Preview Newsletter
RF Monitoring Report 7/6/17
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US May Still Meet Paris Accord Targets, UN Chief Says
Jul 3, 2017 | The Independent
By Mythili Sampathkumar
U.S. backs out of Climate Accord, global implications. -
Alternate Reality (Op-Ed)
Jul 1, 2017 | Huffington Post
By Edward Flattau
Trump's misguided actions surrounding the Climate Accord. -
World’s Largest Coal Company Closes 37 of Its Mines Thanks to Green Energy
Jun 30, 2017 | Huffington Post
By Sophie Gallagher
Coal plants shutting down in India. -
More Than 300 US Cities Have Adopted the Paris Agreement (Op-Ed)
Jun 29, 2017 | Business Insider
By Luc Soete
U.S. cities make climate pledges despite federal disengagement. -
The Unstoppable Renewable Energy Revolution Keeps Faltering
Jun 29, 2017 | Forbes
By Michael Lynch
Analysis of observed trends in the renewable energy market. -
The Human Capital Investment: SDG7 and the Renewable Energy Generation (Op-Ed)
Jun 28, 2017 | Huffington Post
By Kristina Skierka & Danny Kennedy
Paths to accomplishing SDG7 (affordable energy access for all). -
Prime Minister Modi Could Lecture Trump on Climate Change — India is Leapfrogging the US on Renewables
Jun 26, 2017 | Business Insider
By Madeleine Sheehan Perkins
Trump and Modi to meet to discuss energy policy and the G-20 Summit. -
Kenya: Power Authority Bets on Higher Ranking to Light Up More Homes
Jun 25, 2017 | All Africa
By James Kariuki
Power grid development in Kenya. -
India’s Problem with Renewable Energy (Op-Ed)
Jun 22, 2017 | Wall Street Journal
By Rupert Darwall
Global implications of India's energy policy.
Global News
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US May Still Meet Paris Accord Targets, UN Chief Says
Jul 3, 2017 | The Independent
By Mythili Sampathkumar
The US may still meet carbon emissions reduction targets laid out in the Paris Agreement despite Donald Trump's withdrawal from the pact, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said.
Mr Trump took the US out of the global agreement signed by nearly 200 countries in the US as an effort to control global warming and help poorer countries adapt to an already-changed planet in December 2015.
He stated repeatedly that the agreement put American workers at an "economic disadvantage," particularly in the natural gas and coal sectors.
Mr Guterres' optimism is likely due to the nearly 1000 mayors, state governors, and CEOswho have signed their own pact to keep fighting climate change.
Twenty Fortune 500 companies, including Apple, eBay, Gap Inc., Google, Intel, Microsoft, Nike, and several universities are among the signatories. A separate mayoral pledge was signed by over 200 cities to build a clean energy economy.
Michael Bloomberg, the former New York Mayor and now UN Special Envoy on Climate Change and Cities, is "convinced" that this will be enough for the US to meet the targets.
Though the Paris deal includes national plans for climate action, those countries all have authority over their own targets. The agreement is not legally binding for the US. In fact, Mr Trump did not necessarily need to formally withdraw the US in order to simply change or not meet the federal targets.
Cities and states can set their own goals, though given the Trump administration's proposed budget cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and other climate-related programmes in the State Department, they will likely have to use state funds or private sector investment in order to meet them.
Another factor that may have prompted Mr Guterres to say the US is likely to meet its targets is the US military, which has done extensive work in protecting coastlines where military bases are located and researching the connections between conflict and climate. Defence Secretary James Mattis has said in the past that climate change is a national security threat.
Mr Guterres said in a speech in Lisbon, Portugal, that Mr Trump's decision to withdraw from the global Paris agreement last month actually strengthened the deal to fighting global warming by prompting other major countries to reaffirm their commitment to it.
China and India are now leaders in renewable energy, particularly solar power. Countries like France, Germany, and Italy banded together to say that despite Mr Trump's declaration that the Paris Agreement needed to be renegotiated - they were not interested in doing so. They and the EU will continue to work on promoting more "green" policies and economic growth around the world.
Leaders from all the countries are set to meet for the G20 meeting 7-8 July in Hamburg, Germany.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world-0/us-politics/paris-agreement-climate-change-deal-us-may-still-meet-says-un-chief-trump-a7821916.html
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Jul 1, 2017 | Huffington Post
By Edward Flattau
President Donald Trump’s alternate reality appears to stem from a mix of denial, duplicity, and dimwittedness.
