The 80 percent failure target is where our Abbott Government wants to halt the growth of larger scale renewable energy, and prevent any further mitigation of global warming, or provide an answer to Australia’s high per-capita greenhouse gas emissions. This can only be explained by pervasive climate change denial under the influence of a corrupting fossil fuel lobby.
The government today announced its intention to freeze renewable energy capacity at approximates 20 percent of current electricity generation. Mr McFarlane denies AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming), and also denies that he denies AGW. A big unanswered question is why is the figure of 20 as a percentage so important to the government. Must the allowed amount of renewable generation capacity go up and down like a yo-yo, with every change in total electricity consumption? What dire consequences might happen if renewable energy met its current fixed generation target? No member of the government has given valid reasons as to why Australia needs to stop at this magic percentage.
The partisan review of the RET, not waiting for the climate change authority, has already stopped investment in renewable energy in its tracks. Another Australian manufacturing plant, this time for the towers and blades for wind towers has closed shop. Even if the change is completedly rejected by the senate, the damage to investment in these businesses has already been done. This seems to have been intentional. The Abbott government claimed to be open for business, but the large scale renewable energy business has been kicked out of Australia by the dinosaurs of the fossil fuel industry.
1 History of RET
The initial scheme was set up by the Howard government in 2000, as the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target (MRET). It set a target of 9,500 GWh of new renewable energy generation by 2020. A new target was set by the Greens-Labor-Gillard government of 2009, to be 45,000 gigawatt-hours by 2020. Subsidy is phased out towards 2030, assuming better efficiency and innovation in the renewable energy industry.
[5] According to Miles George, CEO of Infigen Energy, the RET was always negotiated in terms of an absolute generation target, and not a percentage of a changing total consumption. Because total consumption has dropped, the sudden political choice of a percentage is a desire to cut new investment in large scale renewable energy to zero. Uncertainty about the target has already dropped the amount of new investment, and new projects have been stalled. This is partly due to the political muscle of large energy suppliers, owned by overseas corporations, who have heavily bought into fossil fuel energy in Australia, and expect to profit from it. This includes the current gas mining boom, and expected price rises in gas, due to participation in the export markets.
The RET has been criticized as unambitious and ineffective in reducing Australia’s fossil fuel dependency, as it only applies to generated electricity, but not to the 77% of energy consumption exported, nor to energy sources which are not used for electricity generation, such as the oil used in transportation. The 20% of renewable energy generation will be only 2% of total energy consumption in Australia. There are many more ambitious possibilities to reduce Australia’s total net carbon emissions, and dependence on hydrocarbon fossil fuel sources.
[4]1.1 Where the energy comes from
It is always energy consumption, and this should never be termed production. Energy is never produced, or created. The first law of thermodynamics states that the total energy in a closed system remains constant. Energy is merely an potential from the environment that can be only consumed once to do work. Energy potential is either consumed to do work or is redistributed in the system as a transformation. In each transformation a part of the available potential to do work becomes unusable, which is described by the second law of thermodynamics.
Renewable energy is the capture and consumption of part of the constant flow of energy from the Sun. The Sun will require more than our planets lifetime to consume its energy potentials. Fossil fuel energy is a chemical potential energy derived from the oxidation of carbon and hydrogen molecules, found as coal, oil or natural gas, buried underground. The energy potential of fossil fuel was originally derived from Solar energy flow, which was used by the original plants and animals. Their fossilized remains were transformed into molecules with high oxidation energy potential, by being burial under low oxygen conditions, producing suitable heat and pressure over time.
Coal is mostly just carbon, and Natural Gas and Oil have varying proportions of hydrogen. The global reserves of fossil fuels are a rapidly depleting, use once only as an energy resource. Large amounts of carbon dioxide, and methane have been released into our atmosphere, from human activities, and have increased the global greenhouse effect. With the exponential growth of population and fossil fuel burning over the last century, we are now rapidly warming our planet. Human influences on the climate record are discernable from the time of agriculture adoption.
1.2 RET review by coal industry
The Warburton RET review has produced just what the Coal Industry ordered, and recommended the two most expensive options that would cause the biggest rises in consumer prices, the least investment, the least jobs, the biggest rise in emissions, and the greatest benefit ($9.3 billion according to the panel itself) to the coal industry.
