Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Energy secretaries

By Nick Anderson of the Houston Chronicle



Trumpkin

Martin Rowson of  The Guardian  on the Trump Russia inquiry.





Solar windows

Source: EcoWatch


We can already have a solar roof from Tesla--tiles which look like ordinary roof tiles but are actually mini solar panels.  Now it looks as if we might be able to have solar windows too:

There's an estimated 5 to 7 billion square meters of glass surfaces in the U.S. For windows on homes, cars and buildings, these glass surfaces perform a few basic functions—letting light and fresh air in when open, and blocking bugs and keeping the cold out when closed.

Now they could all serve another, altogether revolutionary, purpose—generating electricity.

A new paper in the journal Nature Energy describes how transparent solar panels could be placed over all windows and transparent surfaces in the U.S. to generate energy and decrease reliance on fossil fuels.

If that happens, nearly all the electricity demands of the U.S. could be met in conjunction with rooftop solar panels, and as long as storage capabilities are improved.

"Highly transparent solar cells represent the wave of the future for new solar applications," said Richard Lunt, leader author of the report at Michigan State University, in a press release. "We analyzed their potential and show that by harvesting only invisible light, these devices can provide a similar electricity-generation potential as rooftop solar while providing additional functionality to enhance the efficiency of buildings, automobiles and mobile electronics."

[Read more here]

They're not nearly as efficient as conventional rooftop solar, but if they're cheap enough, that won't matter.

Monday, October 30, 2017

Italy 2025 coal phase out.


Source


France, UK, The Netherlands and Canada have all stated that they will phase out coal sometime over the next 10 to 15 years.  In the USA, despite opposition from the Republicans, coal is being progressively phased out, too.

It's not just pollution and global warming which are driving this move out of coal (though they are important), it's cost.   It's hard to believe there will be any coal-fired power stations in 2030, except in China, India, Vietnam, South Africa and a few others, and even there they will produce relatively small percentages of total electricity.  By 2040 they too will be gone.

 [Read more here (paywall)]

Getting it wrong

Source


When one is in the business of analysing data and making forecasts, it's easy to make mistakes.  So one should be careful not to mock the forecasting errors others make.

In the investment world one must be intellectually honest.  One must dig out the facts, verify them, check that any models (mental or computer) are logical and internally consistent, and always be ready to admit where one went wrong and why.  If you repeatedly make the same mistake you deserve ridicule.  As the IEA does.

Bjørn Lomborg's thesis has been that there are more important things poor countries could do with their money than try to prevent climate change.  But that led him to advocating the denialist meme after 1998 (an El Niño year, when temperatures reached a peak) that global temperatures--and therefore sea levels--were no longer rising.  He became the darling of the Denialist Right.  One wonders whether this forecast (above) was biased  by his advocacy,  That does seem likely, as he is a trained statistician, and would know all about trend estimation and the statistical problems posed by random variation in an underlying trend.  It's all too easy to be persuaded that what we want to happen will in fact happen.  Alas, life's not like that.

His argument that it might be better to spend  the money earmarked to prevent climate change on other life-enhancing things instead was sort of plausible when renewables were vastly more expensive than fossil fuels (ignoring their impact on global warming).  But that's not true any more.  In fact, it's the opposite: renewables will raise living standards and increase economic growth by cutting the cost of power.  Even if you ignore the benefits for growth and quality of life which would occur if pollution were stopped.  Recently Lomborg appears to have shifted his position.  For example, he now argues that subsidies to fossil fuels should be removed.

I'm sure you could go through this blog and find many examples where my forecasts have been wrong.  It goes with the territory.  But it is important to examine your own biases to see if they are skewing your own forecasts.  I would like to believe I am not, but perhaps I am.  I shall try to be more rigorous in future.

Saturday, October 28, 2017

US winter one month shorter



Straws Lane, Macedon Ranges (Victoria) this July


You can clearly see how the world is warming using average temperatures or the temperature anomaly, as calculated by NASA, NOAA, Berkeley Earth, of the 3 or 4 other organisations which make the effort.  But you can also see global warming in how much later the winter begins and how much earlier summer starts. 

In the southern hemisphere, mid-winter is in the middle of the year.  Autumn is in March and spring in September.  When we first moved here 25 years, the first frosts came in the last week of April, the first warm day in mid-October.  Now the first frosts don't come till early June and the first warm day comes in early September.  But that isn't very scientific: we need to know the average and we need to properly measure the data.  This winter for example was a lot like it was 25 years ago: we got snow down to 600 metres.  We haven't had that for a long time.  Does it mean global warming is over? Prolly not.

Somewhat more scientific than my impressions:  using records from 700 weather stations, NOAA has calculated that winter in the USA is on average 1 month shorter than it was 100 years ago.

The trend of ever later first freezes appears to have started around 1980, according to data from 700 weather stations across the US going back to 1895 and compiled by Ken Kunkel, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

Kunkel compared the first freeze from each of the 700 stations to the station’s average for the 20th Century. Some parts of the country experience earlier or later freezes every year, but on average freezes are coming later.

The average first freeze over the last 10 years, from 2007 to 2016, is a week later than the average from 1971 to 1980.

This year, about 40% of the Lower 48 states have had a freeze as of 23 October, compared to 65% in a normal year, according to Jeff Masters, meteorology director of the private service Weather Underground.

In Ottawa, Illinois, the average first freeze for the 20th century was 15 October. The normal from 1981 to 2010 based on NOAA computer simulations was 19 October. Since 2010, the average first freeze is on 26 October. Last year, the first freeze in Ottawa came on 12 November.

Last year was “way off the charts” nationwide, Kunkel said. The average first freeze was two weeks later than the 20th century average, and the last frost of spring was nine days earlier than normal.

Overall the United States freeze season of 2016 was more than a month shorter than the freeze season of 1916. It was most extreme in the Pacific Northwest. Oregon’s freeze season was 61 days – two months – shorter than normal.


[Read more here]


If Mt Agung erupts

Big volcanic eruptions temporarily reduce global temperatures because they release sulphur high into the atmosphere, which combines with water to produce sulphuric acid aerosols which reflect incoming sunlight, thus cooling the earth.  If the eruption is large enough, the cooling effect can last a couple of years. There's an excellent article about it on Carbon Brief.

