The benefits of solar do outweigh its costs. Some have a hard time accepting it

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/25/the-benefits-of-solar-do-outweigh-its-costs-some-have-a-hard-time-accepting-it
Giles Parkinson
A new Grattan Institute report on rooftop solar says its economic costs exceed its benefits by $9bn. That’s true only if you don’t include all the benefits


 ‘Network operators talk of a future dominated by solar and micro-grids. Even the retailers are getting on board.’ Photograph: Michaela Rehle/Reuters

Oh dear. Here we go again. The solar industry is clearly winning the battle to turn the global electricity industry upside down and inside out. The plunging cost of battery storage will accelerate that process. It’s just that some people have a hard time accepting it.

The latest big headlines are from the Grattan Institute, which wrote in a reportthat the economic costs of rooftop solar outweighed the benefits by $9bn. When you actually look at the numbers, they’re a witch’s brew of mistaken assumptions and omissions.

Let’s start with that $9bn figure. The Grattan argues that the cost of solar PV ($18bn) overwhelms the benefits ($9bn, mostly in avoided grid costs, and a little in avoided emissions). It further suggests that individual households are getting little bang for their buck from their individual systems

The first thing it gets wrong is to base its numbers on the assumption that solar systems only last for 15 years. Most solar systems are likely to last 25, or even 30 years – some even more. So right at the start, the report has underestimated the benefits in avoided grid costs and abatement by at least 40%. That’s a critical number that delivers an entirely different outcome.

Then – like so many other reports – it adds up the costs but not all the benefits. In this case, to dismiss the lowering of wholesale electricity prices caused by the proliferation of solar PV, which, it argues, “does not constitute a net economic benefit to society”.

Instead, Grattan borrows terminology from the Warburton review to describe this lowering of wholesale prices as a short-term financial transfer from “existing generators to electricity retailers” who may then pass these savings onto consumers.

Well, it just happens that most of those existing generators and electricity retailers are one and the same entities hence the name “gentailers” – Origin Energy, AGL Energy, EnergyAustralia. If they are pocketing the profits, it’s the incumbents with their hand in the till, not the solar households, and a regulatory fault.

There is no doubt that wholesale prices have fallen. The Queensland government’s biggest coal generator, Stanwell Corp, blamed solar exclusivelyon its inability to deliver a profit result in 2013.

Green Energy Markets in late 2013 estimated the cost reduction from solar PV at $2.70/MWh. Spread over a year that amounts to $540m in savings, based on the 200TWh consumed in the National Electricity Market (NEM). Spread over the 15 years used in Grattan’s calculations, that amounts to $8bn.

But the University of Melbourne argued that the savings were even greater. It suggested that rooftop solar PV could be responsible for a reduction of $2-$4/MWh in average price per 1,000MW across the NEM. Given that there is now nearly 4,000MW of solar PV installed in the NEM (that doesn’t include Western Australia), then the savings per year could be $2bn. Over 15 years, that makes a total of $30bn.

Those falls in wholesale prices do find their ways through to the general market, It explains why some major energy users – data centres for banks for instance – pay a price of just 8c/kWh. That’s one quarter what the average household pays. The same experience can be said of Germany, which now delivers some of the lowest costs of electricity to big business, because of the fall in the wholesale price.

That cross subsidy, from homes to business, is just one of many that exist in the Australian market. Households bills are higher to offset the impact of the discounts given to business.

People in the city pay more to offset the cost of delivery to regional areas. In Queensland and Western Australia, this amounts to $600m a year in each state. Over 15 years, that’s a total of $18bn. If those subsidies were removed, there would be an incredibly powerful economic incentive to install solar, storage and micro-grids, as some networks suggest.

Then, of course, there is the cross-subsidy to those households using air-con,estimated at $330 a household, per year.

Another juicy but largely ignored subsidy is the so-called “head-room”. This is the kitty used by the retailers to offer “discounts”. In NSW, this amounts to around $140 per consumer – or a total of around $140m, just so the retailers can offer a discount to neighbours. Grattan says that the cross-subsidy in the various solar schemes amounts to $14bn.

