23/03/2019

Australia Has Enough Solar, Wind Storage In Pipeline To Go 100% Renewables

RenewEconomy - 

On March 15, tens of thousands of school students went on “strike”, imploring politicians to finally Get Serious about climate change policies, and urging a switch to 100 per cent renewable energy by 2030.
Can’t be done, they were told.
Readers may remember, however, that ANU researchers Andrew Blakers and Matt Stocks in February said that if Australia continued at its current rate of wind and solar deployment, then enough to meet the equivalent of 100 per cent of the country’s electricity needs could be delivered by 2030.
Now, new research from the Norway-based research company Rystad says the pipeline of wind, solar and storage projects in Australia will likely reach 100GW before the upcoming federal election in May, including those in “concept” stage, and those seeking development approvals, already have DAs, have won contracts, are under construction, or are already built.
Of course, not all these projects will be built at the scale envisaged. There may be local issues, connection hurdles, financing challenges and market headwinds. But if they were, they would deliver enough megawatt-hours to deliver Australia’s current demand.
Of course, getting to 100 per cent renewables for electricity is not simply a matter of building lots of solar and wind farms. As Blakers and Stocks noted, it needs a plan, and it depends on where this capacity is built, and how it is connected. It also depends on how much storage there is, in both capacity and duration.
And such a dramatic switch would require a wholesale review of market rules and practices to deal with the new technology, and fast-response batteries in particular. Given that many developers could probably construct a small solar farm in the time it takes for regulators to agree on the change of a paragraph in the National Electricity Rules, this looms as a major hurdle.
And, it should be noted, even though nearly every utility and energy expert accepts that the energy transition is inevitable, there is still great debate about how quickly it could or should be done.
Still, the existence of such a huge pipeline of projects underlines the global and national interest in what is happening in Australia, and the depth of resources that can be exploited if the other issues are resolved.
Rystad describes the 100GW level as a “symbolic milestone” and says it follows a “blistering start” to the new year in which 6.65GW of new capacity from 62 assets were added to its data-base in January and February – more than double the capacity and number of assets that were added in the same period last year.
“This clearly shows the confidence investors have in Australia’s renewable future and possibly where the renewables sector sees the election outcome going,” says senior analyst David Dixon.
These new projects include an additional 2.9GW (AC) of large-scale solar, and another 1.4GW of wind. But it is the 2.4GW of storage (a rise of 25 per cent) that catches the eye.


The breakdown of the Rystad data base is as follows, and is also illustrated in the graph above. There is just over 40GW of solar in the pipeline, including 9.6GW of “concept”, 11.4GW awaiting DA approval, and 19.2GW approved. And about 5GW already built or under construction.
There is just under 30GW of wind in the pipeline, with 19.4GW in “concept”, 1.8GW in DA application and 8.5GW in DA approved. The difference in numbers shows the switch to solar technologies as it matches wind in price, and usually has less DA issues.
Storage is the big new player and is split between pumped hydro (PHES) and lithium-ion batteries. For PHES, there is 3.5GW in concept (which includes Snowy 2.0 because it has yet to get DA approval), another 500MW awaiting DA, and 500MW if DA approved.
Lithium-ion batteries have 1.2GW in the “concept” stage, another 2.3GW awaiting DA approval, and another 2.9GW with DA approval. “The battery pipeline has grown exponentially,” Dixon says.

The state break down clearly demonstrates that NSW is leading the way in aggregated totals, Queensland is dominated by solar projects, and South Australia – even though it is already at more than 50 per cent wind and solar – also matches Victoria and W.A.
South Australia is predicted, by the market operator, to install another wind and solar capacity to deliver the equivalent of 100 per cent of its demand as early as 2026 or 2027.
The concept projects include what might be described by some as thought bubbles and land and network prospecting.
But it also includes mostly serious ventures such as the giant Asia Renewable Energy Hub project in the Pilbara, backed by Vestas, Macquarie Group and CWP – which aims for some 11GW of wind and solar that could be exported to Asia, either directly via a sub-sea cable, or via a transportable fuel such as ammonia.
Other projects include the 4GW Walcha project in NSW, proposed by Energy Estate and Mirus Wind, which aims to combine huge amounts of wind, solar and storage for the biggest project proposed so far for the main grid, and the 2GW Star of the South offshore wind project in Bass Strait.


