18/01/2018

Can Poetry Turn The Tide On Climate Change?

Adelaide Review - John Dexter

Poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner
Poetry seems an unlikely avenue for forcing action on climate change, but Marshallese poet and activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner has become a figure of hope for a nation under threat of rising sea levels.
It was her address at the 2014 United Nations Climate Summit that brought wider attention to Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner as a poet and activist, as well as the peril faced by the Marshall Islands and other pacific nations. Speaking as a Civil Society Representative, Jetnil-Kijiner described the dangers faced by oceanic nations in eloquent terms and implored world leaders to act quickly on climate change.
She subsequently performed her poem Dear Matafele Peinem, written as a promise to her daughter that the world would take action on climate change. The stirring call to arms and promise to future generations received a standing ovation on the UN floor.
Jetnil-Kijiner will appear at WOMADelaide this year in a Planet Talk titled Climate Justice and the Human Face of Climate Change with Ursula Rakova, Julian Burnside, Tim Costello and Ben Doherty.


Statement by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Civil Society Representative from the Marshall Islands at the opening of the United Nations Climate Summit 2014.

Speaking to The Adelaide Review, Jetnil Kijiner describes the effects of climate change already underway on the Marshall Islands. The devastating consequences of rising sea levels already in train include crops and homes being damaged by king tides, but even more distressingly, cemeteries being washed out.
“The thing that people need to understand is that the Marshall Islands is only two metres above sea level,” says Jetnil-Kijiner of her island home. “Because of the rising sea level, we’re getting floods that are destroying homes and destroying crops. It’s happening more frequently but also threatening the very existence of our islands. It’s been happening in the past five years more frequently than we’ve ever seen before. It’s happening right now. With the loss of the land comes the loss of cultural identity and our home and basically who we are as a people.”
Rising sea levels don’t just threaten vulnerable land masses, but the cultures so intimately tied to them, Jetnil-Kijiner says. This is especially true in the case of Pacific nations like the Marshall Islands, who have continually inhabited the atoll for thousands of years.
“Our culture is thousands of years old and something we love about it is that we can point to a piece of land, say a reef, and it has a story and a chant behind it,” Jetnil-Kijiner says. “So much of who we are as a people is rooted in the land. If that land is gone, who we are as a people disappears as well.”
There is hope, though, in the younger generations and their capacity to make and advocate for change. Helping to run Jo-Jikum, a Marshallese not-for-profit organisation, Jetnil-Kijiner helps to educate the youth on the causes and consequences of environmental problems, and empower them to make change.
“What I’ve noticed is that there is a growing number of young people that are really concerned about climate change,” she says. “They all know about it, and it’s their generation that’s growing up with that as a reality. They’re seeing it and want to be a part of the fight. Jo-Jikum is really about giving young people that platform and treating them with respect and helping them be a part of the solution.”

While the world’s richest countries talk about climate change, many of the poorest nations are experiencing its devastating effects right now. Climate justice activists, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner (Marshall Islands, pictured) and Ursula Rakova (Carteret Islands) and  are the human face of climate change. Their homelands are the first nations of people being forcibly displaced due to manmade global warming. Ursula Rakova and Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner are joined by Julian Burnside and Tim Costello to explore our responsibilities and the human face of climate change.
Details: 

On top of that, Jetnil-Kijiner continues to share her own stories and poems to awaken the international community to this rising plight. The power of poetry, according to Jetnil-Kijiner, is that it humanises an enormously complex issue, and makes it easier to understand and relate to.
“I see spoken word as a medium for sharing these stories and tackling the issue of climate change from different perspectives,” she says. “I’ve always felt that poetry allows me to put a human face to it. When I perform poetry, it’s not just about climate change but about my own personal experiences, people who I know, stories.
“It’s not just things like science and facts, which can distance people from the issue. I’m trying to get people to understand that we are real and it is happening, and it’s scary.”

Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner will speak as part of WOMADelaide’s Planet Talks on Sunday, March 11

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Coal Fails: Solar Power Thrives In Summer, But Coal And Gas Plants Can’t Take The Heat

Australia Institute

Solar is thriving in the Australian summer even as soaring temperatures cause traditional coal and gas plants to fail.
The Australia Institute’s (AI) Twitter feed records each time a coal or gas facility trips and goes offline in extreme heat events.
Multiple breakdowns are noted in January 2018 alone, as many facilities both old and new feel the heat.
These gas and coal fails mean renewables are becoming more important to maintain base load.
Unlike solar, coal and gas plants are not equipped to deal with the increasingly punishing heat of Australian summers. An AI report from December 2017 even recommends “heat safe’”firming power to back up national coal and gas plants with renewables.
It suggests dispatchable solar thermal with battery storage to provide evening support. Additional PV would reduce peak demand on hot days.
Solar power reaches peak capacity during heatwaves, providing 24/7 dispatchable energy with backup from solar batteries.

Why solar thrives as coal fails
According to AI, solar power is proven to prevent far worse disruption and load-shedding during extreme heat events.
Coal fails: Solar thrives as the nation’s coal and gas plants, old and new, struggle in summer heat. Image: Pixabay
Gas and coal-fired power stations, however, tend to overheat and trip as temperatures rise.
That’s because thermal electricity generation, including coal and combined cycle gas, needs cooling to function. Cooling is more difficult during a heatwave, with many power stations struggling to reach full capacity or even stay online.
The record-breaking heatwave of February 2017 saw major outages in South Australia as the grid failed to cope with peak demand.
The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) issued a heatwave warning early in January 2018, urging electricity providers to call on backup plans.
Meanwhile, Tesla’s big battery proved its worth in South Australia in December, delivery 100 MW into the national grid in record time.
It took just 140 milliseconds for the world’s biggest lithium-ion battery to respond when a major coal-fired power plant failed.

Twitter record of coal and gas plant breakdown
The ‘Gas and Coal Watch’ on the AI’s Twitter feed monitors breakdowns at the nation’s fossil fuel plants.
These breakdowns can mean hundreds of megawatts of power dropped from the grid in minutes. Recent failures include:
  • The Eraring coal-fired power station in Penrith tripped on January 7, dropping around 275 megawatts in 10 minutes.
  • Victoria’s Loy Yang A coal-fired power station has already tripped eight times this month (January 2018).
  • Kogan Creek, Australia’s second-newest coal power plant, has broken down twice this month.
  • Victoria’s Loy Yang Unit 2 plus Yallourn Units 1 and 3 were offline at the same time this month.
  • NSW’s new Tallawarra gas plant has failed twice this month.
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What Kind Of Emoji Do You Need To Talk About Climate Change?

The Verge - Alessandra Potenza

Desperate times call for desperate emoji

Climoji
Emoji have become a language of their own, but until recently, the language made it hard to talk about climate change: There are no emoji about pollution, wildfires, or rising sea levels. So artists Marina Zurkow and Viniyata Pany launched a set of mobile stickers specifically about climate change, called Climoji.
The icons depict melting sea ice, starving polar bears, dead trees, and flooded people. They’re intended to raise awareness about some of the most important issues of our time: global warming and environmental destruction. Need an emoji to express your frustration with plastic pollution? Thanks to Zurkow and Pany, now you have a whale with a plastic bottle in its stomach, or a plastic bottle with a fish skeleton inside.
Image: Climoji
Climate change is already affecting the world, from rising temperatures to rising sea levels. Hurricanes and wildfires made 2017 the most expensive year on record for natural disasters — and scientists say that these catastrophic events will become the new normal as the world continues to warm up. This isn’t an issue for the future, Zurkow tells The Verge. So it seems imperative to make ways for people to talk about it.
“Why are some of our primary communication tools avoiding this issue? Why isn’t there even a hurricane icon in the official emoji set?” says Zurkow.
Climoji was launched as an art project, thanks to New York University’s Green Grants, but Zurkow plans to make it big. In the spring, she wants to approach Facebook, and see if the social media giant will add the stickers to its own library. And eventually, she’d like the Unicode Consortium — the Silicon Valley-based group of computer and internet companies that approve new emoji — to adopt the climate change icons. But before that happens, more people need to use the emoji. Right now, about 400 people have downloaded the set, Zurkow says.
Image: Climoji
The Verge spoke to Zurkow about Climoji, what she hopes the project will accomplish, and what role art can play in discussions about climate change. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

