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Rush to dam northern Australia comes at the expense of sustainability
Coping with floods is just one of the issues dams need to deal with. Tatters ❀/Flickr, CC BY-NDAhead of the election, the major parties have released different visions for developing northern Australia. The Coalition has committed to dam projects across Queensland; Labor has pledged to support the tourism industry.
These pledges build on the Coalition’s A$5 billion Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility, a fund to support large projects, starting on July 1.
The Coalition has pledged A$20 million to support 14 new or existing dams across Queensland should the government be returned to power, as part of a A$2.5 billion plan for dams across northern Australia.
Labor, meanwhile, will redirect A$1 billion from the fund towards tourism, including eco-tourism, indigenous tourism ventures and transport infrastructure (airports, trains, and ports).
It is well recognised that the development of northern Australia will depend on harnessing the north’s abundant water resources. However, it’s also well recognised that the ongoing use of water resources to support industry and agriculture hinges on the health and sustainability of those water resources.
Northern Australia is home to diverse ecosystems, which support a range of ecosystem services and cultural values, and these must be adequately considered in the planning stages.
Sustainability comes secondThe white paper for northern Australia focuses almost solely on driving growth and development. Current water resource management policy in Australia, however, emphasises integrated water resource planning and sustainable water use that protects key ecosystem functions.
Our concern is that the commitment to sustainability embedded in the National Water Initiative (NWI), as well as Queensland’s water policies, may become secondary in the rush to “fast track” these water infrastructure projects.
Lessons from the past show that the long-term success of large water infrastructure projects requires due process, including time for consultation, environmental assessments and investigation of alternative solutions.
What is on the table?The Coalition proposes providing funds to investigate the feasibility of a range of projects, including upgrading existing dams and investigating new dams. The majority of these appear to be focused on increasing the reliability of water supplies in regional urban centres. Few target improved agricultural productivity.
These commitments add to the already proposed feasibility study (A$10 million) of the Ord irrigation scheme in the Northern Territory and the construction of the Nullinga Dam in Queensland. And the A$15 million northern Australia water resources assessment being undertaken by CSIRO, which is focused on the Fitzroy river basin in Western Australia, the Darwin river basins in Northern Territory and the Mitchell river basin in Queensland.
Rethinking damsNew water infrastructure in the north should be part of an integrated investment program to limit overall environmental impacts. Focusing on new dams applies 19th-century thinking to a 21st-century problem, and we have three major concerns about the rush to build dams in northern Australia.
First, the process to establish infrastructure priorities for federal investment is unclear. For instance, it’s uncertain how the projects are connected to Queensland’s State Infrastructure Plan.
Investment in new water infrastructure across northern Australia needs to be part of a long-term water resource plan. This requires clearly articulated objectives for the development of northern Australia, along with assessment criteria that relate to economic, social and environmental outcomes, such as those used in the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.
Second, the federal government emphasises on-stream dams. Dams built across the main river in this way have many well-recognised problems, including:
lack of environmental flows (insufficient water at the appropriate frequency and duration to support ecosystems)
flow inversion (higher flows may occur in the dry season than in the wet, when the bulk of rainfall occurs)
barriers to fish movement and loss of connectivity to wetlands
water quality and temperature impacts (unless there is a multi-level off-take).
As a minimum, new dams should be built away from major waterways (such as on small, tributary streams) and designed to minimise environmental impacts. This requires planning in the early stages, as such alternatives are extremely difficult to retrofit to an existing system.
Finally, the federal government proposals make no mention of climate change impacts. Irrigation and intensive manufacturing industries demand highly reliable water supplies.
While high-value use of water should be encouraged, new industries need to be able to adapt for the increased frequency of low flows; as well as increased intensity of flood events. Government investment needs to build resilience as well as high-value use.
Detailed planning, not press releasesIn place of the rather ad hoc approach to improvements in water infrastructure, such as the projects announced by the federal government in advance of the election, we need a more holistic and considered approach.
The A$20 million investment for 14 feasibility studies and business cases in Queensland represents a relatively small amount of money for each project, and runs the risk of having them undertaken in isolation. The feasibility studies should be part of the entirety of the government’s plan for A$2.5 billion in new dams for northern Australia.
