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  • Abbott to mobilise older workers

     

    “We have already got a series of targeted measures out there to assist older workers, including in our last budget a very substantial work bonus for many elderly people who are on the pension and want to go to work,” he said.

    “When it comes to the pension we put in that very significant increase in the base rate of the pension last year to support senior Australians.”

    Last night Mr Swan told Lateline that the Government was proud of its economic record and was in a position to implement reform if re-elected because of its stewardship throughout the economic crisis.

    But Opposition finance spokesmen Andrew Robb told ABC News 24 that Australia only emerged from the global financial crisis unscathed because of the economic conditions engineered by the Howard government.

    Both party leaders will be campaigning in the battleground state of Queensland today.

    Mr Abbott will be in Brisbane while Ms Gillard heads north to Cairns.

    Tags: community-and-society, government-and-politics, elections, federal-government, older-people, work, abbott-tony, federal-elections, australia, qld, brisbane-4000

    First posted 5 hours 48 minutes ago

  • Gillard to fast-track baby bonus

     

    “Families know what it’s like to come up against an unexpected problem,” Ms Gillard said as she announced the details of the plan during a campaign press stop in the northern Queensland city of Cairns.

    “Families know what it’s like to have these costs come into the family budget.”

    Ms Gillard said the initiative would cost $54 million over four years, to be offset by savings in other areas.

    Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is also campaigning in Queensland today and will use an appearance in Brisbane to announce plans to pay companies incentives to take on older workers.

    Tags: community-and-society, family-and-children, government-and-politics, elections, federal-government, federal-elections, australia, qld, cairns-4870

    First posted 52 minutes ago

  • Polls show Labor is struggling- but read them with care.

     

    The Nielsen poll, taken last week, was the strongest for the Coalition on the two-party vote at 52-48. On a weighted average, Labor was on a primary vote of 37.5 per cent in the four polls. In normal circumstances, it needs a higher primary vote than this to win. The Coalition vote was 43.8 per cent, while the Greens were on 12 per cent.

    Since Julia Gillard announced her proposal for a citizens’ assembly on climate change on July 23, Labor’s two-party vote has dropped 5 points in Newspoll (55 per cent to 50 per cent over two polls) and 6 points in Nielsen (54 per cent to 48 per cent in one poll). Galaxy went up 2 points, and then down 2 points, to end at 50-50. Morgan dropped 2.5 points to 53 per cent two-party for Labor.

    The polls tell us Labor is in trouble, as does Ms Gillard’s reaction. They don’t tell us Labor will lose. They must be read with two big qualifications. First, they give us a snapshot of people’s opinions when the pollsters ask the question. Up to 20 per cent of voters aren’t strongly committed to their current voting intention – some will shift before they actually get to vote.

    Second, and very important, the swing in these polls is a national average. It conceals big differences between different parts of the country, and even between different seats within the same area. These varied swings determine where seats fall or hold. It is possible (as in 1998) for a government to survive on a minority popular vote.

    Source: The Age

  • The only way Is Up: CSP Builds Up Heat

     

    For now Spain continues to dominate the market. ‘Spain is driving the industry and it will likely do so for the next three to five years’, says Reese Tisdale, author of EER’s ‘Global CSP markets and Strategies 2010 to 2025’.

    Concerned about run-away solar expansion, Spain has placed new controls on CSP and requires developers to pre-register projects to receive the feed-in tariff. Developers must also show the ability to secure financing and off-take contracts. Projects totalling about 2.3 GW have pre-registered, and of that about 500 MW will be granted feed-in tariffs over the next four years, Tisdale said.

    The only utility-scale US project in construction is in the southeast, where Florida Power & Light is building a solar/gas hybrid. However, it is the southwest US where most future action will take place. The second major worldwide hotspot for CSP, the region is home to about three dozen project proposals that will generate almost 10,000 MW, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. The Southwest is also home to the world’s first CSP plant, a series of projects developed in the Mojave Desert by Luz International in the mid-1980s and completed in the early 1990s.

    On the plus side, utilities have signed long-term power purchase agreements with several projects, particularly in California. But because of a sour credit market and permitting delays, ‘you are not going to see a whole lot in the US until 2012’, Tisdale said.

    US projects have also been delayed by the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which owns large swathes of desert in Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and California. ‘BLM hasn’t developed a process in which it can permit and award approval to applications yet’, Tisdale added. ‘That has been ongoing for several years now and is expected to continue through this year. They should have a draft process in place in the third or fourth quarter of his year and final approval in 2011.’

    The first projects developed on BLM land will be those deemed by the federal agency as most ready-to-go and put on a fast track for approval. If cleared by December 2010, the projects will be eligible for federal economic stimulus money. The fast-track projects are listed in Table 1.

