Prime Minister Julia Gillard described the legislation passed by Australia’s Senate as “historic” after years campaigning for what is hoped will create a new platform for companies to trade carbon credits and cut pollution. Australia is one of the biggest emitters of carbon per head globally due to its heavy use of coal-fired power generators, which account for about 75% of electricity output, and the new tax is intended to cut carbon pollution by 160 million tons a year by 2020.

The tax will be charged at a fixed price of 23 Australian dollars (US$23.50) per carbon ton from the country’s top 500 polluters starting from July 2012, increasing 2.5% annually until 2015 before changing to a floating-rate price with the government controlling the amount of tradable permits released annually and implementing a price floor and ceiling. At that point companies will be able to trade carbon credits and the scheme is expected to be linked with other systems in New Zealand and Europe.

Business groups have criticized the tax, which they say will add to company expenses and do little to cut global pollution because Australia exports much of its carbon in the form of coal, gas and minerals used for steel making.

“The passage of the climate change legislation with a high starting price and no flexibility to adjust the price in the initial years is deeply disappointing,” Heather Ridout, the chief executive of the Australian Industry Group, said. “This is especially so given the extremely uncertain and weak global economic conditions and the volatility of global carbon prices.”

In an effort to gain public support for the tax, the government has made weighty concessions on its original plan by offering private households generous tax breaks and pension increases to offset higher energy costs.

“The carbon price is expected to have a moderate negative (fiscal year 2013) earnings impact on some emissions-intensive companies,” Tim Jordan, a research analyst at Deutsche Bank AG said in a note to clients.

Australia wants to emulate the European Union’s emissions trading system, or ETS, set up to cut greenhouse gases that many scientists claim cause global warming. The scheme imposes pollution quotas on over 11,000 manufacturers and power companies, leading to a ceiling in 2020 that will be 21% below 2005 emission levels. The EU has lobbied hard to get a successor for the Kyoto treaty, the instrument that regulates carbon emissions internationally and expires next year.

In the U.S., the world’s largest economy, support for a federal climate policy has withered but California is planning to introduce a scheme at state level. California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 requires the state to cut greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

The International Energy Agency warned in October that as the world increasingly relies on coal to meet growing energy demand, it is headed for a “dire future” where high energy prices drag on economic growth and global temperatures rise dangerously, unless significant innovations are made to lower the cost of clean energy and carbon-capture technology.

By Enda Curran and Ray Brindal
Original source click here.

These price increases can be put in perspective by looking at the impact they have on running an electrical appliance. For example, the cost of running a 100 watt light bulb, at Synergy’s current rate of $0.2083 cents per kilowatt hour, for 24 hours a day over the course of a year can be calculated as follows:

0.1 kilowatts p/h x $0.2083 per kwh x 24 hours x 365 days = $182.47

Given that the average Australian household consumes far more power annually than a 100 watt light bulb, and that it is common to find 2400 watt electric heaters, 250 watt LCD televisions, and 650 watt fridge freezers, it is easy to see that even a 10% increase has a big impact on the household bottom line.

Furthermore, the Business Council of Australia has predicted that residential electricity bills may double again by 2015, partially as a result of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, and the continuing price pressures placed upon coal and gas resources from the booming economies of China and India.

With the extra incentive of these past and predicted future electricity price rises, combined with government rebates and feed in tariffs, homeowners have been installing solar power systems in greater numbers than ever before. In fact, according to the Clean Energy Council’s Clean Energy Australia Report 2010 (pdf) there were 105,520 solar power installations between January and September of this year. This is a 69.4% increase on the total installations for all of 2009, and a 556.4% increase on the number of solar power installations conducted in Australia between 2001 and 2008.

This high volume of solar power system installations is generating significant environmental benefits, as every kilowatt hour of electricity produced on a residential roof-top directly reduces the amount of electricity that must be produced via the burning of fossil fuels. As such, although electricity price increases may generate some short-term pain for household budgets, they are also helping to improve the health of our environment.

Original source click here

EnviroMission, a solar-energy start-up based in Melbourne, Australia, said today it is moving forward with plans to construct two 200 MW solar-power facilities in Arizona. EnviroMission Limited, the Australian company’s Phoenix-based subsidiary, has apparently initiated the environmental review process for the two mega solar tower facilities by filing documents with the Arizona Power Plant and Transmission Line Siting Committee.

