03/08/2019

Clean Energy Set To Provide 35% Of Australia's Electricity Within Two Years

The Guardian - 


Wind, hydro and solar power made up 22.3% of electricity used across the month, peaking at 39.2% in the middle of the day on 30 June. Photograph: Dan Himbrechts/AAP 
Clean energy will be providing 35% of Australia’s total electricity needs within two years, analysts say, as new data underlines the pace at which solar power is transforming the national energy market.
A report by consultants Green Energy Markets found rooftop solar systems and new large-scale farms regularly pushed renewable energy to beyond 30% of generation at midday during June, one of the least sunny months.
Wind, hydro and solar power made up 22.3% of electricity used across the month. The level of clean energy in the system at one time peaked at 39.2% in the middle of the day on 30 June.
Renewable energy share of total generation in June
Hourly breakdown of national electricity market generation over June for renewable energy sources
Source: Green Energy Markets
Tristan Edis, a Green Energy Markets director and analyst, said clean energy growth would continue in the short term as a number of projects were in development and yet to come online. But he said the boom was expected to end in the absence of a policy to encourage further investments.
He said he expected clean energy would provide on average 35% electricity by 2021.
“What we are seeing now is just a glimpse of what’s ahead because you’ve still got a substantial number of solar farms coming through,” Edis said. “We’re going to be regularly having 50% of renewables – solar, wind and hydro – across the national electricity market in the middle of the day in the next 12 months. But it is also soon going to get hard to get new stuff built.”
A report by the Clean Energy Regulator last week found enough projects were committed to meet the 2020 renewable energy target, roughly equivalent to 23% of electricity. While most recent investment has been driven by incentives attached to the target, and to a lesser extent a state target in Victoria, recent large-scale clean plants have been funded on a commercial basis by businesses wanting to lock in cheap solar and wind deals while wholesale electricity prices were high.
But Edis said this would end as abundant free solar power during the day reduced wholesale prices to a level where investment in any type of new large-scale generation was not financially attractive. In the absence of federal policy to drive grid transformation, he said investment was likely to slow until the circumstances in the market changed – for example, a coal-fired power plant closed, reducing supply.
He said the tumbling price of wholesale electricity in the middle of the day, in some cases to $0, would make life harder for coal-fired power plants that could not compete on price around the clock but by design usually could not be turned off and on. Those coal plants that could be turned off and on would increasingly be used in a similar way to gas peaking plants, which sell electricity only when they are needed.
“It just shows how crazy this idea is that we should go and build another coal-fired generator to run as baseload,” Edis said. “If we do that it just means another coal-fired power plant is going to shut down because nothing can outcompete solar and wind.”
Greenhouse gas emissions from electricity are expected to continue to be reduced in the short-term, but at a slower pace than experts say is possible or necessary for Australia its part under the Paris climate agreement. While federal data released last month found emissions from electricity were down, national emissions continue to rise due to increased carbon pollution from the resources industry, mostly liquefied natural gas production for export, and transport.

‘Any of them could do the job’
At an Australian clean energy summit in Sydney on Tuesday, the Clean Energy Council chief executive, Kane Thornton, said it had been a record-breaking two years, with more than $24bn worth of large-scale renewable energy projects, solar panels on 2m homes and the world’s biggest battery based in South Australia.
But he said a survey of 75 chief executives showed industry confidence had fallen since December due to policy uncertainty, growing constraints on the grid and the pace at which regulations and markets that had been designed for last century were having to be changed. The survey found energy bosses believed the single greatest challenge facing the industry was getting new farms and plants connected to the grid. A lack of energy and climate policy was the second biggest challenge.
“The economics of clean energy continues to improve and we no longer require subsidy,” Thornton said. “But the wholesale market is riddled with uncertainty.”
He said collaboration on energy between the commonwealth and the states was near non-existent, noting federal and state ministers energy ministers had not met for eight months and no meeting was planned.
Thornton said a sensible energy policy could accelerate investment, drive down power prices and deliver jobs in rural areas. The industry did not mind whether the policy was the abandoned national energy guarantee, an extended renewable energy target, the clean energy target proposed by the chief scientist, Alan Finkel, or a baseline-and-credit trading scheme. “Any of them could do the job,” he said.