    In June, 2010, BLM reached a milestone when it published rental rates for land use by solar projects, which includes both base rates set by the counties and a per megawatt capacity rate. Depending on location, the federal agency will charge about US$15–$313/acre ($6–$126/ha). In addition, once in operation, projects must pay a capacity rate of $6570/MW for CSP without storage capacity and $7884/MW for CSP with at least three hours per day of storage capacity. By way of example, the BLM said rental for 4000 acres (1616 ha) in Clark County, Nevada, would be $753,360 per year. Added to that is a capacity fee, which for a 400 MW CSP plant with storage would be about $3.2 million per year for five years.

    CSP works best in the dry, remote deserts where there are large swathes of available land. But these areas lack the water needed to cool plants. They also require new transmission infrastructure. While dry technology exists to reduce water use, this approach adds costs to CSP’s already relatively high price tag, Tisdale said. Thus, CSP’s water and transmission needs put it at a disadvantage to concentrating solar photovolatics, which require little of either. Conversely, CSP offers energy storage capacity not available to PV.

    Still, the IEA sees CSP becoming a competitive source of bulk power for peak and intermediate loads by 2020 and of base-load power by 2025 to 2030. While the US and Spain dominate in 2010, about a dozen other countries have projects under way. Plans are being made to build CSP in China, India, the Middle East, and Africa, with Northern Africa positioned as a possible exporter of CSP to Europe, according to the IEA. Australia also is making a move into CSP with a programme underway to develop 1 GW of solar through 2014. In May the Australian government’s Department of Resource, Energy, and Tourism shortlisted four CSP project developers for funding through its A$1.5 billion ($1.25 billion) solar programme.

    eSolar already operates the 5 MW Sierra SunTower in Antelope Valley, CaliforniaAbove: eSolar already operates the 5 MW Sierra SunTower in Antelope Valley, California. Credit: eSolar

    Parabolic Troughs

    By far the most proven and commonly used CSP technology, parabolic troughs typically consist of two rows of curved mirrors to focus the sun’s rays and steel tubes that act as heat collectors. The tubes are coated to absorb solar radiation and reach temperatures of around 700oF (371oC). In the heat exchanger, water is preheated, evaporated, and superheated into steam, which runs a steam turbine. The water is cooled, condensed, and reused in the heat exchangers. Most of these plants have little or no storage and use combustible fuels for backup to firm capacity. For example, in Spain natural gas produces 12%–15% of CSP generation, according to the IEA. Newer parabolic trough plants do often include significant storage capacity.

    In the US, parabolic trough technology accounts for most of the new projects in the development queue. One of the largest is the 1000 MW Blythe Power Project, owned jointly by Solar Millennium and Chevron Energy Solutions and consisting of four adjacent 250 MW parabolic trough units. Under review before the California Energy Commission as of June 2010, and on fast-track for BLM approval, the project will occupy a little less than 6000 acres (2424 ha), eight miles (13 km) west of Blythe, California in an unincorporated part of Riverside County.

    Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Abu Dhabi’s government-backed Masdar Initiative in June selected Abengoa Solar and French oil company Total to partner in its development of a 100 MW parabolic trough project. Called Shams I, the project is scheduled to begin construction in 2010 and take about two years to complete. Expected to be the largest solar plant in the Middle East with 6,300,000 ft2 (585,900 m2) of parabolic trough collectors, its construction is in keeping with Abu Dhabi’s goal of reaching 7% renewable energy by 2020.

    Abengoa Solar is no stranger to CSP. A Spanish multinational company, it also has projects in Algeria, Morocco and the US.

    Among Abengoa’s parabolic trough projects are:

    • The 280 MW Solana station, outside of Gila Bend, Arizona. The plant is expected to be operating in 2013.
    • The Solúcar Platform, a 300 MW trough and tower project in Seville, Spain, which will consist of 250 MW in troughs and 50 MW of towers. Currently producing about 90 MW from its various solar technologies, the plant is expected to be fully operational in 2013.
    • Abengoa also is participating in the construction of two integrated solar-combined-cycle plants, or ISCC, which are hybrid solar/fossil fuel facilities. The ISCC projects, 150 MW in Algeria and 470 MW in Morocco, will each supply some 20 MW from parabolic troughs.

    Power Towers

    Solar tower central receiver systems use thousands of moving mirrors or heliostats to track the sun in two dimensions and reflect the light to a boiler on top of a tower. When the concentrated sunlight strikes the boiler, it heats the fluid inside to about 1000°F (538°C). Some towers use molten salts for both the heat transfer fluid and thermal storage capacity.

    After parabolic troughs, solar towers represent the largest number of new CSP projects underway in the US. eSolar already operates the 5 MW Sierra SunTower in Antelope Valley, California. And about a dozen others are in development, including BrightSource Energy’s 400 MW Ivanpah installation, a project fast-tracked on BLM land in the Mojave Desert. Ivanpah received $1.4 billion in loan guarantees from the US government earlier in 2010.

