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Hope Cove, Devon I need to go into the attic to check the timbers – an awkward job, but a chance to get out of the wind

An experienced thatcher told me early on in my apprenticeship: “You’ll learn to hate the wind more than anything.” And after five years of working on Devon roofs I’m inclined to agree with him: rain is our more obvious enemy, but rain doesn’t blow the wheat out of your hand or bowl you sideways off your ladder.

On really windy days like this one, you can’t go on the roof. In spite of the warm spring sunshine, a howling south-westerly is whipping up white horses on the Atlantic and training the coastal trees into even more diagonal contortions.

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Application for assessment under the EPBC Act - call for public comments open 23 March 2017 to 28 April 2017

In the first of a three-part series, we explain what rooftop solar is really worth when all of its benefits are taken into account.

The 2018 Zayed Future Energy Prize is now open for entries to the 10th anniversary edition.

The first PV plant in the country to use a solar tracking system.

We're excited to report that the 3rd solar power bulk-buy block has now opened.

Once peak oil is finally reached – whenever that is – demand will begin to drop thereafter, perhaps precipitously.

Knowing why some sperm succeed and others fail could help treat male infertility, researchers say.

Sun King Zhengrong Shi returns to solar market with ultra-light and ultra-thin solar panels hailed as biggest change in solar market in decades. The new panels can be integrated into roofs and facades and he says are better option than Tesla's "heavy and rigid" solar tiles.

Australia's solar pioneers gather to mark 25 years in industry. "We set out to change the world and it is now unassailably and permanently changed."

ABC political editor continues ill-informed campaign against wind and solar, now claiming that 20% is the limit for wind energy.

Victoria's quick deadlines for its 100MW energy storage tender could rule out two technologies: pumped hydro and solar thermal.

How a sperm manages to reach the fallopian tubes is clear at last, scientists say.

Carnegie kicks off Lendlease JV with 10MW solar plant in Northam, and with plans to add storage and "replicate it all over Australia."

AAP/Lukas Coch

Who would have thought that, scarcely five weeks after Treasurer Scott Morrison, paraded a chunk of coal in parliament, planning for Australia’s energy needs would be dominated by renewables, batteries and hydro?

For months now, the Coalition has been talking down renewables, blaming them for power failures, blackouts, and an unreliable energy network.

South Australia was bearing the brunt of this campaign. The state that couldn’t keep its lights on had Coalition politicians and mainstream journalists vexatiously attributing the blame to its high density of renewables.

But this sustained campaign, which would eventually hail “clean coal” as Australia’s salvation, all came unstuck when tech entrepreneur Elon Musk came out with a brilliant stunt: to install a massive battery storage system in South Australia “in 100 days, or it’s free”.

The genius of the stunt was not to win an instant contract to follow up on such a commitment, but to put an end to decades of dithering over energy policy that major political parties are so famous for in Australia and around the world, and which have intensified the climate crisis to dangerous levels.

Musk’s stunt was not without self-interest. It also aimed to position Tesla as a can-do company for future contracts. But where it was lethal was in completely neutering the campaign against renewables.

Anti-renewable politicians around the country, regardless of whether they are captive to the fossil-fuel lobby, could no longer argue for a dubious “clean-coal” powered station that would take between five and seven years to build when Tesla could fix a state’s energy crisis in 100 days – and not emit one gram of carbon at the end of the process.

Both the South Australian and Victorian governments have responded to Musk’s proposal by bidding for 100 megawatts of battery storage in their states. In South Australia’s case, a state-owned 250MW backup gas-fired fast-start aeroderivative power plant is also to be commissioned.

The state-owned gas power plant is, however, only a support to plans for a renewable-fed grid to be the main source of emergency dispatchable power. It is a plant that anticipates the way extreme weather can impact on energy infrastructure in much the same way desalination plants do for water infrastructure.

This is one reason it must be state-owned. But another is that a private operator would insist on full-time generation to maximise investment and profits. Thus, the South Australian gas plant is actually a critique of the privatisation of energy provision in Australia, which is the single greatest cause of why electricity prices have gone up.

As Giles Parkinson from RenewEconomy points out, within a framework in which privatisation dominates, the current market rules actually disadvantage the merits of non-domestic battery storage for consumers – because private power retailers can exploit arbitrage between low and high prices.

They can load up the batteries when excess wind and solar are cheap and sell it at peak demand for inflated prices. So, storage can actually enhance profits for power suppliers and create a bad deal for consumers.

However, the intrinsic value of storage is that the more you add, the less volatility there will be in a market. This creates a stable price for consumers and less profits for the corporations.

An example Parkinson uses is the Wivenhoe pumped storage facility in Queensland. This is:

… rarely used, because it would dampen the profits of its owners, which also own coal and gas generation.

Nevertheless, as a concept, the battery storage solution proposed by Musk, followed by South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill’s decisive action, really had constricted Malcolm Turnbull’s options. For a start, it makes redundant the longstanding fiction of “baseload power”, which was coined by the fossil-fuel industry to justify coal.

By last week, Turnbull would have already had the results of focus groups telling him that “clean” coal doesn’t wash with voters at all.

So, after reeling for most of last week over the humiliation that the Tesla and Weatherill challenge presented, and after scrambling for a counterpunch, Turnbull came up with Snowy Hydro 2.0. Here Musk’s stunt could only be really met with another stunt, but one in which Turnbull is only trying to salvage a very bad hand that he has played against battery-friendly renewables.

It is true that pumped hydro is currently cheaper than battery storage, but cannot be implemented nearly as quickly, and is not infinitely scalable as battery farms are.

