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Wednesday 29 October 2014

The World's First Renewable Energy Limit: Why Our News Should Be Worse

In recent months, I've found my phone, chirping incessantly to draw me from my slumber, packed early with 140-character-nuggets of really annoying or depressing news, hurling into my brain on the conveyor belt of snippets in the Twitter app.

Usually, things like "a politician finds wind farms yucky" or "person says solar panels are only for rich people, despite all the data everywhere saying they're not" - things not advantageous for the future of renewable energy in Australia, essentially.

Lately, these nuggets of bad news have centered around Australia's Renewable Energy Target.

The legislation has always mandated an absolute renewable energy component of 41,000 gigawatt hours - at the time it was written, that happened to be 20% of demand forecasts in 2020, so that was used as the slogan. 

Demand forecasts have fallen since then, and so the government wants the renewable energy target to follow demand forecasts - a so called 'Real 20%'.

This would have the impact of making investment in renewable energy nearly impossible, and it would also mean cutting the amount of clean energy we're aiming for:

This image, from the government's ad-hoc RET review, shows the magnitude of a "real 20%" cut in the target

This will mean that legislation that exists to create certainty for renewable energy investment will necessarily incorporate the uncertainty you get from demand forecasts. This neuters the very thing the RET is meant to do. You can't attach wheel clamps to a car and claim it's an improvement. 

Commentary on these pronounced intentions has simmered at the edges of media and specialist climate publications, in addition to a spike of coverage on the day it was announced. It's all good stuff, but there are two points I've not yet seen addressed. 

They're important points, I think. 

The World's First 20% Renewable Energy Limit 

That renewable energy penetration will exceed 20% of demand in 2020 isn't a surprise to anyone. Each time the target has been adjusted, expanded, reviewed, analysed and interrogated, it's been clear that we want at least '20%', rather than 'no more than 20%'. As columnist and renewable policy expert Tristan Edis writes for Climate Spectator: 

"An exhaustive review of the scheme in 2012 made it very clear that a decline in electricity demand meant the legislation would now deliver 25% market share for renewables"

The most important component of the recent announcement from the government is the intent from the leaders of a country to create a percentage maximum for clean technology penetration in the grid.

This clean energy ceiling is a world first. No other country has wound back a renewable energy target, and no other country has imposed a mandatory limitation on the percentage of clean energy in their electricity grid. 

It's not just a cut to the renewable energy target. It's the weird imposition of a limit on technology that generates electricity more safely, and more sustainably, than the current technology. That's insane. 

The 80% Fossil Fuels Minimum 

The logical follow-through of a maximum is the inverse: an 80% minimum supply of fossil fuel-powered energy on the electricity market.

That the government actively wants a minimum of 80% fossil fuels in the market fills me with a weird sense of dread.

The risks of burning fossil fuels to produce electricity are no longer controversial. To mandate their presence when they've long passed their use-by date is....terrible. They're deeply unpopular, too. This won't sit well with the electorate.


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It hurts me to say this, but I wish my news feed had been a little harder to digest on the morning of the government's announced intent. It's one day those nuggets of news should have filled us with genuine dread. The world's first renewable energy limit. 
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Tuesday 21 October 2014

Look Around You (Or, The Man With The Beret Wants Me To Stare Silently At Strangers)

Tuesdays are not great. They're so close to Monday, and the weekend is so distant, they kind of feel like Monday except without the right to complain.

Making them somewhat better is the fact that the ABC Media Watch video is loaded onto their website, so I can download the show in the morning, and happily dig into the episode on my way to work on Tuesday. This morning, I did so, and once I'd finished, I pulled out my earphones - the train was incredibly crowded, so I wanted to hear in case someone was needing to push past me.

"You're totally obsessed with your phone, aren't you?"

The words came quietly from my left, and I glanced at their source. A squat man in his early 40s, sporting a thin, patterned scarf, an over-sized black leather jacket, dark jeans, and most importantly, a round, high beret, was staring silently at me.



His expression was oddly similar to the expression that those who exercise regularly have when scooting past still-drunk revellers at 6am - a mixture of feigned sympathy and barely-concealed disgust, topped with near-masturbatory righteous pleasure.

