Just three months after Origin Energy stunned the renewables industry
with a record low power off-take deal for the 530MW Stockyard Hill Wind
Farm in Victoria, AGL Energy has delivered more of the same, securing
an off-take price of below $60/MWh through the sale of its 453MW Coopers
Gap Wind Farm, between Kingaroy and Dalby in Queensland’s south-east.
AGL said on Thursday it had reached financial close on the Sunshine
State wind farm – which will be one of Australia’s biggest, once
completed in 2019 – with the $22 million sale of the project to the
Powering Australian Renewables Fund.
The deal includes AGL writing a PPA for electricity and associated
renewable energy certificates of less than $60/MWh for an initial five
years, with an option to extend the agreement for another five years at
the same – or even lower – price.
AGL Macarthur Wind Farm. Source: AGL Blog
In a media statement, AGL said it expected the project to cost a total
of around $850 million, funded through a combination of PARF partners’
equity and a lending group including Westpac, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking
Corporation, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Societe Generale, DBS Bank,
Mizuho Bank and ABN Amro.
The result is undoubtedly a good one for AGL, which created PARF just
one year ago, in partnership with the Queensland Investment
Corporation, with the goal of using it to underwrite 1,000MW of
large-scale renewables to be operated and managed by AGL.
After making its first acquisition in November 2016, buying up the
102MW Nyngan and 52MW Broken Hills solar farms as seed assets, it has
managed to keep growing its portfolio, adding the 200MW Silverton NSW
wind farm in January 2017.
“More than 800 MW of projects have now been vended into PARF in its
first 12 months of operation,” said AGL CEO Andy Vesey in comments on
Thursday.
“The strong support we have received from our equity partners and
lenders for these projects is testament to the readiness of the private
sector to invest in Australia’s energy transformation.”
But Vesey – who recently attended a meeting of energy retail chiefs
in Canberra to discuss the problem of Australia’s world-topping
electricity prices – was keen to stress that public policy settings
remained vital to maintain investor momentum.
“Certainty on energy policy, including the implementation of the
recommendations of the Finkel Review, will enable more projects of this
kind to go ahead and help place downward pressure on energy prices by
increasing supply,” he said.
AGL COO Brett Redman said the Coopers Gap deal has demonstrated the
effectiveness of the investment model, the falling price and increasing
efficiency of renewables technology and the key role it had to play in
Australia’s future energy market.
The project, which will be developed by GE and Catcon, will use 123
specially designed GE turbines to produce around 1,510,000MWh of energy
annually – enough to power more than 260,000 average Australian homes.
For GE, the Coopers Gap contract will bring the global giant’s total
installed wind capacity to almost 1.4GW in Australia by 2019, when the
wind farm is expected to be completed. It is GE’s first wind project in
Queensland.
“That’s the largest number of megawatts in a single year by any GE
onshore wind country outside the United States, ever,” said Pete McCabe,
GE’s global president and CEO of GE Renewable Energy’s Onshore Wind
business.
McCabe, too, took the opportunity of this week’s news to call for strong and stable renewable energy policy in Australia.
“Australia is a great market for wind, and today is GE’s second
largest region globally for our Renewables business. While we see lots
of opportunities in Australia, we need to continue to have policy
certainty to drive investment.”
GE said the successful formula for its bid for Cooper’s Gap included
custom-designed 115-metre towers for the 3.8MW turbines, to get the
optimal wind speed.
The engineering team – which included German wind engineering
“boffin” Dr Joerg Winterfeldt – had to ensure that the design of the
taller tower avoided vibration when the blades turn and also fit within
the logistical puzzle of not being too heavy or wide to cross all the
roads and bridges from port to site.
President Trump speaks about the U.S. role in
the Paris climate change accord in the Rose Garden of the White House in
June. (AP)
The Trump administration has decided to disband the federal advisory panel for the National Climate Assessment,
a group aimed at helping policymakers and private-sector officials
incorporate the government’s climate analysis into long-term planning.
The charter for the 15-person Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment —
which includes academics as well as local officials and corporate
representatives — expires Sunday. On Friday, the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration’s acting administrator, Ben Friedman,
informed the committee’s chair that the agency would not renew the
panel.
The National Climate Assessment is supposed to be issued
every four years but has come out only three times since passage of the
1990 law calling for such analysis. The next one, due for release in
2018, already has become a contentious issue for the Trump
administration.
