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Former head of Hazelwood coal generator proposes 300MW PV plant, possibly storage, as part of major renewables push.

Wind farms are pushing down the price of electricity in the electricity market. Chris J Stewart, Starfish Wind Farm, Cape Jervis, South Australia., CC BY-SA

While Australia’s energy market operator continues its investigation into South Australia’s recent state-wide blackout, there are important questions being asked.

For instance, was extreme weather the only cause? Has South Australia replaced fossil fuels with renewables too quickly?

And is the Australia’s Renewable Energy Target (RET) too ambitious all together?

It is impossible to find answers without understanding how the energy market works, and how replacing one source of energy with another actually happens.

How does the market work?

Most Australians (barring the Northern Territory and Western Australia) get their electricity through the National Electricity Market.

Suppose all the energy users, at a particular day and time, switch on lights, computers, industrial machinery, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, traffic control equipment and more. Added together, they determine how much energy is needed or demanded at that very point in time.

On the other side of the poles and wires, different independent electricity generators – thermal, hydro, wind, solar – are offering energy to the market, each at a price enabling them to recover costs and make a reasonable profit. This is called bidding.

Contemporary electronic technology allows for the wholesale market to take electricity and bids every five minutes, and allocate amounts accepted from the successful bidders. And who are those successful bidders?

All current bids are ranked by unit price. Allocation starts from the lowest-price bidder, then the second lowest one, and continues on until the current demand is met. The last accepted bidder’s price becomes the spot market price, and allows other successful bidders to make more or less profit.

How do renewables affect the market?

The main incentive policy for wind farms in Australia is the Renewable Energy Target (RET), which legislates that 33 gigawatt hours of electricity must come from renewable sources by 2020. As part of the RET, large-scale renewable energy generators (solar and wind farms) receive credits (certificates) for electricity they generate, which are then purchased by retailers to meet the target.

This market is separate to the National Electricity Market (NEM) and acts as a second income source for renewable energy generators.

With this in mind, we have modelled what happens when wind energy is phased into the market based on five minute electricity market data for several years.

The running (marginal) cost of wind generators is zero (because wind is free), unlike traditional thermal technology (which has to pay for coal and gas). Subsequently, wind generators recover their fixed costs and obtain profit in the difference between marginal cost and market price based on “more expensive” bids.

In the long run, wind generation decreases the market price through the bidding process. So with an increase in the energy volume generated by wind, the traditional sources are pushed out from the market. The chart below illustrates this process for South Australia.

As more wind enters the market, other players are pushed out. Gennadi Kazakevitch

Because their fixed costs can be recovered through the RET, wind generators can bid at near zero prices and completely eliminate traditional competitors. Therefore, wind generation can only naturally exist in the market if there are other, more expensive forms of generation to set the price. Otherwise wind farms could not recover their costs without the RET.

This means that there is an optimal proportion of wind energy in the market, where more expensive thermal generators set the market price.

If there is an optimum amount of wind energy in the market, this has important consequences for the RET. The target artificially increases the proportion of wind energy that can be sustained in the grid. While this may be the goal of the RET, without the incentive, wind capacity would eventually fall back to the market optimum.

In practice, this would occur as wind farms reach their natural life of about 20 years and aren’t replaced. So the RET won’t maintain or increase wind energy in the market in the long term, unless the incentives continue indefinitely.

The current RET is legislated to 2030, with a target set for 2020. To encourage wind energy in the long term, it would be required, then, to support the RET by an ongoing financial inducement without a closing date.

Without any financial inducement, wind farm developers would not increase capacity beyond the optimal point, and some thermal generation will continue to exist. Thermal generation can be completely excluded only if all the fixed costs of wind energy can be recovered through the RET. This is impractical and beyond the intentions of the policy.

So as it stands, our modelling suggests the RET is not a good way to increase the amount of wind generation in the electricity network. However our conclusions are different for other renewable energy sources such as hydro, which also have near zero marginal costs but have much longer lifetimes.

Therefore, where and if possible, we need to use a mix of technology, rather than overemphasising wind generation technology.

This article was co-authored by Henry McMillan, masters candidate at Monash University focusing on regulatory and energy economics.

Gennadi Kazakevitch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Spiders can control their web’s tension and stiffness to help them identify potential partners as well as prey, study shows

Spiders can control the tension and stiffness of their webs to optimise their sensory powers, helping them locate and identify prey as well as partners, according to researchers at Oxford University.

Much in same way that notes travel along a plucked guitar string, spider silk transmits vibrations in different frequencies, sending information back to the spider.

