Category Archives: resilience

Renewable energy – some places promote it and shout it out!

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I just had to share this.  It is so positive and encouraging.  Nice to be reminded that in other parts of the world they encourage the growth of renewable energy.

Here’s a shot of the renewable energy tracking on the website of the following group of companies:

Hawaiian Electric Company, Inc.

The image is updated on the company’s Renewable Watch page, and you can click on the image there to enlarge it.

If only our governments and power companies were so proud of the level of generation of renewable energy in Australia.

I found the link to the graphic in a story on Mother Jones on the way in which electricity demand in the USA is dropping year after year.  The total demand in 2013 was two percent below the 2008 level.  The reasons for the drop are pretty much the same as in Australia: higher prices pushing people to cut usage; more people and companies generating their own power, mostly via solar PV; and  increasing efficiency (of buildings and appliances).

Midday wholesale price of electricity falls to zero in Queensland

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An article by Giles Parkinson in The Guardian on 7 July reported that the wholesale price of electricity in Queensland fell into negative territory – in the middle of the day.  Apparently this has never happened in the middle of the day before. Here’s part of what the article reported:

For several days the price, normally around $40-$50 a megawatt hour, hovered in and around zero. Prices were deflated throughout the week, largely because of the influence of one of the newest, biggest power stations in the state – rooftop solar.

“Negative pricing” moves, as they are known, are not uncommon. But they are only supposed to happen at night, when most of the population is mostly asleep, demand is down, and operators of coal fired generators are reluctant to switch off. So they pay others to pick up their output.

That’s not supposed to happen at lunchtime. Daytime prices are supposed to reflect higher demand, when people are awake, office building are in use, factories are in production. That’s when fossil fuel generators would normally be making most of their money.

The influx of rooftop solar has turned this model on its head. There is 1,100MW of it on more than 350,000 buildings in Queensland alone (3,400MW on 1.2m buildings across the country). It is producing electricity just at the time that coal generators used to make hay (while the sun shines).

Yes, the wholesale price level around zero was due to the level of installation of rooftop solar PV systems by homeowners and businesses in Queensland.  But in reality it seems to me that the near zero pricecould more accurately be said to be due to the removal by the Queensland government of most of the feed-in tariff paid to solar PV producers – BUT …  there are still lots of solar PV owners on fixed term contracts and receiving reasonably high feed-in tariffs – so shouldn’t these tariffs have been reflected in the wholesale price when solar PV was dominating the market?  Or are there now so many recent solar PV installations that their low feed-in tariffs are dominating the market around the middle of the day?

Can anyone enlighten me as to how the near zero wholesale electricity price really came about?

Regardless of the confusion, it seems that solar PV is making its mark as a component of the State’s energy generation industry.  Are these low wholesale prices eventually going to be reflected in our electricity bills?

You can read the whole Guardian online article here.

 

Is a 100% renewable electricity supply possible in Australia right now?

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Mark Diesendorf, Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of New South Wales, has posted a detailed and convincing article in The Conversation this morning about the potential for a 100% renewable electricity supply in Australia.

His conclusion (with my underlining):

The renewable scenarios would be economically competitive with the fossil system either with a carbon price of A$50 per tonne of CO2 (reflecting part of the environmental and health damage from fossil fuels) or, in the absence of a carbon price, by removing the existing subsidies to the production and use of fossil fuels and transferring them temporarily to renewable energy.

That’s right: we could start implementing 100% renewable electricity generation RIGHT NOW, and with no financial burden on the economy, just a temporary shift of the political sacred cow of hydrocarbon fuel subsidies to the renewable energy sector.  In fact Diesendorf doesn’t say it, but there would be a significant positive impact on the economy from very significant increases in both temporary and long-term employment in the renewables sector.  And, you never know, when the renewable sector no longer needs the subsidy the government of the day may decide not to reinstate it for the hydrocarbon fuel sector.  Very big win for the economy and possibly the climate if that happened.

Could we do this with current renewable technologies, or would we have to wait for the development of some currently unproven approach?  It’s can all be done with today’s technology.  Here’s Diesendorf again:

“Using conservative projections to 2030 for the costs of renewable energy by the federal government’s Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics (BREE), we found an optimal mix of renewable electricity sources. The mix looks like this:

  • Wind 46%;
  • Concentrated solar thermal (electricity generated by the heat of the sun) with thermal storage 22%;
  • Photovoltaic solar 20% (electricity generated directly from sunlight);
  • Biofuelled gas turbines 6%; and
  • Existing hydro 6%.

