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Facility run by E.ON, to be followed by many more, will help UK grid cope with fast-growing amount of renewable energy

One of the first of a new fleet of industrial-scale battery plants will come online in Sheffield this week to help the grid cope with the rapidly-growing amount of renewable power.

E.ON said the facility, which is next to an existing power plant and has the equivalent capacity of half a million phone batteries, marked a milestone in its efforts to develop storage for power from wind farms, nuclear reactors and gas power stations.

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Coal can no longer compete in the free market, so the Trump administration wants to prop it up with taxpayer subsidies

The conservative philosophy of allowing an unregulated free market to operate unfettered often seems to fall by the wayside when the Republican Party’s industry allies are failing to compete in the marketplace. Trump’s Energy Secretary Rick Perry recently provided a stark example of this philosophical flexibility when he proposed to effectively pull the failing coal industry out of the marketplace and instead prop it up with taxpayer-funded subsidies.

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Ever wondered if cows bore a grudge? This may be the book for you

This meditative little book isn’t new: it came out first in 2003, when it was published by a small farming press. But then a beady-eyed editor at Faber noticed Alan Bennett had praised it in his diary (“it alters the way one looks at the world”, he wrote in an entry on 24 August 2006), with the result that it has now been republished. Its author, Rosamund Young, who lives and works at Kite’s Nest, an organic farm on the edge of the Cotswold escarpment, must be thrilled – or maybe not. Having read her book, which is very sensible but also somewhat dreamy and a bit obsessive, she strikes me as the kind of woman who would rather be standing in a muddy field in her wellies than listening to some eager townie praise her for her wisdom.

Young’s parents began farming in 1953, when she was 12 days old and her brother (with whom she and her husband still run Kite’s Nest) was nearly three; she continues their tradition of treating animals as individuals with varied personalities, rather than as identical members of herds. The Secret Life of Cows, then, is essentially a collection of anecdotes about the many beasts she has hand-reared down the years: bovines, mostly, though there are a few stories about sheep and chickens, too. In a way, it’s like a book for children. Every animal has a name – Araminta, Black Hat, Dorothy – not to mention parents, brothers and sisters. Most have adventures, albeit not massively exciting ones; Young refers casually to their “conversations”, as if cows chat just like humans. After a while, though, you get used to all this, and as a consequence the world does indeed tilt. Or bits of it, at least. This book will change forever the way you see a field of ayrshires or friesians.

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Our readers on their most cherished cycling routes, from remote Scottish islands to Japanese mountain ranges

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Dolebury Warren, Somerset In an iron age hill fort once ruled by rabbits, waxcaps speckle the ground with luminous colour

This shapely hill has steep sides, the sheep-walked turf trodden into neat pleats along the contours. On the ridge, upstanding stony ribs encircle a heart of deeper soil – the iron age hill fort, the Dolebury. In medieval times, when rabbits were tender creatures, a protective warren was built up here, completing the modern name for the place. Nowadays the rabbits look after themselves and the place is often deserted, especially on a ditchwater-dull day like this.

We had come to hunt waxcaps, glistening mushrooms in parrot shades of red, orange, yellow and green. In this peaceful soil their mycelium spreads undisturbed beneath thyme and tormentil (Potentilla erecta). We have been here before, quartering their favourite corners, luckless, only to look back and see them hiding behind a tussock, shining as brightly as lights on a Christmas tree.

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Could Tesla come to the rescue of Puerto Rico's hurricane decimated grid with solar and battery storage? Twitter says, "let's talk."

Tonight former Prime Minister Tony Abbott will be in London to give a speech to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, titled “Daring to Doubt”, in which he will reportedly argue that climate policy is “shutting down industries”. (It’s not clear if he’s bought carbon offsets for the 10 tonnes of carbon that a return flight to the UK will release into the atmosphere.)

Whatever talking points and soundbites he presents will inevitably be interpreted as yet another salvo in the Coalition’s ferocious and interminable war over energy and climate policy.

