Independent MP Tony Windsor says it’s a tragedy that federal parliament has failed to agree on how to deal with asylum seekers, and has turned it into a “bumper sticker” issue.
In the final sitting week before the September 14 election, Mr Windsor said he was “very proud” of the hung parliament and the “tremendous” amount it had achieved.
But he lamented parliament’s failure to develop a regional strategy for dealing with asylum seekers, saying the issue had become far too political.
“What the political process has done in this place is demean it (the issue) to a bumper sticker approach,” he told reporters in Canberra on Tuesday.
“That never works.”
It was far too easy to whip up fear and “do the (Pauline) Hanson stuff” around asylum seekers, but this approach would never solve the issue at hand, he said.
Mr Windsor said only a regional solution involving the Indonesians and others could address the problem, and wished Prime Minister Julia Gillard good luck on her trip to Jakarta next week.
Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said the arrival of another boat overnight brought the number to 25,000 asylum seekers who have made the journey to Australia this financial year.
Those 25,000 people completely exhausted the increase in the refugee and humanitarian intake for the next four years, Mr Morrison added.
“I think this just underscores the dire situation the government has got itself into, with their chronic failures which they continue to refuse to admit let alone correct,” he said.
Australian Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young said Australia needed a new and humane way of dealing with refugees and asylum seekers.
“If we are to manage the needs of asylum seekers throughout the region we need to be more engaged with how they’re treated and the care they’re given in both Indonesia and Malaysia,” she told reporters in Canberra on Tuesday.
She said former Defence Force Chief Angus Houston’s 2012 report on the issue recommended that $70 million be injected into services for refugees, but so far there was only $10 million on the table.
“When the prime minister goes to Indonesia next week she should be talking about putting that money on the table, engaging with Indonesia about how they can provide some type of certainty and care for people while they’re waiting,” Senator Hanson-Young said.
She also said Australia needed to boost its humanitarian intake of refugees by 10,000.
“The only way to stop people taking dangerous boat journeys is by giving them a safer option.
“We could negotiate that with Indonesia if we wanted to. The government has the power to do it – all they need is the courage.”
Stephen Campbell steve@antarcticocean.org via createsend4.com
11:57 AM (36 minutes ago)
to me
The penguins are calling you to action!
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Dear NEVILLE,We’re calling on you to tell 25 key decision makers the time to protect Antarctica’s ocean is now!
The map of Antarctica above shows you the 25 countries, including the EU, who collectively hold the fate of the Southern Ocean in their hands. These countries are meeting in less than 20 days to decide the fate of the last pristine ocean wilderness left on Earth.
2. Click on any of the ‘critical to success’ countries and email their decision maker to urge them to show leadership and protect the Southern Ocean next month.
Last year, the body that manages Antarctica’s marine environment, CCAMLR, failed to reach agreement to protect two key areas — the Ross Sea and East Antarctica’s coastal region. The upcoming meeting in Germany faces the same challenges so we need public support in the call for them to take action.
As all CCAMLR decisions require consensus of the 25 Members, it is critical to send a clear message to these leaders that we are relying on them to show collective vision in order to protect these waters for future generations.
As the CCAMLR meeting in Germany approaches, we will be calling on your support again to spread the word and take action about this momentous decision.
Australian factories and power stations handed in carbon permits and offsets covering 212 million metric tons of greenhouse gases emitted in the past year as the nation prepares for a cap-and-trade program in 2015.
Companies were obliged to surrender permits covering 75 per cent of their emissions in the year to June 30 by an interim deadline on June 17, data from the nation’s Clean Energy Regulator show. The balance of allowances must be surrendered by February 3.
The country introduced a charge for carbon emissions last year as Prime Minister Julia Gillard proceeded with plans for a trading system that has drawn criticism from opposition politicians. Liberal party leader Tony Abbott pledged a “blood oath” to dismantle what he calls a toxic tax on carbon and electricity if he wins a September 14 general election.
