Zero Carbon Australia 2020

As Crocodile Dundee might say if he took to the stump: "That's not a policy, this is a policy."

The Prime Minister's exercise in small-target politics in Brisbane yesterday confirmed both major parties are missing in action on climate this election.

Julia Gillard's announcement should be measured against the Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan released last week by the green group Beyond Zero Emissions and the University of Melbourne's Energy Research Institute.

Its plan tries to answer the question: what would we do if Australia and the world were genuine about cutting emissions quickly enough to give the planet a better-than-even chance of avoiding more than 2 degrees of global warming by 2050?

A PLAN to convert the nation's entire energy sector to renewables has been endorsed by a group of influential engineers and scientists, including miner Rio Tinto's former head scientist Robin Batterham.

The 200-page Zero Carbon Australia (ZCA) 2020 report launched last night at Melbourne University was described by Professor Batterham as "much needed" to shift the climate debate "to focus on energy, security, affordability, export and of course opportunity".

A collaboration between the university's Melbourne Energy Institute and the Beyond Zero Emissions group, the plan details how fossil fuelled power plants could be replaced in a decade at a cost of less than 4 per cent of GDP.

This evening at the University of Melbourne, the Zero Carbon Australia 2020 report will be unveiled. Produced through the donated time of Melbourne Uni researchers and a small green group, Beyond Zero Emissions, the report outlines how Australia could realistically move from our current electricity situation, to one which releases no climate changing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Leigh Ewbank, director of public policy for Beyond Zero Emissions has outlined some of the thinking behind the report in a piece for ABC Environment previously (and also more recently on The Drum).

"We need a nation-building project on the scale of the Snowy Mountains Scheme to invest in renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure. This is the fresh approach needed to drive Australia's transition towards a clean economy and protect the nation from dangerous climate change," he wrote.

Australia's energy grid could run entirely on renewables such as wind and solar power within 10 years, according to a report to be released tomorrow.

The report outlines a 10-year road map which the authors say is affordable and achievable. Its recommendations have been endorsed by the International Energy Agency (IAEA).

It is known as the Zero Carbon Australia 2020 report and it outlines a plan which its authors say can replace fossil fuel electricity with 100 per cent renewable energy within 10 years.

The report's authors say it only refers to technologies that are proven and commercially available.

Matthew Wright from Beyond Zero Emissions is one of the authors of the report. He says 40 to 60 per cent of the energy mix would be run by wind power and solar thermal.

"Earlier examples are in the Mojave Desert in the United States. Now they didn't have significant storage," he said.

The ascension of Julia Gillard provides an opportunity for Labor to reorient its climate change policy agenda.

Contrary to what its proponents have argued for years, emissions trading has not been as politically feasible as initially thought. Labor's inability to pass a market-based mechanism in its first term not only brings into question the political palatability of neoliberal-inspired policy, but also draws attention to the need for alternative approaches.

With the national climate change debate focused solely on capping and trading carbon, policymakers have forgotten that there are many paths to reduce Australia's emissions and transition to a clean energy economy.

The launch of Beyond Zero Emissions' Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy report is an attempt to push back against narrow-minded policymaking. It details a path for Australia to meet 100 per cent of its energy needs with renewable energy by the end of the decade. Making the plan a reality will require a radical shift in climate policy.

ISRAELI electricity company BrightSource has challenged the Federal Government to replicate US President Barack Obama's offer overnight to guarantee loans to two solar energy projects.

The move comes as the International Energy Agency endorses a Zero Carbon Australia 2020 plan to be launched in Melbourne next week.

The US Department of Energy will extend US$1.85 billion ($A2.19 billion) in loan guarantees to Spanish power generation company Abengoa and to solar panel manufacturer Abound Solar.

BrightSource Australian chief Andrew Dyer said Resources Minister Martin Ferguson's $1.5 billion Solar Flagships program should be tweaked to resemble the US model and allow for several solar power plants to be built in tandem.

By Jennifer Macey

ELEANOR HALL: Wind and solar power provide less than one per cent of Australia's total energy needs at the moment.

The Federal Government wants to increase this to 20 per cent over the next decade. But a report by researchers from Melbourne University and the Beyond Zero Emissions group say renewable technologies could provide one hundred per cent of the country's power in the same time frame, as Jennifer Macey reports.

JENNIFER MACEY: It sounds impossible but a new report insists it can be done.

Researchers from Melbourne University and Beyond Zero Emissions have modelled, costed and tested whether introducing 100 per cent renewable energy in the next ten years is feasible.

The Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan was launched in Canberra this morning by Senator Judith Troeth from the Coalition, Independent senator Nick Xenophon and Greens Senator Christine Milne.

By Cathy Alexander

A new report says Australia could power itself entirely by renewable energy within a decade, halving the country's greenhouse gas emissions.

While going down the renewable road would be more expensive, the report, written by engineers and consultants for the Beyond Zero Emissions group, shows it would also yield energy security benefits.

"Today, Australia's energy is supplied by fossil fuels such as black coal and natural gas which are commodities benchmarked to international energy markets," the group's executive director Matthew Wright said.

"Relying on fossil fuels leaves Australian families and Australian industry exposed to future fluctuations in volatile and unpredictable energy costs."

But, Mr Wright said, there were no fuel costs associated with renewable energy.

By Mark Ogge

For years the climate change debate in Australia has been confined to endless discussion of abstract policy mechanisms designed to deliver only modest reductions in Australia's greenhouse gas emissions at best. It could well be characterised as a debate between doing nothing at all, or almost nothing, to address climate change in the Australian context. That all changed this week with the release of the Zero Carbon Australia 2020 Stationary Energy Plan, a detailed and pragmatic blueprint for transitioning the Australian stationary energy sector to 100 per cent renewable energy within a decade.

The project involved a team of engineers, scientists, researchers and others — including engineers from the existing fossil fuel energy sector — contributing thousands of hours of pro bono work to put together a detailed roadmap of the steps necessary to replace our coal and gas infrastructure with renewable energy. The plan uses only technology that is proven, reliable and commercially available now, to allow for an immediate start, and for it to be fully costed.

By Mike Sandiford

Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico may give us the will to shape the future.

Twenty-eight billion is a big number. In tonnes it is a mighty load. It is the sediment eroded globally each year from all our mountains and carried by all our rivers to all our seas. It is also the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere each year from burning fossil fuels. In dollar terms, it is the extra money we would need to spend each year for 10 years to build a zero-emission energy system in Australia.

To make that carbon dioxide, we dig 7 billion tonnes of coal and suck countless litres of oil and gas from the ground. In total, we already excavate more rock from the Earth than nature does. We are almost at the point where oil production will start to decline, and sucking so hard it is creating problems. According to latest estimates, more than one in every 1000 barrels produced each day is now flooding into the Gulf of Mexico from BP's Deepwater Horizon well. At current growth rates, coal will have peaked by mid-century and be largely gone by the end.