So two-thirds of annual energy can be supplied by wind and solar photovoltaic — energy sources that vary depending on the weather — while maintaining reliability of the generating system at the required level. How is this possible?

It turns out that wind and solar photovoltaic are only unable to meet electricity demand a few times a year. These periods occur during peak demand on winter evenings following overcast days that also happen to have low wind speeds across the region.

Since the gaps are few in number and none exceeds two hours in duration, there only needs to be a small amount of generation from the so-called flexible renewables (those that don’t depend on the vagaries of weather): hydro and biofuelled gas turbines. Concentrated solar thermal is also flexible while it has energy in its thermal storage.

The gas turbines have low capital cost and, when operated infrequently and briefly, low fuel costs, so they play the role of reliability insurance with a low premium.”

“BASELOAD POWER!  You’ll need baseload power!”, I hear the coal and gas industries shouting.  Well, clearly such a system would NOT require baseload power in the form that they understand.

I like it too that he has addressed the bogie inherent in the use of biofuel powered gas turbines: the possibility that they will require unacceptable volumes of timber from forests or the allocation of unacceptable areas of food-producing farmland to grow the fuel to run them.  Keeping the gas turbines in reserve, to be used only for periods of a few hours a few times per year would mean that not only would fuel demand be low, but the fuel could be sourced from wastes over a longer period and stockpiled for later use.

Do we know whether it would work in reality?  How about on hot summer evenings, or on those cold, windless winter nights?  Diesendorf’s team used real figures from the National Energy Market (presumably the ones published daily by the Australian Energy Market Operator), to model many different mixes of current renewable energy technologies to come up with the proportions set out above.

 “Ben Elliston, Iain MacGill and I at UNSW have performed thousands of computer simulations of the hour-by-hour operation of the NEM with different mixes of 100% commercially available renewable energy technologies scaled up to meet demand reliably.

We use actual hourly electricity demand and actual hourly solar and wind power data for 2010 and balance supply and demand for almost every hour, while maintaining the required reliability of supply. The relevant papers, published in peer-reviewed international journals, can be downloaded from my UNSW website.”

 Read the full article on The Conversation.

The Foss and Holmgren Presentation

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We went to the presentation by Nicole Foss and David Holmgren in Brisbane on Friday last week.

Very well attended, with a main lecture theatre pretty well packed – maybe 200 people.  There were eight people there from the Lockyer Valley whom I recognised and quite possibly more whom I didn’t recognise.  Pretty impressive, considering the massive disparity between the population of Brisbane and that of the Lockyer Valley.

Nicole Foss’s talk was absolutely riveting, starting with an overview of the history of money and the way that it has been expanded by the incorporation of debt/credit into the “money supply” and the risks that this poses.  She moved on to energy resource issues and linked this to the money supply (debt) through the cost of finding and producing the remaining “difficult” fossil energy sources, concluding that most of the hard to access fossil fuels will not be economic to produce.  The thread running through the presentation was the cyclical nature of the economy and the fact that massive levels of debt, coupled with the interconnectedness of the globalised economy and energy shortages/high energy prices, mean that sooner or later (and very likely sooner) there will be a depression cycle from which the global economy will not be able to recover.

Not all of it was as gloom-and-doomish as that may sound.  Foss gave examples of broad strategies for weathering the storm.

Of course this summary cannot possibly do justice to what was one of the most well delivered, highly informed, logical, well structured and thought provoking presentations that I have ever had the pleasure of listening to.  We came away with a lot of food for thought, and a resolve to review our sustainability planning.

She set the scene perfectly for David Holmgren to step in and elaborate the ways in which permaculture can contribute to creating a way through the economic (and social) breakdown that is coming.

What he started with were a series of bland generalisations, some of which touched on areas Foss had already covered, though some of what he said seemed strangely at odds with what she had presented.

