How Vulnerable is Indonesia to Future Climate Change?

http://www.insideindonesia.org/how-vulnerable-is-indonesia-to-future-climate-change
by Satrio Adi Wicaksono



In a speech delivered to Indonesian students in Jakarta in 2014, United States Secretary of State John Kerry boldly stated that climate change is perhaps ‘the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction’ and Indonesia is ‘one of the most vulnerable countries on Earth’ due to climate change. A close look at climate-related death statistics compiled by the Brussels-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, which included deaths caused by droughts, floods, landslides, and storms, suggest Kerry was not exaggerating. Between 1980 and 2007, more than 174,000 Indonesians died in climate-related disasters. Apart from Ethiopia, the death toll was higher than any other country.

More droughts? More floods?

Climate change is going to have some major consequences in Indonesia through changing rainfall patterns, although the impacts will vary across regions. As an example, the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report suggests that the Nusa Tenggara islands will become dryer while other islands will become wetter by the end of the century. Scientists have already observed deviations from the twentieth century average rainfall, as well as the average length of dry and rainy seasons, for many Indonesian islands. These trends, if they continue, are worrying. Significant increase in rainfall during the rainy season may lead to higher risk of flooding and landslides, whereas delayed rainfall and a longer dry season in the country’s rice-producing regions mean an extended paceklik (hungry season) for farmers, who can no longer predict when the rainy season will start. Fishermen are already finding it harder to predict monsoonal weather patterns, or what fish they can catch with which nets. More extreme weather events mean less time at sea. Both farmers and fishermen undoubtedly face declining livelihoods due to climate change. 

Many Indonesian farmers and fishermen are already familiar with El Niño and La Niña – climate phenomena occurring at irregular intervals of two to seven years which bring extended drought (in the case of El Niño) or wetter than usual conditions (during La Niña). Scientists think stronger and more frequent El Niño/La Niña events are likely to take place under the emerging climate regime, exacerbating the negative impacts of both phenomena, such as paceklik during El Niño and floods during La Niña. 

During an unusually strong 1997-1998 El Niño event, Indonesia experienced a major shortfall of rice production, forcing imports to a record 5.8 million tons in 1998, the largest quantity of rice ever imported by a single nation. The El Niño-induced drought also exacerbated forest fires in Kalimantan and Sumatra in 1997-1998, triggered primarily by illegal land clearing. Smoke and haze from the fires shrouded much of Sumatra, Singapore, the Malaysian Peninsula, and Kalimantan, at a total cost of some US$4.4 billion. Weather-related damage and losses will likely balloon if strong El Niño/La Niña events become the future norm.

Climate model projections for Indonesia

Computer models have been widely used by the climate science community to simulate and project future climate conditions. There are approximately thirty major climate-modelling labs around the world with supercomputer facilities capable of handling the sophisticated calculations needed to run climate simulations. These models incorporate the physics and chemistry of land surfaces, atmosphere, and the oceans, though they each must also involve a large number of simplifying assumptions. Each model is somewhat unique, and different models are better at capturing different climate processes. 

The IPCC has chosen some of the world’s most advanced climate models to run a set of coordinated experiments to provide an improved best-estimate forecast of future climates. These experiments allow us, for example, to compare how each model independently simulates precipitation under different scenarios of future fossil fuel use. 

The simulation results for Indonesia are interesting. Though most models agree that the temperature will increase by two to four degrees Celsius by 2100, there is little agreement on the trend and magnitude of rainfall changes across different parts of Indonesia. This makes it difficult to project how El Niño/La Niña phenomena will behave and how wet or dry a particular region is going to be in the future. How to effectively model the complexity of Indonesian precipitation is a challenge that has yet to be resolved, and this has led some people within the climate science community to think they might be able to improve the work of climate models – especially in the Indonesian context – by adding a new dimension: looking into how climate has changed in the past.

‘Don’t abandon history!’

Sukarno, the founding father of the Republic of Indonesia, once remarked famously, ‘Don’t ever abandon history!’ His message would bring nods of approval from palaeoclimatologists, a subset of climate scientists whose primary work is to reconstruct past climate conditions. They aim to better understand the dynamics of climate change by anchoring global and regional predictions to an understanding of past conditions and processes.