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The cost of wind and solar power in South Africa has fallen to near half the price of new coal plants, and less than half the price of nuclear.

Conservation SA has installed two ZCell batteries to charge an electric car and to provide energy for emergency lighting and data centre backup for its office.

BIG BEASTS: A giant new species of long-necked dinosaur revealed today, sheds light on the likely origin of Australian sauropods.

According to data released by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) this week, September 2016 was the second-hottest September on record globally. Until then, every month since April 2015 was the hottest for its month on record (the hottest August, the hottest July, and so on).

Back in April 2015, Donald Trump was still considering whether to run for US president while Malcolm Turnbull was still five months away from becoming Australian Prime Minister. Since then we’ve also seen two new versions of the iPhone come out.

So our 16-month streak of record heat is a long one. In fact it’s the longest in NOAA’s 137-year records of global temperatures. Other global temperature series have slightly different records but the general story is the same – the last couple of years have been very hot.

Rising temperatures

Heat records are a clear sign that temperatures are rising. If they weren’t, you wouldn’t expect too many new records after more than a century of measurements. For example, to get a record-hot September now means that it has to be hotter than all the other Septembers that have gone before, all 136 of them.

Statistically we might expect record hot or cold months about only once a decade if temperatures were flat. Records are often clustered, one hot month is usually followed by another one.

Of course we do have a trend in global temperatures and this makes breaking heat records much more likely. Without the effect of climate change it’s very unlikely we’d be experiencing so many records.

In contrast, we haven’t experienced a cold record in a very long time. The last record-cold year globally was in 1911, but there have been 20 record-hot years since then up to 2015.

Several studies have shown that even on more local scales we experience far more hot records than cold records, including in Australia where we’ve experienced 12 times as many hot records as cold ones. The increase in hot records has been attributed to climate change.

The El Niño after the ‘hiatus’

The last couple of years have been strongly influenced by El Niño. The expulsion of heat from the ocean into the lower atmosphere (where most of our temperature measurements are made) means that these periods are about one-tenth of a degree more than average.

In comparison, human-caused climate change has warmed the planet by about one degree Celsius. Combining the warming signal of climate change with the El Niño has led to the record warmth over the past 16 consecutive months.

Global temperature anomalies for 1950-2016 (from a 1901-2005 average) with red bars marking El Niño years and blue bars marking La Niña years. The 2016 estimate is the difference between the years of the last strong El Niño (1997 and 1998) added to the 2015 anomaly. The warmth of the last three years follows the early-2000s Benjamin Henley, data from NOAA

The 2015-16 El Niño came off the back of the so-called warming hiatus. From about 2000-14 the Earth experienced very little warming. This has been linked to decade-length variability in the Pacific Ocean. Since 2014, the warming has restarted and this has meant that record heat across the globe is now more likely.

Australia avoids the heat

If you’re reading this in Australia you might be thinking, where’s all this heat? After a warm summer and a record-hot autumn the winter was pretty wet with cities such as Melbourne feeling cool compared to previous winters. But across Australia, this winter past was the sixth warmest and second wettest on record.

September was warmer than average for most of the globe but not southwestern Australia. NOAA

More recently, September was actually cooler than average (one of the few spots across the globe to not be abnormally warm) as well as the second wettest since 1900. The wetter-than-normal conditions were associated with very warm waters to the west of Australia feeding in more moisture across the continent. The wet weather prevented heat from building up.

Australia only represents a small part of the globe though, and overall the world is still experiencing near-record warmth. Over the next few months we’re less likely to see global heat records fall. Now that the El Niño has well and truly disappeared, replaced by cooler waters in the central Pacific, the record warmth is likely gone. For now.

This won’t prevent 2016 as a whole almost certainly becoming the hottest year on record. This will make it the third consecutive record-breaking hot year globally.

And when the next big El Niño comes, combining with a growing human-induced climate change effect, we can be confident more heat records will fall.

Andrew King receives funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.

Benjamin J. Henley receives funding from an ARC Linkage Project and is associated with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.

Companies have been caught off guard by campaigns to divest from fossil fuels. Kamyar Adl/Flickr, CC BY

Climate change poses a major threat to the future of humanity. Extreme weather, rising seas, ocean acidification and biodiversity collapse will undermine many of the systems on which we depend. We’ve even seen a recent example of this, with South Australia’s storm and blackout illustrating the vulnerability of our society to extreme weather.

Risk has become a central construct for how businesses should respond to climate change. As Hank Paulson, former Secretary of the US Treasury has argued, “climate change is not only a risk to the environment but it is the single biggest risk that exists to the economy today”.

