21/06/2021

(AU The Conversation) Three Weeks Without Electricity? That’s The Reality Facing Thousands Of Victorians, And It Will Happen Again

The Conversation - 

James Ross/AAP
Author
 is Researcher and Teacher, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University     
Last week’s storm system wreaked havoc across Victoria. Some 220,000 households and businesses lost power, and residents in the hills on Melbourne’s fringe were warned yesterday it might not be restored for three weeks.

The extreme weather severely damaged the poles and powerlines that distribute electricity, particularly in the Mount Dandenong area. Senior AusNet official Steven Neave said of the region this week, “we basically have no network left, the overhead infrastructure is pretty much gone. It requires a complete rebuild”.

That leaves about 3,000 customers without electricity for weeks, in the heart of winter. The loss of power also cut mobile phone and internet services and reportedly allowed untreated water to enter drinking supplies.

So, could this disaster have been avoided? And under climate change, how can we prepare for more events like this?

Fallen trees brought down power lines across Melbourne. Daniel Pockett/AAP

An uncertain future

The Mount Dandenong area is heavily forested, and the chance of above-ground power infrastructure being hit by falling trees is obviously high.

Without electricity, people cannot turn on lights, refrigerate food or medications, cook on electric stoves or use electric heaters. Electronic banking, schooling and business activities are also badly disrupted. For vulnerable residents, in particular, the implications are profound.

Such disruptions are hard to avoid, at least while the electricity network is above ground. Good management, however, can prevent some trees coming down in storms.

The more pertinent question is: how can we prepare for such an event in the future?

Scientists warn such extreme weather will increase in both frequency and severity as climate change accelerates. The Australian Energy Market Operator is acutely aware of this, warning climate change poses “material risks to individual assets, the integrated energy system, and society”.

However, it’s challenging to predict exactly how future heatwaves, storms, bushfires and floods will affect the power network. As AEMO notes, many climate models related to storms and cyclones involve an element of unpredictability. So, plans to make the electricity system more resilient must address this uncertainty.

As researchers have noted, there is no “one future” to prepare for – we must be ready for many potential eventualities.

Under climate change, extreme weather is predicted to become more severe. Daniel Pockett/AAP
Yallourn – the bigger problem?

Meanwhile, in Victoria’s LaTrobe Valley, a situation at the Yallourn coal-fired power station which may have even greater consequences for electricity supplies.

A coal mine wall adjacent to the station is at risk of collapse after flooding in the Morwell River caused it to crack. If the wall is breached and the mine is flooded, as happened in 2012, there will be no coal to power the station and almost a quarter of Victoria’s power supply could be out for months.

Victoria’s energy needs are increasingly supplied by renewables. However, losing Yallourn’s generation capacity would reduce the capacity of the network to adapt to other possible disruptions.

If further disruptions seem unlikely, it’s worth noting the Callide Power Station in Queensland is still operating at reduced capacity after a recent fire.

A wall adjacent to the Yallourn power plant may collapse. Julian Smith/AAP

Look beyond the immediate crisis

The Victorian government has offered up to A$1,680 per week, for up to three weeks, to help families without power buy supplies and find alternative accommodation.

Welfare groups say the assistance could be improved. They have called for changes to make it quicker and easier for people to access money, cash injections to frontline charities and more temporary accommodation facilities for displaced people and their pets.

While no doubt needed, these are all reactive responses targeted at those without electricity. When any system is disrupted, however, the effects can be widespread and felt long after the initial problem has been addressed.

Take dairy farmers in Gippsland, for example, who could not milk their cows without electricity. Cows must be milked regularly or else they stop producing milk – they cannot be “switched back on” when electricity is restored. Longer-term assistance may well be required for farmers facing such ripple effects.

And as welfare groups have noted, power companies should support affected customers over the long-term, with electricity discounts, deferrals and payment plans.

Relief centres offer affected residents a hot shower and electricity access, but longer-term solutions are also needed. Daniel Pockett/AAP

A call for backup

So, what else can be done to prepare for future power disruptions? Those with backup options, such as portable fuel-powered generators, or off-grid household batteries connected to solar panels, will undoubtedly be more resilient in such events.

These are examples of “system redundancy”, providing alternative electricity until the network is restored.

But it costs money to invest in household batteries or a generator that may never be used. Resilience is often a function of wealth, and the less well-off risk being left behind.

Certainly, governments can act to make society as a whole more resilient to power outages. For example, mobile phone towers have backup battery life of just 24 hours. As Victoria’s Emergency Management Commissioner Andrew Crisp said this week, extending that is something authorities “need to look at”.