The review advocated that the RET scheme be closed to new entrants, or reduced to a “real” 20 per cent target, rather than the current 41,000GWh target. It has cost taxpayers $587,329 for a picked coal-choice panel to tell the government exactly what it wanted to hear. A complete waste of money.
Fortunately the Climate Change Authority - CCA, will be conducting its own statutory review of the RET which it must complete before the end of 2014. The Abbott government has tried to abolish the CCA, since assuming power, but so far this action has been blocked in the Senate. The CCA which is charged with ensuring that Australia sets carbon dioxide emissions targets appropriate for our economy and current climate science, and recommends actions to meet them.
1.3 Public is ahead of the government by decades
It has always been understood, by most people concerned about global warming, that there are high external costs of burning coal for electricity. The RET for 2020 was an interim goal in terms of moving generating capacity on the way to 100% renewable energy, and that all coal burning for electricity needs to be phased out. Small scale solar installation, benefitted from decades of cost reductions, and millions of small installations have been successful in reducing overall energy demand. Distributed wind energy is a proven supplier of cheap electricity, and cheaper than building new coal power stations. Within the predictive time frames for wind patterns, wind energy has proven to be reliable for so called ’baseload power’ generation.
What Australia lacks is a grid scale renewable energy storage, to provide on demand electricity to fill in predicted wind energy shortfalls. Solar energy storage technology of various kinds are already available and their are implementations by a number of companies around the world. Price will improve as economies of scale are applied.
1.4 Concentrated solar thermal with storage
There are a number of variants of concentrated solar thermal energy with storage. Potential energy from incoming solar radiation energy as heat in large tanks of molten salt fluid. There is no need to burn large quantities of coal under a boiler to generate steam. By using stored fluid at a very high temperature (590 C), a simple heat exchange flow transfers the energy to a water flow circuit, creating instant large quantities of steam to push turbines around to generate electricity. Beyond Zero Emissions and others have shown that this is a necessary part of having an affordable large scale solution for a reliable electricity system with zero carbon emissions.
[4] The on-demand solar systems complement the variability of very cheap distributed wind energy, and other renewable energy capture systems. The technology requires the large scale deployment of fields of heliostats, or tracking mirrors. A large total surface area for solar energy collection is an unavoidable requirement.
2 Planned phase out of coal
For Australia to mitigate global warming, all coal burning electricity must be phased out, which requires a staged and planned replacement with renewable energy systems. The RET scheme has been productive in building the replacement systems so far, but now the politically hard part, is going further to shut down the economically threatened coal burning systems. These are sunk investments of very rich and influential people. Banks and Corporations have invested many billions of dollars in the fossil fuel energy systems. It is these people and agencies that are directing the Abbott government to halt the RET for large scale energy as it threatens their personal investments. The costs of energy provision to ordinary citizens and its effects on the future climate in Australia are not under primary consideration by the Abbott government.
The findings of climate science, with measured rapid changes in earth climate systems dictate that fossil fuel industry be scaled rapidly down, before its fossil fuel resources become uneconomic to mine.
2.1 Climate science is settled, and its findings have been certain for decades.
Publicly digestible information about the threats of global warming were first widely published in a Scientific American Article in 1959. The data shows that the unprecedented global warming trend is noticeable by 1980, with the first 3 years the warmest on record up to then.
[6]Science about the drivers of earths climate system dates from the beginning of the 18th Century with Fourier and heat transfer calculations for our planet and its atmosphere. Tyndall in 1859 measured the effect of carbon dioxide gas as a blocker of heat rays, or what we now call infrared radiation. Arrhenius in 1896 made the first calculation of climate sensitivity to a reduction of atmosphere carbon dioxide, in an effort to understand the climate history of periodic ice ages. He noted that human burning of fossil fuels would cause a warmer global climate. Scientists investigated this with a low-priority curiosity until the 1950’s, when better technology and more money was applied. By 1960, the effect of a doubling of carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere was estimated to be around 3 degrees C. By 1960 Keeling had accumulated enough daily atmosphere carbon dioxide measurements to show for the first time the seasonal changes in atmosphere carbon dioxide, and unmistakable evidence of an upwards trend.