 How do you hope that people will use these emoji?
The first thing is, I think [emoji have] become great shorthand for people who are influencers. Anybody who wants to do a campaign, anybody who wants to get somebody’s attention, icons are really good at this kind of condensed non-linear, non-sentence-based messaging. So I’m hoping that people will be able to use these as a kind of invitation to a conversation. The second is a lot more sketchy, and this is where as an academic and an artist I move into more of a hypothetical realm. There’s a lot of studies done on how metaphor enters into language. All emoji are metaphors: lips are a metaphor for love, for kissing someone. So, can these things as visual metaphors amplify and naturalize the conversation around climate change?
... there needs to be a sense of being moved by how grim things are.
The most obvious example would be the drowning arm sticking out of the whirlpool: if that becomes an icon for personal despair, does that steer us away from the conversation of climate change or do we think of flooding and drowning as an everyday enough occurrence to become a metaphor? Emoji are often about personal expression; they’re not that often about fact-based things. Sometimes they are: I had a glass of wine or, I’m taking a car. And I think that’s probably where these will be used most but also, there will possibly have some emotional weight.

The emoji are pretty bleak, and some people in the climate community say that promoting a totally doom-and-gloom scenario won’t help people act on climate change. What do you think?
The answer is not simple. We plan to do a set of icons that will address mitigation and adaptation and a kind of philosophical alternative to the models that we live on at the moment. Those might include embracing ecological diversity, ecological justice, and environmental justice. But it’s also solar, organic farming and composting, wind turbines, less meat consumption, having less children, driving less cars, and riding bikes. It’s all that: these are mitigation and adaptation towards resilience. But part of that has to be a mental shift. And I think in order to make that mental shift, there needs to be a sense of being moved by how grim things are.
Image: Climoji
For us, it really is chapter one: chapter one is, be awake and be okay with experiencing with how discomfiting this is, without letting your guilt consume you. I don’t think the way out is to pretend there’s a solution, and if I do one thing, I can go back to exactly what I was doing. I think we need to be participating in a much larger change. I feel guilty that I’ve created such a depressing set of icons. And yet I feel really committed to holding that space for discomfort.

If you went back, would you add more positive emoji in this set?
No. I feel guilty when people confront me about how bleak it is, but I wouldn’t change it. I would make another set that are really about resiliency. I want to move forward, out of things that imply fixity, that imply resolution, that are not systemic answers, systemic responses. And I realize how unpopular this is. When I say I don’t want to provide a solution, people become disappointed.
Image: Climoji
What’s your favorite emoji?
The saddest one, the one that breaks my heart, is the whale with the plastic bottle in its stomach. I’ve been doing a lot work on the North Atlantic right whale population, which is on the border of extinction. I’ve been working with the Center for Coastal Studies and a group of artists who’s been engaged in the Cape Cod seashore. It’s really depressing.

