greensynergy

We are getting closer to understanding the new landscape for renewable energy credits for solar systems. Regulations passed last week identifying how the Federal system works:

Go to www.climatechange.gov.au/renewabletarget/index.html for the downloadables.

Note that a new term “Solar Credits” has been coined. These are RECS (Renewable Energy Credits) on steroids. RECS still exist at whatever the going rate is. A Solar Credit is equivalent to a 5 RECs over the next 3 years, then phasing out by 2016. Then it is 1:1. The Solar Credits are only available on the first 1.5kw; I assume 1:1 RECS apply on systems over that – the info is not clear on this. Its also a “one-bite-of-the-cherry” situation – so, no point going for a 1kw system, and looking for an upgrade later – you won’t get the Solar Credits on the 0.5kw balance, but RECS still apply.

The NSW Government will introduce its Feed-In Tariff (FIT) Scheme from the beginning of next year. This will pay 4 times the market rate for solar electricity. It is on a net basis, not gross. That means, only on the net amount delivered to the grid during sunshine hours. So with the fridge on during the day, only up to 50% or so of the electricity generated by a 1.5kw system will be exported to the grid, and thus attract the feed in rate – currently 60c per kwh.

Check out: www.dwe.nsw.gov.au/energy/sustain_renew_fit.shtml for details

In yesterday’s Australian, Bjorn Lomborg of Skeptical Environmentalist fame shows that he is clearly in the camp on human contribution to climate change, but is very skeptical about Emissions Trading. He raises good points about the technology needed by 2100 to mitigate climate change, but is skeptical of the business as usual approach to technological evolution in meeting that need. I think his analysis is sobering, but perhaps a better pathway than just assuming the price signal from carbon will drive innovation in non-fossil fuels. While I disagree that there is no storage capacity for wind power (a solar system will soon be commenced in South Australia with night storage), his view is spot on and should influence the debate. He demonstrates that while one can accept the science of climate change, one doesn’t have to accept that carbon trading will bring about the change we need. Too many people on both sides of the debate are conflating these two issues and causing much confusion. Lomborg’s article is below, and can be accessed at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26035132-11949,00.html.

OUR present approach to solving global warming will not work. It is flawed economically, because carbon taxes will cost a fortune and do little, and it is
flawed politically, because negotiations to reduce CO2 emissions will become ever more fraught and divisive. And even if you disagree on both counts,
the present approach is also flawed technologically.

Many countries are now setting ambitious carbon-cutting goals ahead of global negotiations in Copenhagen this December to replace the Kyoto Protocol. Let us imagine that the world ultimately agrees on an ambitious target. Say we decide to reduce CO2 emissions by three-quarters by 2100 while maintaining reasonable growth. Herein lies the
technological problem: to meet this goal, non-carbon-based sources of energy would have to be an astounding 2.5 times greater in 2100 than the level of total global energy
consumption was in 2000.
These figures were calculated by economists Chris Green and Isabel Galiana of McGill University. Their research shows that confronting global warming effectively requires
nothing short of a technological revolution. We are not taking this challenge seriously. If we continue on our current path, technological development will be nowhere near
significant enough to make non-carbon-based energy sources competitive with fossil fuels on price and effectiveness.
In Copenhagen this December, the focus will be on how much carbon to cut, rather than on how to do so. Little or no consideration will be given to whether the means of cutting
emissions are sufficient to achieve the goals. Politicians will base their decisions on global warming models that simply assume that technological breakthroughs will happen by themselves. This faith is sadly – and dangerously – misplaced.

Green and Galiana examine the state of non-carbon-based energy today – nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal, etc – and find that, taken together, alternative energy sources would
get us less than halfway towards a path of stable carbon emissions by 2050, and only a tiny fraction of the way toward stabilisation by 2100. We need many, many times more
non-carbon-based energy than is currently produced. Yet the needed technology will not be ready in terms of scalability or stability. In many cases, there is still a need for the most basic research and development. We are not even close to getting this revolution started.

