Can you live a 1.5c life? Pt 1

1.5c is a pretty important target, as I've written about here. Even under the best case scenarios, the human race has already locked ourselves in for a lot of misery thanks to climate change, but if we can't keep ourselves to under 1.5c of warming, we will almost certainly be creating an extinction-level event. So I was intrigued to see my super fund, Australian Ethical, wanted to tell me "How to live a 1.5 degree life" - and even wanted me to take a "living a 1.5-degree life challenge" this month.

Since I've been doing a lot of reading about the climate science of this target, as well as the politics of action to get us there, I thought I'd better take the challenge and make sure I'm doing all that I personally can - but also run the numbers, and see if they actually add up. I'll do this over the course of a few posts, as the challenge emails come in.

I'm going to set out a bit of a conceptual framework here, as a whole lot of maths isn't really my strong suit. If every Australian made these lifestyle changes, would that alone really put us on track to the reductions we need to keep to our Paris Accord commitments and no more than 1.5c of warming? Of course, Australia has a small population - but we are the fourteenth largest emitter, and one of the highest per capita emitters, with only small island states or countries with oil-centric economies ahead of us. We can, and should, lead the way, not drag our heals and continue to beat the drum for fossil fuels.

So, what are the personal actions Australian Ethical wants us to take?

Number one on the list is switching to renewable energy, either through rooftop solar if you can, or switching to a renewable provider (like Meridian, which the Australian Ethical video admits they invest in).




Now, I'm a renter, so I've already done as much as I can right now - made the switch to Powershop, the subsidiary which retails Meridian's renewable electricity. I did this well before I switched my super to Australian Ethical, back when my partner and I started renting again at the end of 2018, after being referred by a local environmental activist, and I've since referred one fellow activist on myself.

I've passed the first step of the challenge. But am I living a 1.5c life?

What would happen if every Australian did this? The simplest answer would be, we would all have renewable energy. But the grid doesn't work that way. Australia is comprised of one main grid or "market" - connecting the east and southern coast states (the National Energy Market or NEM), with others for Western Australia and the Northern Territory. A big part of Beyond Zero Emission's roadmap for a 100% renewable grid in Australia is connecting all the state grids from east to west, so that energy can be moved from regions where renewables are producing to those where it is not. The entirety of section 5 of the plan is dedicated to grid upgrades.

The website OpenNEM actually displays the contribution renewables are making to the NEM over time, if you are interested in diving into the numbers:

OpenNEM snapshot on May 17

The black and brown bars contributing most of our power are coal. In the past year, coal contributed 67% of the NEM's electricity. Powershop's parent company may sell renewable energy to the market, but, as they point out in a recent blog post, they cannot guarantee where the actual electicity arriving down the wire is coming from - and especially in peak times on windless summer evenings, most of it will be from fossil fuels. That is why Powershop also buys carbon offsets, to "undo" the damage being done by that coal power they are selling.

If every Australian started buying only accredited green power from Powershop or other retailers today, it would not solve the fundamental issues with that market within the time frame that we need. The immediate rise in price of green power certificates and carbon offsets would make projects selling renewables a lot more profitable than coal, but without a coast-to-coast smart grid with substantial built-in storage, it won't allow for us to switch of all of our coal-fired power within a decade. That would take major intervention by government or large capitalists.

In fact, it is the present system of markets and price signals which has, so far, failed to deliver on the most significant untapped form of renewable energy in Beyond Zero Emission's report: Concentrated Solar Thermal. In Port Augusta, a plant was proposed, with the backing of the entire local community. But it failed to drum up sufficient up-front capital, and was bought out by company 1414 Degrees - who plan to build traditional photovoltaic solar instead, and add storage later, to reduce the upfront capital cost. 

This is the exact kind of slow, insufficient change that leaving electricity supply up to the market has given us already. From a mandatory renewables target of 5% in 2001, the NEM reached 26% of energy coming from renewables last year. 

Every Australian buying from a renewable provider might drive change a little bit faster than that increase of 21% in 19 years. That's what Powershop's argues on their website:

By purchasing GreenPower you’re minimising your impact on the environment and it means additional RECs are surrendered over and above the compulsory requirements set by the Renewable Energy Target. This clearly demonstrates that there’s a demand for renewables leading to continued growth, investment and promotion of the renewable energy sector.

However, this isn't actually the case. Australian consumer watchdog Choice has warned that GreenPower certification certificates won't lead to any change beyond what our governments have already committed to doing:

Back in 2009, CHOICE complained to the ACCC about misleading GreenPower claims in relation to emissions reductions that were in breach of Australian Consumer Law. After consultation with the ACCC, GreenPower directed electricity companies to change their marketing language – they could no longer say that buying GreenPower lowered emissions or had an 'environmental' impact... if you're hoping for an environmental benefit in the form of cutting Australia's emissions, beyond what the government has already committed to deliver, it's not.

In other words, when it comes to renewables, market mechanisms can't do the job of bringing us in line with a 1.5c target, unless the government introduces policy that matches it - like 100% renewables and net zero by 2035. 

I am not living a 1.5c life.

There is another part of Australian Ethical's ask that I haven't addressed, as it doesn't apply to me, as a renter in a strata-managed building: buying and installing your own rooftop solar photovoltaics (PV). If I owned my own house and generated my own solar, could I be living a 1.5c life?

Right now, there are 2.37 million solar PV installations on rooftops around the country - 21% of all houses, and rooftop solar generated 11,000 gigawatt hours for the NEM in the last year - 5.7% of the market. So if all households in Australia (somewhere around 11 million) generated at the same rate, we could have about 28% percent of our electricity coming from rooftop PV. 

There's a number of problems with this maths, too, though. Once again, technical issues with the grid hold us back. Our grids are designed to take power from large sources and distribute it down the line. Houses providing their own electricity takes load off the grid, but if they try and start feeding it back in on that kind of scale, the energy companies warn it could cause power surges, leading to local transformers tripping off and localised blackouts. That is, unless they slug us for upgrading the grid.

Audrey Zibelman, head of the national regulator AEMO, wrote about the troubles with this approach earlier this year, when they said Australia could be seeing days of 75% renewables within 5 years - but at that point, the regulators would need to update inverter standards and make other reforms, or renewable contribution would have to be limited to 60%. AEMO projects that amount could rise to 90% renewables by 2040 - heartening, but well outside of the point Australia should have already reached net zero to stay consistent with 1.5c of warming.

So, if I wanted to live a 1.5c life, I would have to disconnect from the grid completely, and go "off-grid" with in-home storage like a Tesla Powerwall and rooftop PV. For my partner and I in a small, two-bedroom house (apartment, actually) that would set us back $15,000 - $25,000 AUD; for the average household with 4 bedrooms, this could be up to $40,000. This is inefficient compared to the economies of scale of large solar and wind farms; it also leaves me out of pocket for the up-front cost, not a government or utility corporation.

That leads me onto another big part to this equation, which is the concept of climate justice. As well as applying to the gap in contribution between already developed and currently developing nations, climate justice also applies within developed societies. Massive fossil fuel companies and governments made the decisions that led to our grid being set up to still be running on coal power when a fully-renewable grid could be up and running today. Capitalists have continued to rake in massive profits over the years, even though they have known their investment was causing climate change for decades. 

Yet, if every house makes the same contribution by paying the cost to go off-grid, the individuals who made those decisions would pay the exact same cost as those from the massive majority of society who never had a say. That is not climate justice.

I'll deal with the other main points of Australian Ethical's first challenge in my next post.

Part two of this series of posts on the 1.5c life challenge is here. Part three is here.