The last time Mt Agung erupted, in 1963, it reduced global temperatures by 0.2 C, as you can see in the chart below.   The blue line in the chart suggests the possible impact on the underlying upward trend if (when) Mt Agung erupts.  No doubt when this happens, denialists will argue that global temperatures will have stopped rising and we can stop worrying about carbon emissions.  Which will be nonsense.

Source: Zeke Hausfather at Carbon Brief

But it does raise the question:  could we simulate volcanic eruptions by artificially releasing sulphur dioxide at very high altitudes (18 kms plus) which will help offset the impact of global warming? This is called geo-engineering. 

There are questions about geo-engineering: cost (who will pay? will it be cheaper than just switching to a green economy? At what scale would we need to do it? ); environmental impact (remember acid rain? is it safe to have a continuous layer of sulphuric acid in the atmosphere?); and politics (would it stop attempts to reduce carbon emissions?)

The Economist has done a short video on it, which you might find interesting.



Thursday, October 26, 2017

Pumped Hydro is cheap

Kidston pumped hydro.  Source: RenewEconomy.



There are three pumped hydro projects either in a late planning/funding stage or already under construction in Australia.  (Snowy 2.0, which might potentially be a very large fourth pumped hydro project still seems to be at the air bubble phase)

Pumped hydro can store power like a battery.  When electricity is plentiful or demand is low, water is pumped uphill into a dam.  When demand is high, the water flows back downhill and turns the turbines, generating electricity which is fed into the grid.  It's easy to confuse conventional hydro with pumped hydro.  Conventional hydro "uses" the water once: it flows through the turbines and away.  Pumped hydro re-uses the water, again and again.  The only losses are via evaporation.  Pumped hydro dams are about 1% of the size of conventional hydro dams.  Unlike conventional hydro which can produce continuous baseload generation, or, if needed, dispatchable generation up to the maximum capacity, pumped hydro power plants will only produce power when it's needed, for a few hours each day.  Because pumped hydro only needs small dams, there are far more suitable sites than is the case with conventional hydro.  And pumped hydro is a cheap form of storage.   Molten salt storage is also cheap, but only when it's part of a CSP plant. Pumped hydro on the other hand can be used for wind, solar and even baseload (to handle demand variations.)


The three projects are at Kidston in northern Queensland, Oven Mountain in NSW, and  Cultana in South  Australia, which will be the first salt-water pumped hydro in Australia.

Let's compare the projects.  I've also included Tesla's South Australian "big battery" for comparison.



Right now, pumped hydro is still a lot cheaper than li-ion batteries.  Even assuming that battery prices fall more slowly (20% p.a.) over the next 5 years than they did for the last 3 (30% p.a.) then  li-ion battery storage will be close to pumped hydro in 5 years.  But as I've said before, diversification in both sources of supply and sources of storage is sensible, because it reduces risks.

New Yorker's Trump cover

From The New Yorker




Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Wind plus solar hybrid update

I talked about Windlab's hybrid wind/solar/storage Kennedy "energy park" hereCleantechnica has an update:

A world first renewable energy project has taken its first steps in Australia, with big-name companies Vestas, Tesla, and Windlab backed by Australia’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation partnering on a $160 million, 60 MW hybrid wind, solar, and energy storage project.

A flurry of announcements were published Thursday confirming the development of a 60 MW (megawatt) hybrid wind, solar, and energy storage by Australia’s international wind energy company Windlab. The AUD$160 million Kennedy Energy Park set to be built in central north Queensland as a joint venture between Windlab and Eurus Energy Holdings Corporation of Japan.

Kennedy Energy Park will be the first wind, solar, and storage hybrid generator connected to Australia’s national electricity network via a single connection point. It also serves as an industry-leading project demonstrating the complementary nature of the three technologies and proving their ability to work together. Vestas — who will provide the wind turbines for the project — describes the project as a “world first” of its kind.

The Kennedy Energy Park will consist of 43.2 MW worth of wind, made up of twelve Vestas V136, 3.6MW turbines; 15 MW worth of AC, single-axis tracking solar; and a 4 MWh Li Ion battery storage provided by Tesla.

Upon completion, Kennedy will be able to generate approximately 210,000 MWh of electricity per annum, which is the equivalent of enough electricity to supply over 35,000 average Australian homes.

[Read more here]

I estimated that they might need 3 hours of storage, but in fact they will have only about 10 minutes' worth.  Although the battery storage is enough to stabilise short-term fluctuations in output, it's not enough to provide the "load shifting" needed for the evening peak in demand.   I presume that the cost of battery storage remains a limiting factor.  To provide true baseload, they will need more storage, to wit, 72 MWh.  However, the new Kidston pumped hydro storage in N Queensland (a couple of hundred k's west of Kennedy) will have 2000 MWh of storage (more on that in a later post)

(As an aside, the last paragraph in the quote above suggests a daily household use of electricity of 16.4 kWh, a tad higher than my previous estimate of 15.9 kWh.  The shorter-range Tesla Model 3 will have a 50 kWh battery pack or 3 days' worth of power for the average Ozzie house.  The Tesla home battery, the Powerwall, has 13.5 kWh of storage, or enough to cover 19 hours of demand.  I suspect that most of the battery storage in Australia will initially be behind the meter)

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Renewable Energy Certificates

Source: The Australia Institute




The Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) in Oz are similar to the US Federal Production Tax Credit, which pays 1.8 cents/kWh for each kWh of wind power produced in the first 10 years of the wind farm's life.  The difference in Australia is that no one knows how much the RECs will be worth in the future.  In the US, the tax credit/subsidy is fixed.  In Australia it depends on the gap between the Renewable Energy Target (RET) and actual renewable electricity production.  This is what the government body The Clean Energy Regulator says about RECs (there are small scale RECs too, for rooftop solar)

The Renewable Energy Target operates through the creation of tradable certificates which create an incentive for additional generation of electricity from renewable sources. Certificates are created and issued through the REC Registry —an online trading platform managed by the Clean Energy Regulator.

Through the scheme, large renewable power stations and the owners of small-scale systems are eligible to create certificates for every megawatt hour of power they generate—creating the 'supply' side of the certificate market. Wholesale purchasers ​​​of electricity, mainly electricity retailers, buy these certificates to meet their renewable energy obligations—forming the 'demand' side of the certificate market. Wholesale purchasers of electricity then surrender these certificates to the Clean Energy Regulator in percentages set by regulation each year.

