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

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

“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

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.

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

“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

Em Herring has grown garlic once before: in an old tyre on her grandpa’s beef cattle farm in Gloucester, NSW, when she was only 8 years old.

“He said to me, ‘Emily, if there’s one crop you grow when you’re older, it should be garlic’,” she recalls. “It’s funny that I’ve come full-circle.”

Herring is now 25, a tertiary-trained musician living in Northcote, and she’s turning back to the land.

She’s one of a dozen people – overwhelmingly young women – who are taking part in the inaugural Pop Up Garlic Farmers program, run by a group called Farmer Incubator.

From left, Paul Miragliotta, Emily Connors and Em Herring, with Age photographer Simon Schluter. Credit: Farmer Incubator

The fledgling farmers have each sown 500 cloves, at four different donor farms around Melbourne – in Coburg, Keilor, Ballan and the Mornington Peninsula. They’ll take the crop all the way from seed to market, harvesting in December, and learning about sales and marketing along the way.

“It’s a way to engage people in the city with farming,” explains Paul Miragliotta, from Farmer Incubator. “There are lots of positive things you can do in agriculture, like regenerating the land and growing local food systems. But getting into it is quite daunting if you’re not from a farm, or don’t have much money.”

The 32-year-old is in a similar situation himself, having recently taken his first lease on a small farm in Keilor.

He says garlic is the ideal crop for the experiment: it grows slowly over winter, which eases the pressure for watering; and it stores well, so the farmers won’t have to sell on a deadline.

“We’re also trying, in a small way, to bridge the gap between imported, supermarket garlic and boutique, farmers’ market garlic,” Miragliotta says.

Before Pop Up Garlic Farmers began, he interviewed six experienced growers for their tips. Number one is to avoid a “weedy nightmare”, he says. “Weeds are like street fighters and garlic can’t compete with them.”

Emily Connors hasn’t grown garlic before. She grew up in Sandringham, without a veggie patch. She always shopped at supermarkets and had no understanding of her food, how it was grown, or by whom. “I went to an all-girls Catholic school and I don’t remember a seeing a farmer at the careers nights!” she laughs.

She now works at CERES in Brunswick East, often labouring at its Harding Street market garden in Coburg, where she recently sowed her first garlic crop. The site has been a market garden since the late 1800s, when Chinese migrants began farming on the banks of the Merri Creek.

“I feel like I’m part of that rich tradition,” Connors says. She hopes the coming months will help steer her towards a market garden of her own.

“We have a food system dominated by companies which are profit-driven, rather than focussing on nurturing people and land,” she says. “This a perfect way of countering that system, and connecting our community with our food.”

Read this article at The Age online

The local sustainability group is launching two green energy projects: a new solar energy scheme and the resurrection of a longstanding plan for three community-owned wind turbines.

Today, at the Sustainable Living Festival in Woodend, Energy and Resources Minister Lily D’Ambrosio will announce a $100,000 grant for a 30-kilowatt solar farm.

The panels will be installed at the old timber mill, where the tenants’ ongoing electricity bills will be reinvested in further solar panels. It will create a “perpetual fund” for community renewable energy, says Ralf Thesing, president of the Macedon Ranges Sustainability Group.

Last week, D’Ambrosio announced a $200,000 grant for the central Victorian town of Newstead to become fully powered by renewable energy.

She says the new government will “support and stand alongside” communities such as Newstead and Woodend, who are planning “to better control how their energy is made and where it comes from”.

“Everywhere I go, whether it’s metro Melbourne or regional and rural Victoria, people love renewable energy,” D’Ambrosio says. “That’s why we’re seeing many communities coming up with plans to make renewable energy part of their everyday life. They’re bottom-up approaches and they’re a terrific boon for local jobs.”

The Andrews government is preparing a “renewable energy action plan” and finalising the guidelines for its $20 million “new energy jobs fund”. It will also release a discussion paper on community-owned wind power.