As Earther points out, the Climoji characters that are drowning are brown, while the one on the lifeboat is white. Why?
We didn’t make, as Unicode does, six shades of skin color for people to identify with personally. So, in lieu of that, some decision had to be made. The unfortunate truth is that people who are predominantly brown are going to suffer. It is a demographic problem, right? People who are white or symbolically white are going to do better in the face of climate change. They’re going have more escape hatches, like lifeboats. They’re going to literally have more lifeboats to get out. That’s a fact. That’s happening already.
Image: Climoji
What role can art have in communicating the risks of climate change?
All issues that require change and compromise and a new point of view require an emotional component. There’s very little logic that makes for large-scale change and I think that climate change is example A in this. The two things I think are going to change the way that we think about the climate and the way that we think about our participation as citizens and as individuals and as consumers, those are going to be an emotional shift, like a shift of mind, an understanding of kinship beyond our immediate tribe and immediate interests. And art can do that. Art can shift those things in a way that all the metrics in the world, all the logic, all the empirical information just won’t. The other way is, of course, more grassroots efforts. But that’s not my business. My business is, with some humor and some fairness and some invitation, to try to nudge paradigms a tiny bit to the side.

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17/01/2018

Climate politics in 2018: another guide for the perplexed

The Conversation - 

If Jay Weatherill is returned as the premier of South Australia in 2018, he promises to once again butt heads with Malcolm Turnbull over energy policy. Morgan Sette/AAP
As I predicted a year ago, 2017 was another vicious and bloody-minded year in Australian climate politics. Yet the political bickering belied the fact that it was actually a great year for green energy.
Nowhere was that more in evidence than in South Australia, which got its big battery inside 100-day deadline, with the world’s biggest solar thermal plant set to begin construction this year. Elsewhere, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull talked up the prospects of the Snowy 2.0 hydro storage project.


Climate change drove decline of Aussie tigers and rise of devils
A new study led by The Australian National University has found a strong link between a rapidly cooling climate and the decline of Australia's marsupial tigers, triggering the rise of the Tasmanian Devil and its relatives.

Yet the politics remain as rancorous as ever. The federal government unveiled its National Energy Guarantee in November, after Chief Scientist Alan Finkel’s Clean Energy Target proved too rich for some in the Coalition. Just before Christmas, the long-awaited climate policy review was released, and immediately branded as weak.
Both issues are unresolved, and are set to loom large on the landscape this year. But what else is on the horizon?

Domestic bliss
We should always expect the unexpected. But perhaps the most predictable “unexpected” event would be a heatwave, prompting one or more of our creaking coal-fired power stations to have a meltdown. Maybe the “Big Banana” (as Elon Musk’s battery has been branded) will step in again, as it already has.
If fossil fuel power stations fail again, expect to see the culture war heat up again, with coal’s defenders using ever more twisting logic to defend their dear dinosaur technology.
Barring the apocalypse, on March 17 South Australians will go to the polls. Will Premier Jay Weatherill be returned to power, to continue his long-running stoush with federal energy minister Josh Frydenberg? Will heatwaves and power outages help or hinder him? At the moment, polls have former senator Nick Xenophon as putative premier. My crystal ball is hazy on what this would mean for energy policy.
In April there will be a meeting of the COAG Energy Council at which the NEG proposal will come under scrutiny. Expect it to be bloody. State governments have demanded more modelling, so they can compare the NEG to Finkel’s Clean Energy Target that Finkel suggested, and an emissions intensity scheme.
Illustration: Andrew Dyson 
Current SA treasurer Tom Koutsantonis has raised several concerns with the NEG, arguing that it doesn’t give a big enough boost to renewables, and would do nothing to break up the power of the big “gentailers”, who generate and sell electricity.
“To proceed, the NEG would require unanimous support at COAG, so this policy is either years away, or won’t happen at all,” Koutsantonis said. Expect a long-running pitched battle if Weatherill and Koutsantonis are still about, and perhaps even if they’re not.