There is no better illustration of this syndrome than in environmental matters.
His dismissive attitude towards the climate change threat leads Trump to downplay reality. A graphic example is his reassuring the 500 inhabitants of steadily shrinking Tangier Island in the middle of Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay that they have nothing to fear from rising sea level. The 1.2 square mile island is losing nine acres a year to encroaching waters (linked to human-generated global warming). Scientists predict that at the current erosion rate, Tangier will be uninhabitable in 50 years, a menace obscured in Trump’s denial.
Blissfully consistent, Trump doesn’t seem to recognize that his own Mar-a-Lago Florida beach property also faces being eventually overrun by rising sea levels if climate change is not confronted.
What is behind Trump’s bogus assertion that the Paris climate accord’s provisions are binding? A plausible explanation is that he is intentionally peddling a false narrative to advance his policy of reversing President Obama’s climate change initiatives.
Trump does not regard climate change as a national security threat, even as an afterthought. This is so despite the Pentagon’s longstanding well-documented conclusions to the contrary. An argument could be made for attributing Trump’s intransigence to ideologically-motivated dimwitted blinders.
Trump maintains he is fully committed to clean air and pure water. Simultaneously, he has rescinded regulation prohibiting coal companies from dumping toxic tailings into mountain streams that are sources of drinking water. Trump has moved to weaken a series of air quality protection rules, and oblivious to his past environmental vows, claims he is just getting started.
During his presidential campaign, Trump pledged to preserve undeveloped conservation-oriented federal lands from industry takeover. Yet only six months into his term, he has ended a coal leasing moratorium on those very lands and cut the federal budget for strategic parkland acquisition and maintenance.
Trump has scoffed at the idea of clean renewable energy economically competing with coal and oil. He ignores that renewables registered record global electricity installation in 2016, doubling in investments and adding more new capacity than fossil fuels did.
Coal mining, which Trump vowed to revive as a cornerstone of the American economy, is actually in decline. The national coal job total is a dwindling 53,000 in contrast to the more than 800,000 workers in the ever expanding renewable energy field.
Trump asks why the United States should require its industries to bear the cost of reducing carbon emissions when China and India are doing virtually nothing. Privy to daily intelligence briefings, Trump has to be aware that China and India are both on track to exceed their carbon emission reduction targets submitted at the Paris climate summit.
It is also no state secret that both nations are cutting back on building coal-fired power plants. China is about to install a greenhouse gas emissions trading system to reduce pollutants. India has an ambitious government-sponsored solar energy expansion program and aims to derive 40 percent of its electric power from renewables by 2022. They are lofty goals, which is more than can be said for our nation’s future under Trump’s alternate reality.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/alternate-reality_us_5957c2fae4b0c85b96c66261
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World’s Largest Coal Company Closes 37 of Its Mines Thanks to Green Energy
Jun 30, 2017 | Huffington Post
By Sophie Gallagher
The biggest coal mining company in the world has announced that it will close 37 coal mines in India, because they are no longer financially viable.
In a country that the World Health Organisations says needs to “systematically tackle” air pollution because of the “huge burden of associated ill health” on its people, this is a victory for people and the planet.
According to The Independent, the Coal India mines will be decommissioned as soon as March 2018. And will reportedly save around £98 million for the company who produce 82% of the nation’s coal.
The decision is all thanks to the plummeting cost of solar power; a Climate Action report from February found that If the cost of renewable energy and storage continues to fall at current rates, India could phase out coal power completely by 2050.
There has also been heavy international investment in renewables in India, which has compounded the pressure on fossil fuel firms to move to cleaner methods of production.
The closures, which affect 9% of India’s mining sites, come as part of a series of mixed messages from the Indian government, who only earlier this year wanted to build more plants.
In April they released proposals for 370 new coal plants and Steven Davis, from The University of California, said: “India is facing a dilemma of its own making. The country has vowed to curtail its use of fossil fuels in electricity generation, but it has also put itself on a path to building hundreds of coal-burning power plants to feed its growing industrial economy.”
Then in May the government backtracked and said it would actually not be building anymore plants after 2022, and plans for nearly 14 gigawatts of coal-fired power stations were scrapped on the spot.