Considering the scale of the proposed towers, the environmental review may receive more significant scrutiny than other solar-energy projects. A pilot facility using similar technology operated in Spain during the 1980s, but only produced about 50 kW of power. The scale proposed for the Arizona projects would be a step-change in scale for these types of solar-energy projects. Each of the towers would be roughly the size of a two-car garage standing well-over half a mile high. Collectively, both facilities would occupy more than 10,000 acres of land. In October, EnviroMission received approval to sell electricity from the first of two planned 200 MW solar power facilities to the Southern California Public Power Authority under the terms of a Power Purchase Agreement.

The solar tower would produce electric power through a so-called “solar updraft” technology. The tower harnesses the sun’s radiation to heat a large body of air stored under a large collector zone. This process can raise air temperatures above 150 degrees Fahrenheit. This heat funnels intense drafts of hot air through wind turbines constructed on the inside of the tower’s vertical shaft. The massive scale of the two towers would produce up to 200 MW of electricity respectively.

While the facility would only operate at full capacity for 12 hours a day, the technology is designed to work without water, which is often used in cooling systems for solar thermal plants and is a precious commodity in Arizona. The precise locations of the proposed facilities in Arizon is still confidential.

By William Pentland.
Original source: http://blogs.forbes.com/williampentland/2010/11/10/solar-tower/

AUSTRALIA’S clean energy sector is struggling because of delays in the imposition of an emissions trading scheme, leaving the renewable energy target system devised by the Howard government as the only reliable economic carrot worth chasing.

Business owners across the country are grinding their teeth at the delays in putting a price on carbon, the single most critical element in any energy regime that wants to increase the economic attractiveness of renewables and decrease reliance on coal-fired power generation, currently the cheapest system by a long way.

“Emissions trading scheme” (ETS) is the generic term for what we need and carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS) is the specific name of what was proposed and rejected in Canberra early in 2010.

And because the RET system is significantly smaller and less comprehensive than any ETS, we are beginning to see the scary phenomenon of lower prices for renewable energy stocks.

Why? Isn’t every new windmill or solar panel in Australia a long-term positive?

Yes, but until the much delayed Australian election result brought forward the likely date for a renewal of the ETS/CPRS debate, investors and generators alike have been thrust back on a little part of the overall picture, the one investment certainty in an ocean of waffle: the Renewable Energy Certificate system by which electricity producers must reduce their emissions by 20 per cent by the year 2020.

And because those generators have been buying certificates on the open market, as they have been encouraged, and building windfarms, the amount of clean energy being produced in Australia is at risk of plateauing.

They’re scaling up gradually but not only do they not have to get there just yet, but there are now reports that they’re very close to having enough certificates to cover themselves for 2011-2013.

Which means that anyone who builds a wind farm from scratch in Australia in the near future and who does not have a contract with an electricity provider had better have a lot of electricity users of their own planned, because those providers won’t be buying until they have to.

In simple terms, our attempts to wean ourselves off coal-fired power have struck growing pains and we’ve barely started.

Wind isn’t of course the only renewable, following well behind hydro power — but it is still well ahead, in cost and time terms, of large-scale solar power. That makes it the biggest game in renewables in Australia at the moment.

That’s something the existing generators have emphatically noticed and they are forging ahead with new wind capacity.

The bad guys, if you want to call them that, are ironically the only ones likely to make much money out of wind in the short to medium term.

For instance the $1 billion Macarthur wind farm in Victoria being jointly developed by AGL and its New Zealand partner Meridian Energy looks likely to earn its developers so many renewable energy certificates (RECs) that the price of those certificates will stay at around $40 per megawatt hour.

This is not enough to make any new wind farm economical on its own for a company that doesn’t generate electricity from more old- fashioned sources such as coal.

The $1 billion 420-megawatt farm, near Hamilton 260 kilometres west of Melbourne, is due for completion early in 2013.

That capacity, which incidentally was recently uprated by 25 per cent because of the introduction of bigger turbines, will be enough to power more than 220,000 average Victorian homes and save more than 1.7 million tonnes of greenhouse gases each year. AGL recently said that was the equivalent of taking more than 420,000 cars off the road.

There’s strong opinion out there that with that sort of scale of construction, Australia will hit its grated renewable energy targets easily. Jenny Cosgrove, a power analyst at stockbroker Wilson HTM, was recently quoted as saying we’re rapidly approaching a balance of supply and demand for the period up to 2013, and that’s not including the supply of small-scale RECs that she estimates to total more than 21 gigawatt hours by the end of this year.

“It will take a number of years before this excess supply is absorbed,” she said.

Conclusion?

Our large-scale power generating industry turns out to be well ahead of our federal government on the renewables side of the ledger and householders are catching up fast.

So strong has been the demand by households to be involved in generating their own electricity that the federal government had to devise a whole new system called the SRES, Small Scale Renewable Energy Scheme.

To the credit of the ALP federal government earlier this year, “the number of systems receiving support under the SRES will be uncapped to ensure small scale installers have certainty”, to quote a government fact sheet issued in February.

The problem with all this is that there’s all the difference in the world between generating an increasing percentage of Australia’s electricity from renewables, and pushing less CO2 into the atmosphere by the more challenging process of phasing out coal-fired power generation.

It’s an irony that before the federal election John Brumby’s ALP state government in Victoria had done more to move on the emissions issue than the federal government had, by canvassing in July the idea of shutting at least part of the ancient and notorious Hazelwood brown coal power station in the Latrobe Valley.

At the time he did it Julia Gillard had put off the likely action date on setting a carbon price until 2012, thus earning him significant brownie points with his proposal to shut down 25 per cent of Hazelwood by 2014 to save four million tonnes of CO2 emissions annually.

Admittedly the idea is dependent on federal funding to hand as much as $1 billion in compensation to the plant’s owners.

But in a legislative landscape where nothing appeared to be happening, the idea got media traction.

The final 76-74 settlement of the House of Representatives on September 7 in favour of the battered ALP incumbent presages a likely second attempt to bring in an emissions trading scheme of the sort that was proposed, then abandoned, early this year.

New Green MP Adam Bandt clearly wants an ETS, if a tougher scheme than the one previously rejected, and during the negotiating process that followed the election ex-National Party independents Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott both highlighted the need for an early debate on the ETS as one of their most urgent priorities.

It’s also worth noting that on the eve of the August election, Gillard said she would view a victory as a mandate for a carbon price provided the community was ready for it.

The main reason for the Emissions Trading Scheme’s rejection in April was the Greens’ emphatic belief that it ought to go further than it did, particularly in relation to the excessively generous protection that the Greens thought it granted to existing “dirty” electricity generators.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s noisy objection to it was the most widely reported element of the ETS’s rejection.

But it was the Senate Greens’ blocking stance against the ETS on the grounds of its perceived inadequacy, tied ironically in with the Coalition senators’ objection on the entirely opposite ground that the measure was excessive, that finally did for it. Coalition doubters weren’t its only executioners.

Can that happen again?

Certainly, particularly as the number of Green senators is going to go up on July 1 as a consequence of the August election, but there’s a growing belief among the majority of electors in Australia who want to see an ETS legislated soon that a modest scheme is still a great deal better, particularly in perception terms, than no scheme.

Perhaps we should leave it to Henry Derwent, President and CEO of IETA, the most powerful emissions trading body in the world, to give us an external view of the rejected Australian ETS.

“Australia’s emissions trading scheme was first-rate, comprehensive and effective.

“It was probably insufficiently flexible but it was potentially very efficient,” he told a press conference in Singapore in August.

Derwent runs the Geneva-based International Emissions Trading Association.

Original source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/special-reports/climate-change/climate-series-delays-test-true-believers/story-fn5oikwf-1225935460834

A report to be released by Greenpeace today shows the big banks provided loans worth $5.5 billion to the coal industry over the past five years – seven times more than the $784 million lent to the renewable energy sector.

None of the banks would refuse to finance new coal-fired power stations yesterday, but the Westpac media relations manager, Jane Counsel, said apart from historical customers, the bank’s future funding would be likely to focus on projects leaning towards energy efficiency and clean energy, to help make the transition to a low emissions economy.

”Westpac supports the development of an efficient, affordable, safe and secure energy system that recognises and addresses the need to reduce carbon emissions,” she said in a statement.

“Within Australia, in the short to medium term, we do not expect that new coal-fired electricity generation will be attractive from an environmental viewpoint. Therefore the application of technological solutions to reduce emissions is critical.

”We will continue to work with government and with our customers as regulatory frameworks around the introduction of carbon constraints firm up in the jurisdictions where we operate.”

ANZ, recently ranked the world’s most sustainable bank, was the biggest financier to Australia’s coal industry according to the report, by the Dutch economic consultancy Profundo, providing loans worth $1.7 billion.

It was followed by the Commonwealth Bank ($1.6 billion), NAB and Westpac ($1 million each), and Suncorp ($227 million). Two other institutions surveyed, Bendigo Bank and the Mecu credit union, did not lend to the coal industry.