Read more: Two new books show there’s still no goodbye to messy climate politics

The venue is the same one where Abbott’s mentor John Howard U-turned on his earlier climate policy U-turn. In a 2013 speech, Howard disparagingly declared that “one religion is enough”, despite having belatedly pledged in 2006 to introduce an emissions trading scheme, only to lose to Kevin Rudd the following year.

Who are the GWPF anyway?

The Global Warming Policy Foundation was set up in 2009 by Nigel Lawson, who in the 1980s served as Chancellor of the Exchequer (the UK equivalent of treasurer) in Margaret Thatcher’s government, but is arguably more famous these days as Nigella’s dad.

The foundation was founded just days after the first so-called “Climategate” emails were leaked. But after complaints, in 2014 the UK Charity Commission rejected the notion that the organisation provides an educational resource, concluding that:

The [GWPF] website could not be regarded as a comprehensive and structured educational resource sufficient to demonstrate public benefit. In areas of controversy, education requires balance and neutrality with sufficient weight given to competing arguments.

Ahead of the Commission’s report, the Global Warming Policy Forum was born as the organisation’s campaigning arm, free from the regulations that govern charities.

Despite its loud demands for crystal-clear transparency about climate science, and its repeated claims that scientists are swayed by big fat grants, the GWPF is oddly cagey about its own funding. In a 2012 BBC Radio programme, Lawson said he relied on friends who “tend to be richer than the average person and much more intelligent than the average person”. An investigation by the website DeSmog has dug up some more information.

More recently the GWP Forum has been in the news because it appointed a pro-Brexit oil company boss to its board and because in August Lawson appeared on BBC Radio to attack Al Gore, accusing the Nobel prizewinning climate activist of peddling “the same old claptrap” and adding: “People often fail to change and he says he hasn’t changed, he’s like the man who goes around saying ‘the end of the world is nigh’ with a big placard”.

Read more: A brief history of Al Gore’s climate missions to Australia

Lawson wasn’t done. He also claimed that “according to the official figures, during this past 10 years, if anything, mean global temperature, average world temperature, has slightly declined”.

Factcheckers were quick off the mark, and the BBC was chided by, among others, Professor Brian Cox (a year on from bringing his graph to Q&A to try to educate the British-Australian politician Malcolm Roberts).

Days later Lawson admitted that his figures were not from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but from a meteorologist who works for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank founded by Charles Koch.

Abbott the weathervane

Anyway, back to Abbott. Digging around in the archives throws up some amusing surprises about him, as befits a man who has been making headline since 1977. In 1994 an environmental campaign to recreate Tasmania’s Lake Pedder found an unusual ally in the newly minted Member for Warringah, who wrote an article in The Australian that plaintively asked:

If we can renovate old houses and old cars, rejuvenate works of art, recreate forgotten languages and restore degraded bushland, why can’t we rehabilitate the site of a redundant dam?

Abbott seems not to have been particularly exercised by climate policy during the first decade of his parliamentary career. But once the issue hit the top of the political agenda, Abbott was – in his own words to Malcolm Turnbull – “a bit of a weathervane”.

He helped convince Howard to agree to some sort of ETS proposal during the ultimately futile bid to fend off Kevin Rudd in 2007. In July 2009, in a front-page story in The Australian headed “Abbott – we have to vote for ETS”, he was quoted as saying:

The [Rudd] government’s emissions trading scheme is the perfect political response to the public’s fears. It’s a plausible means to limit carbon emissions that doesn’t impose any obvious costs on voters.

However, by September 2009, with Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership on the rocks (remember Godwin Grech?), Abbott made a fateful trip to Beaufort in rural Victoria, and discovered that the room loved him saying “climate change is absolute crap”. The weathervane had made an abrupt about-face.

As Paul Kelly notes in his 2014 opus Triumph and Demise, then-Senator Nick Minchin was crucial in convincing Abbott that there was no serious electoral price to be paid in opposing Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

Turnbull was on the ropes, and Abbott won the leadership ballot by one vote. As David Marr recounts, the party was almost as stunned as the nation. “God Almighty,” one of the Liberals cried in the party room that day. “What have we done?”