Administration
officials are currently reviewing a scientific report that is key to
the final document. Known as the Climate Science Special Report, it was
produced by scientists from 13 different federal agencies and estimates
that human activities were responsible for an increase in global
temperatures of 1.1 to 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit from 1951 to 2010.
The
committee was established to help translate findings from the National
Climate Assessment into concrete guidance for both public and
private-sector officials. Its members have been writing a report to
inform federal officials on the data sets and approaches that would best
be included, and chair Richard Moss said in an interview Saturday that
ending the group’s work was shortsighted.
“It doesn’t seem to be
the best course of action,” said Moss, an adjunct professor in the
University of Maryland’s Department of Geographical Sciences, and he
warned of consequences for the decisions that state and local
authorities must make on a range of issues from building road projects
to maintaining adequate hydropower supplies. “We’re going to be running
huge risks here and possibly end up hurting the next generation’s
economic prospects.”
But NOAA communications director Julie
Roberts said in an email Saturday that “this action does not impact the
completion of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, which remains a
key priority.”
While
many state and local officials have pressed the federal government for
more concrete guidance on how to factor climate change into future
infrastructure, President Trump has moved in the opposite direction.
Last week, the president signed an executive order on infrastructure
that included language overturning a federal requirement that projects
built in coastal floodplains and receiving federal aid take projected
sea-level rise into account.
Seattle Mayor Ed Murray (D) said in
an interview Saturday that the move to dissolve the committee represents
“an example of the president not leading, and the president stepping
away from reality.” An official from Seattle Public Utilities has been
serving on the panel; with its disbanding, Murray said it would now be
“more difficult” for cities to participate in the climate assessment. On
climate change, Trump “has left us all individually to figure it out.”
Richard
Wright, the past chair of the American Society of Civil Engineers’
Committee on Adaptation to a Changing Climate, has been working with the
committee to convey the importance of detailed climate projections in
next year’s assessment. The society establishes guidelines that form the
basis of building codes across the country, and these are based on a
historical record that may no longer be an accurate predictor of future
weather extremes.
“We need to work on updating our standards with
good estimates on what future weather and climate extremes will be,”
Wright said Saturday. “I think it’s going to be a serious handicap for
us that the advisory committee is not functional.”
The committee
was established in 2015, but its members were not appointed until last
summer. They convened their first meeting in the fall. Moss said members
of the group intend to keep working on their report, which is due out
next spring, even though it now will lack the official imprimatur of the
federal government. “It won’t have the same weight as if we were
issuing it as a federal advisory committee,” he said.
Other Trump Cabinet officials have either altered the makeup of outside advisory boards or suspended these panels
in recent months, though they have not abolished the groups outright.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt decided to
replace dozens of members on one of the agency’s key scientific review
boards, while Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is “reviewing the charter
and charge” of more than 200 advisory boards for his department.
Scientists aboard a French research ship say they have been shocked to see the extent of coral bleaching across the Pacific Ocean, just halfway through their two-year voyage around the world.
The vessel Tara has been sailing around the globe for more than a decade to study the effects of climate change on the ocean.
Its current expedition will cross 11 time zones and span 100,000 kilometres from Europe to Asia and back again, and the group claims it is the biggest study of this scale across coral reefs.
The focus is how coral reefs in the Pacific are adapting to climate change, and on a stopover in Sydney, captain Nicolas De La Brosse said the extent of damage is already deeply troubling.
"What we've seen in really isolated spots like Samoa for example, even though it's very far away from [developed] countries with pollution, we struggled to find any coral life," he said.
Mr De La Brosse said nowhere was immune to the effects of global warming.
"It doesn't matter where you are in the Pacific, coral is starting to bleach."
He said data was still being collected and analysed and the final results would be released at the end of 2019.
The ship is not just a floating science lab — it is a temporary home for 16 people, including engineers, scientists, sailors, crew and, of course, a cook who whips up French dishes and sometimes, local favourites.
"When we arrived in Australia I made a banana cake because I know in Australia you have this cake," chef Dominique Limbour said.
Spending months at a time at sea together in the 26-metre vessel can be a challenge.
"We have to work all together. You can't argue with someone else — you have to be pretty easygoing," Mr De La Brosse said.
