3 January 2016, Climate News Network, Thinking beyond the Age of Fire. Human society without fire is unthinkable. But a new book says we need to think of a world where fire gives way to electricity. In December, in an unprecedented demonstration of international unity, 195 countries adopted the first-ever, universal, legally-binding agreement to take action on climate change. It was a decision that, to be truly effective, requires an obligation to think again, at the most fundamental level, about how humans manage energy and maintain the essential comforts of civilisation. Humans cannot go back to the beginning and start again, but if they had to, Walt Patterson’s new book would be as fundamental a guide to the challenges as any. It doesn’t contain many helpful prescriptions about the most efficient exploitation of the emerging technologies that could deliver renewable energy, or deliver more bang for the megabuck of investment. But that’s not the point. Patterson’s point is that a new start means a fresh attitude, and Electricity vs Fire is as nice a statement of the essential simplicity – and the scale – of the challenge as I have yet seen. Patterson first made his name 45 years ago as an informed critic of the nuclear industry, and as one of the early voices of Friends of the Earth. He starts simply by reducing what humans do to six simple and very easily described physical actions. Read More here
Tag Archives: Renewables
31 December 2015, Climate News Network, Paris fails to revive the nuclear dream. Charlatans, or planetary saviours? Post-Paris views on the nuclear industry suggest few experts believe it will bring closer a world rid of fossil fuels. In Paris, in early December, the advocates of nuclear power made yet another appeal to world leaders to adopt their technology as central to saving the planet from dangerous climate change. Yet analysis of the plans of 195 governments that signed up to the Paris Agreement, each with their own individual schemes on how to reduce national carbon emissions, show that nearly all of them exclude nuclear power. Only a few big players – China, Russia, India, South Korea and the United Kingdom – still want an extensive programme of new–build reactors. To try to understand why this is so the US-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists asked eight experts in the field to look at the future of nuclear power in the context of climate change. One believed that large-scale new-build nuclear power “could and should” be used to combat climate change, and another thought nuclear could play a role, although a small one. The rest thought new nuclear stations were too expensive, too slow to construct and had too many inherent disadvantages to compete with renewables. Industry in distress Amory Lovins, co-founder and chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute, produced a devastating analysis saying that the slow-motion decline of the nuclear industry was simply down to the lack of a business case. The average nuclear reactor, he wrote, was now 29 years old and the percentage of global electricity generated continued to fall from a peak of 17.6% in 1996 to 10.8% in 2014. “Financial distress stalks the industry”, he wrote. Lovins says nuclear power now costs several times more than wind or solar energy and is so far behind in cost and building time that it could never catch up. The full details of what he and other experts said are on the Bulletin’s site, with some of their comments below. Read More here
17 December 2015, The Guardian, There is a new form of climate denialism to look out for – so don’t celebrate yet. After the signing of a historic climate pact in Paris, we might now hope that the merchants of doubt – who for two decades have denied the science and dismissed the threat – are officially irrelevant. But not so fast. There is also a new, strange form of denial that has appeared on the landscape of late, one that says that renewable sources can’t meet our energy needs. Oddly, some of these voices include climate scientists, who insist that we must now turn to wholesale expansion of nuclear power. Just this past week, as negotiators were closing in on the Paris agreement, four climate scientists held an off-site session insisting that the only way we can solve the coupled climate/energy problem is with a massive and immediate expansion of nuclear power. More than that, they are blaming environmentalists, suggesting that the opposition to nuclear power stands between all of us and a two-degree world. That would have troubling consequences for climate change if it were true, but it is not. Numerous high quality studies, including one recently published by Mark Jacobson of Stanford University, show that this isn’t so. We can transition to a decarbonized economy without expanded nuclear power, by focusing on wind, water and solar, coupled with grid integration, energy efficiency and demand management. In fact, our best studies show that we can do it faster, and more cheaply. Read more here
17 December 2015, Renew Economy, Tasmania switches gas fired generator back on as hydro runs low. Hydro Tasmania has announced that it will re-assemble and restart its Tamar Valley gas-fired generators for the first time in 18 months in response to the driest spring in the state ever recorded. The state-owned company, which powers the local grid mostly with hydro and wind energy, and exports some of that to the mainland, says hydro levels have sunk to around 25 per cent after the driest September to November period on record, although better inflows have been received in recent weeks. It says that restarting the Tamar Valley gas generators, which operate as a combined cycle gas turbine (broadly equivalent to base load rather than peaking) makes “good commercial sense”. Presumably because it allows the limited hydro to be conserved for higher pricing peaking events. The fall in hydro reservoirs is not just a problem in Tasmania. Earlier this year, Snowy Hydro decided to pay $234 million for the Colongra gas-fired power plant in NSW. Even though the plant had only operated for a total of 300 hours in 5 years, and rising gas prices basically priced it out of the market, Snowy Hydro bought the gas peaking plant as an insurance against the risk of declining water levels. Its gas plants in Victoria performed a similar role in the last drought in that state. Read more here