    ‘We expect to receive final permits this summer and begin construction in the fall. Ivanpah will be the first commercial-scale solar thermal power plant constructed in California in nearly two decades. Once constructed, Ivanpah will represent the world’s largest solar energy project, nearly doubling the amount of solar thermal electricity produced in the US today’, said Keely Wachs, BrightSource’ senior director of corporate communications.

    BrightSource chose tower technology because of its efficiency, relatively low cost and environmental benevolence, according to Wachs. ‘We have lower capital costs due to commodity-based inputs – heliostat mirrors are simpler to manufacture and less costly to install than parabolic mirrors’, he said. ‘We use air instead of water for cooling – dry cooling – which reduces water consumption by 90%, up to 25 times less than other solar technologies’, he added.

    Meanwhile, Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, a United Technologies Corporation company, received $10.2 million in 2010 from the Department of Energy to design and develop power tower technologies that lower solar electricity costs. Currently, solar electricity is significantly more expensive than fossil fuels and this project is considered a step towards competitive solar pricing.

    The IEA Technology Roadmap Report predicts that CSP technologies will become competitive with fossil fuel-based generation in the sunniest countries by 2020 for intermediate loads and 2030 for base loads.

    Dish/Engine Systems

    Parabolic central receiver dishes reflect sunlight onto a focal point above the dish, while also tracking the sun. Most dishes have a small generator at the focal point. They do not require a heat transfer fluid or cooling water, and boast the best solar-electric conversion rate among CSP systems. The dish recievers reach up to 1200oF (649oC). However, they are relatively small in size, which means that many dishes must be combined for large-scale energy production.

    Stirling Energy Systems, a pioneer in CSP dish-engine technology, manufactures the SunCatcher solar dish, which has an estimated daily energy generated per unit area of 629 kWh/m2 (parabolic troughs typically produce 260 kWh/m2 and power towers some 327 kWh/m2). The technology also lays claim to significantly lower water usage than other CSP technologies.

    When built, the company’s Imperial Valley Solar project (previously known as Solar Two) is expected to generate 750 MW on more than 6000 acres (2424 ha) of land in Imperial County, California. The caveat of dish systems is, of course, that you need a lot of them – phase I of the planed construction would include 12,000 SunCatchers and phase II a further 18,000. That’s 30,000 individual dishes each producing 25 kW. This project is also on BLM’s fast-track for approval.

    Linear Fresnel Collectors

    Fresnel collector systems, which still represent a relatively small portion of the market, consist of long, parallel, rows of flat mirrors (in contrast to the curved mirrors used by parabolic troughs) that track sunlight throughout the day, and reflect sunlight onto a central receiver in a fixed focal line above the mirrors. Operational Fresnel collectors currently use water instead of oil or molten salts as the heat transfer medium, so steam can be generated directly inside the receivers. While Fresnel collectors are generally considered less efficient than other CSP technologies, in their favour they also offer lower initial investment costs due to the use of cheaper flat mirrors and a simplified design.

    Schott Solar, which manufactures high-performance evacuated receivers, recently signed a deal with Fresnel specialist Novatec Bisol. Schott’s receivers will be used in the high-temperature area of Novatec’s collectors. In April Novatec broke ground on its first Fresnel project, the 30 MW Puerto Errado 2 plant in Murcia, Spain.

    Ausra, acquired by Areva this year, operates the 5 MW Kimberlina Solar Thermal Energy in Bakersfield, California and a 3 MW plant in New South Wales, Australia, that supplies solar-produced steam to the Liddell Power Station. The company touts the ability to offer efficient heat storage with natural gas backup systems, ensuring reliability and smooth integration into the grid. Ausra says it can achieve 50% more energy production per unit area than competing technologies.

    Given the range of developments underway, and in particular in the hotspots of the southwestern US and Spain, it is evident that CSP technology in all of its various guises continues to attract the attention of technology companies, developers and policy-makers. Certainly, the market has developed enough for the IEA to believe that CSP has a significant role to play in securing future supplies of low carbon energy. And, with a range of competing technologies under development, it seems that the winning players have already likely taken a seat at the table and stake in the game.

  • Obama must take a lead on climate change and soon

     

     

    Changing the world’s energy and agricultural systems is no small matter. It is not enough to just wave our hands and declare that climate change is an emergency. We need a practical strategy for overhauling two economic sectors that stand at the centre of the global economy and involve the entire world’s population.

     

    The second major challenge in addressing climate change is the complexity of the science itself. Today’s understanding of earth’s climate and the human-induced component of climate change is the result of extremely difficult scientific work involving many thousands of scientists in all parts of the world. This scientific understanding is incomplete, and there remain significant uncertainties about the precise magnitudes, timing, and dangers of climate change.