For Indian citizens, the decision to decommission the plants is about more than just international pledges to go green, a recent New York Times report found that the air pollution crisis kills 1.1 million Indians annually.
And smog in New Delhi, long considered the world’s most polluted city, is now so bad that you can see it from outer space, as confirmed by a series of photos released by NASA.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/worlds-largest-coal-company-closes-37-of-its-mines-thanks-to-green-energy_uk_59561799e4b05c37bb7d7f03
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More Than 300 US Cities Have Adopted the Paris Agreement (Op-Ed)
Jun 29, 2017 | Business Insider
By Luc Soete
When President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris agreement, the landmark climate accord signed by 196 nations that came into force in November 2016, the decision caused a significant negative backlash among other signatory countries.
Given that the US is one of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters, its June 1 reneging on the deal delivered a blow to the global agreement.
But, as many commentators were quick to point out, as long as other leaders didn’t follow Trump’s lead, it was largely a symbolic one.
So far, the international response has confirmed this: a chain reaction of support for climate change mitigation, from grassroots up to the highest ranks of government.
Making the planet great again
China has reiterated its support for the Paris agreement, and India, the world’s fourth-largest greenhouse gas emitter, seems likely to continue the renewable energy revolution already underway there.
Europe, led by Germany and France, is also stepping into the fray.
“Make our planet great again,” French President Emmanuel Macron retorted from the Élysée Palace on June 1, inviting American scientists to France for work on developing solutions to climate change.
In the same speech, Macron also proposed a follow up to the Paris agreement: a global pact on environmental justice, under which states could be held accountable for flouting the rights of a group or individual.
More than any other European leader, the 39-year-old French president seems to represent younger generations’ concerns about climate change. And, of course, the Paris agreement wouldn’t be the Paris agreement without France.
Heat islands
Trump’s environmentalism has also incentivized US stakeholders to play a more central role in holding up the American end of the Paris agreement, which then US secretary of state John Kerry signed in April 2016 with his granddaughter on his lap.
US cities, companies, universities and states are now taking the initiative to cooperate directly with other countries and coordinate initiatives on reducing greenhouse gas emissions via the UN’s Non-State Actor Zone for Climate Action portal (NAZCA), which recognizes the importance of sub-national actors in climate action. As of June 24, 331 US cities had adopted the Paris agreement, and at a mayors’ conference that concluded yesterday in Miami Republican and Democratic leaders supported.
These pledges may not be legally binding, as they are when countries sign agreements, but the commitments of US cities, states and companies, which will be reported and measured through NAZCA’s data partners, may well have a significant environmental impact.
As former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire philanthropist who has invested US$15 million in American cities’ effort to engage internationally, said about mitigating climate change in a recent interview on National Public Radio, “Local governments can do something, state governments less and federal governments almost nothing.”
Large cities give rise to the “urban heat island” effect, in which heat-trapping concrete and asphalt replace natural vegetation and water. This steamy situation is exacerbated by heat from cars, subway systems, air conditioners and the like.
According to new research reported in the journal Nature Climate Change, the heat island effect in the world’s most populous cities – a clutch of sprawling megalopolises that includes Chicago, Houston, and San Diego in the US, as well as Shanghai in China and Lagos in Nigeria – is expected to add two degrees to global warming by 2050.
The study by Francisco Estrada, W. J. Wouter Botzen and Richard S. J. Tol provides the first quantitative assessment of the economic costs of the joint impacts of local and global climate change for all major urban centers around the world.
The analysis, which looked at some 1,500 large cities, shows that the total economic costs of climate change for cities could be 2.6 times higher when heat island effects are taken into account than when they are not. For the worst-off cities, losses could reach more than 10% of their gross domestic product GDP by the end of the century.
There are relatively low-cost solutions to this highly localized problem, from cool pavements, which are designed to reflect more sunlight and absorb less heat, to green roofing.
According the the study, converting just 20% of a city’s rooftops and half of its pavements to modern heat-reducing versions could save up to 12 times what they cost to install and maintain, and reduce local air temperatures citywide by up to 0.8°C.
As study author Richard Tol has noted, “City-level adaptation strategies to limit local warming have important economic net benefits for almost all cities around the world.
It is clear that we have until now underestimated the dramatic impact that local policies could make in reducing urban warming.”