(Source: The Clean Energy Regulator)

The price for RECs will therefore vary.  If total renewable generation exceeds the 33,000 GWh requirement, then the price of RECs will be zero.  If renewable electricity production is very low, then the REC price will be commensurately high.  As a result of the attempted abolition of the Renewable Energy Target by the L/NP (the right-wing coalition which rules Australia at the Federal level), there was a slump in new investment in renewables.  But the attempt failed. In the end, Labor persuaded the government just to reduce the RET (to 33,000 GWh from 40,000 GWh), not abolish it, and investment restarted. 

However, the price of the renewable energy certificates zoomed, because of the absence of new renewable investments.  The RECs depend on how much renewable output is generated relative to the target, and the target kept on rising but investment stopped.  After the drought caused by Abbott's attempt to abolish the RET (which drove up the price of RECs) , there is currently a flood of new investment in wind and solar (18 GW of capacity, which will produce roughly 6 GW of new output or 52,560 GWh per year), which will increase renewables generation way above the target, and drive down the price of RECs to zero. This is reflected in the future price for RECs which drops from $84 this year to $40 next, and will likely reach zero before 2022. Moreover, the constant chatter from Abbott and others on the climate denialist right about abolishing the RET means that the certificates might in fact be worthless even before that.

Like the Production Tax Credit in the USA, the renewable energy certificates are earned for each MW of renewable electricity when they are produced, not upfront. So the calculation of how much RECs are worth to a new renewables generator is how much they will earn over the lifetime of the project (25- 30 years)? To get that (ignoring interest charges/discount rates), add up the price of RECs for 25/30 years and divide by 25/30 to get the effective upfront benefit.

The RET will end in 2020, but certificates will continue to be earned (though not for new generators) until 2030. For the last 15 or so years of the life of a renewable electricity project (say from 2030 to 2045), the price of RECs will by definition be zero. But because the price of RECs fluctuates, and is likely to slump as new renewables come on stream, even the near years (until 2030) are uncertain.

Right now, new renewable generation capacity is being planned by investors on the assumption that there will be little or no benefit from RECs. The current high price of RECs is a windfall to existing "green" generators, but no one in the industry expects it to last. You can't base a 25-30 year investment on one year's windfall.

There is no "massive subsidy" to renewables, whatever the Right and the Murdochcracy say.  Wind and solar farms will not go on earning $84 per MWh from RECs indefinitely into the future.  The only way the prices of RECs would rise from now on instead of falling rapidly to zero would be if the Renewable Energy Target were extended past 2020 and materially increased.   Even with Labor's 50% target by 2030, that would only happen if the flood of renewable investment were to slow, which as I have argued here is very unlikely.

Pollution kills 9 million a year


Source: The Guardian

Pollution kills at least nine million people and costs trillions of dollars every year, according to the most comprehensive global analysis to date, which warns the crisis “threatens the continuing survival of human societies”.

Toxic air, water, soils and workplaces are responsible for the diseases that kill one in every six people around the world, the landmark report found, and the true total could be millions higher because the impact of many pollutants are poorly understood. The deaths attributed to pollution are triple those from Aids, malaria and tuberculosis combined.

The vast majority of the pollution deaths occur in poorer nations and in some, such as India, Chad and Madagascar, pollution causes a quarter of all deaths. The international researchers said this burden is a hugely expensive drag on developing economies.

Rich nations still have work to do to tackle pollution: the US and Japan are in the top 10 for deaths from “modern” forms of pollution, ie fossil fuel-related air pollution and chemical pollution. But the scientists said that the big improvements that have been made in developed nations in recent decades show that beating pollution is a winnable battle if there is the political will.

Prof Philip Landrigan, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, US, who co-led the commission, said: “We fear that with nine million deaths a year, we are pushing the envelope on the amount of pollution the Earth can carry.” For example, he said, air pollution deaths in south-east Asia are on track to double by 2050.

Landrigan said the scale of deaths from pollution had surprised the researchers and that two other “real shockers” stood out. First was how quickly modern pollution deaths were rising, while “traditional” pollution deaths – from contaminated water and wood cooking fires – were falling as development work bears fruit.

“Secondly, we hadn’t really got our minds around how much pollution is not counted in the present tally,” he said. “The current figure of nine million is almost certainly an underestimate, probably by several million.”

The researchers estimated the welfare losses from pollution at $4.6tn a year, equivalent to more than 6% of global GDP. “Those costs are so massive they can drag down the economy of countries that are trying to get ahead,” said Landrigan. “We always hear ‘we can’t afford to clean up pollution’ – I say we can’t afford not to clean it up.”

[Read more here]

When people tell you it's too expensive to eliminate fossil fuels .....

Chinese air pollution can be seen from space.

Sunday, October 22, 2017

Starlink

Source: NextBigFuture


If you followed Musk's presentation to the International aeronautical Congress in Adelaide last month closely, you would have seen that out of roughly 60 rocket launches next year, 30 will be by SpaceX.  Which sounds fantastic: in 2012 it did just two launches.  But SpaceX's new BFR*  will be so big it will be able to launch up to 10 satellites at a time.  And to get people to Mars by 2026, they will need at least 6 BFRs.  Where is the funding for that coming from?  Musk said that launches between now and 2026 will generate enough cash to fund them.  But .... there's a lot of cash needed.   What sort of demand for launch services is SpaceX counting on?

Ah.

Elon Musk is also planning a world-wide high speed internet, using his own satellites.  He set up a satellite division in SpaceX arguing that he could produce satellites more cheaply than the satellite industry was doing, just like he did with rockets.  And then he decided to build out a world wide ultra high speed internet, using these satellites:

Elon Musk's SpaceX wants to launch thousands of satellites into space with the aim of providing super-fast global internet coverage, according to a regulatory filing.

SpaceX – the company on a mission to colonize Mars – outlined plans to put 4,425 satellites into space in a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) filing from earlier this week.

That's three times the 1,419 satellites that are currently in space, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, a not-for-profit group made up of scientists across the world.

Billionaire Musk – who is also the chief executive of electric car company Tesla – first announced plans for the project in 2015, with an estimated cost of around $10 billion. The FCC filing did not outline the financials of the project.

