The recommendations of Bill McKibben and Ross Gelbspan, among others, attracted me to Sajed Kamal’s book The Renewable Revolution, and its subtitle was an additional enticement: How we can Fight Climate Change, Prevent Energy Wars, Revitalise the Economy and Transition to a Sustainable Future. The book is on a smaller scale than its subtitle might suggest. Kamal has long been involved in sustainable development and renewable energy as a teacher, project consultant and speaker. He is eloquent on the Sun as the energy source that connects all life, and it is solar energy that he sees as able to meet all humanity’s energy needs many times over, directly through light and heat and indirectly through wind, water movement and photosynthesis.
Tag: wind
Renewable Energy: The Facts
Germany is a country which has attracted much attention for taking renewable energy technology seriously, not least because it has gained significant economic advantage in doing so. That lends interest to the publication of an English translation of the book, Renewable Energy: The Facts, by German writers Dieter Seifried and Walter Witzel. The authors write chiefly about the German experience, but the book is also relevant to an international audience. Renewable energy is often difficult to get a handle on. Claims and counter-claims jostle confusingly. Sober evaluations such as this book seeks to supply are helpful. The book sets out to provide straightforward information, albeit with the conviction that renewable energy can successfully replace the fossil-fuelled sources which have become so dangerous in their impact on climate change.
NZ regions planning for climate change
I opened the latest Environment Waikato news update to discover that a Regional Policy Statement (RPS) is due, ten years after the last one. As I thumbed through the publication a heading leapt out at me: “Our climate is changing, so we must too.” Underneath came this statement:
“Even if all greenhouse gas emissions were stopped now, we will still be affected by greenhouse gas emissions already in the atmosphere, and will need to adapt to changes for generations to come.”
Following paragraphs mentioned some of the specifics for our region. It was comprehensive. Agriculture and forestry, our major commercial land uses, could be directly affected by climate change and climate policy. We can expect rising sea levels, more extreme weather, more droughts in the east, more intense rain and increased winds in the west, warmer, drier summers, milder winters and shifting seasons, increased risks from natural hazards such as river and coastal flooding, coastal erosion and severe weather.
Examples were then given of the kind of responses Environment Waikato will focus on. Flood management, the use and development of natural resources, planning, building regulations, infrastructure design and location. All sensible and appropriate.
I was pleasantly surprised by the prominence being given to climate change in the policy statement. It is listed as the second of six key issues facing the region, the first of which is the pressure being put on natural resources. The third issue is energy sources, and here again reference to climate change and the need to cut carbon emissions figures strongly. Even in the fourth issue, land use, the question of carbon footprint gets a look in.
Encouraged, I went looking for other regions’ ten-year plans. Not with a great deal of success. However I found Greater Wellington’s which was approved last year. It too identifies climate change as a key issue (page 29). It was more discursive than Waikato’s, and introduces mitigation more prominently. What it seeks:
“A resilient community that, as far as possible, is reducing its greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate the effects of global warming, but is also adapting well to any changes caused by climate change.”
Among the likely changes it points to are increasing drought in the Wairarapa, increases in storm intensity across the region, increased fire danger and the serious implications of sea level rise for coastal areas.
In relation to mitigation measures it finds space to respond to the argument that because New Zealand is so small Wellington shouldn’t worry about reducing its emissions but simply concentrate on adapting to whatever results from the rest of the developed world’s activities:
“The countering argument is that if, to achieve a liveable future, we wish to persuade the rest of the developed world to mitigate the effects of global warming, we only acquire the moral right to do so by doing our bit.”
The counter argument seems to have won out, for the document goes on to set out the response of the regional body to the climate change issue:
“Greater Wellington is currently working with the city and district councils in the region and around New Zealand, and is leading the region’s planning for dealing with climate change. Local authorities have agreed to work collaboratively on developing goals and a shared plan for the region to reduce the region’s greenhouse gas emissions. We will also take the opportunity to develop strategies to support our communities to be resilient and adapt to the effects of climate change.”
It details steps which are under way or planned. Prominent amongst them is the identification of potential renewable energy options for the region, such as marine and solar, and the intention to make Greater Wellington-owned land available for private developers to construct wind farms at Puketiro in the Akatarawa Forest and Stoney Creek in the Wairarapa.
Whether these two regional councils are representative of the long-term thinking of all the regions is unclear. Auckland’s planning is on hold pending the new governance set-up there. Canterbury, the other major centre of population, surprisingly doesn’t seem to address climate change specifically in its draft statement or identify it as a major issue. However, the major attention given to the matter in the Waikato and Wellington statements indicates that it is becoming integrated into their thinking and that they are being guided by the predictions of the science. The Waikato draft notes that New Zealand’s response in terms of actions to reduce climate change is primarily a central government rather than a local government role, but nevertheless expresses some interest in emissions reduction within its bailiwick, particularly in relation to renewable energy generation and more climate-friendly transport. Wellington is quite bullish on the contributions it can make to mitigation as well as adaptation.
