Finally, a real plan to cut emissions for good

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.

The cornerstone of the renewable electricity generation infrastructure is solar thermal power. Unlike wind power or solar photovoltaic panels, which generate electricity directly, solar thermal power uses mirrors to concentrate the sun's energy onto a receiver and create heat, which can then be used to make steam to run a turbine and generate electricity, in the same way as a conventional coal-fired power station. What makes this technology such a game-changer is that heat can be stored very efficiently in large tanks of molten salt, like an enormous thermos flask, and then be dispatched to generate electricity at any time of the day or night, making it in effect baseload solar power. This smashes the myth that renewable energy cannot supply baseload electricity, that is, a reliable supply 24 hours a day.

The report points out that solar thermal power plants are already being rolled out on a large scale in Spain, the US and other parts of the world. Spain, for example, is expected to have 2400MW online by 2013, while Australia, in spite of its vastly greater solar resource, will have none. The plan details a rollout of large solar thermal plants at 12 proposed sites across the country to supply 60 per cent of Australia's power, with the other 40 per cent being supplied by wind. Wind power has been growing globally at a rate of about 30 per cent every year for the past decade, and in China at about 100 per cent for the past few years.

Wind and solar thermal power integrate extremely well, with dispatchable solar thermal power providing the firming power to complement wind. The plan goes into great detail on the resource and labour requirements, and even the factories that would be required to make all the component parts. It has detailed energy modelling to establish that it could actually supply the electricity reliably all year round, and goes into great detail with costing to establish the size of the investment required. Amazingly, this is only equivalent to one coffee a day for every Australian for the next 10 years.

It is an absolute breath of fresh air — a rigorous and coherent plan to answer the one question that needs to be answered: what would it take to do the job properly and move Australia decisively away from its dirty fossil fuel energy infrastructure to a modern renewable energy economy? And that it was done by a group of dedicated engineers in their own time, makes it all the more extraordinary!

Mark Ogge is an artist who is director of communications for Beyond Zero Emissions in his spare time.