Blog - Dan Cass and Company

Community renewable energy in Australia

2012-05-17T14:11:30Z

Last night I spoke to a forum that was organised to allow the Premier, Ted Baillieu, to discuss his energy and climate policy with his own electorate. It was hosted by Lighter Footprints, a wonderful energy action group in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs

Lighter Footprints started to organise the forum last year and it took something like seven months for the Premier to finally, formally decline their request and handball the invitation to Michael O'Brien, his Energy Minister. Apparently the Minister took some months to handball the invitation to the public service, who attended in his place.

What follows is my speech.

Lighter Footprints Renewable Energy Forum

North Balwyn, Vic.

Wednesday 16 May, 2012 at 7:00 pm

Dan Cass

Thank you Carolyn inviting me, and Ken for the kind introduction.

Lighter Footprints is an inspiration.

You are

active, organised and intelligent
well connected into politics, which is key to having influence
determined to help humanity get out of this climate mess.

Hepburn Wind

going well
ur two beautiful turbines, Gusto and Gale, are installed and generating clean energy at Leonards Hill, 10km south of Daylesford.

We also have an exciting partnership with Red Energy.

You can buy good green power through the Community Saver product, and pay your bills on time – of course – and in return, Red will donate $12.50 against each bill, to the Hepburn Wind Community Fund.

The Community Fund is the most generous in Australia, paying $15,000 per turbine per year in grants to local groups.

Just this week the local paper reported that Wombat Forestcare group had a big find thanks to two new motion sensor cameras purchased by a Community Fund grant.

Cameras took night time photos of the nocturnal Brush-tailed Phascogale, a species listed as vulnerable.

We hope this data is useful to Government agencies and conservation scientists who are responsible for keeping watch over our native species.

The good news for everyone who accepts climate science, is that renewable energy is ready, here and now.

Even better news, human ingenuity, determination and competition between firms and nations is bringing down the price of solar and other clean technologies, making them competitive with coal and gas, just on narrow economic terms, let alone the climate imperative.

The tipping point is finally here.

I’ve been asked to speak about local action.

There is a case to be made that local is where all the most exciting action will take place, because energy is becoming decentralised, thanks to renewables.

The future for the grid is not centralised coal and gas power plants transmitting through a monopoly network, all run by a cosy oligopoly of big polluters.

The future of the grid is energy everywhere – a smart network of energy production and consumption, linked together in the ‘internet of things’.

My suggestion therefore – start a community energy company of your own.

Lighter Footprints Global Energy Magnates, Incorporated.

This is the best way to make a difference.

Because

there is nothing more hopeful and exciting than the rapid progress of clean technology
starting the good is more effective than stopping the bad

Could you succeed?

You have the right internal factors:

professionals in the local community, with valuable skills and networks: business, public service, academia, professional services, engineering, teaching etc.
demonstrated that you can be cross party political, so you represent whole community
a relatively prosperous local community, with enough ready capital to start an enterprise

Solar is the technology to look at first – here’s why.

Last week the NSW Parliamentary Secretary for Renewable Energy, Rob Stokes, spoke to a national forum on community renewable energy in Sydney.

Mr Stokes cited ‘Darkest before dawn’, a new report from McKinsey & Company.

The report found that solar is already competitive with coal in some markets and its price will fall another 40 per cent by 2015.

Over this same period, consumers of conventional, black energy will continue to see their bills rise, dramatically.

This combination of the inefficiency of centralised, conventional electricity and the improving economics of solar led McKinseys to the conclusion that solar could be worth US$1 trillion over the next eight years, with an economic potential at 2020 of 1 million megawatts.

You can plan now, on the basis of the price solar will be at in a few years and get ahead of the energy game.

What would your energy co-operative look like?

Hepburn Wind has 2000 members, who have invested $10 million, to build a $13 million wind farm. This will generate electricity equivalent to Daylesford’s demand over the course of a year.

You could start smaller and do a project that has less risk and technical complexity

How about 200 members, investing $1 million in solar panels locally?

Find public buildings like this one, or commercial properties and negotiate to build a community solar park. Or even do a bulk buy and install on households, like other communities in Victoria.

You should also investigate the options of 3rd party financing, to add to your investor capital. The Labor-Greens Clean Energy Future package has created a $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

The Broadbent report on the CEFC has opened the door to investing some of the $10 billion in community renewable energy.

There is also private capital to draw on. In the USA there are big investments being made in solar lease products.

These mean that a company will install the solar system for free and the debt is paid back against the cost savings made against rising conventional electricity prices.

My friend Danny Kennedy’s company Sungevity uses this finance model and Sungevity is now the fastest growing solar installer in the USA.

Another option is to plug in to the smart grid model and go virtual.

You could build your Lighter Footprints solar farm somewhere sunnier than lovely Balwyn.

How about Mildura, which has some of the most valuable solar resource in the world?

For example, your virtual energy utility could buy panels and install them behind the electricity meter at big commercial or industrial facilities in sunny Mildura and sell the power to those customers.

Financial and organisational innovations like this, are the cutting edge for renewable energy.

The technology is proven and cost effective. What we need now is to liberate new capital and drive down costs.

Federal Energy Minister Martin Ferguson’s solar flagships have been shipwrecked on the rocks of bad policy, leaving Mildura frustrated that it still lacks a big solar power plant.

Imagine how inspiring it would be if a community energy company built big solar in Mildura?

You could easily generate energy equivalent to the consumption of your many members.

Or you could be more ambitious and plan to grow and eventually offset the electricity use of a whole municipality.

The internet of energy allows you to even go one step further and use your investment to pay your home electricity bill.

The Clean Energy Collective in Colorado is leading the way, with a smart grid technology called Virtual Net Metering.

People can invest in the CEC for little as $700 for 1 solar panel. The CEC installs the panel as part of a large array and manage it for the investors. The electricity generated is credited against the investor’s bill.

On the internet of energy, you don’t have to be literally wired to your panel, to get the financial benefits from helping the planet.

An added benefit is convenience – the virtual energy generator company manages the whole portfolio of solar installations.

There are also financial benefits to investing in a virtual energy company – it can negotiate with suppliers and landholders for the best prices and buy the best technologies and put them in the best locations.

If you are serious, you can work with Embark – Hepburn Wind’s sister organisation.

Embark is a social venture established by our board chair, Simon Holmes à Court, to support the growth of the community renewable energy sector. The vision is to help encourage the establishment of 100 community enterprises over a decade.

Lastly – a solar co-op has the added benefit that it does not run up against the state government’s draconian anti-wind laws.

I believe there are many Liberals who are rational and mainstream. They do not subscribe to conspiracy theories about wind sickness, nor climate science and are embarrassed to see policy formed not on the basis of science, but anecdote.

The mainstream in the Liberal party should win out before long and overturn the wind setbacks. This will liberate $7 billion worth of investment in Victoria, producing clean energy, jobs and regional development opportunities.

And don’t forget that Hepburn Wind is still open to investors, in holdings from as little as $1100. So while you work on your own community renewable energy company, you can invest in Australia’s first one.

I’ll leave it there for now and look forward to our small group discussion after a cup of tea.

[Put box of business cards? – take one.]

Thank you for having me.

Is Tony Abbott’s vision for Australia future-proof?

2012-05-15T13:37:05Z

This was re-published on ABC Opinion The Drum.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is confident that he is going to be our next Prime Minister. If he wins, he might well be PM all the way through the rest of this decade. Before that happens, we need to know, is Mr Abbott’s vision for Australia future-proof?