It is clearly worth keeping an eye on local government while agonising over the continuing evasiveness of central government. Engagement with adaptation issues locally must surely impress people with the reality of climate change and the need to mitigate further damage. There’s an irony that the Minister of Local Government, Rodney Hide, should be a vocal climate change denier who laments what he describes as the massive costs inherent in climate change policy. He even goes so far as to say that the policy is designed to upend society and stifle industrial processes and progress. Fortunately there are limits to his authority.
The answer, my friend…
Some encouraging facts and figures are provided in an interview with the CEO of the European Wind Energy Association, Christian Kjaer, by Yale Environment 360. For the past two years 40 per cent of all new electricity generating capacity in Europe came from wind turbines. (Add solar and other renewables and that rises to 63 per cent.) From Spain to Sweden so many new turbines are being erected that Europe is on target to produce 15 per cent of its electricity from wind by 2020 and 50 per cent by 2050.
Kjaer puts the emergence of wind as Europe’s leading form of green energy down to a combination of government policies, entrepreneurial vision, and public support. Carrots and sticks are involved. The European Union provides tax credits, financial incentives, and priority access for renewable energy to the electricity grid to encourage the growth of wind, solar and other forms or renewables. The stick is the requirement that member states set renewable energy targets or face the possibility of being sued.
The result is that increasingly as plants fired by coal and natural gas reach the end of their lives they are being replaced by wind and solar power. The economic benefits of the transition are clear, with nearly 200,000 people currently employed in European wind power, rising to an estimated 450,000 by 2020. Kjaer has no doubt that green energy is an engine of job creation.
He thinks the early start that Europe gained in wind power, particularly in Spain and Germany and Denmark, gives them an advantage in the new industry and means they are reaping commercial benefits in terms of wind turbine manufacturing and activity further down the supply line. The high quality manufacturing sector, strongly supported by governments, should see Europe retaining an edge over the intensifying competition from Asian countries. “The winners of tomorrow’s energy wars,” he says, “are going to be those who understand how to develop new technology, deploy new technology and get the benefits of exporting that technology to the rest of the world.”
He speaks of the need for Europe to make a serious effort in terms of changing the way they operate their grids, and to move more quickly to develop an offshore grid for utilizing the offshore wind energy. Politicians need to give attention to optimizing and expanding the grid infrastructure to accommodate a larger amount of variable wind power in the system, and also other renewables.
“One of the main reasons for the strong political support for a supergrid is also that we want to create an internal [European] market for electricity, which of course, in the end, should give consumers the most affordable electricity. That’s the whole idea about the internal market, is that it would create the free movement over borders of goods, services, and in this case electricity at the lowest cost. And in order to create an internal market for electricity you need the infrastructure, just as you need roads to move goods around the European Union.”
Concerning policies required for a robust industry Kjaer speaks first of stable long-term frameworks for investing in renewables. Stable frameworks help the European industry by contrast with the US where the framework is unable to be predicted more than one or two years ahead. This means the US is not reaping the job creation benefits of wind energy; a lot of manufacturing has to be imported since no one’s going to invest in a factory in the United States if they don’t know how the market looks beyond the next two years.
As an aside, a news item today reported US steelworkers complaining that in the manufacture of wind turbines and solar panels China is breaking WTO rules by an array of subsidies, tax credits, cut-rate loans, and other policies that give Chinese companies a strong competitive advantage over foreign firms. If Kjaer is right they might do better to complain of their own government’s failure to support green energy development ahead of the fossil fuel industry which is still favoured by extensive subsidies.
To return to Europe. Kjaer identifies three elements in the stable framework Europe is providing for renewable energy. Financial support such as tax credit is one. Access to the grid is another:
“And what European legislation does, it mandated all 27 member states to give priority access to wind energy, which means that if you have a wind farm and a gas plant, and they’re planned projects, the wind energy should be connected first. And also, if you have plants operating on the system, electricity from the renewables plant gets fed into the grid first.”
The third element is more straightforward administrative procedures. Kjaer spoke of hopes of streamlining what in some European countries are extremely tortuous permission processes.
Asked about public opposition to the expansion of wind turbines, he acknowledged it was an issue, more so in some countries than others. Onshore turbines in the UK are particularly difficult.