For the clean energy advocates in Macedon Ranges shire, the election result was transformative. “It changes our situation completely – from being banned, we’re now unbanned,” says Barry Mann, who is helping coordinate the wind power project.

In 2010, under the previous state Labor government, the group was awarded a $50,000 grant for a wind monitoring mast. But the funding wasn’t finalised until after the Liberal party won the election. Within three weeks of handing over the cash, the new government had imposed a wind power “no-go” zone over the entire region.

“It was pretty clear to me that the policy wasn’t based on any evidence or community consultation. It was a purely ideological thing,” Mann says. “Now it’s a bit like ‘Groundhog Day’. We’re back to where we were four years ago.”

Within weeks, the monitoring mast will finally be installed at their preferred site, in a pine plantation about 5 kilometres from Woodend. The proposed turbines would produce enough electricity to offset the annual consumption of Woodend, Macedon and Mount Macedon combined.

“Just because our project was banned didn’t mean we would disappear, because we know it’s got too many benefits for locals,” Mann says. “I think most Australians get the fact that climate change and cheaper renewable energy aren’t going away.”

The Andrews government has promised to scale back tough planning restrictions on wind farms. Under the changes, only residents living within 1 kilometre will retain the right to veto projects – down from 2 kilometres. The planning minister, rather than local councils, will be responsible for deciding applications.

The controversial wind turbine “no-go zones” – which include the Yarra Valley, the Mornington Peninsula and the Great Ocean Road – will stay, but community-owned turbines in the Macedon region will be exempt.

Planning minister Richard Wynne says he expects to receive final advice on the planning amendments within a fortnight.

“We want to encourage more of these community wind farms, because this is about communities taking ownership of climate change in a very practical way,” he says.

The outlook is not so promising for large-scale wind farms. Kane Thornton, CEO of the Clean Energy Council, says that while the industry is pleased the planning rules will be relaxed, investment in big projects has stalled, pending a decision on the federal Renewable Energy Target.

The Abbott government has yet to announce its stance on the RET, after its review panel recommended the target be reduced. Subsequently, a further review by the Climate Change Authority recommended the target be maintained.

“The RET is the main driver to investment and, at the moment, the biggest barrier,” Thornton says. “Until the federal situation is resolved we’re not going to see a big rush in large-scale projects in Victoria.”

Leigh Ewbank, from Friends of the Earth’s “Yes to Renewables” campaign, says that if the federal government continues to hold back investment, state policies should fill the gap. The ACT government has legislated a 90 per cent renewable energy target for 2020.

“The ACT policy is driving construction of renewable energy projects,” Ewbank says. “Victorian policy makers can take similar action.”

The Victorian Liberal party appears to have had a change of heart under the leadership of Matthew Guy. For the first time, the state has a “shadow minister for renewables”, David Southwick. He says Victoria has the opportunity to be a leader in renewable energy. “We want an industry that can deliver more clean energy and clean energy jobs.”

Southwick says his party is seeking a “positive outcome on the Renewable Energy Target that supports local jobs in Victoria”.

Read an edited version of this article at The Age online

He began researching the Yarra’s urban history. “I found a story from 1932 which spoke about an iconic race where 100,000 people lined the banks,” he says. “It was the biggest open water swimming event in the world.”

With a group of friends, Stewart resolved to revive the “Race to Prince’s Bridge”.

Their organisation, Yarra Swim Co, is aiming for the race to begin again next year. “It’s ambitious,” he says. “We want to inspire people to see the river as a place for recreation, where we can swim permanently in the future.”

The 3-mile swim was first held in 1913, from the Twickenham Ferry – now the site of the MacRobertson Bridge, in Burnley – to (the then) Prince’s Bridge, near Flinders Street Station.

Coburg swimming club members who took part in the 3-mile swim, c1937. Coburg Historical Society.

In 1929, it set a world record for the number of competitors and 100,000 people lined the banks to watch.