Water resource planning is too important and too expensive to cut corners on planning. Investment proposals for Queensland need to be integrated with water resource planning across the state, and across northern Australia, and with appropriate consideration of climate change impacts.
Fast tracking dams without considering ecosystem impacts, future variability in water supplies, and resilience in local communities merely sets the scene for future problems that will likely demand another round of intervention and reform.
The authors do 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.
Wind and solar PV have won the race – it's too late for other clean energy technologies
Across the world, solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind are the dominant clean energy technologies. This dominance is likely to become overwhelming over the next few years, preventing other clean energy technologies (including carbon capture and storage, nuclear and other renewables) from growing much.
As the graph below shows, PV and wind constitute half of new generation capacity installed worldwide, with fossil, nuclear, hydro and all other renewable energy sources making up the other half. In Australia this dominance is even clearer, with PV and wind constituting virtually all new generation capacity.
Moreover, this trend is set to continue. Wind and PV installation rates grew by 19% in 2015 worldwide, while rates for other technologies were static or declined.
PV and wind dominate because they have already achieved commercial scale, are cheap (and set to get cheaper), and are not constrained by fuel availability, environmental considerations, construction materials, water supply, or security issues.
In fact, PV and wind now have such a large head start that no other low-emission generation technology has a reasonable prospect of catching them. Conventional hydro power cannot keep pace because each country will sooner or later run out of rivers to dam, and biomass availability is severely limited.
Heroic growth rates would be required for nuclear, carbon capture and storage, concentrating solar thermal, ocean energy and geothermal to span the 20- to 200-fold difference in annual installation scale to catch wind and PV – which are themselves growing rapidly.
Both wind and PV access massive economies of scale. Their ability to saturate national electricity markets around the world severely constrains other low-emission technologies. Some of the other technologies may become significant in some regions, but these will essentially be niche markets, such as geothermal in Iceland, or hydro power in Tasmania.
Around 80% of the energy sector could be electrified in the next two decades, including electrification of land transport (vehicles and public transport) and electric heat pumps for heat production. This will further increase opportunities for PV and wind, and allows for the elimination of two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions (based upon sectoral breakdown of national emissions data).
Storage and integrationWhat about the oft-cited problems with the variable nature of photovoltaics and wind energy? Fortunately, there is range of solutions that can help them achieve high levels of grid penetration.
While individual PV and wind generators can have very variable outputs, the combined output of thousands of generators is in fact quite predictable when coupled with good weather forecasting and smoothed out over a wide area.
What’s more, PV and wind often produce power under different weather conditions – storms favour wind, whereas calm conditions are often sunny. Rapid improvements in high-voltage DC transmission allows large amounts of power to be transmitted cheaply and efficiently over thousands of kilometres, meaning that the impact of local weather is less important.
Another option is “load management”, in which power demands for things like domestic and commercial water heating, and household and electric car battery charging, are moved from night time to day to coincide with availability of sun and wind. Existing hydro and gas or biogas generators, operated for just a small fraction of the year, can also help.
Finally, mass power storage is already available in the form of pumped hydro energy storage (PHES), in which surplus energy is used to pump water uphill to a storage reservoir, which is then released through a turbine to recover around 80% of the stored energy later on. This technology constitutes 99% of electricity storage worldwide and is overwhelmingly dominant in terms of new storage capacity installed each year (3.4 Gigawatts in 2015).
Australia already has several PHES facilities, such as Wivenhoe near Brisbane and Tumut 3 in the Snowy Mountains. All of these are at least 30 years old, but more can be built to accommodate the storage needs of new wind and PV capacity. Modelling underway at the Australian National University shows that reservoirs containing enough water for only 3-8 hours of grid operation is sufficient to stabilise a grid with about 90% PV and wind – mostly to shift daytime solar power for use at night.
This would require only a few hundred hectares of reservoirs for the Australian grid, and could be accomplished by building a series of “off-river” pumped hydro storages. Unlike conventional “on-river” hydro power, off-river PHES requires pairs of hectare-scale reservoirs, rather like oversized farm dams, located in steep, hilly, farm country, separated by an altitude difference of 200-1000 metres, and joined by a pipe containing a pump and turbine.
One example is the proposed Kidston project in an old gold mine in north Queensland. In these systems water goes around a closed loop, they consume very little water (evaporation minus rainfall), and have a much smaller environmental impact than river-based systems.