Global problems, local response
So, from Pittsburgh to Phuket, cities will be essential for keeping the increase in the average global temperature below 2°C, the main goal of the Paris agreement.
The unprecedented bottom-up commitment to this international climate deal is also in the clear interest of participating states and cities, which are most likely to directly and immediately feel the impact of global warming.
California, for example, has a long-term commitment to reducing emissions, alongside its unique technological strengths in renewable energy and research on autonomous cars. Meanwhile, the island state of Hawaii is particularly sensitive to climate change-related sea level rises.
Mayors and governors are also the public officials responsible for common infrastructural needs that can help population centres mitigate climate change, such as reinforcing dikes and improving public transit – eco-friendly investments that also improve quality of life for residents.
In neighbouring Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has made battling climate change a priority for his administration, many provinces, including populous Quebec and Ontario, are now making direct agreements with states and cities on cap-and-trade agreements and other environmental initiatives.
The world’s response to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement is a powerful reminder that global challenges – not just climate change but also conflict, migration and others – are profoundly intertwined with local and regional issues.
At a time when countries’ openness to the world has become a matter of contention, many of the world’s most pressing problems still require not just active international collaboration between nation states but also engagement on all levels of government, whether the administration in Washington likes it or not.
Paris, in this sense, was just the beginning.
http://www.businessinsider.com/cities-rally-around-the-paris-deal-2017-6
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The Unstoppable Renewable Energy Revolution Keeps Faltering
Jun 29, 2017 | Forbes
By Michael Lynch
Solar, wind and electric vehicles are now said to have such momentum that they are going to cause a peak in oil demand within as little as five years, according to the most optimistic projections. Solar and wind represent the bulk of new power capacity globally, the Chinese electric vehicle industry is booming, and India has embraced both solar and electric vehicles. “The electric vehicle revolution is now as unstoppable as the renewable revolution. China understands that fact better than any other country.” Joe Romm 9/1/16 while the BBC says, “India is embracing solar power.”
Costs have come down to the point where the Financial Times published an article titled, “The Big Green Bang: How renewable energy became unstoppable.” This has been much cited around the web, especially by advocates of “green” energy, of whom there are many, but others as well. One typical article was titled, “Futurist Ray Kurzweil Predicts Solar Industry Dominance In 12 Years –Trajectories Are Exponential” which looked at growth rates and the effect of compounding on market share over the long term.
Others have talked about falling costs which is encouraging ever more investment. “2015 has been a great year for solar... And the estimates for the next years are even better as the total installation cost of utility scale PV are expected to decrease by a further 20% over the next three years.” And lower oil and gas prices are said to be irrelevant. “Wind and solar have grown seemingly unstoppable. While two years of crashing prices for oil, natural gas, and coal triggered dramatic downsizing in those industries, renewables have been thriving.”
Support at the local level is touted, particularly as the Trump Administration pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord. “Pueblo, Colorado and Moab, Utah, this week became the 22nd and 23rd cities in the U.S. to commit to transition to 100 percent clean, renewable energy.” A number of states, led by California, have pushed their own programs and Andrew Winston in the Harvard Business Review noted “the business community does not want to leave the Paris climate agreement.”
It all sounds like Dorothy and her friends skipping gaily along towards the Emerald City while “Optimistic Voices” plays in the background (“Step into the sun, step into the light”). Unfortunately, reality is the wicked witch and the flying monkeys are starting to descend.
As the professors say, compare and contrast with the earlier quotes: “New investment in clean energy fell to $287.5bn in 2016, 18% lower than the record investment of $348.5bn in 2015 and 9% lower than the $315bn invested in 2014.” And where one story notes, “We are convinced China will become the leading market for electromobility,” Volkswagen brand chief Herbert Diess told Reuters at the Shanghai show, it also explained “In China, credits and rebates are driving impressive EV sales.” A recent report indicated market weakness in Chinese EV sales, although it is too early to say whether this is a trend. “The Chinese market had 6,260 new EVs registered in January, far from the 15,275 units of January 2016."
Which highlights the importance of why: “One suspected strategy involves manufacturers selling faulty or incomplete cars to related parties who pocket the subsidies and then return the cars. That could explain why wholesale shipments of electric cars between January and November were 56% above retail sales, according to LMC Automotive data. By contrast, in the broader car market, wholesale was 6% higher than retail.” Similarly, the IEA noted that wind power installations soared in China as builders rushed to meet a deadline for high priced power contracts, and then fell by nearly half in 2016.
