A video from Undecided by Matt Ferrell
Yes, it's catastrophically stupid. It's as if, at the beginning of the jet age, the US government had banned jets and insisted on using Lockheed Constellations and DC-6s. By the time America comes to its senses (if it ever does) China will be so far ahead, the US will never catch up.
Four in five people want their countries to ramp up efforts in the fight against climate change, according to a United Nations survey billed as the largest yet on the issue.
The UN Development Programme (UNDP) published the poll on Thursday, finding that a majority of people in 62 of the 77 countries surveyed said they supported a quick transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy.
These included the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters, with 80 percent in China and 54 percent in the United States supporting the move, though respondents in Russia were notably less keen, with only 16 percent approving.
“As world leaders decide on the next round of pledges under the Paris Agreement by 2025, these results are undeniable evidence that people everywhere support bold climate action,” said Cassie Flynn, UNDP global climate director.
Conducted in collaboration with Oxford University and GeoPoll, the survey posed 15 questions by randomised telephone calls to 75,000 people in 77 countries, the populations of which represent 87 percent of the world’s total – making it the biggest poll of its kind.
Overall, 80 percent of those polled wanted to see stronger commitments to addressing the problem, the clamour for action rising to 89 percent in poorer countries feeling the brunt of climate change.
Climate anxiety was higher in poorer countries like Fiji, where 80 percent are more worried about the problem compared to a year ago, followed by Afghanistan (78 percent) and Turkey (77 percent). Saudi Arabia saw the lowest increase in climate fears, with 25 percent more concerned.
Overall, the survey found 56 percent of respondents said they think about climate change at least once a week. Over half of those surveyed said they were more worried about climate change than last year, compared with 15 percent who said they were less worried.
Climate change is also changing people’s lives, with 69 percent of respondents saying that global warming had impacted major decisions, such as where to live or work and what to buy.
But Achim Steiner, head of the UNDP, said these concerns do not necessarily translate into electoral and consumer decisions.
He pointed to what he called a “perception gap” when it comes to climate action, summing up people’s typical reaction as: “I would do more. But the others won’t. So I will not do anything."
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We forecast a record fall of 20% in EU fossil generation in 2023 - almost 2x the previous record in 2020.
Why? Record growth in wind & solar, falling electricity demand and a return to normal for hydro reservoirs and French nuclear plants.
European Electricity Review, 2023
So, it can be done. We could slash emissions from electricity generation by 10% a year. If we got our act together.
It's easy enough to be deeply pessimistic about climate change. Emissions continue to rise, and while these days one only occasionally encounters unhinged denialists, the acceptance that something needs to be done hasn't yet translated into effective action. There is lots of "committed to" but little real action. (Buying scammy carbon offsets isn't real action. Real action is actually cutting emissions.) Lots of blah-blah-blah, as Thunberg says.
But there are two trends which really are signs that things are shifting.
The first is that over the last 14 years, solar has risen from 1% of new generation capacity installed to 51%, wind from 10% to 25%. Over the same period, coal fell from 46% to 4%. And this is the gross addition to the stock of coal-powered generation, that is, it does not include shuttering old coal power stations. The long-term trend lines in the graphic are obvious, with solar moving from an insignificant sliver to dominance, and fossil fuels falling from 2/3rds to 1/7th.
What this means is that emissions from electricity generation, which contributes 30% of CO2 emissions globally, have prolly peaked. To avoid a rise of 1.5 degrees, electricity emissions would have to fall by 10% a year over the next 10 years, and that isn't going to happen. Nevertheless, if it happens over the next 20 years (highly plausible), this alone will cut total emissions by ±1.8% per annum.
The second trend is the exponential growth in EV sales. Land transport (which however includes diesel-powered freight transport on road and by rail) contributes another ±20% to CO2 emissions. EV sales are growing by 60% per annum. That means they could rise 6.5 times between now and 2026, taking them close to 100% of total car and light truck sales. If car and light trucks last 15 years, that means that from 2026 onwards, emissions from this sector will be falling by 6% a year.
What's more, the car and light truck fleet will help stabilise the grid, either passively, by charging only when grid supply is high, or actively, by contributing some power back to the grid when there's a shortage.
The surge in the price of lithium is a threat, but two new battery technologies are already making their way out of laboratories into factories: sodium-ion and aluminium-ion. Battery costs will resume their decline.
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| N.B. Log scale! |
If the transition to a nearly 100% renewable grid and a 100% electric land transport fleet takes 20 years, emissions will fall by 3.5% a year. And that is almost acceptable. It's certainly far better than it's been. We'll miss the target of limiting the global increase in temperatures to 1.5 degrees, but assuming temperatures continue to rise by 0.2 degrees per decade, but halving as emissions halve, we'll avoid 2 degrees.
