This is a lightly edited transcript of the Giles Parkinson and David Leitch interview with Kingsmill Bond, the chief energy strategist for Carbon Tracker. You can listen to the interview on the Energy Insiders Podcast here.
Giles Parkinson
This week Carbon Tracker and Ember released a very significant report talking about the potential of wind and solar and there ability to help this sort of massive transition that we’re about to embark on in the world. And we talked to Kingsmill Bond, who’s the chief energy strategist for Carbon Tracker. Kingsmill, thank you very much for joining Energy Insiders.
29 April 2021
As we saw last week, the world’s biggest economies are, slowly but surely, ratcheting up their climate ambitions. For the US, for instance, an ambition for a fully clean grid by 2035 is one step closer, with an upcoming policy to set a target of 80% clean power by 2030; merely nine years from now. The bulk of this will be driven by wind and solar. And ditto for the UK, whose grid ambitions involve a 95-99% zero carbon grid by 2035.
As RenewEconomy reported yesterday, a new report from Australia’s grid operator, AEMO, shows that the transition is accelerating. “The two most striking elements of the Q1 report, though, were the fall to record lows of black coal output – down to an average of 11,006MW, its lowest Q1 output since NEM start more than two decades ago, and 1,018MW lower than the same period last year – largely as a result of more outages and displacement by rooftop solar”, wrote Sophie Vorrath and Giles Parkinson. And gas-fired power had its lowes
29 April 2021
The Australian Energy Market Commission has announced major changes to the way “system strength” is managed on Australia’s main grid, effectively ending its controversial “do no harm” legislation from 2017 and putting the responsibility on network owners to manage the issue.
System strength is an essential grid service that is key to maintaining voltage control in the face of a disturbance, and concerns about the state of system strength has caused significant delays to the commissioning of many big wind and solar farms, and caused many to have their output reduced to manage the risk.
In 2017, in what was widely seen as a panicked response to the South Australia blackout and the Finkel Review, the AEMC introduced new rules – known as the “do no harm” rule – that put the emphasis on new generators to “make good” any assumed threat to the grid their added capacity might create.
27 April 2021
One of the more insidious claims at last week’s ‘Leaders Climate Summit’ coming from Australia’s leadership – namely, the Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Energy and Emissions Reductions Minister Angus Taylor – is that Australia has been a global leader in climate action, and particularly for renewable energy.
“We are deploying renewable energy ten times faster than the global average per person. We have the highest uptake of rooftop solar in the world”.
In some senses, it is true. Australia really does have the world’s highest per-capita installations of solar PV, by capacity. The rate of renewable energy growth is uniquely high, though “ten times faster than the global average per person” is hard to verify.
28 April 2021
South Australia has set a stunning new benchmark in the electricity market, with its big share of rooftop solar sending the average daytime wholesale price of electricity to below zero in the first quarter.
According to the Energy Market Operator, the average price of wholesale power in South Australia between 10am and 3.30pm was minus $12/MWh in the three months to March 31 – the first time this has occurred in Australia’s main grid.
South Australia already leads the world in the share of wind and solar in its grid – 60 per cent over the last 13 months – but it is the growing impact of rooftop solar that is causing the biggest frowns at AEMO as it tries to keep the grid stable and the lights on.