NSW threatens to go it alone
Matt Kean, the New South Wales energy and environment minister, repeated his warning that the Berejiklian government would introduce its own climate and energy policy if the federal government did not act.
“The NSW government still supports the national energy guarantee and will continue to support a national mechanism that integrates climate and energy policy,” he told the summit. “As I’ve said before, if the commonwealth won’t get on board NSW will consider going it alone.”
Kean said NSW wanted to be known as the easiest jurisdiction in the OECD for energy construction.
Thornton said the industry was still on track for 50% clean energy before 2030 and a fully renewable energy system was now inevitable and could be achieved well before mid-century. He said the next stage would be decarbonising other sectors such as transport and building a renewable export industry selling green hydrogen and clean energy via undersea cable.
“It’s now time we started debating when Australia should target 200% renewable energy generation,” he said.

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When Climate Change Interferes With Ability 'To Listen To The Earth'

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

The Wik people of western Cape York often can't follow their traditional routes because "huge salt water lakes" appear where they hadn't before, and they say climate change is the obvious culprit.
Bruce Martin, a Wik-Nagthan man, says the disruption from rising sea levels and other impacts is not only damaging the ecosystems of the far north but also the cultures of the Indigenous people who inhabit the region.


The death of over 1000 kilometres of mangrove forests along the Gulf of Carpentaria has been blamed on extreme conditions including record temperatures. Vision courtesy James Cook University.

"If we're not able to move on the same routes as we have for generations, obviously it affects our songs and ceremonies," Mr Martin said. "It also affects our cultural resilience and our ability to pass it down to the future."
Elsewhere, erosion is cutting deeply into the coast, with islanders telling Donna Green, a climate researcher at the University of NSW, "they have had to walk along the shoreline after a king tide looking for and picking up bones of their ancestors" after graveyards were exposed.
The fate of remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders is one focus of a new report, Health and Climate Change: From Townsville to Tuvalu - released by the Global Health Alliance Australia on Wednesday.
The 47 groups making up the alliance say people across Australia and the Pacific are already suffering from rising temperatures and altered weather patterns such as stronger cyclones - and the health and other threats are going to get worse.
A king tide erodes a graveyard in the Torres Strait. Credit: Donna Green
Not only will some areas become unbearably hot for humans and other species for parts of the year but the warmer conditions will also aid the spread of diseases, the report finds.
For instance, Nipah, a bat-borne virus that has been fatal to pigs and humans in south-east Asia, is among the diseases expected to become established in northern Australia.
Two fruit bat species in Australia are closely related to two bat species that now carry the disease. The disease's introduction to Australia "would present substantial risks to humans, pigs and horses", the report said.
Nipah virus spread
Areas in red show the most optimistic 2050 scenario for the
potential additional range of the Henipavirus carried by fruit bats.
Source: Global Health Alliance Australia
Physical and cultural threats
While all populations are likely to become less resilient over time to adverse impacts of climate change, some groups such as women, children and the elderly are more vulnerable. For many Indigenous populations, the "threat is even more prevalent", the report said.
The risks include exacerbating the relatively poor health of existing communities. Climate change, though, also puts at risk food stocks, hurts populations of species of totemic significance and can undermine coastal or riverine locations where they live.
Warning: Bruce Martin.
"In Australia, there's been very little recognition just how vulnerable Indigenous Australians are currently [to climate change] and have been over the last decade or so," said Professor Green, an environmental scientist at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes at UNSW.
One example was the huge forest die back that killed up to 1000 kilometres of mangroves along the Gulf of Carpentaria in 2016, wiping important nurseries for totemic and food fish for local population.
Salt-water inundation is also affecting taro roots, sometimes wiping out the important food source, Professor Green said.
That salt water can also "affect the whole ecosystem", from small skinks, lizards and frogs all the way up to apex predators, Mr Martin said. "It's already started happening."