Overall, the embrace appears to be of subsidies, not green technologies. In case after case, where subsidies or support is removed, sales suffer. “Sales in Denmark of Electrically Chargeable Vehicles (ECV), which include plug-in hybrids, plunged 60.5 percent in the first quarter of the year…. electric car dealers were for a long time spared the jaw-dropping import tax of 180 percent that Denmark applies on vehicles fueled by a traditional combustion engine.” The state of Georgia rescinded electric vehicle rebates and sales dropped by 80%.
And whereas general interest magazines like National Geographic note, “The prolonged plunge in fossil fuel prices is rippling across the globe. Yet it’s barely put a dent in the booming market for clean energy, heralding perhaps a new era for wind and solar,” others have found significant market weakness. “Global investments in renewable energy fell by almost a quarter in 2016 amid a drop in prices and lower spending in some markets, according to a U.N.-backed report published Thursday.”
The reality remains in the markets where governments reduced generous financial support for solar, wind and electric vehicles, sales have plummeted. New European solar installations dropped by one-third in 2016 as several countries reduced high prices for purchased power. Advocates tend to muddy the water by saying ““All we ask is for the government to stop improvising” (in Spain, in this case) instead of saying the sector is uncommercial and requires heavy financial assistance.
No question but that costs have dropped for wind, solar, and batteries for electric vehicles, but their success remains contingent on government support, which hardly makes them “unstoppable”. An end to heavy subsidies and mandates might not cause the near-disappearance of these industries as in the past, but some serious retrenchment is a real possibility and it’s puzzling that so many are treating that as impossible.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaellynch/2017/06/29/the-unstoppable-renewable-energy-revolution-keeps-faltering/#1722d43c71b7
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The Human Capital Investment: SDG7 and the Renewable Energy Generation (Op-Ed)
Jun 28, 2017 | Huffington Post
By Kristina Skierka & Danny Kennedy
Solving energy poverty is not a technology issue. With affordable new services, performance improvements, and the ability to pay-as-you-go on mobile money platforms, decentralized renewable energy (DRE) can enable the delivery of basic Tier 1 and Tier 2 energy access (e.g., light and mobile phone charging to everyone by 2030). While many countries are fighting a losing battle using business-as-usual approaches to reach electrification goals, the DRE sector—ranging from micro-hydro to mini-grids and mobile solar farms—is providing energy to more customers than many of the largest global utilities today. Not only is DRE a viable energy option, but evidence suggests that DRE can deliver a basic level of universal energy access in a fraction of the time and cost of conventional approaches
However, the challenges that limit the DRE sector’s ability to accelerate adoption of environmentally-friendly technology to achieve energy access—last mile-delivery, adoption at scale, leveling the playing field, financing—requires creativity, ingenuity and tenacity across the ecosystem to solve. In short, it takes human capital—the collective skills, knowledge, and intangible human assets—that will make or break SDG7—the sustainable development goal to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all. Despite the importance of human capacity supporting the spread of DRE technology, there has yet to be a coordinated global effort to develop a DRE-specific human capital pipeline to meet the needs of this rapidly growing sector.
Most commonly referred to as capacity-building, workforce development for decentralized renewables is not just about the DRE value chain, but also relates to capacity within a broader ecosystem: banks (commercial and development), utilities, technical assistance, advocates, financial professionals, engineers of all kinds, lawyers and entrepreneurs. The impact potential is enormous: Today, there are an estimated 170,000 jobs in the solar-powered lighting sector alone. And, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) in the future the entire DRE value chain—including sales, installation, service, appliances, operations and management—is projected to create 4.5 million jobs globally by 2030.
According to the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship’s Universal Energy Access: An Enterprise System Approach (2015) these millions of jobs are likely to spread across thousands of small and medium-sized businesses—up to 20,000. The more DRE companies there are, the more likely the nearly bottomless market of 2 billion people without reliable access to energy will have their needs met. Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) is bullish on the prospects for the sector: BNEF predicts off-grid solar technologies will firmly establish themselves in the mainstream over the next five years, generating sales of around $3.1 billion by 2020.
