Blog - Dan Cass and Company

May-June contact details

2013-05-04T13:14:28Z

I am going away on a well-earned holiday from 5 – 26 May 2013 and won’t be checking emails nor checking my mobile phone voicemail.

From 27 May – 5 June I will be working in Europe and contactable by email and mobile. I will list that mobile phone number at Contact.

Chameleon-powered solar PV?

2013-04-08T09:48:46Z

This was reposted by Renew Economy.

Every week there are good news stories about breakthroughs in solar power and other renewables around the world. Australia’s media often ignores these stories, but this week it has picked up on one about Australian research.

University of Melbourne scientist Dr Devi Stuart-Fox is studying why and how Australian bearded dragons change colour.

The CSIRO says that these insights could be used to design pigments for capturing the sun’s energy and turning it into photovoltaic power.

I have written previously about Australia’s stunning record of achievement in solar PV research. The UNSW, ANU and CSIRO have been major drivers of solar technology for nearly four decades.

America’s National Center for Photovoltaics at NREL regularly updates its excellent graph of the progress of solar PV cell efficiencies, grouped according to technology type. Here is the March 2013 chart: Best Research-Cell Efficiencies

If you look at the orange lines in the bottom right corner, these show the exotic, emerging technologies such as organic dyes. This is where cells derived from dragon skin would sit.

It would be quite a story if the next generation of solar power technology is based on the chemicals that chameleons and Australian lizards use to change the colour of their skin.

I am particularly drawn to this story because when I was a boy I wanted to sponsor a lion at the Melbourne Zoo, but it cost thousands of dollars a year, so I chose the most interesting animal that matched my budget – Pogona vitticeps, the inland bearded dragon.

Al Gore's online campaign to fix the media

2013-03-08T09:11:49Z

Al Gore’s latest campaign project is an exciting online community, which compensates for media bias against climate science. Reality Drop is essentially an online game in which the goal is to spread the most climate science information across the media.

The ABC’s Environment Online editor, Sara Phillips has today criticised Gore and Reality Drop;

It reduces the climate change discussion to the lowest level; in effect making it a yes/no shouting match where the loudest voice wins.

Climate change is complicated, subtle, nuanced and multi-faceted. The last thing we need to help us grapple with the realities of climate change is production-line comments. As a planet, we need to engage with the issue, not unleash a blast of automated propaganda.

I agree entirely with the values and intention behind what Phillips is arguing. The problem is that she has applied ideal world values to a real world situation which is far from ideal.

The reality is that the polluters have debased journalism, in Australia and globally. Polluters have funded ‘think tanks’ and used other forms of PR to bully the media. Traditionally this has meant undermining climate science but since about 2010 the polluters have also paid think tanks to undermine renewable energy technology, through the media.

Journalism is no longer a profession that can be relied on to do its job, when it comes to climate science and climate solutions. There are excellent journalists who do excellent climate and environment journalism, here and internationally, but they are the exception that proves the rule.

Take Sara’s own ABC for example. It is Australia’s best media organisation, routinely producing the highest quality journalism. However a study published on Independent Australia shows that the ABC’s daily current affairs panel show, The Drum, has been polluted by the toxic talking points of the polluters.

The study revealed that the selection of ‘think tanks’ on The Drum is dominated by Australia’s leading polluter-funded PR machine, the Institute of Public Affairs.

I agree with the ideal values that Phillips writes about. But the inconvenient truth for the media is that it has failed to deal with climate change, just the same as other aspects of our democracy, such as the national parliaments and the United Nations.

Until journalists take responsibility for the failure of their profession, it is necessary to have checks and balances in place, such as Reality Drop. When the media does its job, then campaigners can make business and politics the target again, not the media.

Political power and the green economy

2012-12-06T09:11:11Z

This was published today on the official Suntech blog, Suntech Connect.

Solar and wind industries share the same end goal of cleaner energy production worldwide — but each deploys vastly different technologies and methods to get there. How did each industry gain its following?

Let’s take a look.

Solar photovoltaic cells can be installed at any scale and made to work anywhere there is sunlight. Indeed, they can be built into the actual device that uses the electricity. On my desk, there is a solar-power calculator, and overhead there are satellites powered by solar panels.

Since solar is an easily distributed technology, it is becoming common across communities and is highly visible. Most people either have a personal experience with solar or know someone who does. When the positive experience of lowering power bills or generating green electricity is shared, public opinion is affected. That’s valuable political capital.

Wind turbines are very different. No wind turbine will ever directly power a wristwatch or generate electricity on Mars. Turbines deploy mechanical energy to drive electric generators. Wind farms require significant amounts of upfront capital, and must be built in particular localities, where there is a rich wind resource. Typically, this meant putting groups of many turbines together in rural or offshore locations.

For wind, the best way to gain political capital is for communities to literally invest in the technology and the outcome. In its purest form, this means community-owned wind cooperatives. This helps broaden and localize ownership of wind generators. The Danes are leaders in this area, with three-quarters of their wind turbine assets held not by corporations, but by farmers, locals and co-operatives.

