Pumped Hydro Storage 'Could Make Australia Run On Renewable Energy Alone Within 20 Years'

ABC News - Stephen Smiley | Caroline Winter


Pumped Hydro: Australia's energy future? (Lateline)

Key points: Investment in renewables will see an increased need for hydro storage, researchers say Study found at least 22,000 suitable locations for pumped hydro sites Researchers say Australia could transition to 100pc renewable energy in 20 years if just a few of those sites were built

Australia has the capacity to store up to 1,000 times more renewable energy than it could ever conceivably need, according to an analysis by researchers at the Australian National University (ANU).
ANU engineering professor Andrew Blakers has conducted a study looking into pumped hydro sites and has concluded that there are at least 22,000 suitable locations nationwide.
Professor Blakers said if storage was built at just a tiny fraction of those places, Australia could transition to 100 per cent renewable power within two decades.
"No matter where you are in Australia, you will find a good pumped hydro site not very far away from where you, or your wind or your solar farm is located," he said.

"We only need to build about one or two dozen to support a 100 per cent-renewable electricity grid."

Pumped hydro works by pumping water uphill between two connected reservoirs when power is plentiful, and dispatching power to the grid when demand is high or when wind and solar do not work.
ANU engineering research fellow Matthew Stocks said a typical pumped hydro facility could deliver maximum power for between five hours and one full day.
The power could be quickly dispatched to the grid, when needed.
"It can go from zero to full power in about one minute," Dr Stocks said.

How pumped hydro works. (Supplied: EnergyAustralia)

The technology behind pumped hydro is not new — a facility was opened in the 1970s at the Tumut 3 Power Station at Talbingo in New South Wales.
Pumped hydro is also widespread in Europe, especially in the alpine parts of Italy, Germany and France, and in Scandinavian countries like Norway. It is also widely used in Japan and the United States.
Professor Blakers said as investment in renewable sources of energy like wind and solar increases in Australia, the need for pumped hydro storage would grow.
"We have so little solar and wind in the system at the moment that we don't need the storage," he said.
"Maybe now South Australia, at 50 per cent wind and solar PV, is just getting to the stage where it does need either strong interconnection or a pumped hydro or both.
"But the other states will catch up and will be at the 50 per cent level by the early 2020s I think, so they also need to start planning with pumped hydro now."

'Australia could be fully electrified within two decades'
For the report, Professor Blakers, Dr Stocks and their colleagues looked closely at tens of thousands of sites Australia-wide.
They found the greatest density of pumped hydro storage sites was in New South Wales, where they estimated there was potential to build 29,000 gigawatt hours' worth of storage capacity across 8,600 sites.
In Victoria they estimated there were 4,400 potentially suitable sites capable of storing 11,000 gigawatt hours' capacity, while Tasmania could theoretically support 2,050 sites, adding 6,000 gigawatt hours' of storage.

Professor Blakers said the ANU study located at least 22,000 suitable locations for pumped hydro sites across Australia (Image supplied: ANU) (ABC News)

"The Great Dividing Range is the best place," Professor Blakers said.
"All the way from North Queensland down to near Melbourne has thousands and thousands of sites."
Professor Blakers said if pumped hydro storage facilities were built at just a handful of sites spread out nationwide, Australia could run on renewables alone.
"Pumped hydro, high-voltage DC interconnectors between the states, solar photovoltaics, wind, batteries and demand management can do the whole job," he said.
"Not just the whole job for electricity, but the whole job for energy — electrify land transport, electrify heating and cooling and you could make 75 per cent cuts in Australia's greenhouse gas emissions.
"And I think this is going to happen over the next 15 or 20 years."

Major expansion of hydro storage: Frydenberg
The ANU researchers' work was funded by a $500,000 grant made by the Federal Government's Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).

---

Pumped hydro and its potential role in SA

The PM wants to further investigate pumped hydro as a way of boosting energy stability in Australia. But what is it and could it help South Australia in particular?