The plan is to launch 800 satellites initially to expand internet in the U.S. And then the rest of the satellites would follow, although there was no timeline for the launch.

"The system is designed to provide a wide range of broadband and communications services for residential, commercial, institutional, government and professional users worldwide," SpaceX said in the FCC filing.

SpaceX's satellites will orbit at altitudes between 1,150 kilometers and 1,275 kilometers, allowing each one to cover a space of around 2,120 kilometers wide. According to the official filing, each satellite will weigh around 850 pounds and be the size of a small car.

Once "fully optimized", the system will be able to provide bandwith of 1 gigabytes per second for users globally. That's over 180 times faster than the current global internet speed average of 5.6 megabytes per second which was recorded in the Akamai State of the Internet report at the end of last year.

Reports earlier this year suggested Google and Fidelity had invested $1 billion into SpaceX to support the satellite project.


[Read more here and here and here]

The Wikipedia article on what it calls the SpaceX Satellite Constellation says:

In March 2017, SpaceX filed with the FCC plans to field a constellation of more than 7500 "V-band satellites in non-geosynchronous orbits to provide communications services" in an electromagnetic spectrum that has not previously been "heavily employed for commercial communications services."

Called the "V-band low-Earth orbit (VLEO) constellation," it would consist of "7,518 satellites to follow the [earlier] proposed 4,425 satellites that would function in Ka- and Ku-band. The March 2017 plan calls for SpaceX to launch test satellites of the type in both 2017 and 2018, and as of May 2017, begin launching the operational constellation sats in 2019.
 
Full build-out of the constellation is not expected to be completed until 2024, at which time there are expected to be "4,425 satellites into orbit around the Earth, operating in 83 planes, at fairly low altitudes of between 1,110 kilometers and 1,325 kilometers."

By September 2017, the planned number of sats in each constellation had not changed, but the altitude of each constellation became explicit: the larger group—7,518 sats—would operate at 340 kilometres (210 mi) altitude, while the smaller group—4,425 sats—would orbit at 1,200 kilometres (750 mi) altitude.

[Read more here]

SpaceX will be calling this system Starlink.

At 10 satellites per launch of the BFR, that's over 1,200 launches.  Sheer genius: SpaceX will be creating its own market for the BFR.  That's why Musk feels so confident about the finances of building enough BFRs to start the first Mars colony. While just oh so casually also giving the world, the whole world, everywhere in the world--deserts, seas, forests as well as urban and built-up areas--an ultra high speed internet.

The achievements of this bloke are just extraordinary: electric cars; electric trucks; cheap batteries to help green the grid; solar roofs; high speed suborbital rockets giving us 30 minute travel times between continents; ultra high speed internet, everywhere, for everyone; a moon colony; human settlement on Mars; high-speed travel via tubes (The Boring Company); and an intracranial mesh to allow the human brain to connect with the grid and AI (Neuralink).  You'll notice I've included a few things in that list which haven't yet happened yet.  But who can doubt that he will achieve his goals?  Even if it takes him longer than he says.


*I might as well let you into the secret: BFR stands for Big Fucking Rocket.  The name was coined by Tim Urban at WaitButWhy

Litter, or less than 2%

There are many who argue that since Australia produces less than 2% of global emissions, we shouldn't bother to try and reduce our own emissions.  Our output is too small to make a difference.  This is akin to saying that you can throw your rubbish out of the car window because you contribute only 0.0001% of total litter.  Countries each individually emitting less than 2% of the global total for CO2 together emit nearly 40% of the global total, which is more even than China. (Chart from Simon Holmes à Court )

Yes, China is very important.  But China is actually taking serious steps to reduce its emissions.  Yes, the USA is important and despite the orange clown, it too is cutting its CO2 emissions.  India is a big emitter, but it's started down the road towards a low carbon economy.  (We will avert our eyes from Russia.)  And if every country responsible for less than 2% of global CO2 emissions also did their duty, we would be able to limit global warming to 1.6 or 1.8 C by 2050.

Source: Simon Holmes à Court

Consider, however, that not throwing your litter out of the window costs you very little.  Compliance with that social norm is cheap.  Perhaps complying with the global need to reduce carbon emissions is expensive?  In which case, you might be justified "throwing your litter out of the window", if everybody else also did that.  Why bother to be moral when nobody else does?  An age-old question.

20 or 15 years ago, switching to renewables was very expensive.  Renewables were 10 or 20 times as costly as fossil fuels.  Only countries with strong social consciences started down the road towards green energy.  They dutifully disposed of their litter, or at least some of it, while the rest of us continued to toss it out of the window.  It was too costly, too hard, to switch to renewables.

Even 5 years ago, though their costs had declined, renewables were still more expensive than fossil fuels.  However, by then the cost gap had narrowed dramatically, and it went on narrowing.  Now, in most places in the world, wind is cheaper than coal, and large-scale solar either is or soon will be.  We now have a powerful economic incentive to stop CO2 pollution.  The moral imperative now coincides with the economic.  Within a few years (3? 4? 5?) new renewables globally, even with some storage, will undercut the cost of old, fully depreciated coal power stations--the total cost of renewables will be less than the fuel cost of coal power stations. The only factor restraining the shuttering of old coal power stations will be how quickly we can roll out renewables to replace them, not how much renewables cost.

The same rapid cost declines are taking place with electric cars (EVs)  In five years' time, electric cars will have sticker prices which match those of ICEVs (petrol/gasoline/diesel cars.)  EVs are already far cheaper to run than ICEVs.  Even in Australia with its high electricity prices a 100 kWh Tesla  can be "filled" for just A$26. This is about one quarter the cost of the petrol needed for a similar range in a luxury (=heavy) ICEV.  Maintenance is cheaper, too: basically rotate tyres and refill windscreen washer reservoirs.  EVs are quieter, smoother, funner to drive, less smelly.  And they will park themselves.  When sticker prices of EVs match those of ICEVs, EVs will be extremely attractive, and car sales will switch very rapidly.  Yet this will require that the source of the electricity which "fills" EVs is renewable, or the benefits of switching (for society) will be a lot smaller.

