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About 600 Tasmanian devils untouched by facial tumour disease will stay in sanctuaries as insurance against animals in the wild becoming extinct

A controversial proposal to halve the insurance population of disease-free Tasmanian devils has been scrapped.

But the state government said it would continue to support the staged release of some of the animals as part of a vaccine-testing program.

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Australia will likely have to close more coal power stations to meet climate targets Coal power image from www.shutterstock.com

Australia’s energy watchdog, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), has issued a stark warning: more wind and solar power will demand new approaches to avoid interruptions to electricity supply.

In its annual Electricity Statement of Opportunities, released this week, AEMO indicated that the overall outlook for reliability has improved. So far, so good.

However, South Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales are potentially at greater risk of interruptions within ten years if the current trend of shutting down old coal-fired power stations accelerates, as we can expect from Australia’s efforts to meet national and international climate targets.

AEMO projections of supply 2016 AEMO Electricity Statement of Opportunities

The threat of power blackouts is reliable headline fodder as seen in yesterday’s Australian Financial Review. But the solution to this very real challenge is not to cling to ageing fossil fuel power stations.

Rather, as AEMO Chief Operating Officer Mike Cleary put it:

possible solutions could include an increased interconnection across [the electricity market], battery storage, and demand side management services.

While there is much excitement about battery technology, it is the oft-forgotten human dimension that offers the greatest potential. We consumers, the so-called “demand side” of the market, can play a crucial role in reducing the strain on the electricity network, which will in turn make for more reliable power.

The biggest variability that the electricity sector has to contend with is not intermittent solar or wind generation output, but the ups and downs of power demand.

People power

Helping business and household consumers manage their demand for power (or “demand management”) is a win-win scenario – lower costs for electricity and a stronger electricity system. Demand management and energy efficiency are key elements in lifting Australia’s energy productivity. Lifting energy productivity means we do not need to slow down the transition to a low-carbon economy.

Research from the University of Technology Sydney’s Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) that supported GetUp!’s Homegrown Power Plan highlights that we can not only retire coal power to achieve our climate targets, but also shift entirely to 100% renewable electricity generation by 2030.

However, to do this affordably we need to get smarter about saving energy and supporting the grid. GetUp!’s plan factored in a target to double Australia’s energy productivity by 2030, as advocated by the Australian Alliance to Save Energy and ClimateWorks.

Despite the potential, neither AEMO nor any other institution is tasked with assessing demand management opportunities that will strengthen the network and promote renewables. Work is needed to understand this demand-side opportunity, just as AEMO’s latest report provided for electricity supply.

It may also be time to revisit AEMO’s 2013 modelling on 100% renewables that did not factor in major energy productivity gains.

Switching up

The importance of demand management has been recognised since the dawn of the National Electricity Market in 1992. But this potential has never been properly tapped.

Happily, there are signs that this is finally changing. For example, the Australian Energy Regulator has announced a process to design a Demand Management Incentive Scheme. This will provide an incentive for electricity networks to help consumers reduce demand and cut energy costs.

The more progressive energy systems worldwide have already incorporated energy productivity into their energy policies and strategies. Germany is implementing its National Action Plan for Energy Efficiency as one of the twin pillars of its Energiewende (energy transition). And a 23% reduction in buildings' energy consumption by 2030 is one of the three key targets to achieve New York’s “Reforming the Energy Vision”.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has also recommended energy efficiency improvements as its first measure to achieve peak energy emissions by 2020, in tandem with a US$130 billion increase in renewables investment. This “bridge” scenario was the IEA’s contribution to the 2015 Paris climate summit.

Policy measures recommended under the IEA Bridge Scenario OECD/IEA 2015 World Energy Outlook Special Report 2015: Energy and Climate Change, IEA Publishing Global energy-related GHG emissions reduction by policy measure in the Bridge Scenario relative to the INDC Scenario OECD/IEA 2015 World Energy Outlook Special Report 2015: Energy and Climate Change, IEA Publishing. Time for Australia to get serious

It is now time for Australia to embrace the link between demand management, energy productivity and renewable energy. We need these to work together so that we can achieve our carbon reduction goals while protecting electricity security and economic growth.

We have taken a good first step, releasing a comprehensive National Energy Productivity Plan at the end of 2015. It is not quite as ambitious as proposed by the Homegrown Power Plan (it only seeks a 40% improvement between 2015 and 2030) but it is a step in the right direction.

What are missing, as RMIT energy researcher Alan Pears points out, are the resources to make it happen: no additional funding has been allocated to deliver the 34 recommended measures.

We can unlock Australia’s energy productivity potential. And we can have a clean, affordable and reliable electricity system. But this will not happen by accident.

Let’s encourage our utilities to engage energy consumers in providing the solutions. In other words, power to the people.

The Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney undertakes paid sustainability research for a wide range of government, NGO and corporate clients, including energy businesses.

The Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney undertakes paid sustainability research for a wide range of government, NGO and corporate clients, including energy businesses.

The world’s population of elephants is nearing a critical point. Karl Mathiesen explains why there has never been a more dangerous time to be an elephant

The largest of all land beasts, elephants are thundering, trumpeting six-tonne monuments to the wonder of evolution. From the tip of that distinctive trunk with its 100,000 dextrous muscles; to their outsize ears that flap the heat away; to the complex matriarchal societies and the mourning of their dead; to the points of their ivory tusks, designed to defend, but ultimately the cause of their ruin.

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Four-tuskers, hoe-tuskers, shovel-tuskers are all wiped out - now only a fragment of this keystone species remains

If, just 800 generations ago, we took a summer holiday to Crete, Cyprus or Malta, we would have found familiar-looking islands, filled with the flowers and birds we can enjoy today. But bursting through the scrub would’ve been one surprise: a pygmy elephant, one metre high, one of many different elephant species that once roamed every continent apart from Australia and Antarctica.

The 20,000-year-old pygmy elephants of the Mediterranean islands may appear as fantastical as the woolly mammoths which still ambled across one Alaskan island just 5,600 years ago. But these animals’ lives, and deaths, take on a new pertinence today. They lived a blink of an eye ago in evolutionary time and shared the planet with modern humans. And the fate of these lost elephants, warns Prof Adrian Lister, paleobiologist at the Natural History Museum, is analogous to the troubled future facing their close relatives, the African and Asian elephants threatened with obliteration today.

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In the last three years, significant amounts of illegal ivory have been picked up in the Singapore – conservationists worry that new smuggling routes are opening up

Large-scale seizures of ivory in Singapore over the last three years make the south-east Asian city-state one of the world’s premier ivory smuggling hubs for organised crime, say conservation watchdogs.

Data from seizures, collected by the UN’s wildlife trade monitor Traffic and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and shared with the Guardian, reveals how the gangsters operate. Shipping containers carrying thousands of tusks are labelled as carrying anything from tea to waste paper or avocados. They leave Africa from a few ports well-known for high levels of corruption.

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Knepp Castle Estate, West Sussex Emerging sallow scrub has provided these alluring butterflies with new territory, and the estate has become a breeding hotspot

Throngs of butterflies were on the wing. Small tortoiseshells basked on the sun-baked path, a red admiral was puddling in a muddy tyre track and peacocks were growing intoxicated on tree sap.

Meadow browns flitted low across the pasture, mingling with gatekeepers, ringlets and marbled whites among the thistles and knapweed. In the hedgerow a white admiral took nectar from the last of the bramble blossom, while a scalloped-winged comma fed on the first ripe blackberry.

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The first of five EV fast-charging stations has been opened in Queensland by power retailer Locality Planning Energy, using Tritium Veefil fast-chargers.

Energy prices are soaring again in South Australia, but the clean energy industry is blaming the market operator for poor choices and bad planning, and allowing a few generators to virtually set their own price for frequency services.

First Solar's Jack Curtis says "aggressive" investor appetite for Australian big solar could see it deliver up to 4GW of remaining RET.

Perth start-up to begin trials of blockchain technology that, if successful, could kick off peer-to-peer solar trading in Australia.

It's become clear that the energy future can and must include electric vehicles. A new report illustrates how they can help slash emissions.

Climate Flu is inconvenient to governments, corporates and the investor community for two key reasons. But while the symptoms are likely to get worse, there is a cure.

To celebrate the EV festival happening in Newcastle, our growing gang will jump on our Zero electric motorbikes and set out to push the boundaries of ev use yet again

Roberts' unrelenting harassment of climate scientists and academics working on climate change points to the kind of activities Roberts’ might get up to as a Senator.

Thousands are calling for a ban on grouse shooting, arguing the sport increases the threat faced by an endangered species of raptors.

Western Australian museum runs naming competition for new kind of sea-slug discovered by scientists in the Indian Ocean

The Western Australian museum is running a public competition to name a new species of “flamboyant sea-slug”, part of an order named nudibranch.

The blue and orange creature is up to 8cm long and looks like a cross between a slug and a Pokémon.

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Queensland government study shows current funding is far less than what is needed to meet environmental targets and avoid reef being placed on Unesco watch list

Attempting to fix the water qualityfor the Great Barrier Reef will cost $8.2bn in the next decade but even then some of the targets will be impossible to meet, according to a landmark report commissioned by the Queensland government.

The targets are part of the federal government’s Reef 2050 Plan, the implementation of which is required by Unesco in order for the reef to avoid being included on the world heritage in danger list. Currently, state and federal governments are spending less than a tenth of what the report finds is required.

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Scientists say they have found a Greenland shark that is about 400 years old - making it the longest-living vertebrate known.

Agency application on ecological sustainability - call for public comments open from 15 August 2016 until 14 September 2016

Agency application on ecological sustainability - call for public comments open from 15 August 2016 until 14 September 2016