Environment

Contested territory

In Environment, Social justice on September 5, 2016

Some Pacific Island communities are already moving themselves beyond rising tides, but there’s nothing simple about how, why or when they’re doing it.

FOR the last ten years, Ursula Rakova has been trying to move her small community to higher ground.

Rakova grew up on the Carteret Islands, Papua New Guinea. “It’s beautiful – like white, sandy beaches,” she says. “The sea is very clear. I mean, if you wanted a holiday, that is a place you will want to go – except that, if you intend to go for two weeks, you should bring extra food to cater for a month, in case the storms decide to come.”

Carteret Islanders paddling a traditional canoe. (Image courtesy of Tulele Peisa.)

The atoll is in the South Pacific, three hours by boat “on a really calm day” from Buka, the northernmost island of Bougainville.

A decade ago, at the request of her elders, Rakova founded an organisation called Tulele Peisa – which means “sailing the waters on our own” – to guide her people’s relocation. She toured Australia in April this year, to muster support and funds for the move, and to advocate for climate change mitigation. One evening at the University of Melbourne, she told a small audience: “We can no longer tell when the strong winds are coming. The climate is changing and changing fast.”

Progress, however, has been slow. Rakova says the Carteret Island population numbers 2700. The Catholic Church donated four parcels of land in Bougainville. So far, only ten families, just over 100 people, have moved to one of those plots, at Tinputz.

Ursula Rakova speaking in Brisbane in 2010. (Image courtesy of Wendy Flannery/Friends of the Earth)

Rakova prizes the carefulness and thoroughness of the transition process, but the delays are a source of anguish. “As I’m talking to you, the schools on the island are closed,” she tells me. “Why are they closed? The children cannot get enough food to get them to concentrate in class.”

“The Carterets will not be underwater soon, but growing food is becoming very very difficult. Sustaining lives on the island is the biggest question and it’s urgent,” she says. “I thought the government in Bougainville would have declared a state of emergency on the Carterets many years back.”

The Carteret Islanders’ new settlement at Tinputz is just one example among many Pacific Island communities in flux – from tiny villages though to whole cities, from mere metres to thousands of nautical miles, on someone else’s land or their own. In the media, Pacific islands are rapidly populating with apocryphal climate change “firsts”: the first islands to disappear, the first “climate refugees”, the first village to relocate, the first city to move, the first nation to disappear.

But as Rakova knows too well, what’s happening isn’t straightforward. It’s a complex phenomenon, one that encompasses lived-experience and science, perception and propaganda, concepts of justice and questions of land. So why are people planning to relocate in the Pacific? Is it something new? Who’s talking about it, and what are they saying?

Is it climate change?

In 2012, Dr Simon Albert was out on a boat with an old man from the Solomon Islands. “He pointed at a reef, and said: ‘There used to be islands there – I was camping and fishing here with my son ten years ago,’” Albert says.

The researcher, from University of Queensland’s school of civil engineering, was surprised. It prompted him to search for old photos. “Sure enough, ten years ago, it was a significant, five-hectare island,” he says.

Later, he spent weeks in a dusty archive in Honiara, seeking out aerial images of over 30 islands going back to just after World War II. After detailed analysis, the researchers concluded that five islands had disappeared and a further six had shrunk severely. “These aren’t little ephemeral sand cays,” Albert says. “These are islands with substantial tropical vegetation on them. There’s a reasonable chance they’re 1,000 years old.”

The results were published in May this year, and induced an unexpected frenzy among media eager to report on frontline evidence of climate change. The results were more nuanced, however: Albert and his team attributed the sea-level rise to both climate change and climatic cycles.

“The Solomons, over the last 20 years, has been this perfect storm of high rates of sea-level rise, more trade winds and high wave energy,” he explains. But that doesn’t diminish the meaning of the findings: the conditions in the Solomons provide “insight into the future impacts of accelerated sea-level rise”.

At the time Albert began that paper, he and his colleagues were working on a plan for the wholesale relocation of Taro, the provincial capital of Choiseul, in the Solomon Islands. It was reported as the “first township” in the Pacific to relocate because of climate change. (Taro remains in the same place, however: “The sums of money are significant,” Albert says ruefully. “They’re waiting for someone to knock on their door with 100 million dollars.”)

The threat of climate change was just one of the drivers for the relocation plan, alongside pressing concerns of population growth, coastal erosion and tsunami risks. But the prospect of increasing rates of sea-level rise did change the equation. “It no longer made sense to invest in infrastructure on a place that has a very defined life,” he says.

The case of Taro offers a good case study for the environmental issues elsewhere in the western tropical Pacific, Albert explains. Erosion and flooding threaten villages and infrastructure in many places, but these problems are largely caused by extreme weather, seawalls or inappropriate planning and development – not just sea-level rise propelled by climate change.