The major part of his presentation though was an attempt to breathe life into his Aussie Street  scenario.  For those who haven’t seen it, this is a series of morphing diagrams tracing the evolution of households on four house blocks in an Australian suburban street.  It is long, barely entertaining, and the ratio of stimulating ideas to slightly cute waffle is very low.  We first saw it about eight years ago, and neither of us could decide whether there was actually any new material in Friday’s presentation.  As an illustration of the application of permaculture principles to suburban planning and lifestyle it can only be described as weak.  As a follow-up to the opportunity that Nicole Foss had set up for someone to highlight the role that permaculture can play in dealing with the coming disastrous wind-down of the economy and associated resource issues, Holmgren’s presentation was a massive lost opportunity.

We kept thinking, there’s got to be more.  A friend of ours said later, “I just wanted to throw things at him to wake him up to what he needed to be saying”.

But if you can get to the the Melbourne presentation on July 15, don’t miss it.  This is a chance to hear Nicole Foss give a truly remarkable overview of where we are headed and why.  If you are thinking of going to the Hobart presentation (Holmgren without Foss) on July 19, my advice is don’t bother.

An urban agriculture website that has lessons for us all.

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Urban agriculture is receiving growing attention in permaculture circles, whether it is highly productive permaculture backyards (or balconies!) or rooftop farms on city buildings.

Urban agriculture can take many forms (click on the image to read the article on the importance of urban agriculture in developing countries)

I know that the Lockyer Valley isn’t exactly “urban”, but in fact there is a significant proportion of the population of the Lockyer Valley Region living in urban or suburban environments – and there are followers of this blog who live in urban areas outside the Lockyer.  And if we are concerned about food security, whether at present or under more difficult circumstances in the future, urban agriculture is, and will continue to be, an important element in maintaining food security and social resilience.

All of which is a long-winded way of introducing the website of the RUAF (Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security).

If you check out their home page it’s likely you’ll find something of interest, whether it’s in their publications, Urban Agriculture Magazine or bibliographic database on urban agriculture, or in the Hot News section on the home page.  Take a look – one of the things I’ve learned about implementing permaculture is that lessons come from the most unexpected places.

Bioregionalism – and a taste of Italy

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A rather bland definition of bioregionalism is “the belief that social organization and environmental policies should be based on the bioregion rather than on a region determined by political or economic boundaries.”

Others would describe it more practically as “a fancy name for living a rooted life. Sometimes called “living in place,” bioregionalism means you are aware of the ecology, economy and culture of the place where you live, and are committed to making choices that enhance them.”

It’s a concept I have been vaguely aware of without really thinking about it, even though it clearly links to my recognition of “connectedness with place” as a significant factor in the mental health of many people, including (but definitely not restricted to) the original Australians and families living for many generations in the one location.  I’m sure many of us in the Lockyer can recognise this.

Now a friend has brought the latest edition of the journal PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature to my attention, for its focus on fungi, and it happened also to contain a report on the Italian bioregional movement.  I can’t think of a better way to “get” the concept of bioregionalism than to read this delightful report – and at the same time to soak up the mood of Italian enjoyment of life and place.  Enjoy.

Lockyer Valley cited as an example of sustainable and resilient action in the face of climate change

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There’s an article in The Conversation today on Fire and flood: how home insurance can help us adapt to climate change that refers to the fact that after a natural disaster home insurance allows a home to be replaced on-site on a “like-for-like” basis, and life carries on as usual.  And it’s that “life as usual” aspect of it that is the problem.  The site has the same disaster risk as before and, to the extent that local planning laws allow, the new house has the same risk profile as before.  And house insurance premiums keep climbing because of the risk profile of so much of the housing stock in the face of increasingly extreme weather conditions arising from climate change.

The article suggests that the solution may lie in action taken through the

“… critical relationships that bring together the different players involved in insurance, housing provision, climate adaptation and disaster management.

They will be required to work together with various stakeholders in bravely and innovatively deciding how and where we redesign and build more resilient Australian communities. The plan to relocate homes in the ravaged township of Grantham in the Lockyer Valley is an Australian first and exemplary of how such initiatives might work through land-swaps.

There will be an uncomfortable period of transition; communities in urban areas have an inertia to them that means change is slow. Even as new safe havens pop up, they will not be available to everyone immediately. Weathering our climate change future will require a response that involves all Australians.”

I completely agree, having long thought that we need to use natural disasters as a catalyst for a process that recognises past errors in planning and design and moves, in stages if necessary, to a more sustainable and resilient situation.

Go to

to read the full article by Stewart Williams, University of Tasmania