After its Sydney stop the ship will head north to study the extent to which coral in the Great Barrier Reef is adapting to climate change.
Greenhouse gases are released from a factory in Australia. (Dave Hunt / European Pressphoto Agency)
We’ve all been there: The perfectly innocuous conversation you’ve
been having at a friend’s party or your kid’s soccer game devolves into
an argument about climate change. Suddenly, you realize you’re talking
to a climate change skeptic.
You want to help your acquaintances see the light. But how?
We
asked climate scientists and communicators how to have constructive
discussions about climate change. They offered both general advice about
how to engage and specific information to rebut doubters’ claims.
Start by looking for common ground. We all depend on the same planet for our survival, and all of us want a good outcome, said Richard Alley, a geoscientist at Penn State University who studies abrupt changes in the climate.
Also,
recognize that there’s a grain of truth in most of the arguments put
out by climate skeptics — or at least an intriguing question that
climate scientists have considered at some point. Acknowledging the
merits of these ideas often leads to more productive discussions, said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
Read on and you’ll be ready when the next unexpected debate comes your way.
Beware of cherry-picking
In
many cases, so-called evidence against climate change is drawn from a
zoomed-in picture, like data taken from a short time period or a single
geographical location. It’s not that the information is wrong — it may
just be taken out of context.
Climate scientists emphasize the
need to look at global data over long periods to understand it in
context and see larger trends. For example, it’s easy to pick an
exceptionally hot year — like 1998 — and point out that the average
global temperature was only 0.1° Celsius warmer than in 2008, a relatively cool one. But all this example shows is that there are fluctuations from year to year.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen exponentially in the last century. (NASA)
What really matters, climate scientists say, is that the global average temperature is on a rising trend. NOAA’s 2016 climate report
shows that every year since 1977 has been warmer than the 20th century
average. This means the Earth is retaining more heat over time.
Always
ask skeptics about the data their argument is based on. If it’s from an
isolated location or a small chunk of time, it may not be
representative of the bigger picture.
Greenhouse gases are the key
When
looking for something to blame for rising temperatures, skeptics tend
to focus on natural factors that can shift over time, such as the
intensity of the sun, the amount of volcanic activity or changes in
Earth’s orbit. They may even acknowledge the role of certain man-made
pollutants like ozone or aerosols.
But all of these factors are dwarfed by the impact of greenhouse gases.
When
we burn fossil fuels in cars, planes and power plants, the hydrocarbon
molecules in the fuel break down to produce carbon dioxide and water.
Both are then released into the atmosphere.
Emissions spew from a large stack at a coal-fired power plant in Newburg, Md. (Mark Wilson / Getty Images)
Carbon dioxide (CO2) and some other small molecules, such as methane (CH4) and nitrous oxides (NOx), are known as greenhouse gases
because they absorb and trap light from the sun as well as infrared
radiation coming from the Earth’s surface. Both are converted into heat
by these gases that warms the air — much like a greenhouse does.
Carbon
dioxide is the most important greenhouse gas by far, Alley said. Every
time the climate has changed in ways that scientists can measure, carbon
dioxide has had something to do with it, he said.
The NASA
Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York modeled the impact of a
variety of natural and industrial factors on global temperature. They
found that only carbon dioxide levels predicted the temperature increase
we’ve seen in recent decades. This visualization from Bloomberg makes it easy to see.
Methane and nitrous oxides actually have more powerful greenhouse effects than carbon dioxide — but carbon dioxide has a larger overall influence because we’re releasing so much more of it. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, carbon dioxide accounted for 82% of all greenhouse gas emissions in 2015.
Humans are responsible for the surge in carbon dioxide
Where
did all that carbon dioxide come from? When looking at the
concentrations of CO2 over time, “nothing interesting happened until we
started burning coal,” Schmidt said.
That’s when atmospheric CO2 really picked up — and it’s increased exponentially ever since.
According to data compiled
by the Goddard Institute, carbon dioxide was at an atmospheric
concentration of 291 parts per million in 1880. It had risen to 311 ppm
by 1950 and to 370 ppm by 2000. NOAA’s reported global annual average reached 402 ppm in 2016.