Existing technology is so inefficient that – to take just one example – if we were serious about wind power, we would have to blanket most countries with wind turbines to
generate enough energy for everybody, and we would still have the massive problem of storage: we don’t know what to do when the wind doesn’t blow.
Policymakers should abandon fraught carbon-reduction negotiations, and instead make agreements to invest in research and development to get this technology to the level
where it needs to be. Not only would this have a much greater chance of actually addressing climate change, but it would also have a much greater chance of political success.
The biggest emitters of the 21st century, including India and China, are unwilling to sign up to tough, costly emission targets. They would be much more likely to embrace a
cheaper, smarter, and more beneficial path of innovation.

Today’s politicians focus narrowly on how high a carbon tax should be to stop people from using fossil fuels. That is the wrong question. The market alone is an ineffective way to
stimulate research and development into uncertain technology, and a high carbon tax will simply hurt growth if alternatives are not ready. In other words, we will all be worse
off.

Green and Galiana propose limiting carbon pricing initially to a low tax (say, $5 a tonne) to finance energy research and development. Over time, they argue, the tax should be
allowed to rise slowly to encourage the deployment of effective, affordable technology alternatives.

Investing about $100 billion annually in non-carbon-based energy research would mean that we could essentially fix climate change on the century scale. Green and Galiana
calculate the benefits – from reduced warming and greater prosperity – and conservatively conclude that for every dollar spent this approach would avoid about $11 of climate
damage. Compare this with other analyses showing that strong and immediate carbon cuts would be expensive, yet achieve as little as $0.02 of avoided climate damage.
If we continue implementing policies to reduce emissions in the short term without any focus on developing the technology to achieve this, there is only one possible outcome:
virtually no climate impact, but a significant dent in global economic growth, with more people in poverty, and the planet in a worse state than it could be.

In Today’s The Australian comes a better story about indigenous housing in the North Queensland Community of Mapoon. While Tim Costello is the front man, this new thinking has the look of my former colleague from the Centre For Appropriate Technology, Mark Moran, who joined World Vision in 2008 to run their Indigenous program.

Mark did the ground-breaking participatory settlement planning work with the Mapoon Community back in 1995-1997. Their foresight has now resulted in the “most attractive and liveable Indigenous community” title as per the article below. While the Mapoon model met with lots of interest, it was never taken up by the bureaucrats that lay out community plans: layouts are largely driven by mainstream servicing technologies, short pipe runs, and all that. So all the new housing results in extended grid patterns, with all the same problems.

By extending the creative thinking, World Vision has come up with a model to reduce the cost of housing by half of the NT program. Again more evidence that the more the delivery of Indigenous housing goes mainstream, the more expensive and less appropriate it becomes.

Read on:

INTERNATIONAL aid agency World Vision Australia has turned to its own backyard, with a ground-breaking scheme to help indigenous people build new homes for half the price the government would pay.

In the process, World Vision boss Tim Costello has thrown down the gauntlet to the federal and Northern Territory governments over their failure to date to deliver homes for remote communities under the $672 million Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program.

Mr Costello, whose most publicised charitable works have been in Third World countries, was asked by the Mapoon community in north Queensland to cut through the maze of red tape around Aboriginal housing.

Mr Costello, a Baptist minister and the brother of the former federal treasurer, outlined his plan to The Australian after spending two days in the former mission community on Cape York peninsula.

World Vision believed it could build homes for between $250,000 and $300,000 in Mapoon, compared with the price tag of up to $700,000 quoted for similar residences in Northern Territory communities.

Mr Costello said the plan involved the land being converted to 99-year leases and finance for the building work extended by Indigenous Business Australia, a government agency that helps Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders get into business or the home market.

Mapoon is possibly Australia’s most attractive and liveable indigenous community, belying its tragic history.

On November 15, 1963, police acting on the instruction of the Queensland government arrived at the church mission settlement and ordered residents at gunpoint to board a barge and leave with only what they could carry.

The police then burnt down every dwelling and the families were shipped to “New Mapoon” on the tip of Cape York.

The action cleared the way for mining giant Comalco to extract valuable bauxite deposits.

In 1974, families began drifting back and rebuilding homes, so that now there is a virtually new township with well-spaced homes built in harmony with the bushland.. Children are healthy, employment opportunities are available, homes are not overcrowded, and crime is rare.