The Carteret Islands are another of the “firsts”. Professor John Connell, a geographer from the University of Sydney, began a recent paper, in Asia Pacific Viewpoint, with a startling quote lifted from an article published online in 2014. It claimed that the Carteret Islanders were the first entire community in the world to be displaced by climate change. “The island they call home will be completely underwater by 2015.” (As Rakova told me: it isn’t, and won’t be any time soon.)

Connell has been writing about the Carteret Islands since the 1980s. Despite noting that scientific studies have been absent there, Connell surmised that the primary cause of the islands’ problems is “human influence” – clearing mangroves, dynamiting reefs and building sea walls – along with cyclical weather extremes, such as king tides. Sustenance, too, has been a long-term problem. From the 1960s, he said, patrol reports by the Australian colonial administration “commented on food and timber shortages, and occasionally made reference to malnutrition”.

Climate change is present in the Pacific – as everywhere – but its effects on people and settlements are hard to delineate. A 2014 report by Australia’s CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology described a trend of more warmer days and nights in the Western Tropical Pacific, but variable rainfall, variable rates of sea-level rise, and no clear signal in the number of intense cyclones. Its long-term projections include a doubling or quadrupling in the frequency of extreme rainfall by 2090, as well as rising seas and fewer, but more severe, tropical cyclones.

Does it matter?

In early 2015, Jillian Campbell travelled with local researchers around Nauru, Kiribati and Tuvalu, asking nearly 6000 people about their basic needs, environmental problems and migration patterns. It was a project of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. The researchers told participants it was about climate change, but from then on, they didn’t mention the hot-button words. “We didn’t want to bias the survey, because climate change is becoming such a catchphrase,” Campbell says. Instead, they asked questions about people’s observations of flooding or food availability.

In her findings, however, Campbell connected their answers to the impacts climate change. Most people in each country have experienced climate change impacts, she says. They reported things like increased flooding, saltwater intrusion and drought. In Tuvalu and Kiribati, seven out of ten people said they might need to leave if those problems grew more acute.

“I was surprised at the number of people who feel they’d have to migrate if things became worse,” Campbell says. Livelihoods are especially precarious in the outer islands of Kiribati. “I think people are really struggling to survive, and if climate change worsens any of these things, they won’t be able to.”

When that kind of need arises, the precise degree to which climate change is culpable is unimportant. But there are reasons why the causes and semantics do matter: the adaptation decisions villagers and governments make, and their ability to marshal funding, is influenced by the framing of their problems. Should people move, or are there other solutions? Who decides? Who owns the land? Who should go? Where to?

Christine Fung has been wrestling with these questions – and many more – for the last three years, working on the Fijian government’s forthcoming relocation guidelines. “As the consultations went along, it became very apparent that it is quite a complex issue,” she says.

Fung is the technical advisor on a programme called ‘Coping with Climate Change in the Pacific Island Region’, coordinated by development agencies GIZ and Pacific Community.

In Fiji, over 60 villages have already been identified for relocation and the issue often makes the front page of the Fiji Times. As the government prepares its guidelines, Fung has been collating the lessons from previous relocations, such as the stalled attempt to move the village of Narikoso, on Ono Island.

In Narikoso, the coastline has eroded about 15 metres in the last three decades. A few years ago, villagers decided to relocate to higher ground close by, within its customary land. “On that request, the government cleared a hill behind Narikoso for the new site, but the villagers thought it was an unstable area,” Fung explains. “The decision for the entire village to move was largely based on emotions and misconceptions rather than real scientific studies.”

Subsequently, technical assessments have indicated that only the first row of houses is now at risk. The erosion had been worsened by a seawall built in the 1960s. “Unfortunately, in the process of clearing the new site they also removed mangroves and coastal vegetation – the very environment that was protecting the village,” she says. So far, no one has moved, but a partial relocation will begin soon.

“Relocation should be the last option,” Fung says. “But regardless of the cause, if people’s lives are under threat, then they need to move.”

Moving close

Vunidogoloa, on the island of Vanua Levu, is another of “the firsts”: it’s often described as the first community to permanently relocate due to climate change. In 2014, the village retreated about 20 minutes walk from the coastline, but still within its clan land.

Dr Celia McMichael, an anthropologist at the University of Melbourne, travelled to Fiji in late 2015 and again in June 2016, visiting several communities. She says relocation is being driven “in villages where there is a charismatic leader who is clear that they’re affected by climate change”. That’s the case in Vunidogoloa, where headman Sailosi Ramatu has appeared in many media interviews.

McMichael’s ongoing research is about what happens next: “When it comes to the crunch, what is the experience of moving? How does it affect their lives and livelihoods, and the future for their families and communities?” In Vunidogoloa, people told her they’re happy with their new site. The old village was flooding often, and the new one is much more accessible – it’s right on a bus route to the market. The change has influenced village life: dwellings are smaller, so people now live as nuclear families. For the time being there’s no church and some people worry that the devoutly Methodist congregation is splintering. And because it’s hilly, some elderly people feel less mobile and more isolated.