Based on the opposition leader’s budget reply speech last week, we have reason to be concerned.

The fossil fuel age is drawing to a close, driven both by the threat of climate change and the opportunity of technological progress. Exciting new technologies are changing how we run the grid, power the factories, chill the beer and burn the toast.

Over the next several years the price of solar electricity will beat the price of conventional electricity (from gas and coal) around the world. Solar’s competitive advantage is caused by the progress of the technology, whether or not there is a price on carbon.

This fact is welcomed by every mainstream figure in the energy industry globally. (It is not accepted by Energy Minister Martin Ferguson, but that is another issue.)

Clever countries are embracing solar (and wind and other clean tech). There have recently been announcements of significant government and private investment in renewables in America, China, Germany, Japan, India, Brazil, South Africa and Saudi Arabia.

Germany, America and Japan are racing to capitalise on their early mover advantage in R&D and intellectual capital. China, India, Brazil and Saudi Arabia are seeking late mover advantage, for example in scalability and manufacturing competitiveness.

Unfortunately the Liberal party is now riven by a factional split that makes it hard for the party to keep pace with reality. The mainstream faction believes in (climate) science and (renewables) technology. The extreme faction believes that science and technology are part of a global conspiracy to wreck western civilisation.

One of the extremists is Alby Shultz, who has accused climate science of being Nazi science and believes that in-audible sounds generated by windmills are causing disease and death.

The extreme faction had its first historic win in Victoria, where it convinced Premier Ted Baillieu to ignore the scientific evidence and impose the most draconian, anti-wind laws in the free world.

Consider what Mr Abbott did not say in his budget reply speech. He made not one mention of science, innovation, research or universities. This is a problem because the new energy economy is being created now, invented by university researchers and commercialised by the smartest technology firms.

Mr Abbott also declined to mention the key technological issues: solar, wind, electric vehicles, peak oil, petrol prices, smart grid, nuclear decommissioning or energy storage. This is a problem, because these are the drivers shaping the new energy economy of the 21st century.

What did Mr Abbott say? He said:

The Coalition will reward conservation-minded businesses with incentives to be more efficient users of energy and lower carbon emitters. Our policy means better soils, more trees and smarter technology – unlike the carbon tax which is socialism masquerading as environmentalism.

(The Australian Financial Review’s Geoff Kitney called the Tony Abbott speech “one of the most vacuous budget reply speeches ever delivered by an opposition leader.”)

This is presumably Mr Abbott’s dog whistle to the extreme faction, to prevent them from leaving the party and forming a new version of One Nation. It is as if to say, ‘Yes, I agree that the Cold War is still going on and electric cars, windmills and climate science are the Communist vanguard, out to get you!’

The truth is far less extreme. A price on carbon is a quintessentially capitalist policy. It originated on the conservative side of politics, with thinkers such as climate spokesperson Greg Hunt, who wrote his University thesis on it. It is the economic rationalist’s solution to climate change. The green movement took up the carbon price, to win over business and get support across the political spectrum. It was never the natural policy approach for greens.

For a conservative party to now reject the economic rationalist policy of a price on carbon is an intellectual betrayal and a Great Big New Lie. (It reveals that many conservative intellectuals lack a rational, coherent view of the world, but that is another story.)

In the past, the Liberal Party was the party of business. When I talk to energy and technology companies, it is surprising that many of the smartest companies and people in business are concerned by the rise of anti-science extremism in the Liberal Party.

The leader of the mainstream faction of the Liberal Party is the former leader, Malcolm Turnbull, but there are other brilliant rising stars also. Last week the NSW Parliamentary Secretary for Renewable Energy, Rob Stokes, spokes to a national forum on community renewable energy in Sydney. Stokes demonstrated that he respects the mainstream of science, technology and economics.

Mr Stokes cited ‘Darkest before dawn’, a recent report from McKinsey & Company, which is perhaps the most elite and well respected business consulting firm in the world. The report found that solar is already competitive with coal in some markets and its price will fall another 40% by 2015. Solar could be worth US$1 trillion over the next 8 years, with an economic potential at 2020 of 1 million megawatts.

These facts drive the Liberal’s extreme faction bezerk. They probably think McKinsey & Co is part of a deep green conspiracy, along with those closet communists at KPMG and the socialists at HSBC, who all agree that solar is out-competing coal!

Smart, mainstream firms are already investing in solar: Google, General Electric, Toyota, Berkshire Hathaway, Total Oil, Areva and the list goes on.

This technological innovation beyond dirty coal is a classic dynamic of capitalism itself. It is this restless process of creative destruction that makes capitalist economies so dynamic. If the Liberal party is against renewable energy innovation, then it can’t really call itself a capitalist party any more. It is, rather, a protectionist party.

While Mr Abbott is campaigning to become Prime Minister, he will try to cover up the cracks between the mainstream and extreme factions of the Liberal Party.

But as PM, Mr Abbott will be making decisions every day. This will force him to decide, does he put his faith in science, engineering and economics, or conspiracy theories? Will he protect the interests of the whole Australian economy and society, or just the interests of billionaire miners who deny climate science?

Does the contemporary Liberal party support business, or just business-as-usual?

Anti wind industry campaign revealed

2012-05-10T10:22:39Z

The fossil fuel industry is redeploying its PR troops from the 20-year war on climate science, to wage war on renewables.

This week we learned about the strategy to destroy the American wind industry. DeSmogBlog obtained a leaked memo from a right-wing US thinktank and the story broke in The Guardian.

Here is the memo.

I have been warning international and Australian wind companies about this threat for two years and proposing solutions for countering the threat. There is now a simple and effective campaign model available, which neutralises the anti-wind conspiracy.

US President Barack Obama has been under attack from the right and Fox News for his support of renewable energy, in particular solar after the collapse of Solyndra solar.

Australia's media bias against renewable energy

2012-05-03T12:13:56Z

We need to have a serious conversation in Australia about the role the media plays, holding back the renewable energy sector and undermining the economy.

Here is an example of the kind of story that the media here is failing to report. The number of clean energy patents filed in the USA in 2011 was at an all time high.

It has grown dramatically and consistently between 2008 (when it was below 1000) to today (2331). This is being driven by the market but also by President Barack Obama’s brilliant SunShot Initiative and other programmes. These are revolutionising the industrial technology base of the US economy but as far as I know the ABC is yet to file a single story on SunShot.

Anyone who is well informed about clean technology would probably be able to guess which two firms are leading the clean energy patents index: General Electric and Samsung. But the media in Canberra is more interested in reporting political gossip and opining about each other’s opinions.

Rupert Murdoch’s flagship paper, the Australian, is today running yet another anti-wind story from an anti-environmentalist. This propaganda has been turned into policy by the Liberal governments of Victoria and NSW, threatening $20 billion worth of wind investment and holding back regional economies.

The most anti-renewable group of people I speak to all have one thing in common- they work in the Canberra Press Gallery. The Gallery has politicised technological progress, in order to concoct a narrative where energy saving and innovation is seen as radical and ‘Green’.

Crikey did a good job of getting on board the climate debate, before other outlets. But as soon as the issue moved from the problem (global warming) to the solution (energy and technology), Crikey went weak and joined the MSM consensus that its all too hard, we can’t pick winners, green schemes are corrupt….blah blah blah.

Meanwhile, outside the media-political elite, Australians love renewable energy. Polls demonstrate that 80% want more renewables. Every day I Tweet a few positive stories about renewable energy. Dozens of people re-Tweet them and according to Peerindex, I’m consistently in the top 10 influencers on Twitter on these issues.