The ensuing years need no extended recap, though two points are worth mentioning. The first is the admission by Abbott’s former chief of staff Peta Credlin that the “carbon tax” that was going to be the end of the world… wasn’t a carbon tax.

The second is that former environment minister Greg Hunt recently rebutted the claim that backbenchers prevented further cuts to the Renewable Energy Target under Abbott’s prime ministership.

Backed into a corner

The upshot is that Abbott has, as Philip Coorey recently observed, totally painted himself into a corner on energy and renewables.

Mind you, it may not matter that much to him, given that his apparent aim is not to “do a Rudd” and return to the helm, but simply to drive a wrecking ball through Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership – with climate and energy policy as collateral damage.

Read more: Coal and the Coalition: the policy knot that still won’t untie

As Abbott accepts another pat on the back from a roomful of climate deniers in London, we may wonder how long business interests in Australia will tolerate his wrecking, undermining and sniping. There is bewilderment and dismay at the destabilising effect on policy.

Among the business lobby, BHP has evidently forced the departure of Brendan Pearson as head of the Minerals Council in protest at the council’s similarly backward stance. That much is within their gift. But with regard to the Coalition government, those businesses can do little but despair at the handful of recalcitrant MPs who have nominated climate policy as the ditch in which they will die, in service of the culture war.

The hot air just doesn’t seem to be letting up, any more than our hot summers will in the future.

Australia's CleanTech Index outperformed the ASX in September and in Q1 of the financial year – just as it has over the last three years.

Living in a single-storey unit can lead to much higher air conditioning costs. Author provided

With rising temperatures, surging power prices and an ageing population, there are challenging times ahead in terms of looking after our most vulnerable elderly citizens.

But my research suggests that residential aged care facilities are not well regulated in terms of providing safe indoor temperatures, especially during hot summer months.

Heatwaves have caused more deaths in Australia over the past 200 years than floods or cyclones. People over 75 are more at risk of temperature-related health issues, and some are even more at risk than others. The most vulnerable groups include women, people living alone, people on low incomes, and people with existing health or mobility issues.

Vulnerable subgroups of elderly population. Wendy Miller

By mid-century, more than 2 million Australians will be aged 85 or over, and more than a quarter of these are likely to find themselves living in residential aged care facilities. These communities, often resembling retirement villages, cater to the needs of older people with varying levels of care needs in terms of their health, mobility and independence.

Aged care homes are strongly regulated by national laws governing their terms of occupancy, fees, fire safety procedures, and service costs such as electricity bills. But this regulation does not seem to extend to thermal comfort.

Population distribution of older people. Derived from Australian Demographic Statistics June 2014, ABS Comfortable buildings

My research team has been investigating how buildings at an aged care community in southeast Queensland impact on internal temperatures and occupant electricity bills. Residents in this community are aged 80 or older and most live alone. We measured inside and outside temperatures in 11 apartments and evaluated the electricity bills of all 110 apartments. We also inspected the design and construction of the buildings.

On average, residents used only 80% of the monthly electricity assumed by the Queensland government for low-energy-consumption households. Actual monthly electricity bills (excluding metering and connection charges) ranged between 1% and 6% of the 2015 aged care pension rate.

Read more: How to keep your house cool in a heatwave

Next, we examined the 20 apartments with the highest electricity bills. Eighteen of them were directly exposed to the roof – that is, they were either in a single-storey apartment building or on the upper floor of a two-storey building.

Electricity bills also seemed to be linked to the weather. In some units, winter and summer bills were 60-70% higher than the corresponding bills in autumn and spring. In the most extreme cases, summer electricity bills were four to five times higher than at other times of year. Some units required winter heating, while others did not.

This huge variation in electricity bills suggests that building quality plays a part in determining how much residents have to spend to stay cool in summer. To find out, we next compared the temperatures inside two identical, unoccupied units – one on the ground floor and one directly above – during a run of hot summer weather.