But people’s sense of belonging wasn’t tied to the old location. “They said they have wanted to move for decades,” McMichael explains. “Everyone narrates the village as mobile. Historically, people used to live up in the hills because there was a threat of an attack coming from the sea. Then, after colonisation and ‘missionisation’, people came down to the coastline.”

In Vunidogoloa and some other Fijian villages, she says, people are telling a story of mobility and agency at the same time as a story of being struck by climate change. The relocations offer a contrast to the spectacle presented in international media, where people are often reduced to “climate refugees” in waiting.

The notion of climate refugees is very much contested. Among researchers there’s widespread agreement that worldwide, the impacts of climate change will cause more people to be displaced internally than internationally. Some academics have also criticised environmental campaigners and journalists for employing the suffering (or threat) of climate refugees to spruik their cause or make headlines. In a 2010 paper, ‘Wishful Sinking’, Dr Carol Farbotko described “a problematic moral geography… only after they disappear are the islands useful as an absolute truth of the urgency of climate change, and thus a prompt to save the rest of the planet.”

Moving far

In Fiji so far, planned village relocations generally involve relatively small retreats within clan land. When people plan to move onto someone else’s territory, the task becomes even more complex.

Professor Jane McAdam, from the law faculty of the University of New South Wales, says there’s a set of “very, very tricky questions to be balanced”. In a paper published in 2015, together with Elizabeth Ferris from Brookings Institution, she raises issues ranging from access to land and the maintenance of cultural identities, to decision-making authority, consent and compensation, and, subsequently, the difficult prospect of guaranteeing livelihoods, infrastructure and public services.

In mid-2014, Kiribati received global press for its decision to purchase 20 square kilometres of land on Vanua Levu, Fiji. Then-president Anote Tong was quoted stating it might be used for relocation as a last resort. Subsequently, he said the purpose was to guarantee food security.

Tong was also renowned for championing the concept of “migration with dignity”. But the government’s stance is more a vision statement than a policy: an aspiration to create opportunities for I-Kiribati to migrate and to lift education levels so they’re more attractive as migrants. For now, however, migration options remain limited. The population is over 100,000. Every year, 75 families are eligible to migrate to New Zealand. To work in Australia, I-Kiribati can apply for (difficult to get) skilled worker visas, seasonal worker visas, or one of only 250 places under the new two-year “micro-state visa”, divided between Kiribati and the much smaller nations of Nauru and Tuvalu.

McAdam says cross-border migration at present remains a matter for individuals, rather than entire communities. But with more planned relocations on the horizon, she says we can still learn from two historical cases in the Pacific, and the legacies borne by subsequent generations.

In December 1945, the British Phosphate Commission expanded its mining operations on the island of Banaba, at the expense of the locals: they were moved to Rabi Island, in Fiji. Then, in 1947, just two years later, people from another Pacific Island, Vaitupu, settled on Kioa, an island close by.

Whereas the Banabans (who were from present-day Kiribati) were forced to leave, the Vaitupuans (part of present-day Tuvalu) initiated the move themselves as a long-term precaution against overcrowding.

When McAdam visited, nearly 70 years later, she found a stark contrast. “The Banabans thought they had been coerced in moving, that they’d lost control over their resources and their destiny,” she says. “The Vaitupuans say: ‘We pulled together as a community, we were pioneers, we really built something’. It wasn’t always rosy, but certainly the idea of relocation came from within the community.”

McAdam says it’s clear that climate change will exacerbate existing vulnerabilities, and act as tipping point for displacement. The experience of the Banabans provides a warning about the sense of injustice that can endure when people are resettled without being involved or in control. “People need to have access to participatory processes,” she says, “particularly those who might not have a strong formal voice at the table.”

We are moving

Ursula Rakova lives at the Carteret Islanders’ new settlement at Tinputz, on Bougainville. At night she tries to catch up on emails, because in the daytime, she’s usually caught up doing the work of connecting with “the host community” – contributing to local fundraising and various celebrations. The challenges are deep: the land Tulele Peisa was given by the Catholic Church is in four locations, one on a different island. The Carteret Islanders’ language is Halia, which isn’t one of the 43 languages spoken on Bougainville.

Tulele Peisa is documenting aspects of life and culture on the Carterets to form part of the ongoing school curriculum. Custodianship of the land is matrilineal in the Carterets, Rakova says, and so it is with the new plots of land on Bougainville. Rakova has found men more resistant than women to establishing the new location. “It’s just about being lazy to do manual work,” Rakova laughs. “Because all they do is sit around the coconut trees, in the shade, and do nothing but tell stories. We feel it’s actually the women who are turning the minds of their husbands around.”

Rakova hopes that in another ten years, they will have settled all the parcels of land they’ve been given so far, and maybe secured more. “But I know it will not be,” she says, because funding has been too hard to come by. “The sustainable livelihood program is progressing quite well, but no one is so willing to fund the construction part of the program.”

