NewEnergyNews: ZERO EMISSIONS AUSTRALIA, THE HIGHEST AMBITIONS FROM DOWN UNDER/

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YESTERDAY

THINGS-TO-THINK-ABOUT WEDNESDAY, August 23:

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  • TTTA Wednesday-ORIGINAL REPORTING: The IRA And the EV Revolution
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    WEEKEND VIDEOS, July 15-16:

  • Weekend Video: The Truth About China And The Climate Crisis
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  • THE DAY BEFORE THAT

    WEEKEND VIDEOS, July 8-9:

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  • Texas Heat And Politics Of Denial
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    Founding Editor Herman K. Trabish

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    WEEKEND VIDEOS, June 17-18

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  • The Virtual Power Plant Boom, Part 2

    Wednesday, August 04, 2010

    ZERO EMISSIONS AUSTRALIA, THE HIGHEST AMBITIONS FROM DOWN UNDER

    BZE’s ‘Easy Way’: Renewable Energy for the price of lunch
    Rikki Stancich, 9 July 2010 (CSP Today)
    and
    A Call for Energy Realism; The fossil-fuel economy won’t disappear anytime soon
    Duncan Currie, August 2, 2010 (National Review)

    THE POINT
    Those Aussies, who have long faced a challenging environment on an island continent, are a practical-minded folk. Yet some seem to believe it makes sense to aim for the seemingly impossible dream of an emissions-free economy.

    Zero Carbon Australia, Stationary Energy Plan; A ten year roadmap for 100% renewable energy, from Beyond Zero Emissions (BZE) and academics from the University of Melbourne, argues that the technology is already commercially available and there are no technical barriers preventing Australia from deploying the necessary infrastructure over the next ten years. It is a blueprint for a 100% New Energy economy that would transform Australia into a world leader in the marketplace growing around the fight to stop global climate change.

    Nobody would doubt the audacity of BZE’s ambitions more than Duncan Currie, a writer for the very conservative National Review. He recently described Al Gore’s similar 2008 proposal for the U.S. to move to 100% New Energy and concluded “the promise of renewables has consistently been oversold…” Currie referenced work by mathematician Vaclav Smil and oil & gas industry shill Robert Bryce in arguing such a dramatic and abrupt shift away from fossil fuels is completely unrealistic.

    The BZE paper presents a stark reminder of why such ambitions are, first of all, urgent. While world leaders, captured by the exigencies of electoral politics and media trivia, have allowed deniers to trumpet lies about a climate that is changing in plain sight, the concentration of greenhouse gases (GhGs) in the atmosphere has hit 390 parts per million (ppm) though frank climate scientists say anything over 350 ppm portends the worst impacts.

    Currie’s basic thesis is that shifts from one type of energy dependence to another (wood to coal, coal to oil) have always taken decades. He fails to prove that such a transition CAN not be made more rapidly, only that it HAS not been done rapidly. Perhaps, BZE and Mr. Gore might reply, there has never been such urgency.

    Furthermore, Currie’s whole repetition of Bryce’s fatuous “straw man” arguments are pointless. Oil emerged in the mid-1800s but did not supplant coal in the U.S. until 1950, say Currie and Bryce. That’s right, because oil is for transport, which only achieved widespread availability and modern energy consumption dominance at mid-century. Coal was and is for heating buildings and generating electricity, needs that continue to sustain it. Oil’s rise, say Currie and Bryce, was driven largely by the automobile revolution and WWII military needs. Exactly, which demonstrates what can be done when there is an urgent need for a shift in energy dependence.