How renewables can dominate Australian energyIn Australia, if wind and PV continue at the installation rate required to reach the 2020 renewable energy target (about 1 GW per year each), we would hit 50% renewable electricity by 2030. This rises to 80% if the installation rates double to 2 GW per year each under a more ambitious renewable energy target – the barriers to which are probably more political than technological.
PV and wind will be overwhelmingly dominant in the renewable energy transition because there isn’t time for another low-emission technology to catch them before they saturate the market.
Wind, PV, PHES, HVDC and heat pumps are proven renewable energy solutions in large-scale deployment (100-1,000 GW installed worldwide for each). These technologies can drive rapid and deep cuts to the energy sector’s greenhouse emissions without any heroic assumptions.
Apart from a modest contribution from existing hydroelectricity, other low-emission technologies are unlikely to make significant contributions in the foreseeable future.
Andrew Blakers is a professor engineering at the Australian National University. He works in the area of photovoltaics, supported by grants from ARENA, the ARC, private companies and other bodies.
UK food prices set to rise after Brexit vote
Plunging pound and Britain’s reliance on imports will mean higher prices, says farmers’ leader
Food prices are likely to go up as a short-term consequence of Britain’s voting to leave the EU, owing to the UK’s dependence on imports, according to the president of the National Farmers Union.
Meurig Raymond said the EU referendum result had been a “political car crash” and that UK farmers who receive up to £3bn in subsidies from the EU each year were headed into “uncharted waters”.
How the dormouse is returning to England’s hedgerows after 100 years
Moves to save the tiny woodland mammal from extinction could herald the reintroduction of larger lost species such as the wolf and sea eagle
More than 100 years after they were last recorded by Victorian naturalists in Yorkshire’s Wensleydale valley, rare dormice have returned to a secret woodland location there.
Last Thursday, 20 breeding pairs of rare hazel dormice (Muscardinus avellanarius) were reintroduced in the Yorkshire Dales national park as part of a national scheme to reverse the decline of one of Britain’s most threatened mammals.
Continue reading...The eco guide to having a drink
Is having a pint ethically unconscientious? What’s the carbon footprint of getting drunk? Time to uncork the issues
At the risk of channelling Al Murray’s Pub Landlord, the great British boozer is brilliantly ethical in some respects. In fact, the New Economics Foundation says your local is one of the top places in which to spend money on the high street if you want it to stay local. And now, in an effort to make watering holes ethical powerhouses, the Greener Retailing Publicans Guide has just launched. The report, which also identifies ways in which pubs, restaurants and bars can become more profitable, goes strong on tackling food waste, which costs UK pubs £357m a year. It reckons they easily waste at least £1,000 each year in spilled pints, too.
This matters not just because it’s waste, but because a lot of water and energy is required to convert one gallon of water into one gallon of beer, whisky or wine. Brands are looking to do something to address these environmental pressures. Heineken recently opened the world’s first “major zero-carbon brewery” in Austria, and everyone from whisky makers to cideries is trying to curtail their demand for clean water.
Continue reading...Great Barrier Reef: scientists ask Malcolm Turnbull to curb fossil fuel use
International Society for Reef Studies presidents say prime minister should prioritise reef after ‘devastating’ damage
As the largest international gathering of coral reef experts comes to a close, scientists have written to the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, calling for action to save the world’s reefs.
The letter was sent to Turnbull on Saturday imploring his government to do more to conserve the nation’s reefs and curb fossil fuel consumption.
Continue reading...Hardwood from illegal logging makes its way into UK stores
British shoppers could be unknowingly buying wooden furniture, flooring and even food items that are byproducts of destructive illegal logging in the Amazon, environmental campaigners are warning.
Friends of the Earth is calling on ministers to make companies reveal the source of their products in order to stop the black market trade. Last week human rights watchdog Global Witness revealed that 185 environmental activists were killed in 2015, many of whom had been trying to stop illegal logging in the Amazon. An estimated 80% of Brazilian hardwood is illegally logged.
Continue reading...Hebden Bridge flood victims finally get their Christmas dinner
People in West Yorkshire enjoyed their Christmas dinner yesterday, six months after floods inundated homes along the Calder valley.
