A National Imperative: 100% Renewable Energy in a Decade

ABOUT THE ZERO CARBON AUSTRALIA 2020 Plan: Beyond Zero Emissions has detailed and costed a blueprint for Australia’s transition to 100% renewable energy by 2020. The plan, Zero Carbon Australia 2020 (ZCA2020), will be launched in mid-2010. Beyond Zero Emissions is a not for profit, independent climate change group which uses the expertise of engineers, scientists and other professionals with industrial and academic experience to show how 100% renewable energy can be achieved by 2020, with an investment of only 3% of GDP per year. In 2007, the then Federal Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull infamously stated, “You can’t run a modern economy on wind farms and solar panels. It’s a pity that you can’t, but you can’t.” What a gaff. Even back in 2007, modern economies like Germany, Spain and Denmark had thousands of megawatts of Wind and Solar powering their modern industrial economies.  Beyond Zero Emission’s Zero Carbon Australia 2020 report, proves Turnbull wrong unequivocally. The technology and know-how to run a renewable economy on wind farms and solar is already operating commercially around the world. What Australia now needs to run our economy with renewables is political will. Political will akin to the tens of billions of dollars our political leaders used as economic stimulus to stave off any possible effects from the Global Financial Crisis. 

Renewable energy is ready to re-power the energy-intensive Australian economy. People still say, “The wind doesn't blow all the time and the sun doesn't shine at night”. True, but 1980s technology overcomes these limitations. While wind power output is variable, a combination of large-scale concentrated solar thermal plants with molten salt storage (otherwise known as Baseload Solar) and wind farms can power this nation twenty-four hours a day every day of the year. Baseload Solar Thermal is the game-changing renewable energy technology. The Baseload Solar plants with molten salt storage used in the ZCA2020 plan were developed by the US Department of Energy in the late 80s.  They are now commercially available from SolarReserve of California and Torresol Energy/SENER of Spain, and many other solar thermal companies are upgrading to this technology, including Solar Thermal industry leaders Acciona and Abengoa of Spain, Brightsource of Israel and Solar Millennium of Germany.  

Solar thermal plants use many mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto a receiver, generating heat. The heat is safely stored in insulated tanks of high-temperature molten salt, just like a thermos-flask stores a hot liquid. At any time of day or night, the hot liquid salt is used to make steam to power a conventional turbine, creating zero-emissions, baseload solar electricity. According to U.S. DoE projections, solar thermal will be cost-competitive with coal and gas power, as the Baseload Solar industry scales up to an installed capacity of about 4 Bayswater Power stations equivalent globally.   Even the conservative International Energy Agency to whom the world’s major economies turn for advice on energy says that Solar will make up 25% of the world’s energy by 2050 and that electricity from Baseload Solar Thermal plants will be the same price as electricity from coal plants by 2025. 

Baseload Solar and Wind power are the perfect fit for Australia. We are blessed with the developed world’s best solar resource and have a long, windy coastline. These vast renewable resources are our natural advantage in the global shift towards clean energy systems. With a relatively small population, Australia can move to renewable energy at the lowest cost of any country on earth. Unfortunately our political leaders haven’t seized the opportunity and so countries with far less sun and wind are getting in first.  

In Spain, where the solar resource is roughly on par with cloudy Victoria, Solar Millenium/ACS Cobra already has 150MW of operational solar thermal plants with 7.5 hours storage – enough for baseload operation in the summer, and intermediate load in the winter. Torresol Energy is building a 17MWe Baseload Solar power tower plant, Gemasolar, with 15 hours of molten salt storage. Gemasolar will be complete around the end of this year. Meanwhile, US company SolarReserve has three Baseload Solar projects on the go: one 50 MWe plant in Spain, and two plants in the US – 100 MWe and 150 MWe respectively. The concentrating solar thermal industry is currently building billions of dollars of plants globally, including $20 billion in Spain and more than $20 billion breaking ground this year in the south-west of the USA.  