I'd been preparing for this moment my whole life. I knew he'd be getting off the train some time soon - he didn't look the sort to venture north of Redfern, so I didn't have a lot of time.

"Yes, I am obsessed with my phone. Is that a problem?"

"Well, why don't you just look around you?"

It's too easy. The snooty drawl. The leather jacket. The beret. Oh, god, the beret. Make it hard for me, man. Don't make it so easy.

"I can access the entire wealth of human knowledge through this device. I can watch a live feed of the space. I can read about psychology, art or poetry. I can access and read the majority of contemporary literature. I can have  real-time conversation with relatives in San Francsisco, Denmark, London and Germany. What do you propose I do?"

Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

"Look up from your phone. Take in the world. Look around you"

I glanced around the train. In the vestibule stood around 15 people, packed in tight peak-hour congestion, each staring down at their phone or straight ahead. Directly to my left sat a young woman reading a book.

"I've just found out about the death of a major Australian figure through Twitter. I can guarantee you're not going to know anything about it unless you turn on or walk past a digital device. I also read the tweets of people in space, or watch comets flying past Mars. There are just people standing on this train. It's astonishing that you're saying I should just weirdly stare at these people instead"




"Yes, astonishing" he muttered, as he sauntered grumpily out of the train carriage and onto the platform at Redfern.

As he stepped off the train, a man standing nearby glanced at me. With a knowing look, I smiled and raised my phone at him. He smiled back, and raised his phone, and I went back to reading an article about how we'd sent a robot to another planet, and that a comet had flown past that planet, which we'd watched using a gigantic telescope orbiting the Earth.

If I'm at a beach, or in view of some magnificent vista, I won't be buried in a handset. But my daily commute is a fairly perfect time for consuming everything fantastic that the internet has to offer. There's no ridiculous bygone era where people would sit on the train, wordlessly gazing lovingly at each other, taking in the varieties of human morphology.


Basically, Beret-Wearing-Redfern-Technophobe, you better think twice before screwing with people on a Tuesday.
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Thursday 16 October 2014

Alan Jones declares (at least) 219,000 Australians Should be Suffering From Wind Turbine Syndrome

Pseudoscience needs drama to survive. Without conflict and heightened emotions, spurious claims based on poor logic stand vulnerable to reasoned assessment. When surrounded by theatrics, you can make any claim you want.

And so, with the drama emerging around the NSW Gullen Range wind farm development, involving several wind turbines built in unapproved locations, comes an unsurprising segue from radio presenter Alan Jones, during an interview with the NSW planning Minister:

"There's any amount of scientific evidence that anyone with ten kilometres of wind turbine (sic) has health problems, and there's international scientific evidence...that will dramatically prove that this a public health disaster"



Well. This is a pretty significant claim. It was curiously echoed by Senator John Madigan in a press release on Thursday:

"Low frequency noise and infrasound from industrial wind power stations are not mentioned in the applicable wind farm noise standard and are not measured. The impacts are not assessed. But ask anyone living near a wind factory and they'll tell you it exists alright. Infrasound is experienced by the body as a sensation, pressure or vibration rather than heard"

Again, it's explicitly stated that 'infrasound' impacts everyone - the mere existence of a low frequency is merciless, no one is spared.

As it happens, infrasound is everywhere, and most environments are significantly 'louder' (in terms of infrasound) than environments near operational wind farms:


For the sake of curiosity, let's assume Jones' warnings are accurate - anyone within ten kilometres of a wind turbine is going to 'have health problems' - the map below shows a ten kilometre radius around the mid-point of each Australian wind farm (the coordinate set is a little old so a few newer farms may have been left out), along with a pin indicating a rough installed capacity. Zoom in to the pins to see the radii:



There are a few towns that are completely engulfed by the Alan Jones' 'Wind Turbine Syndrome' radius, including:

Wonthaggi - population 20,032


Newcastle - population 148,535


Bungendore - population 3,553


Hepburn - population 14,367


If you compile a selection of towns within ten kilometres of wind farms (along with some multipliers for some radii that cover some portion of the town), you get a minimum of about 219,468 individuals who, according to Jones, ought to be suffering the health impacts of wind turbines.



