Photo Source Doman84 | CC BY 2.0
We humans are an interesting species … instead of seeing eye-to-eye, we are inclined to see eye-to-nose. We focus on the present and ourselves, particularly where our comfort is concerned, no matter how dire the predictions for the future.
Although these are now over, such has been evident at the climate change talks in Katowice, Poland. An effort to mandate the Paris agreement, in light of the dire 1.5C report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has been stymied repeatedly by Saudi Arabia, the US, Russia and Kuwait. Particularly disturbed are island countries like the Maldives that are literally disappearing with sea-level rise. One of the last spats was on the word “welcoming” as in welcoming the IPCC 1.5C report. It has been changed to “welcomes the timely completion of … ” in the final draft thereby not endorsing its conclusions, stark warnings or more ambitious goals.
The serious sticking point has been Article 6. It deals with country plans and is of special concern to the poorer countries promised financial support. But to obtain it Measuring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) of carbon emissions reduction is sought by donor agencies and private sector groups.
Thus Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) is an international organization promoting balanced economic growth, that is without harming the environment. It can help prepare a low emissions development strategy by assisting in developing viable MRV schemes. It has for Colombia, Fiji and Mongolia, and is pursuing the same for others like Laos, Mozambique, Nepal and Senegal among others, Sri Lanka, a vulnerable island nation, has prepared MRV systems for energy and transportation but requires help in other areas like agriculture, animal husbandry and industrial emissions.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
For some time now we here on Energy Matters have been harping on about the prohibitive costs of long-term battery storage. Here, using two simplified examples, I quantify these costs. The results show that while batteries may be useful for fast-frequency response applications they increase the levelized costs of wind and solar electricity by a factor of ten or more when used for long-term – in particular seasonal – storage. Obviously a commercial-scale storage technology much cheaper than batteries is going to be needed before the world’s electricity sector can transition to intermittent renewables. The problem is that there isn’t one.
Back in December 2013 Scottish and Southern Energy PLC (SSE) was granted planning approval for the 600 MW / 30 GWh pumped hydro storage (PHS) scheme at Coire Glas, northern Scotland. At the time I wrote a post called 
The National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) was launched by then-chancellor George Osborne in October 2015 to “think dispassionately and independently about Britain’s long-term infrastructure needs in areas like transport, energy, communication, flood defence and the like.” Well, the NIC has now thought dispassionately and independently about energy and has concluded that the UK can meet its 2050 decarbonization goals with either a mostly nuclear or mostly renewable generation mix, but that “wind and solar could deliver the same generating capacity as nuclear for the same price, and would be a better choice because there was less risk”. Here we take a brief look at this renewables-beats-nuclear option to see whether it might work.
Like a number of other remote island communities, The Cook Islands have decided to get rid of expensive diesel power and go to 100% solar within the next few years. To do this they are constructing solar arrays backed up with small amounts of Li-ion battery storage which they believe will overcome the solar intermittency problem. Once again, however, the planners have failed to recognize the prohibitive amounts of battery storage that will be required, and their plans are doomed to fail as a result. The only approach that has any chance of succeeding is to minimize storage requirements by installing far more solar capacity than is needed to meet demand (“overgeneration”), but this approach has problems of its own. (Inset- Rarotonga, the largest and most populous of the Cook Islands).
Solar PV is a multidimensional energy system difficult to evaluate on a global basis. Maximum concentration required from The Game players! First, there is solar thermal hot water, solar thermal power generation (also known as CSP) and solar PV. Today’s game is exclusively on the latter. And in solar PV there are two main families of panels: 1) thin film and 2) polycrystalline. Today’s game is exclusively on the latter. Add to that the fact that solar PV works much better at low latitude than high, not only from the resource perspective but also from the seasonal storage one. In short, solar PV makes much better sense in Arizona and Mexico than it does in Aberdeen. Politicians tend to see devices that generate free, clean electricity, while I tend to see expensive devices made from coal in China that produce electricity some of the time.
Fig 2: Nameplate capacities of Victoria’s brown coal
Fig 3: Black coal generation
Fig 4: Nameplate capacities of NSW black coal
Fig 6: Black coal generation over 24 hrs/6 days
While rummaging around the internet to see if I could find any information on the performance of wind farms in Queensland (and especially in Far North Queensland – Andrew Blakers’ supposed panacea for the rather more correlated wind farm outputs in the NEM area), I came across Thursday Island, which installed a small two turbine wind farm 20 years ago. Thursday Island is about as FNQ as you can get – about 25 miles into the Torres Strait that separates Australia and Papua New Guinea. The bonanza came when I encountered a 
