Paying Australia’s coal-fired power stations to stay open longer is bad for consumers and the planet

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Daniel J Cass, University of Sydney; Joel Gilmore, Griffith University, and Tim Nelson, Griffith UniversityAustralian governments are busy designing the nation’s transition to a clean energy future. Unfortunately, in a misguided effort to ensure electricity supplies remain affordable and reliable, governments are considering a move that would effectively pay Australia’s old, polluting coal-fired power stations to stay open longer.

The measure is one of several options proposed by the Energy Security Board (ESB), the chief energy advisor to Australian governments on electricity market reform. The board on Friday released a vision to redesign the National Electricity Market as it transitions to clean energy.

The key challenges of the transition are ensuring it is smooth (without blackouts) and affordable, as coal and gas generators close and are replaced by renewable energy.

The redesign has been two years in the making. The ESB has done a very good job of identifying key issues, and most of its recommendations are sound. But its option to change the way electricity generators and retailers strike contracts for electricity, if adopted, would be highly counterproductive – bad both for consumers and for climate action.

One proposed reform to Australia’s electricity market would be bad for consumers and climate action.
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The energy market dilemma

The National Electricity Market (NEM) covers every Australian jurisdiction except Western Australia and the Northern Territory. It comprises electricity generators, transmission and distribution networks, electricity retailers, customers and a financial market where electricity is traded.

Electricity generators in the NEM comprise older, polluting technology such as gas- and coal-fired power, and newer, clean forms of generation such as wind and solar. Renewable energy, which makes up about 23% of our electricity mix, is now cheaper than energy from coal and gas.

Wind and solar energy is “variable” – only produced when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. Technology such as battery storage is needed to smooth out renewable energy supplies and make it “dispatchable”, meaning it can be delivered on demand.

Some say coal generators, which supply dispatchable electricity, are the best way to ensure reliable and affordable electricity. But Australia’s coal-fired power stations, some of which are more than 40 years old, are becoming more prone to breakdowns – and so less reliable and more expensive – as they age. This has led to some closing suddenly.

Without a clear national approach to emissions targets, there’s a risk these sudden closures will occur again.

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Explainer: what is the electricity transmission system, and why does it need fixing?

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Wind and solar energy is variable.
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So what’s proposed?

To address reliability concerns, the ESB has proposed an option known as the “physical retailer reliability obligation”.

In a nutshell, the change would require electricity retailers to negotiate contracts for a certain amount of “dispatchable” electricity from specific generators for times of the year when reliability is a concern, such as the peak weeks of summer when lots of people use air conditioning.

Currently, the Australian Energy Market Operator has reserve electricity measures it can deploy when market supply falls short.

But under the new obligation, all retailers would also have to enter contracts for dispatchable supply. This would likely require buying electricity from the coal generators that dominate the market. This provides a revenue source enabling these coal plants to remain open even when cheaper renewable energy makes them unprofitable.

The ESB says without the change, the closure of coal generators will be unpredictable or “disorderly”, creating price shocks and reliability risks.

The ESWB says the recommendation would address concerns over electricity reliability.
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A big risk

Even the ESB concedes the recommendation comes with considerable risks. In particular, the board says it may:

• impose increased barriers to retail competition and product innovation
• lead to possible overcompensation of existing coal and gas generators.

In short, the policy could potentially lock in increasingly unreliable, ageing coal assets, stall new investment in new renewable energy storage such as batteries and pumped hydro and increase market concentration.

It could also push up electricity prices. Electricity retailers are likely to pass on the cost of these new electricity contracts to consumers, no matter how much energy that household or business actually used.

The existing market already encourages generators to provide reliable supply – and applies strong penalties if they don’t. And in fact, the NEM experiences reliability issues for an average of just one minute per year. It would appear little could be added to the existing market design to make generators more reliable than they are.

Finally, the market is dominated by three large “gentailers” – AGL, Energy Australia and Origin – which own both generators and the retail companies that sell electricity. The proposed change would disadvantage smaller electricity retailers, which in many cases would be forced to buy electricity from generators owned by their competitors.

Australia’s gentailers are heavily invested in coal power stations. The proposed change would further concentrate their market power while propping up coal.

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‘Failure is not an option’: after a lost decade on climate action, the 2020s offer one last chance

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The proposed change brings a raft of risks to the electricity market.
Kelly Barnes/AAP

What governments should do

If coal-fired power stations are protected from competition, it will deter investment in cleaner alternatives. The recommendation, if adopted, would delay decarbonisation and put Australia further at odds with our international peers on climate policy.

The federal and state governments must work together to develop a plan for electricity that facilitates clean energy investment while controlling costs for consumers.

The plan should be coordinated across the states. Without this, we risk creating a sharper shock later, when climate diplomacy requires the planned retirement of coal plants. Other nations have acknowledged the likely demise of coal, and it’s time Australia caught up.

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Spot the difference: as world leaders rose to the occasion at the Biden climate summit, Morrison faltered

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Daniel J Cass, Research Affiliate, Sydney Business School, University of Sydney; Joel Gilmore, Associate Professor, Griffith University, and Tim Nelson, Associate Professor of Economics, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The open Australian beach is a myth: not everyone can access these spaces equally

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Michelle O’Shea, Western Sydney University; Hazel Maxwell, University of Tasmania, and Megan Stronach, University of Technology Sydney

Last week, the McIver’s Ladies Baths in Sydney came under fire for their (since removed) policy stating “only transgender women who’ve undergone a gender reassignment surgery are allowed entry”. The policy was seemingly in defiance of New South Wales’ anti-discrimintation and sex discrimination acts.

Managed since 1922 by the Randwick and Coogee Ladies Amateur Swimming Club, the baths are a haven for women, and the last remaining women’s-only seawater pool in Australia.

Just over 100 public ocean pools sit on Australia’s rocky coast, most in New South Wales. Segregated baths gave women a place to experience the water, prohibited from most beach access until “continental” (or mixed gender) bathing was introduced in the early 20th century.

The council removed the wording on the website, and put out a statement saying they have “always supported the inclusion of transgender women at McIver’s Ladies Baths”. But this weekend, trans women and allies gathered at the baths, calling for a specifically inclusive policy to be drawn up.

Writing for Pedestrian, Alex Gallagher called the baths “a queer haven”. Of beaches, they wrote:

There’s likely no other place I feel such an undercurrent of anxiety that I’ll face scrutiny for not conforming to a sexist ideal of what a body “should” look like than the beach.

This is the latest in a long history of discrimination at Australia’s public beaches. Indeed, Australia’s beaches and ocean pools are a window into deep divisions.

Sites of contest

With Captain Cook’s arrival in 1770, coastal beaches were the first sites of early interactions and confrontations between the Aboriginal people and the colonisers.

Indigenous women, such as the Palawa women of Tasmania, once had an intimate relationship with water environments. Water was a playground as well as a source of nourishment and socialisation.

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The colonial erasure of these histories and knowledge has contributed to a culture where Aboriginal swimmers who defied convention – by participating in formal competition or by serving as lifeguards — were swimming against a tide of discrimination.

Aboriginal people were commonly caricatured at surf carnivals in degrading, costumed representations. The development of organised competitive swimming associations in Sydney in the late 1800s saw segregated “Natives’ Races”: scarcely mentioned in the media, except to demonstrate perceived white superiority in the baths.

Student Action for Aborigines protest outside Moree Artesian Baths, 1965. Aboriginal people were banned from the pool, and the protest drew national attention.
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and Courtesy SEARCH Foundation, CC BY

As recently as the 1960s, it was routine for Aboriginal people to be banned from public swimming pools.