---

ARENA is itself already funding feasibility studies into pumped hydro storage in Tasmania, and in the Upper Spencer Gulf in South Australia and Kidston in north Queensland.
ARENA's CEO Ivor Frischknecht said while additional research was now needed into the 22,000 sites identified by the study, the message was clear — Australia could have 100 per cent renewable power.
"There's no question that wind and solar investment are going to keep going," he said.
"The challenge is to ensure that we end up with a reliable system that is also affordable, and that's where this study comes in.

"This study shows that it would be relatively affordable to run the entire system on wind, solar and pumped hydro."

In a statement to AM, Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg welcomed the study's findings.
He said the Government was already delivering a "major expansion" of the Snowy Hydro scheme and cited the on-going feasibility studies in Tasmania, South Australia and Queensland.
The Minister also indicated that the Government was working on a "new priority funding round for large scale storage and other flexible capacity projects including pumped hydro".

Links

• Study maps potential pumped hydro sites across SA
• 'Thousands' of pumped hydro opportunities in Australia
• Explained: Pumped hydro and its potential role in SA
• Explained: Why does Turnbull care if a power station closes down?
• The true cost of keeping the Liddell power station open
• AGL appears committed to closing Liddell plant despite meeting with PM
• Grattan: Turnbull's rush for energy 'announceable' sows confusion
• Verrender: Coal-fired generators have no future in Australia
• 'Criminal': Turnbull in talks to keep oldest coal-fired power station open
• Why emissions reductions from 'clean coal' remain a pipe dream
• Gas prices will rise and there's not much we can do to stop it
• Gas, not coal, the key to fixing electricity mess

The World's Soaring CO2 Levels Visualized As Skyscrapers

CityLab - John Metcalfe

This unusual animation gives an architectural twist to the history and possible dark future of climate change.

A new visualization highlights areas where C02 has soared. PIK/FHP

If you want an unusual but punchy telling of the world’s explosion of climate-warping gases, look no further than this visualization of CO2 levels over the past centuries soaring like skyscrapers into space.
“A Brief History of CO2 Emissions” portrays the cumulative amount of this common greenhouse gas that humans have produced since the mid-1700s. It also projects to the end of the 21st century to show what might happen if the world disregards the Paris Agreement, an ambitious effort to limit warming that 200 countries signed onto in 2015. (President Donald Trump still wants to renege on it.) At this point, the CO2-plagued atmosphere could see jumps in average temperature as high as 6 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit, the animation’s narrator warns, displaying a model of Earth looking less like planet than porcupine.


A Brief History of CO2 Emissions. FH Potsdam on Vimeo

“We wanted to show where and when CO2 was emitted in the last 250 years—and might be emitted in the coming 80 years if no climate action is taken,” emails Boris Mueller, a creator of the viz along with designer Julian Braun and others at Germany’s University of Applied Sciences Potsdam and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “By visualizing the global distribution and the local amount of cumulated CO2, we were able to create a strong image that demonstrates very clearly the dominant CO2-emitting regions and time spans.”
The visualization begins with a small, white lump growing on London around 1760—the start of the Industrial Revolution. More white dots quickly appear throughout Europe, rising prominently in Paris and Brussels in the mid-1800s, then throughout Asia and the U.S., where in the early 1900s emissions skyrocket in the New York region, Chicago, and Southern California.

(PIK/FHP)

By the time the present day rolls around, the world looks home to the biggest construction project in existence, with spires that’d put the Burj Khalifa to shame ascending in the U.S., China, and Europe—currently the worst emitters in terms of volume of CO2.