Remember this is a massive underestimate, involving only 9 of Australian's 30-or-so wind farms (and an old list that doesn't include newer wind farms).

A piece of research published last year collated all publicly held complaints about health and noise impacts from wind farms, and found only 129 individuals had issued these complaints - compared with an estimated population of ~32,000 within a five kilometre radius of Australia's wind farms:



A very small proportion of individuals living near wind farms claim their health problems are due to the operation of wind turbines, and of these, a majority are at wind farms that have been visited by anti-wind groups.

The vast gap between the strength of their belief and the absence of any evidence to suggest their problems are caused by wind turbines betrays the vital role of community discontent in the emergence of weirdly unhinged claims like that of Jones.

Alan Jones' 'public health disaster' has failed to materialise

The Waubra Foundation, a 'wind turbine syndrome'-based anti-wind group that's been doing presentations at the Gullen Range Wind Farm development hearings, claims 50% of those within five kilometres are susceptible to wind farm disease - which suggests there should be about 16,000 complaints nationally - about 8,300% larger than the actual published number of individual complainants in Australia. Even if the mythical disease affected 1% of the population, the observed rate of complaints would still fall short of the hyperbole.

Alan Jones, John Madigan and the Waubra Foundation are free to make claims as outlandish and physically ridiculous as they please. A requisite level of theatrics provides an unspoken writ of illogical, irrational allowance.

Perhaps, then, the tactics for fighting misinformation might lie (at least, partly) in ensuring conflict, disagreement and drama don't arise around the development of new technology. Once emotion is removed from the picture, absurd claims are seen by most for what they are.
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Tuesday 7 October 2014

Kinetic Energy and Power: A Timelapse Visualisation of Clean Tech

We've dug up compressed bits of old plant and burned them to make energy for a few hundreds years, and its powered a revolution that's helped us build and sell nice things, like air-conditioners and computers.But, burning these fuels leads to our habitat becoming royally screwed, because a byproduct blocks heat in the oceans and the atmosphere.

The kinetic energy stored in the movement of the atmosphere is a good alternative to fossil fuels. Wind speeds change over time, and we can't control that, so it means we can source some, but not all, of our power from this source.

With this in mind, I left a laptop running (in low-power mode) for two weeks (22nd September to 6th of October), with an excellent visualisation of the Earth's atmosphere (created by Cameron Beccario) running on the left, and a display of the output of South Australian and Victorian wind farms (Australia's two highest-wind states) running on the right. You can see Australia's wind farms dotted along the south coast in the map below:

Elemental Power Industries map of Australian operational wind power - click here for a kmz file for viewing in Google Earth
Included in this time period is the one day period where nearly 100% of South Australian demand was met by clean tech - the 27th of September.

Without further ado, here's the short video (no sound) of the last fortnight's worth of atmospheric power conversion - you can see walls of energy moving across the continent, and the output of wind farms ebbing upwards when these pockets of power move over the installations:



Or, the middle 10 seconds of the video, in djiff form:


If you're interested in a different view of the two-week period, below is the generation data for Australia's wind power fleet (SA, Tas, Vic and NSW), averaged by day:


You can download the enitre set of images (~127 MB) used to create the animation here, the video (in mp4) here, or the djiff, here. GeoScience Australia has an excellent summary of Australia's wind power resources here.

I like nice things, like air conditioners and televisions. If we can source our electricity from a fuel source that doesn't burden us with current and future harm, we can continue to have nice things.
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Thursday 2 October 2014

A Sour Relationship: How The 'Wind Turbine Deafness' Story Got So Wrong, So Quick

The relationship between the tabloid press and science has always been sour.

Not sour like a wedge of lemon. More, like 58 wedges of lemon soaked in vinegar, in a bed of kumquats and Greek yoghurt, sprinkled with sauerkraut and wrapped in pages torn out of Kevin Rudd's memoirs.  Very sour.

So it's unsurprising that the latest cycle of "wind turbines make you [thing they don't make you]" has been instantaneously debunked by the scientist who wrote the research in the first place.

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The Daily Mail was first off the mark, with a shouty article headlined "Could living near a wind farm make you DEAF?"