If renewables and electric cars are cheaper than fossil fuels, the last excuse of the soft denialists will be swept away.  No country will be allowed by the world community to avoid doing their moral duty to cut emissions.  They will have no excuse not to go green.  In fact, small countries will be the least likely to be allowed to get away with subsidising coal or petrol and resisting the switch to a carbon-free economy.  Those small countries together producing 40% of world emissions will be under intense, irresistible, political pressure from the rest of the world to do their bit.  And that includes Australia.

Once, littering was socially acceptable.  It isn't any more.  In some quarters, emitting CO2 is still preferable to going green. It's somehow a mark of your right-wing credentials to support coal (WTF?)   But the social, moral and political pressure against carbon will just keep on intensifying as the costs of renewables plummet and global temperatures rise.  The Right's crusade against renewables will inevitably fail. And it will leave them looking like the really bad guys.




Saturday, October 21, 2017

The ALP's 50% renewables target

The Right, as ever, have been working themselves up into a lather about Federal Labor's 50% renewables target by 2030.  "Unworkable!"  "Risky!"  "Utter madness."

It's actually not a particularly brave or extreme target.

AGL's new wind farm at Silverton, near Broken Hill, will deliver electricity at A$65/MWhAGL said that the cost of solar is around A$70/MWh.  The company estimates that the cost of new (black) coal power stations is A$110/MWh.  According to Lazard, the total cost of wind in the USA has been falling by 14% per annum since 2009, and solar by 24% per annum.  According to Origin Electricity, the cost of renewables in Australia (solar and wind) has halved over the last 5 years, a compound rate of decline of 13% per annum (the difference with Lazard's data is partly due to movements in the A$.)

Meanwhile the cost of fuel in Oz coal generators is rising as old contracts expire. AGL disclosed that its cost of generation was $37/MWh in 2016, but this is based on old long-term contracts.  As these expire, the cost of fuel alone will rise towards $60/MWh.  And the cost of maintenance of the older generators is rising too. I don't know what maintenance cost for aging coal power stations are, but  AGL mentioned $900 million over ten years for Liddell, which is about $7/MWh on generous output assumptions.  So right now, the cost of existing coal-powered electricity is close to the costs of new renewables.  But renewables will go on getting cheaper, while coal won't.  In a couple of years, the economic pressure to shutter older coal generators, even without a carbon tax, will be intense.

What about the variability of wind and solar, you say? Well, battery costs are falling rapidly too. They have halved over the last 3 years, which is a cumulative rate of decline of 30% per annum.   Let's assume that this rate of decline slows down to 20% p.a., though with 12 battery gigafactories being built round the world, it probably won't.

Tesla's South Australia's battery bank cost US$50 million, for 129 MWh of storage.  Assuming (conservatively) a 10 year life, that works out at US$106/MWh delivered, or A$141/MWh.  The CSIRO estimates that we would need less than 5 hours storage at 80% penetration.  So, being cautious, let's do the costs for 6 hours of battery storage at 50% renewables penetration.  6 hours of li-ion battery storage added to wind or solar would add A$35/MWh to the underlying cost of the energy--which is $65/MWh for wind, & $70/MWh for solar--taking total cost (power plus storage) to A$100/MWh and A$105/MWh respectively.

But .... the costs of wind, solar and batteries will go on declining.  Look at the table below:



(Notes: The total renewables cost assumes 50% wind and 50% solar with a conservative 6 hours of li-ion battery storage.  The fuel cost of coal is assumed to rise to $60/MWh as cheap coal supply contracts expire.  The coal price is assumed to remain flat, and the A$ is assumed to remain unchanged.  The cost of new coal is assumed to remain at A$110/MWh.  I've ignored the high probability that some form of carbon tax/cap and trade is introduced.  A $20/tonne carbon tax adds about $20 to the cost of coal-generated electricity.  I've ignored the profits that battery storage could make from arbitraging fluctuations in the wholesale electricity price over the day, which would reduce their cost.)

So:-

  • New coal power stations are already more expensive than a portfolio of new renewables with 6 hours of storage.
  • By 2022, new coal will be almost twice as expensive as the renewables portfolio
  • By 2020, new renewables will be as cheap as the fuel cost of coal, before maintenance.  Let me repeat that: the cost of a brand new portfolio of wind, solar and batteries will be cheaper than the running cost of coal power stations by 2020.  And the differential will only widen thereafter.
  • Coal power stations are 25 or 30 year investments.  They are already more expensive than renewables.  Within 3 years their fuel cost on its own will be more expensive than renewables. Why would anyone rational build a new coal power station?  And after 2020 or 2021, why would anyone keep an existing coal power station going when renewables are so much cheaper? 
  • I've used the example of li-ion batteries which are currently the most expensive commercially available storage options.  However, there are already cheaper options.  Pumped hydro storage costs vary a lot depending on the site it's located at, but I've seen estimates of A$30 per hour.  The CSP plant at Port Augusta has a PPA of A$75/MWh, which includes the cost of power and storage, little more than solar without storage, but that prolly assumes some profits from arbitrage.  
  • I haven't even included household/small business solar with behind-the meter batteries.  These by themselves could contribute the equivalent of a couple of hours of grid-level storage.


Labor won't have to push very hard to get 50% renewables by 2030. Market forces are already rapidly driving electricity generation that way.  The people who are "utterly mad" in this whole imbroglio are the right-wing coal spruikers in the "Liberal" Party, and the ill-informed hacks of the Murdochcracy.  Their passion for 19th century technology when cheaper, cleaner, and better replacements exist is, frankly, demented. 

My numbers will certainly be wrong, but the trend is crystal clear.

Friday, October 20, 2017

The Netherlands is to close all coal plants by 2030

Source: Lonely Planet


This week, The Netherlands introduced legislation to close all coal-fired power stations in Holland by 2030.  From PV Magazine:

The news will come as a blow to three utilities that as recently as 2015 commissioned three coal plants in the Netherlands – the newest in Europe – but will be welcomed by clean energy advocates across Europe.

Engie, RWE and Uniper each invested heavily in Dutch coal plants completed in 2015, but now all three utilities will likely suffer massive losses on the write downs made on these coal plants, said Gerard Wynn, analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).

“The impairments reflect the impact of massive growth in renewable power in neighboring Germany, which has depressed wholesale power prices, and the utilities having failed to foresee flat or falling electricity demand,” Wynn said.

