groundswell bass coast climate change renewable energy

New community investment funding program for rooftop solar has met its $139,600 target in just two days, taking its total fund-raising to nearly $500,000 from four programs…The latest fund-raising program from not-for-profit group Repower Shoalhaven opened on 3pm Monday, but by the close of business on Tuesday had already met target…“We are blown away,” the organisation said in an emailed message to its supporters. “If you missed out, do not worry – hopefully Repower Five is not too far away into the new year.”

Secretary Jessica Berg says the three previous fund-raising took about a week to meet the target, but in his case half the funds had been raised within three hours. The average investment was $7,000.

Repower 4 investment project aims to install a 95kW solar project on the Nowra Bowling club, a local dairy farm and a timber yard. The businesses do not pay for the system, but do pay the solar power they use…Under the program, investors get an annual return of 5.19 per cent in interest and some of the capital back, until the system is paid off after 10 years. At the point, the system is then gifted to the business, who can then access “free solar” for the remaining lifetime of the system. Solar systems usually last 25 years or more…So far, Repower Shoalhaven has $495,000 in community investment to fund 325kW of solar on local business rooftops

>more> OneStepOffTheGrid

The modelling suggests that “wobbling” output of the gas generators might have been the principal cause of the instability in the grid that led to the separation from Victoria…The ageing, slow reacting gas plants constantly overshot as they struggled to manage the system faults caused by the collapse of three major transmission lines, causing the grid to become unstable…huge challenge to protect energy generation supply and demand in extreme weather conditions…requires investment long-term and adoption of new technology and solutions that enable sustainable energy provision now and in the future.”

RES, one of the world’s biggest developers of battery storage plants, is to team up with engineering firm Lloyds Register to look at a 100MW lithium-ion battery storage plant in South Australia – to show that is a cheaper and more secure option than new transmission lines or gas plants…The $100 million project could be built next year, in a fraction of the time it would take to build a vastly more costly, multi-billion dollar transmission line linking the renewable energy leading state with NSW or Victoria.

“We keep reading about power price surges and not having enough power, but it does not compute. Having a storage type solution allows you to fully utilise those assets, and get a much better outcome at a fraction of the cost, and it doesn’t lock us into a 40 year asset that consumers will have to pay for.”..RES has more than 12GW of installed renewable energy capacity across the globe, including the 107MW Taralga wind farm and is currently building the 242MW Ararat wind farm. It has operated in Australia for 12 years and is also developing the Twin Creek wind project in South Australia…Lloyd’s Register is a global engineering, technical and business services organisation wholly owned by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation, a UK charity dedicated to research and education in science and engineering.

>more> RenewEconomy

Note – from The Conversation, this is just part showing emissions growth because of pumping, compressing and refrigerating  LNG:
To understand why demand is increasing we can look at the three major consumer groups – industry, business and households – as you can see in the figure below.

After growing until 2012, industry demand fell sharply because of closures of several major establishments, most notably aluminium smelters in New South Wales and Victoria.

Since 2015 very rapid growth has occurred in Queensland, driven by the coal seam gas industry. Extraction of coal seam gas requires the use of enormous numbers of pumps, compressors and related equipment, to first extract the gas from underground and then to compress it for pipeline transport to the LNG plants at Gladstone.

Initially, the industry used gas engines to power this equipment, but then realised that electric motor drive would cost less. The government-owned Queensland electricity transmission business, Powerlink Queensland, is making major investments (paid for by the gas producers) in new transmission lines and substations to meet this new demand.

By the end of 2017-18, electricity demand could increase by 20% in Queensland and by 5% for Australia overall. All of this demand, at least initially, will be supplied by coal-fired power stations, increasing Australia’s total emissions by about 8 million tonnes, or roughly 1.5%.

As a side note, the LNG plants in Queensland will not themselves use electricity from the grid, but will use about 120 petajoules of gas each by 2017-18, adding another 6 million tonnes to national greenhouse gas emissions.

>more> TheConversation