Who'd have guessed? Increasing renewables really does decrease carbon emissions

Renewable energy, especially solar and wind are growing and supplying an ever greater percentage of the electricity in many countries. Common sense would tell you that as solar and wind increase and coal and gas generation goes down the amount of carbon pollution and other toxic gasses emitted from fossil fuel plants will decrease. Like anything in the climate and clean energy though, there are "skeptics" who don't agree with this, but data are better than opinions and the NREL lab at the Department on Energy in the US have crunched the numbers to find out.

The area of contention is that the intermittent nature of (some) renewables means fossil fuel plants need to fire up and then down more often (cycling). When you fire up a plant it tends to emit more, at that moment, than if it was running steadily. Kind of how like starting a car uses a burst of fuel. So what is the overall impact of this?

NREL found that:

"The negative impact of cycling on overall plant emissions is relatively small. The increase in plant emissions from cycling to accommodate variable renewables are more than offset by the overall reduction in CO₂, NO_x, and SO₂."

I.E:

"Emission Impacts of Cycling Are Relatively Small Compared to Emission Reductions Due to Renewables"

 NREL found that moving to 1/3 renewables from solar and wind would cause carbon emissions to drop by 1/3. Toxic gasses would also decrease. This is because although there might be a small increase in some emissions associated with cycling a plant on and off these are tiny compared to the decrease in emissions due to less fossil fuels being burnt, because 1/3 of the power is now coming from renewables. The claims of some "skeptics" is like claiming you should leave your car idling for an hour instead of turning it off and then on again an hour later because turning you car on uses more fuel that idling would at that second.

Here's the impact for 1/3 renewables:

So there you have it, increasing renewables decreases carbon emissions (as well as other toxic gasses that coal plants especially produce a lot of). Common sense right?

2013 election: What the major parties will do about climate change, clean energy and public transport.

As you go into vote this weekend you may want to consider how the various parties rate on issues important to Transition Town Kenmore (TTKD) such as action on climate change and increasing resilience in the face of resource depletion (a good example of this would be policies on active and public transport). While TTKD does not endorse any particular political party I've written a bit of a guide to the policies of the major parties.

With regards to climate change both the Climate Institute (CI) and the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) have climate policy scorecards, which are very quick to look at.

See the CI pollute-o-meter here.
See the ACF environmental scorecard here.


Summary of policies on Climate and Public Transport
Price on Carbon:
Both Labour and the Green support price on carbon pollution where major polluters pay for each ton of carbon they emit. Total emissions of pollution are capped and decrease each year. Most people are compensated for price rises that occur as a result of polluting companies paying a carbon price. Such market based mechanisms are generally agreed to be the cheapest and most effective means of cutting pollution. The Green aim for a much more ambitious cut to Australia's carbon emissions.

The Coalition plan to scrap the polluter pays carbon pricing scheme and instead use general taxpayer revenue to pay major polluters to "decrease" the amount of pollution they emit. I say "decrease" because it is not totally clear to me if a polluter actually has to decrease their emissions. It may well be fine for a polluter to accept money to increase their emission, but by a smaller amount than they originally expected too. Credible estimates suggest by 2020 Australia's emissions will increase under this scheme. This is for 2 reasons. Firstly not a lot of money (in the scheme of thing) is available for grants to polluters and secondly because while some polluters will decrease their emissions using the grants, other companies not involved in the scheme will increase their emissions.
The Coalition also plan to fund a "green army" to plant trees and look after local environments.  This is unlikely to have an significant impact on Australia's carbon emmissions but may help in local re-vegetation and improve health of creek catchments etc.

Climate Change Authority:
Labour and the Greens plan to keep the Climate Change Authority (CCA), an independent body set up to advise the government on addressing climate change. The Coalition plans to scrap the CCA.

Clean Energy Finance Corporation:
Labour and the Green plan to keep the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which has $10 billion dollars to invest in clean energy and energy efficiency (ie: helping fund wind and solar farms, helping businesses to decrease their energy costs). The Coalition plans to scrap the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

2020 renewable energy target:
All major parties support the renewable energy target. However The Coalition plan to review the target in 2014.