(PIK/FHP)

For this project, the team pulled historical data from the U.S. Department of Energy-affiliated Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center. The “CO2 emission estimates are deduced from information on the amount and location of fossil-fuel combustion and cement production over time,” says Elmar Kriegler, the viz’s scientific lead. “Therefore, the visualization also tells the history of the Industrial Revolution which started in England, spread across Europe and the United States, and finally across the world.”
Astute observers will notice a couple of troubling things, such as the huge amount of emissions pouring out of urban areas like London, New York, and Tokyo. Cities and the power plants that keep them humming remain the world’s largest source of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Also notable: the relative absence of emissions in some parts of the planet. That isn’t necessarily a good thing. “Some regions, in particular Africa, still do not show a significant cumulative CO2-emissions signal,” says Kriegler, “highlighting that they are still in the beginning of industrialization and may increase their emissions rapidly in the future, if they follow the path of Europe, the U.S., Japan, and recently China and Southeast Asia.”
How likely is it the worst-case scenario portrayed in this viz is nearing our doorstep? The viz’s creators argue that some current damage is here to stay. But they have some cause for optimism, too. “Reducing CO2 emissions to zero in the second half of the century can be achieved with decisive, global-scale emissions-reductions policies and efforts,” Kriegler says. “The Paris Agreement can be an important [catalyst] for this development if embraced fully by the world’s leading emitters and powers. But as we say in the movie, the time to act is now.”

Links

• A Brief History of CO2 Emissions
• Paris Agreement
• How Trump Is Helping the Politics of Local Climate Action
• Each Country's Share of CO2 Emissions
• Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center
• The Fossil-Fuel-Free Cities of the Future Sure Look Weird

The Entrepreneurs Turning Carbon Dioxide Into Fuels

The Guardian - Mark Harris

The race is on to prove that CO2 can be taken from the air and recycled into profitable, carbon neutral fuels. But cost and investment obstacles remain

Climeworks, the world’s first direct air capture plant, opened in June. It hopes to sell its concentrated CO2 to companies producing fuels. Photograph: Julia Dunlop

In an industrial greenhouse about 30km from Zurich, plump aubergines and juicy cherry tomatoes are ripening to perfection. Growing Mediterranean crops in Switzerland would traditionally be energy intensive but these vegetables are very nearly carbon-neutral. The greenhouse uses waste energy from a nearby refuse plant, and carbon dioxide from the world’s first commercial direct air capture plant.
The facility, designed by Zurich-based start-up Climeworks, pumps the gas into greenhouses to boost the plants’ photosynthesis and increase their yield, it hopes, by up to 20%. Climeworks says it will extract around 900 tonnes of CO2 a year from the air.
The company’s end game is not plumper tomatoes but something far more ambitious – proving that carbon dioxide can be recycled from the atmosphere and turned into something useful. If this installation is a success, Climeworks wants to sell its concentrated carbon dioxide to companies producing carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuels.

The greenhouse supplied by Climeworks. Photograph: Julia Dunlop/Climeworks

With concentrations of CO2 at their highest in the last 400,000 years, the world needs to remove the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere – as well as cut emissions – if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change.
Of course, nature has been recycling carbon dioxide for millions of years. Photosynthesis turns sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into sugars which fuel plants, which provide us with food, wood and complex sugars for fuel. But most plants turn less than 1% of the solar energy they receive into useful energy-rich compounds.
Scientists and entrepreneurs are working on technologies that they hope will improve on nature and make recycling carbon dioxide a profitable industry.
The World Economic Forum and Scientific American recently named an artificial leaf as one of the top emerging technologies of 2017. Dan Nocera, a chemist at Harvard University, is one of the scientists working on developing this “leaf”, which looks like a small, plain computer chip.
Nocera’s leaf has an energy efficiency of around 10%, according to his paper published last year in Science, a peer-reviewed academic journal. It has two processes. The first is an electrochemical system that uses metal catalysts and electricity from solar panels to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Then the hydrogen, along with carbon dioxide, is fed to bacteria commonly found in soil and water. The bacteria convert the gases into alcohols like methanol and ethanol that are the precursors to liquid fuels.


