Weatherill’s legacy is a cleaner state
The defeat of the Labor Party in South Australia’s state election on 17 March has removed from power one of the country’s foremost champions of renewable energy.
State premier Jay Weatherill had been fighting the good fight against the fossil-fuel-supporting federal administrations since taking the hot seat in 2011. He featured in our selection of wind power’s most influential (and interesting) people last year. But now he’s relegated to the opposition back benches, watching on as the Liberal Party under new state premier Steven Marshall seeks to roll back the progress the state has made on cleaning up its energy generation.
Marshall has promised measures that include repealing the state’s renewable energy target (RET), building a new interconnector with New South Wales to import its coal-fired energy to the state, and cancelling Labor’s deal with Tesla to create a network of 50,000 home solar systems backed up by battery storage.
But energy analysts are less than convinced that Marshall will be able to make good on his promises. Repealing the RET — 50% of electricity to be generated from renewables by 2025 — means nothing when that target has already been achieved well ahead of schedule. Weatherill made an election pledge to raise this to 75%, which sounded ambitious, but is more than achievable.
"Take the rhetoric with a shovel full of salt," said energy analyst Hugh Saddler. "The amount of renewables projects already in development will take the state up to 75%."
As for the interconnector, that will take up to nine years to build and could well result in South Australia exporting more renewable energy than it imports from coal.
Weatherill’s legacy looks harder to overturn than the coal advocates imagine.
Ice hockey goes green in Detroit
The Little Caesars Arena, home of the Detroit Red Wings ice hockey team, designated March as its "green month", as part of a campaign to reduce the stadium’s carbon footprint.
Michigan utility DTE Energy is behind the scheme, which promotes its MIGreenPower subsidiary, to allow customers to buy more of their power from renewables.
Three solar arrays located in Detroit and Lapeer provide some of the green power, but most comes from the 30 GE 1.7MW turbines at the Pinnebog wind farm in Huron Country, commissioned in late 2016.
Latin America Figures and facts
46GW Amount of new wind-power capacity forecast to be build in the region by 2028. Cumulative capacity currently stands at just over 22GW (Make Consulting)
10m/s Annual average wind speeds in the La Guajira region, north-east Colombia. The area has a theoretical wind-power potential of 21GW of capacity, enough to meet the country’s total electricity demand twice over. It currently has just 19.5MW of wind capacity (Norton Rose Fullbright)
$37.70 Price per megawatt hour for the lowest winning wind-power bid in Argentina’s most recent renewable-energy auction. The average was $41.23/MWh
Quote of the month
"Let’s use it, let’s deploy it. There are still areas where we could absolutely build onshore wind farms, areas where the local communities are acceptive of wind farms"
Keith Anderson, chief corporate officer of ScottishPower, calling on the UK government to reverse its opposition to onshore wind
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