There is something else she is clear about – she doesn’t accept that the Carteret Islanders are refugees. “We are internally displaced. We are relocating because of the rising sea levels and the impact of what’s happening destroying our food gardens, eroding our shorelines, breaking our island in half. We are moving, but we are moving with dignity. We are moving with our culture, our way of life.”

Read the article at Nature Climate Change

This article was published in Nature Climate Change, September 2016

Community power

In Environment, Social justice on March 17, 2016

Could a partnership between a small town and a large utility help to transform the Australian electricity grid?

FIVE years ago, Geoff Park and his neighbours began investigating whether their village, Newstead, could become Australia’s first 100 per cent renewable-powered town.

Newstead is in south-eastern Australia, one-and-a-half hours drive from Melbourne. It has a population of 800, but boasts more than fifty volunteer groups, and, among its most active residents, fierce civic pride. “Now you’ve visited,” one man told me, “you will decide to move here.”

Motivated by rising electricity costs, Park and the group began by completing energy efficiency audits of 400 out of the town’s 500 households – an extraordinarily high participation rate. But when I first spoke to them, two years ago, the project had stalled.

Together with a commercial partner, they had researched creating an embedded micro-grid, and attempted to contact the private company that owns the poles and wires, Powercor. “We needed their cooperation to find out how much power was being used in the town,” Park said in 2013. “But they refused to even answer our letters or emails or phone calls.”

The situation has since changed. In early 2015, the group received a A$200,000 grant from the state government to develop a business case. Then in September, a high-level delegation from Powercor visited. Afterwards, the parties began negotiating a Memorandum of Understanding to govern the project.

Park and the other volunteers from “Renewable Newstead” haven’t settled on the technical details. “It could be anything from panels on people’s roofs, to big clusters on community buildings, to some sort of solar farm. I suspect it will include battery storage,” Park said to me. “The biggest issue is to get the network to cope with whatever we’re doing. Will Powercor collaborate with us?”

What happens next in Newstead matters. It is a case study for an emerging global phenomenon: the shift from a centralised, fossil fuel–powered grid to more decentralised, renewable electricity systems. Can the old system work with the new? Can communities protect their worst-off and keep the profits? And will governments help or hinder that change?

Renewable Newstead’s Geoff Park speaks with Melissa O’Neill from Powercor

A tough couple of years

Central Victoria, the region surrounding Newstead, is becoming a hub for community-owned renewable energy – but nothing has come easily.

Daylesford and Hepburn are twin towns only a short drive south of Newstead. On a Saturday morning in early November, over 100 people seated themselves at the Daylesford town hall, and waited politely for the annual general meeting of their community wind farm – the Hepburn Wind cooperative – to begin. Outside, the footpaths thrummed with city tourists, there to relax in day-spas and visit the mineral springs.

The Hepburn Wind cooperative is Australia’s first and only community-owned wind farm; it took six painstaking years to recruit over 2,000 member-owners, raise capital, gain planning approval and build the two turbines, which they named Gale and Gusto. In 2011 the turbines began generating; they produce more electricity than the households in both towns use. In the last two years, however, the cooperative has been buffeted by federal government policies.

The nation’s electricity consumption had peaked in 2008-2009 and then fallen, and that had caused a political problem. Instead of simply supplying extra demand in the network, new clean energy would now have to displace established coal-fired generators.

In 2013, Australians elected a conservative government – led by then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott – that was determined that coal would not be displaced. Abbott had previously described climate change as “absolute crap” and campaigned hard against the carbon price by repeating a slogan: “Axe the tax”. In office, he described wind farms as “ugly” and “noisy” and, while opening a new coal mine, declared: “Coal is good for humanity”. His government set about abolishing or undermining the nation’s suite of climate change policies, including the carbon tax and a target for renewable energy.

Back in Daylesford town hall, the Hepburn Wind directors reported that as a result of those policy changes, earnings had fallen by nearly one-quarter. The cooperative had stripped back its staffing and devoted its income to paying down debt. No dividends would be paid to members. “Gale and Gusto are pumping out electrons, they’re doing fantastically,” said one director. “But the political environment we’ve been operating in has been vile.”

Taryn Lane manoeuvred around the hall, checking the sound, fixing PowerPoint presentations. Formerly an international development worker, Lane has been employed by the cooperative since 2011, and also for its offshoot, Embark, a not-for-profit consultancy promoting community renewables.

“It’s been a tough couple of years,” she told me later. “The whole industry has gone backwards.”

According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, new investment in large-scale wind and solar farms in Australia fell by nearly 90 per cent in 2014 compared to 2013, while elsewhere in the world it rose by 16 per cent. But all the while, householders continued to purchase solar panels. Surreptitiously, Australians have been installing rooftop photovoltaic systems at a higher rate than anywhere else in the world, with panels now on one out of every seven houses.