Also, whereas the cost of battery storage continues to fall, the cost of the engineering needed for pumped hydro is not. And there are limited locations suitable for its operation.

But more important than all these considerations is that it while Snowy 2.0 will stabilise the national grid no matter whether clean or dirty energy is powering its pumps, it will only assist decarbonisation if the pumps are powered by wind and solar, which has all been glossed over in its PR sell.

With current energy market rules, there is still some incentive for dirty generators to feed the Snowy pumps. This helps energy security but does nothing for the climate crisis.

Yet, with his PR campaign, Turnbull thinks he is on a winner. The Snowy is also an icon of Australian nation-building and fable. And there is probably some political capital to be scored there. But the Snowy is a once-off, and not a part of the future as battery storage is.

But in having to play the part of the Man from Snowy River, Turnbull may have forestalled the inevitable onset of batteries, the price of which was that he was snookered into committing to an alternative substantial renewable-energy-friendly project.

So significant was the original stunt by Musk that set off a train of events cornering Turnbull into offering counter-storage that Giles Parkinson declared:

Turnbull drives stake through heart of fossil fuel industry.

But then, just when you thought coal had been cremated for the last time, it is revived over the weekend with the work of Chris Uhlmann, the ABC’s political editor, who gained notoriety for his anti-renewable stance on South Australia last year.

In his latest piece on the ABC, Uhlmann forewarns that the closure of the Hazlewood power station (5% of the nation’s energy output) will lead to east coast blackouts and crises in the manufacturing sector.

Uhlmann salutes the language of the coal companies in predicting that an energy crisis will result from no new investment in “baseload” power, even though this is precisely what renewables plus storage actually amounts to. He then quotes a Hazelwood unit controller as his source to raise the bogie of intermitancy once again:

Intermittent renewable energy could not be relied on during days of peak demand.

But the most misleading part of his piece was to point to the Australian Energy Market Operator’s prediction that shortfalls in supply next summer can be attributed to the closure of coal power stations, rather than the fact that climate-change-induced hotter temperatures are driving up demand during this period – as they did in the summer just gone, when Hazelwood was operating.

Perhaps Uhlmann’s piece would not look like such an advertorial for the coal industry had it not appeared on the same day as Resources Minister Matt Canavan’s speculation that a new coal-fired plant could be built in Queensland that will be subsidised by the A$5 billion Northern Australia Infrastructure fund.

On the ABC’s Insiders, Canavan lamented that Queensland did not have a:

… baseload power station north of Rockhampton … We’ve got a lot of coal up here, the new clean-coal technologies are at an affordable price, reliable power and lower emission.

It seems that while South Australia is leading the progress on a renewables Kodak moment, Queensland, with plans to build a coal-fired power stations and the Queensland Labor government going to great lengths to support the gigantic Adani coal mine, at least two states are moving in completely opposite directions.

Pumped hydro, big battery, solar thermal and solar PV and storage projects are already planned for South Australia’s power network

When it comes to South Australia’s radical plans for energy storage to support its power network, all roads lead to Port Augusta – or all transmission lines, that is.

Proponents of projects that include energy storage have converged on this small outback city perched on the top of the Spencer Gulf – but why here and why now?

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Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 24 March 1917

SURREY
Sheep, some fifty of them, big black-faced ewes, with about the same number of late lambs just dropped, came this morning out of a great pen at the end of the rickyard which had been put up behind the shelter of two still standing stacks of corn. As they filed through the hurdle gap each began bleating, and all were soon in the wide ditch opposite, nosing about in warm corners for any sweet young shoots of early spring. The lambs of a few days old, each “wickering” (as the shepherd said) after its mother, tumbled about grotesquely; it was their first hour on the open land. Some of the older ones began to frisk; the sedate sheep dog watched them narrowly as if with a mute warning against pranks; then, the barred gate of a near meadow swung, and all were among the turnips littered here and there. But not for long. Clouds swept up with a north-east wind: the lambs shivered and cried plaintively; they had to be housed again behind the piled trusses of wheat straw. We are never out of the wood on the farm.

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There's a renewed push in Tasmania to reduce the output of a big hydro scheme for the sake of tourism.

The commonest garden bird in Iceland, and no stranger to the Scottish Highlands, this visitor is taking the bunting equivalent to a holiday in the Med

Some birds are simply more compelling than others. Think bullfinches and barn owls, peregrines and storm petrels, gannets and golden eagles. The snow bunting is certainly high in the charisma stakes. I first saw them in 1973, swirling around a shingle beach in Norfolk, caught in a biting wind like flurries of snow. Since then I’ve watched them on their breeding grounds in Iceland, where they are the commonest of the very few “garden birds” found in that northerly land.

Once, I even saw one singing in the car park at Reykjavik airport. And I’ve often come across them in the Cairngorms, where they feed on the crumbs left by passing skiers. But we don’t often get snow buntings in Somerset. So when I heard that one was spending the winter on my local patch alongside the River Parrett, I headed down there as soon as I could.

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Often ignored, the ancient sites in the hearts of towns and villages have become refuges for a tremendous range of plants

There are thousands of wild plant sanctuaries across Britain, many in the hearts of villages, towns and cities, but they’re often ignored and forgotten. Cemeteries, churchyards and burial grounds have almost become nature reserves.

Some of the most ancient sites have been around for over 1,000 years, and many grounds haven’t been assaulted with chemicals or intensive management – tighter spending has actually helped even more by cutting back on over-management. And so these sites have become refuges for a tremendous range of plants, including some of our most threatened grassland plants and old trees, mosses, lichens and flowers, as well as wildlife.

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