01/07/2021

(AU ABC) Victorian Government Commits $14 Million To Battery Facility, Regional Hydrogen Hub

ABC News - Jackson Peck

All levels of government are pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the hydrogen industry. (Supplied)

Key Points
  • The Victorian government has announced a $14 million investment in two Deakin University alternative energy projects
  • The projects will focus on new battery and hydrogen technologies
  • The facilities are expected to host nearly 300 jobs, while nearly 80 jobs are expected to be created during construction
The Victorian government has committed $14 million to a battery facility and a regional hydrogen hub at university campuses in Melbourne and regional areas.

The Hycel Technology Hub at Deakin University's Warrnambool campus will receive $9m to develop and test hydrogen fuel technologies.

Meanwhile, $5.2m will go to the Battery Technology Research and Innovation Hub 2.0 at Deakin's Burwood campus.

Deakin Energy director Adrian Panow said the funding for the hydrogen hub would help make the fuel a feasible option for industry.

"To really make that step change where hydrogen becomes a viable option," he said.

"Particularly for those sectors that are very difficult to decarbonise, so heavy transport in particular, finding a substitute for natural gas with the low carbon footprint.
"It's a small factory that will house equipment to manufacture, to trial and to test fuel cell equipment.
"Importantly, it'll be a facility that will interface directly with communities, and particularly regional communities, to build that social licence so that when hydrogen becomes a viable large scale economy that the community is ready to accept it and we have a trained workforce that knows how to implement safely."

The federal government has committed $2m to the Hycel Technology Hub.

Local Federal Member Dan Tehan at a groundbreaking event at the Hycel Technology Hub in November 2020. (Supplied: Alice Miles)
'Viable, safe and can be implemented'

Dr Panow said the funding would help the development of hydrogen technology at scale.

"What we've heard very clearly from our global collaborators is that the research out of a laboratory can't enter global supply chains unless it's been demonstrated at scale," he said.

"That's why the investment needs to be substantial — so you can manufacture, you can build the small and medium enterprise sector to convert the fantastic science into a scale that a manufacturer can pick up and realise it's viable, it's safe and it can be implemented.

"The regional location is perhaps often underestimated in its importance.

"Hydrogen lends itself very well to that long distance travel and the local industry in the south west of Victoria — dairy, forestry and manufacturing in that area.
"Hydrogen enables that whole sector at alternatives in how it's going to decarbonise."
Will 'green hydrogen' live up to the hype?
It's been identified as the clean energy source that could help bring the world to net-zero emissions, but green hydrogen's future is not yet assured. Read more
Deakin University is also aiming to transition its Warrnambool campus from gas to hydrogen and will convert the Warrnambool Bus Lines fleet to renewable energy.

The battery facility will include a testing lab and pilot production line to research and make batteries using lithium and sodium.

The advanced batteries are expected to be used in defence, agriculture, disaster zones and the health industry.

The state government said the facilities would host 290 jobs in research and manufacturing, while 78 jobs were expected to be created during construction, which was slated for next year.

Minister for Higher Education Gayle Tierney, who helped launch the project funding this morning, said it was a great investment in future industries.

"These projects will create world-class training and research facilities right here in Victoria, with huge benefits not just on skills and training but also industry and our economy," she said.

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(ABC / AFP) Hundreds Dead As Record-Breaking Heat Wave Hits Canada And United States

ABC News - AFP

Canada is reporting record-breaking temperatures thanks to a high-pressure ridge trapping warm air in the region. (Reuters: Jennifer Gauthier)

Key Points
  • Record highs of 49.5C are attributed to climate change 
  • 233 deaths have been reported between Friday and Monday in British Columbia
  • Schools and COVID-19 vaccination centres have been forced to close 
Scores of deaths in Canada's Vancouver area and large wildfires are likely linked to a gruelling heat wave, authorities said Tuesday, as the country recorded its highest-ever temperature amid scorching conditions that extended to the Pacific Northwest region of the United States.

The Vancouver Police Department alone said it had responded to more than 65 sudden deaths since Friday, with the vast majority "related to the heat."

The chief coroner for the province of British Columbia, which includes Vancouver, said that it had "experienced a significant increase in deaths reported where it is suspected that extreme heat has been contributory."

The service said in a statement it recorded 233 deaths in the wider British Columbia area between Friday and Monday, compared with 130 on average.

The deaths came as Canada set a new all-time high temperature record for a third day in a row Tuesday, reaching 49.5 degrees Celsius in Lytton, British Columbia, about 250 kilometres east of Vancouver, the country's weather service, Environment Canada, reported.

Climate change is causing record-setting temperatures to become more frequent.

Globally, the decade to 2019 was the hottest recorded, and the five hottest years have all occurred within the last five years.

The scorching heat stretching from the US state of Oregon to Canada's Arctic territories has been blamed on a high-pressure ridge trapping warm air in the region.

Temperatures in the US Pacific Northwest cities of Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington reached levels not seen since record-keeping began in the 1940s.

