Gravel path for solar

ACCORDING to the International Energy Agency’s new roadmap for solar power the world could be getting as much as 25 per cent of its electricity from the sun by the year 2050.

But there are some big ifs and buts. Releasing the roadmaps for the PV and solar thermal industries, the IEA’s executive director Nobuo Tanaka says:

This decade is crucial for effective policies to enable the development of solar electricity. Long-term oriented, predictable solar-specific incentives are needed to sustain early deployment and bring both technologies to competitiveness in the most suitable locations and times.

What Mr Tanaka is suggesting is that the road ahead for solar should be relaid with nice smooth bitumen with as few traffic lights, stop signals and roadworks as possible. The Rudd Government may point to its $1.4 billion funding of solar projects, announced last year, as evidence of these incentives. You might even look at the hotch-potch of domestic feed-in-tariffs currently being played with in different states. Well, there might also be some people who prefer to avoid such hassles and look for a firm like Blaze energy that can do the solar panel installation (click here for Blaze Energy solar panel installations) without any wait time as such firms may be paid upfront. However, in developed countries like the UK, Germany, and the US, the price of installing a solar power system in a home might be lesser compared to other nations. For instance, in Ireland, the cost of installation is often cheaper than in Asian countries–the nation wants to promote solar energy, so when residents choose to hire a company like Clover Energy Systems (one can look up Dublin Solar on the web for details), who are known to do an excellent job in this area, they often receive discounts.

Anyway, coming back to the topic, innovation in technology and the promotion of renewable energy might be the reason behind the wide adoption of such energy sources. (What else could be the reason behind this other than this?) That’s how many big companies like Florida Solar Energy Group (in Miami) often get a lot of contracts from homeowners and real estate builders for the installation of solar panels.

Earlier this week a shortlist of eight projects under Mr Rudd’s Solar Flagships scheme was announced – four are solar PV (electric generated via panels) and four are solar thermal (electric generated by concentrating the sun’s rays to create heat to eventually drive a turbine).

While the Government has been doing much chest beating about the virtues of its flagship programme, the unfortunate reality is that the resultant 1000 MW of power generation is dwarfed, nay trampled on, by plans already in the pipeline for new coal power generation.

To put that 1000MW into perspective, it’s about the same as one single medium sized coal-fired power station. This list of electricity generation capacity in Australia from 2008, leaves a 1000 MW solar thermal plant sticking out like a tiny chink of light among a swathe of black coal.

When Mr Tanaka asks for a shiny new road surface for the solar industry, Australia appears to be building something which looks a bit more like a gravel path.

After first break, we’ll have some dogma

FROM an open letter penned by 255 members (including the President of the Australian Academy of Sciences Professor Kurt Lambeck) of the US-based National Academy of Sciences.

Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers, are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence.

From Tony Abbott, leader of the Opposition in Australia, to some  year five and six kids at a school in Adelaide.

OK, so the climate has changed over the eons and we know from history, at the time of Julius Caesar and Jesus of Nazareth the climate was considerably warmer than it is now.

So which to choose – political dogma, religious dogma or the special interests? In this case, we can have all three.

The first telling of this classroom story came from The Australian which made no attempt to check the scientific validity of Abbott’s statement with any reputable working climate scientists. If it had, the story would have read more like the version told here by The Age, in which Professor David Karoly of Melbourne University has this to say.

It seems strange to me that the leader of a political party would be seeking to disagree with Australia’s chief scientist, the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists and Australia’s support of the work of the IPCC. He obviously knows better.

Karoly suspects Abbott’s statement is derived from the book Heaven + Earth, written by mining director and denialist geologist Professor Ian Plimer. In 2008 and 2009, IR Plimer made $306,000 from his directorship with CBH Resources (see annual report here). Likewise, over the same period he made a whopping $475,579 from his directorship with another mining company, Ivanhoe Australia. That’s more than three quarters of a million dollars of special interest!

Then there’s the political dogma as espoused to ABC Four Corners by Liberal Senator Nick Minchin, the man who helped broker the deal that put Tony Abbott in his now unfortunately influential position.

NICK MINCHIN, SENATOR, LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION IN THE SENATE: For 10 years the left internationally have been very successful in exploiting peoples’ innate fears about global warming and climate change to achieve their political ends.

NICK MINCHIN: For the extreme left it provides the opportunity to do what they’ve always wanted to do, to sort of de-industrialise the western world. You know the collapse of communism was a disaster for the left, and the, and really they embraced environmentalism as their new religion.

Special interests meet political and religious dogma, all wrapped up in Tony Abbott. Those poor kids in Adelaide never stood a chance.

Climate voodoo nation?

Fairies anyone?LATE last year there was an opinion poll knocking around from Nielsen which suggested that some 56 per cent of Australians believed in a heaven.

There’s a lot to like about pearly gates, permanently-white linen smocks, fluffy clouds, twinkly escalator music, never ending lines of chilled carbon-neutral beer or whatever it is that people think a heaven might be.

Aussies like miracles too – 63% believed in those. Astrology got 41%, angels 51% and psychic power  gets 49%. Miracles score 63% but evolution came in at 42% – go figure.

But an interesting phenomenon which this survey, albeit on a small sample, revealed was the way many people are far more prepared to sign-up to fluffy stuff than they are the nasty or challenging bits.

Because while heaven scored 56%, hell only got 38%. Angels beat witches by 51 to 22.

I wonder how much of this is at play in the recent opinion polls suggesting increasing numbers of Australians think humans have had little or no effect on our climate.

The latest poll out today suggests a little over a third accept that humans are changing the climate (although it was commissioned by right-wing think tank and climate change deniers the Institute of Public Affairs).

So an issue backed by decades of peer-reviewed science and observations of the climate is less convincing than psychic powers, astrology, gods, angels and miracles.

Mumbo-jumbo trumps science.

Not looking forward to getting to the End of the Line

I’M not really looking forward to seeing the “new” documentary movie End of the Line (first premiered in January 2009) when it opens in Australia on Friday, but see it I will.

Based on a book of the same name by British journalist Charles Clover, the film looks at… ahh, just watch the trailer and see for yourself. For screenings, go here.

ETS v CARBON TAX = delay

NOW that Australia’s emissions trading scheme has been placed in deep freeze, on the back burner or whatever other analogy you might care for, talk is turning to an alternative market-based system to cut down emissions.

Donna Green and Liz Minchin at newmatilda make a decent stab at suggesting we should have plumped for a carbon tax all along.

Compared with an ETS, a tax is a simpler, more effective, faster solution for cutting emissions. That’s why so many people and major financial institutions — from renowned economists like Jeffrey Sachs and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz to world-leading scientists like NASA’s James Hansen — all back a tax over trading.

Minchin and Green’s analysis of the issue runs over similar ground to that long-argued by the Carbon Tax Center in the US, which also thinks a tax would be faster to implement, encourage more predictable energy prices and be harder to fiddle than cap and trade.

I wonder though if this emerging debate will have a similar effect to the one artificially generated by climate change sceptics over the strength of the scientific evidence backing action on climate change?

Minchin and Green say a tax would be quicker to implement than an ETS. We should remember though that it took the best part of 15 years for Australia to introduce another consumption-based tax, the GST.

What this debate really adds up to is further delays and while this policy uncertainty is certainly harming the renewable energy sector, the same can’t be said for the resources sectors.

In the meantime, why not fiddle around with one of the only policy success stories to come out of the climate change box in recent years – the 20% by 2020 Mandatory Renewable Energy Target?

100% anyone?

By the way… this is the first post of my new blog. My old one is still sitting there with News Ltd.