Antinuclear

Abbott’s propaganda against renewable energy is countered by International Energy Agency

IEA Dispels Abbott’s Renewable Energy Propaganda,CleanTechnica 7 Mar 14  One of the most depressing discussions I have ever had as editor of RenewEconomy was with a policy advisor for a state Coalition government. He started off by giving me a lecture about how his minister only acted on “evidence based information”, and then proceeded to quote some of the more outrageous nonsense published in the Murdoch media and some extremely marginal web-sites.

Perhaps, then, this person and all the other advisors who direct (or distort) energy policy at state and federal level with the conservative administrations should sit down and absorb the latest report by the International Energy Agency on the integration of wind and solar energy. It might reduce the ignorance and misinformation that is having a profound impact on renewable policy in Australia.

The IEA is a useful reference point. It is a highly conservative organization that was created after the 1970s gas crisis to ensure the continuation of energy supply. Energy security is its fundamental raison d’etre. And although some people, as we reported yesterday, criticize it for being way too conservative on solar PV costs, for instance, its research into renewables and systems integration debunks a lot of myths seemingly invented by Abbott’s acolytes and perpetuated by the politicians themselves.

The first myth, of course, is around the cost of renewables. As any number of studies have shown, Australia’s renewable energy target has added just 3 per cent to electricity bills, and has probably helped reduce them by that amount by helping push wholesale electricity prices down to record lows. And as the IEA notes, the levellised cost of electricity of wind power and solar PV is “close to even below the LCOE of fossil or nuclear options.

But that is not what the latest IEA report is about. It’s about the integration of solar and wind – what it calls variable renewable energy, or VRE – into new and existing grids. And it serves to completely debunk some of the other nonsense about renewables needing “back-up” fossil fuels, and adding huge costs to infrastructure.

The IEA could not be any clearer: “No additional dispatchable capacity ever needs to be built because VRE is in the system. On the contrary, to the extent of the capacity credit of VRE, its addition to the system reduces the need for other capacity.”

It points to a European Wind Integration Study, that found wind penetration levels of 10 per cent would require less than $1/MWh to grid costs, and penetration levels of 13 per cent would require around $5.40/MWh. A study in Ireland, an isolated grid, suggested that the grid costs of wind power penetrations ranging from 16 per cent to 59 per cent ranged from just $2.20/MWh to $9.70/MWh.

The PV Parity Project recently assessed grid costs associated with integrating 480 gigawatts (yes, gigawatts, or 480,000MW) of solar PV by 2030 into the European grid, found modest transmission grid costs of up to $4.00/MWh by 2030. Reinforcing distribution networks to accommodate solar PV would cost about $13/MWh by 2030……….

there are system benefits that might outweight the cost of generation of wind and solar and so lower the overall cost of the grid. This is borne out in reduced need for peak generation – as Australia found out in its recent heatwaves – and by lowering the overall wholesale electricity cost – as all Australian generators have found out in recent years…….

Part of the problem, the IEA suggests, comes from the fact that many incumbent utilities view renewables as an “addition” to the grid, and therefore a complication, rather than as a path to transformation of the whole system……..

The message from the IEA is clear, the government needs to start planning for the future, not deploying some ideological claptrap that locks it into the past.
Read more at http://cleantechnica.com/2014/03/06/iea-dispels-abbotts-renewable-energy-propaganda/#TZzW5lXwuwpCIDCB.99

March 8, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized