Antinuclear

Australia should be a regional, even world, winner in renewable energy

Renewables race is one Australia should win, SMH,  May 21, 2014 Elizabeth Farrelly “……The $2.3 billion defunding of ARENA, Australia’s renewable energy agency, may be less colourful than some other budget cuts. But in global embarrassment terms (excepting the camps, of which we should all be profoundly ashamed), abandoning renewables takes the cake.

And frankly, if we don’t have a planet, it isn’t going to matter what your GP costs. Right?

The renewables race is one Australia should win. Ours is the sunniest continent on earth. Every year, we are gifted 58 million petajoules of free energy: ten thousand times our total use. We’re young, wealthy, stable and more-or-less civilised. We also have wind, hot rocks and a massive coastline of potential wave power, to even out the bumps.

Sun, as solar gas, can be exported – like coal, only clean and free. But North Africa and the Middle East are also sun-rich. As Alan Jones MBE, who was until recently the City of Sydney’s trigeneration guru, warned: ”Whoever corners the market first will obliterate fossil fuels.”

It should be us. But since 1992 Australia’s share of the world photovoltaic market has plummeted, from 7 per cent to 1 per cent. This is why ARENA was established. And why the Abbott-Hockey shrinkage of it to one-thousandth full-size ends all hope……….

Australians (a recent CSIRO report showed) love solar energy. Yet at present it accounts for about 0.1 per cent of our consumption. And since our governments insist on seeing renewables as a cost, not an opportunity, it’s clear they won’t be taking us there any time soon.

The federal government is locked into its mining and fossil fuel mindset. The states, meanwhile, are so massively invested in coal-fired infrastructure – particularly that mass of poles and wires known as ”the grid” – they cannot encourage renewables or even level the field. Only about 10 per cent of your power bill, Jones says, is for retail energy. The rest pays the state grid monopoly. As people withdraw, these grid costs increase.

So we’ll have to do it ourselves. Germany’s renewables record is the more amazing because 65 per cent of its renewable energy is customer-owned. In January Hamburg bought back its grid from Swedish giant Vattenfall, ploughing half the profit into energy-bill reduction, the rest into renewables. Berlin has done the same. Since 2007, more than 200 German power-grids and water-systems have been bought by towns and cities.

The scale – the localism – can go smaller still.  Lithium-ion storage for domestic solar is now the size of a small cupboard. This is being trialled in Victoria as we speak by SunPower, the world’s second-largest solar company.

Distributed energy is the energy of dissent. Government may disapprove, as Hockey does of wind farms, but that’s the beauty of microgeneration. It doesn’t need government. We can do it ourselves.

But sooner would be better than later. Now that Barack Obama has SPVs on the White House, will Abbott put $4.5 million worth on the Lodge? : http://www.smh.com.au/comment/renewables-race-is-one-australia-should-win-20140521-zrjp7.html#ixzz32Vfvsd6N

May 22, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | General News