4 December 2017, Inside Climate News, Microgrids Keep These Cities Running When the Power Goes Out. Borrego Springs, California, is a quaint town of about 3,400 people set against the Anza-Borrego Desert about 90 miles east of San Diego. Summers are hot—often north of 100 degrees—and because it lies at the far end of a San Diego Gas & Electric transmission line, the town has suffered frequent power outages. High winds, lightning strikes, forest fires and flash floods can bust up that line and kill the electricity. “If you’re on the very end of a utility line, everything that happens, happens 10 times worse for you,” says Mike Gravely, team leader for energy systems integration at the California Energy Commission. The town has a lot of senior citizens, who can be frail in the heat. “Without air conditioning,” says Linda Haddock, head of the local Chamber of Commerce, “people will die.” But today, Borrego Springs has a failsafe against power outages: a microgrid. Resiliency is one of the main reasons the market in microgrids is booming, with installed capacity in the United States projected to more than double between 2017 and 2022, according to a new report on microgrids from GTM Research. Another is that microgrids can ease the entry of intermittent renewable energy sources, like wind and solar, into the modern grid. Utilities are also interested in microgrids because of the money they can save by deferring the need to build new transmission lines. Read More here
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1 December 2017, CSIRO/ECOS, How to plan for decisions in the midst of bushfire catastrophe. SHOULD I stay or should I go? It’s a tricky question to contemplate and for many people choosing to stay when a fire comes will depend on a … Continue reading →
30 November 2017, The Conversation, It’s 30 years since scientists first warned of climate threats to Australia. Keen students of climate politics might recognise November 30 as the anniversary of the opening of the historic Paris climate summit two years ago. But you might not know that today also marks 30 years since Australian scientists first officially sounded the alarm over climate change, at a conference hailed as the dawn of the ongoing effort to forecast and monitor the future climate of our continent. November 30, 1987, marked the start of the inaugural GREENHOUSE conference hosted by Monash University and attended by 260 delegates. The five-day meeting was convened as part of a new federal government plan in response to the burgeoning global awareness of the impending danger of global warming. The conference’s convenor, the then CSIRO senior research scientist Graeme Pearman, had approached some 100 researchers in the months leading up to the conference. He gave them a scenario of likely climate change for Australia for the next 30 to 50 years, developed with his CSIRO colleague Barrie Pittock, and asked them to forecast the implications for agriculture, farming and other sectors. As a result, the conference gave rise to a book called Greenhouse: Planning for Climate Change, which outlined rainfall changes, sea-level rise and other physical changes that are now, three decades on, all too familiar. As the contents page reveals, it also tackled impacts on society – everything from insurance to water planning, mosquito-borne diseases, and even ski fields. Internationally, awareness of global warming had already been building for a couple of decades, and intensifying for a couple of years. While the ozone hole was hogging global headlines, a United Nations scientific meeting in Villach, Austria, in 1985 had issued a statement warning of the dangers posed by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Read More here
30 November 2017, Renew Economy, Finkel’s frustration: Everyone else has a strategy, but not Australia. One senses that Chief scientist Alan Finkel is just a little frustrated. The center-piece of his land-mark Finkel Review, the clean energy target, has been left in the gutter by weak-kneed politicians, and his attempts to bring perspective to the issue of storage has been branded as “eco-evangelism” by the same forces that make policy makers tremble in their bed at night. Little surprise, then, that Finkel chose to focus his last energy speech of the year on the “Myths and Legends of the Australian electricity market”, delivered to the ANU on Wednesday afternoon. And in doing so, he delivers some major brick-bats to both the country’s policy makers (politicians) and its regulators. Finkel argues that Australia has managed a unique trifecta – high prices, high emissions, and high uncertainty – and fallen behind the rest of the world. And he has no doubt who is to blame. “Everyone else has a strategy,” says one of the key points of his presentation (see above). The next line is equally damming: “Regulatory system suffering 10 years of policy paralysis.” Energy insiders and observers know exactly what Finkel is referring to: the first is clear, the political impasse caused by the Far Right and its opposition to basic economics and science. The second offender would be interpreted as the Australian Energy Market Commission – the rule maker that has stood in the way of blindingly obvious reforms such as introducing environmental considerations into the National Electricity Objective, and which has resisted and delayed nearly every proposed change that would nudge Australia’s ageing, creaking energy infrastructure into the 21st Century. Read More here