    A little-remembered historical fact from early in World War II is profoundly telling. After German U-boats began sinking tankers carrying oil from Gulf Coast ports to major New England population centers, the U.S. was only able to draw on the abundance of Texas and California oil because of a heroic effort to build - unimaginably quickly - Big Inch and Little Inch, a pair of pipelines connecting the deep Southeast to the Northeast. Necessity drove the energy to do what had previously been thought unachievable. Necessity can be, to coin a phrase, the mother of an energy transition.

    click to enlarge

    For Australia to make the transition to 100% New Energy, it would need to get 40% of its power from wind energy. BZE calculates that to be 23 installations with 2,000-to-3,000 megawatts (MW) each. It would also need to get 60% of its power from concentrated solar power (CSP). that would be 12 solar power plants, each with a 3,500 MW capacity. These are technologies already proven to have capacity in Australia, and to be cost-effective and scalable at presently-producing sites around the world. The report calls for backing up these power sources with hydroelectric and biomass generation sources.

    Each CSP plant would have a 17-hour storage capacity and Australia’s wind power assets would be producing at least 15% of the time. Australia’s existing hydroelectric resources and the biomass plants, co-fired with the CSP plants, would be more than adequate for exigencies. So much for what Currie and Bryce call the New Energies' incurable intermittency. Knowledgeable people understand the New Energies are not intermittent but variable, and variability can be managed.

    The report projects the investment required for Australia to make the transition to a New Energy economy could be paid for entirely with retail electricity revenue if the price was increased ~6.5 cents per kilowatt-hour (kW-hr) in 2020. This is ~$AU420 per household per year, or $AU8 per household per week, in 2020. The increase in the price of Australian electricity in a standardized business-as-usual (BAU) scenario is approximately the same.

    Not surprisingly, the Achilles heel of New Energy in the U.S. and around the world would also be a factor in the realization of the BZE roadmap: The plan would not work without adequate new transmission. Currie and Smil described the need for a massive amount of new transmission that make the 100% New Energy idea pretty unlikely. That’s also what a lot of people thought about the practicality of rapidly building pipelines to get Texas oil to New England at the beginning of World War II. It’s amazing what a national sense of urgency can accomplish.

    As for those Aussies, they just don’t seem to understand the idea of limits. That’s the kind of people who do great things, eh mate?

    click to enlarge

    THE DETAILS
    Using the wisest and safest climate science estimates of what it will take to prevent the worst impacts of global climate change, the Zero Carbon Australia 2020 Stationary Energy Plan argues it will be necessary to reduce today’s greenhouse gas atmospheric concentration of 390 parts per million (ppm) to 350 ppm.

    This would make the chances of keeping the global average temperature rise to 2 degrees Centigrade two in three.

    The report argues that a ten year timeframe is both immediate enough to be meaningful and long enough to be reasonable.

    The plan was developed using only proven technologies with established costs:
    (1) onshore wind (40% of the energy mix),
    (2) concentrating solar power (CSP) with molten salt storage (60% of the mix)
    (3) crop waste biomass and hydroelectric power (2% of the energy mix, used as backup for the wind and solar).

    Detailed modeling showed the hypothesized energy supply to be capable of meeting Australia’s 24/7 power needs, largely due to its abundant solar and wind assets.

    click to enlarge

    The cost of transitioning Australia's stationary energy sector to a New Energy infrastructure that would last 30-to-40 years is estimated at 3% of GDP over ten years and within Australia’s financial and industrial capability. From 2010-to-2040, it would cost ~$AU500 billion, absent several factors which would likely make the cost even less:
    (1) transport fuel savings,
    (2) carbon market revenues,
    (3) savings as economies of scale for wind and CSP develop), and
    (4) savings from the external and future rising costs of fossil fuels.

    The 80,000 construction jobs needed at the peak of the required installation would be 8% of Australia’s present construction workforce and would offset the job losses in the fossil fuels industries. This is readily achievable because before the current recession construction jobs were increasing at 50,000 per year.

    The Stationary Energy Plan will be followed by reports roadmapping a similar transition in (1) Transport, (2) Buildings, (3) Land Use and Agriculture, (4) Industrial Processes and (5) Replacing Fossil-Fuel Export Revenue.

    The stationary energy sector is ~55% of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions (GhGs) (all fossil fuels produce 70+% of Australia’s GhGs).

