Lethal Heating: 05/21/21

21/05/2021

(AU ABC) Australian National University Commits To 'Below Zero' Carbon Emissions By 2030

ABC News - Harry Frost

The ANU is the second university in the world to commit to a 'below zero' carbon emissions target. (ABC News: Tamara Penniket)

The Australian National University has become the first university in the country to commit to reducing carbon emissions to below zero by 2030.

The move is part of what the ANU is calling its Below Zero Initiative, aimed at setting a leadership example in taking action on climate change.

ANU vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt said the university has also committed to net-zero emissions by 2025 as a stepping stone.

"Climate change is already here. The past decade includes nine of the 10 hottest years on record around the world — 2019 was Australia's hottest year ever," Professor Schmidt said.

"Unfortunately, the world is on track to warm by between 2.8 and 3.2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century.

"Achieving below zero is ambitious and it will involve big changes to the way we do things — but as the national university, we must show leadership in driving a societal transformation to address climate change."

The ANU is only the second in the world to announce a below zero emissions strategy, after a university in Finland.

Vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt says the ANU has an obligation to be a leader in addressing climate change.

ANU promises to achieve target through emissions reduction, not purchasing offsets

The ANU estimates it currently produces more than 55,000 tonnes of CO2 in a typical year, primarily through work travel and natural gas use.

Director of the university's Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions Professor Mark Howden said the ANU intended to meet the target by fully transitioning off gas and cutting business travel and waste.

"Simple things like making [the ANU's] buildings more energy efficient, less leaky in terms of losing heat or gaining cold depending on the season, replacing gas heaters with electric heaters, ensuring the building usage is appropriate; not cooling or heating or lighting rooms that aren't being used," Professor Howden said.

"In terms of transport emissions, we're moving away from our fossil fuel-based vehicles into electric vehicles and in terms of work travel we're cutting down on that as much as possible."

Institute for Climate director Mark Howden says work travel and natural gas are the primary sources of the ANU's carbon emissions. (Supplied: ANU)

The below zero plan would then go a step further through carbon sequestration measures, becoming a "carbon sink".

The university acknowledges that will require the development of carbon removal or negative emissions technologies.

And making its nine-year target even more ambitious is a promise by the ANU to phase out purchasing carbon offsets to meet its 2030 goal.

"It certainly is a stretch target," Professor Howden said.

"But what we see repeatedly coming from the science is that we haven't had much time to act— we do need to make very significant reductions right now if we're going to avoid the sorts of climate futures we don't want."

ANU remains financier of fossil fuel industries

The university faced criticism in 2014 from a number of parties, including then federal education minister Christopher Pyne, after it announced a plan to divest itself of shares in seven resource and mining companies including Santos and Iluka Resources in a move toward more socially responsible investments.

While it has not committed to fully divesting from fossil fuels, the ANU is working towards reducing the "carbon intensity" of its $1.5 billion portfolio.

In 2019 the ANU's investments were 56 per cent less carbon intensive than benchmark investors such as the ASX200, according to its socially responsible investment report.

That same report showed the ANU financed more than 24,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions through its infrastructure holdings, almost half of that coming from the Kwinana power station in Western Australia.

Professor Howden said the university looks at investments from a "risk management" perspective.

"Climate change is one of those risks that needed to be managed," Professor Howden said.

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(The Guardian) How We Talk About The Climate Crisis Is Increasingly Crucial To Tackling It

The Guardian - Susanna Rustin

Our emotional register – how ‘doomy’ or ‘hopeful’ we are – will inevitably shape the policies we put forward

Greta Thunberg delivers a speech after a Fridays for Future climate protest in Lausanne, Switzerland, January 2020. Photograph: Jean-Christophe Bott/AP

Author

Susanna Rustin is a Guardian columnist and leader writer

As the climate emergency creeps closer to the top of the political agenda, where it belongs, an argument is raging over communication. Exactly what to say about the environmental crisis, and how, is an important question for all sorts of people and organisations, including governments.

It is particularly pressing for journalists, authors and broadcasters. For us, communication is not an adjunct to other activities such as policymaking or campaigning. It is our main job. People need to know what is happening to glaciers, forests and endangered species, and what is being done about this. But information requires interpretation. And while editorial judgments influence the way that all subjects are covered, storytelling about the climate emergency is particularly fraught.

These tensions are nothing new. For several decades, a disinformation campaign led by fossil fuel companies and their allies meant that the overwhelming scientific consensus about the risks of global heating was obscured. The BBC, among other organisations, mistakenly attempted to “balance” the warnings about humanity’s worsening predicament with lies. Greens of all shades were rightly enraged.