Footage of the 1932 race is on YouTube: a reporter asks the female winner of the race – “Miss Gill, of Hawthorn” – how she found the Yarra. “Pretty dirty!” she laughed.

The Race to Prince’s Bridge ran annually until 1963, when it was cancelled because of concerns about water quality. The race was revived, and then canned again, in the late 80s.

During summer, the EPA and Melbourne Water monitor water quality in the river and display the results on the Yarra Watch website. This week the water was suitable for swimming at Kew, Warrandyte and Launching Place in the Upper Yarra. It is illegal to swim in the Yarra downstream of Gipps Street, in Abbotsford.

For the last three years, Dr David McCarthy, from Monash University, has been studying the microbes in the river that could affect human health. His research won’t be complete for another year, but he says water quality deteriorates after rain, when stormwater flows into the river, bringing contaminants from our streets. In very heavy rains, the sewer system overflows into the waterways.

Dr McCarthy says one long-term solution to poor water quality is better stormwater treatment – to capture and treat rainfall where it lands, before it is released into the environment.

The Labor government has proposed new legislation, the Yarra River Protection Act, to guard against overdevelopment along the river’s banks.

Yarra Riverkeeper Andrew Kelly says the new approach must be broader than planning alone. “The river falls on the edge of many people’s responsibilities but not right in the centre for anyone.”

He is hopeful that the new wave of interest in the river will help the Yarra’s cause. On Facebook, 13,000 people have promised to take part in an “inflatable regatta” on the last Saturday of March. The blow-up boats will launch at Abbotsford and land at Bridge Road in Richmond.

Read this article at The Age online

It’s also strange because of the troubling relationship between economic growth, as we know it, and carbon dioxide emissions.

So with those conundrums in mind, here’s an edited version of an interview I did early this year with climate scientist Kevin Anderson, from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester. I interviewed him for a newspaper article that was scrapped before I’d even finished my research, so I never got to write it up.

Anderson wrote a blog late last year stating that if we’re to keep a good chance of staying within 2 degrees warming, rich countries need to cut emissions by up to 10 per cent per year. Reductions of that magnitude are likely to require economic contraction, or degrowth – at least temporarily.

I asked him about that blog:

KA: It caused quite a stir. Almost everyday I get someone responding. I think it’s opened a dialogue which I think was being held back before. It came out of the climate change data and the maths are so blatantly obvious that people cannot argue against the simple numbers: the industrialised countries require degrowth strategies for 2 degrees C. There’s no way out of that.

“We have an inevitably radical future”

My own judgement now is that a lot of people don’t like the conclusions, but don’t necessarily disagree with the analysis. That is not a good enough reason not to have it as part of the debate.

This ties into an already existing language and literature, whether it’s from ecological economics or Herman Daly with his steady state economics and so forth, there have been a lot of people talking about these things for decades. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to get ripped to shreds by people for even discussing it. That still happens, but nevertheless, I think there is now sufficient momentum to allow it to actually become part of the discussion – although very much a minority part of it.

MG: Your carve up of the carbon budget requires rich countries to cut emissions deeply – by 8 to 10 per cent per year.

KA: The important thing about those reduction rates is that they work if we start doing it immediately. Ideally we should have started some little time ago. It’s a few years out of date, but we know that we’re always further along the line than we were when the data ended. Every year we fail, that percentage rate goes up.

MG: And of the rich countries, Australia would be at the upper end of that scale, given its high per capita emissions?

KA: I think you can make quite a good set of reasoned arguments as to why some of the high emitting countries on aggregate – the US, Qatar, Australia – would have to do more than the others. Australia would be at that end, at least.

MG: One reason the rich countries need to cut emissions so fast is that you assume China will peak later – in 2025 – than most of the other modelling does, including that by the Climate Change Authority here in Australia. Is that unrealistic? Do we need China to do more to cut emissions than you’re suggesting?