And, even more quietly, a parallel movement has developed: community energy. In 2011, Hepburn Wind became the first community-owned electricity generator in Australia. Now, there are 22 completed projects nationwide, mainly solar installations, and 70 more in various stages of development: the townsfolk of end-of-the-line Tyalgum want to cut themselves off from the grid, while professionals in Sydney are putting panels on the city’s convention centre. Another town, Yackandandah, is aiming for “energy sovereignty” by 2022. Calling themselves “Totally Renewable Yackandandah” or TRY for short, residents explain the meaning of community energy by way of “three D’s”: “decarbonising, decentralising and democratising”.

Lane travels often to meet and support these people. “Over the past couple of years I saw that communities and local councils are identifying their own renewable energy targets,” she said. “They’re stepping up, because the federal government wasn’t delivering on their expectations.”

In the months before the Hepburn Wind meeting, the outlook for renewable energy improved abruptly. After nearly two years of uncertainty, the Abbott government finally set a reduced target for renewable energy. Even though it was lower than before, the policy was now clear for investors. Then, in September 2015, Abbott was ousted by a more moderate leader, Malcolm Turnbull – who in a previous stint as leader of his party had supported a carbon tax. The market price earned by larger-scale renewable generators, such as Hepburn Wind, increased by 50 per cent in just three months.

The state government in Victoria had changed too, and among its early decisions were the reversal of strict planning rules for wind farms and the awarding of two grants for community energy proposals – one of them for Newstead.

It also commissioned Lane and others to draft a new Guide to Community-Owned Renewable Energy. The state energy minister, Lily D’Ambrosio, attended the Daylesford meeting to launch the guide.

The event was unexpectedly emotional – a collective, tentative, sigh of relief. During her speech, D’Ambrosio removed her reading glasses and looked up from her notes. “It’s dangerous when I go off script,” she said. “But empowerment is so important in all of this. My view is that for ordinary citizens, energy has been something that happens to us. I think people are drawing a line under that.

“Dramatic change will have to happen in the way our energy is produced, how it is supplied, and how much we use of it. Community energy, community organisations, are going to be such a vital part of that transition.”

The Newstead swimming pool, which is run by volunteers from the town

Disruption to the grid

Newstead was founded in the mid-19^th century when farmer-settlers took land on the region’s grassy river flats, at the expense of the Dja Dja Wurrung people. It became a farming community, then a home for miners in the gold rush, and then a century later, a haven for artists and musicians.

Today, one-fifth of residents have solar panels on their roofs. The rest of the town sources its electricity from brown coal–fired generators about 400 kilometres away, in the Latrobe Valley. It arrives by means of a vast system of poles and wires, greased by layers of bureaucracy and market ideology.

When Bruce Mountain completed his engineering degree in Cape Town, he found himself drawn to those greasy layers; he was more interested in the economics and regulation of energy than its technology. Years later, he moved to Australia and set up as an independent energy economist. “I got really exercised by what happened in networks in Australia, which has no parallel internationally,” he said. “It’s been a complete train smash.”

In Australia as elsewhere, Mountain said, electricity generation began as a local concern: “Typically tallow – animal fat, whale fat – and a little bit of hydro around rivers here and there – those were the sources of energy production from the 1870s onwards.”

Over time, production became more centralised, as larger, cheaper generating stations were built. In Victoria, the Yallourn Power Station was first proposed in 1919; from then on, brown coal generators in the Latrobe Valley powered more and more of the state, and eventually Newstead, in 1958.

“That’s been the pattern everywhere in the world,” Mountain said. But the pattern is being disrupted. Over the last decade, the price of solar energy has plummeted, and, because rooftop panels produce electricity where it is used, they bypass the extra costs imposed by distributors and retailers. “The network still has value when the sun isn’t shining,” Mountain said. “But even that value is under threat from the revolution going on in energy storage technology. The underlying economic value of networks has declined massively.

“Solar PV is basically taking the industry back to its roots with new technology. In Australia we’ve lead that seismic shift, principally because of the economics: our solar is so abundant and our networks are so expensive.”

Electricity prices vary from state to state in Australia, but they have risen sharply everywhere, approximately doubling since 2007. (In Victoria, distribution charges are less responsible for the spike than elsewhere. According to Powercor, their costs comprise under a quarter of householders’ bills, compared to nearly half in other states.)

Between reports for clients, Mountain has been chipping away at a PhD – “It has no end!” – analysing the way electricity regulation has failed in Australia. The networks are regulated monopolies (some were privatised, others are state government–owned corporations) and they receive a return on the value of their assets.

Mountain describes the set-up as a “golden goose”. He has been among the most vocal of the analysts who argue that the regulatory system has permitted enormous over-investment in infrastructure. He argues the value of distribution assets must be written down – a sunk cost of A$60-70 billion – otherwise, network owners will seek only to protect their guaranteed returns.

“Local production is often the cheapest,” he said. “It must be allowed to compete fairly with centralised generation. The issue is: will the institutional arrangements allow it, or will they continue to stand in the way?”