Funding issues
In the May budget the Turnbull government is going to have to decide what to do about the Emissions Reduction Fund, the centrepiece of former prime minister Tony Abbott’s Direct Action policy, which replaced his predecessor Julia Gillard’s carbon price.
The fund, which lets companies bid for public money to implement emissions-reduction projects, started at A$2.55bn, and there is about A$260 million left.
Connected to these decisions are questions over whether and how the fund’s “safeguard mechanism”, which is supposed to stop the system being gamed, will be modified.
Among the many criticisms levelled at the government’s 2017 climate policy review, released with little fanfare the week before Christmas, was the proposal to make the already flexible mechanism even more flexible, so as to “reduce the administrative and auditing costs” for businesses.
The government’s climate review also says that in 2018 it will start the process of developing a long-term emissions-reduction strategy, to be finalised by 2020. It has promised to “consult widely” with businesses, the community, states and territories, and other G20 nations. Time will tell exactly how wide this consultation turns out to be, although anything would be better than the Trump Adminstration’s systematic removal of the term “climate change” from federal websites.

 Overseas business
The climate review suggests that the Turnbull government will push for more international carbon trading. An unlikely alliance has formed against the idea, consisting of those who view carbon credits as buck-passing, as well as Tony Abbott, who thinks Australian money “shouldn’t be going offshore into dodgy carbon farms in Equatorial Guinea and Kazakhstan”.
His stance has already been branded as nonsensical by the business lobby – who, it must be said, stand to benefit significantly from carbon trading.
On the diplomatic front, the United Nations will hold a “2018 Talanoa dialogue” process, featuring a series of meetings in which major economies will come under pressure to upgrade their climate commitments to meet the Paris target.
As Giles Parkinson notes, Australia had probably thought that they could get away with no climate target upgrades until around 2025.
In October the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will release a report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5℃ – the more ambitious of the Paris Agreement’s twin goals – and the emissions pathways we would need to follow to get there. Expect climate deniers to get their retaliation in first.
The next UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (number 24 in a never-ending series) will be held in December in Katowice, in Poland’s coal heartland.

Others’ predictions and my own
So, prediction is very difficult, but most of us like to indulge. Reneweconomy asked Frydenberg, his opposite number Mark Butler, and the Greens’ climate spokesperson Adam Bandt what they thought was coming up.
Frydenberg talked up “innovative projects” like this summer’s demand response trial and Snowy 2.0.
Butler gloomily forecasted more policy chaos and renewables-blaming, while Bandt was sunnier, predicting that 2018 will be “the year of energy storage” as the economics for commercial and household batteries begin to stack up.
Bandt also thinks the public debate will heat up as extreme weather hits, and the national security implications become (more) obvious.
Well, it will be fun to watch whether the Minerals Council pulls its horns in under the threat of BHP pulling out. Early signs would suggest not.
Will other mining companies defect?
Will battery storage get a grip on the grid?
Will Adani pull the plug on Carmichael under continuing pressure from campaigners?
Well, here are some safe predictions.
Donald Trump will continue being Donald Trump. Liberal and National backbenchers will put pressure on Turnbull to do what John Howard did when George W. Bush was in the Oval Office – namely, get into the United States’ slipstream and take advantage of the lowered ambition.
There will be further stunning developments in energy storage, and the prices of solar and wind will continue to plummet.
Meanwhile, Australia’s emissions will continue to rise, as will the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide concentrations.

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Qantas Worst Airline Operating Across Pacific For CO2 Emissions, Analysis Reveals

The Guardian - 

Qantas used the two most fuel-intensive aircraft and carried the most empty seats of any transpacific airline
Qantas emits more carbon dioxide per passenger-kilometre than any other airline operating across the Pacific, according to an analysis by the International Council on Clean Transportation, the group that exposed the Volkswagen emissions scandal in 2014.
For each kilometre Qantas transports a passenger across the Pacific, it uses 64% more fuel than the two most fuel-efficient airlines operating across the Pacific: Hainan Airlines and All Nippon Airways (ANA).
One litre of aviation fuel was able to transport one passenger just 22km, on average, on Qantas flights, while Hainan and ANA were able to take a passenger 36km on 1L of fuel.
The wide variation between airlines provides a stark contrast to the industry’s aspirational goal of improving fuel efficiency of international flights by just 2% annually.