KA: Realistic is a word we use that applies to the thinking of the last century. We hear that all the time: ‘This is clearly impossible.’ Well, oh fine, we’re in an impossible world now. Can we deal with 3, 4 or 5 degrees C? Well almost certainly not in any reasonable fashion. Can we mitigate for 2 degrees C? Well if we have the same mindset, then certainly not, either. In that sense, I would argue the future is impossible. It’s unrealistic.

We should have done something about that earlier. But we are where we are now and we have to think differently. The argument I often make is that we have an inevitably radical future. Now, whether it’s radical because we’re doing radical mitigation and we have some control over the levels of climate change we are going to see, or whether it’s radical because we just carry on doing what we do now and we have to reap the repercussions of rapidly changing climate, both of them are radical futures. Both are unrealistic with the current mindset.

On China – I think it’s more realistic to say the wealthy parts of the world should be looking to radically reduce their emissions rather than to expect China to peak before 2025. You have to bear in mind that a lot of the emissions attributed to China and others of the industrialising countries are actually the responsibility of the west, from a consumption perspective – and I’m sure this goes for Australia, because it also imports a lot of manufactured goods.

Really, China should be permitted even longer to peak, but we cannot apply a fair and equitable system because we’ve got to the point where it is inevitably unfair and inequitable.

The historical legacy is such that Australia, the EU, the US, we still owe a huge amount because of what we’ve done. Although China’s emissions are heading in our direction now, if you look at the cumulative emissions per capita they’re much, much lower than the west, and that feeds into development and so forth. So it doesn’t seem reasonable to me to just look at instantaneous per capita emissions and then say China should be peaking earlier. They are clearly still a poor country in terms of development. Their GDP per capita is still much lower and their purchasing power parity is much lower than Australia or the EU.

MG: The world’s governments have agreed to limit warming to no more than 2 degrees. In Australia, we continue to claim that’s our aim, but we also promise very limited emissions reductions. How do we make sense of that contradiction?

KA: That same gap is occurring everywhere. The EU here has just agreed a 40 per cent reduction target by 2030. It then claims that is consistent with a 2-degree trending for the EU, which it isn’t at all. What’s required is nearer 80 per cent. We probably have more appropriate rhetoric here than you have. But the action isn’t any better.

MG: Do we have an idea of what would be necessary to reduce emissions so rapidly? What’s life like for a human in that society?

KA: It’s inevitably a woolly discussion about what that sort of future would look like. But I think you can start to hone it down a little bit in terms of the internal equity within countries. One of the arguments I’ve made repeatedly is that even within nations, the differential in our emissions is absolutely enormous.

So we are not necessarily saying everyone in the UK or Australia has to reduce at that rate. Those people who are the major emitters, they are the ones that need to make the lion’s share of the change. It may well even be, even within a country that is having rapid reductions in emissions, that some of the poorest people may still see no change or even perhaps a rise in their emissions.

The scare tactic is to say that this will apply to everyone, so even if they’re in fuel poverty, they’re going to have to cut back or see dramatic increase in the price of their fuel. As academics in the UK, we’re getting paid three or four times the low salary. It is people like us who have to make the radical changes, not the poorest 20 per cent of our societies.

MG: What kind of policy measures might be necessary to reduce emissions by up to 10 per cent a year?

KA: I think it’s unlikely you can deliver these rates of change with a price mechanism. I would go so far as to say there is no evidence to suggest it’s in any way possible with price, because the price would have to be so high. For those of us who are the main emitters, we are effectively inelastic to the price of energy. The poorer people in our own communities and the poor people globally are highly elastic to it and if the price of energy goes up significantly because of a carbon price, they will be in even more dire positions than they are today. In countries like the UK won’t be able to heat their houses or drive at all.

“We can do things that are seen to be radically different”

I think the price route is going to be re-thought. The argument we’re making is that we need a regulatory framework, maybe complemented with prices as well. From a UK perspective, that sounds like a throwback, but we have to think about regulations differently. They’re about standards, not about picking winners. It isn’t the role of policymakers to say which technology; they usually get that wrong anyway. They set the standards and say you can use whatever technology you want as long as it meets these standards.