Yes, those schemes, mostly wound back several years ago, were more expensive than they needed to be. Former Queensland premier Campbell Newman doubled the cost of the most expensive scheme, the Queensland feed in tariffs, by giving six weeks notice of its closure, inviting tens of thousands to join at the last minute.

The Australian PV Institute says the report does not take into account the fact that all distribution network operators (DNSPs), apart from in Queensland, operate under a weighted average price cap (WAPC). This means that the fall in revenue driven by reduced electricity use is actually borne by the DNSPs, not by customers as Grattan says. This applies to $3.7bn of their costs to customers.

The benefits of some of those subsidies, the small scale renewable scheme, went to the retailers, not solar consumers, because they were allowed by all pricing regulators (with the notable exception of the ACT) to charge $40 for every certificate even when the market price was little more than half.

Grattan goes on to talk of the cost of network upgrades. This again is one sided. As SA Power Networks has said, solar PV has not only shifted, narrowed and capped the peaks (the same has happened in Western Australia), it has also added stability to the grid in the summer heatwaves. EnergyAustralia says solar PV accounts for 25% of demand at peak times, which in any case variously enormously from summer to winter, north to south, and east to west.

Grattan takes a similarly narrow view in its estimate of emissions abatement costs. It puts it at $170/tonne of avoid emissions. Again, this ignores the true life of the solar systems, and the fact that three times as many systems will now be deployed in Australia, with few if any subsidies.

And that forms part of the broader benefits not included in the Grattan report. Yes, initial subsidies were more expensive than they needed to be, but Australia now has the cheapest solar PV anywhere in the world, and the reductions in the wholesale price and the emissions abatement will continue.

That benefit will be amplified when battery storage becomes available – as it will do in a matter of weeks when AGL Energy rolls out a plan to put them on customer rooftops at no upfront cost (apart from signing up for a very long power purchase agreement).

As Muriel Watt, from the APVI, told RenewEconomy:

All the supposed negative impacts on the network, if they exist, are likely to be reversed when batteries come in, and PV households will be the first to install them, potentially making the grid much stronger, if the utilities provide the right incentives.

Why not have headlines which say the investment people have made in PV is soon to provide billions in benefits to all consumers, because adding storage provides a much more resilient power system?

That’s the crunch. When this happens, solar PV, with battery storage, will be even more effective in reducing or even eliminating the peaks. So much so, that some analysts say that the business case for peaking gas generators – the equipment we usually use at great cost when everyone switches on their air-con at the same time – will lose their economic base.

The headline numbers in the Grattan report are little more than scare mongering. And the industry, one hopes, has moved on. The signs are already good. Network operators talk of a future dominated by solar and micro-grids. Even the retailers are getting on board.

Where once AGL energy demonised solar tariffs as a “scam”, it is now offering to buy a solar system for its customers and stick it on their roof. AGL will even buy you a battery system. Where once Origin once called solar households “free riders”, implying they were stealing from their neighbours, now they are urging customers to use their rooftops to “steal from the sun.”

Solar has won. It’s just that some people don’t know it yet.

FULLY SUSTAINABLE TAFE BUILDING

http://coolmyplanet.org/environmental-sustainability/fully-sustainable-tafe-building/

CENTRAL Tafe is home to WA’s first Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA) six star-rated public GreenSkills building, a teaching facility in East Perth for students studying environmental monitoring and technology.

The centre, which was built by architecture firm Woodhead, with Aecom as the electrical, mechanical, structural and hydraulic consultants, has a predicted greenhouse gas savings of 134, 495kg Co2/year, as reported to the GBCA. Central Tafe GreenSkills Centre facilities manager Ann Bona says the building is not only energy and water efficient, but has lower operating costs and is considered to be fully sustainable.

“Energy is generated via 210 roof-mounted and 130 photovoltaic façade-mounted panels,” Ms Bona says. “Rainwater is harvested and stored in two underground water tanks with a capacity of 150 kilolitres for re-use in the building [toilet cisterns and urinals], and a blackwater system has also been installed to recycle the building’s waste water.”