The article's written in a slightly frenetic fashion. Though that's standard operating procedure for the Daily Mail, it still suggested they were trying to compensate for something - my suspicion was that they'd screwed up the science, somehow. The UK's Telegraph picked up the story as well:

"The physical composition of inner ear was “drastically” altered following exposure to low frequency noise, like that emitted by wind turbines, a study has found. 
The research will delight critics of wind farms, who have long complained of their detrimental effects on the health of those who live nearby."

As predicted by the journalist, wind farm critics have been dripping with delight:



In addition to anti-wind groups, a fair few media outlets have credulously repeated the news:


Equally predictably, the story's completely wrong.

Markus Drexl, the lead author of the study, told Carbon Brief that their study didn't look at wind turbines, but at low-frequency noise, and that there was no evidence of 'deafness' or 'hearing loss':

"There's a very loose relationship between our work and wind turbines... If you mention low frequency noise people always seem to relate this to wind turbines. 
"The noise we used was at the same frequency as some of the sounds turbines emit but we by no means mimicked the spectrum of sound they produce." 
"It's [the 'deafening' claim] definitely not what we're saying in the paper. You cannot make this claim. It is not substantiated at the moment because we haven't shown whether low frequency sound is causing any damage to the inner ear. I also don't know of any cases of deafness being reported by people living near wind turbines."
Drexl used an amplitude of 80 dB(A) for the low frequency (around 30 Hz) noise they were looking at. A 2013 South Australian Environmental Protection Agency study, conducted by an acoustics firm, measured low frequency noise at Australian wind farms, and other environments frequented by humans:

"Overall, this study demonstrates that low frequency noise levels near wind farms are no  greater than levels in urban areas or at comparable rural residences away from wind farms"

No surprises there. What about the 80 dB(A) at 30Hz levels that Drexl used in his study? Figure 33 of the EPA's study sheds light on the amplitudes we get from wind farms at this level, though these measurements are 'unweighted' (ie, just 'dB' rather than 'dB(A)'):


Wind farm noise levels (the orange and yellow lines) at 30 Hz are around 40 dB. Taking into account the A-level weighting, this is significantly lower than the noise use in Drexl's study.

Interestingly, the only location in the EPA's study that might apply to Drexl's study is an office environment, as seen in figure 27:


Dr Ralph Holme, Head of Biomedical Research at Action on Hearing Loss explained in more detail to Sense About Science:

“Our ears normally produce very quiet sounds that can be measured by sensitive microphones. These sounds are called spontaneous otoacoustic emissions (SOAEs). The research does show that low frequency noise can change the level and frequency of these sounds. However, the researchers only monitored for up to 7 minutes after the low frequency exposure, so we do not know if the changes are permanent or temporary. 
It is important to remember that SOAEs can be influenced by many different things including everyday noise we might experience just walking down the street. And there was no evidence provided in this research that these changes alter a person’s ability to hear.”
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There's nothing wrong with the research published by Drexl and his team. So how the media manage to screw up the story so badly? Carbon Brief gives us a hint:

"The research paper doesn't mention wind - at all. However, a press summary written by the authors gives wind turbines as one example of sources of low frequency noise, along with ventilation and air conditioning systems" 

It's clear the journalists behind this gargantuan error weren't interested in the science; nor were they interested in hearing what the scientist had to say. This was an opportunity to create bad news about a politically-charged piece of technology. Fear and neophobia can create hits and shares like nothing else.

That this comes at the expense of the scientists publishing work is no barrier to the publications spreading misinformation. The only decent coverage of the research was published in Science Magazine - all other coverage seizes solely on the mention of wind turbines, and ignores the science.

If the outlets involved were to pull their articles, it would make absolutely no difference to the now self-sustaining meme. The myth will be angrily paraphrased and repeated at community meetings by concerned citizens, ill-equipped to debunk the misinformation themselves. It's already been pasted and re-blogged by an array of anti-wind blogs.

Outlets that openly manifest a seething hatred of technology they perceive as a partisan threat are solely responsible for damaging science, in the hope of creating falsehoods that are used to spread fear and anxiety.

Damaging science, all in the name of damaging people. The misinformers and the revenue counters at the media outlets are the only ones left without a bad taste in their mouths.
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