The work we’ve done at the Tyndal Centre here with some of my colleagues has been very much at a sectoral level, without looking necessarily at the whole economy. But it does suggest there is huge potential for emissions reductions.

In the UK, 80 to 90 per cent of all kilometres are travelled by cars that are 8 years or under old. So within 8 years you can change virtually the whole fleet. That’s a very quick turnaround time. So what can you change it to? Using existing cars, in the UK there are now around 300 models available with emissions below 100 grams of CO₂ per kilometre. The average car in the UK is something like 168. If you had a standard that said no car beyond 2015 that was more than 100, then you would have about a 40 to 50 per cent reduction in car emissions within about ten years. With no new technologies, no new infrastructure and no additional price in the system.

You’d get a much bigger saving in places like the US and Australia because you start with cars that are much more inefficient. That’s an example where we could carry on doing exactly what we’re doing, with existing technologies, existing skill sets, and see radical reductions in emissions. You can do it with refrigerators too. Within 8 years you could change out most of the fridges in UK homes and radically reduce our emissions from refrigeration. There are no price premiums on these things.

There are lots of reasons we’re not doing it. In the UK, it’s this old concept of choice: we cannot interfere with the market. As long as we put a label on it, people can choose what they want. And that mindset means that we cannot set standards, we cannot use a regulatory framework to drive down emissions even using existing technologies.

MG: But is efficiency enough to get the kinds of emissions reductions we need?

KA: No, nothing like it. But the demand side is really important and generally gets missed because people talk about wind turbines or tidal schemes or solar or nuclear power. They always talk about these big schemes, but they will take a long time – decadal penetration rates really.

All I’m saying here is the demand technologies penetrate the systems much, much quicker and can deliver huge savings, but only if we can overcome the rebound effect. What policies we can put in place to ensure any savings we make are not just squandered by us then using the money for more consumption? That’s really important. I think those policies will vary depending on the cultural framing of each country.

It wasn’t that long ago that we bathed once a week in the UK. We then started to shower two or three times every week. We now have power showers and people use power showers often twice a day now. We moved towards showers partly for energy reasons many years ago and actually our showers now use far more energy than our baths ever used. We’ve normalised the idea we have to shower once or twice a day, which means we have to buy more clothes, we have to wash our clothes more often, so you get a whole suite of things that build up. These practices are things that are normalised and we say we can’t change them. We need to actively think about the practice we’re embedding in our societies, particularly for poorer parts of the world who can avoid locking themselves into some of the more stupid things we’ve got ourselves locked into.

MG: We don’t seem to be anywhere near having that kind of public conversation. There are all sorts of issues with degrowth we aren’t delving into, right? Like what would happen to our debt-based financial system?

KA: I wonder if we use those things as an excuse for not having bigger discussions. We’re looking at climate change now against the backdrop in which many industrialised countries are having to do things quite differently anyway, because of the economic situation we find ourselves in.

Unfortunately, we tried to resolve what were the biggest banking issues since the 1930s with the same sets of tools that brought about the problem in the first place. We could have retrofitted every single property and to a very high level for the money we gave back to the banks. That would have helped with employment; it would have helped with reinvesting the money back into the economy; it would have helped with resilience to the changing climate; it would have helped fuel poverty. There’s virtually nothing that doesn’t get a tick on that. And yet what we did is we gave the money to the banks.

We are having to think differently in the environment we’re in today, even about our established organisations, so why not think a bit more differently about how we actually deal with these issues? When people say these things are impossible, it at least gives us a chance to turn around and say, ‘Well they weren’t impossible when we had to deal with it from a banking point of view’.

We can do things that are seen to be radically different. I think the agenda is moving. It is moving on to allow us to think about things that were previously just dismissed out of hand. Where people would once say this isn’t possible, I think now the analysis is being undertaken to say: ‘Well, what could be achieved?’