The G20 is currently investigating how companies are exposed to climate risk, and how they disclose that risk to consumers.

However, instead of dealing with the larger problem of rapid and systemic decarbonisation, most businesses construct climate risk solely through the lens of profitability and market opportunity.

As part of a broader study into corporations and the climate crisis, we recently published an article in the journal Organization exploring how corporations have responded to climate risks.

What is risk?

Risk management has become a central feature of corporate language. Risk was translated into management in the 1990s after catastrophes and scandals such as the collapse of Barings Bank and the Brent Spar controversy at Shell.

The core assumption here is that risk is somewhere outside the company: it just has to be found and captured. The perception is that corporations are exposed to a variety of objective risks that can be managed through rational decision-making. This might include cost–benefit analysis based on probabilities and consequences. The aim is to make uncertainty manageable.

How companies construct risk involves a number of processes. In relation to climate change, companies seek to break up a complex concept into smaller parts that can be addressed by specific corporate practices and policies. These include:

• physical risks such as the potential for extreme weather events such as storms, droughts and fires to impact upon business operations (most evident amongst resource, energy and manufacturing companies with vulnerable infrastructure and supply chains)

• regulatory risk, including the potential for governments to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and implement carbon taxes and cap and trade mechanisms

• market risks, such as new disruptive, low-carbon technologies that challenge established business models (such Tesla’s reinvention of electric vehicles and mass production of battery storage)

• reputational risks, such as the threat of negative customer or community perceptions of companies’ environmental impacts (such as growing consumer awareness of environmentally harmful products such as palm oil or fossil-fuel based energy).

To address these risks, companies seek to minimise the threats and maximise the opportunities. These include practices such as scenario planning and retrofitting infrastructure for extreme weather events, engaging politically and lobbying for better regulation, scanning the market for competitive threats, investing in R&D for new “green” products, and actively marketing and branding themselves as “green” businesses.

However, for corporations to prosper from climate change, the risks associated with it have to be meaningful in a business sense. They have to be able to be valued in monetary terms. For instance, putting a price on carbon means emissions can be factored into business strategies, which then stimulate investments in “green” energy and technologies.

As one manager in a financial services organisation confided to us: “The easiest thing to do, is to go carbon trading. There’s a way to make money!”

These risk framings are then institutionalised through corporate roles and practices (such as pricing carbon internally, restructuring activities to identify new products and markets, and actively managing customer and employee perceptions of corporate activities).

As another sustainability manager outlined: “My job is to keep their risk as low as possible … from regulatory right through to perception and reputation.”

But risk is more complex than that

However, these risk constructions often fail to fully account for the physical and political complexities of climate change.

In insurance for example, the reliance on historical climate models often fails to account for new and extreme weather events. As one senior manager explained:

I mean most people didn’t think it hailed in Melbourne until last year (2010). There was another one in Perth, you know it was classic. It was known in the industry as “unmodelled risk”, which means there isn’t a detailed model of the risk that you can use to price it. Perth – hail in Perth was unknown. I mean completely unknown.

Moreover, consumers, employees and communities often surprise companies and wrong-foot corporate risk modelling.

For instance, despite the claims by financial institutions that they are “sustainability” leaders by reducing their carbon emissions and encouraging corporate clients to adopt more climate friendly practices, NGOs and critics have emphasised how these statements conflict with continued investments in fossil-fuel based energy projects.

This has culminated in a global movement of fossil-fuel divestment which undermines the social legitimacy of these investments.

Corporate risk constructions also exclude non-market understandings which underpin personal and social identity. For example, energy companies which promote coal-seam gas as a cleaner energy source have been caught off guard by vehement political battles with agricultural landholders and communities objecting to fracking as a harmful activity. Here, community and environmental concerns collide with corporate risk calculations, which focus on profitability and the opportunity of increasing commodity prices.

By ignoring these factors, and constructing risk in a way that maximises opportunities and profit, corporations emphasise a vision of human mastery over nature. Like latter-day wizardry, corporate risk calculations suggest that markets and capital can, not only control the natural world, but somehow anticipate it.

These risk calculations downplay the need for radical change and emphasise “business as usual”. Ironically, the devastating environmental change that is supposedly being anticipated and managed by corporate risk management is locked in to an ever more terrifying degree.

Christopher Wright has received funding from the Australian Research Council.

Daniel Nyberg has received funding from the Australian Research Council.

It is easy sometimes to wonder whether our governments care about anything except money; yet they refuse to put a monetary value on those aspects of life that lend enchantment (Mary Dejevsky, Quality of life has a price. The frackers should pay it, 17 October). A beautiful view is one of these; so is peace and quiet. So is the ability to keep one’s windows open at night.