The ground floor unit had a more consistent internal temperature and a lower maximum temperature in every room (bedroom, bathroom and kitchen/living room). What’s more, all rooms in the ground floor unit had a greater proportion of time in the comfort zone of 20℃ and 26℃, and never got hotter than 28℃.

Temperature comparison of lower floor (left) and upper floor (right) apartments. Wendy Miller

This doesn’t mean that air conditioning wouldn’t be required, but it does mean that cooling costs for the ground floor unit would be significantly cheaper than for the unit directly upstairs.

Building quality – the absence of ceiling insulation in this case – is impacting on the internal temperatures of these apartments and on the occupants’ electricity bills. It’s an important issue considering that air conditioning is typically the biggest factor in these communities’ energy costs.

Impact of heat and housing on elderly people and society. What do we need to do about this?

This is not an accusation of wrongdoing by the developers and managers of aged care communities. But our results do highlight a serious issue in our approach to energy, buildings and health, especially the increasing heatwave risk to our growing elderly population.

With that in mind, a few questions need answering:

• Are building regulations really protecting the health and safety of older people?

• Why isn’t building quality considered as part of the healthcare plan of older Australians?

• Why do we rely so much on air conditioners to pump heat out of the building, instead of first doing what we can to limit the heat getting into our buildings in the first place.

• Why do governments try to control electricity prices but virtually ignore energy efficiency?

• Why aren’t buildings included in the current discussion about the electricity network, reliability and security?

• Why do we continue to focus on subsidising pensioners’ electricity bills, instead of tackling the problem at source by improving the buildings they live in?

• Are the buildings constructed now going to be fit for purpose in the changing climate?

• Will poor-quality buildings end up being stranded assets in the future?

We have a disconnect between our building quality, energy system, electricity costs and the well-being of our elderly citizens. This does not make Australians safe and secure – something that anyone in aged care would surely wish to be.

Wendy Miller receives funding from the Australian Research Council to examine housing innovation and sustainability. No funding was received from the management of the aged care community that was the subject of this research. This community, however, does provide our research team with access to their buildings and energy data.

AFR's Chanticleer column writes article about battery storage so absurd and stupid it beggars belief that it was published. Such is the state of the energy debate in Australia. It's not just politicians and vested interests that are letting consumers down, it's the media.

Coalition had sought to dodge CET because renewables were too costly, now it is arguing they are too cheap. But Frydenberg says renewables without storage are a "costly burden."

If a CET is abandoned, it will be NSW that will be thrown under a bus. Victoria and QLD have renewable share policies that incentivise new generation. NSW has no policy and despite being an energy importer is not getting its share of new generation investment.

The Turnbull Government today launched the National Carbon Offset Standard for buildings and precincts

The World Solar Challenge begins this weekend when more than 40 solar cars brave the Australian Outback on a 3000-kilometre journey from Darwin to Adelaide.

CHOICE is certified carbon neutral for its Australian business operations from July 2015.

CHOICE is certified carbon neutral for its Australian business operations from July 2015.

S.A. gets 60 proposals for batteries, bioenergy, pumped hydro, thermal, compressed air and flywheel technologies in response to its tender for next-gen renewables and storage.

A short film shot by  Heath Patterson captures photographer Vaughan Brookfield and Tom Lynch's journey to a New Zealand glacier equipped with hundreds of kilograms of gear and a light projector. Their plan was to project images on to the rapidly receding Tasman Glacier. Brookfield says: 'We want to remind people of the effects humans are having on the environment' 

 

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AAP/David Mariuz

This time last year, Australia was getting over a media storm about renewables, energy policy and climate change. The media storm was caused by a physical storm: a mid-latitude cyclone that hit South Australia on September 29 and set in train a series of events that is still playing itself out.

The events include:

• an extraordinary attack on renewables by federal government ministers;

• a steadfast pushback by the South Australian government to continue its renewables roll-out;

• the offer of tech entrepreneur Elon Musk to build the largest battery storage facility in the world in South Australia and;

• the Finkel Review.

