, and recent polls suggest that the Labor Party, led by former union boss Bill Shorten, is favoured to win. Labor says it would set a new emissions target of a 45% cut by 2030, although it has not revealed how it would reach the target. In the meantime, some states have mandated ambitious renewable-energy targets, and business leaders say investment in clean energy is increasing because it is now the cheapest option.

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Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Large-scale solar's contribution to the grid is just beginning to soar. Photo: Supplied

Talking points

Wind, solar and hydro supplied 25.6% of the National Electricity Market in August.
South Australia led mainland states, with renewables including solar supplying 58% of power.
SA and Victoria, the mainland states with the largest clean energy share, had the lowest wholesale prices.
New renewables planned to be online by the end of 2020 would equal almost a 10th of generation over the past year.

Renewable energy supplied more than a quarter of the National Electricity Market last month amid windy weather and a "tsunami of new wind and solar projects" reaching completion, The Australia Institute said.
The progressive think tank's latest energy and emission audit found renewables including hydro and rooftop solar generated a record 25.6 per cent of electricity supplied to the market that serves about four in five Australians.
Clean energy's share of total grid supply for the 12 months to August was 16.1 per cent, beating the previous peak reached in the 12 months to 2014 when hydro plants went full-bore to take advantage of the carbon price before its scrapping by the Abbott government.
When rooftop solar is added, the 12-month share rose to 19.7 per cent - or not far shy of the 2020 Renewable Energy Target set for large-scale renewables.

Source: The Australia Institute

Wholesale prices - which are one component of what households and businesses pay for power - were lowest last month in South Australia at $72 per megawatt-hour. The state sourced 55 per cent of electricity from renewables and 58 per cent when rooftop solar was added, Hugh Saddler, an analyst with The Australia Institute, said.
Victoria's price of $79 per MW-hour was next lowest among mainland states. Renewable projects are surging in that state, with their share of supply jumping by a half in three years from 12.3 per cent to 18.9 per cent.
NSW had the most expensive wholesale power last month at $82 per MW-hour. Clean energy - including hydro running hard - reached only 14 per cent of supply in the state. NSW sources 12 per cent of its power from Victoria or Queensland, the report found.

There were record levels of renewable energy in August. Photo: Supplied

Coal debate
Dr Saddler said since the end of April, new wind farms had lifted capacity by 14 per cent while new solar farms had almost doubled capacity, though from a much smaller base.
"There's no sign of any slowdown of new projects coming on line," he said, noting these would include the 928 MW of new capacity announced last week by the Andrews government as part of its Victorian Renewable Energy Target.
Over the next two years new renewables would increase capacity by almost a 10th, or the equivalent of twice the size of AGL's ailing Liddell coal-fired power plant, the report estimates.
Despite the surge in renewables, the Morrison government continued to discuss the prospect of new coal-fired power stations, a stance at odds with market trends.
"The future is about coal - but about when the coal-fired power stations close," Dr Saddler, who is also an honorary professor at the Australian National University, said.
The rise of renewables meant emissions from the electricity sector continued to retreat, with wind and solar nudging out black coal-fired power. Still, rising fossil fuel use in the transport sector meant total energy combustion emissions "are basically flat", he said.

'Bodyblow'
In a separate blow to coal-fired power, Japan's Marubeni Corporation, one of world's largest developers of coal plants, was reported to be withdrawing from new projects.
Japan's Nikkei said Marubeni would also halve the ownership of plants it already held by 2030 and accelerate its shift to renewable energy.
Tim Buckley, an analyst with anti-fossil fuel group the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said the news that Marubeni was shifting its global weight behind renewables was "a bodyblow to the global coal industry and a profoundly important endorsement of the aims of the Paris Climate Agreement".
"It is inevitable that other global coal plant developers like POSCO of South Korea, Siemens of Germany and GE of America will be forced to evaluate their own position in light of Marubeni’s decision," he said.

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17/09/2018

Australia Has No Climate-Change Policy — Again

'Tsunami' Of New Wind And Solar Projects Drives Renewables Output To A Record