The basic concern is that much of the energy we use ends up as heat, even as in heating the circuits of your computer or your fancy phone. Some turns into light or radio waves which are absorbed as heat by surfaces.

If we use nuclear power, for example, we are making heat out of uranium.

Currently humans use 16 terawatts (TW) of power at any moment, compared to 120,000 TW of solar power absorbed by the Earth at any given time. Energy consumption has been rising by about 2% pa for the last century. Chaisson’s original article based his calculations of (only) 9 billion people by 2100. Those in the OECD will increase their energy usage by 1% pa. The rest will increase theirs by 5% pa until parity is reached, and 1% pa from there. On this basis even if GHG emissions cease immediately the world will warm by 3C in 320 years, when he has us using 4800 TW. Given that we have already warmed by 0.8C since pre-industrial times and a further 0.5C or so is estimated to be in the pipeline, there’s little margin left even if you foolishly think we can warm by 2C with impunity.

There are other sources of power that won’t contribute to global warming. One is hydro power. A second, as John D pointed out on the previous thread, is tidal power, because the gravitational pull of the moon is there and is not going away. A third is bioenergy, which has other problems in some of its forms.

By the way, Chaisson calculates that the modern American uses 12.5 kilowatts of energy, whereas your average hunter gatherer used only 0.15.

There is other interesting material in the article about the effects of wind and solar on the climate. In California, for example, temperatures behind the wind towers were found to be higher at night and as much as 4C lower by day. We only produced 0.2TW from wind worldwide in 2011, so it is thought that we can go much further without affecting the weather generally but the ultimate limits of extractable energy from wind are much lower than solar. At most there is 68TW available, but one estimate indicates only 18TW may be extractable.

Huggy suggested a global grid of ultre-high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines. Perhaps we could do one along each of the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, with lateral connections through the America’s, Europe/Africa and Asia/Australia.

Grossmann et al have been working on the concept of large solar regions connected by HVDC, for example here and here.

Here are a few more matters to consider.

In November last year Giles Parkinson at Climate Spectator spoke to former Ausra chief David Mills about a study Mills had done with former Ausra R&D specialist Wei Li Cheng and US Department of Energy analyst Phil Larochelle looking at whether solar and wind could supply enough electricity to run the US economy, including transport, using hourly data from 2006 and existing technology. They found that they could. Their concept assumed a HVDC network that replaced flatlining baseload power with “a system of flexible and inflexible energy mechanisms based around wind and solar and other sources.”

China, we are told, is installing more HVDC lines than any other country in the world.

You will be aware that there has been a lot of discussion about the prospect of a grid parity cross-over with solar. Back in June last year we looked at whether solar had come of age.

Parkinson’s update after Mills’ talk at the Solar 2011 conference last year made this comment on cost:

“People say we need baseload plans, but we don’t,” he says. Instead, grids can work perfectly well with a mixture of inflexible supply (wind that blows whenever it wants), and flexible supply (solar thermal with storage). Mills has yet to release the financial modelling for his scenario, but notes that wind is already cheaper than new-built coal in the US, and solar thermal with storage, and used as a peaking plant, will be competitive with peaking gas.

Mills was calculating only on large scale concentrated solar, which was his business, rather than on PV, whether in local distributed energy situations or larger arrays, as in this image from Germany:

German PV solar array

Also from the article:

The UNSW study, based on simulations of Australia’s energy needs in 2010, found that the entire supply could be met by a mix of solar thermal with storage, wind, solar PV, existing hydro and peaking gas plants running on biofuels. Only six hours of the year fail to meet the NEM’s reliability standard, all in evening peaks in the winter months.

That study involved Mark Diesendorf, and I worry about him.

A few weeks later Parkinson was at it again, suggesting that solar could be essentially free. If you include the cost a solar array in your mortgage and use the savings in electricity costs to pay off the mortgage you can pay off the mortgage early.

The International Energy Association (IEA) pointed out last year that in 90 minutes, enough sunlight strikes the earth to provide the entire planet’s energy needs for a year. They tested the limit of what they thought could be achieved with solar after 2035 if for whatever reason the world decided to move away from nuclear and carbon sequestration and storage (CCS) technology. I’ve taken a brief look at their vision in a separate post along with the notion of distributed generation. The ultimate would be to combine local generation and sharing with a word-wide network.