The rapid uptake of wind power in other countries is in stark contrast to Australia. Denmark, for example, with 5.4 million inhabitants crammed into an area twenty times smaller than New South Wales, is aiming for 50% of its power to come from wind by 2025. By the end of 2010 the world will generate more electricity from wind than from all of France’s nuclear power. That’s twice Australia’s total 2009 grid consumption.  France took over 50 years to install their nuclear fleet, but 90% of global wind capacity was installed in just the last 10 years. 

Currently, new wind installations continue to grow at 30% per year globally.  This year the world will install 50,000MW of wind power, which will contribute the same amount of electricity to the world supply as all of the generating capacity installed in NSW, WA and SA combined. From 2013 the world will be installing more than the entire Australian annual electricity demand just in wind.  

In China alone, the installed wind capacity has doubled every year for the past five years. “Wind power is vital,” says Shi Lishan, deputy director of renewable energy in China’s National Energy Administration, “as it is the cheapest form of renewable energy. It is advantageous to put as much wind energy as you can harness in the grid because it’s cheap.”. This view is echoed by US Federal Energy Regulation Chairman Jon Wellinghoff. 

Australia’s vast, accessible renewable energy resources must not remain untapped. The Australian economy could be powered by a 60/40 split of solar and wind energy. Solar thermal plants are designed to quickly increase and decrease output, like fast-start hydro and gas plants. This makes solar thermal storage a perfect fit for balancing the output of wind power. The firming power for the wind resource (sometimes described as the back-up) is the Baseload Solar plant’s molten salt heat storage.  

In June, our blueprint showing how to run the Australian economy on 100% renewable energy will be released.  The plan proposes 23 wind farm locations around Australia and 12 locations at which to construct Baseload Solar plants with enough storage for 17 hours of electricity generation at full plant output after the sun has set. Beyond Zero Emissions has carried out detailed modelling based on wind speeds measured half-hourly for a two-year period and solar data from the 12 proposed Baseload Solar sites. With a demand model based on data from the current National Electricity Market (NEM), we show that 100% renewable electricity supply is completely feasible. The specified wind and solar system requires just 2% backup from existing hydro and a small amount of co-firing with waste biomass for rare periods with less sun or wind than required. ZCA2020 shows how we can deliver reliable electricity 24 hours, seven days, every day of the year matching Australia’s demand profile. 

A National Grid allows the renewable generating mix to be shifted from point of supply to demand, and takes advantage of geographical diversity. This would link WA’s two grids in the South and North with the eastern seaboard grid, the NEM. This is based on commercially available and costed High Voltage DC and AC transmission lines. The design of the grid was completed in conjunction with the advice and review of leading engineering firm Sinclair Knight Merz. 

The Plan calls for investment on the scale of 3% of GDP, or $37 Billion per year. Coming from both public and private investment, this is on par with other major investments in the mining and energy sectors. However while the Government has budgeted $42 Billion for the National Broadband Network and $28 Billion for new roads, there is a paltry $1.5 Billion for solar, half of which is going to rooftop solar. 

The plan includes details on resourcing the transition – how much concrete, steel, glass, silver etc is required – as well as the labour requirements.  There is a focus on detailing the kind of industries and jobs that will grow from the construction and manufacturing of the Solar and Wind Plants and the modernised electricity grid.  The plan shows how a vibrant renewable energy sector can be built in the current powerhouses of the Australian economy – the Hunter and Latrobe Valleys, and the Bowen basin in Queensland.  

The next edition of the ZCA2020 plan, due out in 2011, will draw upon the knowledge of more experts from industry and academia to demonstrate even cheaper ways of achieving the necessary renewable energy deployment. With current technical know how, labour force, industrial capacity and industrial scaling, we can reduce to zero the health and environmental issues that come from fossil fuel. Neither the Australian Government, nor Energy Minister Martin Ferguson, nor Opposition Leader Tony Abbott have a 100% renewable plan. So let’s use the Zero Carbon Australia 2020 Plan and get on with it. 

For more information on the ZCA2020 plan goto www.beyondzeroemissions.org