Slashing renewables will push up electricity bills

A new report from global research house Bloomberg new Energy Finance has punctured the rhetoric from incumbent fossil fuel generators, saying that cutting the renewable energy target would lead to an increase in electricity bills for consumers, not a reduction.

Two of the biggest utilities in Australia – Origin Energy and EnergyAustralia – have led a chorus of opposition to the current fixed 41,000GWh renewable energy target.

They and other state-owned power generators have argued that the renewable target will force up costs to consumers, a tack that has apparently won the support of state-based conservative governments, and the federal Coalition, which has agreed to force another review of the RET to investigate those claims.

However, renewable energy groups, and the CCA, have pointed out that the biggest danger from the RET is to the revenues of coal and gas-fired generators.

This has been supported by BNEF’s analysis, which says that reducing the RET may cut the headline costs of the scheme – i.e. the amount and price of renewable energy certificates – but it would lead to an increase in electricity prices because wholesale electricity prices would rebound because of reduced competition.

“Our analysis indicates that a reduction of the Renewable Energy Target is unlikely to result in a cost reduction to the end consumer,” BNEF Australia head Kobad Bhavnagri, said in emailed comments to RenewEconomy.

“By contrast, it could actually put upward pressure on retail electricity prices. This is because the savings from reducing the target are outweighed by the costs.

“Having less renewables in the generating mix is likely to lead to higher wholesale electricity prices, because there will be less competition and fossil fuel generators can sell the power they produce for more. The total cost of higher wholesale electricity prices are likely to outweigh the savings from building less renewables.”

The BNEF analysis (see table at bottom of story), suggests that reducing the RET to a target of around 27,000GWh, as Origin and EnergyAustralia are pushing for, would mean that investment in renewables in Australia would be cut in half – from around $23.8 billion to $12.2 billion.

This would mean around 2,800MW less wind energy, and around 2,700MW less solar PV built out to 2020.

It says the headline costs of the scheme would fall, because the price of renewable energy certificates (RECs) would decline by around 9 per cent. However, this was likely to be offset by increased cost of financing caused by yet another change in government policy.

And because the wholesale price would rise, the overall cost of electricity bills to consumers would increase by $1.3 billion, even though the “headline” cost of the scheme (the RECs) would fall by $1.9 billion.

“Reducing the Renewable Energy Target will, in isolation, bring down the headline cost of the policy,” BNEF writes in its report.

“But having less renewables in the generating mix is likely to lead to higher wholesale electricity prices, because there will be less competition and fossil fuel generators can sell the power they produce for more.

“The total cost of higher wholesale electricity prices are likely to outweigh the savings from building less renewables.”

It notes that renewables like wind and solar power place downward pressure on wholesale electricity prices because once they are built they produce power at practically zero cost.

“This is changing the dynamics of energy markets around the world and cutting the revenue and profits of coal- and gas-fired power stations,” it notes.

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Teenage Summer

Judging by my one-word lead, you probably know that this is not Starshine. My name is Stone, and I am Ms. Roshell’s oldest son. This column will not, for a change, make fun of Christians, vegans, or any other thing my mom is not.

If that’s what you’re into, you’d best stop reading now and check back a couple of weeks when my mom will probably write a column that straddles the line between raunchy humor and uncomfortableness, as usual. This column, however, will discuss a few things my mom doesn’t talk about and will not mention vaginas or flossing. Or vagina flossing, for that matter.

You may be wondering, “Why is Starshine making her son do her work for her?” Well, I’m not sure either, but the reason I accepted her offer was because she told me the only way I could get a glimpse at a TV before 8 p.m. was to bang out a column for her. And of course, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Why do parents feel so strongly about TV-watching anyway? Whenever I ask my parents about why “screen time” is so bad, they say “because it rots your brain,” and they laugh and walk away. If teenagers want to sit on their butts and do nothing all day, don’t stop ’em! What we do every day during the school year is equivalent to an adult work day, except worse. Adults get to eat lunch wherever they want, check Facebook when the boss isn’t looking, and chat with friends all the while.

We receive minor versions of these luxuries (thanks to bros who’ll buy you lunch off-campus, smart phones hidden under your desk, and the invention of whispering), but we don’t get paid for it. Plus, after the school day is over, we have to go home and continue working on homework. So when we finally get to summer, and we wake up that first morning and have an agenda of absolutely nothing for the day, LET US DO IT.

In my opinion, summer should be one extended apology from the parents to the teenagers for all the crap they put their kids through during the rest of the year (room cleaning, studying, “family time,” etc.) They should be offering us rides downtown, encouraging us to play video games, and buying us actual Oreos — not the Trader Joe’s kind.

However, my parents allowed me only two weeks of zoning out on the couch. I feel robbed of my nothingness, in a sense. I should get an even bigger apology, because my mom is absolutely crazy (wow, I hope she doesn’t edit this). Besides the fact that she has twice forced us to clap for her when she parallel-parked in a tight spot, she thinks that biking is a perfect alternative to riding in a car and that driving her son from point A to point B is spoiling him. Whenever I take longer than 12 hours to do my laundry, it suddenly becomes public property, and I wake up to find my dripping-wet clothes in a heap on the floor outside the washing machine. If I’m not careful about guarding my “nothing,” I’ll probably end up just biking around the world and doing laundry for the rest of my teen years.

So there’s your column, Mom. See what you get for asking me to do your work for you? Now the world can hear my logical, well-thought-out views on teenagers and their free time. And look, I even got a few hours of screen time out of it! More information about the program is available on the web site at www.aulaundry.com.