Wynn added that the announcement by the Dutch government highlights the risks involved with investing in new or existing coal-fired power generation facilities in Europe, with the Netherlands now joining a growing band of EU nations that are pursuing accelerated coal phase-out plans.

“This, combined with the rise of renewables and the impact on demand of improved efficiency, puts old electricity production models at risk,” Wynn said.
[Read more here]

Thursday, October 19, 2017

The success of the Energiewende

The Energiewende is Germany's "energy transition" to renewable energy, and out of nuclear and fossil fuels.  It is pronounced with a hard g, as in English "get" and w is pronounced as a v.

It is often criticised as a failure, because


  1. It's pushed up the price of electricity in Germany. Germany has among the highest electricity price in the world 
  2. Germany still uses lots of coal, so what's the point?
  3. They've been doing it for nearly 2 decades and they're still haven't reached 100% renewables.  Surely they should have done more?
When the Energiewende started in 2000, wind was very expensive.  Wind turbines were much smaller than today, and the electricity they generated was much more expensive than it is now.  But as the industry moved down the learning curve, costs fell--since 2009, wind has fallen 66% in cost.  Today, wind is the cheapest generation source.  Solar was even more expensive than wind in 2000.  Its costs have fallen 85% since 2009.  The feed-in tariff contracts signed were for a duration of 20 years, so it will take a while before the newer low-cost wind and solar start to influence electricity costs.  But electricity costs in Germany have probably peaked and will start falling from now on.

We must thank Germany (and Denmark) for their decision to install expensive wind turbines 17 years ago.  They started the world down the learning curve, making it cheaper and easier for us to do the same.  Die Welt sagt Danke, Deutschland.  Verden siger tak, Danmark

As part of the Energiewende, Germany had long-term plans to gradually scale back nuclear.  After Fukushima, the German government promised to close down all nuclear plants by 2022.  You can see what happened (in the chart below): nuclear halved from 10% of total supply to 5%.  Coal picked up the slack.  But through it all, renewables kept on rising, from 7% of total supply (mostly hydro) to 34%, a rise of 27 percentage points in 16 years.  I suspect coal has peaked, and will steadily decline from now on, even as nuclear goes to zero.  There's politics involved: lots of German coal miners.  But Germany is good at transitions, and will find a way.

Source Global Green Shift

The third criticism is plain silly.  Germany is a huge industrial economy, the largest to ever make this transition to a green economy (China will be next.) Although Denmark started before Germany, it was Germany which really got the ball rolling.  It's worth remembering that when they started in 2000, they didn't know how they would do the transition.  Biomass? Nuclear? Wind? Hydro?  Energy saving? Solar wasn't even in contention, it was considered too expensive, and it was thought that Germany was too far north for solar to be workable.  The Germans were pioneers, paving a road that the rest of the world could follow.  And despite the size of the German economy and its population, despite the huge learning curve they traversed, despite growing their heavily industrial economy and raising living standards, they still managed to lift renewables by 27% over 16 years.  If they repeat that achievement, renewables will provide  61% of their power by 2032 and 88% by 2048, very close to the necessary 0% by 2050.  

So far we've just been talking about electricity generation.  But that produces only part of global emissions.  Germany still needs to grasp the opportunity afforded by electric vehicles.  Germany is the auto powerhouse of Europe.  Even if the world gets to 100% green generation, it's still a long way from 100% green transport.  If Germany embraces EV targets as China and California have done, its car manufacturers, who have been dithering about EVs, will be forced into the technological future, a place Germany has always been comfortable in.  

[Read more here]


Don't mess with Texas

From Quartz:


Don’t mess with Texas. Although the White House is leading a campaign to burn more coal, states and utilities are largely ignoring the call. In April, West Virginia rebuffed efforts by Democratic governor Jim Justice to revive its moribund coal industry. On Oct. 13, Texas announced it, too, was turning to renewables.

The retirement of three coal-powered plants owned by Texas utility Luminant early next year means wind capacity in Texas will surge ahead of coal by the end of 2018. The Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin reports that the lost coal power capacity will be more than replaced by about 4,000 MW of wind power coming online.

[Read more here]

Source: Quartz

Note that that's capacity, not output.  Assuming reasonable capacity factors (60% for coal, 40% for wind) output should be around 8,800 MW from the coal and 9,800 from the wind, on average.  So over the course of 2019, wind will exceed coal in ERCOT.

The key point is this: renewables are cheap and getting cheaper.  So cheap that even in Republican, conservative Texas wind is replacing fossil fuels.  Coal doesn't stand a chance.  And in the USA, the transition is easy because gas is cheap, so "firming" supply (i.e., filling in the gaps caused by variability of renewables output) by using gas power stations is relatively cheap.  Outside the US, because gas is more costly, the transition requires storage, which is still a bit expensive.  But inside or outside the US, storage costs are plunging--gas is just an interim fuel until storage becomes cheap enough to replace it.

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Why China and coal matter

China is by far the world's largest emitter of CO2.   This chart, from Global Carbon Project, shows the massive jump in emissions since 2000, as Chinese economic growth exploded, and the recent peak as (a) economic growth slowed and (b) the government started to seriously address air pollution.  US emissions have fallen, because coal-powered generation has been replaced by renewables and gas.  European emissions have fallen because of EU climate change policies including the Energiewende in Germany (more on that in a separate post)  India's CO2 emissions continue to grow rapidly, but the shift away from coal in India does seem to have begun.  Remember: to cut the level of CO2 emissions by 80% over the next 30 years, we'll have to reduce them by about 5% per year.




You get a different picture if you look at emissions per capita.  The US is among the highest CO2 emitters per capita (Australia is higher).  But it has also fallen the most.  In the US economic growth has decoupled from emissions.  Emissions per capita are back where they were in the 60s.  But remember, what matters for the climate is total emissions.  We need to get total emissions as close to zero as we can.



The biggest source of emissions is  burning coal. The next biggest is burning oil, mostly for transport.  Gas is way behind, because it produces half the emissions of coal for the same output.  Even better, gas generation can be scaled up or down quickly in response to demand fluctuations.  So we should concentrate of removing coal from power generation and on electrifying transport.  That doesn't mean we should ignore other sources of carbon.  Coal is used to make iron and steel, so we'll need to find a way to do that efficiently using renewables.  Cement production involves baking calcium carbonate to drive off the CO2, so we'll need to find different ways of making cement.





