Australians will bear yet another blow to our cost of living in July when electricity prices will surge up to 18.3%, which amounts to over A$250 per year in some cases.

This is partly due to geopolitical tensions driving up the cost of generating electricity from coal and gas – costs that are increasingly volatile – leading the Australian Energy Regulator to increase its so-called “default market offers” for electricity retailers in New South Wales, South Australia and Queensland.

If the Albanese government ever needed another reason to turbocharge its efforts on renewable energy and storage, this is it.

Investing in renewables, energy storage, electric vehicles and other clean industries will not only lower power prices, but will also lower emissions, increase our self-sufficiency, create new jobs, and protect us from international price shocks like we’re seeing now.

Fortunately, the Albanese government has a strong mandate for game-changing climate action this decade. The government aims for renewable energy to make up over 80% of Australia’s electricity mix by 2030, but its pledge of $20 billion for new transmission infrastructure means we can aim higher and go faster.

Holding us back, however, is continued investment in the coal industry. Indeed, doubling down on fossil fuels right now would be extraordinarily reckless from a security perspective – as the United Nations climate envoy pointed out this month, “no one owns the wind or the sun”.

So how can Australia transform into a renewable energy powerhouse? Here are three important ways the Albanese government can meet its ambition swiftly and justly.

1. Energy justice with community energy

Communities must be placed at the heart of the energy transition if we’re to see energy justice in Australia.
Energy justice is when all members of society are granted access to clean energy, particularly disadvantaged communities such as those without housing security.

One way to make this happen is with community-owned renewable energy and storage, such as wind energy co-operatives. For example, the Hepburn Wind Co-operative is a 4.1 megawatt wind farm owned by more than 2,000 community shareholders. Another example is community-owned social enterprise electricity retailers such as Enova, which has more than 1,600 community shareholders.

Labor has made a great start. Its Powering Australia plan pledges to install 400 community batteries and develop shared solar banks to give renters, people in apartments, and people who can’t afford upfront installation costs access to solar energy.

The next step should be a rapid roll out of a federal community solar scheme, similar to a program in the United States. The US Community Solar scheme is backed by legislation to create a third-party market for communities. It allows communities to own solar panels or a portion of a solar project, or to buy renewable energy with a subscription.

This means lower socio-economic households can benefit from clean, reliable and cheaper electricity from solar when they’re not able to put panels on their rooftop.

Australia needs a dedicated national policy or government body that builds on the work of other bodies, such as the Coalition for Community Energy, to govern community-based energy and enshrine the principles of energy justice.

2. Rapid uptake of offshore wind

Offshore wind farms represent a key opportunity for Australia’s decarbonisation – the combined capacity of all proposed offshore wind projects would be greater than all Australia’s coal-fired power plants.

But Australia’s offshore wind industry is only in its infancy. And while Labor’s Powering Australia plan targets manufacturing wind turbine components, it lacks policy ambition for offshore wind.

Renewable Energy Zones (a bit like the renewables equivalent of a power station) are currently being rolled out Australia wide. These should encompass offshore wind zones to encourage the rapid uptake of this vast energy source.

For example, in February, the Renewable Energy Zone in the Hunter-Central Coast region had seven offshore wind proposals and attracted over $100 billion in investment. Potential renewable energy projects in this region represent over 100,000 gigawatt hours of energy – the same as the annual output of ten coal-fired power stations.

The federal government should also set an offshore wind target to accelerate uptake. Victoria, for instance, recently announced a target of 2 gigawatts installed by 2032, 4 gigawatts by 2035, and 9 gigawatts by 2040.

Similarly, the United Kingdom recently increased its offshore wind target to 50 gigawatts by 2030 – the equivalent to powering every household in the nation, according to the UK government.

Despite its potential, Australia only introduced federal legislative framework for offshore wind last year – and it needs work. For example, the legislation doesn’t incorporate marine spatial planning, which is a process of coordinating sectors that rely on the ocean, such as marine conservation, the fishing industry, and the government.

3. Just transitions for coal communities

The Australian Energy Market Operator says the National Electricity Market could be 100% powered by renewables by 2025. Further closures of aging and unreliable coal-fired power stations are inevitable.

The government must not leave carbon-intensive regions behind in the transition to new clean industries. If we do this right, generations of Australians could be working in renewable energy, clean manufacturing, renewable hydrogen, and the extraction of critical minerals.