LED lighting has been installed throughout, as well as an air displacement system, in-floor heating, a solar hot water system, and a ‘peel back’ construction that exposes the structure, services and mechanisms used during the build. “This allows students and building users to see first-hand how components of the building fit together and eventually, can be disassembled,” Ms Bona says.

“A building disassembly plan is required to meet six star criteria, and therefore the structure of the building has been designed to be capable of disassembly at the end of its life and components to be recycled.”

GREEN SPACES SUPPORT LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

The building also incorporates biophilic urbanism, which involves bringing nature into buildings, in that it has a green roof as well as terraced seating leading up to the main roof area. “The green roof was included as a way of demonstrating the building’s energy and water systems,” Ms Bona says.

“The adjacent teaching spaces have both a physical and visual connection to the roof to promote these initiatives, being an extension of the learning environment. Mr Bona says the centre was designed using Building Information Modelling (BIM) software, which produces 3D imagery rather than traditional two-dimensional drawings.

“The advantage to using this technology is that the efficiency of a building can be determined prior to construction and architects/engineers have the opportunity to incorporate improvements and changes to the design to achieve the best possible outcome.” Ms Bona says BIM will be used in a course soon to be on offer at Central Tafe.

POSTED BY: Science Network / Lily Yeang

Last great regions of pristine wilderness from Asia to Amazon under threat from massive road-building projects, scientist warns

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/last-great-regions-of-pristine-wilderness-from-asia-to-amazon-under-threat-from-massive-roadbuilding-projects-scientist-warns-10238746.html
STEVE CONNOR

The last great regions of pristine wilderness – from Asia to the Amazon – are threatened by an unprecedented road-building programme financed by aggressive development banks with little interest in protecting the natural world, a leading environmental scientist has warned.

Massive infrastructure and road-building are at the heart of huge development projects around the world, justified as vital attempts at helping the poorest attain a higher standard of living.

Scientists claim that we are living in the most explosive era of road and infrastructure expansion in human history – from the plains of the Serengeti to the rainforests of Sumatra. By 2050, they estimate, there will be an additional 25 million kilometres (15.5 million miles) of new paved roads globally, enough to circle the Earth 600 times.

Approximately 90 per cent of these new roads will be built in the developing world, and many of these will result in the first deep cuts into areas of pristine tropical rainforests to service the building of new mines and hydroelectric dams in some of the remotest places on earth.

Loggers truck carries illegally harvested wood near Arariboia Reserve in Brazil (Getty Images)

However, experience has shown that the first roads mark the beginning of the end for the natural habitats where they are built, according to William Laurance, a distinguished research professor in environmental sustainability at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia.

“The best analogy I can use is that deforestation acts like a cancer. When the first road is built into a forested or wilderness area, deforestation tends to spread contagiously along the road route,” Professor Laurance said.

“The example I often cite is the first road to be built in the Amazon, which originally linked the city of Belem with Brasilia , the national capital,” he said. “It began as a razor-thin cut through the forest, but today has grown into a 400km-wide slash of forest destruction across the eastern Amazon.

“Because of such realities, the only real solution for limiting road impacts is to ‘avoid the first cut’ – keep roads out of wilderness areas, protected areas, and the remnants of rare ecosystems,” he added.

During his time as a scientist working in the Amazon, Professor Laurance saw how road-building triggered much wider environmental destruction. In the Amazon, some 95 per cent of forest destruction has occurred within 5km of a road, and for every 1km of legal road, there were another 3km of illegal roads spreading off it, he said.

“In most developing nations the rule of law, especially in remote frontier areas, is limited. In these contexts roads tend to open a Pandora’s box of environmental problems – such as illegal deforestation, logging, fires, poaching, mining and land speculation,” Professor Laurance said.

“We are living in the most dramatic era of road and infrastructure expansion in human history. The world’s last surviving wildernesses – the Amazon, Congo basin, Siberia, boreal areas of Canada – are being penetrated and cut asunder by roads now. We have already crossed the Rubicon in this sense,” he said.

“To give a non-tropical example, the forests of Alberta, Canada, now have 800,000km of roads, and the road network there is increasing by 25,000km per year,” he added.