Public transport:
The Greens will probably support any worthwhile public transport scheme and also support an eventual Brisbane to Melbourne (via Sydney and Canberra) high speed rail line.
Labour support new rail lines in Brisbane (ie: cross river rail), Melbourne and elsewhere, generally through these project being recommended by Infrastructure Australia as projects of national significance.
The Coalition will stop all federal funding for commuter rail. Locally this means Cross River Rail will not go ahead as it is very unlikely the State Government can afford the cost on its own. Without cross river rail much of the rail network will hit capacity in 2016 and not be able to take extra passengers at peak times.

South Australia on verge of being 30% powered by renewables

In the race to transition to renewable energy in Australia, one state is way ahead of the pack. While Australia as a whole has a renewable energy target of 20% by 2020, South Australia is now close to getting 30% of it's power from renewable electricity in 2013. You can read more about this achievement here in the Climate Spectator.

Mostly SA has done this using wind power, 10 years ago wind barely rated a mention in it's electricity generation, but now it is well over 20%. Solar PV is starting to have an impact as well, generating about 3.5% of the state's power. SA households are very keen on solar PV, but as you can see large scale wind is producing a lot more power than distributed small scale solar (at least currently). Where the solar does help though is in reducing peak demand.

The big loser in SA, as the Climate Spectator articles shows, has been coal fired generation. Since the running costs of renewable energy plants are close to zero, they can out-compete the least efficient/ most expensive generators, and in SA that has seen a number of old coal plants shut down or wound back.

The other important lesson from SA is that the power grids with a large percentage of renewable electricity can be reliable. Plenty of people have said over the years that the intermittent nature of (some) renewables would limit them to a small percentage of electricity production before we'd be in rolling blackouts etc, SA is showing this isn't true.

Is the carbon price reducing emissions?

Good article at The Conversation looking at the carbon price one year on. We know that in the last year electricity demand and emissions have fallen, but how much of this is due to the carbon price, the renewable energy target (RET) or other one off events?

As I have mentioned here a few times here and is explained in the article, the main impact of carbon pricing is to change long term investments decisions. Once built power plants are around for a long time, so once a coal plant is built you essentially lock in it's emissions for the next 30-50 years. Carbon pricing (along with the RET) are changing investment decisions and so planned new power plants in Australia are now dominated by gas and wind not coal. That this is already occurring as can be seen by the list of electricity projects underway or planned as of late last year. (Since then, it is worth noting, one of the two coal projects underway has been scrapped). This data also shows how over the last few years a much greater percentage of power plants being built are renewables.

So while it is hard to say exactly how much of the emissions reductions in the electricity sector in the past year are due to the carbon price, it already seems clear that over the long term it is driving us towards a low carbon future.

Queensland electricity prices to soar by 22%, who's to blame?

Many of you will have heard that electricity prices in QLD are skyrocketing by 22% this year. For the average household this is predicted to increase bills by $268 a year, while "the average electricity bill for a family of four will increase by $343 a year".

But why? 

If you listen to Campbell Newman or the energy minister Mark McArdle you might be forgiven for thinking that this increase was due to carbon pricing or renewable energy. With McArdle complaining that "Ninety-two thousand homes don't pay any power bills at all in Queensland" - well yes Mark, that's because they produce their own electricity. 

However with the help of this article and Queensland Competition Authority price determination I've made this little graph of where the price rises are coming from:

As you can see, less than 20% of price rises are due to carbon pricing or paying people for the solar power they produce. Much greater is the price rise due to the end of the Newman government's electricity tarrif freeze, which only lasted for 12 months. This policy might have sounded great during the last state election, but there's no free lunches in this world, and we are paying for it now.

"Other*" is the biggest category, breaking this down is hard, but it includes increased network prices (ie: the poles and wires), increases in the costs of generating power and then some mind-blowing stuff like electricity companies being allowed to increase prices because power demand has been dropping and they have been making less money than they want to.

So it seems that the government is very concerned about the 20% of the price rises due to polluters no longer being able to pollute for free and for actually having to pay households who are producing clean energy from their solar panels. Instead they seem rather unconcerned (or want to shift our attention from) what is actually causing 80% of the price rises. This is like the captain of the titanic blaming the water on drinks that were spilled when the ship hit the iceberg rather than the gaping hole in the ship.