     

    The general public naturally has a hard time grappling with this complexity and uncertainty, especially since the changes in climate are occurring over a timetable of decades and centuries, rather than months and years. Moreover, year-to-year and even decade-to-decade natural variations in climate are intermixed with human-induced climate change, making it even more difficult to target damaging behaviour.

     

    This has given rise to a third problem in addressing climate change, which stems from a combination of the economic implications of the issue and the uncertainty that surrounds it. This is reflected in the brutal, destructive campaign against climate science by powerful vested interests and ideologues, apparently aimed at creating an atmosphere of ignorance and confusion.

     

    The Wall Street Journal, for example, America’s leading business newspaper, has run an aggressive editorial campaign against climate science for decades. The individuals involved in this campaign are not only scientifically uninformed, but show absolutely no interest in becoming better informed. They have turned down repeated offers by climate scientists to meet and conduct serious discussions about the issues.

     

    Major oil companies and other big corporate interests are also playing this game, and have financed disreputable PR campaigns against climate science. Their general approach is to exaggerate the uncertainties of climate science and to leave the impression that climate scientists are engaged in some kind of conspiracy to frighten the public. It is an absurd charge, but absurd charges can gather public support if presented in a slick, well-funded format.

     

    If we add up these three factors – the enormous economic challenge of reducing greenhouse gases, the complexity of climate science, and deliberate campaigns to confuse the public and discredit the science – we arrive at the fourth and overarching problem: US politicians’ unwillingness or inability to formulate a sensible climate-change policy.

     

    The US bears disproportionate responsibility for inaction on climate change, because it was long the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, until last year, when China overtook it. Even today, per capita US emissions are more than four times higher than China’s. Yet, despite America’s central role in global emissions, the US Senate has done nothing about climate change since ratifying the UN climate change treaty 16 years ago.

     

    When Barack Obama was elected US president, there was hope for progress. Yet, while it is clear that Obama would like to move forward on the issue, so far he has pursued a failed strategy of negotiating with senators and key industries to try to forge an agreement. Yet the special interest groups have dominated the process, and Obama has failed to make any headway.

     

    The Obama administration should have tried – and should still try – an alternative approach. Instead of negotiating with vested interests in the back rooms of the White House and Congress, the president should present a coherent plan to the American people. He should propose a sound strategy over the next 20 years for reducing America’s dependence on fossil fuels, converting to electric vehicles, and expanding non-carbon energy sources such as solar and wind power. He could then present an estimated price tag for phasing in these changes over time, and demonstrate that the costs would be modest compared to the enormous benefits.

     

    Strangely, despite being a candidate of change, Obama has not taken the approach of presenting real plans of action for change. His administration is trapped more and more in the paralysing grip of special-interest groups. Whether this is an intended outcome, so that Obama and his party can continue to mobilise large campaign contributions, or the result of poor decision-making is difficult to determine – and may reflect a bit of both.

     

    What is clear is that we are courting disaster as a result. Nature doesn’t care about our political machinations. And nature is telling us that our current economic model is dangerous and self-defeating. Unless we find some real global leadership in the next few years, we will learn that lesson in the hardest ways possible.

     

    • Jeffrey D. Sachs is professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia university. He is also pecial adviser to UN secretary-general on the millennium development goals. There is a podcast of this commentary.

     

    Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.

  • Gillard questioned on citizens’ assembly leak

     

    When questioned on the AFR report on the campaign trail in western Sydney today, Ms Gillard did not directly answer the claim.

    “I am proud to say that I have been working with my Cabinet colleagues in the lead-up to the election campaign,” she said.

    “We have had extensive discussions in Cabinet about climate change, about getting a deep and lasting community consensus for change.”

    Ms Gillard also faced questions over whether she breached Cabinet rules by allowing an adviser to take notes in the National Security Committee of Cabinet in her absence.

    She said all documents were dealt with appropriately.

    Earlier, Ms Gillard vowed to take control of Labor’s faltering election campaign, declaring she would “throw out the rule book” and show Australians who she really is.

    The Prime Minister’s change in campaign tactics came as today’s Newspoll in The Australian newspaper put Labor and the Coalition neck and neck at 50 per cent on a two-party preferred basis.

    Opposition Leader Tony Abbott seized on Ms Gillard’s words as evidence that the “faceless” factions are running Labor.

    Speaking from Cairns, where he announced a $90m package for the tourism industry, Mr Abbott demanded the “real Julia” stand up.

    “What have we been seeing for the last five weeks if it’s not the real Julia Gillard?” he said.

    “It was the faceless men that put the Prime Minister into office. It was the faceless men who were running her campaign.”

    Tags: climate-change, government-and-politics, elections, federal-government, gillard-julia, abbott-tony, federal-elections, australia