29 January 2018, Renew Economy, Victorian networks blow a fuse in heatwave – Coalition blows its mind on Twitter. Conservatives love a summer blackout. And with two-thirds of peak blackout season already gone, they were not going to miss the opportunity presented by last night’s outages across Victoria to point the finger at renewable energy, the state Labor government’s support of renewables, and most of all last year’s closure of the privately owned Hazelwood coal-fired power plant. The only slight hitch in this ingenious plan is that none of the above had anything at all to do with it. On Sunday, the state reached record grid demand for a Sunday in the midst of the heatwave, but around 55,000 Victorians suffered without power at various times on Sunday evening – and many continue to do so on Monday – after faults across the state’s distribution networks. As explained by the Energy Networks Association, the assorted network companies, and the Australian Energy Market Operator, the blackouts were caused by faults in the *delivery* of the electricity – and not the *supply* or generation of it. That is, as absolutely everyone in the state turned their air conditioners up to 11 to cope with temperatures hovering around 40°C – and an overnight low of around 30°C – the state’s “poles and wires” (mostly substation fuses) systems were overwhelmed by demand that peaked at around 9,144MW: “the highest operational demand for a Sunday, ever,” says AEMO. Read More here
Tag Archives: coal
27 January 2018, DeSmog, Macron’s Pledge to Wipe out Coal Is Just as Meaningless as Trump’s Plan to Revive It. In a speech at the 2018 World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland, French President Emmanuel Macron said he wanted to “make France a model in the fight against climate change” and promised to shut all coal-fired power plants by 2021 — two years earlier than the timetable put forward by his predecessor. While Macron’s move is mainly symbolic since France only generates about 2.2 percent of its power from coal, it signals his government is actively trying to wean itself off fossil fuels in sharp contrast to the current policy of his U.S. counterpart. “We have finally ended the war on coal,” pretty much sums up American policy these days, as President Donald Trump declared in a recent speech. Behind the headlines and clear policy contrasts, however, lies an important point: The U.S. is likely to become coal plant free anyway, with or without presidential support. The reason is economics, which, as always, trumps the words of a politician — even if it can take longer. The US and Coal In the U.S., the Energy Information Administration has been charged, since the energy crises of the 1970s, with providing an unbiased view of the types of energy used to power the U.S. economy. Its data show that in 2006 about 10 percent of all electric power plants — 616 — ran on coal. By 2016, the latest year for which data are available, that figure dropped to just 4 percent, or 381 coal-fired power plants. That compares with 1,801 natural gas plants and 3,624 “other renewables” such as wind, up from 1,659 and 843 in 2006, respectively. Read More here
11 January 2018, ABC News – Science: Forget Paris: Australia needs to stop pretending we’re tackling climate change. As the Bureau of Meteorology confirms another record-breaking year for temperatures in Australia, we should expect a sense of urgency to be creeping into Australia’s climate policy. Instead, we’re seeing the opposite. While 2015-17 were all within the hottest six years on record, our carbon emissions also continued to increase during the same period, including an all-time peak in 2017, when unreliable land-use data was excluded from the analysis. This is despite signing up to the Paris Agreement in 2015, which outlined a plan to reduce our carbon emissions by 26-28 per cent by 2030. Government data pushed out under the cloak of Christmas indicates that we will be about 140 million tonnes — or about 30 per cent — above that target based on current growth Government optimism at odds with UN: Despite last financial year’s continued emissions growth, Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg remains upbeat about Australia’s commitment to the Paris Agreement. “If you look on a yearly basis that is true [that emissions went up]. But if you look on the last quarter, they went down. If you look at the trend, it is improving. And when you talk about the 2030 target, which is our Paris commitment, the numbers that were most recently shown, indicate that they were 30 per cent better than when Labor were last in office,” the Minister told RN Breakfast. But his optimism is at odds with a number of experts, and is contrary to what was reported in the United Nations Emissions Gap Report (see below), 2017. “Government projections indicate that emissions are expected to reach 592 [million tonnes] in 2030, in contrast to the targeted range of 429-440 [million tonnes],” the report states.. Read More here
19 December 2017, Renew Economy, The further unravelling of Adani’s Carmichael coal project. While the Adani Group has bounced back many times from adverse developments with respect to it’s Carmichael coal proposal, the run of negative news has continued at a rapid clip of late, putting the project in real doubt. This week started badly for Adani, with the Downer Group announcing it had relinquished a proposed A$2bn non-binding Letter of Award received in December 2014. This follows on from the Queensland government delivering its veto of the proposed A$1bn loan subsidy last week and a multitude of leading Chinese banks announcing a decision to avoid this controversial project the week before. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) would suggest there is a common point of linkage: the building momentum of the Paris Climate Agreement combines with the unprecedented rate of renewable energy deflation evident globally in the last two years to make increasingly clear stranded asset risks for greenfield thermal coal export proposals. As aptly highlighted by Geoff Summerhayes, Executive Director of the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), the entry into force of the Paris Climate Agreement ‘brings the horizon forward’ for action on climate change. Read More here