Creating a national coal commission could help produce a roadmap away from fossil fuels, and seize on the opportunity to create clean jobs. This is being done in Germany, where a government-appointed coal commission consulted unions, coal regions, local communities and more to develop a pathway to transition the coal industry by 2038.

We can also see this in Canada, which is developing legislation with principles of a just transition by establishing a body to provide advice on strategies supporting workers and communities.

Strong climate and energy policy will take hard work – let’s hope this truly marks the end of the climate wars and the start of Australia’s turbocharged energy transition.

Madeline Taylor, Senior Lecturer, Macquarie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

More than 40 countries have signed an agreement at COP26, the latest UN climate change summit in Glasgow, to phase out coal in electricity generation. The signatories include some of the world’s biggest coal burners: Canada, Poland, Vietnam, South Korea, Ukraine and Indonesia. The larger of these economies pledge to cease using coal in their power sectors in the 2030s, while the smaller ones promise the same during the following decade.

Aside from generating electricity, coal is used to fuel iron and steel furnaces and cement kilns, and to a lesser extent, household heating systems. The mining and burning of coal still contribute over 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions, so rapidly phasing it out and replacing it with clean alternatives is a priority for international action on climate change.

Coal supplied 41% of the UK’s electricity in 2012, but just 1.6% in 2020. Much of the shortfall left by coal has been met by natural gas – another fossil fuel.

Swapping old coal plants for new gas power stations designed to operate well into the 2050s isn’t a solution to the problem, even if gas is a less carbon-intensive fuel than coal. There is no sensible alternative to replacing coal with renewable sources like solar and wind – with battery storage to fill gaps in supply – as quickly as possible.

Despite progress on renewables, coal-fired power generation is rising again in the wake of the pandemic, both in Germany and the US. Meanwhile, China’s government has mandated an expansion in coal production to address its power supply crisis.

Most of the largest coal consumers – Australia, China, the US, India and South Africa – have not joined the Glasgow coal phase-out agreement. China’s recent ban on new financing for overseas coal power is expected to axe 44 plants worldwide, but China’s domestic coal power stations continue to multiply. For the first time in 2020, China became host to over half of the world’s coal power capacity. It still has 100 gigawatts (GW) of coal power under construction, and another 160GW in the planning stages.

Why is coal such a stubborn relic of energy systems around the world – even where cleaner alternatives like solar power are cheaper? And what can be done about it?

Breaking the political might of coal

Coal is still seen as a cheap, abundant and reliable source of electricity. In many of the countries in which it looms largest, such as China, India, South Africa and Indonesia, state-owned companies tend to dominate the power and mining sectors. These powerful interests deep within government offer some of the staunchest opposition to phasing out coal.

It’s often assumed that rapidly eliminating coal mining and burning will inevitably mean impoverishing particular countries and regions where the coal industry is a major employer, not to mention lost tax revenues used to fund a range of public services. Given that most coal plants in the developing world are relatively new, retiring them early also risks heavy financial losses for their owners.

The idea of a just transition (though subject to debate) in the coal power sector would involve supporting miners and other workers to retrain and use their expertise to contribute to new or established low-carbon sectors, including renewable energy. Industrial strategies that follow this path could avoid some of the worst deprivation which has blighted coal communities in former heartlands in the UK.

There are no insurmountable technical barriers to replacing coal in power generation either. It’s already underway in countries like the US, where a power utility recently struck a deal with its largest retail customer to retire some of its coal plants early and replace them with solar power.

Replacing coal in steelmaking and cement plants is more difficult, but also possible. Steel furnaces can be powered by electricity, and green hydrogen fuel is already being trialled by [multinational cement firms in Europe] and steel producers in Germany and Sweden. While green hydrogen remains significantly more expensive than coal or gas, further investment in the technology needed to produce it – plus the continued decline in the cost of green electricity supplying it – may make it as cheap as fossil fuels sooner than expected.

For large economies which are heavily dependent on coal power, particularly China, the most serious barriers to eliminating this fossil fuel are political. Countries with experience in phasing out coal, such as the UK, must work closely with China, Indonesia, India and others to find pathways for replacing coal power with renewables that are economically and technologically viable. Designing social policies that lighten the burden on communities dependent on coal for livelihoods can help overcome resistance to change.

Coal-dependent states must also allocate hefty sums of additional investment to not just expand clean energy generation, which will eventually pay for itself through lower energy bills and public health benefits, but also to limit the financial damage from retiring existing coal mines and plants. The Asian Development Bank’s new US$2.5 billion fund, which is intended to buy up and close coal plants in Indonesia and the Philippines, presents one way of doing this. But using public money to bail out private companies which have continued to plough money into coal despite the risks is arguably unjust and may prove politically infeasible if attempted on a large scale.