At Hepburn Wind, Australia’s first community-owned generator, where I am a director, our locals are very engaged in what we do. Each of our two 2.05 MW turbines generate $15,000 (indexed annually) for the Hepburn Wind community fund, which is allocated to diverse, local, voluntary projects, which in turn strengthens our relationship with the community. The benefits of wind truly come full circle.

In sum, the seemingly wildfire spread of solar — driven primarily by accessibility and affordability of its technology — gives it power in the market of popular opinion. The advocacy solution for the sector is to continue to mobilise its vast consumer base into an electoral base: A solar nation loyal to green energy.

The solution for wind is to build its own support base, in wind regions, through local community ownership. Wind ownership does not need to become as widespread as solar’s in order to be politically powerful, because the population that matters is the community in the immediate, local vicinity. What will help with uptake is that the standard windmill design is being continually refined; every time a bigger model is deployed, it proves itself reliable and even more cost effective. People are now talking about 15MW wind turbines – that’s 15,000,000 Watts of capacity in a single structure.

On 18 November this year, the World Bank issued a report about climate change that reminds us how important solar and wind are for our future. Despite the clear facts presented by climate scientists for twenty years and echoed by the World Bank, coal and conventional utilities continue to dominate the energy market. They leverage this economic power for political influence, preventing action on climate change.

If we can build the social capital of solar and wind, in ways that suit these very different technologies, then we have the power to build a cleaner, greener world for all.

Update: Republished on 10 December 2012 by Climate Spectator.

Liberals lost on the 'science' of 'wind turbine sickness'

2012-11-29T12:07:20Z

Today there is an interesting debate about science going on in the Australian Senate, that wedges the Opposition into a rather untenable position.

The background is that a small lobby group in Australia, called the Waubra Foundation, has spread the idea that infrasound from wind turbines causes ‘wind turbine sickness’ (WTS). This issue has been taken up by two independent Senators (Madigan, Vic; Xenophon, SA).

Senator Madigan has proposed a bill to create specific legislative constraints on wind farms, which is being debated today.

The independent Senators have written a report on their anti-wind bill, where they call for the government to fund research into WTS. Senator Simon Birmingham (Liberal, SA) today backed the idea that government should urgently fund the research.

Senator Birmingham gave a balanced speech, given that the whole issue lacks credibility. But he and other rational Liberals need to be very careful where they go from here. WTS lobbyists are extremists and their issue is basically a conspiracy theory, not a scientific case at all.

The Waubra Foundation’s demand for government mandated research is good retail politics, but bad science, bad policy and eventually, bad politics.

Australia has a world-standard medical research capability. If WTS was a real medical issue, then it would be a hot topic of scientific interest (thanks to all the media coverage by Graham Lloyd at the Australian).

If medical scientists wanted to do deep, extensive research on WTS, then they would write funding proposals for funding bodies, where a peer review process would determine the value of that research.

It is bad policy to call for a government to direct medical scientists to investigate a non-issue, diverting their time and taxpayer funding from other, real diseases. It is illiberal and thus in opposition to the principles of the Liberal Party.

It also smacks of the conspiracy thinking of the climate denialist movement. The polluters and climate denialists have debased the public conversation about climate science and now they are starting to do the same to the public conversation about energy technology. They are beating up an agenda of renewables skepticism.

The Liberal Party is letting Senator Madigan drive its agenda on wind energy the same way it let Pauline Hanson’s One Nation drives its agenda on immigration and cultural identity.

I am hopeful that the big technology, infrastructure, energy and investment companies will pull the Liberals into line over this issue. My reasoning is simple. The Liberals could attack climate science with no political loss, because scientists lack political organisation.

The Liberals will not get away with attacking renewable energy, at least not in the long term. Business is rather more politically organised than science and will quietly educate LNP Senators and Members about wind and other technologies.

Climate science and renewable energy: how far will the haters go?

2012-11-27T16:16:07Z

Today Melbourne’s Herald-Sun has another inflammatory piece by business journalist Terry McCrann, in which he denigrates climate science and renewable energy.

McCrann’s article is a response to a recent report from the Australian Climate Commission. Here are McCrann’s opening lines:

WHICH is the bigger disgrace? A government body which just feeds out complete crap to mislead and deceive the public?

Or the government that set it up with that precise intention?

What McCrann is doing here is finding a way to both smear the science of climate change and renewable energy and also reserve some of his hate for the Labor government. If nothing else, he is good at smear.

Professor Jans Hoachim Schellnhuber, director of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), has recently made a chilling warning about the likely impact of such virulent abuse. He thinks that the anti-science hate will end up with the murder of a scientist.

When Schellnhuber was in Australia in 2011, he was confronted at a public lecture at the University of Melbourne by an anti-climate science protestor, brandishing a hangman’s noose.

