12 July 2017, The Guardian, Commentators who don’t understand the grid should butt out of the battery debate. Criticising South Australia’s battery for not meeting peak demand is akin to raging at your smartphone because it can’t send a fax. he Australian electricity grid’s most recently announced extremity is a gargantuan battery system in South Australia, designed to bolster grid security. The facility has been met mostly with a warm welcome, interspersed with weird, interesting and tense hostility. Buried in the mix of reactions are clues about how a new phase of grid transition might play out, as we switch from the rapid build out of zero carbon power sources to building and integrating them into a system designed for fossil fuels.Before we interrogate the misunderstandings of South Australia’s new battery, we have to step back and look at the system as a single, electric organism. Read More here
Category Archives: The Mitigation Battle
7 July 2017, Renew Economy, Coal CEO admits that ‘clean coal’ is a myth. While President Donald Trump continues to tout “clean” coal, coal baron Robert Murray says it’s just a fantasy. “Carbon capture and sequestration does not work. It’s a pseudonym for ‘no coal,’” the CEO of Murray Energy, the country’s largest privately held coal-mining company, told E&E News. Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), also called carbon capture and storage, is the process of trapping carbon dioxide from a power plant (during or after burning a hydrocarbon like coal) and then storing it permanently, usually underground. It’s a technically challenging and expensive process — especially problematic in an era of cheap natural gas and renewable energy. Mississippi pulled the plug on one of the country’s biggest CCS efforts last month after the company spent billions on trying, and failing, to make it work…. That’s why it’s so stunning a top coal CEO like Murray would now say that clean coal isn’t a real thing. “It is neither practical nor economic, carbon capture and sequestration,” he said last week. “It is just cover for the politicians, both Republicans and Democrats that say, ‘Look what I did for coal,’ knowing all the time that it doesn’t help coal at all.” And this is from a guy who is a member of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity — which has spent tens of millions of dollars trying to persuade the public that clean coal is the solution to global warming. If, as Murray says, CCS is “neither practical nor economic,” then coal clearly has no future. Two years ago the nations of the world agreed in Paris to bring global CO2 emissions down to zero in the second half of this century — the only way to avoid multiple, irreversible catastrophic climate impacts. Read More here
6 July 2017, Climate Home, The tax-free shipping company that took control of a country’s UN mission. How the tiny, climate-threatened Marshall Islands came to be represented at UN shipping talks by a private company based in Virginia, 11,000 km away. In 2015 Tony de Brum, then foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, came to the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) in London to deliver a simple message: international shipping must decarbonise or be responsible for destroying his country. International shipping could be responsible for nearly a fifth of the world’s carbon emissions by 2050. If the IMO, the branch of the UN that regulates international shipping, failed to set ambitious climate targets, it would be disastrous for low-lying islands like his own, de Brum would say. But when he walked in to the IMO plenary, de Brum found strangers sitting in his country’s place. “I was talking about a Goldilocks situation,” he told Climate Home two years later on the verandah of his bungalow on the Marshallese capital atoll Majuro, a few feet from the lagoon. “We had some difficulty convincing the people who were sitting in our seats, literally, that we were the representatives of the Marshall Islands.” The people de Brum found representing the Marshall Islands were from International Registries Inc. (IRI), a private shipping register headquartered in Reston, Virginia. According to its website, the company provides access to the Marshall Islands flag and a “zero tax jurisdiction that statutorily exempts non-resident domestic corporations from taxation on their income and assets”. Thanks to IRI, the Marshall Islands boasts the second largest fleet of ships in the world and the world’s largest fleet of oil tankers. The company attracts ship owners with the promise of zero corporation tax and no seafarer nationality requirements – the latter allows them to skirt organised labour. The 45,000 offshore companies registered with IRI also benefit from corporate anonymity. De Brum, now climate change ambassador for the Marshall Islands, said he was “appalled” by IRI’s suspicious response to his arrival at the IMO. He did eventually deliver his message. But two years on, the shipping industry remains out of step with the rest of the world on climate change. In 20 years, the IMO has made just one intervention to address carbon emissions: an efficiency index which the International Energy Agency said would only improve efficiency by 1% between 2015 and 2025. A new study by CE Delft found the efficiency of new ships actually got worse in 2016. Read More here
30 June 2017, Renew Economy, Another blow to CCS, as EU power giants bow out of Dutch project. European power giants Engie and Uniper have withdrawn from a test project to capture and store carbon dioxide generated by one of several major new coal plants in the Netherlands, dealing yet another blow to the prospects of “clean coal” technology, in which the Australian government and fossil fuel lobbyists still hold much stock. Reuters reported this week that the two companies – one of which, Engie, the majority owner of Australia’s Loy Yang B brown coal-fired power station in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, and who recently closed Hazelwood, – had told the Dutch government they no longer intended to participate in the CCS project, the biggest of its kind in Europe. Holland’s economic affairs Minister Henk Kamp said in a statement he would “examine whether legal steps can be taken to recoup” unspecified subsidies paid to the companies if they had not changed their minds by mid-September. The minister also said that the companies’ withdrawal from the project “changed nothing” in the government’s resolve to develop large-scale CCS demonstration projects. Read More here