There are a few exceptions that prove the rule that the Australian media is ill-informed and biased. For example, Giles Parkinson is the stand-out, with his Renew Economy. If you don’t read it, you’ve got no idea what’s going on and who is running the political economy of Australia.

The Fairfax editors sometimes give space to informed articles about renewable energy, ably written by journalists such as Adam Morton, Tom Arup, Paddy Manning and Ben Cubby.

The interminable Board intrigues of the ABC and climate change could have a book written on it. Despite this central problem, there have been rare cases of excellent journalism done on energy at the ABC, mostly by veterans with enough standing to get the story approved, such as Quentin Dempster, Matt Peacock, Greg Hoy, Margot O'Neill and Marian Wilkinson.

I’d encourage anyone who is serious about the policy and politics of energy, to conserve your mental resources; ignore most of Australian media, most of the time.

Clive Palmer's tax bill and Mercedes Benzes

2012-05-01T13:01:13Z

Clive Palmer is big news thanks to his double announcement yesterday, that he is going to run for parliament and rebuild the Titanic.

Queensland National Party Senator Ron Boswell spokes affectionately about Palmer last year, during the debate over the Clean Energy Future bills:

A couple of years ago the Yabulu nickel-processing plant was going to be closed by BHP. One thousand jobs were going to go, were going to be lost. A friend of mine, Clive Palmer, went in and spent a huge amount of money and turned that business around and made it profitable again.

Last year you may have seen in the papers that he shared his wealth at Christmas time. He bought a number of Mercedes Benzes for his workers.

The Yabulu mine will now be up for a $28 million carbon tax. It will rob the refinery of its entire profit.

Today ABC Online is running a blog post I wrote about Clive Palmer.

Clive Palmer's federal politics push against renewable energy

2012-04-30T14:50:18Z

This was republished on ABC Online.

If Clive Palmer is elected to Parliament, it will put a face to the ‘Greenhouse Mafia’, which could be a very good thing.

For 20 years the climate debate has been spinning in circles. The worlds biggest miners and polluters have used every trick in the book to sabotage progress.

They have funded extremism and confusion, to hide their interests. Now that democracy is on the verge of fixing the problem, they are taking on democracy.

When the public sees a coal billionaire in Parliament, the penny will drop. The whole climate debate has been a charade of false claims and abstract policy. Palmer will make it a concrete battle of interests; coal versus everyone else.

In the USA, the coal versus everyone reality was hidden for years. This involved funding right-wing hate groups, supporting Sarah Palin and spending billions on political lobbying and advertising, to undermine rational politics.

In Australia, we had it all revealed in 2006, when ABC’s Four Corners featured a whistleblower, Guy Pearse. Pearse explained how the government of Prime Minister John Howard had undermined renewable energy technologies, to protect the interests of the miners and polluters.

There are five elements to the political strategies of the polluters and those who share their quarry vision for Australia:

Smear solar and wind as expensive and unreliable
Depict coal, gas (and even nuclear power) as reliable and cheap
Force governments to provide polluters with taxpayer handouts
Undermine the environmental movement
Manipulate the renewable energy sector

If this strategy is prosecuted by Clive Palmer, in the Parliament, everyone will understand what has been going on for years.

The most striking fact that Guy Pearse revealed is that these corporate leaders actually called themselves the ‘Greenhouse Mafia’. It is the political equivalent of a Freudian slip. It is as if they know, in their hearts, that there is something thuggish about their lobbying.

Any rational person will know that these Mafiosi are kidding themselves. A healthy economy relies on a healthy environment. By soiling our environment, they are soiling their environment. There is only one Earth.

The only way that the Greenhouse Mafia has been allowed to throw its power around, is by masking it behind the facade of the political parties. As journalists put it, the most corrosive impact of spin-doctoring and lobbying is to hide the facts. The ultimate aim of spin is not to nuance the bad stories, but to keep them out of the media completely.

Australia could be a renewable energy superpower, but we are throwing away that wealth and opportunity. This story has to be kept out of the media, in order to protect the polluters.

Under the Labor Government, the job of keeping this story out of the media goes to Martin Ferguson, Minister for Energy, Resources and Tourism. Ferguson is the Mafia’s enforcer, who bullies the clean energy sector into submission and confuses the public with false information.

For example, Minister Ferguson artificially inflates the economic costs of renewable energy. His department is the lead agency on energy, so its false information about solar and wind flows through the rest of government. This is why even independent, credible agencies such as the Productivity Commission use inflated costs for clean energy.

Another example, in a recent speech, Ferguson attacked community groups who are campaigning for solar energy. He did not name them, but was clearly aiming at 100% Renewable Campaign, Australian Youth Climate Coalition, Beyond Zero Emissions and GetUp!

Despite all this, Australians still love renewable energy, even more than people in other countries. More than 80% want an increase in solar and wind. (During the John Howard era, the figure was around 90%.) But our democracy has been ‘carbon captured’ and ignores the wishes of the electorate, the needs of the economy and the limits of the planet.

That is why it would be good to have Mr Palmer’s presence in Parliament, directly representing himself and Australia’s other mining billionaires. As the wags in the environment movement put it, he puts the ‘coal’ into the coalition.

The answer is not to ridicule Palmer but for the clean energy lobby to ‘man up’, as Sarah Palin would say, and put its case to the public. Whether or not Palmer is our next Minister for Energy and Resources, the solar and wind industries have to get organised and put their case to the electorate, simply and clearly. (Or will Clive Palmer become Minister Against Climate Science?)

Greens and Labor have negotiated a $13.2 billion dollar package for clean energy, as part of the carbon tax. What has the renewable sector done to explain the value of this? Where are the wall-to-wall ad campaigns that the mining industry runs to advance its agenda?

The good news is that an Abbott-Palmer government would be a one term wonder, if the media does its job properly. Every day there is a good news story about renewable energy somewhere in the world. The Press Gallery would be able to door-stop Mr Palmer every day and ask for his response.

Here are some recent examples, Mr Palmer should respond to, if he seriously wants to become a politician.

Last week UK Prime Minister David Cameron said, ‘As a result, renewables are now the fastest growing energy source on the planet. And I am proud that Britain has played a leading role at the forefront of this green energy revolution.’
The China Development Bank has provided US$47 billion to help the solar and wind industries, just since 2010.
This month Wells Fargo, the largest US mortgage lender, announced US30 billion for green economy investments.
Brazil is bringing in a progressive feed in tariff, to turbo charge the development of its solar industry.
Modelling commissioned by the International Trade Union Confederation shows that an investment of 2% GDP in emerging market economies could create 18 million green jobs over the next 5 years. G20 nations could generate 24 million green jobs.

Clive Palmer is entitled to run for election, on an agenda of self-interest and climate denialism. But he has to start to acknowledge the facts and explain why he thinks Australians don’t deserve the benefits of renewable energy and a clean environment.

Postscript

The article has been a big success.

There were more comments on The Drum piece than for any other article I’ve had published by the ABC and they were of higher quality. The article was attacked by The Australian .

Rupert versus climate reality: from Leveson to Q&A

2012-04-26T21:42:34Z

Tonight in Australia, the ABC is screening a documentary that lowers climate science to the same level as conspiracy theories, treating them as equal, balanced perspectives.

At the same time, in London, Rupert Murdoch is facing his second day of questioning at the Leveson inquiry.

These two events are intimately connected.

In London, Rupert Murdoch is being questioned at an inquiry that was formed after the Milly Dowler scandal, to ‘examine the culture, practices and ethics of the media’.