Clearly there is much for policy makers to think about and questions can be asked about Chaisson’s scenario. The IEA, for example, sees the world in 2060 as one that is four times richer, but through energy efficiency measures using only 50% more power.

Meanwhile Australia’s outlook for solar was characterised yesterday as not so sunny as we stumble towards establishing large-scale solar projects. The Clean Energy Council said a number of other countries have solar markets that are more mature than ours.

One is India, which is now generating cheap solar (8.78 rupees per kilowatt-hour compared with 17 rupees for diesel) in pursuing its “Solar Mission” to install 20,000 megawatts of solar power by 2022.

Amount of solar shipped

The graph above showing the shipping rate of solar came from the International Energy association (IEA) which has recently issued a report Solar Energy Perspectives. You can download the Executive Summary and Table of Contents here, but it seems you have to buy the document itself. They have provided a small slide show including this:

IEA 2050 scenarios

Giles Parkinson’s has an article in Climate Spectator.

The IEA world energy outlook document looks at energy production out to 2035. Solar Energy Perspectives looks out to 2060, when a requirement of even lower emissions will be needed. They seek to test the limits of deploying renewables, in case carbon sequestration is not widely feasible and the growth of nuclear is constrained.

The IEA’s view of the world in 2060 is one that is four times richer, but through energy efficiency measures using only 50% more power. Hence the world should not feel compelled to use cheap power if it is damaging the planet. Solar may not be all that expensive.

The IEA notes that solar PV is already competitive with “bulk power” in many areas, particularly islands, off-grid locations, and where PV is competing with oil. Solar thermal is also likely to fall substantially – a recent tender for a 50MW solar thermal plant in Mongolia was bid at $140/MWh. It says that solar thermal will be competitive with intermediate and peaking plant by 2020, and by 2030, solar costs will range from $50/MWh in the best solar regions, to $150/MWh in the worst. Other technologies will be grouped north or south of $100/MWh. (Emphasis added)

They see a world of 9 billion people, where 7 billion are living in the sunnier areas. Parkinson says that solar could account for half of all electricity generation, the Executive Summary says a third. Parkinson notes the greater flexibility created through decentralised and off-grid generation and through thermal storage. The distinction between peak power and baseload would become less relevant and:

It notes that “contrary to common belief,” intermittent renewables do not need ME for MW backup. Indeed, it says while significant current capacity of flexible gas will remain online in the coming decades, notably in industrialised countries, their capacity factor will decrease, and there will be no, or little, need to build greenfield fossil-fuelled plants for backup.

Distributed generation

I’m not sure, though, that the IEA goes as far as Huggybunny’s vision of distributed energy generation and storage with 12 kWh of energy storage in every home which he says would totally transform the electricity supply network. Inter alia this would provide energy storage for the network equal to double the generation capacity. This would be used to “soak up” and load-shift intermittent renewables and act to stabilise the distribution network.

Space prevents me summarising the discussion on that thread. Some googling revealed that the phrase “distributed energy generation and storage” is commonly shortened to “distributed energy” (see this Wikipedia article) and the CSIRO does flagship research into it.

The concept covers a range of technologies. The CSIRO seem not to be working on solar.

Storage is an issue, especially cost. Huggy suggested googling PHEVs as dynamically configurable dispersed energy storage (PHEV = plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.

My main comment is that you wouldn’t want to have your car battery drained by people getting up in the morning, turning on heaters and making breakfast. We’ve heard a lot in recent times about new methods of energy storage. I suspect we are going to hear a lot more.

See also the related post Renewable energy for all.

Giles Parkinson in this post quotes extensively Roman Dudenhausen, the CEO and co-founder of German energy consultants ConEnergy, and a recently appointed director to the board of Australia’s Ceramic Fuels Cells.

Energy experts had presumed that offshore wind and gas would fill the nuclear gap, but the cost of offshore wind is proving much higher than expected.

Gas is also not coming to the party in the way many had anticipated. The two issues are the cost of gas, expensive in a country that does not have its own supplies, and because the extent of solar PV that has been rolled out in Germany has flattened the energy cost curve, reducing the opportunity for gas to cash in at peak demand. “The big incentive to build gas-fired plants is gone,” Dudenhausen says.