Carbon dioxide concentration changes throughout the year. Shown here: September 2014 - August 2015 (NASA)
Climate change skeptics often point out that volcanic eruptions and
decaying plants also send carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But
multiple studies have shown that human activity produces at least 60 times more
carbon dioxide than volcanoes do each year. And while it’s true that
plants produce more carbon dioxide than humans, they clean up after
themselves — and even pick up some of our slack.
This is one reason the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher in the winter than in the summer.Plants
come with their own carbon sinks – they produce carbon dioxide when
they die and decay, but new plants also absorb it from the air as they
grow.
You can’t blame warming on the sun
Climate change deniers say the sun is the obvious source of the planet’s heat. After all, it’s constantly bathing us in 173,000 terawatts of energy. That’s about 10,000 times more than enough to meet the entire world’s annual energy needs.
But solar activity has actually decreased since 1950, experts said. This means that if nothing else had changed, we would be experiencing a cooling cycle right now.
Solar
energy output varies slightly over an 11-year cycle, and that does have
an effect on temperature. But these effects are much clearer in the
stratosphere than in the lower atmosphere, Schmidt said, and the solar
cycle doesn’t significantly affect surface temperatures on Earth.
A Salvation Army hydration station sign sits in the midday
sun as the temperature climbs to a near-record high in Phoenix. (Ross D.
Franklin / Associated Press)
Typically, solar activity and temperature move together: When one
rises, the other does too. So when we see solar activity and temperature
moving in opposite directions, as has happened recently, we know that
something else is going on.
Other factors are also encouraging cooling right now, several experts said, including an increase in reflective aerosols like sulfates and nitrates in the atmosphere. These block some heat from reaching the Earth’s surface.
If not for these cooling influences, our planet would be warming even more rapidly.
This is not a normal part of a natural cycle
Climate change has occurred naturally in the past. But that doesn’t mean natural causes are responsible this time.
Alley
pointed out the logical flaw in this oft-repeated argument: It’s like
saying that since wildfires sometimes begin with natural events like
lightning strikes they can never be caused by a wayward campfire.
The
climate doesn’t change unless it’s forced to change. And during the
20th century, there weren’t any natural events powerful enough to
account for the changes scientists are documenting.
“Human fingerprints are all over this,” said John Cook, a cognitive scientist who studies beliefs about climate change at George Mason University.
And
just because the climate has changed before doesn’t mean we want it to
happen again — especially this quickly. In the past, rapid changes were
usually pretty hard on living creatures that didn’t have enough time to
adapt to their new conditions. That doesn’t bode well for us.
Don’t be fooled by Antarctic sea ice
For a several years in the early part of the decade, the amount of sea ice extending from Antarctica set new records, peaking at 7.72 million square miles (an area more than twice as large as the United States).
Climate
change skeptics say this is inconsistent with a warming planet. But
they ignore the fact that the vast majority of sea ice is decreasing.
(Remember the warning about cherry-picking?) Even in Antarctica, it has
been losing ground rapidly since 2014 and has now sunk to a record low.
Arctic sea ice hasn’t varied as widely in recent years. According to a report
released in 2014 by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Royal
Society in London, the yearly minimum Arctic sea ice extent in the
summer has decreased by 40% since 1978. This could be the least icy the
Arctic has been in almost 1,500 years, the report noted. Some researchers say that Arctic summers could be completely ice-free by 2030.
Finnish icebreaker MSV Nordica passes through Victoria
Strait while transiting the Northwest Passage connecting the Pacific and
Atlantic oceans earlier than had ever been recorded. (David Goldman /
Associated Press)
Richard Somerville, a climate scientist who spent many years at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, points out that sea ice is highly variable.
“It’s
not simple — the ice doesn’t just melt when the temperature falls below
32° Fahrenheit,” he said. “It gets blown around by the winds and
carried around by the currents, and it gets blown or carried to regions
that are either more prone to melting or less prone to melting.”
He
likens sea ice trends to the stock market: Although it fluctuates from
year to year, the overall trend can be seen when we look at long time
periods — and now it’s a downward one. Focusing on short-term changes
misses this bigger truth, he said.
The take-home message is that
sea ice is complicated, so be careful not to jump to conclusions — in
either direction. For example, the collapse of an iceberg that broke off from Antarctica in July has not been definitively tied to climate change.
Recognize that this is a political debate, not a scientific one
Skeptics like to say that scientists don’t agree on climate change, but the truth is that the consensus is overwhelming.