Around the world, coal is being replaced in electricity generation by renewables, gas and nuclear.   Electric car sales will explode over the next 10 years.  And China, the world's largest CO2 emitter is central to both these trends.  The USA is very important too, and the good news is that despite the orange clown in charge, her emissions will go on falling because states, municipalities and companies want clean power, and because the economics now favour renewables.

This year will probably show the peak in global CO2 emissions.   But the initial rate of decline in emissions will be slow.  Too slow.  World temperatures are rising by 0.2 C every decade.  We need to stabilise the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, which means we have to reduce CO2 emissions to below the rate which natural processes take CO2 out of the atmosphere.  And we need to do that fast.

[All charts from Global Carbon Project]

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

China to target 10% electric cars

Beijing smog.  Source: Green Car Reports


It's official. China is to target 10% NEVs (new energy vehicles) in 2019.  Car makers complained about the 8% target for 2018, saying they didn't have enough time to gear up for it, so the government postponed the start date, but kept the initially planned level of 10% for 2019.  The 2020 target is 12% and the 2025 target remains 20%.  From the article in Green Car Reports:

You may not have heard it happen, but the global automotive industry changed forever on Thursday.

China released its plan to require substantial sales of plug-in electric cars by all makers who want to sell in the world's largest car market, and they start in little more than a year.

The levels far exceed those required by California, whose zero-emission vehicle rules have just started to ramp up for 2018 after staying steady for six years.

"It is no exaggeration to call this a landmark event in the history of the automobile," said Michael Dunne, who's covered that country's auto industry for 20 years.

China's electric-car production quotas, as detailed in China Daily and covered by Bloomberg among others on Thursday, apply to any maker selling more than 30,000 units a year in China—which last year bought 28 million vehicles.

Credits for so-called new-energy vehicles, both plug-in hybrids and battery-electric cars, must make up 10 percent of sales by 2019, one year later than originally planned.

"China is granting automakers a minor break on the timing to get up to speed," Dunne acknowledged, "But these aggressive quotas will put China firmly in the driver's seat for electric cars globally."

“China is sending a clear signal to large automakers that had been dragging their feet on EVs," said Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst Colin McKerracher, "that it’s time to get on board."

The rules from Beijing establish a system of points allocated to all-electric cars, hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, and plug-in hybrids. Total points earned must add up to 10 percent of each automaker's sales, translating to roughly half that percentage in actual units.

It appears that 1 point will be earned for each PHEV (plug-in hybrid) and 2 to 4 points for each EV (electric vehicle) depending on the range. 

World EV/PHEV sales are running at 100,000 per month, 1.8% of global car sales.  Just by itself, this move by China will more than double world EV sales in 2019.  Add the Tesla Model 3 to that (500,000 a year by 2019, or 40,000 per month) and EV sales will be 4.8% of all car sales.  But Nissan expects the new Leaf to more than double its sales, too (which seems very plausible--it's cheaper than the old Leaf with twice the range).  Plus GM's Bolt.  The demonstration effect of friends and neighbours buying EVs and PHEVs will make many more buyers notice too, and they will buy EVs.  The curve is flexing up, steeply.

Meanwhile Shell has bought one of Europe's largest EV charger businesses and will start rolling out Shell-branded chargers at Shell service stations.  It's all happening.

US wind down to $20/MWh

A wind farm near Lake Benton, Minn. (Source)



In the nation's wind corridor, power purchase agreements are being signed for less than 2 cents a kilowatt-hour [$20/MWh]. Even adding transmission costs, wind energy is undercutting competition from existing coal and nuclear plants.

Clean energy advocates and research analysts pointed out the trend in recent reports. A Moody's Investors Service report this spring estimated that 56 gigawatts of coal capacity in the Great Plains is "at risk" from cheaper wind energy. Yesterday, the Union of Concerned Scientists identified 57 GW of coal generation that is uneconomical compared with gas-fired generation.

Utilities are backing it up with their own numbers. Last month, Ameren Missouri, a coal-dependent utility with 1.2 million customers, filed a long-range plan with state regulators that showed the leveled cost of energy from new wind projects, including the federal production tax credit, was below the cost of energy from the company's existing coal and nuclear plants.

The data in the utility's integrated resource plan support the decision to add 700 megawatts of wind energy by the end of the decade. Ameren does not, however, plan to accelerate retirement of any coal plants.

The announcement is just one in a long list of new wind additions by utilities from West Texas to the Dakotas.

[Read more here]

The cost of wind power is reduced by about 1.8 cents/kWh for the first 10 years of operation by the Federal Government's Production Tax Credit.  This tax credit is being progressively scaled back over the next three years.  Even after probable further cost declines in wind (20% plus over the next 3 years), the post-tax cost will rise back towards $30/MWh.  According to the EIA, the running cost of a "fossil steam" power station was 3.7 cents/kWh, or $37/MWh, in 2015.  So the shift to wind will continue after 2020, but perhaps more slowly.  Unless of course, the tax credit is again extended.

Monday, October 16, 2017

Christian principles


High electricity prices in Australia

We're having (again) a rancorous debate in Australia about why electricity prices are so high.  The Right blames, as ever, renewables.  The argument is nonsensical.

Source: RenewEconomy


Those who maintain that renewables have driven electricity prices higher completely misunderstand how the wholesale price of electricity is set.

For half an hour ahead, the AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator) solicits offers for supply. It fills the required demand starting with the cheapest supplier and moving up through the offer "ladder" until supply is satisfied. Then all suppliers get the highest price. There's an explanation of the process here.

At the moment the highest cost supply is gas (it's a lot cheaper in the US). So this sets the wholesale price of electricity. Wind and large scale solar are the cheapest source of supply at the margin, because they have zero fuel cost. But the presence of wind and solar in supply requires "firming", usually peaking gas, to fill gaps in supply caused (a) by the variability of renewables supply and (b) by varying demand. For example, South Australian electricity demand can go from 1000 MW on a cool spring day to 3000 MW on a 45 degree C January afternoon. So batteries, pumped hydro schemes like Snowy 2, or the Cultana scheme in South Australia, or concentrated solar power molten salt storage will sharply lower the wholesale price, because they will obviate the need for expensive peaking gas. Renewables with storage will reduce the wholesale price of electricity.