The knowledge that carbon dioxide was rising in the atmosphere, rather fast compared in terms of a geological time scale, led to more detailed studies of how global climate had behaved in the past. More detailed and inclusive computer models were constructed to predict how earth’s climate system behaves. Data sets and proxy data sets from ages past were built up. Detailed weather records from all over the globe were compiled.
2.2 Global mean temperature rises
Teams of scientists were concerned with predicting the trends in current global climate. The statistical methodologies to compile a global mean temperature GMT record were developed and refined to meet criticisms. When a scientific paper was published that showed that the GMT was departing the general trend for centuries past, with a steep rise, whose extrapolation demanded a response, there was much political consternation.
The so-called “hockey stick”, that was included in the 2001 IPPC report “Summary for policy makers” was a simple graph published in peer-reviewed climate science paper by Michael Mann, using the GMT of collected instrumental data-sets, compiled all over the world, and proxy data for earlier times to 1000 A.D. using tree-ring data provided by other scientists. The simple message of the graph provoked many personal attacks against the original author, Michael Mann.
2.3 Attack the messengers
Dr Mann has since written a personal account of these attacks. He and others have noted,
[1, 2] that over the last 2 decades (1990’s onward), that the efforts of scientists to inform the public about climate change and its potentially disastrous consequences , have run up against powerful vested interests who either deny that such change is occurring or, if it is, deny that human activity plays much if any role in it. Most of the conservative members of the Abbott government fall into either category.
The fossil fuel industries have created and lavishly financed institutions to produce anti-global-warming studies, paid for rallies and Web sites to question the science, and produced scores of economic analyses that purport to show that policies to reduce emissions of climate-altering gases will have a devastating effect on jobs and the overall economy.
This ignores counter arguments that show there are more jobs available in renewable energy industry, and many benefits to the overall economy, including the preservation of our biological life support and agricultural systems.
2.4 Dirty Coal, dirty tactics, dirty politicians
The Warburton RET review can be considered to be the latest of such dishonest economic reviews, which wants to protect the fossil fuel mining and burning industries.
[3] The cheapness of freely available wind and solar energy, and its lack of polluting side effects, is a now a major competitive threat to fossil fuel energy, even without the implications of global warming from carbon dioxide emissions. The efforts to dog the wind energy industry, with bogus ’infra-noise’ complaints and environmental restrictions that are never applied to the much dirtier coal industry, are a special feature of the fossil fuel money used to lobby and influence our governments. The findings of ICAC in NSW show the especially venal nature of many of our politicians. The federal government is obviously unprepared to undergo such rigorous corruption investigations, although it is obvious that such corruption must have taken place, if only on a probability and concentration of power basis.
The Australian government is now a protection racket for the fossil fuel industry.
In effect, Australia has redefined its national priorities: Those priorities are no longer to protect the country, its economy and its people from the impact of climate change and help limit warming to 2C. It is to protect the interests of the fossil fuel industry.[8]
References
[1] The hockey stick and the climate wars : Michael Mann. http://www.amazon.com.au/Hockey-Stick-Climate-Wars-Dispatches-ebook/dp/B0072N4U6S
[2] Merchants of Doubt : Naomi Orestes. http://www.amazon.com.au/Summary-Merchants-Doubt-Obscured%C2%A0-Tobacco%C2%A0Smoke-ebook/dp/B00DKBKSOE
[3] Warburton review a complete waste of money. http://reneweconomy.com.au/2014/warburton-review-complete-waste-money-86396
[4] Beyond Zero Emissions. http://bze.org.au/
[5] History of Renewable Energy Target. http://ret.cleanenergyregulator.gov.au/About-the-Schemes/History-of-the-RET/The-history-of-the-Renewable-Energy-Target
[6] Global warming in the public sphere : Jan Corfee-Morlot1, Mark Maslin1 and Jacquelin Burgess2. http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1860/2741.full
[7] Climate Change denier to head renewables review. http://reneweconomy.com.au/2014/australia-chooses-climate-change-denier-to-head-renewables-review-65883
[8] Australia’s Political and Economic Strategy : Deny Climate Change. Giles Parkinson. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20140924082427-54275423-australia-s-economic-and-political-strategy-deny-climate-change
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