For now, despite the sheer numbers of solar rooftops in Australia, they contribute only 2 per cent of the nation’s electricity generation. Community energy projects comprise only a tiny fraction again.

Mountain pointed to another barrier, especially for community energy projects such as Newstead: complexity. It’s a daunting task for volunteers: they must find a large sum of capital to pay for the generation technology; they need expertise in metering and billing; and their systems must allow for customer choice. They have to negotiate backup supply in a wholesale energy market that has very volatile prices.

“What they need is smart business people slaving away for a period of time. Those people cost money. And you’ve got to fund them and manage them and make them accountable so they don’t just extract rents from the process,” Mountain said. “Quite a lot of people who are attracted to community energy are people with a good dose of wishful thinking.”

An unlikely partnership

In mid-October, I met Powercor’s head of corporate affairs, Melissa O’Neill, and its head of strategy, Lara Olsen. Both of them, along with their CEO, had joined the company recently – after Newstead’s first, unsuccessful attempt to collaborate. Their network spans the sparsely populated north and west of Victoria. (Under the name CitiPower, they also manage the network in Melbourne’s west.)

Olsen previously worked at the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, one of the clean energy bodies the federal government has vowed to abolish. “When I was approached to work at Powercor they said, ‘We’re looking for someone with a different background’,” she said. “As customers adapt what they’re looking for, then as a service provider we need to adapt to deliver that.”

The pair insisted that it is in Powercor’s interests to collaborate with Newstead. The company wants to see if the project is replicable. “You’ve got a community saying they want to make a decision about how their energy is generated, transported and used,” O’Neill said. “Really, who better to help with the solution than someone who owns and operates the grid?”

Despite Powercor’s enthusiasm, the negotiations with Newstead dragged on. Park had hoped for an agreement by late October. On a Saturday in late November, he reported back to a small group of volunteers gathered in the Newstead community garden – a project they had conceived and built, doggedly, during Australia’s long drought last decade.

The draft agreement outlined the information to be shared: data on local consumption and network costs, tariff forecasts, and an analysis of possible business models. He estimated it was still a fortnight from completion. It had seemed a fortnight away for the last two months.

In his spare time, Park –a landscape ecologist – is a prolific bird photographer. On his blog, Natural Newstead, he only posts images from within 15 kilometres of the town; the blog is one of the top 100 bird watching websites in the world.

“I’m motivated by climate change and responding to that, but this is not about saving the world,” Park said. “Our main interest is not so much in renewable energy; it’s in community building.

“We’re driven by the questions of how we work as a community into the future, solve problems, and get everybody involved. Newstead is very cohesive and organised. We put our energy into things we think we can win.”

In the case of Renewable Newstead, their motivations are to keep people on the grid, and keep it cheap. The town has comparatively low average income, and scores highly on measures of socio-economic disadvantage. Many residents already struggle to pay their bills. Park and the others want to save their grid: to find a new economic model that keeps it affordable for everyone.

Newstead’s main advisor, Tosh Szatow, runs a consultancy called Energy for the People and a crowdfunding platform called The People’s Solar. He’s also advising Tyalgum, the hamlet planning to go off-grid altogether. In a video promoting that project, he wears a blue t-shirt that says: “Stick it where the sun shines”.

In the Australian media, he is often asked to talk about the so-called “death spiral” for networks: the scenario in which householders install solar and batteries, and leave the grid, which drives up network prices, which causes more people to leave the grid – and so on.

“If network companies don’t adapt and find a way of partnering with consumers, then people will leave the grid,” he said. “It really is a matter of time.”

In Newstead, however, he believes there is a way for the old and new technology to combine. His advice is to establish a micro-grid, still owned by Powercor but managed by the community – it’s the kind of model used by shopping centres, apartment buildings and caravan parks, but it has never been used for an entire town. Under those circumstances, residents could run a local generator-retailer, which returns profits to the community.

“We’re talking about a model where the assets aren’t written down. People stay connected to the network,” Szatow said.

Most importantly, it would allow the coordination, planning and investment necessary to reach 100 per cent renewable energy. If it’s successful, Szatow believes it will be an example for others to follow. “The only thing that stops it being replicated is: does a community have leaders like they have in Newstead? Do they have that pragmatism? Do they have the ability to build consensus locally? That’s the magic ingredient.”

The beginning

While they waited to sign the agreement with Powercor, the Newstead volunteers turned their minds to what would come next: in-depth community consultation, data collection and hard-headed business models. In the December edition of the local newsletter, the Echo, they wrote: “Current, rapid, changes in the energy and power industry are making everyone uneasy about the future.” They asked for feedback about what they’d done so far, and asked for “people of energy” to join the team. “Your views will help us plan for the next stage.”

Finally, in early January 2016, an entourage from Powercor drove to Newstead. Alastair McKeown, the chief finance officer, arrived in a silver Porsche to sign the agreement on the company’s behalf.

