Cleaning up the climate debate
A recent poll confirms what I have come to believe after watching the global warming issue for 20 years; renewable energy is the only way to save the debate about saving the planet.
If the UN wants to make progress in the climate negotiations and closer to home, if Julia Gillard wants to win the next election, then the debate should be couched in terms of the tangible benefits of today’s solar and wind technologies.
A poll by Essential Research, conducted during Australia’s recent carbon price negotiations, shows overwhelming public support for investment in solar and wind, and that this support might just win the politics of a carbon price.
The poll shows that the public loves renewables, but that this sentiment is vulnerable to attacks from various clean energy detractors. Solar and wind have been politicised and companies need to step in and vigorously defend their interests.
Renewable energy consensus
The central question of the poll was 'Does that fact that the carbon pricing scheme includes a $10 billion investment in renewable energy make you more supportive or less supportive of the carbon pricing scheme or does it make no difference?'
Fourty-three per cent said the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) makes them more supportive, 10 per cent said more negative, and 41 per cent said it made no difference.
If wind and solar firms, along with Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the Australian Greens, can shape the national narrative around the progress of renewable energy technologies, then that 41 per cent who said the CEFC $10 billion makes no difference can probably be activated into supporting the package.
The poll also questioned whether or not renewable energy appeals to people’s basic values. In answer to the proposition, 'Investing in renewable energy is good for people and the environment,' a startling 89 per cent agreed, with only 6 per cent in disagreement, and 5 per cent undecided.
Fourty-five per cent of Australians strongly agreed with the value proposition, and 2 per cent strongly disagreed. That is a level of support that neither fossil fuels nor nuclear power will ever have.
So a majority of Australian think renewables are a good thing, but how many actually want to see money spent on them? It turns out that 87 per cent agree that 'There should be more investment in renewables like solar and wind.' If you understand the value of renewable energy, then you want to see more investment.
The heavy polluting industres know they cannot easily shift basic values, so they have undermined solar and wind at the next level of understanding, around jobs, prices and the electricity industry. In reaction to the statement, 'Investing in renewable energy is good for the economy by creating jobs,' 80 per cent were in agreement, and only 10 per cent in disagreement.
After two years of campaigning for coal and against renewables, energy-intensive and heavy-polluting industry, along with certain media outlets and Opposition leader Tony Abbott, have done barely any damage to the perceived value of renewables as an industry.
When asked to respond to the statement, 'Renewable energy can be as reliable as other sources of energy,' 68 per cent agreed, and we begin to see where the antis have been effective.
Busting the baseload myth
The next issue, to mine, is the question of so-called ‘baseload’ electricity. At the Labor national conference last weekend, a disconcerting number of delegates chose to run the furphy that only coal and uranium can power our electricity grid.
In response to the statement, 'Renewable energy like wind and solar can provide enough energy for all of our needs,' 56 per cent agreed and 17 per cent said "don’t know."
This question is so important that it was asked in another formulation: 'If we invest in sufficient renewable energy it will be able to replace coal and other sources of fossil fuel-based energy.' This had the same result, with 56 per cent in agreement (and 17 per cent undecided).
Detractors, like Tony Abbott say they are concerned with policy, but all they are really interested in is creating hip-pocket fears, so the politics largely hangs on the question of prices. This is where people are very confused. 57 per cent agree with the statement 'With sufficient investment in renewable energy, the costs of power for households would decrease.'
When the question is posed differently, the result shifts. In response to the statement, 'Renewable energy will increase households' cost of living through increased power prices,' 40 per cent agree and 24 per cent are undecided.
This is where the carbon price becomes an electoral liability, with only 44 per cent of people in support of the statement 'I am prepared to pay a little more for renewable energy.'
Renewables are, of course, cheaper in the long run than fossil fuels, because they internalise the environmental costs of carbon pollution. That is the whole point of the debate.
Unfortunately, however, the false economics of our energy market means that there are up-front costs to be borne in the transition to renewable energy, and people are not yet prepared to pay these costs.
Some elements in the Liberal Party have expanded their objections from climate change to renewable energy, and behave as though windmills and solar panels are virtually weapons of mass destruction. Electorally, this would appear to be dangerous ground and should be seen as ripe and juicy low-hanging fruit for campaigners.
It is a moving front in the battle against reason and facts. When asked to consider the proposition, 'There are legitimate concerns about the safety of renewable energy like wind and solar,' only 28 per cent of people actually agree with the safety question and almost as many (25 per cent) are undecided.