The Congo rainforest is reeling from a road-building “spree” with more than 50,000km of roads bulldozed into the rainforest, bringing loggers and poachers in their wake, he said.

In the last decade alone, this has resulted in ivory poachers killing around two thirds of the forest elephants that have lived safely among the trees for millennia.

International banks are helping to finance some of the 29 “development corridors” that will criss-cross sub-Saharan Africa, opening up many wild and inaccessible places to human pressures such as ivory smuggling, logging and the bushmeat trade.

“Yet many economists would look at these trends and applaud them,” said Professor Laurance.

“They say the developing world is simply developing and we should support this.” He cited the $60-$70 trillion to be spent on new infrastructure by the G20 nations over the next 15 years.

“This staggering sum will come from a variety of sources, such as public-private partnerships, pension funds, bilateral aid and the major development banks.

“This will be the single biggest financial transaction in human history and the environmental impacts will be Earth-shaking,” Professor Laurance said.

There are ways of minimising the impact of infrastructure development by, for instance, using existing waterways for transport rather than building the first roads, or by concentrating on road improvements in areas already settled. But he believes environmental concerns are being brushed aside in the drive to exploit natural resources.

He is particularly worried about two development banks, the new China-dominated Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) based in Beijing, and the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES). Both banks allegedly operate to different environmental standards than the more traditional development banks, he claimed.

“My main concern is that the AIIB and BNDES will force the traditional lenders to loosen their environmental and social concerns in order to remain competitive,” he said.

“The BNDES has funded a range of highly damaging infrastructure projects, notably including some massive Amazonian dams that have flooded vast areas of forest and promoted a spate of associated road and power line building and deforestation,” he explained.

“Regarding the AIIB, it hasn’t actually begun functioning yet but two things are clear. First, it is hugely capitalised, especially by China – already having at least half of the capitalisation of the World Bank and IMF,” he said. 

“China has been notorious for placing a low priority on environmental and social concerns in its many dealings internationally.

“In such senses it tends to be agnostic –leaving these concerns to the local governments to deal with. All it cares about is getting the natural resources it desires, in whatever way is necessary.”

This year, France and Germany decided to follow the UK’s lead in becoming members of the Chinese-led bank, the AIIB, which has shocked other countries, including the United States which sees the bank as a rival to the western-dominated World Bank.

A spokesman for the BNDES said it has a “series of mechanisms” designed to evaluate projects, ranging from “meticulous analysis of any social and environmental impacts in any project receiving financial support, to financing for investments that generate direct benefits to boost environmental quality and to reduce social and regional inequalities in the country”. The AIIB did not respond to a request for comment.

Critics argue that the new European members will give the AIIB credibility that it doesn’t deserve. However, others have suggested that Britain and the other western nations could work on the inside trying to tighten up the bank’s environmental standards – although the sheer size of the bank’s development fund will undoubtedly mean more road-building in areas of pristine wilderness.

“The only way I would see a real change of tack is if nations such as the UK, Germany, France, Australia and New Zealand have the courage and influence to take a strong stand and demand social and environmental safeguards,” Professor Laurance said. “But will they? And if they did, would China respond? I have my doubts.”

How To Make Your Own Solar Power Generator (It’s Quite Simple!)

http://www.trueactivist.com/how-to-make-your-own-solar-power-generator-its-quite-simple/
by Amanda Froelich 

Not only does securing renewable energy help to lessen the collective carbon footprint, but it’s a sustainable – and intelligent – choice to reduce energy costs long-term as fossil fuels phase out. For this reason and more, implementing clean, green energy has become a priority for eco-conscious individuals around the world.

Just in the United States, demand and capacity for solar power grew a whopping 418% between 2010 and 2014. And recently in France, a new decree was passed mandating new roofs to have solar power or oxygen-producing plants.

But did you know that you can actually build your own solar power generator at home? Really. Just by obtaining a few pieces of equipment and following the guidance of Rapid Online, you can have a DIY green energy machine operating in no time.

The awesome infographic below explains which components you need, provides a step-by-step guide to assembling a photovoltaic system, and contains a ton of of useful facts about solar generators – as well as some safety precautions to be mindful of.