All of this potential for DRE to be a jobs creation engine and transform the lives of billions will go unrealized unless the global community prioritizes the human capital needs for a creative, empowered, educated entrepreneurs and workers. The energy sector globally is experiencing challenges getting good personnel. Industry hiring managers often report that lack of candidate training, experience, or technical skills are major problems. The 2017 Deloitte Human Capital Trends Report identified the key people-related issues that keep energy executives up at night: organizational structure, careers and learning, performance management, talent acquisition, and leadership. More, many of the jobs in clean technology and renewable energy needed to address the access problem are not in the 50 countries that suffer the most from energy poverty. Notably, Africa has a paltry 62,000, or 0.6%, of those jobs, and just 15,000 of them are in sub-Saharan Africa (not including South Africa).
We need to focus the global community today on developing the knowledge and interest in the sector to create a workforce that can build tens of thousands of companies (to get 20,000 to succeed ,many more will try and fail) that will deliver over 4 million jobs in next 13 years. While there are some excellent examples of DRE training and mentoring—Schneider Electric’s Access to Energy training programs or Free Electrons’ utility-backed cleantech accelerator that connects startups with utility companies to co-create the future of energy—we need a wholesale effort to collaboratively develop the human capacity pipeline needed to accelerate universal access to energy. Partnerships with universities and utilities, vocational schools, student organizations, and Workforce Development Boards are all tools that have been used for successful transitions for similar sub-sectors of the energy field, including energy efficiency and utility-scale solar.
Globally, future generations must be prevented from simply defaulting to fossil fuels for energy. If kerosene, diesel, and coal continue to be prioritized energy sources, climate change impacts will be exacerbated and universal energy access will not be achieved. As the global community rallies around SDG7, we must also develop a specific focus on training, workforce and ecosystem development and exciting the next generation about distributed renewable energy—or we will fail to achieve one of the most important and ambitious goals of this century.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-human-capital-investment-sdg7-and-the-renewable_us_59545488e4b0326c0a8d0dbe
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Jun 26, 2017 | Business Insider
By Madeleine Sheehan Perkins
India's prime minister Narendra Modi is meeting with President Donald Trump on Monday, and the agenda could include climate change as the two prepare for the G-20 Summit in July.
In the wake of Trump's withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, Modi might have a thing or two to lecture the American president about. India is leapfrogging the US with ambitious renewable energy goals - and it's achieving them.
Following the US' departure from the Paris accord, countries like India, China, and the EU have "stepped up to fill the void the US left behind" John Coequyt, the Sierra Club's global climate policy director, told Business Insider on Monday.
India wants to get nearly 60% of its energy from non-fossil fuel sources by 2027, and the country is on track to exceed the goals it set in its commitment to the Paris deal.
"India in particular has made huge progress in terms of not only meeting but actually being on track to exceed its Paris commitments," Coequyt said, "and as the cost of solar energy and other renewables continues to fall globally, we're only going to see that trend accelerate."
So how did India, infamous for its sometimes choking pollution in major cities, cut back its emissions faster than anyone predicted? One word: coal.
India has been unabashedly shutting down its coal plants. For example, The Independent reported last week that Coal India, the world's largest coal company that's responsible for 82% of India's coal, announced it was closing 37 mines due to the economic non-viability of the fossil fuel. Indian economic coal imports are falling, and Bloomberg reported the India's energy minister announced the government wants to do-away with coal imports entirely.
Dropping coal isn't a new phenomenon in India. From July 2015 to July 2016, India's "coal plant pipeline" fell by 40 gigawatts, according to Coal Swarm. And under its draft National Electricity Plan from December 2016, the country isn't planning on building any new coal power plants.
By virtue of adopting renewables with such gusto, about 25,000 remote villages in India could never use fossil fuels. They'll sail right past coal and start using solar, hydropower, and biomass as their first sources of electricity.
Some in India might be seeing renewable electricity before places in the United States. These Indian villages could "leapfrog" fossil fuels and go straight to renewables, Kartikeya Singh, a doctoral candidate at Tufts University, told Business Insider in 2016 - leapfrogging the US in the process.
By comparison, 64% of American electricity came from fossil fuelsincluding natural gas and coal in 2016, according to the US Energy and Information Administration. Renewable sources like solar, wind, and hydropower only accounted for only 15%.
Following through with his campaign trail promises, Trump aims to amp up coal production in the United States, first by rolling back environmental regulations and pulling out of the Paris agreement. EPA administrator Scott Pruitt has been reaching out to coal companies, and his senior policy advisor Mandy Gunasekara told a coal conference audience that the EPA would be there to help coal companies.