Owing to this discriminatory legacy, Aboriginal people — despite a history of a strong water culture — have historically rarely participated in organised swimming. But positive changes are beginning to emerge. In the past ten years, there has been a 47% reduction in drowning deaths in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, reflecting the development of programs specifically tailored for remote communities.

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Read more:
From segregation to celebration: the public pool in Australian culture

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Ocean freedoms and fears

The first year women competed in swimming at the Olympic games, 1912, Australians Sarah “Fanny” Durack and “Mina” Wylie won medals. The McIver’s Ladies Baths were an important venue for their preparations.

Fanny Durack (left) and Mina Wylie at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm.
Wikimedia Commons

But even as beaches and pools became desegregated along gender lines, women weren’t admitted as full members of Surf Lifesaving Australia until 1980.

Muslim people, in particular those women who wear the hijab, have also long faced discrimination on Australian beaches. This was brought to the fore at the Cronulla riots of December 2005, when a crowd of 5,000 mostly white young men rioted on Cronulla beach in a “Leb and Wog bashing day”.

Programs such as Western Sydney’s Swim Sisters challenge Islamophobia at Australia’s beaches. A sisterhood of religiously diverse women, the program allows women a space to challenge themselves and support each other. And 40 years after white women could join Surf Lifesaving, highly skilled Muslim women lifesavers are furthering the tides of change.

Physical access

Australians living with a disability often face poor beach access and a lack of specialised facilities such as beach matting, access ramps and beach wheelchairs.

Without easy access to the beach, many with a disability lack confidence in swimming in the ocean, and there are few training opportunities for carers to develop the skills to assist.

Mats allowing wheelchair access, and accessibility chairs that can travel on the sand and into the water, improve accessibility to beach spaces.
AAP Image/Supplied by City of Gold Coast

Here, too, there are positive signs of change, with Accessible Beaches Australia aiming to open all patrolled beaches to people with disability.

Despite our history, the myth Australia’s beaches are egalitarian spaces persists. We remain a long way off inclusivity for all in our public blue spaces.

The story of the McIver’s Ladies Baths is only the latest in a long history of discrimination. We must ensure everyone can find an ocean pool or beach where they belong.

Michelle O’Shea, Senior Lecturer, School of Business, Western Sydney University; Hazel Maxwell, Senior Lecturer, University of Tasmania, and Megan Stronach, Post Doctoral Research Fellow, University of Technology Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Open data shows lightning, not arson, was the likely cause of most Victorian bushfires last summer

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Dianne Cook, Monash University

As last summer’s horrific bushfires raged, so too did debate about what caused them. Despite the prolonged drought and ever worsening climate change, some people sought to blame the fires largely on arson.

Federal Coalition MPs were among those pushing the arsonist claim. And on Twitter, a fierce hashtag war broke out: “#ClimateEmergency” vs “#ArsonEmergency”.

Fire authorities rejected the arson claims, saying most fires were thought to be caused by lightning.

We dug into open data resources to learn more about the causes of last summer’s bushfires in Victoria, and further test the arson claim. Our analysis suggests 82% of the fires can be attributed to lightning, 14% to accidents and 1% to burning off. Only 4% can be attributed to arson.

Lightning, not arson, caused most Victorian bushfires last summer.
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What we did

We started with hotspots data taken from the Himawari-8 satellite, which shows heat source locations over time and space, in almost real time. We omitted hotspots unlikely to be bushfires, and used a type of data mining called “spatiotemporal clustering” – where time dimension is introduced to geographic data – to estimate ignition time and location.

We supplemented this with data from other sources: temperature, moisture, rainfall, wind, sun exposure, fuel load, as well as distance to camp sites, roads and Country Fire Authority (CFA) stations.

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Victoria’s Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP) holds historical data on bushfire ignition from 2000 to the 2018-19 summer. The forensic research required to determine fire cause is laborious, and remotely sensed data from satellites may be useful and more immediate.