Bionic Leaf Turns Sunlight Into Liquid Fuel

These “solar fuels” – so called because they are made from nothing more than sunlight, water and air – could be a carbon neutral drop-in replacement for today’s fossil fuels.
Nocera’s ultimate vision is a cheap, standalone solar-powered system for developing countries to turn water into fuel for vehicles, cooking or power generation. His initial target market is India, where he hopes local scientists and entrepreneurs will help to commercialise the system, although he admits that his technology is years from commercialisation.
In the meantime, several start-ups are trying to beat Nocera to a practical system to recycle CO2 into useful products. Like Nocera’s leaf, all are designed to run on a trickle of electricity from solar panels.
In 2015, Staff Sheehan left Yale University and founded Catalytic Innovations to use metal catalysts like Nocera’s to turn carbon dioxide and water into ethanol, a biofuel that is already added to petrol in many countries to reduce its carbon footprint.
Another start-up, Opus 12, recently spun out of Stanford University in Silicon Valley says it’s “recreating photosynthesis, but at warp speed”. The company says its tech can be used at any source of CO2 emissions to produce syngas. This mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide can be burned like natural gas or used to produce a range of industrial chemicals.
And at the annual American Chemical Society meeting in Washington DC last month, a small company called Dioxide Materials said that it had developed electrolysis technology that could split carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon monoxide – a precursor for methanol – with twice the efficiency of previous systems.
In order for CO2 recycling systems to operate efficiently, however, the gas has to be captured and concentrated from sources such as factories and power stations – or extracted from the air using a system like Climeworks’. And that isn’t cheap.
Capturing CO2 at a factory chimney could cost up to $80 per ton, according to research from the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. Extracting from thin air is pricier still. Climeworks says it currently costs around $600 to extract a ton of CO2, although it expects that price to halve in its second-generation plant.
“Technologies to capture CO2 from the air, like Climeworks’ units, have the potential for the sort of steep price declines that we’ve seen from solar, wind, and batteries, which are also factory manufactured products,” says Matt Lucas of the Center for Carbon Removal, a non-profit dedicated to curtailing climate change.
“But if we want to compete with gasoline,” says Sheehan, “that cost has to be practically nothing.”
 There are a couple of dozen large-scale projects underway to capture and store carbon dioxide from industrial facilities, including a pilot in India turning CO2 into baking soda. However, the International Energy Agency says they are not on track to meet its objective for more than 100 projects by 2020.
Another challenge is the swift change in the political climate. “Traditionally, solar-fuelled artificial photosynthesis has been a government-funded effort,” says Dick Co, director of the Solar Fuels Institute, a global team of scientists working to recycle CO2 into fuels. “But accelerated by the US election last year, we’re seeing a quick shift from government money to philanthropists like Bill Gates and Tom Steyer.” It’s unknown whether these philanthropists will be committed to funding solar fuels over the years and decades they will need to reach commercial reality.
For young companies like Catalytic Innovations, that means seeking out every source of funding. Sheehan’s start-up has made it to the semi-finals of the NRG Cosia Carbon XPrize, a $20m competition to recycle waste carbon dioxide from power plants into valuable fuel or building materials. He is now looking for money to build a larger prototype in the hope of making it to the final round – which would come with half a million dollars seed money.

Links

• Indian firm makes carbon capture breakthrough
• California’s big battery experiment: a turning point for energy storage?
• Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says
• The idea that climate scientists are in it for the cash has deep ideological roots
• The role of renewables in the UK energy mix
• Asia's glaciers to shrink by a third by 2100, threatening water supply of millions
• Battery storage and rooftop solar could mean new life post-grid for consumers
• Negative emissions tech: can more trees, carbon capture or biochar solve our CO2 problem?

Developing Countries Can Prosper Without Increasing Emissions

The Conversation - Meg Argyriou*

A worker inspects solar panels at a solar farm in China. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

One of the ironies of fighting climate change is that developed countries – which have benefited from decades or centuries of industrialisation – are now asking developing countries to abandon highly polluting technology.
But as developing countries work hard to grow their economies, there are real opportunities to leapfrog the significant investment in fossil fuel technology typically associated with economic development.
This week, researchers, practitioners and policy makers from around the world are gathered in New York city for the International Conference on Sustainable Development as part of Climate Week. We at ClimateWorks will be putting the spotlight on how developing countries can use low- or zero-emissions alternatives to traditional infrastructure and technology.