“But it’s my feeling that the concern from locals is biggest in the beginning of a new market taking off. So the first thousand megawatts are much more difficult to install than the next thousand megawatts. Because people get used to them, they understand that they don’t make noise anymore — the turbines twenty years ago made quite a lot of noise, today you can’t hear them, almost, if you’re more than two hundred meters away.”
Asked whether 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2050 was possible Kjaer explained why he thinks it is:
“Almost two-thirds of our new capacity is from renewables. That figure was about 20 per cent in the year 2000. So in nine years we’ve gone from 20 per cent to 62 — by 2020 of course we can get to 100 per cent of new capacity. And if we can get in 2020 to a situation where all new capacity is renewables, then we will, by definition almost, have 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2050 because all the other power plants will be taken off [line].”
Infrastructure is the absolute key:
“ – we need to build an infrastructure that is different. But, again, our infrastructure in Europe is aging – we haven’t been building power lines since the ‘60s or ‘70s. It needs to be replaced anyway. So we need to make sure that the infrastructure is changed in a way that it accommodates 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2050.”
While I was preparing this post a newsletter coincidentally arrived from the New Zealand Wind Energy Association, welcoming the Government’s continued commitment to its target of 90 per cent renewable electricity by 2025 in the draft New Zealand Energy Strategy and affirming the part that wind generation is able to play.
“In New Zealand, wind generation has increased 10-fold since 2003, helping lift total renewable generation to recent highs of over 70%. With four wind farms currently under construction, together with other new and planned renewable projects, New Zealand is making progress towards the 90% target and the rewards that it brings to the economy and the environment.”
It points to the economic advantage of globally competitive electricity prices that will accrue to New Zealand in the development of its ample renewable energy resources.
“Electricity prices have increased significantly in recent years on the back of rising natural gas prices. Increasing use of renewables such as wind energy, which has no fuel or carbon emissions costs, is helping to check these rising prices.”
There’s a note of understandable exasperation in a section of the newsletter addressing the misinformation barrier which it says is bizarrely making it easier to obtain resource consent for new thermal generation than for renewable generation.
Such misinformation as this:
“In the last few months we’ve seen claims that a proposed wind farm won’t generate the amount of electricity that the developer estimates because wind generation varies with the wind. Such claims overlook that developers’ calculations already take the variable nature of wind generation into account. Developers usually identify both the installed generating capacity of the project in megawatts (or MW) and the total amount of electricity that they expect the project to generate in a year in gigawatt-hours (GWh). This estimate of generation takes into account the wind conditions at the site and that varying wind conditions affect generation.”
The newsletter points out that wind is proving itself in New Zealand on its own merits. (I would add, in spite of the unfair advantages enjoyed by fossil fuels which are only just beginning to have a modest price put on them.) Unlike other countries, New Zealand wind farms are not subsidised. A wind farm will be built here only when it can generate electricity at a cost that is competitive with other forms of generation.
The NZ wind resource is very strong by comparison with other parts of the world where wind farms are being installed. Our wind farms generate almost twice as much electricity per installed megawatt of capacity as the international average.
In response to the claim that new thermal generation is required as back up for new wind farms the newsletter responds that our existing hydro base is sufficient to balance about 2000MW of wind capacity without adding significantly to the price of electricity. Current wind energy capacity sits just under 500MW, so there’s obviously some distance to go before back up becomes a serious concern.
It’s the view of the newsletter that the considerable range of research and practical experience available regarding wind energy after more than 10 years operation in NZ and more than 20 years overseas reveals that many of the claims commonly heard in denigration of wind energy do not stand up to scrutiny.
So, this evidence from Europe and New Zealand, along with that from the US and from China among others, demonstrates that in spite of all its detractors wind generation is advancing rapidly. It’s heartening to see that there are governments prepared to offer the financial and policy support that it needs. Some point sneeringly to that and utter the dirty word ‘subsidies’. In a market place which doesn’t price the environmental costs of fossil fuels there is currently no other way of putting renewables on an equal footing. In any case the imperative to phase out emissions means that we must pay what it costs to do so, just as, for example, we are preparing to pay the costs of repairing the earthquake damage in Canterbury. There are some expenditures which can’t be avoided. Would that our Draft Energy Strategy would recognise that.
Ramping up renewables
There may be conflicting reports as to whether renewable energy can replace fossil fuels in time to significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and there are still plenty of people in positions of authority, like our own Energy Minister, who see little reason to hurry the process. The heavy lobbying influence of big oil and coal interests remains powerful. But it’s heartening to be reminded from time to time that transition is nevertheless under way in many parts of the world and that it’s gathering pace. An Earth Policy Institute article has arrived in my inbox offering just such a reminder. It refreshes what Lester Brown had to say about the shift to renewable energy in his book Plan B 4.0.