By training our model on the historical data, we can more immediately predict causes of last summer’s fires detected from satellite data. (Note: even though we were analysing events in the past, we use the term “predict” because authorities have not released official data.)

DELWP’s data attributes 41% of fires to lightning, 17% to arson, 34% to accidents and 7% to hazard reduction or back burning which escaped containment lines (which our analysis refers to as burning off).

Causes of fires from 2000-2019. Lightning is most common cause. The number of fires is increasing, and this is mostly due to accidents.
Own work

To make predictions for the 2019-20 bushfires, we needed an accurate model for causes in the historical data. We trained the model to predict one of four causes – lightning, accident, arson, burning off – using a machine learning algorithm.

The model performed well on the historical data: 75% overall accuracy, 90% accurate on lightning, 78% for accidents, and 54% for arson (which was mostly confused with accident, as would make sense).

The most important contributors to distinguishing between lightning and arson (or accident) ignition were distance to CFA stations, roads and camp sites, and average wind speed.

As might be expected, smaller distances to CFA stations, roads and camp sites, and higher than average winds, meant the fire was most likely the result of arson or accident. In the case of longer distances, where bush would have been largely inaccessible to the public, lightning was predicted to be the cause.

Spatial distribution of causes of fires from 2000-2019, and predictions for 2019-2020 season.
Own work

What we found

Our model predicted that 82% of Victoria’s fires in the summer of 2019-2020 were due to lightning. Most fires were located in densely vegetated areas inaccessible by road – similar to the historical locations. (The percentage is double that in the historical data, though, probably because the satellite hotspot data can see fire ignitions in locations inaccessible to fire experts).

All fires in February 2020 were predicted to be due to lightning. Accident and arson were commonly predicted causes in March, and early in the season. Reassuringly, ignition due to burning off was predicted primarily in October 2019, prior to the fire restrictions.

Spatio-temporal distribution of cause predictions for 2019-2020 season. Reassuringly, fires due to burning off primarily occurred in October, prior to fire restrictions. February fires were all predicted to be due to lightning.
Own work

Quicker fire ignition information

Our analysis used open-data and open-source software, and could be applied to fires elsewhere in Australia.

This analysis shows how we can quickly predict causes of bushfires, using satellite data combined with other information. It could reduce the work of fire forensics teams, and provide more complete fire ignition data in future.

The code used for the analysis can be found here. Explore the historical fire data, predictions for 2019-2020 fires, and a fire risk map for Victoria using this app.

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This analysis is based on thesis research by Monash University Honours student Weihao Li. She was supervised by the author, and former Principal Inventive Scientist at AT&T Labs Research, Emily Dodwell. The Australian Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers supported Emily’s travel to Australia to start this project. The full analysis is available here.

Dianne Cook, Professor of Business Analytics, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Sharks: one in four habitats in remote open ocean threatened by longline fishing

Though they’re protected worldwide, great white sharks encounter longline fishing vessels in half of their range.
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David Sims, University of Southampton

Unlike the many species which stalk the shallow, coastal waters that fisheries exploit all year round, pelagic sharks roam the vast open oceans. These are the long-distance travellers of the submarine world and include the world’s largest fish, the whale shark, and also one of the fastest fish in the sea, the shortfin mako shark, capable of swimming at 40mph.

Because these species range far from shore, you might expect them to escape most of the lines and nets that fishing vessels cast. But over the last 50 years, industrial scale fisheries have extended their reach across the world’s oceans and tens of millions of pelagic sharks are now caught every year for their valuable fins and meat.

On average, large pelagic sharks account for over half of all shark species identified in catches worldwide. The toll this has taken on species such as the shortfin mako has prompted calls to introduce catch limits in the high seas – areas of the ocean beyond national jurisdiction where there is little or no management for the majority of shark species.