The work of palaeoclimatologists helps climate modellers to replicate past climate conditions and in so doing make future predictions more accurate. With the help of past climate data, the efficacy of current climate models can thus be improved. Long-term reconstructed rainfall data across different parts of Indonesia from different time periods can be used to test climate models and to reduce the disagreement about projected rainfall patterns for Indonesia.

Projected future climate changes in Indonesia will likely occur at faster rates and will be of a greater magnitude than in the past. Nevertheless, studying past episodes of climate change can provide us with insight on how complex rainfall systems operate in Indonesia and what we might expect from human-induced global warming. The Earth’s climate has changed many times in the past, mostly due to long-term cycles in the globe’s orbital position as it revolves around the sun, as well as variations in greenhouse gases and aerosols. The more recent climate change has been attributed to the rapid increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide – an important greenhouse gas – since the Industrial Revolution. Preliminary studies, including the work that I have been conducting in Sulawesi, and described later in the article, indicate that these past global changes induced significant precipitation changes in Indonesia. 

Understanding Indonesian precipitation is also crucial because of the geophysical importance of its location. The waters surrounding Indonesia are the warmest in the world, which leads to strong atmospheric convection and high annual rainfall in most parts of Indonesia, especially compared to other regions on Earth. This in turn has given rise to the archipelago’s diverse tropical rainforest ecosystems. An interconnected global climate system means Indonesia’s warm waters also serve as a major source of global water vapour and heat transport, essentially energising the Earth’s water and energy cycles. A firmer understanding of Indonesian rainfall histories will thus give climate scientists a clearer picture of feedbacks associated with water and heat transport cycles, which may lead to better predictions of climate change in Indonesia and globally.

How do palaeoclimatologists reconstruct Indonesian rainfall history?

The recording of weather and climate in Indonesia was begun by the Dutch around mid-nineteenth century. With only 150 years of climate records, however, it is difficult to understand longer-term trends and dynamics of climate variability in the archipelago. To reconstruct past climate conditions beyond what is recorded by these direct records, palaeoclimatologists look to proxy measures of rainfall preserved within tree rings, corals, polar ice cores, cave stalagmites, and sediments from lakes and oceans. These data can then be calibrated to modern-day temperature and rainfall, which will allow scientists to estimate past climate conditions. 

At present, the reconstruction of Indonesian rainfall history is a bit like trying to fit together a jigsaw with some pieces missing. There are a limited number of long-term, high-resolution precipitation records from the region. These records tend to be patchy, in terms of spatial and temporal coverage. The Indonesian archipelago’s vast area, combined with the topography of its islands, also means that the precipitation history of Sulawesi will be different, for example, from that of Papua. 

Despite this complexity, the climate records available for Indonesia have turned out to be very useful for understanding the sensitivity of this region to climate change. For example, a research project of mine indicates that the climates of central Sulawesi have varied considerably in the last 50,000 years. Analyses of the carbon isotopes of leaf wax (a marker for climate-dependent plant biomass such as closed-canopy rainforests and savannas), extracted from a thirteen-metre sediment core of Lake Towuti in East Luwu Regency, South Sulawesi, have suggested that the normally wet, tropical climate was interrupted by a severe dry period during the peak of the last ice age, from around 33,000 to 16,000 years ago. At that time, much of lowland central Sulawesi, currently filled by lush tropical rainforests, was covered by widespread grasslands similar to those found in eastern Nusa Tenggara. There is a strong indication that glaciers covering vast swathes of the northern hemisphere at this time can easily shift the path of the Indonesian monsoon, causing dry conditions in central Indonesia and wetter climate in northern Australia. 

However, a similar dataset from the nearby Lake Matano, located at a higher altitude, suggests that that the high mountains near Lake Matano remained home to rainforests even during the dry ice age, indicating the persistence of wetter condition in some parts of Sulawesi. The contrasting findings between Lake Towuti and Lake Matano is important as it illustrates the role of high elevation regions as a refuge for tropical rainforests during historic drying periods and in the establishment of the current high biodiversity in the region.

Many palaeoclimatologists I know were drawn into the field not only due to the field’s scientific importance in advancing our prediction of future climate, but also because of palaeoclimatology’s multifaceted nature. It is a fascinating, multidisciplinary field, combining geology, archaeology, history, chemistry, physics, biology, and ocean sciences. The work I have been doing in Sulawesi and other Indonesian islands since I started my doctoral program has made me realise that palaeoclimatology is not only highly rewarding scientifically, the field and laboratory work that go into producing the climate data are also equally enjoyable.

The more, the merrier

Completing the jigsaw puzzle of Indonesian climate history is no easy task. Proxy records of precipitation preserved underneath Indonesian seas and lands are highly useful for understanding future climate change, but they are often difficult and expensive to uncover and analyse. For example, the budget for the coring project in central Sulawesi, excluding laboratory analyses, was approximately US$100,000.

Another problem is there are only a handful of palaeoclimatologists working to understand long-term changes in Indonesian climate, and very few of them are Indonesians. To my knowledge, less than ten professors and researchers are working full time in this field at Indonesian institutions, and there are only six postgraduates completing theses in this field in foreign universities. Although there has been an uptake in palaeoclimate research in Indonesia over the last few years, many interesting research questions remain to be answered, especially regarding the state of rainfall during climate change intervals deeper in time (Geologists and paleoclimatologists often refer to the periods occurring before 10 thousand years ago as "deep time" periods, at least in the geology timescale).

Building on the success of our work on Sulawesi’s past precipitation during the last ice age, the research group I am working with is now spearheading an effort to recover even deeper sediment records from Lake Towuti, all the way down to the lake’s bedrock (up to 170 metres of sediment). In what will be the first scientific lake drilling project in Southeast Asia, 39 scientists from 17 institutions across six countries work collaboratively to understand the response and sensitivity of Sulawesi precipitation and rainforests to global climate changes over the past 800,000 years. Indonesia is huge, so work like this in other regions will be essential to completing the puzzle of Indonesian climate history. We need to know a lot more before we can understand Indonesia’s vulnerability to climate change and improve our ability to predict future precipitation patterns.

Satrio Adi Wicaksono (satrioadi.wicaksono@gmail.com) is a PhD candidate in climate science at Brown University in Providence, USA. He serves as Project Coordinator for the scientific drilling project of Lake Towuti in central Sulawesi, due to commence in May 2015 (http://facebook.com/towutidrilling/). 

Kini Rumah Bisa Jual Listrik ke PLN.

http://solarsuryaindonesia.com/news/kini-rumah-bisa-jual-listrik-ke-pln

Jakarta -PT PLN (Persero) saat ini sudah menerapkan kerjasama jual-beli listrik dengan rumah tangga khususnya bagi pemilik rumah yang atap huniannya dipasangi solar cell. Salah satunya di Menteng, Jakarta Pusat. Pemilik rumah di Jalan Mangunsarkoro, Menteng, Jakarta Pusat, memasang solar cell di bagian atas rumahnya, ukuran solar cell yang dipasang juga cukup besar. Menurut Dirjen Energi Baru Terbarukan dan Koservasi Energi Rida Mulyana, satu lembar solar cell tersebut, dapat menghasilkan listrik sebesar 250 watt. Agar bisa jual-beli listrik antara PLN dengan pemilik rumah, meteran yang digunakan juga berbeda, yakni meteran listrik ‘ekspor-impor’.

KWH meter listrik ‘ekspor-impor’ dapat memisahkan antara listrik yang dihasilkan dari solar cell atau fotovoltaik dengan listrik yang berasal dari jaringan PLN. Berikut penampakan rumah yang menggunakan solar cell yang listriknya dijual ke PLN di Menteng:

Pemerintah menyiapkan aturan Tarif Listrik Atap Indonesia, maksudnya rumah yang atapnya dipasangi solar cell dapat menjual listriknya ke PLN. Aturan ini diharapkan bisa meluas, tidak hanya untuk solar cell saja, melainkan pembangkit listrik dari energi baru terbarukan lainnya. “Aturan ini harus teralisasi, karena negara ini butuh listrik yang banyak. Tapi agar lebih menarik lagi, jangan hanya sebatas solar cell saja, tapi bila ada masyarakat yang membangun pembangkit listrik mini hydro, biomass, dan energi baru terbarukan lainnya skala kecil bisa dijual ke PLN,” ungkap Aris kepada detikFinance, Rabu (6/5/2015).