In one sense, the Finkel Review was a response to the government’s concerns about “energy security”. But it also managed to successfully respond to the way energy policy had become a political plaything, as exemplified by the attacks on South Australia.

New research on the media coverage that framed the energy debate that has ensued over the past year reveals some interesting turning points in how Australia’s media report on climate change.

While extreme weather events are the best time to communicate climate change – the additional energy people are adding to the climate is on full display – the South Australian event was used to attack renewables rather than the carbonisation of the atmosphere. Federal MPs hijacked people’s need to understand the reason for the blackout “by simply swapping climate change with renewables”.

However, the research shows that, ironically, MPs who invited us to “look over here” at the recalcitrant renewables – and not at climate-change-fuelled super-storms – managed to make climate change reappear.

The study searched for all Australian newspaper articles that mentioned either a storm or a cyclone in relation to South Australia that had been published in the ten days either side of the event. This returned 591 articles. Most of the relevant articles were published after the storm, with warnings of the cyclone beforehand.

Some of the standout findings include:

• 51% of articles were about the power outage and 38% were about renewables, but 12% of all articles connected these two.

• 20% of articles focused on the event being politicised by politicians.

• 9% of articles raised climate change as a force in the event and the blackouts.

• 10% of articles blamed the blackouts on renewables.

• Of all of the articles linking power outages to renewables 46% were published in News Corp and 14% were published in Fairfax.

• Narratives that typically substituted any possibility of a link to climate change, included the “unstoppable power of nature” (18%), failure of planning (5.25%), and triumph of humanity (5.6%).

Only 9% of articles discussed climate change. Of these, 73% presented climate change positively, 21% were neutral, and 6% negative. But, for the most part, climate change was linked to the conversation around renewables: there was a 74% overlap. 36% of articles discussing climate change linked it to the intensification of extreme weather events.

There was also a strong correlation between the positive and negative discussion of climate change and the ownership of newspapers.

The starkest contrast was between the two largest Australian newspaper groups. Of all the sampled articles that mentioned climate change, News Corp was the only group to has a negative stance on climate change (at 50% of articles), but still with 38% positive. Fairfax was 90% positive and 10% neutral about climate change.

Positive/negative stance of articles covering climate change by percentage.

Given that more than half of all articles discussed power outages, the cyclone in a sense competed with renewables as a news item. Both have a bearing on power supply and distribution. But, ironically, it was renewables that put climate change on the news agenda – not the cyclone.

Of the articles discussing renewables, 67% were positive about renewables with only 33% “negative” and blaming them for the power outages.

In this way, the negative frame that politicians put on renewable energy may have sparked debate that was used to highlight the positives of renewable energy and what’s driving it: reduced emissions.

But perhaps the most interesting finding is the backlash by news media against MPs’ attempts to politicise renewables.

19.63% of all articles in the sample had called out (mainly federal) MPs for politicising the issue and using South Australians’ misfortune as a political opportunity. This in turn was related to the fact that, of all the articles discussing renewables, 67% were positive about renewables with only 33% supporting MPs’ attempts to blame them for the power outages.

In this way, while many MPs had put renewables on the agenda by denigrating them, most journalists were eager to cover the positive side of renewables.

Nevertheless, the way MPs sought to dominate the news agenda over the storm did take away from discussion of climate science and the causes of the cyclone. Less than 4% of articles referred to extreme weather intensifying as a trend.

This is problematic. It means that, with a few exceptions, Australia’s climate scientists are not able to engage with the public in key periods after extreme weather events.

When MPs, with co-ordinated media campaigns, enjoy monopoly holdings in the attention economy of news cycles, science communication and the stories of climate that could be told are often relegated to other media.

With thanks to Tahnee Burgess for research assistance on this article.

Disclosure

David Holmes received funding from Monash University to conduct this research.

It’s been a bit of a free-for-all up till now, but the regulatory regime seems to be developing in a way that should benefit consumers and renewables in the long run.