From all this I draw two conclusions:

1. All that kerfuffle from certain politicians that the (basically one off) 9% rise in power prices from the carbon price was going to ruin us all was self serving nonsense. A year later we are facing over double that rise for different reasons and the idea this will ruin us all has been conveniently forgotten.

2. We as a community are going to have to start demanding explanations for what's causing 80% of our power prices rises and then demand useful ideas for what to do about it, or we'll continue to see politicians scapegoating renewable energy and a continuation of massive price rises.

Could we have have 100% renewable electricity?

Yes, according to the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), which has just released its draft results on whether Australia could run it's electricity supply off 100% renewable electricity by 2030 or 2050.

As noted here, this should kill off the idea that the intermittency of supply in renewable electricity prevents it from supplying all our electricity, especially in a country like Australia where we have good renewable energy resources. Some may remember that Beyond Zero Emissions (BZE) released a report a couple of years ago that also outlined a plan for Australia to move to 100% renewables. One difference with the AEMO is that these are the people who manage the electricity market and so their conclusion that 100% renewables could provide reliable supply will probably carry more weight.

Similar to BZE the AEMO report sees an important role for solar thermal with molten salt storage and also biogass for helping to meet the meet peaks in electricity demand and to provide supply when there is little incoming solar and wind energy.

Obviously moving to 100% renewables isn't cheap, but as noted at Renew Economy, by 2050 most existing coal and gas fired power plants in Australia would need to be replaced anyway, so while the total cost may sound like a lot, it may not differ all that much from what would be spend over the next 40 years to maintain a fairly polluting power sector.

There are also a couple of interesting critisms of the report from Renew Economy, stating that the AEMO are likely overestimating the cost of renewables and ignoring a role for energy efficiency improvement in decreasing the actual amount of electricity required. Both of which would make 100% renewables cheaper and easier to obtain.

To learn more, you can find the draft report and executive summary here, as well as some good commentary here, here and here.

Clean energy 2012: year in review

Now that 2013 has begun, here's a look back at the top ten clean energy stories from 2012, thanks to Renew Economy.

Stories include:

1. Australia introduces a carbon price, the world doesn’t come to an end

2. The opening of Australia’s first utility-scale solar PV farm

3. Australia passes 2,000MW mark on household rooftops

4. South Australia’s wind success story

5. Germany’s solar success story.


Read about these and n.o.s 6-10 here.


Happy new year everyone.

Community renewable energy - locally owned renewable power stations

Community renewable energy is something we will hopefully be hearing a lot more about in the future. The idea, which is popular overseas, is for members of a local community to get together, combine their money and build a much larger renewable energy "power station" than they could individually afford. The proceeds from selling the electricity created then provide a return on investment.

The classic example of this in Australia is Hepburn Wind in Victoria where roughly 2000 people got together and installed a ~4MW wind farm. Recently another project has been announced for Sydney where a community scheme will put 400 kW of solar panels on the roof of the new convention centre in Darling Harbour. Helping drive this (and many other proposed projects) is Embark a not for profit group aiming to spur along community renewable energy by providing know-how and also seed funding.

Although community owned renewables are unlikely to generate a large percentage of the electricity we produce any time soon, they provide an opportunity for people who can't otherwise create their own electricity (renters, people living in apartments, home owners whose roof isn't suitable for solar panels etc etc) to get involved. Importantly they also allow the local community to own and benefit from their local renewable energy resource (whatever that might be) and for people to make money out of being green.

For a more detailed look at community renewable energy and it's benefits and possibilies, see this article in Renew Economy.


So what about in QLD? Well, recently Energetic Communities, which aims to develop community renewable energy in SEQ got up and running. Hopefully I'll have more to say about them in the near future.

Yes Virginia, wind power really does decrease carbon emissions

In most technical or scientific fields, the response to self-proclaimed experts who are claiming everyone else has got it wrong should be cautious skepticism. Doubly so when they have little or no actual expertise in the field. Double again when this technical area is anything to do with climate change, which seems to attract self-styled "expert skeptics" like moths to a flame. Unless of course, you are a certain newspaper, then these sorts of claims need to be taken very seriously indeed and given lots of space, even if, for example they contain obviously nonsense, like claiming a huge drop in global temperatures that never actually happened.