The renewable energy industry has done almost nothing to defend itself, when compared to the energetic campaigns run by the likes of the coal sector, banks, pokies, retailers, coal-seam gas miner, fishermen, tobacco and alcohol retailers.
So why is renewable energy still held in such high esteem? Firstly, because while people might be easily misled and apathetic, but they are not stupid. Anyone can see that solar and wind are excellent technologies.
Secondly, it is due to the effort of two organisations that I donate my time to: Beyond Zero Emissions and the 100% Renewable Campaign. Both organisations have given more constructive momentum to the climate debate in Australia than the government or the traditional environmental NGOs.
But more must be done if the CEFC and the Renewable Energy Target are to be protected. It is necessary to present the electorate with the real world choice we face. The constantly dropping costs of renewable energy must be showcased frequently and clearly. With the right campaign effort, killing off renewables will come to be seen as a crazy form of political suicide
Saving the debate
Renewable energy is the technological core of the transition to a healthy, post-carbon economy. This fact has seemingly been forgotten by the thousands of well meaning climate NGOs and experts who have been drawn into the vortex of the UN climate process.
Thanks to Beyond Zero Emissions, 100% Renewable Campaign and the Greens, Australia is moving the conversation away from the carbon fetish and towards renewables, where it should be. The core of the CEF agreement is renewable energy, and that is what will power most of the emissions reduction. The carbon price starts at $23, which is not high enough to bring on solar and wind by itself, so it should be seen as a support mechanism. The carbon price provides a small but important economic signal and raises funds for RE acceleration.
This technology-centred approach could save the UNFCCC, which is far too broad, slow and unenforceable. The climate treaty being negotiated in Durban was written in 1992. It is clear that we would have been better spending the last 20 years accelerating the progress of proven solar and wind renewables, rather than the toothless, complex climate agreement we have today.
If we had simply focused on renewables, they would now be cheaper than coal and gas and we could let the market solve the problem. This would free up the UN to address complex issues of industrial production and agriculture and how to protect our forests and oceans.
The opposition in Australia probably won't wake up to this anytime soon, but it could. A sensible opposition would look to today’s wind and solar technologies for new financial opportunities, cleaner power, innovation and climate security.
A carbon price should not be seen as the only response to the global climate disaster we're heading for, otherwise the garbage put out by the polluters will crowd out reason and responsible action.
(These poll questions were asked in the weekly omnibus conducted by Essential Research from 27th to 31st July 2011 and is based on 1,019 respondents. The survey was conducted online.)
Dan Cass started Dan Cass & Co in 2010 to provide lobbying and campaign services to renewable energy firms. He is a Director of Hepburn Wind, Australia's first community-owned wind farm.
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Sth Australia time difference
Adelaide has a longitude of 138.5 degrees. Brisbane is 153, Sydney is 151.
At 15 degrees per hour, there is typically 1 hour difference between sunsets in Brisbane and Adelaide. In winter there will be less, (as low as 41 minutes), and summer more (as high as 1:18).
Adelaide and Brisbane are comparable in size, but the NEM connection between them does not have a high capacity.
Certainly this time difference, is a good argument to upgrade the NEM, but at a typical difference of just 1 hour, the ability to "smear" PVA output doesn't seem very attractive.
Certainly the Perth-Sydney differences and the Perth-Brisbane differences, which are close to 3 hours, would allow some good "smearing". Again though the justification for building a Nullarbor link applies to far more than just spreading PVA output.
The ability to send power back and forwards across the Nullarbor has huge bounties in its ability to reduce peak "spot" electricity pricing. Ie there are advantages that apply to the electricity market independently of how that electricity is generated.
The BZE report though did not focus on PVA at all. Most of the electricity that the report proposed should be generated, were from solar thermal plants which had thermal storage. Most of the rest of the power was to be from windfarms.
The network upgrades it proposed were to connect up desert plants and to allow aggregation from geographically diverse solar plants and windfarms.
For the 57th time?
Mark Duffett, what you don't consider? is that Australia is a big big country, with the vast majority of the population clinging to a thin strip of land on the far east of the continent
Observation shows that as the planet revolves the sunlight moves ever steadily and reliably westward
Therefore when the peak caused by the coastal clinging masses all switching on their airconditioners on the hot summer days after 5 PM just a couple of time zones away somewhere in South Australia the sun is beating down more than enough sunlight to power that peak load and much more as well.