    The report does not get into the policy mechanisms needed to drive the transition and generate funding from public and private sources.

    click to enlarge

    Key features:
    With the zero emissions plan, Australia’s electricity demand is expected to be 40+% higher in 2020, more than the business-as-usual (BAU) demand growth. This is because electricity would replace fossil fuels used in transport and heating. Combining the installed capacities of wind and CSP with Energy Efficiency (EE) and fuel-switching, the roadmap could more than meet the increased demand.

    The sum total of energy consumed would be less than half of BAU though there would be no dimishment of energy services (including transport, heating and cooling, industrial energy, etc.)

    A key source of savings would be in transport because battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are far more efficient than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. <20% of the energy ICE vehicles use creates motion while BEVs convert 80-to-90% of their energy to motion.

    It is the same with space heating. Heat pump systems for domestic buildings use 25% of the energy of natural gas heating systems and those in commercial buildings use one-third of the energy. The report allows for a small amount of biogas and biofuels for energy demands that cannot be met with emissions-free electricity.

    Cost savings will come through a “flatter” electricity use pattern because (1) grid integration techniques for the New Energies create higher efficiencies, (2) BEVs can be used for the storage of off-peak wind, and CSP storage allows for the use of electricity when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing.

    Like hydroelectric dams that store immediately dispersible power, CSP using molten salts to store heat has the “better-than-baseload" quality of stored power ready to answer any fluctuation in demand.

    click to enlarge

    Detailed modeling not only found no constraint preventing the realization of the zero emissions plan, the New Energies would – because the wind and CSP generation sites will be geographically dispersed – serve as large-scale distributed generation. The half-hourly timescale modeling showed geographic distribution to add more security to Australia’s energy supply and to increase its capacity by 25%.

    The CSP technology modeled is the solar power tower power plant systems developed by Torresol and Solar Reserve, among others. They are proven to have high performance around the year, even at higher summer operating temperatures and during the winter. The molten salt storage they offer provides 24/7 generation. Plants with crop-waste biomass co-firing offer a final level of energy security.

    Scale-up and cost reduction trajectories are based on work from the U.S. Department of Energy and Sargent & Lundy Consulting LLC. It is projected that solar power tower technology economies of scale will, when 8,700 MWe is installed, generate electricity that is cost-competitive with conventional coal-generated electricity (5-to-6 AU cents/kW-hr).

    Each power tower “module” is a 217 MWe turbine, a mirror field, and a molten salt system with 17 hours of storage. The power cycle would be air-cooled to minimize water consumption. The modules run at a 72% per year capacity factor - more than most fossil fuel plants. The roadmap calls for the use of twelve solar power plant sites, each with a 3,500MW installed capacity.

    Australia’s current installed wind capacity is <2,000 MWe. The roadmap would add 48,000 MWe of new capacity with an average per year capacity factor of 30%. This would require 6,400 7.5 MW wind turbines at 23 geographically diverse sites.

    click to enlarge

    The models show this amount of wind can readily be integrated into the grid with the CSP. When winds are high, it would get preference and the CSP systems would store their heat. When wind falls off, the CSP and the storage take over. The models show at least 15% of the wind would always be generating electricity.

    The 2% biomass and hydroelectricity contingency backup provide the final level of security against the unavailability of wind and solar. They would be co-fired in the same way that natural gas is now used with solar power plants. 13% of Australia’s current waste straw residue would be adequate to meet the entire backup need. Australia’s existing hydroelectricity systems would also serve, absent future drought.

    The dispersed wind and solar sites were chosen from NASA and Australian Government data and distributed for high year-round peak and off-peak energy availability. A new and upgraded interstate transmission system would be necessary to service the resource diversity. Efficient, low-loss High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) lines would provide long-distance transmission. 500kV alternating current links would connect new power stations near high load centers. There would also be 4,475 MW of off-grid power for load centers without grid access.

