SYDNEY, Jan. 22 (UPI) — Australia’s drinking water is at risk from extreme weather, a new study says.The study, commissioned by the United States-based Water Research Foundation, says flooding, prolonged rainfall, drought, cyclones and bush fires impact surface water quality. Such weather events, it says, are predicted to become more frequent and intense in many parts of Australia due to climate change.

“We need to focus on building resilience into our future supplies,” said Stuart Khan, an associate professor of the school of civil and environmental engineering at the University of New South Wales, and lead author of the report, in a news release.

“This means designing systems that are more protected from the impacts of climate change and that have greater flexibility to respond to extreme weather events. This could be partially brought about through a diversification of water sources.”

The report comes as Australia broke another heat wave record, with the temperature in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, reaching 114.8 degrees Friday. Bush fires raged across the southeast last week, with more than 100 blazes in South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales.

In Queensland, 26 local government areas are now drought declared, covering almost 65 percent of the state.

Bush fires, for example, can cause ash and phosphorus to enter waterways which feed drinking water catchments, while extreme hot weather speeds up the growth of bacteria that can prove harmful to humans.

Although Australian water utilities are “reasonably well prepared to respond to extreme weather events” because of an industry-wide focus on risk assessment and risk management, Khan said, the vulnerability of the country’s water systems requires urgent action.

Australia has for the most part avoided potable water emergencies.

Amid heavy flooding last year, Brisbane came close to running out of drinking water when the city’s main water treatment plant was knocked out by a huge volume of silt that had washed down from catchments.

“The one thing that saved them was the ability to ramp up water production from the Gold Coast desalination plant at that time,” Khan told the Sydney Morning Herald.

The biggest risk to water supply follows a combination of extreme weather events, such as a drought followed by bush fires and then a flood, rather than an extreme but isolated event.

In 2009, Melbourne’s water supplies avoided a major threat after massive bush fires because heavy rain did not follow those blazes.

But Hahn warns, “As we see these events happening more frequently, it’s likely the impacts will become more severe.”

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A new “sugar battery” possessing an “unmatched” energy density has been created by a research team from Virginia Tech. The researchers think that their new battery — which, it bears repeating, runs on sugar — could potentially replace conventional forms of battery technology within only the next couple of years.

The researchers argue that their sugar batteries’ relative affordability, ability to be refilled, and biodegradability, are significant advantages as compared to current battery technologies, and should give it the edge in competition. They are currently aiming for the technology to hit the market sometime within the next few years.

“Sugar is a perfect energy storage compound in nature,” stated researcher YH Percival Zhang, an associate professor of biological systems engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Engineering. “So it’s only logical that we try to harness this natural power in an environmentally friendly way to produce a battery.”

While sugar batteries aren’t an entirely new concept, they have never been all that viable either — the new technology, though, is different, possessing an “energy density an order of magnitude higher than others,” according to Zhang. Continuing: “Sugar is a perfect energy storage compound in nature. So it’s only logical that we try to harness this natural power in an environmentally friendly way to produce a battery.”

Virginia Tech provides more:

This is one of Zhang’s many successes in the last year that utilize a series of enzymes mixed together in combinations not found in nature. In this newest development, Zhang and his colleagues constructed a non-natural synthetic enzymatic pathway that strip all charge potentials from the sugar to generate electricity in an enzymatic fuel cell. Then, low-cost biocatalyst enzymes are used as catalyst instead of costly platinum, which is typically used in conventional batteries.

Like all fuel cells, the sugar battery combines fuel — in this case, maltodextrin, a polysaccharide made from partial hydrolysis of starch — with air to generate electricity and water as the main byproducts.

“We are releasing all electron charges stored in the sugar solution slowly step-by-step by using an enzyme cascade,” Zhang explained. “Different from hydrogen fuel cells and direct methanol fuel cells, the fuel sugar solution is neither explosive nor flammable and has a higher energy storage density. The enzymes and fuels used to build the device are biodegradable. The battery is also refillable and sugar can be added to it much like filling a printer cartridge with ink.”
Source: Clean Technica. Reproduced with permission.

The Australian rooftop solar PV industry may have to prepare for a future with no federal government incentives. There is growing speculation that the small scale renewable certificate may be cut in a revamp of the national renewable energy target.