There is still a bright future beyond coal, but countries should be prepared to forego short-term and short-sighted gains in order to get there.

This story is part of The Conversation’s coverage on COP26, the Glasgow climate conference, by experts from around the world.

Amid a rising tide of climate news and stories, The Conversation is here to clear the air and make sure you get information you can trust. More.

Alex Clark, DPhil Candidate in Energy and Economics, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Reuters: “It’s the end of coal, UK tells COP26 climate summit”

The administration’s plan is extremely important because it will allow the U.S. to lead the rest of the world in the right direction. Under the odious Trump, the US was trying to ramp up emissions, and so had no moral authority to tell anyone else to cut it out. If we cut our emissions in half from the 2005 peak, we can dicker with China and Poland about doing the same.

Despite tensions with Washington, China’s Xi Jinping is coming to Biden’s climate summit today.

America put out 5.789 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2005. That number had declined slightly by 2019 to 5.130 billion metric tons worth of annual emissions. In other words we have not made much progress in significantly reducing our yearly production of C02, a deadly heat-trapping gas. We had certainly not made the sort of progress that would keep global heating to 2.7 degrees F. (1.5 degrees C.) of average heating of the earth’s surface. That is the level of extra heating scientists think could allow us to avoid the most dangerous consequences.

So Biden is saying that in 2030, the US hopes “only” to emit 2.894 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. According to AP, climate scientist Michael Mann believes that if the US does this and gets commitments from other polluting countries to do the same, it could be enough to keep us to a 2.7 degree F. increase. (Remember, that is an average, and some places will be 10 degrees hotter, which is not something you want to hear if you live in Tucson, AZ in the summer).

We can get to Biden’s goal if we take certain steps, according to Lauren Sommer at NPR..

1. We’d have to close down all coal plants and use wind and solar to generate half of our electricity within the next decade, This step is eminently feasible, since wind and solar are falling rapidly in cost even as their efficiency is improving.

2. We’d have to get to the point where between half and all new car sales were of electric vehicles.

3. Factories would have to be greened and electrified. This is not as hard as it sounds in some instances. Two-thirds of US steel plants already use electric arc technology for smelting rather than coal. All you have to do is connect them to solar panels or wind turbines to produce the electric arc, and you have green steel.

4. We need green cement and green agriculture, as well.

All these steps are practical even if they are hard. They are more practical if the government gets behind them with incentives and tax breaks.

The Biden plan is also important because we have a sort of deadline with regard to emissions, and these steps would help us meet it. The oceans absorb carbon dioxide, and over time will take in the billions of extra tons of it we have emitted, but they have a limit– they can only absorb so much. If we overrun the limit of the oceanic carbon sink, then it will get very hot and we will face superstorms, wildfires, storm surges, sea level rise, floods and so forth. The more CO2 we put up there, the worse those calamities will be.

The Biden initiative will go a long way toward helping us avoid the worst case scenario.

h/t Microtrends

There is substantial public support for Biden’s ambitious climate goals. Adele Peters at Fast Company reports that a gaggle of major companies– Apple, Google, Walmart, Nike, Levi Strauss and many others — have urged this goal of halving emissions on the Biden administration. Climate disruptions are bad for business.

To explain why I am not impressed by the decline of 12.4 percent in US C02 emissions since 2005, it is because it isn’t nearly as significant as many greenwashing observers make it out to be, because we are talking about annual emissions. Like, every year.

So imagine were are talking pounds of weight a person is putting on, with 2005 being, say, 5.789 pounds and 2019 being 5.130 pounds. You’d be a little happy if you were trying to lose weight if you “only” put on about five pounds this year rather than the nearly 6 pounds a year you used to 16 years ago. But you’re still putting on over five pounds a year, which over 16 years means you would have packed on about 88 pounds. I don’t know about you, but when I’m trying to lose weight I’m not happy about ballooning up another 5 pounds this year, even if it isn’t the 6 pounds I ballooned up in 2005. And packing on 88 pounds, becoming morbidly obese, would be nothing to brag about. In the real world, the United States has put some 85 billion metric tons of deadly CO2 in the the atmosphere since 2005. That is like blowing up large numbers of hydrogen bombs up there. Makes it hot.