A whopping 97% of climate scientists share the view that climate change is happening now and that human activity is to blame.
Greenpeace activists in Spain protest President Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. (Mariscal / European Pressphoto Agency)
It’s important to understand where science ends and politics begins.
To boost your chances for success, make a point of separating the two,
Somerville said. Many people are not suspicious of the science, but
rather of the consequences associated with climate change.
“There’s
no such thing as a Democratic or Republican thermometer,” Somerville
said. We can agree on what the science says, even if we have different
political ideas, he added.
Understand why people may be misinformed
According to a recent poll
conducted by researchers at Yale and George Mason University, only half
of the American public realizes that a majority of climate scientists
agree on climate change. Only 13% of those polled were aware that the
degree of scientific consensus is upwards of 90%.
A number of factors have led to this widespread misunderstanding, Cook said.
First,
some industry groups who oppose environmental regulation have made a
concerted effort to confuse the public about climate change.
Additionally,
media reports tend to include two sides to every story, including those
about climate change. But that implies that both sides have equal
weight, even when they don’t.
Finally, the sheer volume of climate
change information is daunting, and many Americans don’t have the time
or energy to sort fact from fiction. “Because there’s so much noise,
people tend to disengage,” Cook said.
And finally, know when to cut your losses
As with any contentious issue, you have to realize when you’re talking to someone who just wants to argue.
“If that’s the case, just stop.” Schmidt said. Links
Jay Weatherill’s government says 150 megawatt plant will be biggest of its kind in the world and create about 700 jobs
Solar Reserve’s Crescent Dune plant in Nevada will be a blueprint for its 150 megawatt solar thermal plant in Port Augusta.
Photograph: Solar Reserve
A proposed solar thermal power plant in South Australia’s mid-north has been contracted to supply all the state government’s power needs.
Work on the $650m SolarReserve facility will start in 2018, creating 650 construction jobs and 50 ongoing positions.
The state government said the 150 megawatt plant, to be ready in
2020, would dispatch energy to the grid even when the sun was not
shining.
The chief executive of the Australian Solar Council and Energy Storage Council, John Grimes, described the government’s commitment as a win for the Port Augusta community.
“Solar thermal in Port Augusta means jobs for regional South Australia,” he said. “It means zero emissions baseload power.”
The South Australian premier, Jay Weatherill, said the solar thermal plant was “the biggest of its kind in the world”.
“Importantly, this project will deliver more than 700 jobs, with requirements for local workers,” he said.
For more than five years, Port Augusta residents campaigned for solar
thermal alongside the city council, unions, local business, health
groups, climate groups and renewable energy groups from across Australia
as part of the Repower Port Augusta Alliance.
Gary Rowbottom, a former coal-fired power station worker and
chairperson of Repower Port Augusta, said: “Building solar thermal with
storage in Port Augusta will create new jobs, on-demand solar power,
reduce emissions and put downward pressure on power bills.”
Solar thermal has been supported across party lines with the federal
government committing $110m of equity in the May 2017 federal budget to
building solar thermal with storage in Port Augusta.
Solar thermal technology uses mirrors to concentrate the sun’s light
at the top of a tower, heating molten salt which is stored and the heat
used to operate a steam turbine. Solar Reserve has a track record in solar thermal, already operating the 110MW Crescent Dunes project in Nevada and recently announcing a 450MW tower for Chile.
Weatherill said the maximum government load was 125MW, meaning the plant would be able to supply other customers.
“This, in addition to our state-owned gas plant, and the world’s largest lithium ion battery, will help to make our energy grid more secure,” he said. Energy
experts said the new plant was an important step in understanding how
solar thermal could contribute to the energy mix in future.
Wasim Saman, professor of sustainable ernergy engineering at the
University of South Australia, said solar thermal was a more economical
way of storing energy than using batteries.
“The significance of solar thermal generation lies in its ability to provide energy virtually on demand,” he said.
But Dr Matthew Stocks, a research fellow in the research school of
engineering at the Australian National University, said solar thermal
also had limits.
“One of the big challenges for solar thermal as a storage tool is
that it can only store heat. If there is an excess of electricity in the
system because the wind is blowing strong, it cannot efficiently use it
to store electrical power to shift the energy to times of shortage,
unlike batteries and pumped hydro,” he said.