Power and communications infrastructure could be moved underground to protect it from storms. While such a move would be expensive, it has been argued not doing so will lead to greater long-term costs under a changing climate.

The recent challenges at Yallourn and Callide show the risks inherent in a centralised electricity network dominated by coal.

Certainly, integrating renewable energy sources into the power network comes with its own challenges. However, expanding energy storage such as batteries, or shifting to small, community-level microgrids will go a long way to improving the resilience of the system.

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(AU The Guardian) ‘From Denial To Delay’: A Forehead-Slapping Week In Australian Climate Policy

The Guardian - 

Australia sees a high-profile show of political backing for gas even as world leaders and investors exert pressure to shift away from fossil fuels

The Woodside gas plant at Burrup, Western Australia. A ‘gas-led recovery’ is likely to further exacerbate Australia’s rising emissions at a time when they need to be falling. Photograph: Daniel Munoz/Reuters
It took a major international investment group with $279bn under its control to break through the climate-laden rhetoric of geopolitics last week.

You may not have heard of Robeco Institutional Asset Management, but on Thursday the Netherlands-based asset manager made a stunning declaration, singling out Australia as a country with a “particularly high-risk profile” that it wants to pressure to transition out of fossil fuels.

The warning that it would look to restrict investments in the country’s government bonds came after a week that started in the village of Carbis Bay in Cornwall and careered through an oil and gas conference in Perth.

Robeco’s position shows it’s unconvinced by the Morrison government’s claim its technology-led approach to cutting greenhouse gas emissions stands credibly on the international stage.

The prime minister, Scott Morrison, had taken his technology-focused, Australia-first talking points to Cornwall’s Carbis Bay for the G7 summit.

Robeco’s bruising intervention suggests the government’s carefully crafted climate messaging is now being usurped by reality.

“It can’t have been easy for the prime minister to be at a meeting like that, with [US president] Joe Biden and [German chancellor] Angela Merkel, and then taking a position to put a foot on the brake,” says Prof Frank Jotzo, an expert in climate economics at the Australian National University.

“In the context of the type of actions these countries are taking, talking about the development of future technologies really doesn’t cut it.”

Morrison did return to Australia with some endorsements, signing agreements with Germany and Japan on developing lower emissions technologies.

But he also returned without any update to Australia’s 2030 emissions target that remains stuck in its 2015 position to cut emissions by 26% to 28% below 2005 levels. He also did not commit Australia to a date to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions.

Political backing for fossil fuel gas

Over in Perth, the country’s oil and gas sector kicked off its annual conference with a video message from Morrison, who told the gathered executives their fossil fuel industry “will always be” a major contributor to Australia’s prosperity.

Not surprising, given the Morrison government has gone full-bore on identifying gas, rather than renewables, as the key feedstock for Australia’s economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic.

By Thursday’s close – and after the resources minister, Keith Pitt, and Labor’s spokeswoman, Madeleine King, had both injected heavy praise on the industry – the chief executive of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (APPEA), Andrew McConville, was bullish.

He said the industry saw a clear future in a lower emissions world. It could help the world to a lower emissions future, he said, and provide the feedstock for an expected hydrogen boom.

But, like Pitt and King, he took a swing at climate “activists” who, he said, “will say and do anything to get their way”.

“We are the innovators and the doers, while our opponents are the naysayers,” he said.

But what is inescapable here (aside from how those activists now include other governments, major banks and major investors), is that gas extraction and LNG production has been identified by the federal energy department as a major new contributor to Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.

A “gas-led recovery” is likely to further exacerbate Australia’s problem of rising or plateauing emissions in the transport, heavy industry and agriculture sector at a time when they need to be falling steeply.

All this comes before fossil fuel gas is burned, accumulating more and more greenhouse gas molecules in the atmosphere that will remain there for decades, heating the planet, acidifying the ocean and driving the climate crisis.

Scott Morrison at the table with other world leaders at the G7 summit in Cornwall. Photograph: Reuters

APPEA says its use of gas is helping to cut emissions, claiming it has the potential to cut 170Mt a year in Asia.

The energy minister, Angus Taylor, has been criticised for making a similar claim – that LNG is replacing coal in power plants and is “saving” emissions to the tune of 148Mt a year.

The International Energy Agency’s data does not back this up, and says replacing coal with less dirty gas in the power sector only saved 58Mt in 2020, compared to 440Mt for renewables. 