Bila hal tersebut bisa difasilitasi pemerintah kata Aris, maka akan banyak masyarakat yang tergerak khususnya di pedesaan, yang potensi energi baru terbarukannya lebih besar daripada masyarakat yang tinggal di perkotaan. “Misal generator mini atau mini hydro bisa menghasilkan 1.000 watt (1 Kw) dengan biaya investasi hanya belasan juta rupiah. Tapi kebutuhan masyarakat di desa tersebut tidak lebih dari 1 Kw, kan kelebihan listriknya bisa diekspor ke PLN, oleh PLN disalurkan ke desa lainnya,” ucapnya.

Namun, aturan ini juga harus jelas dan adil baik terutama bagi masyarakat yang menjual listriknya ke PLN. Misalnya saja bagaimana cara PLN membayar kepada masyarakat rumah tangga bila ekspor listriknya lebih besar daripada penggunaan pemilik rumah. “Kompensasi tagihan dengan jumlah yang diekspor bagaimana menghitungnya. Inisiatif rumah tangga untuk mau melakukan ekspor impor listrik dengan PLN perlu diapresiasi, karena negara kita masih butuh banyak listrik. Jangan sampai rencana baik ini berhenti hanya karena Pemerintah atau PLN dianggap kurang fair dalam bisnis listrik rumahan ini,” tutup Aris.

Terkait tarif jual-beli listrik, yang berasal dari atap rumah yang dipasangi solar cell atau Pembangkit Listrik Tenaga Surya (PLTS). Ternyata, saat ini sudah ada rumah yang menjual listriknya ke PLN. “Ya sudah ada,” kata Kepala Divisi Niaga PT PLN (Persero) Benny Marbun, kepada detikFinance, Rabu (6/5/2015).

Benny mengungkapkan, beberapa rumah di sekitar Jakarta seperti di Menteng, Depok, sudah ekspor-impor listrik dari PLTS di rumahnya ke jaringan PLN. Sistem ekspor-impor listrik ini sangat sederhana, saling tukar menukar listrik, ketika siang hari pemilik rumah kerja dan minim menggunakan listrik, listrik dari hasil PLTS yang dipasang di atap rumah ditransfer ke jaringan listrik PLN, kemudian di malam hari ketika kebutuhan listrik meningkat karena lampu dinyalakan, TV, AC, dan lainnya, sementara solar cell tidak menghasilkan listrik, karena tidak ada sinar matahari, artinya pemilik rumah akan impor/beli listrik ke PLN gantian, PLN yang transfer listrik.

“Sederhananya bisa dikatakan tidak jual-beli listrik, tapi melainkan saling tukar saja. Kalau konsumen kirim ke PLN 100 kWh (kilowatt-jam), lalu konsumen pakai dari PLN 300 kWh, maka yang dibayar konsumen hanya 200 kWh, jadi lebih hemat,” tutup Benny.

Direktur Jenderal Energi Baru Terbarukan dan Konservasi Energi, Kementerian ESDM, Rida Mulyana mengatakan, dengan memasang solar cell di atap rumah dan menjualnya ke PLN, bisa balik modal dalam enam tahun, ucap Rida kepada detikFinance, Rabu (6/5/2015).

Rida mengatakan, saat ini sedang dihitung berapa tarif yang membuat masyarakat untung dan mau investasi dulu dan PLN juga diuntungkan. “Karena kan ini keluar uang dulu, semakin besar kapasitas listrik yang dihasilkan makin besar investasinya. Apalagi, dengan sekali pasang, solar cell yang dipasang di atap-atap rumah bisa 20 tahun lebih lho tahannya, perawatannya hanya rajin-rajin saja mengelap solar cell-nya, gampang kan. 6 tahun sudah balik modal, belum lebih hemat bayar listrik setiap bulannya karena dipotong penjualan listrik ke PLN,” ungkap Rida. “Ini akan mendorong energi baru terbarukan makin meluas dimanfaatkan oleh masyarakat, kemandirian energi kita makin meningkat,” tutup Rida.