    The total land for all of the CSP projects – ideally sited on marginal farming land – would be would be 2,760 square kilometers, 0.04% of Australia’s total land mass and less than the land used by two Northern Territory cattle stations.

    Implementation would require a rapid ramp-up and project fast-tracking, though the 10-year timeframe is considered reasonable. The goals for the first 5 years (to 2015) would be 15,000 MW of wind and 5,000 MW of CSP.

    click to enlarge

    Half the wind turbine components and CSP heliostat mirrors would be manufactured in Australia, creating 30,000 new jobs, whereas Australia’s one million person manufacturing workforce would decline in BAU. There would be 45,000 more ongoing jobs in CSP and wind operations & maintenance, more than offsetting the 20,000-job fossil fuel industries job loss.

    Australia is calculated to have more than adequate concrete, steel and glass. 7% of Australia’s current concrete production, 1.3% of Australia’s total iron ore exports and steel production; and 2.6% of Australia’s total silver production would be needed. Steel and glass production would need to be increased or more would need to be imported.

    600,000 heliostats per year could be produced in a single factory, comparable to car factories that produce 300,000 to 500,000 cars per year.

    A total investment of $AU370 billion would be needed from 2011-to-2020 for the zero-emissions plan. This would be $AU37 billion per year on average, less in the early years. The total is 3% of Australia’s $AU1.2 trillion per year GDP.

    BAU would require $AU135 billion for ongoing capital investments in energy infrastructure from 2011-to-2020 and would require $AU300 billion per year in ongoing fossil fuel costs.

    Over the 2010-2040 timeframe, therefore, the costs of a New Energy economy and an Old Energy economy are comparable.

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    The substitution of electricity for oil in transport would save $AU1,170 billion. Avoided emissions costs could save $AU370 billion more. This is a total savings of $AU1,550 billion.

    Private sector investment would likely cover up-front construction costs of the transition to New Energy and see favorable returns over time. With the extra savings, the return would likely be within a few years.

    A sample analysis found the investment could be paid for entirely with retail electricity revenue if the price was increased ~6.5 cents/per kW-hr in 2020. This is ~$AU420 per household per year, or $AU8 per household per week, in 2020. This about what is projected for BAU.

    click to enlarge

    QUOTES
    - Duncan Currie, National Review: “Even if previous energy transitions moved at a slow, incremental pace, might we be able to accelerate them in the years ahead? Smil acknowledges that we now "possess incomparably more powerful technical means to effect faster energy transitions than we did a century or a half century ago." …Smil also addresses the ten-year plan laid out by Al Gore: Even if America had the necessary high-voltage transmission interconnections, it would entail the construction of 1,740 gigawatts of new wind- and solar-power capacity…”

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    - From the roadmap: “Current levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are already sufficiently high to carry the climate system past significant tipping points. They pose an unacceptable risk of dangerous and irreversible changes to the world’s climate, to biodiversity, and therefore to human civilisation. These changes directly affect Australia’s food and water security, and increase the risk of regional instability…[T]o have a two-in-three chance of keeping global warming to less than 2oC above preindustrial temperatures, developed nations with the highest per capita rates of emissions, such as the United States and Australia, would need to decarbonise their economies by 2020. There is increasing consensus that the 2oC threshold is too high and beyond a ‘safe boundary’, and that atmospheric carbon dioxide must be reduced from the current level of around 390 parts per million (ppm) into the range of 300 to 350 ppm…”

    click to enlarge

    - Matthew Wright, Executive Director, Beyond Zero Emissions: “If [Australia’s 3 existing] grids were somehow merged and privatized, it would have to be a public-private partnership based on an incentives system…We have not seen much infrastructure build-out since the late eighties, early nineties…There has been little build-out and no talk about grid upgrades. But by mapping out a grid and by establishing the goal posts, it is more likely that an end goal will be reached. In fact, many of the grid upgrades we are proposing are similar to ones that are being seriously discussed by the Australian Energy Market Operator…If the money is there they will do it…”

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