RenewEconomy understands that there is a renewed push by utilities and generators – particularly but not exclusively the state-owned ones – to close the small scale renewable energy scheme (SRES) and cease issuing renewable energy certificates for rooftop solar. Others suggest cutting the price cap on the certificates.

The renewable energy target is already under threat from utilities and generators, state governments, and sympathizers within the Abbott ministry to either remove, or severely dilute, the 20 per cent target.

Large scale developers are more or less resigned to having the fixed target of 41,000GWh for the large scale component moved beyond 2020 – possibly to 2022 or 2025. Because of falling demand, the government will claim that renewables will still account for 20 per cent of national demand in 2020.

However, less expected is a new attack on the small scale solar subsidy. However, Australia already has more than 3,000MW of rooftop solar, is adding around 700-800MW a year, and this is having a big impact on the returns of generators such as Stanwell Corp, and the business models of network operators.

Australian utilities are not alone, because rooftop solar is threatening their business models across the world – particularly in north America and Europe. Consider these remarkable comments made this week by Mark Ferron, one of the heads of the California Public Utilities Commission, who resigned this week.

He noted that utilities, while claiming to like solar, “would still dearly like to strangle rooftop solar if they could.” Ferron said the CPUC – and by inference other regulators – would come under pressure to  “protect the interest of the utilities over those of consumers and potential self-generators, all in the name of addressing exaggerated concerns about grid stability, cost and fairness.”

That is exactly what has been happening in Australia, where solar is couched in terms of the “death spiral” and its potential impact on non-solar users, rather than the benefits it can bring to consumers and the grid as a whole, as the heatwave underlined last week.

The RET once offered 5 certificates for each estimated megawatt hour of electricity produced by rooftop solar. This – in combination of generous state-based feed-in-tariffs – created a flood of certificates and forced authorities to separate the small scale scheme to absorb the excess. The multiple was rapidly brought down to one as it became clear that the cost of rooftop solar PV had fallen.

Ironically, that small scale solar market had finally reached balance just as the utilities make a new push to have it removed altogether. Their argument is that rooftop solar no longer needs the subsidy (the states have already largely removed feed in tariffs). The Queensland government, for instance, is constantly deflecting the blame on rising electricity bills on to the cost of solar subsidies.

The reality is that the small scale scheme adds very little to electricity bills, less than one per cent, according to official data, and the Climate Change Authority, which reviewed the RET in 2012.

However, the CCA raised the possibility that the certificate multiple could be reduced below one (say to 0.5/MWh) if the costs of the scheme rose beyond 1.5 per cent of consumer bills, and the payback of rooftop solar PV fell below 10 years.

That assessment brought howls of protest from the solar industry, which pointed out that few businesses would invest in technology on such a payback, so why should households.

The reality is, however, is that the payback for rooftop solar PV has now fallen to below 5 years, and to 7 years for commercial installations. The solar industry says that removing the certificates would add two years to that payback.

That would make rooftop solar less obtainable and attractive for those on lower incomes. However, the government has the potential to offset this by targeting, as it has flagged, its “one million solar roofs” program to the lower income, rental and apartment markets. That program has already slashed its proposed subsidy from $1,000 to $500 a system, but it is not yet clear how it would be introduced.

There have been arguments that it is superfluous if the RECs exist. Others such as ARENA are working on financing models for lower income and rental households, arguing that this would be a more effective system.

In a recent submission to the Direct Action proposal, Origin Energy, the largest utility in Australia, stopped short of calling for the SRES to be scrapped, but called for the $40 cap on the price of small scale certificates to be reduced. It also questioned the one million rooftop program, noting that on its estimates, another million roofs would be connected to solar by 2020 anyway.

“It is against this policy context that Origin believes that current support for solar PV systems should be moderated,” it writes in its Senate submission. It also wants a 10kW limit on SRECs, which it noted had been proposed by the CCA.  Any bigger system would still qualify for large scale renewable energy certificates, which are based on actual output rather than an upfront rated capacity.

The Federal Government has yet to release the terms of reference for its RET review, despite having committed to do so by early December. Part of the problem is the complication of the CCA remaining in existence after Labor and the Greens voted down its repeal.

However, removing the SRES could have implications for large scale developments, and it is not clear how the various targets would be resolved. No doubt the utilities will make clear their ideas when the RET review is finally open to submissions.