Seriously, I think Labor had a policy to encourage energy-efficiency audits to overcome intertia on the issue. Beyond that, not sure…

Mug Punter, apparently if coal is exported and burned overseas then the emissions do not matter anymore.

Given the near zero chance that any of our coal export markets will put a price on carbon anytime soon (except perhaps Japan), why not tax it at the port?

It doesn’t help when the likes of Gittins cheer on our fabulous new found wealth derived from enemy of the human race. Ross should know better.

Australia has made a deal with the devil and the devil is coal. Its like we’ve harvested a bumper crop of opium poppies and the economists are applauding the high price of herion and telling us how much richer we’ll all be (ugh!). It may be a radical view now, but I am utterly convinced this is how we will view this dark period in Australia’s history in … oh, around 2020.

Big subsidies is not really the way to go. Suggest instead mass-producing standardized solar power units - simple, dirt-cheap, robust - and since the holy Market has been such a consistently abject failure in mass-producing things that would make life so much easier in remote and rural Australia, let them be produced in government facilities …. such as in - shock!! horror!! - prison factories [run humanely and of ultimate benefit to the prisoners, of course].

Melaleuca [33]:
I have to agree with much of what Ambigulous said on [32].

You said

“Problem is we only know what direction is positive after the event”.

That’s only partially true. We don’t have to pick winners but we can eliminate some obvious duds - for instance, like having only one thickness of cladding on an exterior wall [and there are money-free ways of overcoming that heat-loss/heat-gain problem].

I wasn’t referring to grant money: that should certainly be spread around. Because the better energy outcomes for society will still, IMHO, be multi-pronged. I thought you were referring to giving subsidies to home-owners and factory operators (planning to install energy-saving devices, solar collectors, etc).

Research funding: let a hundred flowers bloom!!
Yes, some’ll be duds but we won’t know until the figures come in.

I think we’re in agreement.

Problem is we only know what direction is positive after the event. It may turn out that wind power or tidal power or geothermal or something else will end being more important. Another possibility: the Oz Government could put one billion dollars into various solar programs here that turn out to be duds while someone in lets say, Spain, makes the breakthrough that makes solar the best available option.

As I say, spread the grant money around.

Nothing wrong with frugality, and nothing wrong with a MULTI-pronged approach, to reducing greenhouse gas emission, saving energy, reducing pollution, saving water, etc etc. I get a little sick of advocates of ONE energy system pooh-poohing all the others. We currently use a mixture of sources. We currently aren’t yet doing very well in passive solar for houses & offices; urban design - but we are learning. Grid-connected photovoltaics make sense to me: and why not a subsidy of some size [argue about its size but don’t prohibit a subsidy].

We’re learning to build lighter vehicles, improving battery design, improving both photovolataic and solar hot water designs, and AT LAST getting serious about windpower generation.

I see many hopeful signs for a long-term conversion to a more energy-efficient transport/homes/industry system. Public opinion has shifted remarkably, at last.

Of course there will be many, complementary energy sources for the foreseeable future.

melaleuca decries “picking winners” - well yes, we should never “put all our eggs in one basket”, but giving consumer decisions a gentle nudge in a positive direction sounds like a policy that has the potential to get us a win-win outcome, to me.

Agree wholeheartedly that the needs of poor hoseholds require special attention. IMHO the poor are the “forgotten people” of modern Australia.

cheerio

But I think history shows that the best way to get frugality is through the hip-pocket nerve.

Furthermore, it’s a question of how best to help those in the Other Australia. Do we give them big subsidies to install rooftop solar, or would it be better to increase their welfare payments so they can afford to buy green power from the grid? At the moment, it makes much more sense to do the latter.

I knew someone living out of Esk (about 90 minutes drive out of Brisbane for all you Southerners) who had been quoted something over $10 K to connect to the grid. In their case subsidised solar was almost an attractive deal.

But I suspect that re-jigging the tax-welfare system would be more effective means of assisting rural people on low incomes than providing heavily subsidised solar power systems.

There is an order - or two - of magnitude involved here. These are people who are lucky if they are running around in an ‘eighties Falcon or Holden, let alone a modern fuel-efficient vehicle …. as for a Toorak tractor, forget it.

The Queensland government also had a rebate scheme for new solar-electric hot water system installations - that might have been within reach of some lucky enough to have that much cash …. but solar electric power systems are way way beyond their wildest dreams.

On roof-top photovoltaic, I’m uncomfortable about depending on large-scale use of batteries.

Yes, Brian. Rooftop solar should be grid connected.

I’d favour another desalination plant instead, with the provisos that the required energy be 100% carbon free

Big problem with this, Brian. The desal plant will take the hypothecated green power which otherwise would be available to supplant coal power. We can only build so much green power in so many years and with so many dollars. Would prefer not to divert that precious green power on desal (unless ppl are going thirsty - and I would want official Big Government check that their lips are cracking.)

Agree with Robert, actually, about urban water. (Here in Vic leastways.) CO2 is the issue. Urban water waste is still monumental.

I’d question whether it was wise to ever go 90% solar though, simply because you have to build in contingency supply arrangements to cover whatever power is unavailable through inclement weather.

This is where geothermal has a marked superiority (or will have if it is proven to work large-scale) because the weather is simply irrelevant.