ANZ also provided more finance for coal-fired power stations than any other bank surveyed, at $650 million, compared with Commonwealth ($546 million), Westpac ($454 million), NAB ($382 million) and Suncorp ($18 million).

Greenpeace wants the banks to rule out financing a dozen planned power stations around the country, including Macquarie Generation’s Bayswater B plant in the Hunter Valley and Delta Electricity’s Mount Piper extension near Lithgow, which are both proposed as gas or coal-fired.

A Greenpeace campaigner, John Hepburn, said most Australians opposed construction of new coal-fired power stations. “A lot of people have just voted for action on climate change. Those people would actually be quite outraged to realise their savings in the bank are being used to make the problem worse.”

Commonwealth Bank said it had no financing commitments to the construction of any new coal-fired power stations and had the lowest debt exposure to single asset Australian coal-fired generation financings among the big banks.

A spokesman for ANZ, which topped bank sector rankings last month in the global Dow Jones Sustainability Index for 2010, said the bank was Australia’s leading renewable energy financier and “renewable projects already [represent] one-third of our energy portfolio”.

Greenpeace said the Profundo survey, which collected publicly available data on loans to coal-fired power stations, coalmines and coal port infrastructure, showed bank branding on sustainability was a “triumph of spin over substance”.

A Profundo analyst, Jan Willem van Gelder, said in Amsterdam that banks around the world were struggling to develop responsible lending policies, given climate change and the need to finance a shift to more sustainable energy production.

Mr van Gelder said if there was less supply of capital for coalmining companies and coal-fired power stations, then loan interest rates would rise and coal industry projects would become less attractive. “I don’t think that is yet the case, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it would happen in near future,” he said.

Original source: http://www.smh.com.au/business/clean-energy-to-trump-coal-for-bank-lending-20101001-16138.html

Waves crashing on to Australia’s southern shores each year contain enough energy to power the country three times over, scientists said on Tuesday in a study that underscores the scale of Australia’s green energy. The research, in the latest issue of the journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, comes as the nation is struggling to wean itself of years of using cheap, polluting coal to power the economy and to put a price on carbon emissions.

Oceanographers Mark Hemer and David Griffin from the state-funded research body the CSIRO looked at how wave energy propagates across the continental shelf and how much is lost. The aim was to build a picture of the amount of energy on an annual basis and how reliable that source is.

The government has passed laws that mandate 20 percent renewable electricity generation by 2020 to curb carbon emissions and wind power is likely to make up the bulk of the green energy investment. Wave power is still in early development.

“So what we’re saying is that we can achieve that target if we harness 10 percent of the available wave energy resource,” Hemer told Reuters from Hobart.

Hemer and Griffin used complex computer models to map how the energy in the waves attenuates near the shore. They looked at the annual cycle both in terms of mean wave conditions and the 10th and 90th percentiles.

This means that 10 percent of the time waves are smaller than the mean and for the 90th percentile the waves are larger than that value for 10 percent of that time.

“Basically what this means is that there is still a fairly large resource for 90 percent of the time,” said Hemer. And this is crucial because some types of renewable energy, such as wind and solar panels, are limited because they can’t generate steady power 24 hours a day, unlike coal or gas.

Wave power has much greater potential to deliver steady power supplies, but connecting it to the grid in remote areas could be a problem.

“Averaged over the whole year, Australia’s southern coastline has a sustained wave energy resource of 146 gigawatts (1,329 terawatt-hours/year),” the researchers say in their study, or three times Australia’s total installed generation capacity.

The government, facing an election on Saturday, is under pressure to put a price on planet-warming carbon emissions and further boost investment in cleaner energy.

The country is one of the developed world’s top carbon emitters and relies on coal to generate about 80 percent of its electricity.

Hemer and Griffin’s work has created a series of maps of the coastline that helps wave power investors find the right sites and design projects that can cope with calm and stormy conditions and how frequent these might be.

Their work is different from some past studies, which used wave data from deep-ocean waters.

The researchers don’t advocate any particular wave power technology.

But there are three firms in Australia developing technologies, including Fremantle-based Carnegie Wave Energy, which has a system based on large buoys suspended just below the surface near the shore.

Hemer and Griffin’s estimates are based on the amount of energy along the coast at 20 meters deep, since many emerging wave power systems are likely to be at that depth or less.

Ideal sites included Portland in Victoria and Albany in southern Western Australia because of easy grid connections.

Source: http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE67G2G420100817