You can find more of Anderson’s work on his website. Or, see the recordings from the Tyndall Centre’s Radical Emission Reduction Conference last December.

CHEWTON Primary School – student population 40 – perches on a hill above the houses of the small Central Victorian town, which borders on Castlemaine.

Before the year is out, its red tin roof will be home to solar panels facing east and west, positioned to best offset its demand. The school is crowdfunding for a renewable energy system, by way of a new scheme called The People’s Solar.

“Our savings won’t go back into the big bucket,” says principal Julie Holden. “They won’t be used for staffing and books.” She’s promising to fund environmental initiatives by students around the town instead, as well as more energy efficiency improvements for the buildings.

Modest though its goal sounds, Chewton Primary is one front in a revolution.

In a speech in mid-October, Michelle Groves, CEO of the Australian Energy Regulator, described the coming change in the electricity industry that way: “a revolution”.

“Revolutions can seem threatening at first, but they also present opportunities,” she said.

In her speech, delivered to the Energy Users Association of Australia conference, she was discussing the rise of “prosumers” – consumers of electricity who are now also producers. Over a million households have installed solar panels in the last few years, she said, and that’s a good thing: along with smart appliances and batteries, this wave of solar generation is increasing both customer choice and the resilience of the electricity network.

But she warned that if existing networks resist these new, competing technologies, “there is a risk that a significant number of consumers will ‘walk away’ from the network”.

That is, they’ll leave the grid altogether, in favour of their own generation and storage, leaving its fixed costs to be defrayed among fewer users. “This would have major consequences for many consumers and for the efficient operation of energy markets,” Groves said.

Solar photovoltaic panels are booming for good reason. They’re a consumer item of malleable meaning, alluring for stubborn individualists and climate change activists alike.

But for a growing number of people, renewable energy promises something even more: an opportunity to rejuvenate communities and create local jobs. All around the country, volunteers are planning energy systems that will be owned by their community, covering a scale from single rooftops to entire towns.

“The buzz phrase is that solar power is democratising the energy market,” says Tosh Szatow, the founder of the People’s Solar, as well as a consultancy called Energy for the People. “But the democracy we’ve got isn’t serving our interests. This is something more – it’s energy owned by people, serving interests defined by those communities themselves.”

Around Castlemaine and districts, in particular, the solar citizens are rallying.

It’s a cloudless Sunday morning at Chewton Primary. Szatow explains the People’s Solar to his audience: “If the community gives the solar panels once, those panels will give back to the community for 25 years. So we turn $8000 of donations into $25,000, or more, of reinvestment in the town.”

Szatow is wearing a blue t-shirt bearing the slogan: “Stick it where the sun shines”. The event is called “Going off the grid” and it’s doubling as a fundraiser for the primary school’s panels. The People’s Solar has already overseen the installation of community-funded panels at Taradale Primary and Castlemaine Childcare Co-operative.

The region is becoming a hotspot for grid-connected solar households. In August, over 300 residents signed up for new rooftop systems by way of a not-for-profit, bulk-buying scheme called Mount Alexander Solar Homes.

Beforehand, Castlemaine already boasted nearly double the statewide proportion of solar houses, says the scheme’s coordinator, Neil Barrett. Because the new systems are much larger than most pre-existing ones, in total they’ll lift the shire’s solar generation capacity by up to a quarter. “It’s been a ripper,” he says. “It’s employed a lot of people for four or five months. We’re taking expressions of interest for a possible second stage.”

Volunteers with another organisation, the Mount Alexander Sustainability Group, are investigating renewable generation on an even larger scale. They’re scoping a range of options, including a solar farm, small-scale hydro and biofuels generation, which would account for a quarter of the shire’s total electricity consumption. They are planning to establish their project as a co-operative, majority-owned by locals.

The group has adopted the same model used by Hepburn Wind, a community wind farm that has been generating power since 2011. Its two turbines feed enough electricity into the grid to more than match the needs of nearby towns Daylesford and Hepburn.