The key, though, lies in the make-up of the energy market itself. While generation is dominated by four big companies – RWE, E.ON, Vattenfall and EnBW – which have 80 per cent of the market, these companies have only 15 per cent of the retail market, which is highly fragmented, with more than 800 different retailers; and the distribution network is managed by councils and other local and regional authorities. Network utilities are required by law to connect small-scale generators to the grid and to allow energy to be exported. Crucially, it is also part of a broader European grid.

Some of the co-operatives have as many as 7 million customers. Dudenhausen sees opportunities for storage technologies such as ceramic fuel cells. Germany, he says will emerge as a role model for the development of green and decentralised new energy.

“We are ready for radical change,” he says. Some development he contemplates seeing soon include solar PV painted on buildings, and a web-based energy “exchange” among small-scale generator owners – based loosely around the Napster music concept.

The major power companies are in retreat, scaling back and concentrating on international markets as the power industry decentralises. The biggest change is in EnBW, once the largest nuclear generator in Germany:

The state of Baden-Wuerttemberg (then controlled by conservative parties but now by the Greens) last year bought back a 45 per cent stake in the company from French nuclear giant EdF, while another 45 per cent is held by regional councils, and EnBW is being transformed into a utility that focuses on wind, solar and other renewables. “Politicians are willing to take some risks,” Dudenhausen said. “The question about change is not when or if, but how fast – fast or faster. This will be a very difficult period for the traditional energy industry.”

Dudenhausen, of course, has an interest in marketing fuel cells, which could be used as local storage in a system that relied on the distributed generation of energy, rather that grid supply by giant utilities. It does appear that half of Germany’s renewables are owned by citizens or farmers rather than utilities, which should make a good basis for a decentralised system.

Then you get articles like this one where, it is alleged, the decision to get rid of nukes was political “without a technical concept behind it”. There is a worry that there is no incentive for creating standby gas power when much of the power generation is fragmented and decentralised. Standby gas facilities need to be paid for, well, standing by. How does that work in an open market?

There is also a worry about the upgrading of the distribution network.

RWE Chief Executive Juergen Grossmann said more money was needed in high voltage power lines across the region where progress has lagged due to unclear legislation and citizens’ opposition.

Many energy executives are angry that billions of euros are being poured into subsidising renewables to create a decentralised power generation structure instead of funding the infrastructure.

Are these just the bleatings of grid suppliers out of luck in the new environment?

Subsidies to solar PV have in fact been the subject of an undignified public row between the Environment and Economics ministers. Der Spiegel goes into the problem at some length in Solar Subsidy Sinkhole.

Under Germany’s Renewable Energy Law, each new PV system qualifies for 20 years of subsidies, leading to a mountain of future payment obligations. PV installed in 2011 will attract about €18 billion in subsidies over the next 20 years. The grand total of future subsidy commitments is in the order of €100 billion.

And, they say, solar is not competitive:

For the same cost, wind supplies at least five times as much electricity as solar, while hydroelectric power plants generate six times as much. Even biomass plants are still three times as efficient as solar.

Consumers already pay a green energy surcharge, predicted to increase from 3.59 to 4.7 cents per kilowatt hour.

To make matters worse, German solar manufacturers have grown lazy on the subsidies, spend little on research and are finding Chinese competition difficult to handle.

Germany is reducing subsidy levels and the Environment Minister intends to speed this up.

Post Fukushima in May, 2010 Germany decided to phase out nukes by 2020, implying that renewables would need to achieve 35% of electricity output by 2010. Barry Brook had a look at what this might mean and found that wind/solar would need to increase 17-fold in just 9 years.

According to Wikipedia in 2009 wind constituted 40% of renewables as against 6.6% for solar.

Wind power is having problems of its own, with offshore construction of the towers and the grid network connection proving challenging and subject to delays. Commenter Nick has been following this and identifies some additional problems.

Barry Brook’s piece saw success of Germany’s renewables venture as possible, but possible outcomes included the demonstration that nukes really were essential, and power so expensive as to result in the de-industrialisation of Germany. There is a lot riding on the outcome. To me what’s happening does not inspire confidence.

