Category Archives: The Mitigation Battle

PLEA Network

4 November 2015, Renew Economy, Graph of the Day: Watch US electricity grid evolve before your eyes. We talk a lot about the changing shape of the electricity grid, but what does it look like? We first came across this rather hypnotic GIF via the Union of Concerned Scientists blog, The Equation, who borrowed it from Pat Knight at Synapse Energy Economics. It shows, in animated graph form, how the electricity mix has changed in each state of America over the past 15 years. And as UCS senior energy analyst John Rogers notes, the only constant in the “mesmerising” GIF is change. 

The really interesting changes come from about 2009 onwards. But Rogers sees five trends in the graph’s “undulating bars” and outlines what’s behind them:

  1. Coal waning – The most visible change in recent years, says Rogers, is shown in the shrinkage of the dark section on the left of the GIF. “Coal provided fully half of (the US’s) electricity as recently as 2006. Now it’s down to below 40 percent, as the eroding economics of coal have asserted themselves,” he writes.
  2. Natural gas growing – For the US, a big part of the decline of coal (and the rise of concerns about natural gas overreliance).
  3. Renewables surging – Another reason King Coal is falling, says Rogers: “the result of smart policies in a lot of forward-thinking states, and great cost reductions. Synapse’s Knight offers this great statistic: ‘In 2014, 11 states produced 10 percent or more generation from renewables (compared to zero states in 2005)’.”
  4. Renewables surging (wind) – Wind, the technology to beat in many US locations, now accounts for more than 10 per cent of generation in nine states, says Rogers, and more than 25 percent in two (Iowa and South Dakota).
  5. Renewables surging (solar) – At the end of the GIF’s journey, solar starts to make its presence felt, says Rogers – and it’s only just beginning to claim its share of the spotlight, with rapidly increasing scale and rapidly dropping costs. See Hawaii. Read More here
PLEA Network

4 November 2015, New York Times, The Tough Realities of the Paris Climate Talks. In less than a month, delegates from more than 190 countries will convene in Paris to finalize a sweeping agreement intended to constrain human influence on the climate. But any post-meeting celebration will be tempered by two sobering scientific realities that will weaken the effectiveness of even the most ambitious emissions reduction plans that are being discussed. The first reality is that emissions of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas of greatest concern, accumulate in the atmosphere and remain there for centuries as they are slowly absorbed by plants and the oceans. This means modest reductions in emissions will only delay the rise in atmospheric concentration but will not prevent it. Thus, even if global emissions could be reduced by a heroic average 20 percent from their “business as usual” course over the next 50 years, we would be delaying the projected doubling of the concentration by only 10 years, from 2065 to 2075. This is why drastic reductions would be needed to stabilize human influences on the climate at supposed “safe” levels. According to scenarios used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global annual per capita emissions would need to fall from today’s five metric tons to less than one ton by 2075, a level well below what any major country emits today and comparable to the emissions from such countries as Haiti, Yemen and Malawi. For comparison, current annual per capita emissions from the United States, Europe and China are, respectively, about 17, 7 and 6 tons. The second scientific reality, arising from peculiarities of the carbon dioxide molecule, is that the warming influence of the gas in the atmosphere changes less than proportionately as the concentration changes. As a result, small reductions will have progressively less influence on the climate as the atmospheric concentration increases. The practical implication of this slow logarithmic dependence is that eliminating a ton of emissions in the middle of the 21st century will exert only half of the cooling influence that it would have had in the middle of the 20th century. Read More here

PLEA Network

30 October 2015, Renew Economy, With latest fires crisis, Indonesia surpasses Russia as world’s fourth-largest emitter. New analysis reveals even more troubling news about Indonesia’s fires crisis. Emissions from this year’s fires have reached 1.62 billion metric tons of CO2—bumping Indonesia from the sixth-largest emitter in the world up to the fourth-largest in just six weeks. The analysis from Guido van der Werf with the Global Fire Emissions Database also reveals that:

  • Emissions from Indonesia’s fires alone are approaching the total annual emissions of Brazil.
  • Indonesia’s current total emissions hover around 760 Mt CO2 (excluding land-use change), meaning the fires alone have tripled Indonesia’s entire annual emissions.
  • Indonesian fires during 38 of the past 56 days (as of October 26) have released more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire U.S. economy on those days.

While the country may finally be getting some relief as heavy rainfall interruptsmonths of record-breaking fires and toxic smog in South Sumatra and Kalimantan, the damage to human health, the economy and the global climate has already been done. Read More here

PLEA Network

28 October 2015, One Step Off the Grid, How Garnaut & Co plan to help communities take power back from the grid. Eleven years ago, Richard Turner was trying to nut out how to fit his kids’ cubby house with a solar panel and battery, to run a light and a television at night, when the sun wasn’t shining. Long story short, it was no easy DIY task. “Back then, there was no industry at all,” says Turner. The only suitable solar hardware he could find was from a local hobby shop. And then he needed to find a battery to match, and wiring, and make it all safe…“I worked it out, because I did physics and maths at school, and I enjoyed it. But I also did commerce and marketing, and I saw an enormous opportunity here to provide people with a fully branded and integrated (solar and storage) system. …There were no barriers to how big you could go.” Back in 2004, Turner took up that opportunity and the result was ZEN Technologies, now a highly successful Australian solar and storage company based in Adelaide. But since then another opportunity has presented itself to Turner, and that is to provide Australian consumers with an option to use 100 per cent renewable energy to power their homes, businesses or entire communities, at a cost cheaper than electricity from the grid. Read More here