We wanted to know where the ocean’s shark hotspots are – the places where lots of different species gather – and how much these places are worked by fishing boats. We took up the challenge of finding out where pelagic sharks hang out by satellite tracking their movements with electronic tags. This approach by our international team of over 150 scientists from 26 countries has an important advantage over fishery catch records. Rather than showing where a fishing boat found them, it can precisely map all of the places sharks visit.

Nowhere to hide

For a new study published in Nature we tracked nearly 2,000 sharks from 23 different species, including great whites, blue sharks, shortfin mako and tiger sharks. We were able to map their positions in unprecedented detail and discern the most visited hotspots where sharks feed, breed and rest.

Hotspots were often located in frontal zones – boundaries in the sea between different water masses that can have the best conditions of temperature and nutrients for phytoplankton to bloom, which attracts masses of zooplankton, as well as the fish and squid that sharks eat.

Then we calculated how much these hotspots overlapped with global fleets of large, longline fishing vessels, which we also tracked by satellite. This type of fishing gear is used very widely on the high seas and catches more pelagic sharks than trawls and other gear. Each longline vessel is capable of deploying a 100km long line bearing over 1,000 baited hooks.

We found that even the most remote parts of the ocean that are many miles from land offer pelagic sharks little refuge from industrial-scale fishing fleets. One in four of the places sharks visited each month overlapped with the areas longline fishing vessels operated in.

Sharks such as the North Atlantic blue and the shortfin mako – which fishers also target for their fins and meat – were much more likely to encounter these vessels, with as much as 76% of the places these species visited most in each month overlapping with where longline vessels were fishing. Even internationally protected species such as great whites and porbeagle sharks encountered longline vessels in half of their tracked range.

It’s now clear that much of the world’s fishing activity on the high seas is centred on shark hotspots, which longlines rake for much of the year. Many large sharks, which are already endangered, face a future without refuge from industrial fishing in the places they gather.

High seas marine protected areas

The maps of shark hotspots and longline fishing activity that we created can at least provide a blueprint for where large-scale marine protected areas aimed at conserving sharks could be set. Outside of these, strict quotas could reduce catches.

The United Nations is creating a high seas treaty for protecting ocean biodiversity – negotiations are due to continue in August 2019 in New York. They’ll consider large-scale marine protected areas for the high seas and we’ll suggest where these could be located to best protect pelagic sharks.

Satellite monitoring could give real-time signals of where sharks and other threatened creatures such as turtles and whales are gathering. Tracking where these species roam and where fishers interact with them will help patrol vessels monitor these high-risk zones more efficiently.

Such management action is overdue for many shark populations in the high seas. Take North Atlantic shortfin makos – not only are they overfished
and endangered, but now we know they have no respite from longline fishing during many months of the year in the places they gather most often. Some of these shark hotspots may not exist in the near future if action isn’t taken now to conserve these species and the habitats they depend on.

David Sims, Professor of Marine Ecology, University of Southampton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Canada: The Great Trail is Now Open

The link below is to an article reporting on the opening of the world’s longest bushwalking/hiking trail – The Great Trail in Canada.

For more visit:
http://inhabitat.com/the-worlds-longest-hiking-trail-is-officially-open/

Nepal Opens Everest to Climbers for First Time Since Earthquake

Open Spaces of the USA

Media Release: Warrumbungle National Park

The link below is to a media release concerning Warrumbungle National Park and areas now open to the public following devastating bushfires.

For more visit:
http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/media/OEHMedia13051502.htm

Australia: Carbon Price Needed Now

Thirteen of Australia’s leading economists have signed and published an open letter calling for a speedy introduction of a carbon price for carbon polluters. They prefer to have a carbon emissions trading scheme institututed as soon as possible.

The introduction of carbon pricing is designed to accelerate a move to more environmentally friendly production methods, increased reliance on renewable energy sources, etc.

For more visit:
http://theconversation.edu.au/economists-open-letter-calls-for-carbon-price-1639

View the actual letter.