While the federal government is stepping down from its leadership role on fighting climate change, cities and companies are pledging their support. Twenty-nine states have adopted renewable energy goals, and the We Are Still In movement - a coalition of government players, academics, and big businesses that pledges to stick to the Paris agreement - represents $6.2 trillion of the US economy.
Businesses in the US and India can both see that phasing out fossil fuels and adopting renewables is the path forward.
"Shifting away from fossil fuels toward clean, renewable energy is not an option when it comes to the economy and healthy communities," Coequyt said. "That's a fact in India, in the US, and around the world."
During their working dinner on Monday night, Modi might just broach the topic of climate change with Trump.
http://nordic.businessinsider.com/modi-trump-meeting-india-renewables-climate-change-2017-6?r=US&IR=T
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Kenya: Power Authority Bets on Higher Ranking to Light Up More Homes
Jun 25, 2017 | All Africa
By James Kariuki
The Rural Electrification Authority (REA) is banking on its promotion to a higher ranking to accelerate provision of power in rural areas.
The authority has received approval from the State Corporation Advisory Committee to upgrade to Category Two from Three. With the new category, the agency will, among other things, be allocated more funds by the Treasury as well as employ more staff and remunerate them at competitive rates.
"This is a significant step as it will allow us to do a lot of things that we were unable to do under Category Three," said REA chairman Simon Gicharu.
With the new status, its budgetary allocation from the Treasury will rise by about Sh300 million annually.
One of the biggest obstacles to the authority's work, Mr Gicharu said, has been inadequate staff and inability to retain experienced and highly skilled employees.
This has made it difficult for the authority to properly monitor and follow up on projects across the country.
"Staffing has been our key handicap. Because we do not have enough manpower, we have been forced to hire external services. This is not only costly but it leads to poor workmanship," he said.
"The new category will enable us to hire the best and retain them as we will be able to remunerate them at competitive rates," the chairman said, adding that employees have been leaving the company citing poor pay."
To meet the manpower needs of the new organisation structure, the authority plans to employ 190 more people, taking its total workforce to 481. Currently the authority has 291 employees, of whom 113 are on contract.
"We will employ about 70 technical workers and about 30 administrative officials. This will see us do away with outsourcing of services," he said.
To fast-track delivery of services, the REA board says the authority will be restructured into three directorates headed by general managers. The directorates are: strategy and planning; corporate services; and technical services. They will be led by interim managers until substantive office holders are appointed.
The authority says it is now setting its sights on promotion to Category One. "We seek to ride on the new position to work towards attainment of category one status," Mr Gicharu said.
Being classified under category one will mean the agency will be in the same league as parastatals such as Kenya Power #ticker:KPLC and Kenya Pipeline. "Our aim is to be self-sustainable by commercialising our power-generation projects," the chairman said.
Making REA a commercial entity means it will no longer have to hand over its facilities to Kenya Power.
This will squarely place the agency in competition with the power distributor, something that the authority says will translate into improved services for consumers.
The promotion comes at a time when the authority is accelerating its rural electricity projects. It plans to spend Sh700 million to install seven diesel-powered generators (Gensets) in off-grid areas, thereby enabling more Kenyans in far-flung regions to access electricity.
The REA has already established a Genset station in Garissa at a cost of Sh100 million. The plant has been handed over to Kenya Power.
Gensets under construction are Kamorliban, Kakuma, Lokiriama, Kotulo, Banisa and Maikona. Mr Gicharu said that once completed, they will be handed over to Kenya Power.
He said the agency already has a Sh14 billion power plant with a capacity to generate 55 megawatts. "We will use this power to connect more primary schools this year," he added. About 22,590 primary schools have already been connected at a cost of Sh30 billion as part of efforts to implement digital learning.
http://allafrica.com/stories/201706250118.html
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India’s Problem with Renewable Energy (Op-Ed)
Jun 22, 2017 | Wall Street Journal
By Rupert Darwall
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Washington next week could prove to be his most important summit since Donald Trump became president. There is bound to be some friction, for instance over changes to America’s H-1B visa program for skilled workers. But the two democracies have many interests in common, the most significant being energy.