There have been many simulations of a 100% renewable electricity grid for Australia, including some ground-breaking studies from Beyond Zero Emissions, The University of New South Wales and the ANU.
Even the recently released Integrated System Plan from the Australian Energy Market Operator exceeds 97% renewable in the 2040s.
So, what is the point of another one?
Well, this simulation differs from the others in a couple of ways:It uses actual generation and demand data rather than relying on synthetic traces for those quantities
It is being conducted in near real-time
The benefit of using actual generation and demand data is that some people are sceptical of synthetic wind and solar traces. They may also be dubious when you start modifying demand.
The benefit of the near real-time modelling is that people tend to be more concerned about recent events. If a recent day had very little wind and solar generation, some will take that as proof that you cannot run an electricity grid on renewables. A study based on data from a few years ago is unlikely to change their minds.
Another aspect of near real-time modelling is that it is one thing to optimise a simulation when you have all the data in advance, it is another when you design the simulation before you get the data.
With that in mind, exactly one year ago I started running a simple simulation of Australia’s main electricity grid to show that it can get very close to 100% renewable electricity with approximately five hours of storage (24GW/120GWh).
Each week, I would download demand and generation data from OpenNEM. I left demand unchanged.
The generation data for wind, rooftop and utility solar data was rescaled to supply ~60%, 25% and 20% of demand respectively over the year. For example, over the last year utility solar generation has met 5% of demand. The target for utility solar was 20%, so I rescaled the last 7 days of utility solar data by 4x (ie, 20% divided by 5%).
Note that the sum of 60%, 25% and 20% is greater than 100%. This is important. Any optimised model of a highly renewable grid will have significant amounts of over-generation.
It is better to over-generate and have some curtailment than to generate exactly what you need over the year with significant shortfalls during some months requiring huge amounts of storage or backup. As will be seen later in this article, this simulation ended up having 18% excess generation over the year.
The decision to use 60% wind, 45% solar was based on rough optimisation experiments. A mixture reasonably close to 50:50 takes advantage of the fact that wind and solar are negatively correlated with each other.
Wind tends to generate above average during the night and during winter, complementing the solar generation. I have a bias to wind as it requires less short-term storage, which is used primarily to shift solar generation from the day to the evening and night.
My simulation used the 24GW/120GWh of assumed storage and existing hydro to firm up the wind and solar and match demand.
Both the hydro and storage were assumed highly flexible. Note that I did not use the actual hydro generation data. I completely changed the dispatch of hydro so that it had minimal generation on days when it wasn’t needed, and elevated levels whenever there was a day with significant shortfalls of wind and solar relative to demand.
This is reasonable as most of the hydro capacity on the NEM is associated with large storage dams, making the hydro highly dispatchable. However, to maintain consistency with historical generation, hydro generation was also subject to the following constraints:Hydro generation was kept between 200 MW and 6,000 MW
Weekly hydro generation was kept above 168 GWh
Annual hydro generation was targeted at between 6% and 9% of demand, though ideally closer to 15,000 GWh, or about 7.5% of demand.
If the wind, solar, storage and hydro was unable to meet demand, then the model supplements generation with ‘Other’. ‘Other’ was deliberately left undefined. It could be gas generation. Indeed, in the short to medium term it is likely to be existing gas peakers that will help firm renewables along with storage and hydro.
But longer term, ‘Other’ could be a highly flexible dispatchable generator running on renewable fuels such as biofuels or green hydrogen, or it could be long-term storage such as Snowy 2.0. When calculating the renewable percentage of the simulation, I have assumed ‘other’ is not renewable, even though it is hoped that in the future ‘other’ will become renewable.
Each week I posted the results of the simulation of the previous seven days to my Twitter account. On Wednesday of this week, I posted the 52nd week, marking a full year of simulations.
I’ve copied the simulation below. It is fitting that the renewable penetration of 99% for the final week of the simulation very closely matched the renewable penetration over the entire 52-week period, 98.8%
Key results from the 52 weeks of simulations are summarised as follows:The wind and solar generation ended up slightly exceeding the targets of 60%, 20% and 25% for wind, utility solar and rooftop solar respectively.
- Renewables met 98.8% of demand over the year, with the remaining 1.2% met by ‘Other’
- ‘Other’ generation peaked at 6.59 GW on the night of July 12. Over the year its average capacity factor was 4.3%.
- Hydro met 6.9% of demand. This was lower than my target of 7.5%, and also less than actual hydro generation of 8%. This means that dam storage levels in my simulation would have ended the year higher than they did in the real world.
- 17% of the wind and solar generation was in excess of requirements and ended up being curtailed.
- 11% of wind and solar generation went into storage. Storage discharge met 10% of demand.