Fuel efficiency for different airlines
Guardian graphic | Source: International Council of Clean Transportation

 
Aviation currently accounts for about 2.5% of global carbon dioxide emissions. But pollution from the industry is expected to increase and, by 2050, use up a quarter of the allowable greenhouse gas emissions if the world is to keep global warming at less than 1.5C – the world’s “carbon budget”.
While Hainan and ANA tied as the most fuel-efficient airlines, they used different strategies to achieve the relatively low fuel burn.
Hainan Airways, a Chinese carrier, employed more fuel-efficient aircraft, using the Boeing 787 Dreamliner for more than 80% of its flights, and the Airbus A330 for the remainder. It also avoided having excessive empty seats, further increasing its efficiency.
Meanwhile, the Japanese airline ANA achieved the low fuel-burn by carrying a lot of cargo, which the analysis treated as equivalent to carrying people.
In contrast, Qantas used the two most fuel-intensive aircraft – Airbus A380 and Boeing 747-400ER – and carried the most empty seats of any transpacific airline, filling just 74% of its seats.
Comparing all the airlines, ICCT found that how much freight an airline carried was the strongest determinant of its fuel efficiency, explaining 48% of the variation between airlines. Seating density, aircraft efficiency and passenger load were the other major factors.
Looking at specific routes, the analysis found Delta was the most fuel-efficient airline on the Sydney-Los Angeles route, flying a passenger 33km on a litre of fuel. Virgin Australia and United were not far behind on 32km, while Qantas lagged on just 24km.

Efficiency for airlines serving LA-Sydney routes
Guardian graphic | Source: International Council of Clean Transportation

 
The most competitive transpacific route was Los Angeles-Tokyo, with six airlines flying between the two hubs. On that route United was the most fuel-efficient, taking a passenger 42km on a litre of fuel. Singapore Airlines was the least fuel-efficient, taking a passenger just 26km on a litre of fuel.

Efficiency for airlines serving LA-Tokyo routes
Guardian graphic | Source: International Council for Clean Transportation

 
The report notes that Qantas is planning on using eight new Dreamliners for flights to the US, which, if operating now, would lift the airline one place from the bottom, above Korean Air and tying with Asiana in the second-bottom place.
The results follow an earlier analysis ICCT conducted on the efficiency of airlines on transatlantic routes in 2015, which found a significant but smaller variation between airlines than was found on Pacific routes.
In that report, British Airways and Lufthansa were found to have emitted 51% more carbon dioxide than the cleanest flyers, Norwegian Air.
“This research shows that there are a variety of ways that international airlines can reduce fuel use and carbon emissions,” said Brandon Graver from ICCT, the lead author of the study. “Buying new aircraft, carrying large numbers of passengers and optimising freight strategies all make a difference.”
Dan Rutherford, ICCT’s aviation program director and co-author of the paper, said: “There’s a reason airlines around the world are starting to avoid very large aircraft like the 747 and A380.
“Newer twin-engine widebodies provide the payload and range capabilities needed for transpacific flights with much lower fuel burn.”
Alan Milne, head of fuel and environment at Qantas told the Guardian that the airline ranks low in the analysis because it uses large aircraft, flies long distances and has premium cabins that leave more space between passengers.
“We’re committed to reducing carbon emissions and continually look at ways to lower them across our operations,” he said. “We are switching our 747s for more fuel-efficient Dreamliners and we have several data-driven programs in place to reduce fuel burn.”