Only one of the original corrugated iron homes survived the arson attack, and its owner, community elder Susie Madua, is among a group of traditional owners who strongly support home ownership.

“This is our land, our home, and we want to stay here and own the houses we live in,” she said.

“I was here when the community was burnt down by the police and my family returned. I have a house I would like to own and hand on to my children and grandchildren when I go.”

Mr Costello said if home ownership for indigenous people was not achievable in Mapoon, it could not be achieved in any community.

Mr Costello said World Vision’s task was to brief the Queensland and federal governments on its work in Mapoon on housing affordability.

“We have been working with the community for five months along with our partners Indigenous Business Australia, the Mapoon community trustees and the Mapoon Council to establish a successfully operating home ownership scheme within two years,” Mr Costello said.

World Vision had concentrated on five case studies of the possible 28 locals who wanted to buy the homes they now rented, and tested their capacity to pay projected sale prices in communities where land is held under deed of grant in trust title.

One aspect of the World Vision scheme is to create a new mechanism for valuing property in remote communities, where land is often held as a communal deed in trust and capital gains do not exist.

Mr Costello said current methods valued existing homes at significantly more than people could afford, and the challenge was to solve this problem.

He said the reasons people gave for wanting to own homes were reflective of broader community aspirations. “They want to own something and they want an asset to pass on to their children,” he said.

The report released by Mr Costello seeks special concessions for Mapoon residents buying their existing homes. Purchases would be made with funding through IBA, which would also fund new homes. Mr Costello said there were about 60 publicly-owned homes in Mapoon and a few privately owned dwellings. Close to one third of households could be assumed to qualify for a home loan with IBA, he said.

Another presentation from Peter, in 2 parts as posted on You Tube by the Fremantle filmmaker, Linda Blagg. Its beautifully done. By the way, Peter has been unwell of late, but I believe he is on the mend and will be taking it a bit easier for the immediate future.

Sawtell during the Chilli Festival in July 2009

My home town Sawtell has just been recently nominated in research by the University of New England as the most desirable/livable town in NSW, and second nationally to Mt Beauty in Victoria. Fantastic – we know its great to live in and to visit. But these surveys can be a bit dodgy. Most of the top 10 places in NSW were on the mid- and far North Coasts of NSW. I think the researcher from Armidale comes down the mountain to go surfing or something like that and has a built-in bias! (Just joking). Alternatively, in a survey of the best 100 towns in Australia by Australian Traveller Magazine, Sawtell did not even get a look in. Admittedly, the second survey was for towns you would most like to take an hour out of your journey to visit. From that point of view, Sawtell is a no-brainer – 5 minutes off the highway, great beach next to a great village with loads of character, fig trees up the middle of the street, great cafes, art deco cinema, headland with views over Bongil Bongil NP to the south. So why it didn’t make the list is beyond me. Yet another conundrum in the rich pageant of life.

Speaking of rich pageant, just to do my bit to promote the town, I have attached a recent photo of the main street during the Chilli Festival in July. There will be another street closure in October for the International Buskers Festival. This is a great event – usually three or four performance areas and packed crowds enjoying great fun. If you are in the area, drop in to town!

Application Solutions is Greensynergy’s Sydney consulting partner. Andrew Latimer of Application Solutions has released the Application Solutions – Spring 2009 Newsletter looking at current Building Code of Australia Section J Energy Efficiency issues. The current issue looks at upcoming changes, Mandatory Disclosure of Energy performance legislation and NABERS Ratings issues. You can download by clicking on the highlighted link or go to www.applicationsolutions.com.au.

I am becoming very concerned (no, disgusted) about the failure of indigenous housing programs. Back in the day (in the late 1990) when I worked for a small NGO on housing projects in Central Australia, the process was generally devolved to small local consultants for project management, and housing cost around $100,000 including consultants fees. At the time, there was plenty of dodgy work and corruption, but at least the houses were built. Now there is “Best Practice Project Management” and a house in a remote community costs $600,000!! And yet, there is still almost no local participation in construction for all the rhetoric. It has not dawned on the bureaucrats that developing the capacity of people in remote communities is mututally exclusive of Best Practice PM. The decision-makers have been inexorably moving toward an institutionalised delivery model that takes the worst aspects of free enterprise (greed) and the bureaucracy (total inflexibility), and has become self-serving. More recently as a housing lifecycles researcher with the Desert Knowledge CRC, it was clear that the pathway of “Best Practice Project Management” was a poor path to take when looking for real outcomes.  As we pointed out in the lifecycles report, housing delivery is the best vehicle for community development and sustainable livelihood in remote communities. Whereas the only sustainable livelihood under the current system is for bureaucrats and big-company project managers.The following Australian extracts say it all:

From The Australian July 23rd:

NORTHERN Territory government ministers have been warned that the federal government’s $673 million remote housing package is likely to deliver as few as 300 houses – less than half the number originally promised.

Figures revealed in a confidential briefing given last week to Territory government ministers and senior bureaucrats showed the Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program was seriously off-track, with up to70 per cent of allocated public funds swallowed up in indirect costs, including contractors’ fees, fees paid to expensive consultants and government administration fees.

A source at the briefing in Darwin last week told The Australian the figures — which suggested only 30 per cent of the $673m in SIHIP funding would flow to direct costs of refurbishment of housing and the building of new houses — shocked MPs and bureaucrats.

Fifteen months ago, the federal government announced SIHIP would provide 750 new houses to remote Aboriginal communities in the Territory. So far, not one house has been built.

Add this to the following article in today’s Australian (13th August),  looking at the pro’s and con’s of the Federal Government’s Intervention in remote communities. This raises very serious questions about the gravy train that has built up such a head of steam that there is too much vested interest to stop it. The author of today’s article, Bob Durnan, a community worker in Hermannsburg, Central Australia has this to say:

I work in several central Australian communities and see the evidence every day. I have absolutely no doubt that support for income management (the quarantining of 50 per cent of welfare income) has grown significantly and it is popular, particularly with women. I have recently witnessed several fair and well-conducted consultations by public servants where representative groups of Aboriginal men and women expressed almost total support for the NT emergency intervention’s main measures.

On the other hand, these same people are not at all happy about the housing and jobs crises in their home towns. It is not just a matter of delayed housing. Most of them face the prospect of no new housing being built in their communities, despite horrific levels of overcrowding, and they see no effective training opportunities or local jobs for their children. In their eyes these are chief among the intervention’s failings.

The intervention’s shortcomings are thus predominantly in the areas of poor bureaucratic performance on strategy and program design (particularly Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs housing proposals and Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations blueprints for employment and training reform).

These shortcomings first manifested themselves in the political and bureaucratic clumsiness evidenced by the intervention’s initial implementation phase. They were especially apparent in the ideologically driven plan to absorb the remote Aboriginal jobless quickly into the tourism and mining industries, despite all the obvious impediments. They are starkly illustrated by the cumbersome alliance housing model.

An equally important way forward on many of these fronts is to support and encourage individuals to adapt their behaviour and provide discipline and leadership for their families and, through that, to their communities and organisations.

It is clear from these comments that the institutionalising of housing delivery within the large corporate sector has failed. The possibility of economies of scale are wiped out by the massive project management and administration fees charged by government and industry. No wonder the people on the ground are fed up.

Working with remote communities in a way that opens housing delivery to maximum participation for local people is hard uncertain work, often with more failures than successes. But the successes are usually experienced at the local level. I spent 5 years working with remote communities, and no longer do so, because it requires continual commitment and flow of resources into a community to build up confidence, local commitment and critical levels of meaningful activity.  That is not possible with mainstream delivery. However, as the mainstream approach  is proving to be a dismal failure anyway, it would be better to aim to build slowly, more simply, with participation, over the long term to provide real opportunities. This approach will also build the capacity of communities to manage their housing at far less cost than a one-off hugely expensive flurry, with the conveyor belt of housing delivery causing a housing crash at the end of the conveyor and a much worse situation than before.

Thanks to ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) for permission to reproduce this presentation.

Thanks to ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) for permission to reproduce this presentation.

This is a more complete version of Peter’s ICLEI 2009 Presentation. Other parts to follow. Thanks to ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) for permission to reproduce this presentation.