There is no saying where this deranged protestor got the idea for his gruesome stunt, but only a few years ago, one of McCrann’s colleagues, Miranda Devine, was calling for greens to be lynched. (Her proximate topic was bushfires, but her ultimate grievance is the same as McCranns; greens and climate scientists are evil.)

Schellenhuber is a German, so he is particularly attuned to the power of the ‘hate media’ and the ability of words to become actions. The history of the Holocaust shows that the final culmination of an atmosphere of abstract hate is the moment when it is concretised in the body of an enemy.

In the climate debate over the past twenty years, the antis have moved from criticising the theories of climate science, to criticising the climate scientists themselves. They have moved the target from the abstract ideas, to the actual individuals who hold those ideas. Hating an idea is hateful, but hating a person is dangerous.

It is impossible to predict whether or not Schellenhuber’s grim predictions are correct. Like every civil Australian, I sincerely hope he is wrong.

But it is now a matter of national shame that Australia has such a nasty conversation about climate change and renewable energy. It is not just a side conversation held on right-wind blogs. Even mainstream media outlets see nothing wrong with printing hate speech.

Much of the blame for our situation in this country should be placed on the shoulders of the political leadership. Tony Abbott is presenting himself as the alternative Prime Minister, the highest office in the land. As such, everything he says, not matter how angry or silly, has a powerful resonance. He speak, theoretically, for all of us.

So when Mr Abbott denigrates climate science as “crap”, he is taking some share of responsibility for everything that happens when the debate he started, goes too far.

If Mr Abbott or Mr McCrann want to take responsibility for their deeds, then they need to clarify that climate science is not “crap” and neither are climate scientists.

They need to talk back to the shrillest of their supporters and make it very clear that violent speech should never be turned into violent action.

They should turn down the hysteria in their own speech.

The profession of journalism in Australia also needs to take some responsibility. McCrann’s piece is factually incorrect in many places. If Australia had a reliable system of media self-regulation, then these errors would either not make it into print, or the Herald-Sun would correct them at a later date.

Yet every day there are factually fanciful statements put out by broadcasters such as Alan Jones and journalists such as McCrann. At least Jones is how having factual accuracy training, but what about McCrann?

Since the formal system of self-regulation is clearly not working, the informal culture of journalism has to step up. McCrann’s peers can show responsibility, by speaking back to him, in public and in private.

McCrann is entitled to be wrong, but is he really entitled to denigrate people?

Clearly not.

Prior to Schellenhuber’s incident with the noose protestor in Melbourne, I was asked to write a piece for Green Magazine about anti-green hate speech. Bob Brown wanted this issue covered, in a special edition about political language. (You can download the fully referenced version.)

It is time to move beyond the ranting and have an adult conversation about climate solutions. I’m not speaking here about specific policies or technologies, but for the sake of our dignity as a nation. Australians are among the worst climate polluters in the world and the richest citizens, per capita, in the world.

If we also end up being the angriest antis, urging violent acts against climate scientists, then how will the rest of the world judge us?

Appointed to Sustainable Energy Developments Editorial Advisory Board

2012-11-23T10:28:35Z

I am honoured to have been appointed to the Editorial Advisory Board of an exciting new books series about sustainability and energy, from one of the oldest scientific publishers in the world.

My contribution to the Board will be to advise on the issues that are the focus of my work as Dan Cass & Co and as a Director of Hepburn Wind; renewable energy especially community ownership, the political economy of cleantech with an emphasis on the social licence of different generation technologies.

The first book in the Sustainable Energy Developments series is Global Cooling Strategies for Climate Protection by Hans-Josef Fell. Fell is a German Greens politician and one of the world’s leading renewable energy policy innovators.

The publisher of the series is CRC Press, part of the Taylor & Francis group, which has a wonderful history. Taylor & Francis is famous for being the publisher of Philosophical Magazine, ever since it was founded by Alexander Tilloch, in 1789.

Philosophical Magazine published the original papers of the founders of the electromagnetic sciences, Michael Faraday and James Maxwell in the nineteenth century. Without these foundations, the electrification of the world would never have taken place.

This was a heady period of history, when ‘natural philosophy’ still had its encyclopaedic breadth and individuals could make huge discoveries. If the solar age we are embarking on has half the sense of adventure as that era, then we are blessed to live in very interesting times.

In the twentieth century, Philosophical Magazine published work by the intellectual successors of Faraday and Maxwell, such as the Nobel Prize winning nuclear physicists, Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr. This all adds up to a wonderful tradition for anyone working in renewable energy.

CRC Press itself has a charming founding story. It was founded originally as marketing incentive, by the Friedman brothers of Cleveland, Ohio. Arthur, Leo and Emanuel Friedman manufactured rubber aprons for protecting chemists working in laboratories.

In 1913 they produced a little Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, sized to fit in the pockets of their aprons, and given away to those who ordered a dozen or more. The Friedman family business was called the Chemical Rubber Company, hence the name CRC.

