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Friends of the Earth International web@foei.org via bounce.bluestatedigital.com	9:57 PM (5 minutes ago)
to me

Neville,
Last week María, a community organiser in Honduras, was brutally attacked by seven people with machetes, sticks and stones. Her community has firmly rejected plans to build a dam on their land. The government is not listening to them. In fact, authorities are looking the other way while these attacks intensify. Write to the Honduran government to demand protection for peaceful protestors and a full investigation into the savage attack on María Santos Domínguez and her family.

Ms María Santos Domínguez’s husband and son came to her rescue but were also attacked. Her son lost his ear following a blow with a machete. The activist and her family have faced death threats on many occasions. She is the co-ordinator of the Organización del Consejo Indígena del Río Blanco y del Sector Norte de Intibucá (Indigenous Coucil of Río Blanco and the North of Intibucá) and an emblematic leader in the struggle for the defence of the local Gualcarque river and the indigenous Lenca territory.

Honduras is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a human rights defender, owing to threats, defamation, judicial harassment, physical attacks and killings.

Friends of the Earth International roundly condemns the attempt on the life of human rights defender María Santos Domínguez, as well as the attack on her husband and son. Friends of the Earth International considers the attack to be directly related to the peaceful and legitimate work of María Santos Domínguez and the Organización del Consejo Indígena del Río Blanco y del Sector Norte de Intibucá.

Join us and demand that the Honduran government protect peaceful protestors and launch a full investigation into the savage attack on María Santos Domínguez and her family.

Thanks for your solidarity,

Friends of the Earth International

Hazelwood owner told to shut Italian coal plant blamed for deaths

A fossil-fuelled power plant in Italy’s north – part owned by GDF Suez, the ultimate owner of Victoria’s Hazelwood brown coal generator – has been ordered to shut down two of its coal-fired generation units after a court ruled they were responsible for hundreds of human deaths and thousands of cases of heart and lung disease.

Italian news site Rai News reported on Tuesday that a judge directed police to take control of the Vado Ligure plant in the northern district of Savona, after finding in favor of prosecutors in the case.

Francantonio Granero, Savona’s chief prosecutor, had argued that emissions from the plant, owned by Tirreno Power, were responsible for more than 400 premature deaths between 2000 and 2007, and 2,000 cases of heart and lung disease.

Tirreno Power, which is 50 per cent owned by French energy giant GDF Suez, called the study on the plant’s health effects “biased” in a statement to United Press International last month.

The Vado Ligure plant in northern Italy consists of a combined-cycle unit powered by natural gas with a capacity of 800 megawatts and two coal-fired units, each with a capacity of 330 MW that date back to 1971.

“They have shut down the two coal units, while the combined-cycle one is not affected by the measure,” a spokesman for Tirreno Power told Reuters on Tuesday, adding the ruling seemed to be related to a violation of environmental requirements. “We do not understand the rational for this decision.”

The ruling could provide a timely heads up for GDF Suez, though, a subsidiary of which also owns a majority stake in, and operates, the Hazelwood coal plant and mine in Victoria’s La Trobe Valley, where a month-long fire has now become the subject of an independent inquiry.

The inquiry will investigate how the blaze started, the emergency response and whether the regulatory requirements for the mine were stringent enough. Health and environmental responses will also be investigated, although the terms of reference have not yet been finalised.

In the nearby La Trobe Valley community of Morwell, where residents have been badly affected by smoke and coal dust from the fire, the local Council has been given a $50,000 state government grant towards a recovery program, which it has kicked off by purchasing 24 special vacuum cleaners capable of filtering fine particles, as well as air-purifiers.

Renewables can do 24-hour base load anywhere, anytime

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The University of NSW has exploded the myth that renewables can’t do 24-hour base load. Dr Mark Diesendorf reports.

THE FUTURE of civilisation and much biodiversity hangs to a large degree on whether we can replace fossil fuels — coal, oil and gas — with clean, safe and affordable energy within several decades. The good news is that renewable energy technologies and energy efficiency measures have advanced with extraordinary speed over the past decade.

Energy efficient buildings and appliances, solar hot water, on-shore wind, solar photovoltaic (PV) modules, concentrated solar thermal (CST) power with thermal storage and gas turbines burning a wide range of renewable liquid and gaseous fuels are commercially available on a large scale.

The costs of these technologies have declined substantially, especially those of solar PV. In 2012, despite the global financial crisis, global investment in these clean, safe and healthy technologies amounted to US $269 billion. Denmark, Scotland and Germany and several states/provinces around the world have official targets of around 100% renewable electricity and are implementing policies to achieve them.

The principal barrier is resistance from vested interests and their supporters  in the big greenhouse gas polluting industries and from an unsafe, expensive, polluting, would-be competitor to a renewable energy future, nuclear power. These powerful interests are running a campaign of renewable energy denial that is almost as fierce as the long-running campaign of climate change denial. Both campaigns are particularly noisy in the Murdoch press.

So far the anti-renewables campaign, with its misinformation and gross exaggerations, has received little critical examination in the mainstream media.

The renewable energy deniers rehash, among others, the old myth that renewable energy is unreliable in supplying base load demand.

Renewable energy is reliable

In a previous article for The Conversation, I reported on the initial results of computer simulations by a research team at the University of New South Wales that busted the myth that renewable energy cannot supply base load demand. However at the time of the article, I was still under the misconception that some base load renewable energy supply may be needed to be part of the renewable energy mix.

Since then, Ben Elliston, Iain MacGill and I have performed thousands of computer simulations of 100% renewable electricity in the National Electricity Market (NEM), using actual hourly data on electricity demand, wind and solar power for 2010.

Our latest research, available here and reported here, finds that generating systems comprising a mix of different commercially available renewable energy technologies, located on geographically dispersed sites, do not need base load power stations to achieve the same reliability as fossil-fuelled systems.

The old myth was based on the incorrect assumption that base load demand can only be supplied by base load power stations; for example, coal in Australia and nuclear in France. However, the mix of renewable energy technologies in our computer model, which has no base load power stations, easily supplies base load demand.

Our optimal mix comprises wind 50-60%; solar PV 15-20%; concentrated solar thermal with 15 hours of thermal storage 15-20%; and the small remainder supplied by existing hydro and gas turbines burning renewable gases or liquids. (Contrary to some claims, concentrated solar with thermal storage does not behave as base load in winter; however, that doesn’t matter.)

The real challenge is to supply peaks in demand on calm winter evenings following overcast days. That’s when the peak-load power stations, that is, hydro and gas turbines, make vital contributions by filling gaps in wind and solar generation.

We used the technology costs projected to 2030 in the conservative 2012 study by the Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics (BREE). (In my personal view, future solar PV and wind costs are likely to be lower than the BREE projections, and future fossil fuel and nuclear costs are likely to be higher.) Then, we did thousands of hourly simulations of supply and demand over 2010, until we found the mix of renewable energy sources that gave the minimum annual cost.

Under transparent assumptions, we found that the total annualised cost (including capital, operation, maintenance and fuel where relevant) of the least-cost renewable energy system is $7-10 billion per year higher than that of the “efficient” fossil scenario.

For comparison, the subsidies to the production and use of all fossil fuels in Australia are at least $10 billion per year. So, if governments shifted the fossil subsidies to renewable electricity, we could easily pay for the latter’s additional costs.

Thus 100% renewable electricity would be affordable under sensible government policy, busting another myth. All we need are effective policies to drive the transition.

(This article is an update published by RenewEconomy on 10 April 2013 of an earlier article published in The Conversation.)