- 82% of demand was directly powered by wind and solar without having to pass through storage or be curtailed
It is impossible to know in advance if the year would be above or below average, so it is not surprising that they did not exactly hit their target. However, the methodology used to rescale the wind and solar data meant that there was a high probability that they would exceed their targets.
The graph above shows the weekly fraction of demand that was met by ‘Other’. Levels of ‘Other’ were essentially zero for almost seven months from September to late March. However, by late April, the simulation started to become more ‘interesting’.For countries without hydro, the results of this simulation for Australia suggest that to cover winter demand, "other" (natural gas, for now; SNG later) would need to be ±15% of the generation mix. Of course, this would only be for part of the year. The average over the year would still be modest, so even if we have to use gas, we would still cut emissions substantially. But the simulation highlights the need for gas peaking/back-up. If we use surplus green electricity to create synthetic natural gas (SNG) then we could in principle run a 100% green grid.
Most weeks from late April through to the present required some levels of ‘Other’, due to the inability of wind, solar, storage and hydro to entirely meet demand throughout the week. The week starting on June 29 proved to be the most difficult week of the simulation, with ‘Other’ having to provide 8.1% of demand that week.
The graph illustrates clearly that late autumn and winter will prove to be the most challenging periods for a mostly renewable grid in Australia. Solar generation in late June and early August can often be as low half the annual average.
And while wind tends to be above average during winter, there are often stretches of two or three days in a row that have significantly below average wind. This can leave a significant shortfall in generation that cannot be entirely filled by existing hydro.
The challenge of matching supply and demand during winter will be even more difficult as we start to electrify much more of the gas heating that is present in the southern states, particularly Victoria. Doing so will elevate winter demand much more than summer demand.
It is important to note that wind in Queensland is not well correlated with wind in the southern states. That means that when it is calm in South Australia, Victoria, Tasmania and NSW, it is often windier than average in Queensland. For this reason, it is unfortunate that wind only makes up 3% of Queensland demand, or about one-quarter of the NEM average of 12%.
More wind in QLD will greatly help to improve the geographic diversity of renewable generation, making it easier to match supply and demand over the year. However, it will not completely solve the problem. There will remain many days with poor renewable supply in both the southern states and in Queensland. Increases in Queensland wind generation will make it easier to get closer to 100% renewable electricity, but is unlikely to significantly reduce the peak requirements of ‘Other’.
It is interesting to note that the ISP is predicting that approximately 9GW of peaking gas or liquids will need to be retained in the NEM’s generation mix out to 2050. This is more than the 6.6GW required so far in this study.
However, the ISP is a much more sophisticated model than the simulation I have done here, with increased demand due to increased electrification. It has modelled many years of generation, ensuring that supply stays secure and reliable. It is quite likely that some winters may prove more challenging in a high renewable world than the winter of 2022 simulated here.
The key disadvantage of the hydrogen economy, or the hydrogen storage cycle, is that the energy loss during conversion of water to hydrogen and oxygen using electrolysis has been too high. The round trip efficiency of producing hydrogen for storage using green electricity, and then burning the hydrogen later to produce electricity has been very low. For example, in cars, if you compared lithium-ion batteries with hydrogen fuel cells, batteries are 76% efficient, while fuel cells are only 30% efficient, although this calculation also includes the cost of compressing and transporting the hydrogen. The major reason is that there is a substantial energy loss during electrolysis. But the new technology mentioned in this report by The Age promises to change that.
Australian researchers claim to have made a “giant leap” in lifting the efficiency of electrolysers, bringing forward the time when green hydrogen will be competitive with fossil fuels as an energy source.
Hysata, a company using technology developed at the University of Wollongong, said its patented capillary-fed electrolysis cells achieve 95% efficiency, meaning little wastage, beating by about one-quarter the levels of current technology.
The achievement, published in the peer-reviewed Nature Communication journal today, could see the Morrison government’s so-called hydrogen stretch goal of $2 a kilogram to make the fuel competitive reached as soon as 2025, the Hysata chief executive, Paul Barrett, said.
“We’ve gone from 75% [efficiency] to 95% – it’s really a giant leap for the electrolysis industry,” Barrett said.
Renewable energy from sources such as wind and solar is making big inroads into the power sector, supplying more than a third of eastern Australia’s electricity in the final three months of 2021. However, decarbonising industry and some transport, such as trucking, is likely to be tougher unless fuels such as hydrogen become much cheaper.
Gerry Swiegers, Hysata’s chief technology officer and a UoW professor, said electrolysis – which uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen – had been around for two centuries with mostly only incremental improvements in processing.
The central challenge was to reduce the electrical resistance within the electrolysis cell. Much like a smart phone battery warming as it charges, resistance wasted energy in a regular cell as well as often requiring additional energy for cooling.
“What we did differently was just to start completely over and to think about it from a very high level,” Swiegers said. “Everyone else was looking at improving materials or an existing design.”
With the help of two PhD researchers – Aaron Hodges and Anh Linh Hoang – the small team used readily available materials to develop a thin sponge-like membrane to suck the water up between two electrodes. The avoidance of creating bubbles was also key.
“So a combination of that wicking membrane and that bubble-free operation resulted in inherently low resistance,” Barrett said. Hydrogen could be produced using 41.5 kilowatt-hours of electricity per kilogram.
“For hydrogen producers, this will significantly reduce both the capital and operational costs to produce green hydrogen,” he said, adding the efficiency levels achieved were “the best in the world”.
From an initial concept in 2019, the research has advanced quickly. With $4.25m from UK-based IP Group and $750,000 from Australia’s Clean Energy Finance Corp, Hysata is now looking to begin a pilot manufacturing site of electrolysis plates – each 250mm in diameter – by the end of 2023.
“We want to help Australia build core electrolyser technology,” Barrett said, adding the plan would be to build a plant capable of producing one gigawatt of electrolysers a year. Similar-sized plants for elsewhere in the country and beyond would follow as the production techniques were mastered.
Hysata is hiring more staff to add to its 20-strong team, with a plan for a fundraising announcement in the second half of 2022, Barrett said.
At stake is potentially an industry worth trillions of dollars. According to the government’s national hydrogen strategy released in 2019, a “cautiously optimistic scenario” could see an Australian hydrogen industry generate about 7,600 jobs and add about $11bn a year in additional GDP by 2050” or another 10,000 jobs and $26bn annually if markets develop faster.
“I’m very excited about this project,” Swiegers said. “I think this really gives us a chance to get to net zero [carbon emissions] potentially earlier than expected.”
Even if this technology takes off, there are still problems with the hydrogen storage cycle. Hydrogen has to be compressed and liquefied for transport; the H2 molecule is so small it escapes easily even through metal; it makes the pipes brittle. Even with this advance, hydrogen fuel cells for transport are not going to replace batteries. However, there are plenty of uses where hydrogen, or methane/hydrocarbons created from hydrogen using the Sabatier process, can be useful. We will need seasonal storage for 100% green electricity grids. De-carbonising iron and steel production using green hydrogen or green methane, fuelling jets and shipping are others.
From The Guardian
People in well-off countries can help avert climate breakdown by making six relatively straightforward lifestyle changes, according to research from three leading institutions.
The study found that sticking to six specific commitments – from flying no more than once every three years to only buying three new items of clothing a year – could rein in the runaway consumption that is partially driving the climate crisis.
The research carried out by academics at Leeds University and analysed by experts at the global engineering firm Arup and the C40 group of world cities, found that making the six commitments could account for a quarter of the emissions reductions required to keep the global heating down to 1.5C.
The study was published on Monday alongside the launch of a new climate movement to persuade and support relatively well off people to make “The Jump” and sign up to the six pledges.
Tom Bailey, co-founder of the campaign said: “This ends once and for all the debate about whether citizens can have a role in protecting our earth. We don’t have time to wait for one group to act, we need ‘all action from all actors now’.”
Last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its “bleakest warning yet”, saying the climate crisis was accelerating rapidly with only a narrow chance left of avoiding its worst ravages.
Bailey said as the world reaches the edge of ecological collapse, it needed a workable alternative to this ‘universal consumer society’ in the next decade.
“The research is clear that governments and the private sector have the largest role to play but it is also equally clear from our analysis that individuals and communities can make a huge difference.”
The Jump campaign asks people to sign up to take the following six “shifts” for one, three or six months:
The campaign was officially kicked off on Saturday and Bailey said there was already a growing movement emerging in response to the evidence with Jump groups up and running around the country.
The research is based on a study by academics at Leeds University, Arup and the C40 group of leading cities which assesses the impact of consumption by people in the world’s leading cities.
Analysis of that data has found that the six steps set out above could cut global emissions by between 25% and 27%.
My own six recommendations are:
Greenpeace Australia has updated their guide to green electricity providers. The last one was done in 2018. Then, as now, Diamond Energy and Enova (a community electricity co-op) top the list. At the bottom of the list are the big electricity utilities, producing most of their electricity from black, or, even worse, brown coal. Here's the scoring card for the lowest ranked utility, AGL, which spends a lot of advertising money on images with wind and solar farms trying to make itself appear green when it really, really isn't. 35% of Oz's emissions come from electricity generation. You can make your own significant personal contribution to reducing emissions by switching to one of the suppliers on the top of Greenpeace's list.
You can read the report here.