Would all of this be enough for 100 per cent renewables energy for Australia’s electricity needs?
“Easily,” says Ben Elliston, a co-author of one report into 100 per cent renewable energy options published by the UNSW three years ago.
Elliston says, however, there are a lot of different answers to what 100 per cent renewables might look like, and the work of his team has possibly been over-run by unexpectedly quick cost reductions in solar.  “I would expect to see less wind and more PV if (the study) was repeated today.”
The ANU’s Blakers and Stocks say that 100GW should be sufficient, but reaching 100 per cent renewables will ultimately depend on the mix and the location, and to the amount of storage, and transmission available.
“The amount of storage we need to support this is well short at present,” Blakers says. “We need an additional 450GWh of energy with 20GW of power, which can come from a combination of pumped hydro, batteries and demand management.
“We also need quite a lot more transmission. However, the cost of this additional storage (+ associated transmission) is only about $25/MWh (considerably less than the cost of the PV & wind that it supports).”
And, there will also likely to be a need for more electricity, as electric cars become the main form of transport and as heat pumps and other technologies push oil and gas heating our of buildings.

Links
at No comments:

Expanding Gas Mining Threatens Our Climate, Water And Health

The Conversation -  | 

Unconventional gas wells are being approved in their thousands across Australia. AAP Image/Dean Lewins
Australia, like its competitors Qatar, Canada and the United States, aspires to become the world’s largest exporter of gas, arguing this helps importing nations reduce their greenhouse emissions by replacing coal.
Yes, burning gas emits less carbon dioxide than burning coal. Yet the “fugitive emissions” – the methane that escapes, often unmeasured, during production, distribution and combustion of gas – is a much more potent short-term greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
A special report issued by the World Health Organisation after the 2018 Katowice climate summit urged governments to take “specific commitments to reduce emissions of short-lived climate pollutants” such as methane, so as to boost the chances of staying with the Paris Agreement’s ambitious 1.5℃ global warming limit.
Current gas expansion plans in Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland, where another 2,500 coal seam gas wells have been approved, reveal little impetus to deliver on this. Harvesting all of WA’s gas reserves would emit about 4.4 times more carbon dioxide equivalent than Australia’s total domestic energy-related emissions budget.

Gas as a cause of local ill-health
There are not only global, but also significant local and regional risks to health and well-being associated with unconventional gas mining. Our comprehensive review examines the current state of the evidence.
Since our previous reviews (see here, here and here), more than 1,400 further peer-reviewed articles have been published, helping to clarify how expanding unconventional gas production across Australia risks our health, well-being, climate, water and food security.
This research has been possible because, since 2010, 17.6 million US citizens’ homes have been within a mile (1.6km) of gas wells and fracking operations. Furthermore, some US research funding is independent of the gas industry, whereas much of Australia’s comparatively small budget for research in this area is channelled through an industry-funded CSIRO research hub.

Key medical findings
There is evidence that living close to unconventional gas mining activities is linked to a wide range of health conditions, including psychological and social problems.
The US literature now consistently reports higher frequencies of low birth weight, extreme premature births, higher-risk pregnancies and some birth defects, in pregnancies spent closer to unconventional gas mining activities, compared with pregnancies further away. No parallel studies have so far been published in Australia.
US studies have found increased indicators of cardiovascular disease, higher rates of sinus disorders, fatigue and migraines, and hospitalisations for asthma, heart, neurological, kidney and urinary tract conditions, and childhood blood cancer near shale gas operations.
Exploratory studies in Queensland found higher rates of hospitalisation for circulatory, immune system and respiratory disorders in children and adults in the Darling Downs region where coal seam gas mining is concentrated.

Water exposure
Chemicals found in gas mining wastewater include volatile organic compounds such as benzene, phenols and polyaromatic hydrocarbons, as well as heavy metals, radioactive materials, and endocrine-disrupting substances – compounds that can affect the body’s hormones.
This wastewater can find its way into aquifers and surface water through spillage, injection procedures, and leakage from wastewater ponds.
The environmental safety of treated wastewater and the vast quantities of crystalline salt produced is unclear, raising questions about cumulative long-term impacts on soil productivity and drinking water security.
Concern about the unconventional gas industry’s use of large quantities of water has increased since 2013. Particularly relevant to Australian agriculture and remote communities is research showing an unexpected but consistent increase in the “water footprint” of gas wells across all six major shale oil and gas mining regions of the US from 2011 to 2016. Maximum increases in water use per well (7.7-fold higher, Permian deposits, New Mexico and Texas) and wastewater production per well (14-fold, Eagle Ford deposits, Texas) occurred where water stress is very high. The drop in water efficiency was tied to a drop in gas prices.