These blessings are disappearing at great speed, as the skies fill up, and as lorries, cars and machines are added to our beloved landscapes. We are told that “those affected by fracking” might be compensated, but I do not believe that many people would rather have £10,000 than the peace and quiet, and the grassy view that will vanish, with their clean drinking water, as the frackers appear. It is generally noise that provides the majority of council complaints. For example, between January and September 2014, councils in the UK received 200,220 noise complaints, almost half the total number (Report, 18 March 2014).

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Some of the giants of the dinosaur family may have arisen in South America and crossed over Antarctica to Australia about 100 million years ago, new fossil evidence suggests.

The European Union’s push away from fossil fuels toward renewables, along with falling costs, has seen offshore wind thrive with turbines being installed from the Irish to the Baltic Seas, reports Environment 360

On a sunny October morning, our boat passes the run-down relicts of Liverpool’s maritime past and heads down the river Mersey and into the Irish Sea. As we steam offshore, I see in the distance a cluster of tall structures that soon reveal themselves to be towers of a wind turbine array. Arriving at the windfarm, six miles offshore, the turbines rise as high as 650ft, taller than the tallest church in the world. Each of the turbines’ three shiny metallic rotor blades is nearly 300ft long.

“A single rotation of an eight-megawatt turbine will cover the daily electricity consumption of an average British household,” says Benj Sykes, vice president of Dong Energy Wind Power, the company that is constructing and co-owns this wind project, as the boat rocks in five-foot swells.

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The Ogoni leader and son of renowned Niger delta environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa has died from a stroke in London, aged 47

The president of Nigeria has joined politicians, environmental activists and others to pay tribute to Ken Wiwa, the Ogoni leader and critic of Shell and other western oil companies in the Niger delta, who has died from a stroke in London.

Wiwa, the eldest son of Nigerian author Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed in 1995 after leading a peaceful uprising by the Ogoni people to stop Shell from polluting their oil-rich area of the delta, was a journalist with the Guardian who later became an adviser to three Nigerian presidents.

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Munganga Nzonga Jacques died in a region of Kahuzi Biega national park previously believed to be safe for the gorillas, Mongabay reports

On October 4, a park ranger was killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Kahuzi Biega national park while trying to protect the park’s rare Grauer’s gorillas.

The ranger, Munganga Nzonga Jacques, died at the age of 26. He was killed in the Tshivanga region of the park — an area that was previously believed to be safe for the gorillas, according to a statement by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

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Scores of spectacular and rare undersea species have been found on expeditions to some of the deepest trenches in the Pacific Ocean.

Kumbuka, an endangered lowland gorilla, escaped from his enclosure in London zoo on 13 October. It was later discovered he drank five litres of undiluted blackcurrant squash before being returned to his space. The zoo says Kumbuka was never a threat to visitors

• London Zoo gorilla drank five litres of blackcurrant juice after escaping enclosure
  

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Bacchus Wilson Panyonnoh, a 35-year-old palm oil worker, and Lee Sworh, a community activist, live in the remote forests of south-east Liberia. Both have been affected by the arrival of Golden Veroleum Liberia to build one of the country’s largest palm oil plantations. For Panyonnoh, it offers the chance of a better life but Sworh wants it off the land

• Liberia: the growth of a new palm oil frontier

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Europe's Schiaparelli lander did not behave as expected as it headed down to the surface of Mars on Wednesday, data shows.

Scientists in Italy have discovered how our brains can be tricked into feeling disembodied from our own limbs.

Japanese fleets have killed more than 300 minke whales in the Southern Ocean despite a court ruling and three-decade-old ban

Japan is likely to face international criticism at a whaling summit this week for killing whales in the Southern Ocean in defiance of a court ruling and a three-decade-old ban.

Japanese fleets killed more than 300 minke whales, many of them pregnant, when they resumed so-called scientific whaling in 2015-16 after a hiatus the year before because the international court of justice decided the hunts were not scientific and should cease.

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In a letter seen by the Guardian, European parliament president, Martin Schulz, warns EU chief, Jean Claude-Juncker, that inaction over a stalled review of the EU’s nature directives is jeopardising EU biodiversity targets

An impasse in Brussels over changes to the EU’s pioneering nature laws has pitted the president of the European parliament, Martin Schulz, against the bloc’s chief, Jean Claude-Juncker, in private correspondence seen by the Guardian.

More than a thousand animal and plant species – and 500 types of wild bird – are protected by the EU’s nature laws.

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