With the Biden plan, we’ll be putting on significantly less “weight” every year, and the carbon sink of the oceans will then allow us to “lose” a lot of carbon weight.

This news is the most hopeful I’ve heard in my lifetime.

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Bonus Video:

Reuters: “U.S. to set new climate targets”

German steelmaker Thyssenkrupp will supply an electrolyser for a massive international green hydrogen project in Saudi Arabia with the capacity to produce up to 650 tonnes of the climate-neutral gas per day with wind and solar power installations.

The German economy ministry (BMWi) announced that it will support the “Element One” power-to-X project in the context of its national hydrogen strategy in a bid to prepare a “global market scale-up” by backing Thyssenkrupp’s contribution of an electrolysis module with a capacity of 20 megawatts.

The entire electrolysis project will eventually be powered by up to four gigawatts of renewable energy installations. It will be built by 2025 in Saudi Arabia’s NEOM innovation centre in the country’s North-West.

Besides green hydrogen, the plant is also planned to produce up to 3,000 tonnes of ammoniac per day, which would be shipped to other locations and later converted into hydrogen for use in transport and other sectors, the ministry said.

The project in Saudi Arabia is the second hydrogen production installation abroad to be supported by Germany’s hydrogen strategy. The government has set aside nine billion euros for implementing its strategy, two billion euros of which are earmarked for selected projects in partner countries.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Middle East Energy: “Middle East prepares for Green hydrogen revolution”

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology climate classification, a modification of Köppen’s classification. Data from bom.gov.au

The consortium had earlier considered trying to export the electricity as far away as Singapore by undersea cables, which would probably have been feasible. They have now decided instead to use the renewable electricity generated by the solar panels and the wind turbines for hydrolysis, producing hydrogen and oxygen out of water (H2O). Then the hydrogen will be bonded with nitrogen from the air to make ammonia. The ammonia, which, although it is toxic is not volatile (unlike the fertilizer, ammonium nitrate, which blew up Beirut this summer), can be liquefied at -33 degrees, and there is already an infrastructure for doing so and for transporting it. Liquefied ammonia can be transported on ships, just as liquefied natural gas is now carried that way.

Ammonia does not produce greenhouse gas emissions when burned. Engineers are working on ensuring that it also does not produce nitrogen oxides, which are a pollutant that contributes to ozone. Ammonia can be used in coal-fired electricity plants instead of coal. It is also suitable as a fuel for, e.g., large ships.

Robin Hardy at the Financial Times reported this summer that Japan has decided to make a big investment in ammonia as a fuel for its power plants, given that the Fukushima nuclear complex was irreparably damaged by a tsunami in 2011 and so has been the nuclear energy industry as a whole. Japan has had to make up the lost electricity production with imports of liquefied natural gas, which has significantly increased the country’s carbon footprint. Importing liquefied ammonia could help Japan go green so as to meet its commitments under the Paris accords.

Personal checks should be made out to Juan Cole and sent to me at:

Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)

The Japanese energy firm JERA, partially owned by Japan’s powerful TEPCO corporation, has decided to entirely replace its coal plants with ammonia by 2030, according to Sonal Patel at Power Mag.

But Japan can only have green ammonia if it buys it from someone who produces it with renewables. Enter Australia.

At the moment, at least, solar panels are space hogs, and they obviously generate more electricity under very sunny conditions than under cloudy ones. Under cloudy conditions, solar panels might only have an efficiency of 10%. I presume that is what I am getting in Michigan in December and January. But under sunny conditions, their efficiency can be as much as 25%. (In the summer, my electricity bill is almost nothing).

So from the point of view of green electricity production, the ideal place to put 30,000 acres worth of solar panels is in the Australian outback. As Robert Rapier notes at Oilprice.com, it will have the equivalent of 9 million rooftop solar photovoltaic panels of the sort I have on my roof. The solar farm would be paired with a gargantuan 30 gigawatt-hour (GWh) battery facility that will allow electricity to be stored during the daytime so it can continue to be released at night. (Rapier wrote before the recent decision of the consortium to abandon the plans for underwater cables and to go with liquefied ammonia instead).

The project will also involve installation of 1,743 wind turbines, each nearly a thousand feet tall. The Australian ABC says that it is now the plan to attempt to produce 26 gigawatts at the massive new site.

The Renewable Energy Hub is looking at 2027 for coming online. Things could change rapidly in the aftermath. If ammonia can replace coal in China, for instance, that development in itself would save the earth.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Ammonia: The Next Big Thing in Energy Production – GenCell