The BZE proposal covers this with the costings for improving the national grid included in that plan, a grid that extands all the way to Carnarvon in WA.
South Australia is already a part of the NEM
The failing is with the current centralised grid that we now have, not of the ability for renewables to take on the task of supplying base load power
Air con
The 5pm-6pm summer peak for aircon is a huge problem, not just for the generators but also for the poles and wires. The recent price hikes in NSW owe more to that than anything else. I've heard that for every $1 spent on domestic AC the network has to spend $3.
Pre-cooling should help. Maybe even store it locally: latent heat of fusion of 11kg water is about a kWh. But approaches like that won't fly until we have smart metering to charge more for peak power.
I agree that the evening is important but...
Firstly I'd like to note that rooftop PVA (to me) makes more sense when sited on industrial complexes, and school rooves, than houses. Most houses are empty during the day - people are at work or school (using electricity there).
Secondly solar thermal with about 20 hours of storage makes sense to me, as these will usually be able to store, on average, power to the equivalent of around 8-16 hours at midday power levels. Solar PVA farms only make sense to me when coupled with pumped hydro, or some other reasonable efficient "battery" technology.
But there are two applications which would be good when powered from rooftop PVA, PVA farms, or windfarms.
The first is desalination with the output going to dams rather than the water grid. The second is the pumping of treated water (from sewage and storm water pipes) back up to the top of river valleys.
It would be good to pump treated water back up into the upper reaches of the shoalhaven, for instance, to compensate for what we steal for Sydney's sprawling suburbs.
The reason that these applications are perfect is that when the wind isn't blowing and the sun has set, then we simply stop the pumps.
for the 58th time
5 pm is the approximate time of the total peak demand on the highest-demand summer days. This is a fact. Not 'may or may not' (http://www.aemo.com.au/planning/SASDO2011/documents/CHAPTER2.pdf, page 11). Sorry, you don't get to choose your own facts. And it is the key fact, with respect to rooftop PV output. I don't know whether domestic a/c is the controlling factor in this; that was my inference. But to say that commercial AC is a 'much higher demand level' inducing an earlier daily peak is demonstrably wrong.
for the 57th time
5pm may (or may not) be when the domestic peak AC occurs but the commercial AC peak - a much higher demand level - is during the working day and during that time those unused rooftop PV panels are pouring their power into the grid.
not that much?
Those cloudy vs cloudless production figures are about what I would have expected, but it's all in the eye of the beholder (or more to the point, energy user) - a drop of over 65% counts as 'that much' in my book.
Your girlfriend's family property setup sounds almost identical to that of friends of mine in southern Tasmania, with the exception that they use their PV for refrigeration and freezing as well, not to mention electronic media. They don't get to see much TV or internet in winter. Do your friends use gas for refrigeration?
Our friends also went to the trouble of installing wind turbines at some remove from the house, for similar reasons to yours, but even after having done so concluded they were not worth the trouble.
Just a minor point
In response to Mark Duffet:
It seems that cloudy days dont drop the output from solar PVA that much. Yesterday (08/12/11), for example, Sydney was covered in really heavy dark clouds for the whole day, yet the average outut from a collecton of Sydney systems was arond 240kWh, down from around a peak of 702kWh on a cloudless day.
See:
http://www.pvoutput.org/listteam.jsp?tid=9
But I take your point, storage is key. My girlfriend's family have a property with no electricity. They use PVA to charge deep-cycle lead acid batteries. This is mainly used for lighting in the evening.
The 4 houses on the property (each sibling has their own house) have designed the houses to catch any and every breeze, and to prevent light (in the warmer months) from coming from the North. Even in Jan/Feb, the houses in this Nth Coast farm are cool enough.
There is insufficient PVA power for water heating. This is provided by solar (thermal) heaters on the roof. They dont run out.
Energy for cooking is provided by bottled gas. As this is expensive, it is used sparingly.
Being in a sheltered valley, wind is way too unreliable to be of much use, but on the ridge at the top of the property, they have considered installing a windmill, but the cost of building it, getting permission from their neighbour (it would be on the property boundary) and running the power 700m down to the houses, are all big negatives.
I would love to believe that this poll is "real"
The results of an online poll do not give me that much confidence of the results.
If we got similar results from something like a Morgan Research Poll, etc - something done across the country then that would be good, but also very expensive.
Matthew, if you tried to raise money for such a poll by donations, I'd put some money in.