Homes are being evacuated due to wildfires

Smoke billows during the Sparks Lake wildfire at Thompson-Nicola Regional District, British Columbia, Canada. (Supplied: BC Wildfire Service)

The extreme heat, combined with intense drought, also created the perfect conditions for several fires to break out.

Evacuation orders were issued in British Columbia's Thompson-Nicola region amid wildfires spanning 750 hectares.

Another wildfire at McKay Creek region spanned 3,700 hectares. 

The British Columbia Wildfire Service tweeted images and attributed the fire to the hot, dry weather.

Another blaze on the California-Oregon border burned some 600 hectares by Monday morning.

'Hottest week ever'

"We are in the midst of the hottest week British Columbians have ever experienced, and there are consequences to that, disastrous consequences for families and for communities," British Columbia Premier John Horgan told a news conference.

The heat wave has forced schools and COVID-19 vaccination centres to close in the Vancouver area, while officials set up temporary water fountains and misting stations on street corners.

Stores quickly sold out of portable air-conditioners and fans, so several people without cooling at home told AFP they hunkered down in their air-conditioned cars or underground parking garages at night.

Cities across the western United States and Canada opened emergency cooling centres and outreach workers handed out bottles of water and hats.

The Salvation Army has been handing out bottled water. (Reuters: Karen Ducey)

In Oregon, organisers were forced to adjust the final day of the US Olympic track and field trials, moving afternoon events to the evening.

"Dubai would be cooler than what we're seeing now," David Phillips, a senior climatologist for Environment Canada, told AFP on Monday.

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(ID SMH) ‘Hazards Are Many’: Millions Found To Be At Risk From Sea Level Rise

Sydney Morning Herald - Peter Hannam

Indonesia has been identified as the country with the most land at risk of sea level rise, adding to the threats climate change will pose to Australia’s populous northern neighbour.

New satellite data has found Indonesia has 118,200 square kilometres of land at two metres or less above mean sea level, or an area 14 times larger than previously thought, according to research published Wednesday in the Nature Communications journal.

That land, which amounts to about 6.3 per cent of the archipelago, is already home to 17.2 million people.

New satellite detection methods have identified 267 million people living at elevations of 2 metres or less above sea level. About two-thirds are located in the tropics, with Indonesia home to the largest population at risk as sea levels rise because of climate change. Credit: Getty Images

Remote-sensing Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) pulses detected land around the world that is home to 267 million people living at two metres above sea level or lower, the research found, putting them at flooding risk.

Assuming seas will rise about a metre by 2100 as the climate heats up, those at risk will swell to 410 million even assuming no population increase, with about 72 per cent of them living in the tropics, it said.

“Consequently, whether measured by area, population size or population growth, the burdens of relative sea-level rise are likely to fall [disproportionately] upon developing countries in the tropics that often have limited capacity to adapt,” the paper said.

Vanishing coast
Thousands of kilometres of Australia's beaches at risk from rising seas
Aljosja Hooijer and colleagues at Deltares, a Dutch-based research institute, said that while tropical Asia, in particular, was known to have vulnerable coastal and delta regions before, LiDAR allowed much more precise estimates to be made.

The work, done to 5-kilometre resolutions, would be refined further to 1-kilometre, he told the Herald and The Age.

Dr Hooijer said land elevation data had received relatively limited scientific interest so far, simply because existing data was highly inaccurate with errors well over one metre.

“Our new data show coastal lands to be substantially lower than was known before, which will translate into substantially higher flood risk of course,” he said.

Indonesia faces multiple climate change risks, with sea-level rises just one of them, according to Robert Glasser at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Credit: Getty Images
Along with Indonesia, Bangladesh and China had among the largest areas and populations at risk. Australia had about 30,000 square kilometres of land at 2 metres or less above sea level, which was home to about 300,000 people. With one metre of sea level rise, that area would swell to about 48,000 square kilometres, with 800,000 at risk even without population increasing.

Climate policy
Failure to model costs of climate change to coal, gas ‘beggars belief’
Robert Glasser, head of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s climate centre and author of a recent report on the rising threat of global warming in the region, said that the Nature paper underestimated the risks because it did not assess the rising population.

“If people are being flooded and flooded over and over again, people tend to move,” Dr Glasser said. “The pressures on places like Indonesia are going to be enormous.”

In his report, Dr Glasser said the wider Southeast Asian region faced “a dangerous constellation of simultaneous climate hazards” that would pose national security issues for Australia quite apart from its own exposure to threats from a warming world.

“Sea-level there is rising four times faster than the global average, driven by climate change and other factors, such as groundwater extraction,” he wrote.

Even so, most analyses treated climate risks as independent, rather than considering how they would likely interact, his report noted.

A study of the impact that rising temperatures will have on agricultural productivity, for instance, would typically overlook the compounding impacts of other hazards such as flooding, drought, fires, increases of pests, saltwater inundation, cyclones, migrations of people, and so on.

“The hazards are many and the cascades will affect everything,” Dr Glasser said.

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