I reviewed the book on Hot Topic last year, but at the risk of repeating myself I’ll report some of the points which he now reiterates and updates. The first is that the transition to energy powered by wind, solar and geothermal sources is moving worldwide at a pace and on a scale we could not have imagined even two years ago. Texas, the oil state, is a prime example. It has 9,700 megawatts of wind generating capacity online, 370 more in construction, and a huge amount in the development stage. When all of these wind farms are completed, Texas will have 53,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity—the equivalent of 53 coal-fired power plants. This will more than satisfy the residential needs of the state’s 25 million people, enabling Texas to export electricity, just as it has long exported oil.
South Dakota has begun development on a vast 5050-megawatt farm that when completed will produce nearly five times as much electricity as the state needs. It will become an exporter, as some ten American states and several Canadian provinces are planning to be.
Brown then moves across the Atlantic to point to the hopes of the Scottish government for the development of an enormous off-shore wind generating capacity of some 60,000 megawatts. I reported on Hot Topic a few months ago on a major survey which has identified North Sea potential from wind and wave of even larger potential, capable of producing six times as much electricity as is currently used in the UK. If joined to a northern super-grid it could enable access to a single European electricity market and export opportunity.
Algeria plans to build 6000 megawatts of solar thermal generating power for export to Europe via undersea cable
It’s not only the developed world that is embracing renewable energy on a rapidly growing scale. Brown instances Algeria’s plans to build 6000 megawatts of solar thermal generating power for export to Europe via undersea cable. He points to their awareness that they have enough harnessable solar energy in their vast deserts to power the entire world economy. Solar energy is clearly of enormous potential not only in the Mediterranean region but also in the south-west US and the Indian desert and China, and there is regular news of new developments in all of these areas.
Brown touches on Turkey where construction permits are being issued for 7,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity, in response to bids to build a staggering 78,000 megawatts. In Indonesia the state oil company Pertamina is responsible for developing most of a planned 6,900 megawatts of geothermal generating capacity.
“These are only a few of the visionary initiatives to tap the earth’s renewable energy. The resources are vast. In the United States, three states—North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas—have enough harnessable wind energy to run the entire economy. In China, wind will likely become the dominant power source. Indonesia could one day get all its power from geothermal energy alone. Europe will be powered largely by wind farms in the North Sea and solar thermal power plants in the North African desert.”
The 20th century saw the globalisation of the world energy economy as countries everywhere turned to oil, much of it from the Middle East. This century, says Brown, will see the localisation of energy production as the world turns to wind, solar and geothermal energy. It will also see the electrification of the economy.
“The transport sector will shift from gasoline-powered automobiles to plug-in gas-electric hybrids, all-electric cars, light rail transit, and high-speed intercity rail. And for long-distance freight, the shift will be from diesel-powered trucks to electrically powered rail freight systems. The movement of people and goods will be powered largely by electricity. In this new energy economy, buildings will rely on renewable electricity almost exclusively for heating, cooling, and lighting.”
Can renewable energy be expanded fast enough? Brown thinks so, encouraged by the phenomenon of the extraordinary growth of the communications and information economies in only the last thirty years. Others don’t. Barry Brook in Australia is one, with his views summed up in this recent article and much more on his Brave New Climate website. Not that he’s arguing for fossil fuels – in his view nuclear power is the only technology that can get us there fast enough and economically enough.
Lester Brown falls back on the analogy of the Second World War when the American economy changed direction with extraordinary speed and prospered in doing so. He’s not alone in sounding this theme, but he was an early proponent of it. The difficulty with this concept is that our societies are hardly yet ready to see climate change in the stark terms which obtained in 1939 and 1941.
Whether renewables will be ratcheted up quickly enough or not they certainly represent one of our best hopes of containing climate change impacts. Don’t forget to tell Gerry Brownlee so before September 2, when submissions on the new draft energy strategy close. I’ve said elsewhere on Hot Topic what I see as wrong with the draft. Simon Boxer of Greenpeace has put it succinctly:
“It’s a document that lacks vision and goals. It shows that the Energy and Resources Minister Gerry Brownlee is ignoring the climate crisis. It’s a route map to a dead end.
“The Government’s energy strategy prioritises drilling and mining for more oil and coal, while providing virtually no stimulation for the development of renewable energy and clean technology. It fails to acknowledge the seriousness of climate change and makes no attempt to set measurable emissions reduction targets.”
If you’d like some suggestions the Greens offer a thoughtful submission guide. If you’re lacking time a shortcut is offered by Greenpeace or WWF . Many of the 40,000 submissions received by the government on Brownlee’s proposals to mine conservation land no doubt used form statements provided by organisations. They still count, so use one of the offered quick responses rather than pass the opportunity by.