“It is not yet clear whether it will deliver a better outcome than wind and solar with electrical storage.”
The government contract with Solar Reserve would last for 20 years,
and was the “lowest cost option” of shortlisted bids for the project, he
said.
The government will pay a maximum of $78 per megawatt hour.
Most of Australia can expect a hotter-than-average spring driven in
part by unusually warm waters off the east coast, increasing the chances
of an early and active fire season in the south-east.
For Sydney, the outlook is also for the abnormally warm winter to extend through spring.
Is NSW a major bushfire risk this summer? Forest regions of NSW, including areas around Sydney, are rapidly drying out, raising the risk of early and significant fire activity this bushfire season.
The Bureau of Meteorology's three-month outlook released
on Thursday also shows the odds will favour milder overnight
temperatures will extend through much of September to November for
eastern half of the country. (See chart below.)
Felicity Gamble,
the bureau's acting head of climate prediction services, said that with
neutral influences in the Indian, Pacific and Southern oceans, secondary
factors such as the balmy waters off the east coast were playing a key
role.
"We're seeing those above-average temperatures [of winter]
continuing," Ms Gamble said, adding a clear climate change signal was
evident. "It's the background trend in warming temperatures that we've
seen over the past couple of decades."
For Sydney, day-time
temperatures so far this winter have been averaging 19.3 degrees,
ranking it third behind 2013 and 2005, Blair Trewin, the bureau's senior
climatologist, said. It's also likely to be among the top four warmest
Augusts for NSW.
The city will have a couple of relatively chilly days on Friday and
Saturday with tops of 16 degrees forecast. The rest of the month is
likely to have average maximums of about 20 degrees, Joel Pippard, a
Weatherzone meteorologist said.
July was easily Australia's hottest on record for daytime temperatures and June was the seventh-warmest, the bureau said earlier this month.
South-eastern Australia's warmer than usual winter looks likely to last through spring. Photo: Justin McManus
Globally, last month tied with July a year ago as the warmest on record, NASA said earlier this week. Rain outlook
A warm spring may add to the drying out of much of Australia after a drier than usual winter.
The
bureau's outlook points to mixed odds for rain for the eastern part of
the country, while the south-west may be in for a dry spring. (See chart
below.)
Cooler-than-normal waters off the west coast means
"there's less moisture to be drawn" as rain-bearing fronts move in, Ms
Gamble said.
With little additional rain, July and August are
shaping up to be Sydney's driest for those two months since 1995, Dr
Trewin said. A Fairfax Media has reported, bushfire
researchers have already identified low moisture levels in both dead
and live fuel across regions near Sydney and the far south coast of NSW.
The Sydney region can expect another mostly dry week, with the chance of some rain on Monday, Mr Pippard said.
After past two months of particularly dry weather, fire crews in NSW may be in for an active spring.
"It's
definitely worth considering an early start to the bushfire season for
most of NSW and southern Queensland," Mr Pippard said.
The NSW
Rural Fire Service said on Wednesday they were battling 70 fires across
the state, with many still active on Thursday morning:
IMAGE
Both states have had a few particularly warm days this week. Sydney
posted its warmest August morning for 6am readings on Wednesday, with
the mercury sitting on 22.1 degrees.
Odds continue to favour an early and active fire season for NSW. Photo: Wolter Peeters
Elsewhere in NSW, Port Macquarie and Coffs Harbour both posted their
hottest days on Wednesday for this early in the warming season. On
Tuesday, Wilcannia and Cobar in the state's west had their hottest
August days on record.
The bureau's outlook release on Thursday
marks the first of a regular fortnightly rather than monthly update. The
more frequently releases are intended to give farmers and other users
of the climate maps earlier access to any change.
The move follows
an instance in October 2015 when the bureau noted a sudden shift
towards drier conditions with an emerging El Nino. That prompted a
mid-monthly report that will now become standard by the agency.
Environmental Justice Australia report says Australian coal-fired power plants regularly exceed lax limits imposed on them
A representative of Victoria’s Yallourn power plant, pictured, told the
EPA it did not report when pollution levels were exceeded.
Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images
Australian coal-fired power stationsare allowed to
produce levels of toxic air pollution that would be illegal in the US,
Europe and China, and may exceed even the lax limits imposed on them
with few or no consequences, according to an investigation by
Environmental Justice Australia.