'Listening to the earth'
For some of the Wik, the first contact with Europeans did not happen until as recently as 1975, so "people know what it was like" before the changes, Mr Martin said.
As an indicator of close connections to country, the local word for the timing of a child's birth is "Aarngay", meaning "first listened to the earth", he said.
People being evacuated from Groote Eylandt and the McArthur River Mine airfield near Borroloola in the Northern Territory ahead of Cyclone Trevor last March. Credit: ADF
The people are keenly aware when "sickness" comes to the land, he said. "You're losing part of your family."
Professor Green said many groups have told her "they have a feeling of sadness" because they're unable to carry out their obligations to care for their land.
While Indigenous people can be remarkably resilient to temperature changes - central Australians have adapted to extremes ranging from about zero to "the early 50s" - limits could be crossed if the mercury keeps rising.
"My concern is we're reaching a turning point," Mr Martin said.
Darwin, for instance, could experience 35-degree or warmer days for the equivalent of nine months a year amid future warming, with humidity levels making it "intolerable" for many, Professor Green said.
Mr Martin said that, while Australians like to think they stand for a "fair go", there was little fairness in the disproportionate effects a warming world would have on their communities.
"Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders will be impacted unfairly because they have contributed very little to global warming," he said.
"Things are changing outside our experience and we'll be left to deal with it."
Mangrove forests were wiped out along a 1000-kilometre stretch of the northern Australian coast in 2016. Credit: Norman Duke


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The Guardian View On Climate Breakdown: An Emergency For All, But Especially The Poor

The Guardian - Editorial

Record temperatures in Europe and the US have reinforced the danger of global heating for many inhabitants. But others are and will be far worse hit 
A flood-affected family in Kurigram, Bangladesh on 26 July 2019. ‘Poorer countries, which broadly speaking are the least to blame for the climate crisis, will suffer most.’ Photograph: Suman Paul/AFP/Getty Images 
We tend to learn better from experience than from what we have simply been told. So for many in Europe, sleepless nights and suffocating buses or workplaces have helped to make real the threat posed by global heating.
Now statistics are reinforcing the message. Last week the UK had the hottest day on record: 38.7C in Cambridge. New records were set in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands in July, and June was the hottest month in US history. The Met Office says that the UK’s 10 hottest years on record have all been since 2002.
Heatwaves naturally occur in summer, but they did not used to be so hot, or so frequent. Experts say that the UK’s sweltering weather last summer was made 30 times more likely by global heating. That link has sunk in: in a new survey, 77% believed the recent heatwave was partially or wholly caused by the climate crisis. As temperatures reach unprecedented levels, so does public concern about the environment.
Yet while global heating is just that, its impact varies even within countries. Most people surveyed in July considered the weather too hot. But, while 73% of people in the east of England judged it too hot, in chillier Scotland only 47% of people agreed – and a slightly larger proportion thought it just right or not warm enough. Some may look forward to warmer staycations and the chance to grow grapes in their back garden.
Even those alarmed by July’s heat may not envision the full scale of the climate crisis. The connection between global heating and heatwaves seems self-evident. It’s intuitively harder to link it to other extreme weather events, and to take in experts’ warnings that Britain seems to be getting wetter as well as warmer. It’s more difficult still to fully comprehend how harsh its impact will be elsewhere.
For many people, even a small rise in temperatures will be catastrophic. A new report from Monash University in Melbourne warns that the climate crisis is already causing deaths; one of its authors said almost 400 people died from heat stress and heatstroke during fires in Victoria 10 years ago. It predicts climate-related stunting, malnutrition and lower IQ in children within the coming decades; a 2018 report from the World Health Organisation predicted that an additional 250,000 deaths a year will occur between 2030 and 2050 due to global heating.
Some places will experience more severe temperature shifts or will find it harder to adapt than others, often through lack of resources. Poorer countries, which broadly speaking are the least to blame for the climate crisis – emitting less carbon dioxide per capita – will suffer most. A hurricane or wildfire is deadlier when there is little capacity to prepare for it or to speed recovery. Families that spend most of their income on food struggle to eat when crops suffer.
A recent study found that global heating has already increased global inequality: in most poor countries, higher temperatures are very likely to have resulted in lower economic output than they would otherwise have enjoyed, while richer nations were not harmed to the same degree, and some were potentially able to actually benefit.
Bangladesh and sub-Saharan African nations are among those hit. The research ties in with previous projections that by 2100 the average income in the poorest countries will be 75% lower than it would be without climate change, and that some wealthy countries might even see higher incomes.
Yet none of these problems will be fully contained within national borders. Drought and famine are already forcing families from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to attempt to migrate to the United States when they are unable to feed themselves. A World Food Programme study of Central American migrants found that almost half were food insecure.
A 4C rise this century, which is now considered a realistic prospect, would produce at least 300 million refugees and drown cities in the US and China. It is the duty of richer nations to do all they can to hold back the soaring temperatures which they did most to produce, and to take what action they can to mitigate their impact – abroad as well as at home. It is also in their self-interest.

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