The agency’s most recent report detailed a path to reaching net zero, with its scenario being clear that to get there (which Morrison says he wants to do as soon as possible) there can be no more new fossil fuel production.

When you add the pressure from the world’s capital investors on both companies and governments, and then multiply that by the geopolitical pressure that could end with countries placing trade tariffs on goods from intransigent economies, Australia is starting to look a little surrounded.

Yet the political backing for fossil fuel gas – from both sides of Australian politics – continues.

‘Before the curtain falls’

Prof Chris Wright, of the University of Sydney, is an expert in climate and energy politics. In a study last month, Wright and colleagues looked at how the fossil fuel industry had managed to maintain its grip on political discourse over the past decade.

“In some ways the politicians take a more extreme position [than industry groups]. The industry associations are the mouthpieces of the corporations and gives them some deniability.

“But the politicians on the conservative side have become even more extreme. It’s like they operate as an extreme flank in the public debate.”

Wright’s analysis finds fossil fuel groups have moved away from attacking the science and, instead, deploy one of four arguments. They back the science and the need to act, but paint themselves as being part of Australia’s prosperity, and as pragmatists that can be part of the solution in a measured response to the climate crisis.

“It’s gone from denial to delay,” Wright says.

Part of the fossil fuel industry’s success at capturing political discourse, Wright says, is down to the revolving lobby door that sees personnel moving between high political offices and the industry.

Even before the G7 dust had settled onto the Cornwall cobbles, the Morrison government was releasing more offshore areas for oil and gas – some 80,000sq km, including a swathe of ocean just 5km from the picture-perfect tourism mecca of the Twelve Apostles on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road.

In submissions to the government before it released the new acreage, other stakeholders – including the government’s own environment department – lined up to either oppose it on climate grounds, or note the risks to wildlife and fish stocks.

The conservation division of the government’s own environment department pointed out some areas being released overlapped with areas vital for whales and turtles.

Last month the International Energy Agency’s landmark report set out how the world could still reach net zero emissions by 2050 – a mark that would give the planet a fighting chance of keeping global heating below 1.5C.

Jotzo says it was notable, coming from the usually conservative global energy advisory group, but it was just a scenario “and not a projection”.

But the fact Morrison chose to keep talking up the fossil fuel industry in its wake, and as he sat with international leaders bearing more ambitious 2030 plans, “shows how deep the politics must be running [in Australia]”.

The global shift away from fossil fuels is inevitable, he says, and there now appears to be a race on to “squeeze the most out of fossil fuel reserves before the curtain falls”.

“Continued investment in new fossil fuel supply infrastructure at this point means betting on the world not reaching the Paris agreement goal. It is that clear.”

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(BE Common Dreams) 'Historic': Belgium Court Says Inadequate Climate Policy A Human Rights Violation

Common Dreams - Andrea Germanos

Climate campaigners welcomed the ruling as a victory.

Youth protest during 7th Brussels youth climate march on February 21, 2019 in Brussels. (Photo: Maja Hitij/Getty Images)
Climate campaigners claimed a "historic victory" after a Brussels court on Thursday condemned Belgium for its climate policy that breaches the country's duty of care and human rights obligations.

The verdict from the Court of First Instance followed a six-year legal battle first launched by non-profit group Klimaatzaak (Climate Case) representing over 58,000 citizens. According to the Guardian: "By not taking all 'necessary measures' to prevent the 'detrimental' effects of climate change, the court said, Belgian authorities had breached the right to life (article 2) and the right to respect for private and family life (article 8)" of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The federal government and those of three regions—the Brussels-Capital, the Flemish, and the Walloon regions—had "not behaved as generally prudent and diligent authorities, which constitutes an offense," reported Agence France-Presse.

In an explanation of the legal action on its website, Klimaatzaak references a 2019 ruling from the Supreme Court of the Netherlands:
This lawsuit is necessary because temperature records continue to be broken, because flooding is becoming more frequent… but above all because there is no real Belgian climate policy. We've seen in the Netherlands that this can be enforced via legal action: the Dutch climate organization Urgenda won a similar case that has led to an ambitious climate law.
The climate group had sought from the Brussels court specific emissions reduction targets: at least 42% compared to 1990 levels by 2025 and at least 55% compared to 1990 by 2030, with zero net emissions reached in 2050. The judge did not authorize those demands, however, citing separation of powers. Greenpeace Belgium called the court's verdict "a clear condemnation of our country's climate policy" and urged all ministers to "get to work." 

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