Meanwhile, distributed renewables (rooftop solar plus household battery storage) and demand management will take away the need to upgrade the distribution grid which has given the networks the excuse for "gold plating" the grid which has made the cost of "poles and wires" so expensive.  The cost of distribution now makes up half the cost of the typical retail bill.

This interesting report shows how rooftop solar is already driving down wholesale electricity prices because it's curtailing demand on hot days.

These things are all rational and explicable and logical. It would be wonderful if the Right bothered to try and understand.

China's war on coal

China's "airpocalypse" in winter 2013.  Source: The Age



China is to stop work on 151 planned or under-construction coal power stations

The list affects coal power plants with capacity equal to the combined operating capacity of Germany and Japan (95,000 megawatts) costing around US$60 billion (389 billion rmb).

The amount of capacity affected hence exceeds the target set for this year but is still well short of the total of 150,000 megawatts the government says is needed by 2020.

However the number of plants on the list has shrunk by around 15% from an original list of 182; a watering down of earlier plans after intense political negotiations. Also, the majority of the plants are technically only “delayed”, putting off the final decision to cancel the projects.

Building new coal-fired power plants doesn’t directly increase CO2 emissions, because coal-fired generation in China is limited by lack of demand. But it does create a conflict between dirty and clean energy in the grid, because the grid operators tend to favor coal power plant operators when dispatching electricity.

It's not all good news:

China hit the brakes on approvals of new coal-fired power plant projects on the second half of 2016, but previously approved plants have continued coming online at a rate of almost one large plant per week.

Last year, China set a target of stopping or delaying at least 150,000 megawatts of coal-fired power plant projects to alleviate the looming overcapacity problem with the new list marking the start of this process.

[Read more here]

For 50 years, coal power stations have been a symbol of progress in China.  Electrification is the sine qua non of economic progress.  In India, 25% of the population still has no access to the grid.  But in China it's 3%.  Electrification was the obvious and visible symbol of progress under the Communist regime.  It's hard for local and provincial officials to get used to the new idea that coal power stations are antiquated, and should no longer be built. 

But the opposition by the central government to coal power is based on more than the need to reduce carbon emissions:

The war on coal reached fever pitch here [in China] this month. As a deadline looms to achieve clean air targets by the end of 2017, October has seen unprecedented measures come into force to curb air pollution and reduce emissions.  Steel production has been halved in major steel cities, coal banned in China's coal capital, factories closed down for failing pollution inspections, and hundreds of officials sacked for failing to meet environmental targets.

The complete shutdowns, or 50 per cent production cuts, will stay in place for an unprecedented five months.  The winter heating season in China is approaching, when coal use has traditionally spiked, worsening northern China's notorious air pollution.  But cities are under pressure to meet important domestic targets for clean air, set five years ago by the State Council in response to a public outcry over pollution.

China can't allow a repeat of last winter, when, after several years of improvement, air quality suddenly worsened in some cities.  For a few days in January 2016, the sky darkened and it looked possible that the "airpocalypse" of 2013 – which first drew global attention to Beijing's severe air pollution – was back. Social media went into overdrive.

Fighting air pollution is a matter of social stability, Environment Protection Minister Li Ganjie said a fortnight ago.

So now the Chinese government has brought out the "iron fist".

That was the phrase used by the environment protection bureau in China's most polluted province, Hebei, as 69 government officials were sacked and 154 handed over to police for investigation last month for failing to implement pollution control measures.

Meeting emissions targets has become a key performance indicator for local Communist Party bosses and mayors alike.

Local governments that don't enforce the pollution controls will have environmental assessments for new property developments suspended by the Ministry for Environment Protection, effectively blocking deals.

A battle plan has been drawn up by the ministry to cover 28 northern cities, including Beijing and Tianjin, where 7000 pollution inspectors will be deployed to expose violations and look for data fraud.

Yuan Xu, associate professor with the Chinese University of Hong Kong's Institute of Environment, Energy and Sustainability, says there has been a major change in the Chinese government's understanding of the relationship between economic growth and environmental protection.

"In the past, the two were taken as tradeoffs ... China has been more and more benefiting from newly created industries and jobs due to environmental protection and especially climate mitigation," he says.  Renewable energy has created several million jobs and multiple world-leading industries.

China's special representative on climate change, Xie Zhenhua, has said: "The cause of air pollution and climate change is the same - the burning of fossil fuels. Many of the policies and measures to solve the two issues are the same."

[Read more here]

China consumes half the world's coal output and produces 1/3rd of the world's carbon emissions.  So it's a key factor in reducing global carbon emissions.  It's aggressively pushing to de-carbonise its economy, in electricity generation and in transport.  That's good news for global warming, and for the cost of renewables, as the sheer volume of demand from China pushes renewables down their learning curves.  It also completely demolishes the argument of the soft denialists who say that reducing our own carbon emissions is pointless while China is still increasing hers.

Saturday, October 14, 2017

Playing the race/Muslim/terrorist card

Playing the race card, by Rob Tornoe


Since 90% of the population wouldn't vote for neo-liberal policies, what the conservatives do is play the race/foreigner/dole bludger/Muslim/terrorist/communist card. Only we, they say, can keep you safe from these imaginary horrors. Vote for us, they say, and stop worrying about your falling living standards. We'll look after you, they say. We're on the side of the battlers and the strugglers, they lie. Look down on those "outsiders", they say, because that way you'll feel better. While secretly the politicians who represent the 1% look down on all of us. They despise us because we are so stupid we vote for them.

Donald Trump did this to perfection.  Pretending to care about poor Americans, he in fact has tried to enact policies which benefit only the rich and will make the poor far worse off.  In the UK, the "alt-right" of the UKIP and the right wing of the Conservative party pulled the same trick with Brexit.  In Australia, the so-called "Liberals" are trying that tired old wheeze again. Facial recognition will keep us safe for terrorists (10,000 times as many people die from heart attacks)! There are terrorists under every bed, watch out! The  Labor party wants to take us back to the days of socialism!  The Greens are far left!

While our living standards decline and the rich get obscenely richer.  But the Rabid Right are correct in one thing.  We are stupid, because we do vote these people in.