Climate Spectator ran a summary of this fascinating interview with David Crane, the CEO of NRG Energy. NRG energy has more than 24 Gw of power plants in its portfolio, equivalent to nearly half the size of Australia’s entire grid. Climate Spectator says that “it’s kind of interesting when someone with an apparent vested interest in maintaining the status quo – a massive utility with huge investments in coal, nuclear, oil and gas power generation, as well as large-scale solar – should provide an even more powerful argument for change, and for why he is tying his company’s future to a green economy – and this is in America, with no carbon price, and with clean energy incentives under relentless attack from the Republicans.”

In the interview Crane

says that the energy industry is moving rapidly from the “take what I deliver” approach to customers to “we’ll do what you want”. The massive centralised networks and operations like his own will be gradually broken into a decentralised system, and the consumer choice will be driven by two key technologies, solar PV and electric vehicles, and will be enabled by the rollout of another, smart meters.

Crane has interesting things to say on EV, solar PV, decentralisation, innovation and politics in the US. On politics he says:

“In the last four to five years, energy and the environment have become completely politicised along the same red/blue lines that divide every other major issue in Washington. I think that is extremely unfortunate because, if you look at the history of energy and environmental policy – well, the last big energy bill, which was passed in 2005, was passed with bipartisan support. The Clean Air Act of 1990 was signed by George W Bush. So the fall into partisanship is definitely a step backwards.”

And he has an interesting take on Solyndra, the solar start-up that collapsed despite receiving a loan guarantee under a Department of Energy program that was similar to Australia’s proposed Clean Energy Financial Corporation, and which is now being used by the Republicans as an example of green energy waste, just like the Federal Opposition here is painting the CEFC.

“I would say look back at the early history of the high tech industry. Companies and chip makers failed all the time. The manufacturing business in any new area is a brutally Darwinistic place. One thing Solyndra was impacted by is that the cost of their product dropped like a stone, which is our basic point. …What’s bad for Solyndra is good for the consumer.”

Both the summary and the full interview are worth discussing.

Wind energy

Wind energy leads green energy race in China

The number of wind turbines in China, excluding Chinese Taiwan, reached nearly 34,500 at the end of 2010, more than 85 percent of which were produced by Chinese companies.

China’s newly installed wind power capacity reached 18.9 gigawatts in 2010, and the total capacity jumped to 44.7 gigawatts, both ranking first in the world.

UK sails ahead in offshore wind power

The UK has sailed ahead in offshore wind power generation in the past six months, building more offshore windfarms than any other country in the world, and accounting for almost all of the turbines erected in European waters this year.

Norway builds a prototype floating turbine

I hope they build them better than they make videos.

Could algae solve world’s fuel crisis?

Genetically modified blue and green algae could be the answer to the world’s fuel problems. Bioengineers have already developed algae that produce ethanol, oil and even diesel — and the only things the organisms need are sunlight, CO2 and seawater.

But:

carbon dioxide in the air won’t be enough to feed the microalgae. Scientists estimate that a commercial algae fuel plant would require about 10,000 cubic meters of CO2 a day.

And land for ponds the size of Portugal to supply Europe’s fuel needs.

Sun-free photovoltaics

A new photovoltaic energy-conversion system developed at MIT can be powered solely by heat, generating electricity with no sunlight at all. While the principle involved is not new, a novel way of engineering the surface of a material to convert heat into precisely tuned wavelengths of light — selected to match the wavelengths that photovoltaic cells can best convert to electricity — makes the new system much more efficient than previous versions.

The focus appears to be on small button-sized devices.

Land grabs for biofuels undermine food security

This one keeps on surfacing. ‘Investors’ include universities like Harvard and Vanderbilt.

In 2009, total land grabs around the world equalled the size of France, with much of that activity happening in developing countries.

In Kenya’s Tana Delta there is talk of war.

Solar PV tariffs depend on where you live

What you get

depends entirely on whether you voted for Labor or a conservative coalition.

If it’s the latter, and you live in NSW or WA, you may not get anything at all for the energy you export into the grid from your rooftop solar PV panels – between 6c and 8c/kWh if you are lucky. If you are in a Labor state or territory (South Australia, Tasmania, or the ACT) then the chances are that your exported solar-powered electrons are valued at three times the price.