Solar power’s success is key to clean energy

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/greenpolitics/11676499/Solar-powers-success-is-key-to-clean-energy.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
By Leonie Green

Politicians have not yet woken up to the implications of this cheap and popular fuel

Photo: REUTERS

They have become a commonplace sight across Britain: rows of darkly-winking panels marching across rooftops, quietly generating free energy for the inhabitants below simply when the sun shines.

It is fair to say that the success of solar power has astonished energy analysts over the last five years. On Monday the International Energy Agency forecast that renewables will produce more power than coal within 15 years. If solar’s current rate of growth continues, it could match world power demand in just 18 years time. From big banks such as UBS and Citigroup, to environmental groups and technology entrepreneurs, everyone is talking of a “solar revolution”. The sun has become mainstream, and the world is moving inexorably towards a future that is not only clean, but which promises to democratise energy generation.

The twin stories of climate change and solar power prove that crisis can create opportunity, and on an unprecedented scale. The key question is whether we can transform our energy systems in time to avert dangerous levels of climate change. But there is a big economic question too: how can the UK strengthen its position in a global solar market estimated by Deutsche Bank to be worth a staggering $5 trillion to 2035?

UK solar output nearly doubled last year and in Britain there is now around 8GW installed across houses, offices, schools and poor-quality land – enough to power 2.4 million homes. Combined with unprecedented cost reductions for equipment (a 70 per cent price drop in five years) and massive public popularity (80 per cent plus in repeated opinion surveys), solar power has been an astonishing UK energy success story.

Unfortunately, politicians don’t seem to have woken up to the fact. Policy changes made towards the end of the last government favour more expensive and less popular technologies, which risks stalling further growth. Other nations, by contrast, are not restraining themselves. Both India and China will have 100GW installed within the next seven years. In its official projections, the Department for Energy and Climate Change anticipates that Britain will install only 4GW between now and 2020. To follow this pathway would be to constrain a cutting-edge British industry that has the potential not only to generate cost-effective electricity at home, but also to become a leading player in the global market, guaranteeing jobs and revenue.

So what do we need to do to develop our solar industry?

The first thing is to focus on increasing installation of solar panels across large rooftops: factories, university buildings, warehouses and the like. Our independently verified analysis shows that the UK can install twice as much solar capacity by 2020 as currently forecasted, for only a little more than we estimate current policies will cost. This is a question of using financial support more efficiently – getting more “bangs per buck” for each unit of subsidy. This would see solar power providing seven per cent of UK electricity in 2020 and providing 57,000 jobs across the solar industry .

Taking this path would mean that this is the last government that would have to subsidise solar energy to any meaningful extent, and we estimate this subsidy would cost just £13 per household in 2020. This seems a very modest price to pay for nothing short of a clean energy revolution that can consign shock energy bill rises to history.

Investing in solar energy now also comes with two other important benefits. In the UK, solar is more “home-grown” than other electricity technologies – so every unit of investment results in a larger amount of value accruing to the UK than offshore wind, say, or nuclear power – technologies which we buy in from abroad. Secondly, maximising the power of the sun can free us from the geopolitical wrangles of importing fossil fuels. No more paying for the gas that funds Vladimir Putin’s empire; less dependence on oil imported from the Middle East.

Combined with rapidly improving energy storage as batteries improve, as well as “smart grids” that respond intelligently to consumer and supplier demands, a clean energy technology future is within our grasp.

But the next few years will be crucial. Ernst and Young’s recent Renewable Energy Attractiveness Index saw the UK slipping out of the world top 10 countries for solar investment. The UK has the furthest to go of all countries in Europe to meet its 2020 renewable energy targets. The new government has a golden opportunity to embrace the renewable-powered future as so many others are doing, with consistent, efficient policies that cultivate our domestic industry and remove the need for subsidies. Huge public popularity, costs that could fall below new gas generation in just a couple of years, stable energy bills and climate security. If this isn’t a bright future, what is?