The U.S. and India were the biggest losers from the Paris climate accord. The U.S. decision to pull out should embolden India to do the same, and the two could cooperate on building the clean-coal energy infrastructure that India needs to grow its economy.
At the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, China and India together sank Western attempts to agree on a comprehensive climate treaty. But Xi Jinping’s accession in 2012 saw a sea change in Chinese policy and a new openness to multilateral approaches. This was seized on by the Obama administration, which negotiated the November 2014 U.S.-China climate deal that paved the way for the 2015 Paris accord.
When it comes to energy policy, China and India have divergent interests. China has many features of development maturity. While China’s per capita electricity consumption of 3,927 kWh in 2014 is lower than Western Europe’s, it is similar to countries such as Hungary and Poland.
As the world’s largest producer of solar photovoltaic panels, and with the ambition and means to achieve the same in wind power, China has a mercantilist interest in promoting renewable energy while remaining heavily dependent on coal.
India is in a different place. At 804 kWh, its per capita electricity consumption is little more than 20% of China’s. Even after two years of declining coal consumption, China’s increase in coal usage over the past 10 years exceeded India’s total consumption in 2016.
China can afford the rich man’s illusion of cheap renewable energy. It runs large trade surpluses and has $3 trillion in foreign-currency reserves. India has sizeable current-account deficits and reserves of $380 billion.
In the 2014 elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power promising to bring electricity to every village by 2022. Mr. Modi and his ministers know they can only deliver this promise with coal. According to India’s Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris Agreement, coal accounted for 60.8% of India’s installed capacity and “will continue to dominate power generation in future.”
From 2006 to 2016, Indian coal consumption increased by 88%, in 2015 overtaking the U.S. to become the world’s second-largest coal market. New Delhi plans to replace coal-fired power stations that are more than 25 years old with modern, supercritical plants. That should boost power-station thermal efficiency by nearly 70%, thereby lowering emissions. India’s energy minister, Piyush Goyal, calculates that modernizing India’s coal generation will have a far greater impact on reducing emissions than the Paris accord’s emphasis on renewable energy.
Meeting with U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry at the Clean Energy Ministerial meeting in Beijing earlier this month, India’s science and technology minister, Harsh Vardhan, commented that there had hardly been any mention of climate change. “They are pushing for clean coal,” he said of the Americans.
Under the Obama administration, there had not been much interest. “Since you have taken interest,” Mr. Vardhan said to Mr. Perry, “we can collaborate on the development of clean-coal technology.”
The fly in the ointment is India’s ambitious plans for wind and solar energy. Unlike cellular technology, which enables developing nations to leapfrog fixed-wire telephony, wind and solar energy are intermittent and therefore not reliable substitutes for dependable coal-generated power.
As Mr. Perry has noted, a reliable and resilient electric system is essential for public health, economic growth and job creation. The high fixed costs and zero marginal costs of wind and solar mean wholesale electricity prices trend towards zero, while their intermittency means gas, coal and nuclear plants operate less efficiently. But in the end the same amount of thermal-generating capacity is still needed, multiplying the investment required to fully electrify the Indian subcontinent.
Currently India’s leading electric companies, such as NTPC and Tata Power , generate the healthy profits necessary to build out the Indian grid. But this won’t last, if Germany’s example is anything to go by. In the seven years from December 2007, three German utilities saw the destruction of €68.9 billion ($76.77 billion) in shareholder value.
Wholesale electricity prices in India are already plunging. Over the past nine years, thermal-generating capacity utilization has fallen to 60% from 79%. Germany can tolerate this kind of value destruction because it has a working grid. Young, fast-growing economies like India’s can’t.
Much of the blame for the renewables push rests on international development agencies. The World Bank’s 2016 Climate Action Plan promotes renewable energy as essential to stabilizing the climate, but it doesn’t mention the damaging impact of intermittency on the long-term health of the grid.
Putting more wind and solar energy on India’s grid will push up costs and retard Indians’ access to cheap, reliable power. Ultimately it risks locking India in permanent economic inferiority to China. That outcome isn’t in the interests of India or America. Whatever Mr. Modi says about India’s continued participation in the Paris agreement, as a political leader he has something in common with Mr. Trump: He will put his country’s interests first.
Mr. Darwall is the author of “The Age of Global Warming: A History” (Quartet, 2013).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/indias-problem-with-renewable-energy-1498149487
Global News
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