Taryn Lane is the community officer for Hepburn Wind. She also works for its spinoff, Embark, which was founded to help similar projects start up. Right now, she says, the best option for community groups is solar, because there are several viable models, from bulk buys and donations, to investing in powering the local pub. There are at least ten community groups across the state working on it, from the Surf Coast to East Gippsland, and fifty around the country.

The outlook for wind, however, is grim. The federal government’s decisions to scrap the carbon tax, and review and reduce the Renewable Energy Target have slashed the co-operative’s earnings.

The Victorian government hasn’t helped. Its sudden blanket ban on wind power in the Macedon Ranges (among other locations), imposed in 2011, scuppered locals’ plans for three turbines in a nearby pine plantation. Previously, the community group had received a government grant for a wind monitoring mast.

“It’s a bit of a mess isn’t it?” says Lane. “It shouldn’t be this hard.”

She argues that the state government should exempt community-owned projects from the wind “no-go zones”. It should also introduce a state-based renewable energy target and establish a feed-in-tariff for community-owned solar – policy measures that have already been adopted in South Australia and the ACT.

But as the state election approaches, there’s no sign of change. In mid-October, the Napthine government released its energy policy. Renewable energy wasn’t listed among its seven priorities. The state Labor party has promised to review the wind no-go zones and other planning restrictions, and also, to expand renewable energy, but hasn’t announced how it’ll do so.

North of the Murray, the signs are more encouraging. The New South Wales government, also Liberal, has emerged as an unlikely champion of community-owned energy.

Last Thursday, Rob Stokes, the NSW environment minister, will launch the “Repower One” project, a 99 kW solar array on the roof of the Shoalhaven Bowling and Recreation Club.

He also announced a new round of grants worth $700,000 for community energy projects. Last year, the NSW government awarded $411,000 to nine different community-owned wind and solar farms.

The solar panels on the bowls club are an initiative of volunteer group Repower Shoalhaven. On the strength of countless volunteer hours, they managed to locate a profitable oasis in the regulatory morass, explains Chris Cooper, the group’s founder.

They raised $120,000 in ten days. More than half the investors are locals and Cooper says it’ll deliver them a good commercial return. The bowls club, too, stands to come out several hundred thousand dollars ahead over the life of the system.

Repower Shoalhaven is planning on doing it again and again – cuts to the RET notwithstanding. Already, they’re in discussions about rooftops on local universities, high schools, ambulance buildings and water authorities. “We hope to get another one up by Christmas,” Cooper says. “Every three months we aim to get another project out to our members and investors.”

Elsewhere in NSW, the government is sponsoring a project to establish Australia’s first “Zero Net Energy Town”. The winning town, somewhere in the northern inland region, will be announced in mid-November. It’ll be funded to develop a blueprint and business case to switch to 100 per cent, locally generated renewable energy.

The scheme’s coordinator, Adam Blakester, from Starfish Initiatives, a charity that works on regional sustainability, says the public shouldn’t underestimate the scale of projects, and the ambitions of those involved.

“Most people think community and they think cute and little,” he says. “People haven’t yet understood that this is about serious projects with serious engineering, money, law, governance and marketing. And it’s got to be one of the most professionally overqualified sectors I’ve ever worked in – it’s a long way from the lamington drive part of the community sector.”

All that knowhow goes only so far, however, because the challenge isn’t only technical; it’s also regulatory. Now, over half our electricity bills are consumed by distribution, he says, and the regulated charges are the same no matter how far the electricity travels. Local energy systems, especially in the regions, have the potential to cut those costs – if they’re allowed to.

“Until now, regulation has been about ensuring the generators and network operators don’t go bankrupt and we always have electricity,” Blakester says. “When you want to fiddle with it, you find out it’s very complex – and you bump into some of the most powerful vested interests in the world.”