Leonie Green is head of strategy at the Solar Trade Association

World Environment Day 2015: Seven Billion Dreams, One Planet, Consume with Care

World's first ocean system targeting plastic pollution to launch in 2016

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/5/29/first-ocean-cleanup-system-to-be-deployed.html?utm_content=manual&utm_campaign=ajam&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=SocialFlow
by Renee Lewis

A large, floating barrier deployed near the Japanese island of Tsushima will block and gather plastic trash

The world's first system designed to rid the oceans of plastic pollution will be deployed near Japan in 2016, with the aim of eventually capturing half of the plastic found in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a large concentration of marine debris located between Hawaii and California.

Boyan Slat, the 20-year-old Dutch CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, an organization dedicated to cleaning the world’s oceans, designed the system dubbed The Ocean Cleanup Array.

“I’ve always been interested in technology, and I was launching rockets at 12 years old,” Slat said. “Eventually I started studying aerospace engineering, but I dropped out to try to develop this ocean clean up idea.”

He said his inspiration for the organization came after a diving holiday in Greece where he realized he was coming across more plastic bags than fish.

“I wondered, ‘Why can’t we clean this up?’” Slat said.

Plastic debris, most of it in the form of tiny beads known as microplastics, can be found on up to 88 percent of the surface of all five oceans, according to a recent study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Because of swirling ocean currents, known as gyres, this plastic pollution has become concentrated in certain areas.

In other cases, ocean currents send plastic pollution toward certain islands or coastal areas in greater concentration than others. One such area is the Japanese island of Tsushima.

“The reason we picked that location is because the current and wave conditions are very favorable for our tests, and there really is a lot of plastic,” Slat said. “The island where we performed the test sees 30,000 cubic meters of trash wash ashore per year.”

So much plastic washes up on Tsushima’s shores that both the Japanese government and the island’s residents have agreed to work with The Ocean Cleanup on its pilot project planned for 2016.

The Ocean Cleanup Array — based on research by a team of 100 scientists and engineers and funded by a crowd-funding campaign — is a long, floating barrier that is moored to the seabed in an area that plastic debris gathers due to ocean currents, Slat said. As currents move plastic trash toward the area, the barrier blocks and gathers it onto a collection platform.

The array will span over 1 mile, making it the longest floating structure ever deployed in the ocean, according to apress release by The Ocean Cleanup.

The system works because most plastic trash floating in the ocean is found in the top two meters of the water, Slat discovered after leading four expeditions in different ocean locations to measure how deep the plastic could be found.

The array will be operational for two years, catching plastic before it reaches the shores of Tsushima, which is currently researching whether it can use the material for an energy source.

If the pilot project is successful, The Ocean Cleanup will begin a series of deployments of arrays of increasing scale, Slat said.

Within five years, the organization aims to deploy a 62-mile-long array that will be capable of capturing about half of the trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Slat said. According to a feasibility study conducted by the team of 100 scientists and engineers working with Slat, the giant array will be able to do that over 10 years.

Critics argue that prevention and interception — stopping the plastic trash before it reaches waterways and oceans — is a more sustainable way to stop ocean pollution.

Tony Haymet, a professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego, said peer-reviewed studies from his former students’ 2009 SEAPLEX expedition showed that nearly all plastic pollution in the oceans is in microplastic form — “smaller than the size of about half a little finger nail.”

No system is able to extract the microplastic, Haymet said in previous comments.

“As far as I know — sadly — this remains true today,” Haymet said. “It’s a horribly tricky issue.”

Besides being hard to filter, microplastic — either from microbeads in popular beauty products or the broken down pieces of larger plastic items — gets into the stomachs of small fish, which are then eaten by medium-size fish, and on up the food chain, Haymet said.

In order to better the world’s understanding of the scale and size of plastic pollution in the Pacific Ocean, The Ocean Cleanup will carry out a “mega expedition” in August to measure the amount of trash found in the ocean between California and Hawaii.

“Up to 50 vessels will go to the Patch, thereby becoming the largest research expedition in history,” Slat said. The ships will stay there for about three weeks, taking measurements of the amount and size of plastic contained in the area.

“In that period we will take more measurements [of the Patch] than in the past 40 years combined,” Slat said. The Ocean Cleanup has recruiters throughout the U.S. looking for people with boats to join the expedition. They already have 15 confirmed, and a little over two months until the trip begins.

“It’s 63 days to go, so the pressure is on,” Slat said.

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