“Last week’s provisional surrender would have been the first time that many Australian companies have had to pay for their emissions,” Hugh Bromley, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance in Sydney, said by e-mail June 21. “This is an important step forward as Australia’s per capita emissions are the highest in the OECD.”
Australia’s carbon regime will shift from a flat charge of $23 to $25.40 a ton from 2012 through 2015, to a floating-price market system from 2015, according to legislation passed two years ago.
Permit surrender
All liable entities fulfilled their reporting obligations, according to a June 21 e-mailed statement from the Clean Energy Regulator. Companies surrendered permits covering 99.75 per cent of their discharges, the regulator said.
A total of 256 companies handed over allowances by the June deadline, the data show. About 120 more firms are expected to submit permits by the Feb. 3 deadline, Bromley said.
Companies must top up their quota with permits purchased directly from the government, or carbon offsets generated by projects in Australia that reduce emissions by cutting pollution from livestock, landfills and deforestation. Companies surrendered 1.7 million Australian Carbon Credit Units in the June compliance, data from the regulator show.
From 2015, companies will be allowed to use European Union allowances, or EUAs, and United Nations Certified Emission Reductions for a portion of their compliance, according to the system’s rules.
“Some liable entities will be looking beyond the fixed- price period to take advantage of low carbon prices in the international CER and EUA markets,” Bromley said. “However, political uncertainty makes this too risky a proposition for many companies.”
The Clean Energy Regulator will publish data on those companies that failed to surrender enough permits to cover 75 per cent of their annual emissions on June 28, according to its website.
“We believe almost all entities who were required to provide a provisional surrender did so,” Bromley said.
Renewable energy sources, at least wind and solar, are variable — the wind isn’t always blowing, the sun isn’t always shining. This is something every glib pundit on the internet cites as a reason we’ll need fossil-fuel or nuclear “baseload” power plants for the foreseeable future. It’s a frustrating topic, since people who actually study the subject (like NREL) have shown that there are all sorts of ways to handle variability without disrupting the grid.
One of those ways is transmission: building power lines to take renewable energy from where it is abundant (often remote areas) to where it is needed (mainly big cities). More specifically, the idea is to build high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) lines that would carry energy over long distances from remote sites and feed it into the alternating-current (AC) lines that serve urban areas. (The DC vs. AC question is interesting, but not particularly essential for understanding the bigger questions.)
Transmission is a somewhat vexed subject in the energy world. It brings land/wildlife-focused enviros and local-energy enthusiasts in tension with mainstream enviros and lots of large corporate interests. I’m a local-energy guy myself and have, in the past, pushed back against the kneejerk resort to more transmission.
Still. Even stipulating that we can and should do much, much more to encourage local energy ownership and management; even stipulating that local energy is capable of much more than most forecasts give it credit for; even then, I think new transmission infrastructure is to be welcomed.
Here’s my logic. There are lots of ways other than transmission to handle variable renewable energy and help stabilize its presence on the grid: energy storage, sophisticated distribution grids, demand response, more energy efficiency, etc. Eventually (hopefully?), those other means will allow local, variable, renewable sources of energy to provide smoother, more constant service. And they’ll ensure that every bit of renewable capacity is used to the fullest. But it looks to me like renewables are scaling up much more quickly than those complementary technologies. Until we have more robust local energy systems, I think we’re going to need the brute-force method, i.e., transmission. (I’m open to hearing arguments to the contrary.)
Anyway, this is all by way of introducing some exciting developments in Germany. As a pioneer in scaling up renewables, Germany is currently facing all the challenges and roadbumps that other countries will face in the near future. One of those is the need for transmission.
Right now, the south of Germany — the heavily industrialized part — is struggling a bit. It receives lots of its energy from those big nuclear plants that are in the process of getting shut down. Meanwhile, northern Germany has more wind than it knows what to do with. Wind turbines in the north often stop running because there’s nowhere to send the power:
In 2010, German wind farms let some 127 gigawatt-hours of energy, enough to supply more than 30 000 German households for a year, fly on by. There was no grid capacity to deliver that power.
At other times, there’s so much northern German wind that the surplus power flows into neighboring countries’ AC grids, which aren’t always prepared to accept it:
The Czech Republic is installing phase-shifting transformers at its border with Germany, for example, to keep its neighbor’s renewable energy from looping through the Czech grid, which is at its carrying limit.
One obvious solution to this problem is to build more transmission capacity to carry northern wind power to the south. And this week, the German parliament approved a plan to do just that. (The Germans’ propensity for solving problems rather than whining about them, passing legislation rather than wringing hands, will be somewhat mysterious to young Americans.)
IEEE Spectrum did a really fantastic deep dive into the technology and logistics at work. As it notes, the need for new transmission is pressing:
In 2010, the [German Energy Agency] found that the country would need an additional 3600 km of new AC lines by 2020 to handle the growth in wind and solar power. That’s a daunting number given that stiff local opposition has stymied construction of all but 214 of the 850 km called for in 2005.
The $10 billion plan just approved by parliament will involve three high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) lines running north to south, through Corridors A, C, and D respectively. (I don’t know what happened to poor Corridor B.) Here’s their nifty illustration:
Like much else in the clean-energy world, HVDC lines have been the target of considerable innovation recently. It’s now possible to route them through existing AC corridors, using existing towers, thus minimizing the need for disruptive siting battles. Work is underway on high-tech converters that can also act as breakers, allowing power to be cut off in an instant in the case of fault or accident on the AC grid — at least in that sense, HVDC lines are getting “smarter” than existing AC lines.
In approving these lines, Germany is taking the first step toward a much-discussed “supergrid” that will interconnect all of Europe:
If Germany moves forward with such HVDC lines, it could help pave the way for something much bigger, a “supergrid” of inter connected DC lines capable of transporting electricity on a continental scale, ferrying energy from North Sea turbines, dams in Scandinavia, or Mediterranean solar farms to wherever demand is greatest at that moment. The European Commission is counting on this sort of flexibility to meet its goal of an 80 percent renewable power supply by 2050. Corridor A could be the first step.
I’ve yet to hear much talk of a North American supergrid — presumably much of Mexico would be good for solar, though, and there’s all that hydro in Canada — but there are plenty of folks who’d like to see more HVDC transmission in the U.S. This is the U.S. transmission supergrid that the American Wind Energy Association has proposed:
This is the kind of transmission flow that NREL envisions in its seminal Renewable Electricity Futures Study, which modeled 80 percent renewable electricity by 2050 (the blue dots are energy exporters, the red are energy importers):
For all kinds of reasons — the huge level of funding needed, the lack of federal regulatory authority over the grid, hyperpartisan politics — a supergrid is going to be tough to pull off in the U.S. We don’t really do big things any more. Or smart things. Or … things, really.
But if you want to imagine big, really big, head on over to the Global Energy Network Institute, which advocates “linking renewable energy resources around the world using international electricity transmission.” That’s a fun (and slightly psychedelic) thing to imagine: a networked global electricity system in which energy harvested anywhere on earth is available everywhere on earth. It would be like Gaia getting a nervous system.
Maybe someday. But for now, Germany is taking a small step.
GENIGlobal solar resources, on one of Buckmister Fuller’s famous Dymaxion maps (click to embiggen).
Closure touted: The Greens envision shutting down a unit at Wallerawang power station in the central tablelands by 2017. Photo: Peter Braig
Could NSW be made to operate completely free of fossil-fuelled electricity within 17 years?
The Greens think so. The state branch of the party will this week unveil a bold plan to close down every coal- or gas-fired power plant in the state by 2030, while guaranteeing employment for displaced power sector workers.
The proposal, to be put before State Parliament on Thursday, would cost $8.2 billion a year, part of which would be funded by removing fuel subsidies for mining and power companies that amount to about $2 billion.