That theory will be tested soon when the conservative government in Victoria announces how it will bring its feed-in tariff to a close. The Queensland Labor government appears happy to continue with its tariff of 44c/kWh for exported energy.

China ready to go with Solar PV

China has, in recent years, come to dominate the global market for solar panels, but it has so far installed little in its country – just 0.8 gigawatts in a grid that has grown to nearly 1,000GW. It has preferred to use the world market – which has grown to more than 40GW of installed solar capacity – as its test tube, and to refine its products.

Now it is set to go with national feed-in tariffs.

by 2015 the installation rate is expected to ramp up to 10GW a year. Given its competitiveness with wind, some analysts expect it to match and overtake the annual wind installation rate of 15GW, which is by far the largest in the world.

It’s a more considered approach than they used with wind.

And, it has also been conscious of the problems of its wind industry, which grew so quickly that many turbines were either of sub-standard quality or could not be connected to the grid, and it has learned carefully from those failures.

And the cost looks as though it could soon be competitive with coal. In fact by 2020 new coal power in China could be negligible. Something for our coal exporters to think about.

Germany boosts clean-energy research by 75% to ease nuclear exit

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Cabinet will pump 3.4 billion euros ($4.9 billion) into renewables, energy efficiency, energy storage and grid-technology research in the next three years, the Environment Ministry said today in an e-mailed statement.

Distributed energy model at Anna Maria Island in the Gulf of Mexico

Finally another link to an interesting development on a barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico.

To my untutored eye, the solutions take advantage of features of the site – sandy soil, plenty of rain, plenty of sunshine and a subtropical climate. And it’s not cheap. Still the general strategy may indicate what can be done in other places.

Wind power

Deep in the Saturday Courier mail was an article plugging coal seam gas and interviewing the author of a “new report”, one Matt Ridley. The report was easily run down. It can be downloaded from here.

If you noticed a graph on the header that was giving you a certain message, it could be because The Global Warming Policy Foundation has an academic board with luminaries such as Professors Carter, Lindzen and Plimer. I don’t know whether Matt Ridley as a science writer has committed any crimes against science, but I was interested in the following table, which was derived from a US Government source:

Levelised costs of new generation resources

The table gives levelised costs of new generation resources in the US in terms dollars per megawatt-hour.

The document also contains this quote from Robert F Kennedy Jr:

Surprisingly, America has more gas generation capacity – 450 gigawatts – than it does for coal. However, public regulators generally require utilities to dispatch coal-generated power in preference to gas. For that reason, high-efficiency gas plants are in operation only 36 per cent of the time. By changing the dispatch rule nationally to require that whenever coal and gas plants are competing head-to-head, gas generation must be utilised first, we could quickly reduce coal generation and achieve massive emissions reductions. — Robert F. Kennedy, Financial Times, 19 July 2009. (Emphasis mine)

Shame, Obama, shame!

Meanwhile here’s a selection of items on renewable energy, many from Climate Spectator.

Give and take as US clean energy feels the pinch

It seems that subsidies for renewable energy and biofuels will come under increasing pressure as the budget deficit is reigned in. Currently there is a tax credit of 45 US cents per gallon on biofuel and a tariff on imported ethanol of 54 cents a gallon. But

the US Department of Energy issued more than $US2.2 billion loan guarantees to solar plants, clearly signalling that the Obama administration remains keen on building up the country’s renewable power capacity.

And Connecticut passed legislation to set up the first development bank in the US for clean energy and efficiency projects.

Electric vehicles are coming to Canberra

Better Place plans to bring the first switchable battery vehicle, the Renault Fluence ZE, to Canberra in early 2012. The medium-sized car should sell for around $30,000. In addition

Better Place will then offer a battery leasing arrangement that will include the cost of the battery, access to charging stations at home and in public areas, and the cost of the electricity, as well as navigation services, 24-hour customer service and support.

New solar cell technology

Researchers report a new solar cell based on colloidal quantum dots (CQD). The technology harnesses both the visible and the infrared rays, achieving in principle up to 42% efficiency, compared with 14 to 18% in solar cells currently used on the roofs of houses and in consumer products.

New solar record

California-based start-up Alta Devices has achieved a record solar-cell efficiency of 28.2%, a mark, nearing the “theoretical maximum” of 33.5%.

More work needs to be done before it becomes commercial.