Developing nations are part of climate change
According to recent analysis, six of the top 10 emitters of greenhouse gases are now developing countries (this includes China). Developing countries as a bloc already account for about 60% of global annual emissions.

Explore world's greenhouse gas emissions by country & sector

If we are are to achieve the global climate targets of the Paris Agreement, these countries need an alternative path to prosperity. We must decouple economic growth from carbon emissions. In doing so, these nations may avoid many of the environmental, social and economic costs that are the hallmarks of dependence on fossil fuels.
This goal is not as far-fetched as it might seem. ClimateWorks has been working as part of the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project, a global collaboration of researchers looking for practical ways countries can radically reduce their carbon emissions – while sustaining economic growth.
For example, in conjunction with the Australian National University, we have modelled a deep decarbonisation pathway that shows how Australia could achieve net zero emissions by 2050, while the economy grows by 150%.
Similarly, data compiled by the World Resources Institute shows that 21 countries have reduced annual greenhouse gas emissions while simultaneously growing their economies since 2000. This includes several eastern European countries that have experienced rapid economic growth in the past two decades.
PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Low Carbon Index also found that several G20 countries have reduced the carbon intensity of their economies while maintaining real GDP growth, including nations classified as “developing”, such as China, India, South Africa and Mexico.

‘Clean’ economic growth for sustainable development
If humankind is to live sustainably, future economic growth must minimise environmental impact and maximise social development and inclusion. That’s why in 2015, the UN adopted the Sustainable Development Goals: a set of common aims designed to balance human prosperity with protection of our planet by 2030.
These goals include a specific directive to “take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts”. Likewise, language in the Paris Climate Agreement recognises the needs of developing countries in balancing economic growth and climate change.
The Sustainable Development Goals are interconnected, and drawing these links can provide a compelling rationale for strong climate action. For example, a focus on achieving Goal 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy) that also considers Goal 13 (Climate Action) will prioritise low or zero-emissions energy technologies. This in turn delivers health benefits and saves lives (Goal 3) through improved air quality, which also boosts economic productivity (Goal 8).
Therefore efforts to limit global temperature rise to below 2℃ must be considered within the context of the Sustainable Development Goals. These global goals are intrinsically linked to solving climate change.
But significant barriers prevent developing countries from adopting low-emissions plans and ambitious climate action. Decarbonisation is often not a priority for less developed countries, compared to key issues such as economic growth and poverty alleviation. Many countries struggle with gaps in technical and financial expertise, a lack of resources and inconsistent energy data. More fundamentally, poor governance and highly complex or fragmented decision-making also halt progress.
It’s in the best interest of the entire world to help developing countries navigate these problems. Creating long-term, lowest-emissions strategies, shaped to each country’s unique circumstances, is crucial to maintaining growth while reducing emissions. Addressing these problems is the key to unlocking the financial flows required to move to a just, equitable and environmentally responsible future.

*Meg Argyriou is Acting CEO of ClimateWorks, ClimateWorks Australia

Links

• How trade policies can support global efforts to curb climate change
• Climate change set to increase air pollution deaths by hundreds of thousands by 2100
• How to help farmers prepare for climate change
• The relationship between drought and famine: lessons from the Horn of Africa
• Politics podcast: AGL chief economist Tim Nelson on what to do with Liddell
• Chasing the flame: Does media coverage of wildfires probe deeply enough?

US Solar Plant Costs Fall Another 30 Per Cent In Just One Year

RenewEconomy - Christian Roselund (PV Magazine)

Only ten days before the U.S. solar industry finds out whether or not it will have to deal with trade remedies imposed by the Trump Administration, the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL) put out a new report showing new low costs for solar in the first quarter of 2017.
U.S. Solar Photovoltaic System Cost Benchmark: Q1 2017 shows PV system prices falling roughly 30 per cent in only one year for utility-scale solar, to an average price of $1.03 per watt-DC for fixed-tilt systems and $1.11 per watt for systems with tracking.