Geoff Park had pushed together two tables in the town’s only café. He expressed his gratitude for the unlikely partnership between the corporation and the small community, two entities “poles apart”. A surprising and satisfying conversation ensued, as the out-of-town professionals and local volunteers traded speculation and frank questions about the future of energy, for more than an hour. “We know there’s change coming,” McKeown said.

Park summarised the long history of the project so far: five years, only to reach the beginning. Now, many will be watching, from near and far.

“One of the things we respond to very well in this town,” he said, “is when people say: ‘You’ll never be able to do that.’”

This article was published in Nature Energy

The last drop of water in Broken Hill

In Environment on June 30, 2015

As the drill is plugging downward at a thousand feet of level,
If the Lord won’t send us water, oh, we’ll get it from the devil.
—Banjo Paterson, “Song of the Artesian Water” (1896)

“YOU’RE under five metres of water right now,” Barry Philp says. “Hard to imagine, isn’t it?” I look through the windshield of his four-wheel-drive. The sky is blue and empty and the land is dead flat to the horizon.

We’re rattling along a grey clay track on the bottom of Lake Menindee, several kilometres from its shore. Three years ago the lake was full. Together with surrounding lakes, it held five times the water in Sydney Harbour. Beginning in 2010, two summers of severe rains had followed a prolonged, notorious drought in eastern Australia – “the millennium drought”. The land was flooded.

But yet again, so soon, the inland is wretched for lack of water. Rainfall in the past three years is tracking lower than the worst on record. Today, the lakebed is bone dry. In this improbable place, we are driving in search of water.

The “line of lode” overlooking Broken Hill

It is late April 2015. Four months ago, officials estimated that Broken Hill, population 18,000, would run out of water in August. They began a drilling program to find emergency supplies from underground.

A blue rig rises above the plain, surrounded by white trucks and men clad in orange and blue. Philp pulls up next to it. He grew up in Menindee, the hamlet nearby, and now manages the enormous Menindee Lakes storage infrastructure with his small team of seven. The system was built in the 1950s to secure a water supply for Broken Hill, 70 miles north-west. For the second time this century, it’s on the brink of failure.

We watch as water gushes from the bore, muddy at first, then clearer. Nick, a geo-hydrologist from Canada, takes samples. To complete the test, they’ll pump water from the well – about 55 yards underground – non-stop for two days, while assessing the results from three surrounding monitoring wells. What is the flow rate and quality? Is the water table dipping? Is water migrating through the aquifer?

But while the drillers are working seven days a week, the residents of Broken Hill are agitating just as hard for them to stop. A campaigning group called WE WANT ACTION has sprung up – its logo is a fish skeleton encased with the slogans: “Refuse to Lose” and “United We Stand”.

Mark Hutton, a long-ago retrenched miner, who now works on the hospital’s reception desk, founded its predecessor, the Darling River Action Group, during the millennium drought. He’s among the leaders of its vigorous online incarnation, which uses Facebook to publicise and scrutinise water supply issues and foment opposition to the bores. In these parts, resistance is a way of life. “We’ve been fighting the New South Wales government for 200 years,” he says.

Chemists define it as H₂O, but in Broken Hill, water demands a more complex formula. Add salt and scarcity, erosion and evaporation, ill-considered dams and irrational irrigation, intractable politics, sacred sites, speedboats and roses. Stir up dissatisfaction and stand well back, because, within days, the state government will announce its emergency water strategy for the town.

Before I arrived, a policy worker had told me, exasperated: “Everyone comes new to water and thinks it just falls from the sky. It doesn’t. The Menindee Lakes system is one of the most complex water systems in one of the most variable climates in the world.”

And this, too: “You’ll hear all sorts of crazy talk in Broken Hill.”

Read the full article in Nautilus Magazine

Bob Pascoe has 64 rose bushes in his front yard in South Broken Hill

A car with stickers saying "Don't Let the Darling River Die"

Locals protest against water policy decisions by way of the “WE WANT ACTION” page on Facebook.

Lake Menindee. The white marks on the tree trunks show where the water level once reached

What’s left of Lake Pamamaroo.

The bore drilling team is working on the enormous dry bed of Lake Menindee.

A geo-hydrologist inspects earth samples from the test bore on Lake Menindee, while water begins to be pumped from the well.

Totally Renewable Yackandandah

In Community development, Environment, The Age on June 10, 2015

WHEN Frank Burfitt was planning the new Men’s Shed at Yackandandah, he struck a problem – its electricity supply. It required a costly new connection from the road, traversing the hospital grounds.

So they did something that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago: bypass the network altogether. “We did it cheaper than connecting to the grid,” Burfitt, a retired electrical engineer, explains.

“We got the first juice about a month ago and we’ve been using the power to fit out the shed. We’re proud we could do something visionary.”

The solar panel and battery system at the Men’s Shed is connected with a bigger initiative: Totally Renewable Yackandandah. A group of residents want the north-eastern Victorian town to produce more electricity than it uses, by 2022.