After unprecedented rainfall last December the river Calder burst its banks, flooding the market town of Hebden Bridge and the village of Mytholmroyd, forcing residents to abandon their Christmas festivities.
Continue reading...Where do you belong?
EU out vote puts UK commitment to Paris climate agreement in doubt
Leave victory risks delaying EU ratification of the Paris deal, leaving the door open for Obama’s successor to unpick the pact
The UK government won high praise six months ago for taking a leading role in the successful Paris climate change agreement, the first legally binding commitment on curbing carbon emissions by all 195 United Nations countries.
With the vote to leave the EU, the UK’s future participation in that landmark accord is now in doubt.
Continue reading...How can we make Brexit work for the environment? | Craig Bennett
Leaving the EU puts about 70% of UK environmental safeguards at risk. But Brexit is not a mandate to make us the dirty man of Europe again – we have to make it work for the environment, from the grassroots up
And so, Brexit has happened. I, like many people reading this, feel desperately sad today.
Friends of the Earth campaigned vigorously to remain in the EU. Membership of Europe has been good for our ‘green and pleasant land’, and the plain truth is that pollution doesn’t recognise national boundaries. It seems obvious to me that the best way of solving anything other than very local environmental problems is for countries to cooperate and develop solutions under a common framework.
Continue reading...Four billy goats with a tale to tell
Coignafearn, Highlands There is something about wild goats that appeals to me – perhaps their look of superiority?
Standing on the side of the burn, I watched the water flow past my feet, gurgling and murmuring as it continued on its way to the river Findhorn below. After the cold spring, the spring and early summer plants were all flowering together. The yellow carpets of bird’s foot-trefoil, or “eggs and bacon” as I prefer to call it, dominated the scene. On the drier areas were small groups of mountain pansies whose flowers varied from red to intense violet.
The butterworts in the splash zone of the burn were such an outstanding purple that their tiny flowers looked much larger than they actually were. Lady’s smock plants – also known as cuckooflowers, because they bloom when the first cuckoo begins calling – stood out above the others. Their slender stems topped with tiny pale lilac flower heads looked as if they were just waiting for an orange tip butterfly to lay its tiny orange eggs on them.
Continue reading...Flying for your life: Birds without borders
Anti-fracking activist refuses to pay £55,000 legal bill in Cuadrilla dispute
Tina Louise Rothery was part of a group that occupied field near Blackpool being considered for shale gas exploration
An anti-fracking campaigner has appeared in court faced with a legal bill of more than £55,000 and a potential custodial sentence after being sued for trespass.
Tina Louise Rotheryrefused to answer questions about her financial affairs at Blackpool district registry and said she would not pay the bill. She said afterwards she had been told she could face up to two weeks in prison.
Continue reading...Germany bans fracking after years of dispute
Coalition government revived proposals after companies said they would push ahead with projects
German politicians have approved a law that bans fracking, ending years of dispute over the controversial technology to release oil and gas locked deep underground.
The law does not outlaw conventional drilling for oil and gas, leaving it to state governments to decide on individual cases.
Continue reading...The week in wildlife – in pictures
Feasting jackals, Yellowstone’s grizzly bears and delicate pick roseate spoonbills are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world
Continue reading...EU referendum: UK science wakes up to new future
UK's out vote is a 'red alert' for the environment
From the ‘red-tape’ slashing desires of the Brexiters to the judgment of green professionals, all indications are for weaker environmental protections
Despite being an issue that knows no borders, affects all and is of vital interest to future generations, the environment was low on the agenda ahead of the UK’s historic vote to leave the European Union.
The short answer to what happens next with pollution, wildlife, farming, green energy, climate change and more is we don’t know – we are in uncharted territory. But all the indications – from the “red-tape” slashing desires of the Brexiters to the judgment of environmental professionals – are that the protections for our environment will get weaker.
Continue reading...Pianist Ludovico Einaudi’s haunting iceberg performance to draw attention to Arctic plight – video
The Italian pianist Ludovico Einaudi, renowned for his career composing scores for television and movies, gives a haunting performance among the icebergs of the Arctic in conjunction with Greenpeace in an attempt to draw attention to the plight of the region. The concert was planned to tie in with a meeting of the Ospar Commission, which will decide on a proposal to safeguard 10% of the Arctic Ocean this week
Continue reading...17th Conference of the Parties to CITES - invitation to comment
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