This is a dramatic slide in prices even for an industry that has been greatly successful in reducing prices, and appears to come mostly from the collapse in PV module prices over the same period.
This in turn is largely due to a mismatch between supply and demand in China, which has caused significant pain for module makers, and it is not coincidence that there is currently a case before the U.S. government on potential trade protection for U.S. solar cell and module makers.
NREL has estimated that this translates to levelized costs of electricity from $50-66 per megawatt-hour (MWh) for fixed tilt systems and $44-$61/MWh for tracking systems, excluding the effect of the U.S. federal Investment Tax Credit (ITC).
These prices show that utility-scale solar has already beaten the 2020 targets set by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SunShot Initiative, which has led the new head of the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) to shift the focus of SunShot away from cost reduction and towards integration of high levels of renewable energy (please see our interview with EERE head Daniel Simmons here).
As the bulk of cost reductions were driven by the module price collapse, prices in other sectors have not fallen as quickly. NREL found that prices for commercial and industrial (C&I) systems fell a still-impressive 15% over the last year to an average of $1.85 per watt-DC, while prices for residential systems fell only 6% to $2.80 per watt.
This means LCOE of $92-120/MWh for C&I systems, and $129-167/MWh for residential systems. This is still well below SunShot goals for unsubsidized solar and given the current rate of price declines residential solar may not meet its SunShot target in 2020.
However, when the effect of the ITC is calculated, such costs fall significantly, putting the average cost of residential PV below $100/MWh.

NREL notes that this points to the difficulty in reducing non-hardware “soft” costs, which have increased to two-thirds of the cost of residential systems and 59% of C&I systems.

Links

• UK power firm Drax plans world’s largest battery storage project
•  Netherlands’ first floating PV plant is under construction
•  First ever solar PPA signed in Sweden
•  Global solar installations to top 100 GW despite U.S. slowdown, says EnergyTrend

Rooftop Solar And Storage – Cheaper Than Subsidising Old Coal

RenewEconomy - Giles Parkinson

Leading energy analyst Bruce Mountain says if governments were serious about lowering electricity prices for consumers, they would focus more on supporting rooftop solar and battery storage than seeking to subsidise ageing coal-fired power generators like Liddell.
Mountain, the director of Carbon + Energy Markets CEM says the combination of solar and battery storage is already cheaper than grid prices for most consumers in South Australia, and it would not take much effort or expense to make it so in other states too.
The federal government has claimed that forcing AGL to keep open the ageing and decrepit Liddell power station will lead to more reliability and cheaper prices, despite most analysts and energy companies saying it would do the exact opposite.
“If the federal government is determined to deliver lower electricity prices, it might focus its effort on ensuring that demand is more responsive to short-term price signals, and on making up the narrowing shortfall needed to encourage widespread uptake of distributed batteries,” Mountain says in a presentation to an energy forum in Melbourne.
“Such policies will not be difficult to develop or implement, they will require outlays many times smaller than those needed to build baseload coal plants, and will show results during the term of a government.”
The idea of using rooftop solar and battery storage (part of what is known as “distributed energy”) has been raised in numerous studies – by the CSIRO, by energy networks, and most recently by the Australian Energy Market Operator, which sees 40 per cent of all demand being serviced by localised generation and storage.
AEMO boss Audrey Zibelman sees such resources as critical to not just lowering prices, but also creating a smarter, cleaner and more reliable grid than the system which now relies heavily on centralised generation and extended networks, and is vulnerable to catastrophic failure of equipment, storms and bushfires.
The government knows only too well the benefits of rooftop solar, and battery storage. Many politicians have rooftop solar in their homes and some like Malcolm Turnbull have battery storage. Yet none have ever chosen to champion this, instead promoting the technologies deployed by large corporations.
“One of the few constants in Australia’s energy debate is the fervour of politicians’ and administrators’ homage to the idea that electricity prices should be lower than they are,” Mountain says.
“That electricity prices have reached the level they have, suggests the homage has all too often been a camouflage for other agendas.
“For too long ideology and the protection of vested interests has lurked behind the apparent pursuit of “lower electricity prices”. The obsession with coal-fired “baseload” generation is an enduring manifestation of this malaise.”
He notes that the technology limits of the era required oversized and poorly insulated water heaters to be operated at night to keep inflexible baseload coal generators operating in the dead of night, when there was little demand.
But the viability of the coal fleet relies on its ability to operate continuously, but this is being threatened by the emergence of new cheaper technologies, such as rooftop solar, which cost around one sixth the cost of grid supplied electricity.
“It is no surprise that photovoltaics are now being installed at record rates not just on household roofs but also on farms and in businesses.”
This is now being accompanied by the plunging cost of battery storage, particularly those with lithium chemistries, whose cost curve is even more dramatic than that of solar PV.