On roof-top photovoltaic, I’m uncomfortable about depending on large-scale use of batteries. Also while the Chinese have not yet geared up to produce solar panels cheaply en masse and new materials are being developed it’s hard to see them becoming cost competitive with large-scale renewables.

I was a bit surprised with Robert’s statement:

Furthermore, urban water usage is a fairly minor engineering challenge. It is not a crucial economic or environmental issue.

A decision will have to be made on the Traveston Dam soon. I’m betting that Garrett will give it the all clear. Apart from flooding prime agricultural land when all the indications are that the world is going to need all the productive land it can get some very important rare species are going to be put at risk.

I’d favour another desalination plant instead, with the provisos that the required energy be 100% carbon free and the salty brine be adequately distributed.

Please note that I don’t accept the greens’ claim that retro fitting water tanks will do the trick mainly (but not solely) because their costings seem way out.

Interesting topic.

Two points that nobody seems to notice:

[a] Why is so little ever said about lowering household demand for electricity with, for example, fridges that meet one’s actual needs. What’s wrong with a bit of old-fashioned frugality?

[b] So just which foreign aid agency is going to help those living in The Other Australia get CHEAP household solar power systems? It is ridiculous to talk about families living way below the poverty line being able to rush out and buy - and have installed!! - small-scale efficient CHEAP household solar power systems. Subsidy or rebate, the reality is that many families who would benefit most from such systems are the very ones who can least afford them. [It’s a similar story with vermin-proof rainwater tanks and composting/waterless toilets too].

I find all this feed-in stuff an extraordinary waste of public money when the same money could be devoted to building a utility.

I agree with you Paul H. If someone wants to fund their own rooftop install, fine. But govt shld be spending those rebates on utilities instead. As you say. The inefficiencies inherent in the rooftop business must be enormous. It’s governments pandering to the green lobby without committing themselves fully to the agenda I suspect.

(As well, there’s this insidiously romantic notion out there that solar will mean the end of large energy corporations etc as we all become power generators.)

Good post as your posts invariably are. This is only my second contribution to LP since I’m a bashful old bloke who finds blogging rather too hectic and frenetic! I suspect that by the time I post this, everyone will have moved onto something new.

I’ve been drawn to the attractions of utility-sized solar thermal in places like the Southwest US, Mediterranean Europe and Australia (and North Africa for that matter), ie places with plentiful largely uninterrupted sunlight. (I’m not silly enough to suggest the same solution for places like Scotland and Scandinavia, where plainly nuclear and other solutions need to be in the melting pot).

As I wrote to someone the other day (I’m over 60): “I hope I live long enough to see 90% of Australia’s power generation come from large solar thermal farms located, say, between Mildura and Broken Hill, somewhere near Bourke, somewhere near Cloncurry, somewhere south of Geraldton, and somewhere near Port Pirie”. (The best locations need some meteorological modelling.)

I’ve been very much attracted by the arguments of David Mills, the former Sydney Uni academic who is now with Ausra in Silicon Valley. I’m not spruiking for David, because there is intense competition in the large-scale solar field and any one of many similarly young companies could emerge with the best and cheapest technology. I did, however, find his presentation at http://ausra.com/pdfs/ausra_usgridsupply.pdf last month enormously inspirational because it suggested an energy-rich future (and indeed an energy-unlimited future) for places in sunbelts (including Australia).

It is plainly going to require (a) a price put on emissions/carbon; and (b) a very large investment in large-scale steel and mirror installations in arid bits of Australia and transmission lines to populated areas.

Note my fundamental proposition that Australia has a potentially huge competitive advantage in that it has almost unlimited low-cost unproductive sundrenched land that could support solar farms.

My guesstimate, depending on whether we want enough energy to (a) substitute for present domestic/commercial/industrial electricity generation; or (b) power a number of desalination plants (including incidentally the trivial matter of powering large vessels to transport the salt waste back into deep fast-current waters; and/or (c) to power a society where electric cars are the norm for non-public transport; and/or (d) where we export electricity to neighbouring countries via high-voltage DC lines: then:

My guesstimate is that the cost of (a) and (b) above is around the $150-$200bn mark. Seem like a big sum? There’s $50bn a year and rising rapidly going into super and the superfunds are crying out for prudent investment opportunities. There’s precious little that’s attractive or that isn’t crook on the ASX at present. We could easily do this in 20 years.

If there’s money for research, I wouldn’t be putting it into carbon capture and storage: I’d be putting it into things like modelling how solar thermal can reach baseload guarantees, where to situate the solar farms on a national grid so as to reduce any risks of brownouts and I’d be calling a meeting of trustees of large and industry superfunds to ask them what policy settings they need to fulfil their prudential obligations for investing in this sector.

As for Penny Wong’s chairing of the Population, sustainabilty etc. stream of the 2020 Summit: I thought it was a disgrace. I’ve got a lot of respect for Penny Wong and hope that she switches sides sometime in the future once she realises that coal is Australia’s cargo cult. I think we need to make a serious distinction between thermal coal (bad) and coking coal (arguably OK),

I’ll take sides with the utility-scale solar people any time against the rooftop crowd. If it’s rooftop stuff against coal, then sure, vote rooftop (1). I find all this feed-in stuff an extraordinary waste of public money when the same money could be devoted to building a utility.

Cheers

There are many types of solar collectors for water heating. If you are in a frost prone area then the evacuated tube type collector is what would be used. These are used throughout Europe where the frosting is more severe and the solar durations are shorter.