23 June 2015, IIASA, A new resource for clean energy systems: IIASA researchers have contributed to a major new reference work on renewable energy, climate mitigation methods, and sustainable energy. The world’s energy supply is a complex system, linked to climate change, the environment, and poverty. TheHandbook of Clean Energy Systems, a new six-volume reference work, provides a comprehensive view of current research on clean energy, ranging from technology for different types of renewable energy to questions of energy storage, and long term sustainability. IIASA researchers from the Ecosystems Services and Management (ESM) and Energy programs contributed to five chapters in the work, which was published last week. It complements the IIASA-coordinated Global Energy Assessment (2012), which explored energy system transformations for achieving goals on climate change, energy access, and energy security. Read More here
Category Archives: The Mitigation Battle
19 June 2015, Renew Economy, Queensland pushes through massive rises in fixed electricity charges. A victory for McMansions? Fixed charges to households surge, while small business may pay two-thirds of their bill on fixed charges, as government owned utilities move against solar and energy efficiency. The Queensland government managed to get some sympathetic coverage on the ABC and in the local mainstream media – and even some specialist websites who should know better – about the supposed “fall” in electricity bills in the upcoming year. But what they did not mention – presumably because it wasn’t in the Queensland Competition Authority press release – was a huge jump in fixed charges that will penalise households and small business, and reduce the incentive to install rooftop solar.
Fixed charges for households will jump more than 20 per cent to $1.07 a day, meaning that with GST, households will pay a minimum $428 a year on fixed charges, no matter how little electricity they consume. The consumption rate has been cut to 22c/kWh but this means nothing for households that consume around 7kWh a day – pensioners and single person households for instance, and others who pay attention to energy efficiency. Their annual bill will now be more than $1,050 – which equates to a rate of 42c/kWh, probably the highest in the world. And their ability to offset that with solar is greatly reduced because so much of the cost is unavoidable. But small businesses – butchers, restaurants, takeaway food installations, or anyone using refrigeration and cooking – face an even greater proportion of fixed charges under the new scheme. Read More here
18 June 2015, Carbon Brief, China has greatest potential to raise climate ambition: The world is not on track to avoid dangerous climate change and China has the greatest potential to close the gap in climate ambition, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). In a special report on energy and climate change the IEA has added up the combined impact of current climate pledges and other likely policies, including China’s hotly anticipated contribution for the post-2020 period. Dr Fatih Birol, IEA chief economist, says in an interview with Carbon Brief that these pledges are far from what would be needed to limit warming to below 2C. We’ve taken a look at which countries would make the biggest contribution to bridging the gap towards 2C, under the IEA’s cost-neutral bridge scenario.
Climate ambition gap
The climate ambition gap is widely recognised. Last week, UN climate chief Christiana Figueres told Carbon Brief it was “completely clear” that current pledges would be insufficient to avoid 2C of warming above pre-industrial temperatures over the course of the century – the internationally agreed climate target. The IEA’s new assessment suggests they would instead put the world on track for 2.6C by 2100 and 3.5C after 2200. Their long-term impact may be “rather small”, says Birol, but that’s largely because they extend at most 15 years out to 2030. The pledges collectively bend the world’s emissions trajectory (blue line, below) away from business as usual emissions (green line) by 6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO2). Even in the short term, however, the gap between the pledges and what would be needed for 2C (yellow line) grows rapidly, reaching 9GtCO2 in 2030.
Emissions growth under the IEA’s ‘current policies’ scenario, corresponding to business as usual (BAU), compared to the path with current climate pledges, the IEA’s bridge scenario and a scenario consistent with 2C. Source: IEA special report on climate and energy, IEA World Energy Outlook 2014. Chart by Carbon Brief.
15 June 2015, Climate News Network, Long-lived CO2 warms world for many millennia. The heat given off by burning fossil fuels warms the Earth far less than the carbon dioxide emitted, which research shows traps the heat in the atmosphere for thousands of years. Gun the engine, and the ignition of fossil fuel produces not just working energy but heat that dissipates quickly into the atmosphere. But it also produces carbon dioxide that dissipates into the atmosphere. And in less than two months, according to new research, that pulse of carbon dioxide will have engendered more heat for the planet than the original touch of the accelerator. Xiaochun Zhang and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution at Stanford, California, in the United States report in Geophysical Research Letters that the carbon dioxide warming exceeds the heat released by a single act of oil combustion in just 45 days. Light the gas in the cooking stove and the heating cost to the planet is exceeded in 59 days. Burn a lump of coal, and the atmosphere feels the greater heat in just 34 days. And in all three cases, the pulses of carbon dioxide will go on heating the planet – and on, and on. “Ultimately, the warming induced by carbon dioxide over the many thousands of years it remains in the atmosphere would exceed warming from combustion by a factor of 100,000 or more,” said Professor Caldeira. Read More here