Luckily we have journalists at The Climate Spectator and Renew Economy prepared to do a bit of fact checking. And from the latest stoush about wind power two things seem fairly clear.

1. Wind power does decrease the overall carbon footprint of electricity.

2. The growth of renewables (of which wind is a big part) and gas electricity generation, have coincided with a fall in coal power production as the squeeze is put on the most marginal coal plants. According to one energy analyst the combined effect of this and falling demand has been to reduce carbon emission from electricity generation to their lowest levels since 2003.

King coal dethroned

Interesting article published at The Conversation about the skyrocketing amount of investment in renewable energy, which now far exceeds that invested into coal: King coal dethroned

In 2004, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance and the International Energy Agency, investment in renewables was $52 billion, with $250 billion invested in fossil fuels. By 2008 the peak in fossil fuel investment had arrived: it dropped to $140 billion, while renewables overtook it with $155 billion in investment.

By 2010 the amounts were $90 billion in fossil fuels and $211 billion in renewables, and by 2011 only 14% or $40 billion of investment was in fossil fuels while 86% or $260 billion was in renewables.

King coal has in fact been dethroned. It will take a while for the global power system to phase out old power stations and be dominated by renewables, but the transition is proceeding much faster than imagined by most institutions, as well as media

Reads the full article here.

Promoting renewable energy in Queensland

Way back in the mists of time (so sometime in mid 2010 from memory), Transition Kenmore put in a submission to a state government inquiry into "Growing Queensland’s Renewable Energy Electricity Sector". This was set up to look at potential renewable energy targets, what the government could do to promote renewables and the value for money from Govt policies etc.

The Environment and Resources Committee has now released its recommendations. So let's have a brief look at their vision for the future. (Quick note, these are committee recommendations not official govt policies).

1. The inquiry wants the state government to encourage the federal government to get on with the job of putting a price on carbon. - A carbon price will encourage investment in renewables. It will also go someway towards mitigating one identified "barrier" to renewables, which is that they are more expensive that polluting sources of power because these polluting sources get free use of the atmosphere as their garbage dump.

2. The governments top priority should be energy efficiency. - To some degree this makes sense, efficiency is a cheap way to decrease greenhouse gas pollution, although it doesn't actually make power stations any cleaner.

3. The governments second priority should be to set a target for 20% of QLD's electricity to come from gas fired generation by 2020. - This is a bit of an odd one, since the inquiry didn't set out to look at this non-renewable form of electricity at all, but somehow more gas generation has become a more important priority that any policy regarding renewables.

4. The QLD government should set an aspirational target for 20% renewables by 2020. - This is the same level as the mandatory national RET scheme. So while it would appear the committee would like more renewables, they feel no great need for QLD to lead the way or try to surpass the national average.

5. Replace diesel generators with renewables in remote Indigenous committees. - A worthy goal, but not one that will have a large impact on the make up of the state's power generation.

6. Review of the current feed-in tarrif. Is it cost effective? Should it be available to larger sized solar arrays and non solar technologies? Would interest free loans to help buy the systems be a better scheme? - From memory, TTKD proposed the Govt look into allowing the cost of renewables systems to be paid off via council rates bills over ~10 years, but this obviously didn't make the cut, perhaps because it requires council participation.

7. A few recommendations for getting more households to buy Greenpower and to allow future public charging stations for electric vechicle to be supplied with renewable energy.

So there you have it, no recommendations to specifically encourage large scale (ie: 10s to 100s of Mw) renewable energy power plants in Queensland, or that the government should invest in making these happen. No recommendations relating to helping connect renewable power plants to the grid despite the fact this was identified as a "key barrier" faced by renewables. A bit of tinkering here and there, an aspiraitonal renewable energy target and a hard target for lots more gas power plants (which still emit a lot of greenhouse gasses).
One could be tempted to conclude that an inquiry which was designed to recommend how best to promote renewables but which then spruked non-renewables gives a good insight into the priorities of the government.

Somewhat ironically, given the fairly tepid nature of the report, it is interesting to note that the LNP members of the committee issued a dissenting report. It is heavy on taking points, has no policy suggestions for promoting renewable energy, and leaves one with the feeling that although these members say they support renewable energy, that's about the current limit of LNP policy.

Pretty uninspiring all round really.