"Rooftop solar PV is clearly much cheaper than the grid, but solar PV typically only displaces around 30 per cent of grid consumption for a typical house,” Mountain notes (see graph above). “Rooftop PV pays for itself in almost all cases with north or west-facing roof. There is also rapid growth in the commercial sector.”
The combination of battery and photovoltaics installed behind customers’ meters now promises to meet customers’ needs more cheaply than grid-only supply.

In South Australia, which suffers from concentrated electricity markets, dependency on expensive gas and structurally high network charges, this is already the case,
This estimate is supported by the local network operator SA Power Networks, which predicts the cost of solar and storage to fall to just 15c/kWh within five years – less than half the current grid cost.
The combination of solar PV and  Battery storage allows grid-independence for 70-100 per cent of consumption,” he says, although the optimal sizing of the two technologies would depend on many factors.

And Mountain argues that it soon will be in other states. This graph above compares the cost of a rooftop solar installation with battery storage, and grid only prices. With the costs of battery storage falling quickly, this equation will quickly change.
“The combination of solar PV and  Battery storage allows grid-independence for 70-100 per cent of consumption,” he says, although the optimal sizing of the two technologies would depend on many factors.
The issue with a growing uptake of rooftop solar and storage has implications for the grid operators, who have built a network on the assumption of growing demand and “many years of wasteful gold plating”, Mountain says.
They may have no choice but to contemplate write downs. “The biggest adjustment is needed where the networks are partially or fully government-owned,” he says.
“The challenge is not insurmountable but requires governments to take responsibility for their past mistakes. For the privately owned networks, asset write-downs raise legitimate worries about political expropriation and these would need to be resolved.
“If the federal government is really concerned to do something about electricity prices, yesterday’s heroes must be put out to pasture. Those calling the shots must drop the ideology and find the gumption to put the customer first in deed, not just in word.”

Links

• Rooftop solar provides 48% of South Australia power, pushing grid demand to record low
• Let’s follow Malcolm Turnbull’s rooftop solar and storage lead, and keep the lights on
• US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in just one year
• Whyalla steel owners buy into Zen solar and storage company
• Work begins on world’s biggest solar tower and storage plant

Two Major Cities Demand Fossil Fuel Companies Pay For Climate Damages

ThinkProgress - Natasha Geiling

A pair of sailboats make their way across San Francisco Bay. (CREDIT: AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

San Francisco and Oakland are the two latest cities looking to take major fossil fuel companies to court over their role in fueling climate change. City attorneys announced on Wednesday that they had filed lawsuits with state courts in San Francisco and Alameda counties alleging that a handful of fossil fuel producers not only contributed to climate change through their business practices, but did so knowingly. The cities are asking fossil fuel producers to pay into a fund that would be used to pay for current and future damages associated with sea level rise.
The litigation mirrors lawsuits brought earlier in the summer by two California counties and the city of Imperial Beach, and signals a growing movement of cities attempting to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their contribution to climate change through the courts.
All five lawsuits allege that fossil fuel companies have caused widespread harm to the community by knowingly releasing greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, which in turn fuel climate change. Legal experts note similarities between these climate-related public nuisance claims and claims brought against tobacco companies in the mid-1990s, which alleged that the companies had created a public nuisance by knowingly selling harmful products (those suits eventually culminated in a $206 billion settlement).