The Greens concede that the plan, which relies on the work of University of NSW researchers and the environment group Beyond Zero Emissions, is unlikely to gain much support from the Coalition or Labor.
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Instead it is designed to extend the breadth of current debate about the state’s future energy policies and climate change ambitions.
“The barriers to weaning the state off fossil fuels are no longer technical or economic,” Greens MP John Kaye said. “It is the politicians who are getting in the way of the tens of thousands of new jobs in renewable energy . . . The bill might not become law but we want to force every state politician to face the reality that there is an alternative to burning coal and gas that secures electricity supplies and a strong economic future for the state.”
The NSW Minerals Council said the Greens’ bill contained “ridiculously expensive fantasies that would cripple the NSW economy and destroy our way of life”.
The plan calls for a rapid expansion of solar and wind energy to allow the state to close down a unit of Wallerawang power station, in the state’s central tablelands, by 2017, and a ban on the building of new fossil-fuelled power plants of greater than 15 megawatts – a relatively tiny size.
The party wants a panel of experts in renewable power and energy efficiency appointed by the Resources Minister to advise on the most effective way of closing down all remaining large-scale coal and gas plants by 2030. Power plant workers would be represented on the panel by a union official, and all staff would be guaranteed their existing pay and conditions in new jobs in the renewable sector, where many more wind farms and big solar thermal power stations would be constructed.
Stephen Galilee, the chief executive of the ninerals council, said the proposal was hugely expensive and impractical, and would affect 23,000 workers in the Hunter and Illawarra, along with others who depend upon their incomes.
“NSW coal currently provides around 85 per cent of our state’s electricity and is the state’s most valuable export, so the Greens’ policy would threaten the state’s electricity supply, export income and major global trading relationships,” Mr Galilee said in a statement.
“NSW coal also provides around 29 per cent of Australia’s national energy supply so the Greens’ policy would have significant flow-on impacts on the national economy too.”
The renewed debate comes after the Australian Climate Commission declared in a major report last week that most of Australia’s coal reserves would need to be left unburned if the world were to have any hope of meeting the internationally agreed target of holding global warming to an average of two degrees this century.
The commission’s report, which used projections from the International Energy Agency and other respected groups, said it was not seeking to influence political outcomes, but was simply presenting the most up-to-date science on climate change and the impact of greenhouse gas emissions.
The commission’s findings were contested by the Australian Coal Association and other resources groups, which assert that the market for exported coal is healthy. The concept of “unburnable carbon” is a fallacy, the coal association said, because analysts factor risks into company valuations.
The IEA projections suggest that significant amounts of coal would still be burned into the second half of this century.
The Mesocosm Facility for Ocean Acidification Impact Study of State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science (MEL, Xiamen University)(FOANIC-XMU) has been successfully set up in Wuyuan Bay (N24°31′48″, E118°10′47″). The floating platform, the dimension size is 35×7m, has 9 mesocosms with volume of 4 cubic meters and is fully solar-powered for uses of instruments, with 3 independent rooms (9 m2 each). Activities on the platform are monitored and recorded continuously. Different levels of CO2 in the mesocosms can be achieved by the commercially available CO2-enriching device (CO2 enrichlor, Ruihua, Wuhan, China).
Ocean acidification (OA) conditions can be induced gradually with aeration from the CO2 enrichlors. Effects of OA on phytoplankton species competition, primary productivity, food chain effect and microbial processes will be examined by MEL group and their collaborating scientists from overseas to look into the species/community/ecosystem-level impacts. This facility is open to other scientific communities or individual scientists. Contact should be directed to Kunshan Gao (ksgao(at)xmu.edu.cn) or Yaping Wu (yapingwu(at)xmu.edu.cn).
AAP © Enlarge photo
Closure touted: The Greens envision shutting down a unit at Wallerawang power station in the central tablelands by 2017. Photo: Peter Braig