While Murdoch is being quizzed about hacking and ethics, the ABC is screening a strange documentary and then a special episode of Q&A, in which a mining magnate without any expertise will tell the world what he thinks of climate science.

Australia would not be mired in this pointless debate about the science of climate change if not for Rupert Murdoch. 70% of the newspapers in Australia are owned by Murdoch and the editorial line is that climate science is wrong (and renewable energy is bad).

Murdoch’s flagship newspaper in Australia is the Australian. It has run a long campaign to undermine public faith in (climate) science and is now waging a war against wind and solar technology. Fox News in the USA and Murdoch media in the UK and around the world have all waged a war on climate science.

Watching Rupert Murdoch tonight, it is clear that this man is a bully. Like all bullies at the end of their lives, there is something tragic about the man.

Rupert Murdoch sees every piece of criticism against him as ‘personal’ without any ability to reflect on the personal attacks launched by his journalists over the decades. He wields terrific power over politicians and then when asked about it, seems ashamed and feigns political innocence.

According to those who know the company culture, this bullying psychology is emulated by many of Murdoch’s editors and journalists. In colloquial Australian terms, they can dish it out, but they can’t take it.

Rupert Murdoch’s reputation is in tatters. What makes me sad is that long after his reign is over, his malign influence over world affairs will be felt.

We are racing against the clock to stop dangerous climate change, partly because of the ancient hatreds of one angry old man. That is a tragedy for us all.

Renewable energy: Australia's crossroads

2012-04-26T11:00:03Z

This was republished today on The Punch.

Global Warming and rapid progress in renewable energy technology has bought us to a turning point. Do we cling fearfully to coal, or keep up with the rest of the world and develop our vast renewable energy resources?

Senator Christine Milne, the new leader of the Australian Greens, is using this question to construct a new political axis, with the Greens on the side of the future and the Liberal (& National) and Labor parties on the side of the past. She has the facts of science on her side and, increasingly, the successes of the world’s smartest technology companies and investors.

Both the right and left will recognise this as a new take on the classic dilemma of Australian history. In the words of historian Manning Clark, there is always a choice to be made, between the positive vision of the ‘enlargers’ and the fear of the ‘straighteners’.

In the 1993 election campaign, Paul Keating, the Labor Party Prime Minister, used Clark’s dichotomy to pillory the Liberals. Keating said that the Liberals would keep Australia as an industrial museum, a 1950s time capsule of monarchy and Menzies.

In 1996, John Howard, the new Liberal Party Prime Minister, hit back at the left’s version of events. He said,

The late Manning Clark produced a powerful piece of historical mythology when he cast the Labor Party as the ‘enlargers’ of Australian horizons and our side of politics as the ‘straighteners’ of our national life.

It was always a myth, but never more so than today. …

We in the Liberal Party are the enlargers of choice and opportunity in Australian society.

In 2012, it is the leader of the Greens who is defining the enlargers as those who have faith in science and technology and the straighteners as those who cling to the past.

Labor and Liberal acolytes would do well to consider the facts below, before jumping into an uninformed frenzy in the comments section.

Even a climate skeptic like Nick Minchin would concede that rich, developed nations such as the USA and Germany are investing in clean technology. Just this week, Wells Fargo, the largest US mortgage lender, announced US30 billion for green economy investments.

But few Australians seem to be aware that poor countries are catching up and will soon overtake our last-century energy sector:

Indonesia increased its investment in renewable energy by 520% over 2011, a faster growth rate than the US or Australia.
Brazil is bringing in a progressive feed in tariff, to turbo charge the development of its solar industry.
China will manufacture 5 million electric vehicles, just for domestic consumption, in 8 years.
Kenya is starting on a wind farm at Lake Turkana, which will be the biggest in Africa. The wind speed is about double the average for Australian wind farms, which means an energy density eight times higher.
Modelling commissioned by the International Trade Union Confederation shows that an investment of 2% GDP in emerging market economies could create 18 million green jobs over the next 5 years. G20 nations could generate 24 million green jobs.

The Labor-Greens Clean Energy Future package includes $13.2 billion for clean energy, but this is all potentially doomed if Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott becomes Prime Minister.

Tony Abbott’s latest disinformation campaign is against the $10 billion, Clean Energy Finance Corporation. He argues that it is an unprecedented, dangerous investment to make.

As usual, Abbott is using slogans, not facts, to paralyse his fellow ‘straighteners’ with fear and loathing. The China Development Bank has provided US$47 billion to help the solar and wind industries, just since 2010.

While the rest of the world is ramping up investment in a renewable energy future, Australia is still debating the science of climate change!

Consider what the Liberal party has done in the states where it has won power. Victoria has the most draconian anti-wind laws in the world. Queensland has all but shut down its solar industry. New South Wales is enacting a regulatory minefield for wind energy that is likely to drive billions of dollars in investment out of the state.

This struggle between modernisation and stagnation is a constant theme of our economic history. Do you want to see us scrabble for wealth in a hole in the ground, or use our brains to manufacture and value-add?

Paul Keating shocked us in 1986 by warning that unless Australia could become a ‘banana republic’. Unless we grab the opportunity of cleantech, low-carbon industries, we will soon become the Republic of Coal.

Economic rationalists preached in 1980s and 1990s that we should only develop sectors such as mining, where we have a natural competitive advantage, even if this meant losing all our manufacturing jobs to Asia.

Australia’s greatest natural competitive advantage is not our finite, mineral deposits, but our renewable energy wealth. The sun and wind and waves won’t run out.

Our failure to invest in renewable energy, along with the Americans and Germans, Chinese and Indonesians, is already costing us dearly. Over the next several years, Australian energy consumers will pay more than $50 billion of subsidies to the electricity industry, without even knowing it.

The public-private National Energy Market will effectively be taxing each of us, several billion dollars a year, to pay for upgrades to our last century, baseload grid of coal and gas generators.

Our competitors, meanwhile, are modernising their energy networks, to increase productivity, employment and sustainability.

Once the billions are spent, this stranded capital will encourage waste and penalise Australians who invest in their own solar panels, to cut their power bills.

Christine Milne used the first few days of her role as greens leader to start the debate about a ‘green economy’. She has referred the electricity industry to our consumer watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

Technological trends and the spectre of climate change are both on her side. So is popular opinion, with something like 80% of Australians supporting more investment in renewable energy.

Christine Milne sets ACCC on Origin Energy, AGL & TRUenergy

2012-04-16T11:13:16Z

This was republished at ABC The Drum today.

The rise of Senator Christine Milne to the leadership of the Australian Greens is good news for electricity consumers. Senator Milne has bravely challenged the big electricity companies, over allegations that they are operating an energy oligopoly, driving our electricity prices up artificially, to maximise profits.

Beyond Zero Emissions, a renewable energy think tank, has claimed that the relentless rise in the cost of electricity is partly due to ‘price gaming’ by the big polluters.

This is a new chapter in the ‘Greenhouse Mafia’ controversy sparked in 2006. ABC’s Four Corners ran evidence from Guy Pearse, a Liberal Government whistleblower, that showed how Prime Minister John Howard was improperly influenced by a cabal of polluters, who literally called themselves the Greenhouse Mafia.

Australia’s leading renewable energy company is Pacific Hydro. The company has recently told the federal government that the electricity market needs fixing in order to unleash the energy investments we require.

Senator Christine Milne, the new leader of the Australian Greens, has referred these issues to our consumer watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. The ACCC has considerable power to investigate corporate conspiracies. An adverse finding against the big generator-retailers, Origin Energy, AGL and TRUenergy, could send shockwaves through the political economy and damage the standing of Energy Minister Martin Ferguson.

Australia’s electricity industry agencies and regulators do a very good job. As governments around the world will admit, electricity markets are hard to regulate, partly because the physical nature of electricity makes it a commodity unlike most.

Electricity is delivered via a vast interstate network of poles and wires, which cannot be torn up and replaced every time you switch your energy company. Just like the Telstra phone cable or the gas pipe, you are stuck with one physical provider.

How is it possible to have competition in that situation? Its not as if you can run another set of poles and wires from your house, out to your chosen generator, hundreds of kilometres away.

In order to simulate a natural market, the government has established a rules-based trading system for electricity. This gives consumers some of the benefits of competition. While it works very well in some respects, there is evidence that consumers are being exploited by the big polluters.

The outcome of Milne’s ACCC case could shift investment decisions over major coal, gas, grid and renewable energy projects. The money at stake in the grid here and internationally makes Senator Christine Milne’s $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation look like small change. Think a thousand billion, globally and you’re in the right ballpark.

Electricity Market

Australian electricity consumers buy our power from retailers who can buy and sell electricity in the wholesale National Electricity Market. The NEM runs 24/7 through a very clever computerised trading system. This emulates the competitive trading dynamics of a true market commodity.

The NEM effectively allows speculation on the abstract price of electricity, up to 4 years ahead. In that sense, our electricity is not an essential service any more, but partly just another abstract money market, to be played for profit. According to one broker, the market for Futures and Options is larger than the total value of all the actual electricity generated in Australia over a year.

(Note that its not a fully ‘national’ market, but it does include almost everyone outside of WA.)

Giles Parkinson is Australia’s leading climate and energy writer. He says that the NEM rules allow big players to ‘game’ the price. Generators are allowed to dramatically alter the supply side of the wholesale market, for example to create scarcity on a hot day when all the air conditioners are on, and price gouge the consumers.

(Generators can also change the grid services they provide, again potentially holding the market to ransom by threatening energy security).

The technology and law in this area is very complex, so consider this rough analogy with the price of petrol. Imagine Dave, a hapless millionaire, who is running late to a wedding in the country. Dave drives up to the last petrol station before the tollway to the country. The petrol station owner can see how to make some serious coin and tells Dave the petrol will cost $100 a litre. Dave has no choice, so he pays $100 a litre.

Now imagine that a computer registers this energy transaction and imposes this price on every litre sold in the country. This means that since there is one sucker prepared to pay $100 a litre, everyone is charged $100 a litre! Crazy, right? Well these “pool price” and “merit order” principles are not so crazy in the electricity market and in fact work well most of the time.

Some of you are probably already beginning to smell the rat. If an energy supplier is able to massively inflate the price when demand is desperate, their ‘competitors’ also benefit. The consumer will never know. The market transaction is effectively invisible to the punter.

The games polluters play

It would come as no surprise that the price gaming referral to the ACCC was made not by the generator-retailers nor their lobby group, the Energy Supply Association of Australia, but by Senator Christine Milne. It is a dangerous allegation to make, for the energy sector is one of the most politically ruthless industries in the world.

Our energy regulator has often been forced to issue many reports on ‘price events’, when the market jumps way too high or too low. These spikes can drive the cost of electricity from $50 to $10,000 (per MWh, which is the standard trading unit).

Giles Parkinson has reported that generators earn around one quarter of their revenue from windfall profits they make during 40 hours worth of ‘price events’ each year. Energy Minister Martin Ferguson was forced to concede this fact recently. People are unaware how extreme the electricity market price rises can be, because they are hidden in our bills. When you get a quarterly bill, all you know is the average price charged to you for the electricity you used. What you don’t know is the extreme variation hidden by that average price.

The ACCC has reported on AGL’s involvement in ‘price events’ in the past. In one case AGL got a slap on the wrist, in another case, a $20,000 fine.

Senator Milne’s ACCC inquiry will be watched closely not just by our industries, but by some very big companies in the USA, China and Europe.

Senator Milne gets the potential of clean energy better than anyone else in politics. She appreciates that international finance and technology companies are holding back from making significant clean energy investments in Australia and that a strong outcome from the ACCC could provoke an important policy debate.

The final point to be made clear is that the ACCCs findings may contradict the political narrative about ‘green energy rip offs’ that has become dogma in certain sections of the media. As a result, we should expect to see these sections of the media either downplay the ACCC’s inquiry or misreport it significantly, in order to defend their narrative.

Bob Brown resigns, Christine Milne is new Greens leader

2012-04-13T12:25:02Z

Bob Brown has resigned today as leader of the Australian Greens, passing the baton to Christine Milne, and it is the biggest story in Australia.

This transition is the perfect move for the Greens and the country at this time. The world is changing and the Australian Greens are very well positioned for that, with Senator Christine Milne as the new party leader.

Senator Milne is one of the world’s leading thinkers on the renewable energy, cleantech, low carbon economic reality of this century. Both the Labor and Liberal parties are stuck in a negative, quarry vision for the country.

Bob Brown is 67 years young. I have been fortunate to know him since 1995, before he was elected to the Senate. He has always inspired me with his leadership.

Senator Christine Milne is also a great leader and has been was a hero of mine since the 1980s. She is Australia’s Erin Brokovitch, who rose from anonymity to take on a huge environmental campaign (against a pulpmill) and won it.

As Bob Brown just reminded people in his media conference on ABC24 just now, he passed the leadership baton to Christine Milne previously, in the Tasmanian context.

Bob Brown built the party and led progressive Australia in a way that nobody else could. He was a beacon for compassion and ecological wisdom under the mean days of Prime Minister John Howard and then the confused days of PM Rudd and Gillard.

Bob Brown and his Chief of Staff, Ben Oquist, did more than anyone to build the Greens up to 3rd party status. The world now faces an intertwined global economic and climate crisis. Christine Milne has spent her years in the Senate preparing herself to be the leader for these times.

Bob Brown, to his credit, delegated enormous responsibility to Milne over the past years, taking the lead on energy and climate policy. Often this meant that she was busy with obscure, technical issues in the Parliament that did not immediately boost the party’s profile or standing in the media cycle. But Bob was determined that this strategic investment in policy was required and she was the best person to do it.

Australia’s clean energy industry and progressive business has a great friend in Christine Milne. Leading international solar, wind and clean technology companies concede privately that Milne is a far better energy ‘minister’ than Labor’s Martin Ferguson, which is why he hates her so much.

It is also worth noting that two of Christine Milne’s great strengths are connecting to people and managing balance of power (with Liberal and Labor governments). She is very well placed to help the Greens sell the carbon price package to the electorate in the lead up to the next election. Christine Milne won and held her seat in the Tasmanian parliament by doing the ultimate in retail politics; visiting tiny hamlets and towns to talk to anyone who would listen.

Christine Milne is also a powerful Parliamentary strategist and orator, like Bob Brown. These personal attributes, combined with her idea leadership will make her a formidable force.

Community power

2012-04-05T12:51:21Z

Yesterday I did a long radio interview about Hepburn Wind, Australia’s first community-owned energy company, on one of Melbourne’s community-run radio stations, North West FM. The show is called Environmentality.

Last week I did two interviews on the same theme.

One was a short piece for the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia. The other is for a book to be published by Social Business Australia for the UN International Year of Co-operatives.

Renewable energy is a good fit with the community sector, which is reason to think that Australia will have many more communities owning their own energy companies before long.

Global Greens, eleven years strong

2012-03-31T19:37:11Z

Last night I was one of 18 people around the world watching an historic event on internet TV, the Global Greens congress in Dakar, Senegal. I worked on media at the first Global Greens, in Canberra in 2001 so I can imagine how exciting it must be in Dakar.

The 11 years since the 2001 congress was mostly dominated by George W. Bush’s war on terror and the associated conservative cultural shift. As a result of this ‘wasted decade’, the ecological crisis is more acute than it was in 2001. Global warming has begun, the fisheries are failing, forests are drying and Peak Oil is starting to damage the economy. During 2012 the Kyoto Protocol will draw to a close and climate denialism is at a historic high. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that although the ruiners of nature still dominate the political economy, solar and wind energy have proven that we can have ecology together with prosperity. That’s why smart investors, even in the USA, are betting billions of dollars on solar, such as Warren Buffett, General Electric and Google.

Renewable energy will protect the economy, increase employment, raise urban and rural amenity, improve the standard of living of billions of people and give world peace a chance.

If the Global Greens want to succeed, it must create formal alliances with the climate movement and the renewable energy companies. This 3-fold alliance is the only configuration that will be powerful enough to break the fossil fuel industry’s grip on politics, in time to prevent climate catastrophe.

My main reason for continued optimism is the solidarity and intelligence of the global green movement. Here are some of my fondest memories from 2001.

From the moment I landed in Canberra I knew I was in for an adventure. There was some commotion at the baggage area. Several tall, Melanesian men were looking lost and unhappy, arguing in French about what to do. I mustered a few words of my bad schoolboy’s French together and ascertained that they were indeed our delegation of Kanak Chiefs, from the Customary Senate in New Caledonia.

We waited until a convoy of French diplomatic cars arrived. Florence Mayol-Dupunt, First Secretary at the French Embassy took charge of the Chiefs.

Christine Milne, from Australia, was in charge of the media unit. It was important to set the right culture for future events, which required us to be more professional than we could afford to be. Money had already been committed to the venue, translators and travel assistance, so there was not enough budget to establish our international media centre.

Pat Mackle, the founder of AvantCard, saved the day. Her ethical marketing business donated the expertise and materials that we could not afford. It wasn’t quite the UN, but the international and Australian journalists all had their needs met and the operation had the right tone.

We gave a briefing to the media in the mornings, for backgrounding not attributed quotes. This was to preview the day’s proceedings and explain the issues. This was followed by a press conference later in the day, plus exclusive interviews for TV, radio, press and wires.

We had so many media requests that I spent very little of time participating in the conference sessions. I spoke to the plenary at the end of a session one day, asking for delegates to volunteer to do interviews to foreign media. The list of languages was so long that there was an eruption of happy applause; it felt like the Greens had suddenly come of age, as a force in the world. One TV crew arrived by helicopter, to interview Reinhard Bütikofer, from Germany.

Wangari Maathai, from Kenya, was there. She was a true peace maker, who had fought for the environment and the rights of women, endured brutality and prevailed. I aproached her in the conference foyer one morning and told her what I thought. She laughed and looked embarrassed by this ernest praise. Her work was later recognised with the Nobel Peace Prize.

Environmentalists around the world challenge the political economy and the backlash is often brutal. In the western countries, the backlash is led by extremist think-tanks funded by polluters and the ‘hate media’ as Bob Brown calls them. In the rest of the world the backlash comes from the butt of a rifle, or worse.

Global Greens supremo, Margaret Blakers from Australia, had put this issue of security on the agenda. I suggested to her and Bob Brown that we should make a public commitment to a ‘Green Shield’, where we global greens would watch over each other and come to the defence of those threatened by violence from the coal industry or whomever.

The Green Shield was announced to a packed media conference. We broke one of the golden rules of media conferences (keep it simple), by having about eight speakers. This unusually large cohort was chosen in order to demonstrate global solidarity, not just describe it. Speakers included Wangaari Maathai, Bob Brown, Christian Sterzig (Germany), Wangaari Maathai and Ingrid Betancourt from Columbia.

Senator Ingrid Betancourt was one of the most threatened greens in the world at the time. Ingrid sometimes had several bodyguards protecting her and travelled in an armoured car. There were so many questions for her that we allowed her to continue the conversation after the Green Shield announcement was complete.

Ingrid broke the other golden rule of media conferences (keep it short), by speaking for an hour. In 20 years I have never seen journalists so attentive. A female reporter asked how Ingrid could stand a situation where she had to send her children out of the country, for their own safety. Ingrid paused to think and said that it was a spiritual opportunity for them and she hoped they would eventually understand why she felt compelled to help her country, even if it meant danger. Even the most cynical journalist understood then, the reality of the situation.

At the end of the conference, Ingrid said “You have a good energy” and we hugged. It broke my heart later when I heard that she had been captured by the FARC. Our Green Shield had failed her. Bob Brown wanted to go to Bogota to campaign for her freedom and I was terrified that he too would be taken.

We sought advice from someone with army training, who said that unless Bob had overwhelming protective force, it would be safer to use unarmed bodyguards. The principle is that you either provide the armour and ammunition to dominate the space or you make it clear to any potential kidnappers that the VIP has no armed protection and hopefully no shots will be fired.

Bob went to Columbia, called for Ingrid’s release and came back safely. He did not wear armour or have armed body guards.

I wish that I was in Dakar this week, meeting great people from the Global Greens. There is no other political movement able to shepherd our globalised world safely through this century. We either create a clean energy future, or suffer a Mad Max world of climate chaos and fossil-fuelled, fiscal demise. (You can download the latest presentation on the issue from Hans-Josef Fell here.)

Back in 2001 is seemed that we may be wrong and that ‘clean coal’ and nuclear power could be the answer. History tells us that ‘clean coal’ is economically unviable and the nuclear ‘renaissance’ never happened. After Fukushima, there is no alternative to renewable energy.

Global Greens need to become economically credible and politically powerful, by working with the renewable sector and broader climate movement. This will create the right political economy to defeat the fossil fuel corporations and then negotiate a robust successor to the Kyoto Protocol. That social process should be the core of our work for the next eleven years.

International solar energy politics

2012-03-30T12:19:42Z

This was published originally by Suntech and then by Climate Spectator.

People love photovoltaic energy. Studies show that worldwide, 70 to 90 per cent of people favour solar PV energy over any other energy source. A poll conducted in the United States showed that nearly 80 per cent of Americans want their government to invest in renewables as a way to regain the manufacturing jobs it has lost to Asia over the past 20 years.

There is also strong support for solar because it is a technology that is constantly innovating and closely tied to other ‘sunrise industries’ such as electric vehicles and the smart grid.

The technology is doing its part; advances in efficiency and dropping panel prices mean that solar energy has become cheaper than conventional electricity in many markets around the world. Solar has become the only viable electricity source for billions of people living in severe energy poverty, and in parts of the developed world it has become cheaper than coal, gas and nuclear power. Many countries have set bold goals; President Obama has set 2020 as the year that solar must become cost competitive with conventional electricity. India plans to reach this goal by 2022, and certain markets in Australia have already attained this ‘grid parity’ price point.

You might assume this all means PV will soon start to take over a large swathe of electricity generation. Reality is a bit more complicated. In most countries, electricity networks are owned or operated in close association with conventional electricity. Transmission and distribution companies tend to be captive to an old-school attitude – the engineering equivalent of group-think – that is biased against adopting photovoltaic and other renewables as a primary energy source.

That has to change. If PV is to deliver its full economic and environmental benefits, the solar industry needs to learn how to take on some powerful vested interests. The drive to reform competition in the electricity market needs to come from the solar power producers themselves, even if it means coming up against coal and gas companies.

For solar PV to become a major, global energy industry, it must organise itself like one. It must build soft alliances with advocates and make hard decisions about formal industry representation. It also needs to make hard decisions about how to structure its industry advocacy.

In the US, the solar sector is beginning to do this work, which is leading to mergers of old industry organisations as well as the initiation of new community-based organisations. In January 2012, the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), the national solar trade association, merged with the Solar Alliance, the leading solar advocacy organisation. SEIA was founded in 1974 and had 1100 member companies, which it represented to the federal government in Washington DC. Solar Alliance had a more activist bent and was focused on the regulatory environment in the states.

This merger gives the new SEIA a stronger power base. It will continue to work the corridors of Congress but will now be more active in the states, which is where the electricity market is regulated, through the Public Utilities Commissions. Solar companies in the US believe that the merger will deliver the best of both approaches.

In Australia, we have a similar situation to America. While the federal Labor Government has legislated a good carbon price package, in negotiation with the Greens in the Senate, the states are actually the battle ground for grid parity.

As solar becomes price competitive with conventional electricity, the challenge is how to liberate the full market potential this creates. Solar has to break open the electricity industry to competition.

The intention is to gain increased political influence at all levels of government – local, state and federal – in order to accelerate growth in domestic and commercial markets.

Some companies have already begun this ‘campaigning’. For example, Suntech has installed solar on the Sydney Theatre Company building on beautiful Sydney Harbour, at the invitation of the Company’s Artistic Directors, Andrew Upton and Cate Blanchett. It is these kinds of soft alliances with cultural figures that allow influential people to play an advocacy role for PV technology.

More recently in England, Sir David Attenborough was joined by actors and artists at the launch of a wind facility at Glyndebourne opera, south of London. Glyndebourne is one of the world’s leading opera companies and it decided that the best way to offset its greenhouse emissions was to generate electricity.

Indeed, the good news is that PV is not just a brilliant technology that cuts the cost of electricity in a carbon constrained world, it is the key to addressing the threat of global warming. This gives PV companies a great, untapped reservoir of social power to draw on. It is an easy cause around which to organise.

Barack Obama or Campbell Newman?

2012-03-28T09:06:09Z

This was republished on Crikey’s environment blog, Rooted.

There is great news overnight that US President Barack Obama is about to commence the end of the age of coal. The US EPA is about to bring in a greenhouse gas emission standard for new coal fired power plants that is so stringent that it effectively bans any new ones being built.

Just last weekend, Queensland voted in a new Liberal National Party government that is going in exactly the opposite direction to President Obama. The LNP’s policy is to expand coal use and coal exports, seemingly forever. They have no understanding that the world is already investing in renewable energy and making the transition to a low carbon future.

The US EPA decision is a measured, rational policy position, carefully crafted in response to three factors.

Firstly, climate science is right; we are warming the planet and we have to stop, now.

Secondly, President Obama was unable to get the fractious US Congress to agree to a national carbon control policy, so he has gone around it.

Thirdly, the fossil fuel industry has been talking about ways to make it Greenhouse-friendly, such as carbon capture and storage (CCS), since 1986. If the coal industry really believes its own hype, then it will build low-emissions coal fired plants and keep going, business as usual.

This EPA decision should send shockwaves through Australia’s political economy, dominated as it is by mining companies. It is time for the Australian Coal Association, BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Xstrata to either invest real money in CCS and prove that it works, or admit it was all spin.

Queensland’s new Premier, Campbell Newman has a tough job ahead of him, trying to implement rational policies on resources and energy. He is a moderate who leads a party that is blinded by coal.

Mr Newman won the election on the weekend in a landslide that ushered a flock of inexperienced characters into government on his coat-tails. We all saw Newman’s federal Liberal colleagues depose their moderate leader, Malcolm Turnbull, over his rational climate policies and the Premier will be terrified of the same thing happening to him.

Some of these new LNP MPs are almost certainly anti-science, conspiracy extremists) like their federal colleagues, Senators Barnaby Joyce and Ian Macdonald. These characters hate things they don’t understand, i.e. almost everything new, such as solar power, wind energy, electric vehicles and the smart grid.

Tellingly, on the same weekend that Campbell Newman came to power, the world’s leading technology company, General Electric, declared its support for Australia’s carbon tax. It is another indication that Australian conservatives are blinded by coal, while the rest of the world moves on to better things.

GE’s vice-chairman John Rice praised the Labor-Greens carbon tax as a ‘gutsy’ and necessary move.

Campbell Newman, the incoming Premier of Queensland, should take the opportunity to clarify that he understands this economic reality. If the Queensland Press gallery do a good job, they will rigorously pursue the LNP over its irresponsible coal policies and any of his MPs who turn out to be irrational, anti-science extremists.

If you had to choose who had the most responsible climate and energy policy, who would it be, US President Barack Obama or the new Queensland Premier, Campbell Newman?

Note: The new EPA standard is 452 kg (1000 pounds) CO2 per MWh of electricity. The Victorian government has just abandoned a standard set at 800kg per MWh.

Bob Brown 40th anniversary Green Oration

2012-03-23T20:08:45Z

I am happy to be in Hobart today for the 2012 Green Oration, which is being delivered by Senator Bob Brown. The Town Hall is packed to overflowing to hear Bob speak. His topic is the 40th anniversary of the founding of the world’s first green political party, the United Tasmania Group.

If Bob wanted to summarise the history of the past 40 year, he could do it in 4 words – “I told you so”. Of course, Bob would never say that, which makes his prescience doubly irritating to his critics.

I first had the pleasure of working with Bob 17 years ago. He was running for the Senate for the Greens in Tasmania and I was an office bearer of the Greens in Victoria. We were a shoestring operation back then, with almost no paid staff or other resources.

Interestingly, the same people who now criticise Greens for being ‘professional and highly resourced’ (let alone CIA operatives!), criticised the Greens in the 1990s and before, for being ‘unprofessional and disorganised’. This is one of the threads that binds together Bob’s victory; he has destroyed the credibility of his critics, by outlasting their negativity and ignorance.

In 1995 Bob scraped together the money to fly to the mainland to campaign, in the lead up to the 1996 federal election. By the bizarre parochialism of the mainstream media, Bob would sometimes only get coverage back in Tasmania by making announcements in Melbourne. His media advisor, also a volunteer, was the brilliant Ben Oquist. Those friendships forged in Bob’s first Senate win are golden.

I’d just graduated in the history and philosophy of science. Greg Barber, the Greens only paid staffer in Victoria in 1995, taught me how to abandon academic expression for the glibness of the media release. Peter Singer was running for the Senate in Victoria and he donated an old photocopier. It occupied two tables and was incredibly slow. Every time it jammed, which was often, it played a monophonic rendition of the Star Wars theme music as the error warning.

History will record that the Australian media and political elites failed to understand the significance of Bob Brown in the 1996 federal election. With the exception of some hatchet jobs, such as the BRW’s cover story titled ‘The Green Menace’, the media ignored him. When I pressured a Deputy Editor of a newspaper on the issue, he said that environmental issues were no longer important.

The big story for the old parties and the media was of course Pauline Hanson. Remember her? She was a Liberal candidate, shunned for her racism, who went on to form her own party, which has also become a sad footnote in the Australian story.

Gareth Evans, AO, QC spoke for the whole Labor machine when he said that Ms Hanson represented the real Australia, outside the ‘elite triangle’ of Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne.

John Howard used the Hanson media phenomenon to drag the Liberal party beyond liberal values, to hold right wing votes and break the mainstream consensus of multiculturalism. This led to the Liberal party becoming what it is today, an unsteady hybrid of rational, liberal values and irrational, extremist values: refugee bashing, climate denialism and hatred of wind energy.

I’m sitting here listening to Bob start his Green Oration. It seems to me that his unique gift is his hopeful determination. Many successful people have determination, but it often becomes a poison. Rupert Murdoch and Australia’s mining billionaires have determination and a vision of sorts, but I don’t consider them hopeful.

Whether hope wins or not, is up to the rest of us.

Happy 40th birthday Greens.

Congratulations and thanks, Bob.

Here is the text of Bob Brown’s speech.

Suntech blog

2012-03-22T12:51:59Z

Suntech is the world’s leading solar PV company.

The esteemed editorial team of Suntech Connect has invited me to be one of their guest bloggers.

Do you agree with what I wrote in my first post?

The drive to reform competition in the electricity market needs to come from the solar power producers themselves, even if it means coming up against coal and gas companies.

Ted Bailieu's brown coal plan for Victoria is bad economics

2012-03-20T13:09:50Z

I did an interview on this today on ABC 774 – here’s a partial recording.

The article was republished on ABC Opinion.

Premier Ted Bailieu’s plan to expand Victoria’s brown coal sector is a blow to our economic credibility. The world is switching towards renewable energy and the biggest loser in this transition is brown coal, which is the dirtiest, least efficient way to generate energy.

China is the biggest coal consumer in the world, but it is planning to cap coal imports in 2015. That is only 3 years away. Victoria’s new brown coal mines will not even be a hole in the ground by then, let alone a viable export industry.

India is another big coal customer that is turning to renewable energy, because it is more economically viable. The Indian Government set an industry plan in place to bring the cost of solar below the cost of coal, by 2022. A review of this ‘Grid Parity’ by KPMG found that it was likely to be reached 5 years earlier, by 2017!

The USA is still the economic powerhouse and it sets the global energy agenda. It also has an industry plan like India’s, which will get solar cheaper than brown coal by 2020. That is only 8 years away.

As soon as the coal PR agencies read this, they will be putting out media releases about ‘baseload’, hyping up the outdated argument that ‘solar doesn’t shine at night’. The inconvenient truth is that innovation will solve that problem and it is already being backed by billions of dollars in investment from the smartest technology companies in the world, such as General Electric, Siemens, IBM and Samsung.

Take America’s SunShot Initiative, which is the most well funded renewable industry plan. It will beat brown coal on price by 2020, from both types of solar power: solar PV that we see on rooftops and solar thermal baseload that puts electricity out from massive storage units, at night.

Victoria’s green movement is concerned about the potential climate impact of the brown coal plan. I think that it will fail, on economic grounds, irrespective of the climate risks.

My bet is that the finance sector is not going to listen to the shills from the Australian Coal Association, but rather they are going to look at the reality of what is going on in the USA, China and India.

The global money market is tight and investors are going to be more interested in what KMPG has to say, than some dodgy coal billionaire.

The core issue that the Premier has to understand is that brown coal is cheap if you just calculate the value of the coal, but you can’t chill the beer or boil a cup of tea with a lump of coal.

Brown coal has to be dried, burned and used to boil water that becomes steam. Energy is lost at every step. Then the steam drives a turbine that generates electricity, losing more energy in the process. This is then stepped up to a high voltage and sent down the transmission network, for hundreds of kilometres, which wastes even more power. At this point the electricity is still useless to the consumer.

Before you can get anything of value done with the brown coal power, you then have to step down the electricity and pump it through a distribution grid, to the households and businesses that buy the power. All those steps waste more power and cost tens of billions of dollars in Australia, which all ends up on your power bill.

Coal baseload is also a source of bushfire risk, because of unsafe electricity wires and a cause of blackouts and energy insecurity.

Coal was a big deal for the Romans in the 2nd century. Intelligent people in the 21st can do a little better than burning fossilised trees to get electricity.

Solar and wind energy are becoming cheaper every year. The more we invest in solar and wind, the cheaper they get.

South Australia is the wind power leader in Australia and this is already cutting the cost of electricity. Tasmanians are eager to build more renewable energy. This is the global trend and Victorians are being left behind.

Victorians will be slugged with higher electricity prices if the government goes ahead with any plan to dry brown coal for export.

Even if you don’t accept climate science, you have to accept basic economic reality – nobody is going to buy our brown coal, when it is cheaper to generate electricity with renewable energy.

That point where brown coal is left for dead is only 70 months away, give or take a few. What is the chance that Victoria can turn a big profit from exporting lots more brown coal before then?

Community energy for Mildura

2012-03-15T11:33:57Z

This weekend I am speaking at a sustainability conference and community festival at Mildura, in the desert corner of the state of Victoria.

Mildura is a great place for PV and solar thermal power, because it has such a good solar resource.

There have been proposals for large commercial solar plants there (in the 50-100MW range) for many years, but unfortunately the Federal Government’s Solar Flagships programme has failed.

I will be talking about Hepburn Wind and how Mildura could form its own community-owned energy enterprises.

There is already a great group of locals talking about building a community solar park, the North West Renewable Energy Community Group, and I will meet them separately to talk about their plans.

Other speakers include:

Professor Ross Garnaut
John Daley, CEO, Grattan Institute
Ian Porter, CEO, Alternative Technology Association

The Sustainable Sunraysia Festival will be held on a bend of the Murray River, near a paddlesteamer berth.

The festival includes, with exhibitors, workshops and a farmers market, around the sustainability theme.

When will solar in India beat Australia's coal exports?

2012-02-29T09:53:13Z

The Indian solar auctions have set a new world record for the lowest cost of solar power, according to Bloomberg.

Bloomberg reports that Alex Green, an Indian solar developer, has bid to build a 5 MW solar plant (more than twice as big as Australia’s largest), at only $132 / MWh (7,000 rupees).

Australia’s solar flagships programme has languished for almost 3 years without seeing 1 single solar panel installed. India’s government is serious about solar and the regulations require Alex Green to complete the project by August 2013.

India is going to build a lot of solar over the next several years, in order to make it cheaper than coal-fired electricity by 2022.

Meanwhile, a certain newspaper in Australia has been re-preaching its gospel of coal exports to India. The facts are that by the time Australia’s new coal export facilities are built and operating, Indians will be buying solar electricity cheaper than coal.

Yesterday's News: renewable energy, Rupert Murdoch and the American Frontier

2012-02-28T16:34:02Z

I have an essay in the zine-style catalogue for a show by Nat Thomas at Melbourne’s CCP. The show is called ‘Yesterday’s News’ and it is about the media.

Nat made a 36 minute video of the microfilm of the defunct newspaper, The Truth, which was Australia’s most notorious tabloid from the 1960s-1980s. The exhibition consists of this film, plus a shredder (and some shredded newspapers) and a wall of Nat’s clippings from papers and magazines.

Nat has a particular focus on Rupert Murdoch.

My essay is called ‘Calamity Nat’, because I decided that Nat reminds me of Calamity Jane, that great ‘fool’ of the American frontier. Nat is a vocal and absurdist critic of society. Like the cartoonists in our newspapers, she uses comedy to speak the truths which are too disconcerting or controversial for the journalists and editorial writers.

In my essay I compare cartoonists and Nat to the role played by Shakespeare’s fools. I also weave in some notions about renewable energy and the American West, through the ‘Frontier Thesis’.

Have a read and let me know what you think.

The exhibition is on until April Fool’s Day.