Australian Clean Technologies Ideas Competition

From the same post (scroll down to Wanted: Eureka moments) the federal government last week launched its Australian Clean Technologies Ideas Competition – a national competition aimed at helping to make local innovation a global success.

“Australian clean technologies businesses were worth $22 billion in 2010 and the sector employs over 25,000 people nationally. The government’s goal is to develop a sector that helps Australia meet the growing needs of a low carbon economy,” innovation minister Kim Carr said at the launch. “The Australian competition will promote a uniquely Australian take on developing this high-tech, high-skill sector and, I hope, result in some ‘Eureka’ moments.”

Challenge to Productivity Commission solar costs

The Australian PV Association (APVA) reckons that solar PV could be between four and 11 times more effective as a way to cut greenhouse pollution than the Productivity Commission has calculated.

The Commission claims that the cost of emissions reduction achieved via solar PV is $432-$1043/tonne CO2. According to the APVA, the true figure is $90-$95/t CO2, depending on the installation location.

The article says that crossover with grid prices will be reached in four years and cites reports of similar developments in other countries.

Barack Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu is in charge of the government’s “SunShot” Initiative which aims to get baseload solar cheaper than grid electricity by 2020.

Opinions on clean energy

Lane Crockett, local General Manager at Pacific Hydro, believes that the renewable energy industry has been subject to increasing venomous attacks in the media.

These attacks range from being poorly informed, to outright misinformation, and all are orchestrated in a way that leads you to believe that a series of well-funded, politically-motivated campaigns are underway.

The 100% Renewable Energy campaign conducted 14,000 conversations confirming that over 90% of Australians want more renewable energy and that 75% want to see a price on carbon.

in June 2010 Pacific Hydro commissioned research into attitudes towards our future energy supply focusing on a number of Victorian regions where wind farms were either operating or were proposed. This research revealed that people living in these areas overwhelmingly supported wind energy over gas and coal. 81% were supportive of wind energy being built in their region.

Similar results came from a Climate Institute poll, conducted nationally by Auspoll in June 2010, that showed 86 per cent of respondents wanted to see more renewable energy such as solar, wind and geothermal power.

in April 2011, the Clean Energy Council engaged Newspoll to conduct a nation-wide poll which found that over 80 per cent of respondents wanted to see more renewable energy.

The plan, described in fact sheets from the Queensland Government and Origin Energy, is very much at the conceptual stage, but pretty straightforward – build a big hydroelectric plant on the Purari River near the small village of Wabo. Some electricity would be used in Papua New Guinea, but most would be exported, via undersea cable similar to Basslink, to the Queensland electricity grid.

At this stage, it’s little more than a bit of Flash animation and a press release. But there’s no obvious technical reason why it wouldn’t work. If it were to go ahead, however, it would raise all sorts of interesting political questions, to say the least.

The first thing to note is that this is an example of the kind of innovative solutions that a more bottom-up approach can bring, as compared to the top-down central planning that Zero Carbon Australia advocates. It didn’t occur to the writers of that plan to import hydroelectricity from PNG. Nor did it occur to me. But if you’re prepared to trust the market occasionally, it doesn’t matter if the central planners don’t think of it.

That shouldn’t be taken as a statement that this project is necessarily a good idea. I’ve never been to Papua New Guinea, and certainly haven’t been anywhere near the Wabo River. But Google Maps suggests that it’s rather wild country, to say the least. The fact sheets are notably vague on the question of whether a dam will be required, what size that dam might be, how much of the river’s flow will be diverted, and for what distance. Who knows what the effect on the local wildlife might be – let alone the local population. Besides that, flooding areas of tropical rainforest results in lots of methane being released, to the point where it might even be worse for the climate than burning fossil fuels.

All of this poses challenges to the Australian government, not least as it attempts to set the rules for electricity generation into the future. At the moment, Australia has one main mechanism for encouraging low-emissions electricity – the Renewable Energy Target, which requires electricity retailers to buy a certain fraction of their electricity from renewable energy. We may also get a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme. Both of these are potentially complicated by importing large quantities of hydroelectricity from PNG.