California communities are suing 37 fossil fuel companies over climate damages

Unlike previous lawsuits, however, those filed by San Francisco and Oakland are narrower in scope, asking just five major fossil fuel producers to create a fund to pay for current and future adaptation to sea level rise.
The Bay Area is particularly vulnerable to sea level rise, with much of the region built on reclaimed tidal marshes that can easily flood in times of increased rain, high tide, or rising ocean levels. To compound the problem, the region is heavily populated, with around seven million inhabitants relying on infrastructure that could periodically be underwater as climate change continues to push sea levels higher.
According to the Pacific Institute, about four and a half feet of sea level rise by 2100 — on the higher end of projections, but certainly not out of the question — would leave more than 75,000 people in San Francisco and Alameda County vulnerable to inundation. Up and down the California coast, that same amount of sea level rise would threaten $100 billion worth of existing property.
“It’s definitely a continuation of the trend, but it’s actually a very different suit both in scale and the legal strategy behind it,” Carroll Muffett, president and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law, told ThinkProgress. “The real important thing in their doing this is that they both highlight the significant costs that cities are having to pay now, and they open up another new and really powerful legal avenue that other city, county, and state governments can pursue to recoup those costs from polluters that played a major role in creating those costs.”
The companies named in the lawsuits are Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP. Those companies, along with three leading coal producers, have been responsible for nearly 15 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions released since the Industrial Revolution, according to a 2016 Union of Concerned Scientists study.
Increased scientific evidence linking specific companies to greenhouse gas emissions might help bolster the plaintiffs’ case, as well as recent investigations showing that at least one defendant — ExxonMobil — was aware of the dangers of climate change as early as the 1970s, but continued to mislead both investors and the public about the threats to both the planet and the company’s assets.

What happens if the EPA is stripped of its power to fight climate change?

“The science of climate attribution has evolved rapidly, both in the ability to attribute greenhouse gas emissions to specific producers of fossil fuels and the ability to actually map those increased emissions to changes in temperature, sea level rise, and ultimately, the harms from specific extreme weather events,” Muffett said.
The ability to better link fossil fuel companies to the harm they have caused — and continue to cause — might actually be the primary difference between the tobacco litigation of the 1990s and the new wave of climate litigation seen today, Muffett added.
“It took three decades for a court to find evidence of corporate malfeasance,” Muffett said of tobacco companies. “The real difference is that plaintiffs are going into court now with that evidence of malfeasance in hand. These plaintiffs are much farther along at this stage in litigation than tobacco plaintiffs were.”
Beyond better attribution science, Muffett points to one other way that climate litigation already seems to be outpacing tobacco litigation: the speed at which litigation seems to have moved from individual claims to claims by cities and counties. Individuals had attempted to bring civil suits against tobacco companies for decades, but the real breakthrough in tobacco litigation happened when claims moved from individual to class action to, eventually, state claims against companies — an evolution that has occurred much more quickly with climate litigation.
“If you look at the scale and speed of the litigation, while the parallels to tobacco are there, the truth is climate litigation is going much farther, much faster, and the universe of potential plaintiffs and the scale of their potential damages is much greater,” Muffett said.
And while the first wave of climate litigation cases brought by cities against fossil fuel companies have been based in losses from sea level rise, as attribution science becomes stronger, and the links between climate consequences and the actions of fossil fuel companies becomes clearer, the scope of these kinds of claims will likely widen. Muffett suggested that places like Puerto Rico or the Gulf Coast — which are reeling from a series of devastating hurricanes — could potentially bring similar claims against fossil fuel companies in the future.
“We will see more of these suits and we will start seeing them faster, and the scale of what they address is only going to grow,” he said.

Links

• California Coastal Communities Sue 37 Fossil Fuel Companies For 'Knowingly Contributing To Climate Change'
• Exxon, Shell And Other Carbon Producers Sued For Sea Level Rises In California
• This Could Be The Next Big Strategy For Suing Over Climate Change
• California Communities Are Suing 37 Fossil Fuel Companies Over Climate Damages
• Local Governments in California File Common Law Claims Against Largest Fossil Fuel Companies