13 November 2016, Reuters, World CO2 emissions stay flat for third year, helped by China falls: study. World greenhouse gas emissions stayed flat for the third year in a row in 2016, thanks to falls in China, even as the pro-coal policies of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump mean uncertainty for the future, an international study said on Monday. Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry were set to rise a tiny 0.2 percent in 2016 from 2015 levels to 36.4 billion tonnes, the third consecutive year with negligible change and down from three percent growth rates in the 2000,s, it said. The Global Carbon Project, grouping climate researchers, welcomed the flatlining of emissions amid global economic growth. But it cautioned that the world was not yet firmly on track for a greener economy. “It’s far too early to say we’ve reached a peak in emissions,” co-author Glen Peters, of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, told Reuters, referring to the findings issued at U.N. talks on climate change in Marrakesh, Morocco. “So far the slowdown has been driven by China,” Peters said, adding Beijing’s climate change policies would also be the dominant force in future since it accounts for almost 30 percent of global emissions. Chinese emissions were on track to dip 0.5 percent this year, depressed by slower economic growth and coal consumption. U.S. emissions were projected to fall by 1.7 percent in 2016, also driven by declines in coal consumption, according to the study published in the journal Earth System Science Data. By contrast, emissions in many emerging economies are still rising. Carbon dioxide is the main man-made greenhouse gas blamed for trapping heat, stoking disruptions to world water and food supplies with heat waves, floods, storms and droughts. Read More here
Tag Archives: Renewables
11 November 2016, Energy Post, Lumenaza creates regional electricity markets: “We want to connect up all 1.4 million solar PV producers in Germany with consumers locally”. A new software platform in Germany lets utilities buy and sell “regional electricity” by connecting up small producers with consumers. Start-up Lumenaza, founded three years ago, meets a growing demand for transparency, explains CEO and founder Christian Chudoba in an exclusive interview with Energy Post. Unlike a typical virtual power plant, Lumenaza targets tiny producers such as owners of rooftop solar. Its goal is to connect up all of Germany’s 1.4 million small power producers. Lumenaza was inspired by a family party in southern Germany. Christian Chudoba, today the company CEO, realised that everyone around him was generating electricity, but there was no way of buying this local produce. In response, he founded co-Lumenaza with his Siemens colleague Bernhard Böhmer in February 2013. Three years later, the company offers utilities a software platform that directly connects up small, local producers with consumers in the same region. Eight projects are up and running and another 3-4 expected by the end of the year. Chudoba comes from the world of software telecommunications at Siemens. He had the business idea; Böhmer, today Chief Technology Officer, supplied the software expertise. Oliver March, now CFO, jointed one year later bringing in the financial expertise. The two have created a product that they believe can help improve the acceptance for building more renewables in Germany. Just as consumers like to buy local, producers “like the idea of knowing where the electricity they produce is going”, says Chudoba. We call it a marketplace or “utility-in-a-box” software. The platform buys the electricity from local [renewables] producers and sells it to consumers. Read More here
2 November 2016, Renew Economy, Malcolm Turnbull blown off course by South Australia’s 100% renewable energy. It is something of an irony that prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s attempts to visit the South Australian city of Port Lincoln over the weekend should have been thwarted by strong winds – winds, it should be noted, that provided 100 per cent of the state’s power needs for much of the day. According to local media reports, Turnbull’s planned visit to Port Lincoln on Sunday was aborted when his plane was unable to land after two attempts due to strong winds. It is not the first time Turnbull’s attempts to land in Port Lincoln have been thwarted by strong winds – a similar attempt a month ago was also abandoned in the face of bad weather. The winds in Sunday were strong – not strong enough to stop wind turbines from spinning however, as deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce and South Australia Senator Nick Xenophon like to believe, but enough to provide more than 100% of South Australia’s underlying electricity demand for more than 10 hours on Sunday. According to Dylan McConnell from the Melbourne Energy Institute, who provided the graph above, wind provided more than 100 per cent of the state’s needs from 8:10am to 6:40pm. During that period the price averaged approximately negative $25/MWh. At 2pm on Sunday, wind was (very briefly) was producing 46 per cent more than underlying demand – around 1370 MW of wind and 935MW demand from the grid (which does not include rooftop solar being consumed in homes). As it happened, it was not just windy that day, but also quite sunny. And according to the APVI solar map, rooftop solar PV was producing about 293MW, which means that variable renewable energy sources (wind and solar) were producing 1,670MW. Read More here
21 October 2016, Renew Economy, A renewable fiction: Myths mainstream media refuses to let go. For reasons that are not entirely clear, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar appear to have gotten the better of mainstream media. For years now, many in mainstream media have been propagating myths about renewable energy in general, and wind and solar in particular. It’s unclear why this is so – whether it is simply about ideology, politics, the protection of vested interests or simply the fear of new technologies and new ideas. Since the big price spike in South Australia and then the blackout, however, the myth making has reached plague proportions and has spread to some surprising corners. From the arch conservative Andrew Bolt of News Limited to Chris Uhlmann at the ABC, and via so much of the Murdoch media, the Fairfax Press, commercial TV and radio and rather too many in ABC radio and TV, the myths have been perpetuated, egged along by conservative politicians. The instances are so many that it is impossible to count, let alone list, and for this article we will ignore the cheap sloganeering such as “renewables are a fraud”, “wind energy doesn’t work,” and “wind energy is a boondoggle.” The problem we identify in the following examples is that there still seems an inherent bias against wind energy, and it appears to be based either on a lack of understanding of how energy systems work, or how they are changing. They seem convinced that renewables are the primary cause of high electricity prices, that fossil fuel plants don’t need back up, that transmission lines were only built to link remote and unreliable wind farms. They fail to understand – and appear to have no interest in asking – that new technologies can make the grid cheaper and more stable, and that we should be accelerating the transition rather than slowing it down and turning to old and expensive alternatives. Read More here