There is a lovely quote about CRC’s Handbook from Linus Pauling, who was the only person to have every won two Nobel Prizes in their own right and in different fields: Peace and Physics

People who have interviewed me have commented on the extensive knowledge that I have about the properties of substances. I attribute this knowledge in part to the fact that i possessed the Rubber Handbook.

Barack Obama and solar hope

2012-11-07T20:54:24Z

This was also published on Renewable Energy World.

Like most people in the world, I am glad that President Barack Obama won the election. I’ve just watched his victory speech, in which he showed again that he is one of the great orators of our time. Obama can talk about hope and make it sound credible, in a way that most leaders from most countries cannot.

There is so much to say in response to Obama and this election. It is only because of the remarkable ‘audacity of hope’ that a poor black man, married to a working-class woman descended from slaves and slave-owners, is the most powerful man in the world.

But I’m going to stick to one key argument. The success of solar power, over the next four years, can change political power in America. That simple fact could change the world and give us the chance to stop the climate catastrophe.

According to Steven Chu, Obama’s Nobel prize-winning Energy Secretary, solar ‘baseload’ thermal and solar PV will be cheaper than conventional electricity across all the US, by 2020.

If Secretary Chu is right, then during the second term of the Obama administration, solar will be the cheaper choice for tens of millions of households, businesses and farmers.

By the time Barack Obama completes his second term as President, solar will have won the energy argument.

Solar will win, where climate science lost, for the simple reason that people experience it and get it. If you have solar panels on your roof and your power bill goes down, you will trust solar. This cuts across class, educational and other social and attitudinal divides. (The flat-earthers who experienced Hurricane Sandy are already attributing it to an act of God, as punishment for homosexuality and other sins.)

The American right and its media mates will have no comeback against the solar revolution. It will break the conservative consensus, which says that climate change is a communist plot and solar energy is state socialism.

For two decades, the religious far-right in America and its attack-dogs in the media, have attacked climate science. Polluters have funded ‘think tanks’, Super PACs and astroturf and almost stole this election from Obama. They spent something like $300-500 million to bring him down.

Fox News and the GOP have made an ugly alliance with religious fundamentalists who believe that climate science is part of the same satanic conspiracy as Darwinism.

Listening to Obama, we are reminded that America has high ideals and a great sense of its ability to make history. It alone has the audacity required to turbo-boost a clean energy revolution.

Over the next four years, solar will win as the cheapest energy source for tens of millions of American homes, businesses and farms. This will be a final victory over that particular constellation of interests and extremist beliefs.

I am not claiming that America will become a 100% rational, enlightened country, of course. Religion and certain romantic beliefs have been an essential part of American history and these streams will surely continue to flow in the future.

The economy is in a bad way. According to figures in Australia, we can expect that this economic adversity and rising conventional power prices are actually good for solar and the solar polity. These figures show that conservative, white-dominated districts have embraced solar, because it saves money. The solar vote could decide who wins the next election.

Australia is ahead of America in this trend, because it is higher up the grid parity curve, thanks to the solar resource and the price of black energy. As solar reaches out across middle America, it will be embraced by conservative, lower-middle class communities that are often very conservative.

The experience can change the American polity. If this is to happen, however, it will require a vast investment from the solar industry, philanthropy and social movements and a new working alliance that brings them all together, along with the Democratic party, unions, churches and rational conservatives (including Republicans).

Once it is clear that solar works and its green supporters were right all along, the mainstream GOP and media will have to follow along and start conceding to science and reality. This election they got away with ridiculing Nate Silver for his electoral predictions and repeating their own irrational talking points, right up to election night. As solar facts breach the conservative bubble, it will allow the light of other facts to shine in.

The significance of a pro-solar polity, is that the only thing which can stop catastrophic climate change is a rapid acceleration of progress in solar (and other forms of renewable energy). A new political economy of renewable energy is in the ascendency already. This is, as American orators might say, our last great hope.

America's better angels

2012-11-05T19:49:05Z

Like most people in the world, I hope that President Barack Obama wins a second term in the White House in the Presidential election tomorrow.

Lets pray that American’s listen to the ‘better angels’ of nature, to borrow Abraham Lincoln’s words in his first Presidential address.

I’ve made a mashup of one of the most terrifying monsters from Dr Who, to express something of what I feel about the choice American’s face.

They can blink in the face of climate reality and vote for the unreason of the GOP, or they can heed the warning given by Hurricane Sandy and vote for Barack Obama.

Infographics

Infographics and other pictures are powerful tools in politics, so here’s two of the best.

The most lauded infographic of the election is an interactive by the New York Times, which takes you through the 512 different electoral college outcomes available to the condenders in the Presidential race
This amazing picture charts the political balance of power in both houses of Congress, over its entire history

What’s at stake for the climate

Firstly, there is the problem that Mitt Romney and the GOP oppose climate science and renewable energy.

Katherine Stewart is a journalist who has written a book on the US Christian fundamentalist conservatives. She says that the climate denialist movement is inherently theological.

Stewart shows that we really have lost the debate with a large minority of Americans. They are inoculated against rationality and see their battle against climate science as a religious one.

Secondly, there is the obscene influence of fossil fuel interests in the US electoral process. This is worse than ever in 2012, partly as a result of the US Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, Appellant v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, which allows vast PR campaigns, without proper transparency.

The GOP’s Karl Rove is apparently going to spend around US$ 300 million on PR during the election.

Millions of intelligent and good Americans, meanwhile, are campaigning hard for Barack Obama. Megan Mayhew Bergman is an author who has contributed a fine piece on the climate and clean energy reasons for giving Obama a second term.

Mashup time

If you creative, join me and make an Obama image with this file of one of one of the best Dr Who monsters, a weeping angel. Here’s my mashup.

Webinar: Australia & the Rooftop Revolution

2012-09-18T22:42:14Z

This Friday I am hosting an exclusive webinar with Danny Kennedy, Founder of Sungevity, America’s fastest-growing solar installer and Giles Parkinson, Editor of RenewEconomy, one of the world’s leading websites on the clean technology revolution.

Danny will preview his new book, Rooftop Revolution: How Solar Power Can Save Our Economy—And Our Planet—From Dirty Energy.

Then Giles and I will talk with Danny about the political challenges of the Rooftop Revolution.

Who are the winners and losers going to be?
What is conventional energy doing to protect its market share?
How can community and solar industry work together to win?

Participants can start the conversation here, by submitting questions and ideas that you want discussed by Danny and Giles.

If you want to participate, email me via the form on the Contact page.

Climate denialism and the Australian "hate media"

2012-10-01T09:31:59Z

Yesterday it was revealed that Alan Jones, one of Australia’s most powerful shock jocks, had again abused our female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard.

The central theme of Jones' anger is that Julia Gillard accepts climate science, which Jones does not.

Alan Jones is a climate denialist. This means that he is mostly wrong about the most important challenge facing the world. We need to ask what this means for his journalism.

Imagine what it does to your state of mind, to be a climate denialist, year after year.

It means that you believe in a global conspiracy that somehow includes almost everyone else in a position of any authority, from the physical scientists to the finance industry, from Al Gore to The Pope, from Bob Brown to General Electric.

Even if you started out as a reasonable person, it would make you very angry. It might even drive you a little crazy. Eventually, like a religious fundamentalist, you must withdraw from the broader social reality, in order to protect your irrational belief system.

Over the past two years, the denialism has expanded its remit from climate science, to take on renewable energy and technology more generally. For example, Rupert Murdoch’s flagship newspaper, the Australian, is running a campaign against wind energy.

The “hate media” is now angry not just with the climate scientists and the Greens but also with clean energy technologies. The haters are now alienated by both science and progress.

It would be very useful to see some media content and psychological analysis of Alan Jones and other extremists in the Australian media. Is their climate and renewables denialism driving them insane?

And what is the impact of denialism on the rest of the media?

My suspicion is that climate denialism is partly to blame for other failures in Australian journalism.

The constant legitimation of climate denialism and attacks on science have certainly provided cover for opposition leader Tony Abbott’s politics of negativity. In this sense, the media’s failure to deal with denialists means that the our media has become politically partisan.

The Alan Jones incident is an opportunity for the media to take more responsibility for itself, in an era of dangerous climate change.

Clever Canada boosts renewable energy co‑operatives

2012-09-28T11:47:18Z

One of the most positive developments in the world today is the spread of renewable energy co-operatives, out of their stronghold in Denmark and Germany, to North America, the UK and Australia.

Clever governments encourage these community initiatives. For example, when the administration of President Barack Obama invests hundreds of millions of dollars on smart grid technology, much of that will go to the original energy co-ops established by Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Two Canadian provinces, Ontario and Nova Scotia, have shown leadership by creating a reliable revenue stream for renewable energy co-ops.

This was done by modifying the “Feed‑in‑Tariff” (FiT) laws so that the co-ops sector has a guaranteed access to some of the tariff paid for renewables. This is proving so successful that British Columbia may soon follow.

How did this great innovation come about? According to Kirsten and Brian Iler of Iler Campbell LLP (a firm that specialises in social enterprise law),

Activists lobbied hard for changes to the FIT Rules to give priority access to community power, and they won.

Version 2 of the FIT Program, or FIT 2.0, includes a 10 per cent contract capacity set-aside for community- and Aboriginal-controlled renewable energy projects. Co‑ops with a community or Aboriginal equity interest in a project that is 50 per cent or greater, and a demonstrated ability to attract members from the local community, will receive priority over all other applications. This is a huge victory.

Australia lacks a national FiT system, so unfortunately we are not able to emulate the Canadian provinces at the national level. What we do have is a Renewable Energy Target (or what Americans call a Renewable Portfolio Standard).

The Australian government is currently reviewing our RET. Hepburn Wind, the wind co-op that I am a Director of, argued that the RET should by modified, to create a community category, like one in the FiTs of Nova Scotia and Ontario.

You can download the Hepburn Wind submission to the Climate Change Authority’s review into the RET.

Barack Obama's renewable energy lesson for Australia

2012-09-13T12:56:52Z

US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsac has announced a significant milestone for America, with the investment of a quarter of a billion dollars in smart grid technology in rural areas.

Secretary Vilsac gave a detailed announcement of the locations and programs that have been supported through the US Department of Agriculture (USDA):

The $269 million in loan guarantees announced today are provided by USDA Rural Development’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS). The funding helps electric utilities upgrade, expand, maintain and replace rural America’s electric infrastructure. USDA Rural Development also funds energy conservation and renewable energy projects.

Smart grids are the future of energy, because they use the internet to connect up millions of consumers and producers of energy, maximising efficiency and reliability.

This is a huge leap forwards from the nineteenth century baseload, coal-fired generation model that is holding us back in Australia.

The beauty of renewable energy is that the fuel is free and the generator can be local. We can install our solar energy generators on each building that needs electricity, where it will harvest the free energy from the sun.

You could say that if solar is the internet, then coal is the telegraph.

Cooperatives

Secretary Vilsac emphasised the importance of ‘electric cooperatives’ in the rural smart grid programme. About half the money is being paid not to commercial energy utilities but to electric cooperatives, a fine American institution reaching back to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal of 1933-1936.

A report from the University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives explains:

As part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and in the face of significant opposition, the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was created in 1935, and Congress passed the Rural Electrification Act a year later. In 1937, the REA drafted the Electric Cooperative Corporation Act, a model state law for formation and operation of rural electric cooperatives. The REA administered low-interest and long-term loan programs for rural electrification, and also provided technical, managerial, and educational assistance. By 1939, the REA had helped to establish 417 rural electric cooperatives, which served 288,000 households.

I am a Director of Australia’s first energy cooperative, Hepburn Wind so I’m inspired by this history.

This is a great story for the 2012 election, that Obama is modernizing Roosevelt’s electric cooperatives, with renewable energy. Hopefully the GOP will see the virtue of the policy and promise to match it.

ARENA and CEFC

The most important parts of Australia’s climate and energy policy are the $10 billion fund for clean energy investment, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) and the new body for coordinating R&D into renewables, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).

I believe that both ARENA and the CEFC should invest in cooperative energy ventures in Australia. There are dozens of communities wanting to build their own renewable energy generator. They can mobilise retail investor funds and a vast reserve of voluntary effort and good will, which makes them an excellent investment.

Australia has a lot to learn from President Barack Obama’s administration on many issues. The President is working with the clean energy revolution, not against it, like so many on both sides of politics in Australia.

For example, Australia’s Energy Minister Martin Ferguson was allocated a billion dollars to spend on smart grid technology. He spent $1.6 million, on a study.

Germany proves renewable energy reliability

2012-09-06T09:03:18Z

Germany has set another record that shows how we can build a safe energy future. The German electricity grid was more reliable in 2011 and also had a greater proportion of solar and wind energy than ever before.

The Network Agency announced yesterday that the German grid only had a downtime of 15.31 minutes in 2011.

It is crucial that we accelerate the development of intelligent grid management technology. The ‘smart’ grid model means that we can have 100% renewable energy systems which balance the output of hundreds of thousands of local solar, wind and other generators.

The German reliability data demonstrates that this model is right. By way of contrast, Australia’s Energy Minister, Martin Ferguson, was allocated $1 billion dollars to develop smart, renewable energy grid technology and all he did was commission a million dollar study.

A smart grid connects up millions of generators and consumers through information technology, to maximise reliability. It will also allow vast improvements in efficiency, equity and cost control, which are the side benefits of dumping coal and nukes and embracing renewables.

It is important that the clean energy sector promotes the German example widely in the media and social media, because the allegation of unreliability is damaging. Most people love renewables, but they are swayed by claims that the technology is not able to provide secure, reliable energy.

As I have written before on Consultant Dan, if we look at the structure of public opinion in Australia, it shows that the vast majority of people want a switch from coal and gas to renewable energy.

‘Investing in renewable energy is good for people and the environment’ has 89% support

However the level of support drops when we move along a scale of questions that dig into the technological feasibility of renewable energy.

‘Renewable energy can be as reliable as other sources of energy’ has 68% support

(This poll was taken in Aug 2011).

ABC interview on demise of coal

Yesterday I was interviewed by Rafael Epstein on ABC Local Radio 774 about the failure of Federal Energy Minister Martin Ferguson to negotiate with coal power station owners to retire their generators.

I said that solar and wind technology is improving so quickly that it will beat coal on price, all around the world, over the next several years. Australia’s coal-fired electricity industry does not have a long-term future.

I also pointed out that the Labor-Greens plan for the government to actively phase out 2000MW of coal was good for the coal industry workers and their communities. It would mean a just transition out of the dying industry and into new ones such as renewable energy.

Labor’s Ferguson has effectively thrown the coal workers, who are in his own union, to the insecurity of laissez faire energy economics. It has been Greens Leader Christine Milne who has been left to argue for the planned, rational transition.

It makes the Greens look more Labour than Labor. Such is the politics of energy in contemporary Australia.

Solar is the internet, coal is the telegraph.

2012-08-27T08:43:20Z

Its almost spring and time for a new *quote for my website and printed media presence. (Its in the middle up there at the top of this web page.)

The new *quote is:

Solar is the internet, coal is the telegraph.

Usually I rely on the great aphorists but this time I’m going with my own words.

What do you think? How’s your mood?

POSTSCRIPT

Here’s a lovely image to go with my solar aphorism, courtesy of the excellent people at Richir Outreach.

Vale Ravid Rakoff

2012-08-11T16:08:10Z

I barely knew David Rakoff but when I heard of his death, it made me smile and brought a tear to my eyes at the same time.

We had dinner together in Sydney in 2008. He told me all about his life, ‘over-sharing’, as they say in New York.

David never boasted to me about his career as a writer at This American Life, comic, actor and social critic. I didn’t realise what a star he was. He said his only claim to fame is that he’s not David Sedaris. Even now, recalling it makes me laugh.

I was engaged by David’s aptitude for listening, asking questions and gaining trust. He seemed to be interested in all things and able to find connections between them, questions to ask and stories to tell.

We were almost the last people to be ushered out of the Japanese restaurant at, closing time.

David was funny and serious. He was charming, smart and curious. He could draw too, inscribing my copy of one of his books with a little salt shaker.

He wanted to know whether or not I am hopeful that humanity will wake up and prevent climate catastrophe. I answered that I thought there were more useful questions to ask. He smiled and nodded.

He was particularly taken with the story of the spectacular 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. The steel and concrete suspension bridge shook itself apart in a relatively mild wind (64km/hr), despite being strongly built, using the latest engineering techniques.

I’d told the Tacoma story it in passing, by way of making an argument about technology and the environment. David was immediately drawn by the symbolism (of technological hubris) and poetry (the image of a bridge waving like something soft).

Since we first met, I’ve come to appreciate how much David was loved by his friends and also learned of his great achievements in public life. The man had talent and humility. As my grandmother, Eve Shulman might have said, he was a mensch.

There is no doubt that David Rakoff will be missed in death, for he was truly appreciated in life.

Solar progress kills coal's baseload business model

2012-08-07T15:31:17Z

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has today used a speech to shift the debate over climate and energy, by taking aim at Australia’s conventional electricity sector, blaming it for consumer price rises.

(This is another example of her having to over-rule her anti-green Energy Minister, Martin Ferguson, in order to get good energy policy.)

One of the positive trends that the PM should pay more attention to is the rapidly declining cost of solar PV.

Over the next several years, PV will become so cheap that it will start to destroy the profitability of the baseload business model that sustains the coal and nuclear industries.

Prof. Dr. Volker Quaschning, of the Renewable Energy Department at the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin explains the German situation. (Read an English translation here.)

A decade ago, Germany’s Greens party pushed the SPD, its left-centre coalition partner in government, to begin a transition to renewable energy.

Then the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster in 2011 forced the centre-right coalition government to accelerate the switch to renewables and out of nuclear.

Quaschning writes:

In 2011, solar arrays were already covering a large part of peak demand, especially in the spring and summer, thereby offsetting expensive conventional peak load plants. As a result, prices on power exchanges dropped, bringing down the margins of what – up to then – had been the most profitable coal and nuclear plants.

He explains that government subsidies – through feed in tariffs – have been halved between 2008 and 2012. (As a result of the tariffs, Germany’s PV installation prices are the best in the world.)

He predicts that over the next two years “the price will probably be cut in half once again over the next 2 to 5 years. At that point, there will be no stopping solar power.”

The end result, as he sees it, is that the biggest energy companies, which base their business on coal or nuclear baseload generation, will be beaten by solar.

If Australia’s media would wake up, it would realise that this same dynamic is at play in this country. Once this is understood, energy and climate politics begins to make sense.

Australia wins gold in the solar Olympics

2012-07-31T09:36:59Z

Australian solar science is marked by two major features. Firstly, its global significance, secondly, the nation’s failure to appreciate that significance.

The University of NSW began its PV research in 1975.

Since 1975 the University has broken at least one world record in solar technology in 23 of the years up to 2009: 1976, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2008.

Why did Australia fail to celebrate these scientific gold medals?

Our national culture is in the shadow of the resources sector, which wants us to love coal and iron ore above all else. The resources sector is prosecuting an anti-green culture war, which says that universities are elitist and renewables are unpatriotic.

Australia should start to tell a more intelligent story about its economic potential.

Just recently the US government published yet another study which shows that the lion’s share of energy will come from solar power. This should be a cause for national celebration, in a country with leading solar research and so much sun.

There is good reason to think that future generations will talk about Australia’s solar scientists as Olympians. I am starting to do that, today.

Greens Melbourne by-election

2012-07-30T10:40:33Z

From 4-22 July I worked over 270 hours on Cathy Oke’s election campaign to win the seat of Melbourne, Victoria, for the Greens. I was brought in to advise Dr Oke and work closely with her for the final fortnight, when the local by-election had became a national political event.

The election was a wild ride and a great result. Cathy and the Greens won the popular vote (compare Oke with Labor (Kanis) at each voting place across the Melbourne electorate).

Labor has held Melbourne since the Victorian election of 1908. This election was notable because it was the first time that women were invited to vote in Victoria. (Bizarrely, Victoria’s Parliament accidentally gave women the vote before the 1864 election and reversed it in 1865.)

Cathy Oke is the sole Greens councillor on Melbourne City Council. She was chosen to contest the state seat of Melbourne when it was vacated, mid-term, by the incumbent Labor MP and forced to a by-election. She has an excellent standing on Council and is well-known and liked in the inner city.

This was a local election but for the fact that three weekends before the poll, the NSW Labor Right faction and Rupert Murdoch’s flagship newspaper, the Australian, launched an attack on the Greens that Guy Rundle described as bizarre, contradictory “malarky”.

As a result of the attacks, Cathy Oke was put under huge media pressure, which she handled excellently. This graph of Greens media coverage ranks Cathy higher than the leader of the Australian Greens, Senator Christine Milne or her deputy, Adam Bandt MP, for 3-23 July 2012.

We ran a positive campaign on the local issues, such as solar energy, transport and over-development. This annoyed Labor and certain sections of the media and provoked them to do things that they probably now regret.

It is great to return to this blog, Consultant Dan and the life that goes with it.

Robert Manne on climate denialism versus the Enlightenment

2012-06-25T12:41:35Z

This was re-published on Climate Spectator.

I am very much looking forward to hearing Robert Manne give a public lecture this Wednesday, when he will discuss climate denialism and irrationalism in the context of the broader history of ideas.

Robert Manne is one of Australia’s leading public intellectuals, with a keen interest in the meaning and implications of global warming. In his Quarterly Essay “Bad News: Rupert Murdoch’s Australian and the Shaping of the Nation”, he did an excellent job of exposing how Rupert Murdoch’s flagship newspaper mis-reports climate science.

In “Bad News”, Manne went into forensic detail to show how Matthew Warren and other environment editors of the Australian have run a shabby war of misinformation against climate science across the news and opinion pages.

(It was no suprise that the paper had Manne’s essay reviewed by Peter Craven, who knows nothing about the issues and lacks any credibility in the debate.)

So where is Manne going to take the discussion at Wednesday’s lecture?

This is the University’s synopsis:

Ever since the Enlightenment, one of the core assumptions of Western societies has been that in the long run reason would triumph over ignorance. This assumption rested on a simple belief—that stronger, more plausible and evidence-based arguments would be preferred to arguments based on prejudice or the special pleading of vested interests. As the largely successful war against climate science has shown, this core assumption is now under threat. In this lecture the puzzling rise of climate change denialism and irrationalism will be analysed to answer a broader question: whatever has happened to argument?

There are many important issues to be teased out of this discussion.

Here are three questions concerning the renewable energy sector and the ‘green economy’:

Firstly, where is climate denialism going in 2012?

It seems that climate denialism has morphed into ‘renewables skepticism’. These skeptics believe that a global conspiracy is in place to hide various negative facts about renewable energy, such as the notion that wind turbines cause over 100 illnesses or that solar PV generates less energy than is used in the manufacture of the PV cells.

Many conservative figures have become renewables skeptics. They are thus positioning themselves against technological progress itself and the consequent ‘creative destruction’, meant in the liberal sense that old business models are destroyed as capital flows to new models. This is a quite extraordinary situation, because traditionally it has been radicals who have argued against techno-economic progress.

Secondly, who benefits if argument fails?

Conscious change and reform require constructive debate. So it follows that those economic interests who represent the status quo will intrinsically benefit from the failure of argument. For example, if we cannot sensibly debate how to make the transition to a low carbon / high-security economy powered by renewable energy, then we are not going to make the transition; we will remain addicted to coal, oil and gas.

Thirdly, what happens to hate speech and extremism if argument fails?

My fear is that the collapse of rational debate in the public sphere will encourage more extremism in the mainstream political parties and media. This is already resulting in hate-speech against greens and vandalism of wind farms.

Manne is Professor of Politics and Convenor of the Ideas & Society Program at La Trobe University.

This event is part of the Wednesday Lectures series at Melbourne Law School, presented by Professor Raimond Gaita.