Feed aggregator

The administration has unveiled President Donald Trump’s first budget, including a proposed 31% cut in funding to the Environmental Protection Agency. The cuts would remove funding for the Clean Power Plan and scrap all climate change research programs and partnerships. White House budget director Mick Mulvaney confirmed on Thursday that the new administration had no interest in funding to combat climate change, saying: ‘We’re not spending money on that any more. We consider that to be a waste of your money’

• Budget would gut EPA programs tackling climate change and pollution

Continue reading...

A woman stumbles across rafts of debris to make it to safety after being caught in a huge mudslide that crashed through the outskirts of Lima. Media reports in Peru said Evangelina Chamorro Díaz, 32, escaped without serious injury. “She is a little confused, but she is very well and will recover because she is a warrior and thank God nothing serious happened,” health minister Patricia Garcia said after visiting Díaz on Thursday. Several days of unusually heavy rains have killed at least a dozen people in the country.

Continue reading...

It took a couple of tweets, and at least one one-hour long phone call, but it seems pretty clear that Tesla founder, CEO and billionaire Elon Musk has helped turn the debate around energy policy in Australia on its head. We can’t be sure what was said in the phone call between Musk and Turnbull […]

MCS takes some haddock fisheries off green list – but Scottish fishermen accuse it of ‘dressing advocacy up as science’

It is among the most popular fish in the UK, but haddock may soon be off the menu in some fish and chip shops because of dwindling stocks.

Haddock from three North Sea and west of Scotland fisheries have been removed from the Marine Conservation Society recommended “green” list of fish to eat, after stocks fell below the acceptable levels in 2016.

Continue reading...

S.A. government has its eyes on installing five world-first gas plus battery units - each with 50MW of gas power and 10MW of battery storage - across the state.

Researchers trace the parental history of Canadian rocks to a time just after Earth's formation.

First Nations lobby group will support remote communities looking to make transition – and tackle climate change

Like so many of the Indigenous communities dotted across the Australian continent, the remote communities in north-west New South Wales are struggling. “These are not happy places,” says the Euahlayi elder Ghillar Michael Anderson.

Many of the 300 or so residents of Anderson’s hometown of Goodooga rely on welfare, he says. Exorbitant electricity bills – up to $3,000 a quarter for some households – further exacerbate the poverty. “We’re always at the end of the power line, so the service that is there is quite extraordinary in terms of cost.”

Continue reading...

A tunnel under construction beneath a Norwegian mountain is just one link in a new grid that will cross national borders

More than 2km down a dark tunnel deep inside a Norwegian mountain, a drilling machine is boring out holes in the rock. It’s part of a major project that will connect Britain to Norway’s huge hydroelectric power supplies, passing power lines through the mountain near Kvilldal, southwest Norway, before laying the world’s longest undersea power cable, 450km long, to Blyth in Northumberland.

It will take years to build, but when it is completed, the UK could import 1,400 megawatts of electricity, enough to power more than 750,000 homes. It will also allow Britain to export any surplus wind energy back to Norway.

Continue reading...

Former energy advisor Ross Garnaut says Australia is 'a bit late' coming to the energy transition happening in the rest of the world.

The federal government has announced a A$2 billion plan to expand the iconic Snowy Hydro scheme. It will carry out a feasibility study into the idea of adding “pumped hydro” storage capacity, which it says could power up to 500,000 homes.

Hydro is one of the oldest and most mature electricity generation technologies. And pumped hydro storage – in which water is pumped uphill for later use, rather than simply flowing downriver through a hydro power station – is the dominant form of energy storage globally.

But there are limitations to how much freshwater hydro can be accessed, so it’s worth looking at what alternate approaches are available. One promising prospect is to use seawater instead of rivers. This tactic could potentially help South Australia resolve its highly publicised energy problems.

Hydro basics

The principle behind conventional hydro power is straightforward: rainwater runoff feeds a river, which is dammed to create a large reservoir of water. This is then gradually released through pipes to a turbine at the foot of the dam, thus converting the gravitational potential energy into electricity. The water then flows on downriver.

Hydro power is fossil-free and also “dispatchable” – it can be turned on or off at will (provided there is water in the dam). This gives it a significant advantage over wind turbines and solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, which produce power only when the wind blows or the sun shines.

Hydro thus makes an ideal partner for wind and solar PV, as it can adjust its output in response to changes in output from these non-dispatchable renewables.

Pump it up

Pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) is very similar to conventional hydro power but differs in that rather than being a generator, it’s more accurate to describe it as a battery.

Normally done at smaller scales than conventional hydro, PHES uses excess electricity from the grid (such as during periods of low demand and/or high generation) to pump water uphill from a lower reservoir to a higher one.

Later, this water is released back downhill through the turbine, returning the electricity to the grid when it is most needed – typically during the evening peak. It is this approach that is being considered in the Snowy Hydro 2.0 project.

Pumped hydro storage thus helps to “smooth out” peaks in demand by effectively transferring excess electricity from periods of low demand to periods of high demand. It has a “round trip” efficiency of ~80%, which is comparable to that of batteries.

PHES is the most common form of grid-connected energy storage in the world, accounting for around 97% of the total. It is often built in partnership with “baseload” power generators such as coal and nuclear plants, to help them vary their output to cope with peaks and troughs in demand.

Australia already has three PHES facilities – at Tumut 3 in the Snowy Hydro Scheme, at Shoalhaven in New South Wales, and at Wivenhoe Dam on the Brisbane River in Queensland.

South Australia is arguably the place that is most in need of grid-scale energy storage. Unfortunately, South Australia lacks the rainfall, rivers and mountains to run a conventional hydro system, with or without storage.

However, there is a way to use this technology without rivers and mountains: by using the ocean as the lower reservoir, and building an artificial upper one.

The upper reservoir doesn’t need a river to feed it fresh water; it just needs to be significantly higher than the ocean (that is, there should be a steep slope on or near the coastline, up which the seawater can be pumped). Using seawater also avoids the need to divert freshwater resources into a large reservoir, where a significant amount would be lost through evaporation.

Testing the technology

So far, only one seawater PHES installation has been built anywhere in the world – on the island of Okinawa, Japan. It came online in 1999 and was decommissioned in 2016, after Okinawa’s power requirements changed. Seventeen years for a first-of-its-kind project is a significant success. However, the Okinawa project was combined with a coal-fired power station, so linking this technology with intermittent renewables has never been trialled anywhere.

So could this technology help to ease South Australia’s energy crisis? The Melbourne Energy Institute (MEI) report on Pumped Hydro Opportunities identifies several potential seawater PHES locations in South Australia. This includes a very promising site at the northern end of the Spencer Gulf, with significant elevation close to the coast and close to high-capacity transmission lines.

The Department of Defence manages this land, and discussions are ongoing as to how the project might be designed to not interfere with the department’s operations on the site. A win–win development is the primary design aim.

The MEI study suggests that PHES could be delivered at around A$250 per kWh of storage. This compares well with utility-scale lithium ion battery storage, which currently costs of the order of A$800 per kWh, although recent annoucements on Twitter from Elon Musk suggest this might be coming down towards A$500 per kWh.

The Spencer Gulf site has the potential to provide at least 100 megawatts of dispatchable generation, effectively making the wind and solar generation in South Australia significantly more reliable.

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) will help fund a feasibility study into the technology, working with partners Energy Australia, Arup and MEI. If the facility is ultimately built, it could become a key element in SA’s bid to avoid future power blackouts.

Roger Dargaville works with the consortium of EnergyAustralia and Arup that have been funded by ARENA to conduct the PHES feasibility study. He has previously received funding from ARENA to undertake energy system modelling studies.

Trump’s ‘America First’ proposal would cut funding by nearly a third to the Environmental Protection Agency, which is ‘already on a starvation diet’

Dozens of programs that deal with climate change, pollution clean-ups and energy efficiency would be wiped out by by the Trump administration’s budget, which seeks to demolish parts of the Environmental Protection Agency.

The regulator’s funding would be cut by nearly a third under Trump’s “America First” budget proposal (the name borrows from a phrase denounced by the Anti-Defamation League for its links to 1940s Nazi sympathisers), which requests $5.7bn for the EPA in 2018 – a $2.6bn cut, or 31%, on its existing budget. Around one in five EPA employees would lose their jobs.

Continue reading...

Chile signs a historic deal with Kristine McDivitt Tompkins to create a "network of national parks”.

Volcano watchers suffer cuts, bruises and burns as an explosion pelts them with hot rocks and steam.

The UK's favourite yellow submarine is set to leave port for the Antarctic

Chase planes flying behind a jet are providing new insights into aircraft pollution.

Magistrates told that Phillip Cullen was spotted chasing large blues at Daneway Banks in Gloucestershire

A man used a child’s net to illegally capture specimens of Britain’s rarest butterfly, the large blue, magistrates have been told.

Phillip Cullen, 57, was allegedly spotted chasing the large blue at a nature reserve in Gloucestershire and was seen the next day at another location for the butterfly in Somerset.

Continue reading...

The Guardian’s picture editors bring you a selection of photo highlights from around the world, including a cunning flower mimic and a twinkly night

Continue reading...

Germany will use its G20 Presidency to nudge world leaders towards a global price on carbon, say officials.

The famous bird has rebounded across America, but many fear that progress is threatened by lead ammunition that ends up in carrion the eagles eat

His head twisted almost upside down and his body all but paralyzed, the bald eagle sat on its haunches, talons clenching, while two humans neared to put him in a cage. They could not save the bird from lead.

The eagle was the third this year to die from lead poisoning at the Blue Mountain Wildlife center, in north-east Oregon, where Lynn Tompkins has helped rehabilitate sick and injured birds for 30 years. “They eat things that have been shot,” Tompkins said, “whether it’s big game like deer or elk or coyotes or ground squirrels.”

Continue reading...

The New Zealand government has recognised the river as a 'living being' in a world-first decision.