They began working on their scheme twelve months ago, and already the number of solar households in the town has jumped. Now, one in every three houses has solar power, more than double the national average.

Matthew Charles-Jones, from Totally Renewable Yackandandah, says they’re surveying local residents and working on their grand plan, with the help of a council grant. In the meantime, new solar panels, like those on the brand new Men’s Shed will make it easier to reach the target.

Yackandandah is one of three Australian towns plotting to become 100 per cent renewable, along with Newstead, in central Victoria and Uralla in northern NSW. Newstead was recently awarded a $200,000 grant from the state government to develop its plan.

Nicky Ison, director of Community Power Agency, says the technology is the easy part. For larger-scale renewable energy schemes, however, funding remains a challenge. That means starting small and growing.

“These towns first need to do widespread energy efficiency campaigns, and look at household, business and community solar,” she says.

In Yackandandah, the community centre has set the example. Its old brick-veneer house has been transformed, with the help of a state government grant. Local tradies installed a large solar photovoltaic system, insulation, double-glazing, shading and efficient air conditioners for heating and cooling. Electricity bills have plunged by three-quarters.

“We’ve had some really cold days this week,” says Ali Pockley, the centre’s manager. “But you come in here and it’s just toasty. It was hopelessly inefficient up until the retrofit, no doubt about that.”

Ison says that while the idea of “energy self-sufficient towns” is unfamiliar in Australia, it is well established overseas. Last year, she organised a visit by Arno Zengle, the mayor of a village in Bavaria called Wildpoldsried, which produces more than four times the electricity it consumes.

Matthew Charles-Jones heard Zengle speak and was inspired by his message, because Yackandandah is about the same size as Wildpoldsried.

Although going fully renewable is an ambitious goal, the town has form: a decade ago, residents bought out the local petrol station, which was closing down. Now it’s a thriving community-owned business, encompassing hardware and farm supplies, with an annual $3 million turnover. It hands out $20,000 in local grants each year.

It also boasts a large solar photovoltaic array, funded in part by the local folk festival.

Charles-Jones says Totally Renewable Yackandandah is propelled by concern over climate change, but also – as with the petrol station – by a desire to strengthen the local economy.

“We’re not inventing anything new,” he says. “We’re just being smart about the way we’re doing energy.”

Read an edited version of this article at The Age online

Electric vehicles lead the charge

In Environment, The Age on April 18, 2015

WHEN Justin Harding accelerates silently out of a carpark, passers-by do double-takes.

“People wonder what on Earth is going on with that mysterious car that seems to go without starting its engine,” he says, happily.

His number-plates reveal the secret: ELCTR0. Harding, an engineer from Blackburn, finished converting his Mitsubishi Lancer to battery power two years ago.

Tomorrow, he’ll drive it to Hawthorn for the annual Electric Vehicle Expo at Swinburne University, from 10 am until 4 pm. The free event is coordinated by the Alternative Technology Association.

There’ll be electric bikes and factory-line electric cars from Tesla, BMW and Nissan, as well as several models converted by tinkerer-enthusiasts.

Credit: Justin Harding

Electric cars have been slow to take off in Australia. Figures compiled by bloggers suggest that five years ago, there were just over 100 around the country.

By the end of 2014, the number had only risen to 1900 (including plug-in hybrids). But most of those – nearly 1200 – were first registered last year.

Next month, luxury electric carmaker Tesla will open a showroom and charging station in Richmond. The company launched in Australia in December and has announced plans to open charging stations spanning the route from Melbourne to Brisbane by 2016.

There are already 23 charging stations around Melbourne, many of them free. The City of Moreland built the state’s first fast-charging station at the Coburg civic centre in July 2013, and there are now 6 across the municipality.

The council’s climate change officer, Stuart Nesbitt, oversees its electric vehicle program. “One of the barriers to buying these cars is the perception that there’s not enough public charging infrastructure,” he says. “Where possible, we’re trying to expand it.”

There are two electric cars in the council’s fleet, but that number will increase, Nesbitt says. New research conducted for the council shows that electric vehicles can be cheaper over the life of a typical lease, because of their low running cost.

For his own commute, Nesbitt – a former diesel mechanic – has traded in his car for an electric scooter. He fits the demographic for electric vehicle enthusiasts in Australia: they’re often well educated middle-aged men, early adopters of technology, who have solar panels of their own.

But Nesbitt thinks it won’t stay that way: “Electric vehicles are now where mobile phones were with the Motorola brick in the 1980s,” he says.

Credit: Justin Harding

Harding’s car cost about $20,000 to convert, mainly in batteries. In 2009, when he began the project, DIY was the only option. Now, every major vehicle maker has electric cars in planning or production, and their price has fallen significantly.

“The more I looked into it, the more I became convinced that electric vehicles are the way of the future,” he says. “It’s just a more sensible way to power transport, rather than burning fossil fuel and capturing explosions. The simplicity and efficiency of an electric motor wins hands down.”

Read this article at The Age online