Special counsel to fight proposed wind turbines

The Town Council may not have any legal cards left to play in its fight against two proposed wind turbines, but it will not walk away from the table.

The council voted unanimously Monday night to authorize Town Administrator Mark Stankiewicz to hire a special counsel to represent the town at the May 21 Zoning Board of Review hearing at which Whalerock Renewable Energy LLC will seeking a special use permit to build the turbines on a site north of Route 1 between King’s Factory Road and East Quail Run. The meeting will be held at 7 p.m. at Charlestown Elementary School.

The motion presented by council President Thomas Gentz allows the town to spend up to $50,000 to hire the special counsel and arrange for any appropriate experts to provide testimony at the hearing.

“We’ll start at 9 a.m.” today, Gentz said, adding that “it won’t be hard” to put together its case in time for the hearing.

The council discussed the move in executive session before Monday’s monthly meeting, then took the vote immediately after returning from deliberations. The move was prompted by a state Superior Court decision on April 10 that dismissed suits brought by the council and a group of residents living near the site who tried to slow or halt the regulatory process.

Gentz said the council was advised by Town Solicitor Peter Ruggiero that the decision of Superior Court Associate Justice Kristin Rodgers eliminated any legal options the town had remaining. The ruling supported local developer Lawrence LeBlanc’s quest to build the wind energy project .

“It was really the judge that put the town against the wall. When she remanded back to the zoning board, she said the town could not appeal,” Gentz said.

“We felt a special counsel was necessary, and can bring a lot of testimony about the impacts of industrial turbines on the town.”

Neither Gentz, elected to the council in 2010, nor Ruggiero, solicitor the past eight years, could recall a previous instance of Charlestown hiring a special counsel. Ruggiero said he would still participate in the hearing on behalf of the town.

LeBlanc proposed the turbines in 2009 after failing to win approval for affordable housing at the site. He has been fighting the town since an anti-turbine majority was elected to the council in 2010 and imposed a moratorium on wind power plants. LeBlanc argued that his application to the zoning board was substantially completed, though an interim town planner ruled otherwise in 2010, and that his plans only needed an advisory opinion from the Planning Commission, not its outright approval.

Rodgers’ decision ruled that a previous appearance LeBlanc had made before the commission satisfied the advisory requirement, and that the council and the residents’ group had not offered substantial reason to deny him a hearing.

Under town ordinance, a wind turbine plant can only be granted under a special use permit, to be granted by the zoning board.

The age of the robot blurs sci-fi and cutting-edge science

To alarmists, the rise of the machines must stoke inhuman levels of anxiety. And why not? Technology can be truly discomforting. The US government's top secret Darpa labs are currently improving robots' behavioral learning and anomaly detection programs, both of which will make them "smarter" and more efficient killing machines, literally; auto manufacturers are working on self-driving cars like those that run us down in Daniel H Wilson's predictably plotted thriller Robopocalypse; and just this month word spread that European researchers turned on Raputya, an "internet for computers" that bears an uncanny resemblance to Skynet, the fictional super-computer that launched Terminator into our pop culture landscape.

But to those who embrace technology, these upgrades aren't harbingers hellbent on destroying human life. They're portals into a brighter human future. Such technoptimists believe that as computers evolve, so will we. Google Glass is but the beginning of how technology will be meshed onto our bodies. Researchers are already hyping "e-memory" implants that could make Total Recall a reality; and the US Food and Drug Administration recently approved artificial retinas that use video processors and electrodes give partial sight to the blind, just one of the many examples of how "you", the human, can merge with "them", the machines. Futurist Kurzweil believes that nanotechnology will be able to rebuild injured humans.

"It's not us versus them," he told the New York Times. "We've created these tools to overcome our limitations."

If that's the case, the most transcendental merger between man and machine will be between silicon chips and our own motherboard, the brain, a long misunderstood organ that's suddenly getting fresh attention. The US National Institutes of Health hopes $3bn will help lay out the Brain Activity Map, a cartographical layout announced by Barack Obama this month that will dwarf the Human Genome Project in scope and size.

The European Union is putting up over $1bn for a similar, 10-year undertaking unimaginatively called the Human Brain Project, and the NIH''s other expedition into gray matter, the Human Connectome Project, recently released two tetrabytes of data, a sliver of the amount of data the brain could hold: 100 tetrabytes by some estimates. That's 104,857,600 megabytes. To give you an idea of how far away we are from finish: doctors have yet to completely map a mouse brain, or even a fruit fly's.

This is all very exciting for advocates of "mind uploading", a fantastical, as-of-now hypothetical process by which we would transfer our organic brains, including memories, personalities, tastes and proclivities into artificial bodies, or at least disk drives. According to them, once we have a clearer map of the brain and its memory drives, we can use existing technology to freeze or otherwise preserve our brains, wait 100, 200 or even 1,000 years for science to take its course and be awakened in a future, our experiences uploaded into an artificial body.

Dr Ken Hayworth, a neuroscientist who maps fruit fly brains by day and advocates for the independent Brain Preservation Foundation by night, says such a process is the final frontier in breaking the barrier between man and machine. "Mind uploading technology is just breaking the barrier," he says. "If you're really jealous of what your avatar is doing, if you're really jealous of your computer's memory, then mind uploading is the logical conclusion; it's saying: 'Okay, I won't beat them, I'll join them.'"