Zero Carbon Australia 2020

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.

 By Dan Cass

Adrian Whitehead is the only environmentalist I know who has ever harboured credible ambitions to be a paratrooper. We campaigned on forests together in the early 1990s when Adrian was in the Army Reserve. He approaches defence of the nation and of the planet with a consistent moral clarity; if something is valuable and is under threat, then you have a duty to protect it. 

Thanks to weak knees and other joys of impending middle age, Adrian never did make it into 3 RAR. But he did start something heroic. Adrian co-founded Beyond Zero Emissions (BZE) with current Executive Director Matthew Wright. 

Adrian's reasoning was that since greenhouse gases pose an unacceptable threat to the planet and our civilisation, we have to plan an industrial economy that does not cause the release of greenhouse gases. This was too radical for the mainstream environment groups, so he started his own.

TOM ARUP ENVIRONMENT CORRESPONDENT
June 22, 2010

A MASSIVE introduction of solar-thermal power plants and wind farms would allow Australia to generate all its energy needs from renewable technologies by 2020, research shows.

The report, to be announced today by the retiring Liberal Victorian senator Judith Troeth, the Greens senator Christine Milne and the Independent Nick Xenophon, finds a 100 per cent renewable plan by 2020 would cost $37 billion a year, in public and private money - or 3 per cent of Gross Domestic Product.

The report is the result of a research collaboration between an environment group, Beyond Zero Emissions, and Melbourne University's Energy Research Institute, with input from engineering firm Sinclair Knight Merz.

Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan analyses the best technical approach to reach 100 per cent renewable energy production by 2020.

By Pablo Brait and Leigh Ewbank

In April, the Rudd Government abandoned the severely flawed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, the centrepiece of its national climate policy agenda.

After two defeats in the Senate, and unwilling to risk a double dissolution election on the issue, Labor backflipped and deferred its plan to establish a domestic emissions-trading scheme to 2013. At a time when decisive action is needed to avoid dangerous climate change our national climate policy is at a standstill.

Australia desperately needs a new approach. We need a policy agenda that acknowledges the urgency of the situation and accepts the requirement of evidence-based emissions cuts identified by climate science. We need a circuit breaker to reinvigorate the debate and spur action.

Today at Parliament House in Canberra, Beyond Zero Emissions will outline such an approach with the launch the Zero Carbon Australia - Stationary Energy report—a detailed blueprint for transitioning Australia's stationary energy sector to 100 per cent renewable sources by 2020. The report, published in collaboration with the University of Melbourne Energy Institute, is set to spark a debate about Australia's energy present and future, and more broadly, what constitutes credible climate policy.

By Paddy Manning

After an interview with Australian solar energy pioneer David Mills in October, this column previewed a Stanford University study showing that renewable sources - principally wind and solar - could meet all of our energy needs. Its co-author, Mark Jacobson - the university's professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of its atmosphere and energy program - appeared by videoconference at last weekend's Sustainable Living Festival in Melbourne.

He spoke about the findings of his study, which was the cover story in November's Scientific American magazine, which has generated plenty of debate in the United States (and some here, too).

Jacobson and Mark Delucchi, a research scientist at the University of California, compared available world renewable energy resources - wind, water, solar - with maximum forecast energy demand, including transport, of about 16.9 terawatts (1 terawatt equals a trillion watts) in 2030. Today's demand is 12.5 terawatts.