Air exposure
Research on the potentially harmful substances emitted into the atmosphere during water removal, gas production and processing, wastewater handling and transport has expanded. These substances include fine particulate pollutants, ground-level ozone, volatile organic compounds, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, hydrogen sulfide, formaldehyde, diesel exhaust and endocrine-disrupting chemicals.
Measuring concentrations and human exposures to these pollutants is complicated, as they vary widely and unpredictably in both time and location. This makes it difficult to prove a definitive causal link to human health impacts, despite the mounting circumstantial evidence.
Our review found substantially more evidence of what we suspected in 2013: that gas mining poses significant threats to the global climate, to food and water supplies, and to health and well-being.
On this basis, Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA) has reinforced its position that no new gas developments should occur in Australia, and that governments should increase monitoring, regulation and management of existing wells and gas production and transport infrastructure.

Links
at No comments:

Journey to Antarctica: Is This What a Climate Catastrophe Looks Like in Real Time?

Rolling Stone - 

Scientists aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer watch a 25-mile-wide section of ice crumble into the sea
View from the deck of an ice strengthened ship on an expedition cruise to Antarctica, 2013.
Global Warming Images/REX/Shutterstock
The Nathaniel B. Palmer has left Antarctica behind and made the turn toward home. The last science experiments were completed, and the ship headed north, toward Punta Arenas, Chile, where our two-month journey will end. Scientists on board are packing up equipment and writing rough drafts of papers based on discoveries they made during our adventure into uncharted waters around Thwaites glacier. But an almost existential question looms above it all: Did we just witness what amounts to a climate catastrophe playing out in real time?
On March 3rd, Bastien Queste, an oceanographer at the University of East Anglia who is a key member of the science team aboard the ship, got a WhatsApp message from a colleague back in the UK. She had sent him a satellite image of Thwaites glacier and the surrounding region in West Antarctica. At the time, we had just completed our own close encounter with the awesome craggy blue glacier and were only a few miles away, mapping the seabed in front of the glacier with the ship’s sonar device.
On this trip, satellite images have been indispensable in helping scientists track the ever-changing ice in the regions we’ve been exploring. But the map Queste received that morning was different. He noticed dark cracks in parts of the ice shelf, which floats out over the sea like a huge fingernail from the glacier itself. They had not been there before. The ice shelf was clearly starting to break up. Queste’s first thought: “Oh, shit.”
Queste knew as well as anyone, the whole point of this research trip is to better understand the risk of collapse of Thwaites glacier, one of the most consequential tipping points in the Earth’s climate system. It’s not just that Thwaites is big, although it is (imagine a glacier the size of Florida). But because of how the glacier terminates in deep water, as well as the reverse slope of the ground beneath it, Thwaites is vulnerable to particularly rapid collapse. Even more troubling, Thwaites is like the cork in the wine bottle for the rest of the West Antarctica ice sheet. If Thwaites were to fall apart, scientists fear the entire ice sheet could begin to collapse, eventually raising sea levels more than 10 feet.
That’s what Queste’s “oh, shit” was about. It was non-scientific-but-very-human-shorthand for, “Is Thwaites falling apart in real time, right before our eyes?”
Queste showed the image to Rob Larter, the chief scientist on the Palmer. Larter was not entirely surprised by what he saw. A few days earlier, as we cruised along the front of Thwaites, Larter had remarked on how chaotic and jumbled the ice shelf looked. “I thought something like this might happen because of how broken up the ice on the shelf appeared,” he says.
Over the next few days, Queste and Larter — as well as nearly every other scientist and student on the ship — watched the disintegration of the Thwaites ice shelf. It was a spooky sensation, looking at the satellite images then looking out the window as a parade of icebergs floated right by us on their way out to sea. In a matter of 48 hours or so, a mélange of ice about 25 miles wide and 15 miles deep cracked up and scattered into the sea. As Queste says, “A part of the glacier that is as big as the city I live in — it was just gone.”
Here are satellite images of Thwaites before and after the blowout. The red dot shows where the ship was located on those days.