The report reveals evidence that operators of coal power plants in
Australia have been gaming the systems that monitor the deadly
pollution, while others have reported figures the federal government
says are not reliable.
EJA’s investigation reveals further cases of allegedly misleading
behaviour. In Victoria, regulators are investigating one case in which a
representative of a coal power plant allegedly said it regularly
“simplifies” reporting during periods of excessive pollution by just
reporting the figure allowed by its licence, rather than the actual
amount. Pollution
from coal power plants kills hundreds of people each year in Australia.
In Sydney alone, about 130 premature deaths are thought to be caused
each year by coal-fired power stations, with worse impacts in regions
near the stations.
Nationally, the health effects from the pollution emitted by
coal-fired power plants are estimated to cost $2.6bn – a figure that
would amount to $13.20 a megawatt hour if it were added to power costs.
Researchers at EJA collected the individual pollution limits allowed
for 10 of Australia’s 17 commercially operating coal-fired power
stations, chosen for their high levels of pollution and proximity to
populated areas.
Standardising the limits for comparison and collating them with
regulations in the US, Europe and China, they found that in almost all
cases Australian coal power plants were allowed to emit more toxic
pollution.
Mercury emissions compared particularly badly. Coal-fired power is
the second biggest Australian source of mercury, which accumulates in
the environment, causing significant harm to people.
Some coal-fired power plants in New South Wales were allowed to emit
666 times what would be allowed in the US, and 33 times what is allowed
in the EU and China.
Fine particle pollution, which causes hundreds of premature deaths
each year, also compared very badly. Every coal power station in
Victoria is allowed to emit more particulate pollution than power
stations in any of the other three jurisdictions examined, and all in
NSW were allowed to emit more than the Chinese limit.
Australia has no national standard, with each power station having
its own limits. But the EJA researchers found even those limits were
poorly monitored, often exceeded and rarely enforced.
Many power stations were required to monitor their pollution levels
only once or twice a year, the investigation found. Allegations uncovered by EJA,
that one power station was gaming the system by putting less polluting
coal into the generator when the levels were measured, sparked an
inquiry by the NSW Environmental Protection Agency in May.
Levels of particulate pollution reported to the National Pollution
Inventory revealed changes in pollution levels from year to year that
the federal Department of the Environment and Energy said were “not reliable”.
One station, Mount Piper in NSW, recorded a fall in emissions of 90%
between 2014 and 2015, which the department told Guardian Australia was
“unlikely”.
EJA uncovered a previously unpublicised EPA investigation into the
coal-fired power station at Yallourn in Victoria, operated by Energy
Australia. A representative of the power plant told the EPA it did not
report when pollution levels were exceeded, just that the plant emitted
at the limit.
A spokeswoman for Energy Australia would not say how long the
practice went on, or why the company did it. But in a statement to
Guardian Australia, she said: “To be clear, the Yallourn power station
is compliant with strict EPA Victoria requirements relating to air
pollution monitoring and in addition establishes, monitors and meets its
own internal targets to protect local ambient air quality.”
The investigation also attempted to clarify how many of Australia’s
coal-fired power plants were using the best available technology to
limit toxic emissions. The researchers asked the operators of all 10
power stations studied what technology they had in place. Partial
information was received for just six of the power stations.
Between
the responses and the actual pollution data, the researchers concluded
that none of the 10 stations had the latest technology. That includes
“wet scrubbers” that can remove 99% of sulfur pollution and “catalytic
reduction methods” that can reduce nitrogen pollution.
“All power stations are emitting significantly more pollution than
they would if they had these technologies installed,” the report
concludes.
It notes that if the pollution limits in the power stations licences were reduced, they would be forced to use the technology.
“Australia’s air pollution laws are weak, outdated, poorly monitored
and inadequately enforced,” said EJA lawyer Nicola Rivers, a co-author
of the report.
The report also compared the toxic pollution from Australia’s old
coal-fired stations to that of the newest “ultra supercritical plants,”
finding that if current best technology were applied to the existing
stations, new plants would not reduce pollution significantly.
The report called for urgent action to reduce deaths, including the
introduction of binding national emission standards requiring
international best practice, and emissions reduction programs run by the
states for fine and coarse particle pollution, and sulfur and nitrogen
pollution.