At the moment, as far as I can tell, the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Act says nothing about whether a foreign power station, such as proposed, is eligible to become an accredited supplier of renewable energy. Even if it is, however, it’s by no means clear that it should. Regardless of the fate of this particular project succeeds, Australia will not be able to meet any more than a small fraction of its electricity needs from PNG’s hydro resources, and the whole point of the RET is to encourage the development and deployment of technologies that can. This power station, if accredited, would blow a massive hole in the renewable energy market, killing off any incentive to deploy more innovative technologies. As such, it’s my view that the scheme not be eligible for REC’s, and if necessary the REC legislation should be amended to explicitly exclude foreign hydro.

The second question involves the interaction with carbon pricing. A carbon price, by pushing up the wholesale price of electricity in Australia, would obviously make this project more viable, which is fine as far as it goes. But there’s a problem. If the scheme does result of large-scale rainforest flooding, and the scheme doesn’t pay a financial cost for the resultant emissions, that would be unfair to existing Australian generators, who are suddenly competing against somebody who doesn’t pay a carbon price. The natural thing to do would be to put a charge on any electricity from the plant. But that’s not how international trading of any other good or service is handled under the proposed CPRS – instead, “emissions-intensive trade exposed” businesses receive free permits as compensation. Obviously, I’d prefer to have the carbon charge apply to the imported electricity, but that may not make Craig Emerson happy…

But there’s another complication. Papua New Guinea not only has a lot of hydroelectricity potential, it has a pile of natural gas, and it’s periodically proposed to pipe some of it to Australia. What happens if some entrepreneur decides to burn some of it in Papua New Guinean gas-fired power stations, and send the electricity to Australia via an undersea cable?

Something more for the carbon price committee to chew on.

Based on AEMO market data, you can see how much power south-eastern Australia’s wind farms are actually producing, and compare the patterns to total demand.

For what it’s worth, July 2010′s performance is particularly illustrative in my view.

Hat tip Barry Brook.

The survey, part of Auspoll’s national omnibus of 1500 voters, found:

* When asked which party leader “do you trust most to deliver on the issues of pollution and climate change?” 43 per cent of voters responded “no difference”.
* Fifty-eight per cent of soft voters (uncertain about their vote) saw “no difference” between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott when asked who they trust more to deliver on pollution and climate change.
* Forty-five per cent of soft voters said they would be more likely to vote Labor if Prime Minister Julia Gillard was to commit to negotiating and delivering a pollution reduction scheme within the next 12 months.

Julia Gillard has identified climate change as the third issue she wants to resolve before an election is called, and Cabinet is expected to discuss climate change policy tomorrow. If, as appears likely, the policy announcement won’t vary the timetable for considering an ETS, and will focus instead on energy efficiency and funding for renewable energy, this policy stance will be more about neutralising the prospect of a Coalition scare campaign than anything else. The direction of rhetoric emanating from the government seems to suggest that talk of a carbon price is just that, and the talk about consultation and consensus appears directed largely at business.

Given that Kevin Rudd’s backflip on the CPRS was a key moment in Labor’s loss of public support, the ACF poll would indicate that there’s a political opportunity going begging here. At a deeper level, it’s hard not to wonder about why the government is still so shaky about its election prospects.

NB: Previous discussion of the possibilities for an interim climate change policy is here.

The reason? Apparently cooling the total heat generated by these things is equivalent in greenhouse terms to the entire airline industry of the world. There is heaps of green energy in Iceland and with modern telecomms these thing can be anywhere, so why not have a go at cornering the market in computer servers?

I can’t find a link and would appreciate it if anyone can. If true, this news item is interesting on several counts.

First, it seems to me rational that the world should locate industrial functions where they are optimal in terms of the ecosystem. But given the self-interest of nation states this is probably a pipe dream. Still you never know what might happen if the world ever takes the threat of dangerous climate change with the seriousness it deserves.

Secondly, Australia with a visionary government would surely be looking for similar opportunities. We have probably unequalled potential for green energy development, especially in terms of concentrated solar and geothermal.

So how about it Mr Rudd and Ms Wong? If we can do Netco we can do a major initiative to introduce an electricity network with zero emissions. There should even be synergies between these two great nation-building initiatives.

And, like Telstra, companies involved in mining and producing power with hydrocarbons can choose between becoming dinosaurs or getting with the new strength. They should see themselves as energy companies rather than hydrocarbon companies.