Earlier this year, Blakester helped found a peak body, the Coalition for Community Energy, to help lobby for regulatory change. In June, it held a conference in Canberra. One of the speakers was Arno Zengle, the mayor of a village in Bavaria called Wildspoldsried. Last year, the village produced more than four-and-a-half times the electricity it consumed.

“In Germany there are more than 300 towns that have achieved zero net energy status,” Blakester says. “It’s like another planet compared to the centralised energy oligarchy we live in.

“Can we do it in Australia? It’s too soon to be confident the answer is yes. Technically it’s doable, but whether it’s culturally and systemically possible, well, that’s up to us.”

*

THE chasm in thinking about our energy future can be traversed in just 12 kilometres in Central Victoria, between the towns of Maldon and Newstead.

Late last month, the state government announced that Maldon, a village of 1500 residents only a short drive from Castlemaine, is going to get gas – by the end of 2017, approximately.

It’s part of the “Energy for the Regions” program, first announced in 2011. The state government’s latest tender, worth $85 million, will fund gas connection for 11 towns across Victoria by way of “virtual pipelines”. Compressed gas will be trucked to a station on the outskirts of each town. From there it’ll be distributed throughout the streets via a brand new pipe network.

The successful contractor, TasGas, a subsidiary of Brookfield Infrastructure Group, says the rollout will cover 12,500 homes and businesses.

In the middle of next year, the company will go on a “roadshow” of the towns, says CEO Roger Ingram, to explain its offer and pitch residents to connect. TasGas is still finalising its numbers, but Ingram estimates that the virtual pipeline will deliver gas 40 per cent cheaper than LPG.

Tony Wood, the energy program director at the Grattan Institute, thinks it will be a hard sell. The institute’s latest report, Gas at the crossroads, speculates that households will, if anything, begin switching away from gas. In the last 5 years, retail gas prices have risen by more than one-third, and they’re expected to rise significantly more. The wholesale price is tipped to double in the next two years.

“If gas prices go up as much as they might, a lot of customers aren’t going to connect after all. Or if they do connect, they’re going to be really pissed off. How would you feel if you connected and gas prices went up by 50 or 100 per cent in a very short space of time?” Wood says.

He describes the government’s spending on Energy for the Regions as “mindboggling”.

The $85 million amounts to a subsidy of $6800 for each house and business that could connect. But in reality, it’s much more. At the take-up rate estimated by TasGas – between 15 and 30 percent over the next decade – the government is shelling out somewhere between $22,667 and $45,333 a pop.

“I’m sure governments must have made worse investments, but I can’t think of them off the top of my head,” Wood says.

The residents of Newstead, 12 kilometres south of Maldon, want something different. For four years, the volunteers comprising “Renewable Newstead” have been working on a plan to become completely powered by renewable energy.

The group began by offering energy audits, which were taken up by 8 out of every ten residents. Then they began looking into creating a local micro-grid, fed by banks of solar panels.

“Our main interest is community building,” explains Geoff Park, from Renewable Newstead. “We’ve got the complete spectrum of views about climate change and sustainability. The number one priority for us is that whatever we do needs to add to the social capital of our community.”

Park anticipates that the scheme would offer electricity to locals at a slight discount from current prices, while also generating cash for to spend elsewhere in the community. And unlike gas, they don’t need the government to pay. A small grant would help scope a plan, but otherwise, it would be a commercial proposition.

Two years ago, when Park contacted the Liberal state government about the idea, he didn’t even get a reply. The group has had similar trouble dealing with the network distributor, Powercor.

Tosh Stzatow is advising Renewable Newstead on its plan to go 100 per cent renewable. He notes that if the money being poured into “Energy for the Regions” – $6800 per house – was spent on solar instead, it would cut an average household’s electricity bills close to zero for over 20 years.

“We really are at a crossroads,” Szatow says. “Every dollar we spend in centralised gas and electricity infrastructure takes us down a road to rising energy prices, non-renewable fuels and extractive business models.

“The other road is locally-owned and managed renewables, with stable or declining energy prices. That’s the one we want to walk down.”

Read this article at The Age online