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The Hunt Is On For Climate Champs

Cosmos - Geetanjali Rangnekar

Conference organisers call for community nominations for outstanding climate activism.
The hunt is on outstanding climate change activists. Tobias Titz/Getty Images
Key dates
Call for abstracts                      3 October 2017
Abstracts for full papers          11 December 2017
Close abstracts                        2 February 2018
Early bird registration closes    1 March 2018
Conference starts                     8 May 2018
The organisers of the premier Australian gathering of climate scientists and advocates — Climate Adaptation (CA) 2018 —have issued a call for nominations for this year’s Climate Adaptation Champions.
The conference, set to take place in the Australian city of Melbourne from May 8 to 10, is a collaborative effort between the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF) and Engineers Australia.
Nominations fall into four broad categories — individual, community, business, and government. So, if you know of a teacher, neighbourhood group, local store or non-government association working tirelessly to spread the word about the need for climate adaptation, now is the time to act.
Nominate your champion by February 28 to help promote innovative and ingenious ways to tackle the impact of climate change.
The winners will have their registration and travel costs covered for the conference, where they will be presented their awards. The event will see many national and international speakers share their expertise. Attendees will hear keynote addresses from Mark Crosweller, director-general of Emergency Management Australia, and Hallie Eakin, a senior lecturer at Arizona University whose work ranges from consultation with the World Bank to working for the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Climate scientists wishing to make a presentation at the event still have time to apply. Abstracts should be submitted by February 2.
To find out how to register, click here.

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Surging Power Bills Spark Rush For Household Solar In Australia

Bloomberg - Perry Williams
  • Australia solar capacity additions in 2017 estimated at record
  • Solar costs for residential users fell 44 percent since 2012
Photographer: Carla Gottgens/Bloomberg
Australia, one of the world’s biggest users of rooftop solar panels, likely added the most new capacity on record last year as electricity users sought to ease escalating power bills.
A preliminary estimate by Australia’s Clean Energy Regulator of 1.05 gigawatts installed last year would be a record for the country, the government body said in an emailed statement Friday. While subsidies and generous feed-in tariffs helped boost growth earlier this decade, last year’s gains were driven by users seeking to sidestep a surge in the cost of electricity and a push by vendors into the commercial sector, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Getting Cheaper
Average cost for residential solar power system in Australia is falling
Source: Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), Solar Choice
Note: Costs are for a 4kW system after Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme (SRES) subsidy

“We are on track to have had the biggest year yet for installed small-scale solar capacity” in 2017, according to the regulator statement. “What we have seen is that homeowners and businesses continue to embrace solar panel systems, which is driving increased levels of capacity across Australia.”
The shift to solar may have quickened as power prices spiked last year on tight supplies of coal and gas, which fuel the bulk of generation capacity on the national electricity market. BNEF estimates the cost of solar systems for residential customers has declined 44 percent since 2012.

Forget The Grid
Australia will lead the world in households and businesses installing their own electricity supply
Source: Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF)
Note: Figures show ratio of behind-the-meter electricity capacity to total installed capacity
“The payback period for residential solar is now as low as it was in 2012, when super-generous feed-in tariffs and subsidies drove a massive boom in installations,” said BNEF’s Sydney-based analyst Annabel Wilton.
Rooftop solar will account for as much as 24 percent of Australia’s electricity by 2040, according to BNEF’s 2017 New Energy Outlook. When combined with small-scale batteries and demand response initiatives, up to 45 percent of the country’s total power capacity will be located on owners’ properties -- known as behind-the-meter-capacity -- by 2040.
But fossil fuels still hold sway for traditional power producers, even as they look ahead to a less carbon intensive future. Sydney-based Alinta Energy Holdings Ltd., which completed the acquisition of the 1,000 megawatt coal-fired Loy Yang B power station on Monday, sees the purchase as a way to lock-in retail customers now to gain later in the country’s transition toward cleaner power.
“The reality is that it’s great to have a vision to be clean and green, but if you don’t have any customers you don’t have a ticket to the game,” Alinta Chief Executive Officer Jeff Dimery said in a phone interview Monday.


Coal Loses in Australia Amid Switch to Clean Energy

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Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative