Loyalty to coal takes wind out of clean energy advocates' sails

Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday 3/11/2007 Page: 30

In April last year the future of wind energy in Australia was in doubt after the Coalition Government blocked a Victorian wind farm project to protect the endangered Orange-Bellied Parrot, a bird so rare it appeared never to have flown near the site. The decision to overturn state approval for the project ostensibly on environmental grounds sparked outrage from green groups and prompted a string of Pythonesque jokes about dead parrots.

The Labor Party made much mileage from the drama but it refused to say how much renewable energy it would aim for if it won government. Meanwhile, both parties continued to support the country's dirtiest industry, assigning millions of dollars to an elusive technology they said would clean the carbon out of coal. The renewable energy industry watched in despair. Wind turbine manufacturers threatened to quit the country and solar power researchers headed overseas.

Things look very different 18 months later. The two main parties are locked in a battle to prove their green credentials. Opinion polls show voters respond enthusiastically to renewable energy, and to wind and solar power in particular. Ever conscious of the public mood, the Prime Minister, John Howard, in September announced a 15 per cent "clean energy target." That was pipped this week by the 20 per cent target announced by the Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd.

But this is no climate change epiphany, environmentalists warn. They say claims by the Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, that Australia is "leading the world on climate change" ring hollow in light of the latest World Bank figures showing the country's emissions rose 38 per cent between 1994 and 2004, more than the combined increase in emissions from Britain, France and Germany, which have 10 times Australia's population.

Just how little progress Australia has made is clear when the parties' renewable energy commitments are compared with growth in coal-fired power. In the next seven years, coal-fired electricity generation is expected to rise almost as much as the renewable electricity promised by Howard over the next 12 years, according to Greenpeace calculations. "If we simply have a renewables sector growing alongside an ever-expanding coal sector, we will not stop climate change," said the head of Greenpeace Australia, Steven Campbell.

An analysis by the Climate Institute Australia shows that, under Labor policies, by 2020 greenhouse pollution would still have increased 15.1 per cent from 1990. Under the Coalition, it would have risen 20.8 per cent. That said, the renewable energy targets fill the gap between now and when emissions trading begins within four years, giving industry the kick it needs to invest in the sector, said the institute's director of policy and research, Erwin Jackson. "Once they start to run these operations, they get manufacturing scale, they find the best sites, they get better at financing the deals, they find better ways to integrate renewable electricity into the grid; it's `learning by doing'," Mr Jackson said.

The Government this week attacked Labor's 20 per cent target because it excluded so-called clean coal technology, claiming electricity prices would rise and coalmining jobs would be lost. "He's [Rudd] said to the coal industry, your means of remaining viable in a carbon constrained world is now going to be denied to you," Turnbull said on Wednesday. Energy experts point out that any switch to less polluting forms of electricity is going to cost money. The emissions trading scheme is intended to make fossil fuelss more expensive by putting a price on carbon.

A University of New South Wales energy expert, Mark Diesendorf, said job losses could be absorbed by not replacing a small fraction of the workers who retired annually from the industry. With 80 per cent of coal shipped overseas, only 20 per cent of the industry would be affected by a domestic target, or about 44 jobs a year over 12 years, Dr Diesendorf calculated. "On average, the number of annual retirements would be at least 600. This is more than 13 times the estimated annual job losses from renewable energy. And that totally ignores the job gains from renewable energy, which would be several times the job losses," he said.

The Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union boss Tony Maher says no net jobs would be lost to growth in renewables because of the projected increase in energy demands. "It is impossible for there to be any jobs lost," he said. Not everyone is so sanguine. The chief executive of the Energy Supply Association of Australia, Brad Page, is worried that the renewable energy industry will not cope with the pace of construction. He says it is likely most of the power would come from wind, which could mean building as many as 4500 wind turbines. "This is a challenging construction task in itself, complicated by the maze of local, state and federal planning and permitting laws and community consultation processes," Mr Page said.

The thought of 4500 turbines is nowhere near as daunting as the 25 nuclear energy plants proposed by the Government's nuclear taskforce, said the chief executive of the Clean Energy Council, Dominique La Fontaine. "The industry is very confident we can deliver enough capacity," she said, citing overseas precedents. Where does this leave clean coal? Both parties have committed heavily to its development: $500 million from Labor and the bulk of a $500 million Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund set up by the Government.

But Carbon Capture and Storage technology remains commercially unproven and needs suitable underground repositories near coal-fired power stations. The challenges are so great that the project hailed as Australia's most advanced, ZeroGen in Queensland, failed to receive federal funding because it could not attract commercial backing. It will be at least 20 years before the technology is ready for commercial use, said the president of the Academy of Science, Professor Kurt Lambeck. Even then, it would have limitations in curbing carbon emissions. In an address to the National Press Club in Canberra in September, the Australian National University geophysicist said clean coal could be construed as an oxymoron. "The sequestration has its limitations; the capture of the CO2 has limitations, and it's never totally clean anyway," he said.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said most of the deployment of such technology would not happen until after 2050. That is too long to wait, say scientists and environmentalists. On top of that,"clean coal" is based on the assumption our energy profligacy can continue, passing up the opportunity to save money and energy by curbing demand and improving energy efficiency. In contrast, emission cuts achieved with renewable energy will be more significant in an environment where less electricity is consumed.

Labor did not get enough praise for its policy of phasing out off-peak electric hot water, said the Greenpeace energy campaigner Ben Pearson. "It will have a much bigger impact than phasing out incandescent light bulbs," Mr Pearson said. "It is an attack on baseload power that really strips back demand for electricity." Both the main parties have offered rebates to encourage homeowners to install solar or gas hot water, water tanks and insulation, but Mr Pearson said that lets government off the hook.

"Rebates are climate change for rich people. I don't have a couple of spare thousand dollars in my pocket to fund solar hot water on my roof while I wait to get the rebate back," he said. `And it is still based on a philosophy that people must take individual action on climate change. No. The Government must say, `Off-peak electricity is a crime against the planet and we are going to ban it'."