Beyond Zero Emissions training on the renewable energy plan

Last year Beyond Zero Emissions released the Zero Carbon Australia energy plan, outlining how Australia could move to 100% renewable electricity.

Now BZE are going to be running training sessions in Brisbane for people who want to learn about the energy plan and how to explain the plan to others. If you are passionate about a renewable energy future then this is for you.

More information and how to RSVP here.

Date and details:

26th and 27th of February
9.30am - 4pm
QUT campus in the city centre
B124 in B Block

PS: Thanks to Ngaire for all the hard work she is no doubt putting in making this event happen.

Senate enquiry on wind farms

There’s a senate enquiry on The Social and Economic Impact of Rural Wind Farms, Steve Fielding’s going away present to the nation. Responses due by 10 February, so hurry if you can contribute.

This is a field where the denialists go crazy so a few sensible inputs would be useful for balance. Here are the terms of reference:

The social and economic impacts of rural wind farms, and in particular:

1. Any adverse health effects for people living in close proximity to wind farms;
2. Concerns over the excessive noise and vibrations emitted by wind farms, which are in close proximity to people’s homes;
3. The impact of rural wind farms on property values, employment opportunities and farm income;
4. The interface between Commonwealth, state and local planning laws as they pertain to wind farms; and
5. Any other relevant matters.

The questions of course are loaded because they do not consider the alternative, large open-cut coal mines and pollution from fossil fuel power stations.

Here are a few more links for those thinking of responding:

• Submissions already received.
• Some ideas for submissions.

And finally, here is what I submitted:

Beyond Zero Emissions Brisbane Launch

(click to enlarge)

Wednesday 27 October, 6-8pm

Plaza Terrace Room, Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre, Cnr Merivale and Glenelg Streets, South Bank, Brisbane

The event is free but you must register online beforehand.

And the leader in renewable energy is....?

.. not Australia I'm afraid.

The Europeans have just announced that 62% of all the new power generation installed in the EU in 2009 were from renewables, an increase from 57% in 2008. Wind energy has now been the leading energy technology for two years running with 37.1% of new capacity in 09.

Most of that non-renewable energy is in the form of gas generation (24%), but even that was almost beaten by solar PV (21%), pretty outstanding considering Australia with its far superior solar resource is nowhere near these sort of numbers.

So how is Australia doing? According to the Clean Energy Council, 2009 was a good year for renewables by Oz standards with almost 750 megawatts of moderate-to-large scale renewables added (ie: not counting the 1.5 kilowatt solar PV you might have put on your roof as these add to only about ~150 megawatts in total, not just from 2009) far more than any other year in the last decade. Like in Europe, wind was the leading renewable technology, unlike in Europe new large scale solar accounted for less than 1% of new renewable generation.

Unfortunately that's where the good news stops, because the real question is: what percentage of the total installed generation was from renewables?

Australia doesn't seem to have a yearly report as in the EU, but the federal government releases 6 monthly updates of new large scale projects. In the 6 mths to April 2010 1402 Mw was added, of which only 19% was from renewables and, to rub salt into wounds, Origin Energy actually expanded its Townsville plant that runs on oil (kerosene specifically).

But maybe that 6 months was poor, what about the 6 months before that? In that period there was ~1600 Mw of new electricity and 13.5% was new renewables.

So there we have it, a bumper year for renewables but it's still only a small minority of new generation and we've a long way to go to catch up with the Europeans. Time magazine gave Europe an A for what they've achieved, I wonder what they'd give us?

Renewable Energy Solutions - Online version of Phillip Machanicks talk

The first speaker at our recent meeting on renewable energy solutions was Dr Phillip Machanick.

He has been kind enough to put his talk online at www.scribd.com and I have embedded it below.

Don't forget to check out Phil's blog as well.


Clean Energy Options

A few myths debunked

It's been a busy week for myth debunking. Some of my contributions:

• Wind power myths on ABC radio – debunking myths propagated today on Australia All Over that wind power requires a large spinning reserve of coal power plants
  
• No, global warming hasn't ended (again) – debunking a false claim doing the rounds that leading Germany-based climate scientist Prof Mojib Latif, (Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Kiel University) has predicted that we are headed for two decades of cooling
  
• Climate of Fraud Part 2 – latest episode of my war on climate change denial at The Australian