Climate Change Week in Review Week Ending January 26, 2018

From the point of view of developing technology, and of the introduction of that technology into the commercial mainstream, this was a big week in the news for South Australia, a state that covers some of the most arid parts of its continent, and that these days could use some good news as a relief from the mid-summer heat.

There are as it happens two bits of good news for SA that come within the purview of this column. One of these is that the Hornsdale power reserve, in operation for just a month, has reported that it has gotten off to a fine start, generating 2.42 gigawatt-hours of energy, beating expectations and bringing new flexibility to the electrical grid.

What is the Hornsdale power reserve?   It’s a back-up power system that consists of the world’s largest lithium-ion battery, a Tesla “super battery.” This new system has replaced the coal-fired back-up systems that were in place before its creation, and it has already established that it can respond to black-outs more quickly than the old system.  That should help reduce net carbon emissions, as well as helping the people of the region in their day-to-day concerns.

We’ll end this column with another piece of good news for SA. But there has been much underway in the rest of the world this week, too.

PM Modi Speaks at Davos

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland the honor of giving the keynote address fell to Prime Minister Narendi Modi of India to make the keynote speech.

Modi had global warming very much on his mind. Through the Paris Agreement, he said, Indians “have assured the global community that our development process would be entirely in line with our cultural ethos toward environmental safeguards. In fact, we are not only aware of our responsibilities toward climate change; we are willing to take the lead in mitigating its effects.”

By way of example, he said that India will draw 175 gigawatts of energy from renewable resources by 2022. [A gigawatt is one billion watts.]The majority of this (100 GWs) will be solar. India is already, he said, “the fifth largest producer of solar energy in the world” and the sixth largest producer of renewable energy as a whole.

Modi also praised the “International Solar Alliance,” a coalition of countries that lie between the Tropics of Cancer and of Capricorn and that wish to “engage with each other to mitigate the hurdles and promote the enablers in solar energy.” Thus far 48 countries have signed and 19 have ratified the agreement creating this Alliance.  The ISA has reached an agreement with the World Bank to accelerate the financing of solar energy products.

A Local-versus-Global Dilemma Tightens

This week Scientific American reported on a new study with a paradoxical and dismaying finding. Efforts to clean up air pollution may actually speed global warming.

Citing Geophysical Research Letters, the Sci Am article by Chelsea Harvey outlined a local-versus-global quandary. Some pollutants don’t remain in the atmosphere very long, which means that they don’t wander far from the site where they were first emitted.  Certain of these pollutants, such as sulfate, can reflect sunlight away from the Earth. This means that as localities successfully address their pollution problems, they remove material that has had a mitigating effect on global warming.

The scientists reporting in Letters looked at the issue through four distinct models. They concluded that if all human caused emissions of the major ‘aerosols’; including sulfate and soot were eliminated the resultant addition to global warming could be as low as 0.50 C or as high as 1.10 C.

Sci Am. reports that at least some experts believe these results show that the goals of the Paris Agreement are “now almost certain to be overshot, even of the timing is uncertain.”

Trump against Solar Panel Imports

In the United States, this was the week when President Trump announces a 30% tax on imported solar panels. The official statement by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer attributed the decision to complaints by U.S. manufacturers of solar cells who contended the cheap Chinese imports were doing them serious injury.

“The President’s action makes clear that the Trump administration will always defend American workers, farmers, ranchers, and businesses in this regard,” said Lighthizer.

But the tax is likely to be a considerably blow on all the businesses that actually make use of those solar panels (and to their workers). The solar industry as a whole employs more than 260,000 people, which is larger than the numbers who work in the U.S. coal industry, for which the President has a professed fondness.

On one estimate, only 2,000 people work in the United States to manufacture solar cells and panels. But many more manufacture equipment of which those cells are the raw materials.

The tariff puts the federal government in the business of artificially stymying the growth of energy alternatives that do not release carbon into the atmosphere.

Back to South Australia

For our final item this week we return to South Australia. An effort is underway there to create an electric car manufacturing hub.

Motoring reports that  billionaire Sanjeev Gupta has informed the government of the state that he would like to use a defunct facility in Adelaide to turn out electric vehicles working from a prototype design by Gordon Murray Design, a British engineering firm.

This could amount to the creation of lemonade out of a rather nasty lemon. The site at issue belongs to Holden, an Australia based company founded in 1856 (to make saddles). Appropriately it moved from horses to the horseless carriage. Holden has been in the automobile manufacturing field since 1908. As of December 2013 it had close to 3,000 employees. But Holden closed the South Australia plant in October 20178, and is now an importer and marketer of vehicles made elsewhere.

At its peak in 2005 the Holden plant was rolling out 780 vehicles a day. Near the end, that number was down to 175.

It is unsurprising, then, that the SA government is enthusiastic about an entrepreneur, Gupta, who says that he wants an asset in which Holden itself has lost interest. One official there told the Australia Broadcasting Company, “What Mr. Gupta is realizing, like the rest of the world. Is that electric vehicles … are the way of the future.”

Sarah Hanson-Young, a Senator representing South Australia, and a member of the Greens Party, says Gupta’s proposal is “an exciting step forward.”