Global renewable energy industry grew at fastest rate since 1999 last year. Read more

This phase of climate communication led to enormously harmful delays. But the disagreements did not end when the global warming deniers were forced to retreat. Instead, new divisions have either appeared or become more obvious: while those on the left back strong action by governments, those on the right put more emphasis on markets and individuals.

But there is another dimension to the controversy over climate communication. This is an argument as much about mood as about content. At its heart is the question: how “depressing” or “hopeful” should we be?

One version of this conflict has played out in the contrasting approaches of two of the UK’s most influential environmental communicators. In an article in 2018, the campaigning Guardian columnist George Monbiot attacked David Attenborough and the BBC for conveying a false impression, in the Dynasties series, of a pristine wilderness, and for failing to report the true extent of ecological destruction.

Attenborough has become more outspoken recently, telling a parliamentary select committee two years ago that “we cannot be radical enough” on emissions. But for many years, the alarm bells in his programmes were drowned out by animal noises and wonderment. Ten years ago, he told me that the BBC impartiality drummed into him as a young man made him “uneasy” about political statements long after he became convinced that global heating was taking place. Instead, he aimed to cultivate love of the natural world in the hope that this would motivate people to protect it.

A more recent spat illustrates similar tensions from a different angle. Michael E Mann is a US climate scientist whose latest book, The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet, takes aim at the shape-shifting efforts of climate deniers. He describes the new, “softer” tactics adopted by the fossil fuel lobby and its techno-utopian enablers. These include downplaying the dangers of global heating and trying to delay regulatory action. But along with them, Mann attacks a number of writers for engaging in what he calls “doomism” or “despair-mongering”.

One of his targets is the journalist David Wallace-Wells, author of an influential book called The Uninhabitable Earth. Another is the British academic Jem Bendell, who advocates an approach he describes as “deep adaptation” to an anticipated “societal collapse”. While Mann praises Greta Thunberg, who famously told world leaders “I want you to panic”, in general he thinks the word “panic” should be avoided.

While this debate could be seen as a distraction from the more important story of what is actually going on and what needs to be done, I think the argument about how to talk and think about the climate crisis is increasingly central.

Divisions shouldn’t be exaggerated. Mann said in a recent interview that he falls victim to “doomism” himself at times. On an emotional level, he recognises that fear is a natural reaction to what is going on. And, in an important sense, he, Bendell, Wallace-Wells and Thunberg are on the same side: they all recognise global heating as an existential threat. But the point is, major differences of philosophy and strategy also have to be reckoned with, even among those who see themselves as on the same side (against heating).

The deals struck by governments at the Cop26 talks in November will determine what progress on climate the world is able to make over the next decade. Compared with this, the question of how cheerful or miserable you or I or anyone else feels about the situation, and how we encourage others to feel about it, might seem trivial. But I think this emotional register is important, particularly for progressives with their ideological commitment to the idea that things should improve. The socialist critic Raymond Williams used the term “structure of feeling” to describe the way that the cultural life of a democracy could be shaped, from the bottom up.

So what is the “structure of feeling” about the climate at the moment? A recent poll of 1.2 million people by the UN found that two-thirds believe global heating is an “emergency”; in the UK the figure was 81%. What lies beneath such headlines is hard to know. Do most people think things will work out in the end; that the warnings of disaster will turn out to have been exaggerated? Or are millions, even billions of us, living in terror that they won’t?

Mann is far from alone in his hostility to gloominess. Others, too, see it as a gateway to nihilism; and fear that those who anticipate a grim spiral of chaos and scarcity will push reactionary policies focused on controlling borders and resources.

Others, including me, think that while it’s right to be hopeful about the post-carbon future, to embrace the prospect of green jobs and cleaner air, too much optimism also carries risks. The situation is sad and very dangerous. Like a person with a serious illness, we need first to admit this; and then do every single thing we can to preserve life.

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(AU Monash University) The Climate Crisis And The Electricity Grid: AI To The Rescue

Monash University - Ariel Liebman

Ariel Liebman is Associate Professor at Monash University's Faculty of IT; leader of Monash's Digital Energy initiatives; director of the Monash Grid Innovation Hub, and deputy Director of the Monash Energy Materials and Systems Institute.

With the world needing to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and reduce these emissions by a further 80% by 2040, the climate science-based 1.5°C Paris Agreement trajectory seems to become more and more difficult to achieve.

Despite the challenges, there’s hope on the horizon with mass-scale renewable technologies becoming competitive against fossil sources, even in places such as Australia where coal and natural gas can be produced cheaper than in most other parts of the world.

When combined with technologies such as batteries, rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) and electric vehicles (EV), we have a complete set of “solution blocks” for mass decarbonisation of the electricity and transport sectors, accounting for up to two-thirds of the world's energy-based carbon emissions.

Therefore, it’s critical we consider alternative ways of powering our transportation and electricity.

A parallel trend that shouldn’t be overlooked in this debate, and one that’s directly related to the proliferation of large-scale renewable technologies, is the advent of rooftop solar PV and other distributed energy resources.

These come mainly in the form of community and residential batteries, as well as electric vehicles, especially when used in a vehicle-to-grid (V2G) configuration, where the EV batteries not only charge from the grid, but can also discharge into it to provide services such as balancing variable renewables.

While we have many forms of renewable technologies to address the climate situation, integrating all these “solution blocks” together and into the existing grid infrastructure is challenging.

This is where artificial intelligence (AI) and its full range of forms comes into play.

AI to the rescue

Optimisation, machine learning, data science, time series forecasting, as well as anomaly detection, to name a few, play a crucial role in the design and operation of the future carbon-free electricity grid.

By utilising these trends more collaboratively, we have a strong chance of meeting the 1.5°C climate objective and fostering a new energy future.

As one of the Monash Energy Institute's key research partners, International Energy Utility, and ENGIE, have been known to describe it, the energy future is 3D – decarbonised, distributed and digital.

Looking ahead with optimisation

At the Monash Energy Institute, we have a strong focus on developing the energy systems of the future. For this, optimisation is key.

There are many subfields of optimisation, from operation planning, power generation, through to ensuring optimal scheduling of power generation and transmission. In the past, problems associated with the operation and investment in the electricity system were decoupled, and therefore much more computationally tractable.

However, we now need to incorporate the operational scheduling problem into our grid expansion plans, and consider investment planning when balancing variable renewables, such as wind and solar.

This means we need to jointly formulate the operational and investment planning problems. This is an extremely difficult task, and speeding it up is very important, as the rate at which grids need to evolve and therefore be replanned is several times greater than at any time since perhaps the first full rollout of electricity in the early 20th century.

Our researchers in the Monash Energy Institute have used existing tools to show that the fastest-growing grid in Indonesia can achieve almost 50% renewables by 2030 at no extra cost above coal and gas.

The same tools are used by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) to prepare its bi-annual integrated system plans.

Currently, these tools aren’t fast enough to completely sweep the range of future scenarios due to the uncertainty in new technologies such as wind, solar and storage.

To tackle this challenge, the Monash Energy Institute has been working with CSIRO Data61 to develop methods that can find these efficient plans over longer-term horizons.

Levelling up with reinforcement learning

There’s also huge transformation taking place on the demand side of the energy market. The massive uptake of rooftop solar, and the emergence of batteries and smart grid capabilities are leading to the increased opportunity to collectively flex the community’s energy resources through schemes such as virtual power plants and transactive energy management concepts.

One example of this is the Net Zero Initiative, where Monash University is transforming part of the main Clayton campus into a highly flexible microgrid-like precinct.

This project is part of the UN Momentum for Change Lighthouse Award received at the COP24 Climate Conference in Poland in 2018, whereby we were the first Australian university to commit to reducing our climate impact to zero by 2030, which we’re well on track to achieve.

To ensure our campus microgrid is able to follow the output of our rooftop solar and offsite wind farm, we need to change the operation of our building management system-controlled buildings so that they can collectively flex their usage up and down. This requires knowing how to change temperature set points of the building heating and cooling systems in ways that minimise impacts on building occupants.

To achieve this, we’ve developed a combination of reinforcement learning and neural networks to learn how the building’s temperature and comfort levels respond to changes in set points to deliver the desired demand that we can ramp up or down.

Making the most of machine learning

Until we get close to a fully renewable grid, we’ll still need to coordinate the operation of fossil generators, such as coal and gas-fired power stations, with wind, solar and batteries.

This is also critical at the distributed energy resource and electric vehicle integration level.

For scheduling purposes, which include conventional plant, batteries and hydro storage, as well as electric vehicle charging, good forecasts are needed for both electricity demand and for renewable generation (solar and wind) to provide inputs into the optimisation algorithms used in scheduling.

The Monash Energy Institute, through our Grid Innovation Hub partnership, has recently finished an industry project for improving short-term wind and solar farm forecasts by using machine learning technology to improve the market operator’s scheduling function.

There’s another emerging use of machine learning technology, and that’s in ensuring stable and secure operations of the grid. To be able to compute and despatch the many operating systems currently in play, machine learning allows us to accelerate the physics-based simulation and securely operate the grid under new conditions.

With climate science targets requiring rapid decarbonisation, there’s a clear opportunity for AI technologies to play a major part in the solution.

The enabling of mass renewable energy and storage integration into a grid originally designed for fossil fuels requires both fundamental and applied research to be rapidly accelerated and significantly contribute to the fight against climate change.

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