Whilst I'm not a Green supporter, I gave money to the Greens for them to pay for a similar poll. You might find that the Greens and maybe the odd Young Labor branch, and Malcolm Turnbull might kick some money in.
for the 57th time...
...rooftop PV does not provide the power needed for when everyone switches on the air conditioners. Everyone switches on the aircons when they arrive home, which is why summer demand peaks occur around 5 pm - just as rooftop PV output is beginning to plummet. It should also be noted that cloudy hot days are far from uncommon.
Laws of physics are no logical barrier to renewables
Mark,
You say:
"You can call the requirement for reliable, dispatchable electricity a 'furphy' until you're blue in the face"
I think almost nobody disputes that we need reliable electricity. The author is claiming that it is a furphy to say that we must have coal fired or nuclear plants to provide it. That is the claim that is surprising (to me).
As solar starts to do the heavy lifting on those hot days when demand for air-conditioning creates peak demand, I presume we will see a relative decline in the importance of coal.
If economically viable storage is developed the decline will be more marked. The question in my mind is will we ever see storage efficiencies at a level where solar (and other renewables) can replace coal?
Minute by Minute?
Martin, I don't think the coal fired power industry is any paragon of virtue when it comes to matching supply with demand minute by minute.
Solar thermal with storage can do that. And rooftop PV provides the power needed for when everyone switches on the air conditioners too.
Intelligent analysis
Great quality article, Dan. This is the kind of stuff that should be serving up at breakfast time in the popular press - the industrial and political opposition to the Carbon Price would quickly evaporate in a cloud of renewables :)
Unreliables too costly
Well said Martin Nicholson and Mark Duffett. The public will switch off their support for unreliable when th y realise the cost, and the black out that they would cause.
So far the public has been inundated by 20+ years of deceitful propoganda about "renewable" energy. The ABC has been promoting it at every opportunity for 20+ years. No wonder the population has little idea of the reality.
Polls apart
I suspect that a substantial proportion of the general public have very little understanding about electricity or how it’s generated and managed. Few really understand the intermittency issues of both solar and wind – particularly rooftop PV or even the need to exactly match electricity supply and demand – moment by moment.
It’s probably like holding a poll on whether interest rates should be cut this month and suggesting that because more than 50% agreed then we should cut interest rates. Fortunately we leave such decisions to the experts.
Its all about the $
This is great data and shows 2 things very clearly - 1. the general public is not buying the fossil fuel industry and Murdoch Press supported story line - 2. the general public will buy renewable energy when it's cheaper.
I am convinced that the biggest barrier to adoption of small scale reneawable energy (eg roof top solar) is the regulation that governs the electricity market - we don't need FIT's, we dont need a carbon price, what is needed is a level playing field so that if someone / or a company choose to generate electricity on their home or building they will get a fair price for it. Fossil fuel generators / distributors know that PV technology will very soon mean home owners and building owners can install and generate electricity, cheaper than the price they can supply it for (provided home & building owners can sell it to the grid at market price) and are fighting tooth and nail keep the upperhand. Soon, the public / pollies will work this out .....
The laws of physics are not determined democratically
You can call the requirement for reliable, dispatchable electricity a 'furphy' until you're blue in the face, it doesn't change the fact that non-hydro renewables have not shouldered the bulk of a modern electricity grid anywhere despite massive efforts, and that the critiques of the Beyond Zero Emissions plan remain unanswered and unrefuted. Are the 100% renewables crowd really so sure of their position that they're prepared to gamble our climate future on it? There needs to be at very least a Plan B, if not an alternative Plan A.
For an alternative perspective on the politics of climate solutions, see http://decarbonisesa.com/2011/10/30/gong-to-pell-in-a-handbasket-why-it-... The bottom line (as has also been pointed out by George Monbiot in the last few days, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/05/sellafield-nuclear-e...) is that the likes of Dan Cass are a critical part of the problem.
Cleaning up climate debate
When we get the (coal-powered) electricity on in our home or business, we do not pay upfront for the costs of the electric grid, the substation etc. We pay for all this as we go along, with each monthly bill.
But when we set up our solar panels, we pay those capital costs upfront. The system is therefore weighted against people using small-scale distributed solar energy.
It is far from being a "level playing field" and I hope that solar suppliers perhaps with government help, will organise a way to have the capital, infrastructure payments done over time, as with the traditional electrcity
Nice article
The results of the survey really do tell a clear story and also represent a real way forward. Well done Dan.