For scientists both on and off the ship, the big question is, was the blowout a sign that Thwaites is collapsing before our eyes, or was it a more or less ordinary event in the lifecycle of a big glacier? These are not easy questions to answer. Glaciers are practically alive, in flux all the time, exquisitely sensitive to small changes in atmospheric and ocean temperatures. Sometimes changes that look dramatic to non-scientists, like the breakup of the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica a few years ago, have an inconsequential impact on sea level rise (unlike the Thwaites ice shelf, the Larsen B is not holding back a massive city-drowning glacier).
And it’s important to point out that the Thwaites blowout is not the same thing as what scientists typically call a “calving event,” which you often see in movies and documentaries, where big slabs of ice fall off glaciers into the sea. What we witnessed was the sudden disintegration of an ice shelf, which is a very different thing. Unlike the calving of land-based ice into the sea, the break-up of an ice shelf does not itself contribute to sea level rise, because the ice is already floating — just as when the ice in your whiskey melts, the level of whiskey in your drink doesn’t rise.
Nevertheless, ice shelves are important. They buttress the glacier itself, providing stability and in effect holding it back from slipping faster into the sea. The ice shelf that blew out at Thwaites was particularly messy and chaotic — it’s a bunch of bergs glued together with seasonal sea ice rather than a solid shelf. So maybe it wasn’t doing much to stabilize Thwaites, and the blowout wasn’t a big deal.
But given the larger fragility of Thwaites, and the consequences of a sudden collapse, any dramatic change in the structure of the glacier is hardly an encouraging sign.
When it comes to melting glaciers and sea level rise, climate scientists have traditionally been far more concerned about Greenland than Antarctica. In our warming world, Antarctica was viewed as a stable place: very big, very cold, very distant.
Then, in the early 1990s, improved satellite observations proved those assumptions were wrong. Of special concern was West Antarctica, which is particularly vulnerable to warm Circumpolar Deep Water attacking the glaciers from below. A recent paper co-authored by scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California noted that the main trunk of Thwaites accelerated 33 percent between 2006 and 2013 — it’s now sliding into the sea at a rate of about two miles per year. In addition, parts of the glacier are thinning by as much as 13 feet each year.
Here’s a GIF that captures how much Thwaites has changed in just the past five years. The orange and red sections are the fastest flowing parts of the glacier.


And here’s a graph that shows how quickly the ice flow on Thwaites has accelerated — it’s almost doubled in the last five years.



So what does all this mean? Nobody can say for sure. “I’m holding my breath to see what happens next,” says Larter. “The blowout could be the start of a new phase of the evolution of Thwaites glacier. But I’m wary, because sometimes you see things that you think are going to be the start of something big, and then things settle down. I think it’s too early to say which way this is going to go.”
In an email, Eric Rignot, a senior scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who has co-authored recent papers suggesting the collapse of Thwaites is already past the point of no return, told me that he wouldn’t view the blowout as particularly alarming unless he saw retreat of the front of the glacier itself during the process (which, in the most recent satellite images, he hasn’t). But Rignot ended his email to me with an important note: “This sort of event is a good reminder that changes can happen fast in these environments, even though it may seem that nothing much is happening when you are staring at the glacier from a ship deck, right?”
Richard Alley, a highly respected glaciologist at Penn State, had a more nuanced view of it all. Alley (who, like Rignot, is not on the ship) pointed out that because the ice shelf that blew out was already pretty chaotic, it was likely not providing much stability to the glacier. “So its loss is not a huge issue for the still-grounded ice,” Alley emailed. “But the chaotic ice was still doing something.” He compared Thwaites to glaciers in Greenland, where the blowout of similar mélanges are often followed by calving of ice from the glacier itself, which is far more troubling. Alley also pointed out that the loss of ice shelves leaves glaciers vulnerable to stress from what he called “remote forcing” — storms across the Pacific, or tsunamis from an earthquake. “To stretch the analogy a little bit,” Alley said, “if Thwaites were a car, you could say that it has lost part of its bumper. And, while that’s not hugely important, it is part of a pattern that is pointing toward larger changes to come.”
This is, in short, what makes climate change so alarming, and so unlike other threats that humans have faced. By loading the atmosphere with carbon, we are messing with a system that even the best scientists in the world don’t fully understand. Individual events are hard to interpret in real time. “In the history of human civilization, we’ve never seen the rapid collapse of a glacier like Thwaites,” Larter points out. “So we don’t know how exactly it starts, or what it looks like while it’s happening.”
But in the long run, the arc of uncertainty bends toward catastrophe. It may be that this blowout at Thwaites was driven by wind or a shift in ocean temperature that, in the big picture, means little. Or it may be further evidence that the collapse of Thwaites is already underway, and it’s only a matter of time — perhaps even during the lifetimes of kids alive today — before virtually every coastal city from Miami to Jakarta is under six, seven, eight or more feet of water.
If that’s the case, then big parts of the world we live in today may already be doomed. We just don’t know yet.

Links
at No comments: