If you judged by press releases, you’d reckon this was the greenest budget ever. And it is indeed good in parts, though not nearly as good as you might think. The first thing to note is that the CPRS targets and the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target haven’t changed, so emissions won’t change at all (though it may mean we buy fewer permits overseas), nor will the fraction of our electricity generated from renewable sources. What the funding in this budget might do is change the technology mix available to us to achieve those targets.
In the energy space, the big deal is a bunch of new funding for large-scale demonstration projects for both solar and geosequestration in comparable amounts – 1.5 billion over six years to the solar industry, 2 billion over nine years to geosequestration. John Hepburn at Rooted argues the value-for-money case for the solar investment, on the basis that the solar demonstration projects will deliver “…1GW of real, emissions free power within the next 6 years. Wheras the larger investment in CCS will support the development of demonstration projects over 9 years.” CCS research does indeed need to start poohing or be pushed off the government funding pot, but Hepburn is overselling the current state of the renewable energy sector. That 1GW of capacity might be “real” (if only delivered a few hours a day), but it will be very expensive, unreliable, and – until energy storage technology improves – only available when the sun shines, not when the power is wanted. Until these issues are sorted, the contribution of solar energy to Australia’s power grid will remain limited to little more than demonstration levels anyway. Incidentally, solar thermal is highly unlikely to ever be cheaper than Australian coal-fired power (ignoring externalities), because if the fuel is free and at the power plant, most of the rest of the cost is the steam turbine and generator. Guess what – a solar thermal plant needs the exact same steam turbine and generator.
In any case, for what it’s worth I strongly question the policy (as distinct from political) merits of singling out the solar industry for help. While my little investment, Geodynamics, has managed to bugger things up again, it’s just one of a number of alternative sources of renewable energy that can be turned on and off when required, not when the wind deigns to blow or the sun deigns to shine. Why not throw the money for demonstration projects open to the entire renewables sector and see what ideas turn up?
The budget starts taking on a distinctly camouflage mottled hue, unfortunately, when you examine the transport funding plans. On the green side of things there are substantial investments proposed for urban rail pretty much everywhere except NSW. However, the freight rail sector seems to have largely missed out. While there is a reasonable chunk of funding to the Australian Rail Track Corporation, most of that goes to funding infrastructure to export coal from the Hunter. By contrast, there’s roads going everywhere.
Aside from shifting coal around, it seems that the government still believes that the best way to shift goods around Australia is to unload them at the docks and throw them on trucks hurtling down freeways. Pity.
You need to start spruiking my little investment, Carnegie Corporation with their CETO wave power. They haven’t buggered anything up yet.
Hmmm. Unconvinced. I reckon they’re going to run into all manner of environmental hassles if they’re going to install enough of these to get a significant amount of power, not so much from the generators themselves but the infrastructure required to transmit the power – think “what, you want to put…power lines…on my beautiful beach?”
Is there infrastructure to get the energy from A to B either for the Geodynamics project?
I think Geodynamics should first worry about getting the energy before wondering up the transport it.
think you’re clever getting the geodynamics news into a javascript pop-up? my browser hates it.
THe discussion has been made many times before Robert but:
You exaggerate the problems caused by intermittency.
Yes it is an issue, but providing even 10% (maybe more) of our electricity is a bit more than a few demonstration projects. And that’s ignoring the research/possibilities of storage.
You also ignore the problems with baseload generation – it can’t ramp up and down quick enough to match load, requiring spinning reserve and peak load generators to assist.
Solar thermal is one technology that hasn’t been adequately tried out in Australia, and I’m interested to see what the industry can do with this opportunity.
BTW – on solar thermal needing to use steam turbines etc – this can be an advantage as I”m sure you already know – it means that solar thermal can be used to provide pre-heat to coal power stations (as is being tried at Liddell Power station in NSW).
I dont think high temperature solar thermal at the gigawatt scale is ‘very expensive’ either. It might even compete with wind power, which is something i cant see geodynamics doing any time soon.
PS. I’m “unconvinced” by geodynamics. They are taking too long and not getting anywhere fast.
“I’m “unconvinced” by geodynamics. They are taking too long and not getting anywhere fast.”
That’s because they are trying to do the whole thing on pocket-money.
Well, at least they released the Wilkins Review…
http://www.finance.gov.au/publications/strategic-reviews/index.html
Gov’t’s Response: http://www.environment.gov.au/minister/garrett/2009/budmr20090512k.html
Furious balancing: yes, grid connection is an issue for Geodynamics as well, but I can’t see Matthew Richardson taking up surfing to protest building power lines across the Cooper Basin. Power lines all over the coastline? Fat chance of ever happening.
You’ve been calling for this for a while, right? Any analysis coming up or am I going to have to trawl through it myself.
Maybe. Solar thermal is going to work a hell of a lot better north/west of the Divide, which isn’t where most of Australia’s existing power stations are.
Well my little investment in Carnegie is doing much better than my little investment in Geodynamics, but that might have something to do with timing as well. I don’t see powerlines on the coast being a big issue, there are plenty of powerlines where people live on the coast.
One thing missing from the budget is anything about transmission infrastructure for renewable technologies, where there is a clear case of market failure.
The amount of spending on technology ($4 billion over four years) is about four times less than what Garnaut was recommending (at least $3 billion per year).
Geo-thermal. Lovely concept.
Unfortunately not many hot rocks in the right place. Innaminka isn’t very useful. How much will transmission costs be?
What happens when the water runs out? (eg Californian experience)
What happens when the rocks cool down?
Yes Oz – I have been calling for it for a while. I might post on it if I find anything worthwhile. At the moment, nothing too surprising. It basically just puts a blind faith in a proper functioning ETS and credible carbon price. heh.
The adaptation strategy is similarly simplistically neoliberal – the government should ‘facilitate information transfer’ to allow people and firms to make up their own mind. Weird stuff, really.
Peter, wave energy is pretty diffuse. If you’re going to collect serious energy from it, wave generators are going to spread out over many kilometers of coastline. Inevitably, a lot of it is going to be in rather attractive spots.
Robert, this post is below your usual standards.
Your criticism of the intermittency of solar power ignores the fact that peak insolation coincides with peak summer demand, making it far more useful than you imply. A better price comparison is against peaking gas power, rather than baseload coal. You may be right that it will not be competitive if we ‘ignore externalities’, however that is precisely what we can’t afford to do any more.
You also seem to have dismissed Carnegie’s CETO technology without a sufficient knowledge of how it works; i.e. it doesn’t require ‘power lines on beaches’. It does use offshore pipelines, which are generally concealed by burial. I suspect Carnegie’s main problem (like all wave power technologies tried so far) will be maintenance costs.
Nice, but peaking gas is not the thing we need to shut down, it’s baseload coal. As for the point about price competitiveness, that was the claim made on the Rooted blog, and it’s nonsense. Solar thermal can’t be cheaper than Australian coal, because a solar thermal plant is pretty much identical to a coal-fired plant except for its heat source.
That’s not going to be cheap. Salt, barnacles, and electrically-conductive metal objects do not generally mix well without the addition of large amounts of money.
“That’s not going to be cheap.”
Do you think any of the solutions will be ‘cheap’?
Forgive me for saying so, but your commentaries seem to be increasingly biased in favour of certain technologies, when the criticisms you give of any alternatives could be equally applied to them.
I don’t think this budget is too bad in terms of green investment, particularly compared to previous budgets and governments (although it probably falls behind compared with UK and US).
By my calculations, there is $6.5 billion going to “green” RD&D, and another $5 billion going to energy efficiency.
On the RD&D side, it’s true that there is a big imbalance between the technology specific funding of $4.5 billion and the technology neutral funding of $615 million (again by my calculations). I think the government is right to be putting money into both of these, since they are capable of having a broad, longer term strategic perspective than funding bodies like Renewables Australia that allocate money to individual projects (at least in theory). But I’m not so sure that they got the balance right in this case.
These are always going to be difficult decisions, and at some point, someone is going to have to make a subjective judgment that many other people will disagree with, no matter how the funding is allocated.
I have to say Robert isn’t alone, it seems to be popular to pooh-pooh the idea of (1) Solar and (2) distributed systems in general.
Think of what you are typing on. In the olden days you would only have had access to a computer if you were in a big commercial building. It would have been a humongous thing and you would be sitting at a dumb terminal. Processing power – a joke compared to your nephew’s laptop!
think of the car you might have driven today. In the olden days it would have gone about 15 mph, tops, with a dude walking in front with a red flag. And expensive – certainly not a mass owned item.
Who can say that the same pattern of technological advance won’t obtain with renewables if people can only get over the negativity and the obsession with doing things the same way? And wouldn’t a distributed system be heaps less vulnerable than a big nuke or whatever sitting in a central role in the grid?
JMO.
Robert, FWIW, I agree with most of your post, including your point that it’s inappropriate to single out solar for attention.
But I don’t quite understand your logic on the point about price competitiveness. I didn’t actually assert that solar thermal would be cheaper than coal, all other things being equal (nor, as far as I can tell, did the Rooted post).
You seem to be arguing that the cost of the solar infrastructure ancillary to the steam boilers and generators (i.e. the solar collectors and related equipment) will always cost more than the coal infrastructure ancillary to the steam boilers and generators (i.e. pulverisers, furnaces, smokestacks, loading facilities etc) combined with the cost of the coal fuel. That may well be true now, but I don’t really see why it would always be true.
On Carnegie – no arguments there. Offshore installations are bound to be expensive.
One last thing – yes, we need to get rid of baseload coal, but we also need to get rid of gas. Replacing coal with gas is an interim measure only – sooner or later the gas will need to go too. So a price comparison between solar thermal and peaking gas remains relevant.
wave generators are going to spread out over many kilometers of coastline.
Indeed. Of course, the wave generators themselves might be several kilometres offshore or even on the edge of the continental plate, but that isn’t really the issue. The problem is that wave power hasn’t ever been commercially proved for mains power generation. It’s more like solar 20 years ago – for some applications it’s ideal, but those are small and RAPS.
In my book the main advantage is that it’s not tidal. Few things are worse than destroying fish nurseries, and when the return is a small amount of electricity it is very hard to justify.
That said, I’d like it if all these ideas for renewable energy worked really well. The more options we have the less sensible non-renewables seem.
Atlantis Energy apparently has a 240KW commercial tidal power plant under construction right now off the coast of Scotland … tidal is completely predictable and my understanding is doesn’t suffer from the same issues as CETO wave power. Atlantis was an Australian company but left because the MRET wasn’t good enough to make them cost-competitive
Helen, and look at where things are going – more and more of people’s computing is being managed by central IT departments – indeed, by Google – because it’s cheaper to manage centralized systems.
Sometimes distributed is a win, sometimes centralized is a win. I don’t think it’s possible to draw hard and fast rules. But as far as anything involving a heat engine goes, bigger is pretty much always more thermally efficient per unit of power output.
The thing is, Robert, that distributed systems were cheaper for quite a while. That’s why we’ve got so many PCs on so many desks. I think it’s increased complexity of business systems (and hence the need for more expensive cable-chasers) that’s driven the push back to centralised IT (and, of course, the average IT manager’s desire for control and desktop lockdown).
Ben, the problem with tidal power is that the places where it’s worth doing – that is, where natural features give you big tides – tend to be environmentally sensitive, and the tidal power stations inherently interfere with the water flow that’s a key part of that natural environment.
Tim, WRT cost, I quote from the Rooted post:
Broadly, you’ve got two options – solar thermal and solar PV (which you can further subdivide into concentrating and non-concentrating). As I understand it, the steam turbine and the generator – which is exactly the same as would be used in a solar thermal plant – make up 80-odd% of the cost of conventional coal. That doesn’t leave a whole lot of margin for solar thermal to be cheaper, does it?
Solar PV is a different kettle of fish entirely – and theoretically could become cheaper than coal – but despite various promises, it’s still as dear as poison, and the energy storage options are more complex and expensive than for solar thermal.
A few points:Tidal power does not necessarily interfere with water flow – it depends upon how it is executed.
The steam turbine is common to: Nuclear, Solar Thermal, Combined cycle Gas and some Geothermal plants. Good thing about this ? Because of this ubiquity that they are very low cost. Bad thing about steam turbines is that they have an inherently low Carnot efficiency because of the nature of steam and water.
All offshore plants including wind and wave and tidal bring the power in under-water and underground, all this talk of power-lines on the beaches is just rubbish.
Solar thermal plants can extend their generation time with thermal storage , So far as I know all the new plants have his feature. In fact a solar thermal plant with about 6 hours of storage would nicely fill the evening peak. Especially if it was located somewhere in the middle of the continent or even in the Bowen Basin along with all the other stuff.
Here is Nation building plan: Solar and Geothermal in the Bowen basin and a 500kV line to connect it to the East. Then shut down the Coal fired plant.
Huggy
Thanks Robert – I read the Rooted piece in a hurry and missed that reference.
I’m still not entirely convinced by your argument – I can’t recall the source at present, but I remember recently seeing stats showing that the overall operating life cycle cost of coal (and gas) power is dominated by the cost of fuel (i.e over 50%). Fuel cost for solar is zero. Clearly the capital cost of solar thermal is higher, though. I’m not disputing that solar thermal is currently much dearer than coal, nor do I insist that it will inevitably become cheaper than coal.
The real trouble, of course, is that all renewables are much more expensive than coal (if we ignore the externalities), and so is coal with CCS (and nuclear). Whichever way we jump, electricity is getting more expensive, at least in the short to medium term, if for no other reason than that coal’s externalities will start to be priced in.
Solar PV is a different kettle of fish entirely – and theoretically could become cheaper than coal – but despite various promises, it’s still as dear as poison, and the energy storage options are more complex and expensive than for solar thermal.
That’s what I’m saying – things start out clunky and expensive and get better and cheaper IF they are widely adopted. It’s a pattern.
You might be able to match up biogas from old tip landfills with thermal solar by installing solar thermal cells near old tips. The installations could be designed to use the same heat engine, with the biogas being used when energy from solar thermal is not available. You might also be able to temporarily store some of the biogas and have stable renewable power for up to tens of MWs. Not quite at the GW level though…
Possibly because there isn’t actually a free market in electricity. Or transmission. There never has been. They’ve always been government utilities or the heavily regulated, price-fixed, shambolically privatised bits of government utilities.
Indeed we need more gas to cope with the intermittency of renewables.
Did wind get any direct funding like solar and CCS? Wind probably isn’t cool anymore, but its a proven technology, and its already pretty competitive with fossil energy.
Robert, you seem quite concerned about the intermittency issue (as am I) but John Quiggin dismisses it as an irrelevance:
Robert (besides Mark) you the only reason I read the blog. Why the hell you aren’t published wider is beyond me. Go on Q & A with Barnaby Joyce or something for fucks sake! It is the sort of robust debate the county needs more than ever…for better or worse!!
Quiggin is only half-right in this instance. The peak demand for electricity today occurred between 6 and 8:30 pm, which at this time of year is in the dark.
He’s right that the demand at 3am would probably be a bit lower than it currently is. But the pricing mechanism for electricity is going to work a lot less well than he thinks in this case.
It would be interesting to determine how much of baseload demand (about 5000 megawatts in Victoria) is the result of electric hot water systems, which is the obvious source of elective demand for off-peak power. I think about 720 megawatts is the Portland smelter.
Carbon, Quiggin is stretching that a bit isn’t he?
So, at 8pm in the middle of a cold Melbourne winter the demand for power would be close to zero with variable pricing? That price would have to be astronomically high. Intermittency isn’t just a day/night issue either.Also, we are a long way from proper variable retail pricing of electricity being viable politically. When I defended it on a thread a couple of months ago it was as though I was trying to kill old people in their beds.
Part of the problem with public funding for low-emission research, development and demonstration is that governments haven’t taken a holistic approach to it. Lots of money for coal because we have abundant natural resources, export a lot of it, and it is located in politically sensitive seats. Some money for solar because it tests well in focus groups. Less money for wind because it doesn’t. Little consideration for nuclear because it is a political mine-field.
The approach also doesn’t take enough account of uncertainty about how costs for various technologies will evolve in the longer term. Everyone seems to have their pet technology, but on top of providing the right price signal, funding needs to be distributed very broadly to ensure that we don’t invest disproportionately in technolgoies that prove to be cost ineffective or non-viable for other reasons. Governments also have to do more to reduce uncertainty about future policy.
What a wacky and poorly-informed little screed.
There exist twelve basic ways to generate electricity.
Oil
Natural gas
Nuclear
Coal
Biomass
Geothermal
Hydroelectric
Solar PV
Solar thermal
Tidal
Wave
Wind
Let’s begin by accepting that we can’t rely on something with a declining supply. We wouldn’t put up solar panels if the world were getting darker, and we shouldn’t rely on things which are finite and get burned up. In considering this, we have to remember that power plants have a lifetime of 40-60 years. So if in (say) 30 years we won’t be able to afford the fuel for thing because it’s so scarce, it’d be stupid to build it.
Minerals and fossil fuels, their production follows a sort of bell curve. At some point it gets harder to get the stuff out of the ground, and the rate it comes out slows down, and the price of the stuff jumps up. It’s not like turning a tap off overnight, but things get pricier and it’s a pain.
The world’s conventional crude oil production peaked in May 2005; increases in “liquids” production since then have come from tar sands, biofuels, etc. Total “liquids” peaked in 2008; it may go a bit higher in the next few years if some big coal-to-liquids projects come online, but probably not. Oil supply will only go down from now. So it’d be stupid to build oil-fired power plants.
Natural gas is relatively plentiful, however everyone and his dog is building gas-fired plants, and people use it to heat their homes, too. Plus it’s used to make artificial fertiliser. And it’s used to heat tar sands to get oil. Still, we can expect production to not peak before 2025. However, depending on how fast oil drops off we may see a lot of countries trying to substitute gas for their oil use, so that brings the peak closer. So I wouldn’t build gas-fired plants, either.
Coal is all over the place, but easily-mined seams aren’t so common. Still, it’s widely-used. Peak for coal is less clear, but sometime between 2040-70 seems reasonable, depending on your assumptions – like how much coal will be turned to substitute oil, how many more coal-fired plants and iron foundries and cement factories the Chinese and Indians will build, etc. So what we see is that if you build a coal-fired plant today, there’s an even chance fuel will start to decline in availability during its lifetime.
All three fossil fuels contribute to climate change. And all three are going to run very short some day – whether we think we can live with them or not, whether burning coal gives us vitamin C or chokes us, doesn’t matter – they’re going to run short, and within the lifetime of the power plants we build today. So in sum we can say that it’s a bad idea to build coal, gas or oil-fired power plants. That leaves us with nine options.
Nuclear also relies on a declining resource, uranium, expected to peak around 2025. You can get a few more years out of it with fast breeders and reprocessing, but then you get a big weapons proliferation risk, and substantial amounts of radioactive waste to go with it. It’s technically doable but politically difficult, and diplomatically impossible – imagine Iran, Libya, Uganda, Chile, Thailand, Vietnam, Argentina, Azerbaijan, all with fast breeder reactors and tonnes of plutonium. So probably we can set nuclear aside, too. That leaves us with eight options.
Biomass in principle is a wonderful idea, the full grows back, carbon neutral and all that. In practice… well, put it this way: the environmental movement essentially began in the 1950s with people worried about excessive logging and deforestation. Half a century later deforestation is still contributing some 17% of all greenhouse gases, it’s still a big problem. Countries like Japan have managed to become about two-thirds forest-covered, but then Japan imports 80% of its timber products, from places like Malaysia and Nigeria where most of the logging is illegal but done anyway. So if we’re unable to deal with deforestation now, how much harder will it be if the forest provides fuel for our electricity generation? So in practice biomass is likely to make the climate change problem worse, not better.
Now we’re down to seven options. Wave power sounds very promising but unfortunately is not commercially-proven. Maybe later, we’ll see.
That leaves us with six: geothermal, hydroelectric, solar PV, solar thermal, and wind.
Here Down Under hydro and tidal are not really serious options on a large scale, as we’re such a dry country and have few wild rivers left. There’s a few places like Broome and the Kimberely that could do well with it, but it’s not a national solution.
So geothermal, solar PV, solar thermal, and wind are it for Australia. Doesn’t matter how expensive they are, doesn’t matter if you like ‘em or not, because those are our options for the long-term.
The intermittency issue has to be considered, but it’s not too difficult to deal with. Just don’t rely on One Big Facility. There has never been a time in recorded Australian history when it was dark or overcast with still air across the whole country at once. Never. So you just have lots of facilities spread out across the country, and a grid connecting them. Chuck in some geothermal and you’re golden.
We alreay do this sort of thing; Tassie sends Vic hydro electricity on its rainy days, and Vic sends Tassie its coal electricity during droughts. And the Danes and Swedes do it, too – the Danes send the Swedes wind energy, the Swedes consume the energy or use it to pump water into their hydro dams, and then on still days the Swedes send the Danes some hydro energy.
It’s not an easy thing to do, quite technical, but this is what we have engineers for, and no technological breakthroughs are needed.
Kiashu: fuel supply will not be an issue for nuclear power any time in the next millennium.
For one, we haven’t looked for uranium nearly as hard as oil. For another, it’s so energy dense we can afford to mine extremely poor-quality ores – of which there are ridiculously huge quantities known – to get it. For heaven’s sake, you could mine fly ash for uranium. For another, we can build reactors that are orders of magnitude more efficient in their use of uranium than current ones, with known, already demonstrated technology. Fast breeders don’t just get you a few more years, it’s a few more millennia. For another, there’s the thorium fuel cycle, which is even more abundant than uranium and is inherently a breeder technology. It’s even possible to use some thorium in existing reactors.
In any case, the chances of going anywhere near running out of uranium over the 60-year lifespan of the next generation plants is around about zero, which is all that really matters.
Robert, Tell us what has happened to the Yucca mountain nuclear waste repository that was supposed to solve the nuclear waste problem that the nuclear lovers so carefully ignore ?
Huggy
Minerals and fossil fuels, their production follows a sort of bell curve. At some point it gets harder to get the stuff out of the ground, and the rate it comes out slows down, and the price of the stuff jumps up. It’s not like turning a tap off overnight, but things get pricier and it’s a pain
Yes, and additionally, once stuff is harder to get out of the ground (and we have to explore further sources) it means the carving up and despoliation of various precious remote and/or wild ecosystems. Those who don’t care about this part of it might like to consider the possibility of unforeseen consequences.
It’s a good question because these were basically mandated as a grid management/peak demand shaving technology to suit coal fired generation. They’re being phased out as part of the national strategy on energy efficiency
I saw some Cost Benefit Analysis figures on this yesterday and considering that the CPRS is probably locking us in to coal fired generation for the next 15-20 years because they can buy bits of paper and keep polluting, the phase out of electric hot water is probably the cheapest abatement option in Australia.
Kiashu, don’t you think you’re a little rude, calling one of the site posters “wacky and poorly informed” when you’ve got several errors in your not so little screed?
As noted, claims about uranium running out are demonstrably false, while coal is not going to run out any time this or next century. Hopefully it’ll never run out because we’ll stop burning the stuff…
There has never been a time in recorded Australian history when it was dark or overcast with still air across the whole country at once. Never.
Have you got evidence to back this strong statement up? I’ll tell you what, I reckon it gets dark across the whole country at least once per day! It’s handwaving to say that we can just get a nifty grid and all intermittency problems are solved. What you’re saying is that there needs to be multiples of total Australian demand available in each and every State. Crazy stuff, and at what cost.
It’s been cancelled because of politics, Huggy.
Summarising the environmental & energy items in the 2009 Federal Budget.
The Government will invest $4.5 billion (including $1 billion of existing funding) in a new Clean Energy Initiative, including:
* $465 million for the establishment of a renewable technology innovation body, Renewables Australia (could be good, if the stay away from burning forests for fuel)
* $1.5 billion for a Solar Flagships Program aiming to establish 1,000 megawatts of solar electricity generation (looks good)
* $2 billion over nine years for investment in large-scale Carbon Capture and Storage demonstration projects (not good – should be funded by coal industry, not taxpayers).
Additional sustainability programs funded under the Budget include:
* $2.75 billion ($2.45 billion existing funding) to the Climate Change Action Fund under the CPRS, to inform and position business, industry and community on the impacts of a low carbon economy (a huge amount of greenwash for the CPRS?)
* $100 million per annum to establish the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute to inform global action on the development and commercialization of this technology (not good)
* $100 million per annum over three years to the World Bank’s Clean Technology Fund. (not sure about this one).
For those that want more detail, the Climate Change Budget Overview 2009—10 provides a summary of the Government’s climate change strategy, describing the objectives of each measure and the providing the name of the agencies who will implement them.
Overall, for I give it 2/10 for transitioning us to a low carbon economy and off coal.
Labour Outsider @ 36:
Sure, but governments clearly aren’t prepared to provide the right price signal, so the goal has to be to make low emissions technology competitive with fossil energy. Government investment can’t do that alone, private investment is required, and to get that private investment happening we need to distort the markets so it becomes irresistibly attractive to invest in clean technology.
I see no alternative. People anticipating real change out of Bali, Copenhagen or wherever the next gabfest is, are seriously deluded. Waiting another 6 months for Copenhagen is just another 6 months wasted.
We spent all that time waiting for Garnaut, then the white paper, then green paper, then the CPRS legislation, only to have it hopelessly watered down and delayed. When are people going to wake up to the fact that the politicians are never going to punish us for using energy?
How about we remove the capital gains tax on investments in the renewables sector? We do it for the family home, why not for something that will help save the planet?
Only because they think that we’ll punish them at the next election for doing so
And we can fund it by doing a swap – CGT on the family home in exchange for no CGT on renewable investments. Two wins in one!
And I suspect we would. You only have to look at the hysteria over petrol prices last year to realise that if energy prices really began to hurt (which of course they must to change behaviour) the punters would revolt.
Robert: we haven’t looked for uranium nearly as hard as oil
No, and for good reason: known supplies are ample. Largely because it’s a material with few uses and little demand.
we can build reactors that are orders of magnitude more efficient in their use of uranium than current ones, with known, already demonstrated technology
“we” the human race, possibly. “we” Australians, not at all. Even the toy reactors in Sydney are built by overseas “experts” because we lack the knowledge. We also lack the skills to correctly assemble the ones we have if the repeated construction problems are any guide.
But eventually we humans also hope to build reactors that are profitable and acceptably safe to operate when externalities are counted. Face it Robert, if the plants were profitable people would be fighting to build them. I don’t see a queue. What I see is demands for special treatment and subsidies that make Macquarie Bank look like philanthropists.
I suggest that one reason there’s been limited research is the huge cost of subsidising existing nuclear plants. The US DOE are huge fans of nuclear but their substantial budget is all used up just patching over the cracks in the industry. Between the cost of what amounts to PR “disaster proofing” measures and the cost of temporary storage of radioactive waste, they just don’t have the resources.
I’m also offended on an engineering level that “waste” products have so much readily available energy content that dealing with energy leaks makes the waste intractable. FFS, “it spontaneously gives off heat” is a description of an energy source, not a waste product. Why aren’t you demanding that we mine that source first, since it’s already highly refined and people will pay you to take it away?
If I could just be provocative for a moment to those who yearn for a holistic approach towards a rational energy policy (pet technology or not) two questions:
1) Can you point to any country that has or has ever had one?
2) If not, why are you and other policy activists/analysts pursuing it?
A bill for 17% cuts by 2020 goes to the US HoR for a vote next week.
[“I am optimistic. I believe we will have the votes to pass the bill [next week],” Waxman said.
Waxman had to compromise with Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) on one of his key goals —the overall level of carbon reductions by 2020. Waxman had wanted a 20 percent cut; Boucher has worried such a steep cut would outpace the development of new technologies like carbon capture from coal-fired power plants. They settled on a 17 percent cut instead.
Waxman also agreed to give utilities free initial allocations on nearly all of their emissions. Boucher had sought to give utilities the credits to avoid rate hikes for consumers.]
http://www.rollcall.com/news/34859-1.html
Robert yes 25 years and 13.5 BILLION US$ later they close it.
That 13.5 billion dollars would have been better spent on a massive geothermal project surely?
Huggy
Interesting, I thought the legislators would have realised that whether utilities get free permits or not would not at all affect whether they decide to pass on costs to consumers or not.
Some combination of France, Germany and California would come closest.
France because they’ve produce more low-emissions electricity than anyone (why would that be Robert?), fast trains etc
Germany for wind (fly over Germany, amazing) solar feed in tariff, not so good with coal.
California for innovation, and the closest thing in the world we have to a cleantech investment bubble, not so good with public transport, cars, roads etc.
France’s energy policy is due to fortuity – they had no coal – rather than a decision to pursue nuclear based on its environmental credentials.
Germany’s is pretty irrational, to be honest. Never has a country spent so much money on their environment for so little effect.
“And I suspect we would. You only have to look at the hysteria over petrol prices last year to realise that if energy prices really began to hurt (which of course they must to change behaviour) the punters would revolt.”
Not only did the Liberal Party in British Columbia put in a very comprehensive carbon tax (raising gas prices by 9 cents a gallon and progressively increasing) but they won an election where the opposition NDP was actively opposing the policy and the number one issue was the economy.
Robert: it sounds like you need to read up a bit more on wave power, and CETO in particular.
Wave energy is certainly a lot more dense than wind… but we have wind turbine farms everywhere.
Wave energy incidence can be accurately predicted a week in advance, unlike wind or solar.
CETO involves pressurising sea water using buoys anchored under the surface just off-shore. This pressurised water is fed into a conventional electricity generating turbine and reverse osmosis filter: both proven technologies currently in use in Australia.
No power lines on the beaches, more energy dense than wind, no unsightly plant (it’s underwater) apart from the on-shore facility (similar to what a desal plant would look like now), using conventional materials proven for their marine suitability.
As the document at my previous link stated, France’s giant renewable energy producer EDF EN has an agreement to develop CETO wave power sites in the Northern hemisphere.
Frankly, a reliable, baseload, emissions free source of electricity and drinking water which coincides with our highest areas of population density seems like a good thing to me. How are the geothermal companies going to solve the power transmission issues?
“Some combination of France, Germany and California would come closest.”
Why not Spain? More than 30% of it’s energy comes from renewable sources.
All these points about intermittent power etc. miss the point, in my opinion. Yes it is critical to resolve them if you want 100% of your energy sourced from renewables but that isn’t going to happen any time soon. Even getting a target of 40-50% would massively reduce GHG emissions and generate huge amounts of investment in the sector, spurring R&D.
Sitting around bitching out individual technologies because they haven’t solved every issue and thus shouldn’t be pursued to their fullest extent is ridiculous.
Fun fact – in the space of one year Spain went from 1.6GW of installed wind capacity to 17GW.
Also, you want to talk to talk about private investors vs. goverment? A very well known investment bank (guess who) is planning to build 1GW of wind turbines in western NSW. Obviously they think it will have some kind of commercial return, so perhaps some of the harking about renewables being insanely expensive is overblown. If they’re doing 1GW on their own imagine what happen with government guarantees and tariffs, as in Spain.
Sorry, fun fact is wrong. Rather, Spain’s installed wind capacity is growing at a rate of 10% and currently stands at 17GW.
Robert @ 54: Yeah but without Germany solar PV would be nowhere. Sure its making bugger all contribution to Germany’s power needs but by creating the demand they’ve advanced the technology considerably. The Germans have also contributed significantly to wind, which is now pretty competitive with fossil energy.
Oz @ 55: The BC carbon tax is the equivalent of just 2.4c/L on petrol (so its very tame) and of course, the Canadian Liberal Party proposed a carbon tax at the last federal election and were comprehensively thumped.
Oz @ 57: True, Spain deserves a mention.
Like you say, imagine how much they’d kick in if they had some juicy tax incentives?
Robert in post #38 writes of the ways we might extract more uranium. And he is correct. However, these ways take time to develop the infrastructure for. It’s like saying that because of tar sands we don’t have to worry about conventional crude oil peaking.
There’s a difference between reserves and production; reserves is the size of the tank, production is the size of the tap. However large the reserves, making the tap is the hard part. In principle we can get a barrel of oil from Titan, a whole world made of hydrocarbons. But it’d be a billion-dollar barrel, and we could only get a few of those barrels a year.
That’s an extreme case, but it illustrates the issue: reserves aren’t production. That the element is physically there doesn’t mean it can be extracted quickly enough to make up for declines elsewhere.
In any case, as I said I think the political and diplomatic issues surrounding nuclear are far more of an obstacle to it. People just don’t want it. And even when we want it for ourselves, we’re not willing for everyone to have it. So we do a big build-out of nuclear and fast breeders and have great piles of plutonium to be the seeds for thorium reactors in the West, but then wave our fingers at and perhaps drop some bombs on Iran, Libya, Sudan, Ghana, Argentina and so on for doing the same.
That’s not what I’d call an optimal global solution to our problems. I hope for something a bit more equitable and peaceful.
Wilful in #42 gets upset at rude words, and more upset at contending with what I actually said, rather than some other stuff he made up. I never said gas, oil or coal would “run out.” I said they would decline in availability, and rise in price. If for example we have 1,000 coal-fired stations burning 1 million tonnes of coal each annually, we need 1,000 million tonnes of coal to feed them. When world production is 2,000 million tonnes, that’s not a problem; if world production drops to 800 million tonnes, that’s a problem. Someone misses out, and the rest have to pay a lot more for their fuel.
Last year this was seen with oil. Many Third World countries have oil-fired generation, and when oil leapt up to near $150/bbl, places like Ghana simply couldn’t afford to keep fuelling their electricity generation. So they had blackouts. What happened to them last year could happen to us in 10 or 20 or 30 years. (Obviously, it’s unlikely to happen to Australia with coal, unless the NSW govt gets its way and manages to export it all before Aussies have a chance to use it. By “us” I mean the First World generally.)
Wilful also gets upset with my saying, “There has never been a time in recorded Australian history when it was dark or overcast with still air across the whole country at once. Never.” He points out that it gets dark once a day. And indeed it does. But it is not dark and with still air across the whole country “at once”, that is “at the same time.” Across the country there’s always some sun or some wind.
Wilful further writes, “What you’re saying is that there needs to be multiples of total Australian demand available in each and every State. Crazy stuff, and at what cost.”
Yes, there’d need to be multiples. It’s called “backup”, and is a well-known and well-practised principle in engineering generally.
What cost? Well, a lot. But what are our alternatives? The fossil fuels won’t last forever, even if they did we’d have to stop using them because they’re screwing our climate, and the world won’t accept everyone having nukes. So we can have expensive renewables, or have no electricity at all. I think that most people would rather have expensive electricity than none at all.
If you feel differently, switch off your computer and don’t post again
“a solar thermal plant needs the exact same steam turbine and generator [as a coal power plant]“.
Theoretically, could a coal power plant be converted to solar thermal, I wonder.
Also, you use this statement to argue that solar thermal couldn’t be cheaper than coal – why not? If the fuel is free, and the rest is the same, why would it be more expensive than a new coal power plant? Or are you comparing a new solar thermal vs an existing coal plant?
“For one, we haven’t looked for uranium nearly as hard as oil. For another, it’s so energy dense we can afford to mine extremely poor-quality ores – of which there are ridiculously huge quantities known – to get it.”
Once again, you mention the environmental impacts of spoiling our beaches with powerlines for wave energy, yet you seem ambivalent about the environmental impacts of mining even “extremely poor quality ores”, as if it’s the economics of such an endeavour that is the only obstacle of concern to you. We need only wait for the value of uranium to climb, so that digging up even low quality Uranium becomes profitable? So, seemingly our environment has no intrinsic value to you, it only begins to matter when a public person makes it their business to defend it’s value. In other words, it matters from a political and aesthetic point of view and that’s all.
If the ambivalence about desert ecosystems is a reflection of your values, fine, but you might want to rename the thread, as it seems your concern for “green-ness” is extremely superficial.
After all, why does climate change matter?….if it’s not the overall general health and integrity of the global environment at stake, couldn’t we just engineer a solution to simply maintain human existence? If that is the approach, I think the answers to these questions would be a lot different, and those defending a continuation of the unsustainable exploitation of our ecosystems should at least be honest about their values and drop the ‘green’ rhetoric from their commentaries.
Furious balancing: yeah, I care about desert ecosystems. As I’ve said before, the damage done to them by mining pales into utter insigificance compared to rabbits, cattle, and so on.
If we’re talking beaches, my point was a political one, not an environmental one. Wind farms have SFA impact on the environment. But they drive NIMBYs mad because they’re ugly and they’re often located in highly visible spots. Similarly with the Wonthaggi desal plant.
Mines out in the middle of nowhere have much less political pull.
Oz: aside from land use, stationary energy is the easiest sector of the lot to cut, and any big cuts in transport will involve conversion from fossil fuel to electricity, which will increase demand for stationary energy. Right now, stationary energy accounts for roughly one-third of Australia’s emissions. So you cut it in half, that represents about 17% of Australia’s current emissions. There’s no way in the world you can meet the kind of targets we need to meet with that chunk of residual emissions continuing for another 30-40 years. None.
Andos: I had a look at the independent expert’s report. Nice tech, in principle. Costs are high.
“So you cut it in half, that represents about 17% of Australia’s current emissions. There’s no way in the world you can meet the kind of targets we need to meet with that chunk of residual emissions continuing for another 30-40 years”
Of course not, but the issues you’re raising about intermittent supply and no 24/7 capability aren’t a hindrance to getting 50% cut in our emissions from stationary energy, they’re a block to getting to the other 50%.
And the only way we’re going to get the technology and investment to get across the second hurdle is by jumping over the first one.
The damage done by mining is only minimal compared to rabbits and cattle when it’s contained, which is why I understand the point when you are discussing Olympic Dam, but that becomes a much less compelling argument when you start talking about the mining of “extremely poor-quality ores”.
In regard to the damage from cattle, I would think that given the issues relating to land tenure in arid Australia, you would have to include damage from stock as one of the consequences of mining.
In order to mine on @ 17,000 hectares at Olympic Dam BHP Billiton runs stock on 1,136,000 hectares. They stock conservatively, but the compulsion to be engaged in pastoral activities on pastoral leases exists, and should be considered in any discussion about mining in areas where the land tenure includes pastoral leases ie: most of inland Australia.
I think it would be very unlikely that the pastoral activity on many of these leases would be considered economically viable in the long term. Indeed, with the absence of mining in the area, a more likely outcome would be an expansion of conservation under the National Parks, with joint management under a Native title arrangement with the local indigenous people.
Not half as mad as a nuke eh Robert?!
Besides, I think they’re beautiful, certainly the most beautiful power generating device humanity has come up with. Its the noise that would drive me crazy.
Old Dutch windmills are lovely. Can we hook them up to a generator?
Robert,
“Guess what – a solar thermal plant needs the exact same steam turbine and generator.”
Solar thermal needs a steam turbine, yes. But it is a very different turbine to a coal fired plant. Solar thermal produces saturated steam more akin to a nuclear power power plant. Coal powered steam temperatures are much higher.
But that has little to do with the cost of the electricity produced. The main penalty that Solar Thermal suffers from is the small army of people required to keep the mirrors clean for maximum reflectivity. Until recently this kept staffing at 2 people per megawatt. You do the maths on how that figures into electricity pricing. HOWEVER…a penalty of this nature is, as any good industrialist will tell you, is a major advantage. That staffing level can be moderated with machinery. It is projected that a staffing level of 500 people per gigawatt is a practical target in the near future.
A simple example of human labour cost to machinery cost. A $100,000 (computer numerically controlled) machine will have a monthly lease financing cost of around $1500. A basic semi skilled worker will cost around $5000 per month. The machine will work 24 hours seven days for the same equipment cost, plus fuel. The machine will have roughly 6 times the productive output of a person using manually controlled machinery in an engineering application within an 8 hour period. It is this multiplication factor that makes our standard of living possible. CNC machines still need people to manage and maintain them.
So the cost of solar thermal used in most evaluations to date has been based on old information derived from small scale installations, primitive prototype operating practices, and significant ignorance of the nature of the machinery of solar power conversion.
I did try at one point to find out how many people are required to man a 1 gig steam power plant along with the coal mine to supply it, but drew a blank.
You mean the Parsons Binckerhoff report from 2006?
By high costs, what are you comparing it to?
From the website:
Then think about the CO2 cost comparisons…
Anyway, time will tell on this one. Personally, I’m pretty optimistic and glad that I managed to get in on this action at the bottom of the market.
Robert,
” So you cut it in half, that represents about 17% of Australia’s current emissions. There’s no way in the world you can meet the kind of targets we need to meet with that chunk of residual emissions continuing for another 30-40 years. None.”
This can be cut to near zero in a 30 year time frame, then continue to replace most transport emissions with electric powered vehicles.
Renewable is the path forward….maximum pace. The arguments of cost are are opportunistic foot dragging which will ultimately be demonstrated to be such as the cost of the status quo mounts with time.
Re: Wind Power
In case anyone hadn’t seen this idea, tensile wing kites flying in a constant figure of 8 pattern at speeds up to 20x the wind speed (depends on the lift/drag ratio of the wing) with small, light high speed generators attached to the wing.
Brief intro here:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20071012_003200.html
Less info than we be good here:
http://www.makanipower.com/home.html
And a presentation by Saul Griffith at TED:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/saul_griffith_on_kites_as_the_future_of_renewable_energy.html
Wind power isn’t just a big white thing on a hillside.
The initial comment was about the distribution of research funds. The key questions here are:
- Potential for improvement?
- Is the research being covered elswhere? Why do it in Australia?
- Can the technology evolve?
Comments on the clean alternatives:
- Wind: Scope for improving windmills limited. Kite power being touted as a more reliable, lower cost alternative with the ugly bit far up in the sky. Should at least be seriously considering more involement in kite power. (Wide open spaces required for reducing risk if kite falls down.) HIGH POTENTIAL FOR KITE POWER.
- Solar PV: High potential for dramatic cost reduction/kwh for roof top installations. Roof top avoids need for additional power lines. it is also far more robust in the sense that it is much harder for terrorists etc. to shut down. VERY HIGH POTENTIAL FOR IMPROVEMENT IF WE FOCUS ON REDUCING COST OF ROOF TOP INSTEAD OF POWER/SQR METRE.
- Thermal CV: Most attractive when we get to the point of wanting to reduce coal consumption since it can use generators, switchyards etc. as well as having a generation plant that can use coal or gas power for back-up as required. Can evolve from small installation that replaces some coal fired heat through to full replacement of saturated steam while the sun shines through to provision of superheated steam through to full 24/7 supply of superheated steam using molten salt heat storage. Can see no reason why capital and operating costs can’t be driven down by mirror develpoments, automated mirror cleaning etc,
- Tidal and ocean currents: Potential to use “undersea windmills”, “undersea kites” etc. to recover power from weaker tides/currents whithout the need for environmentally threatening barrages or long power lines from the Kimberlies. Can give more consistent power. HIGH POTENTIAL FOR IMPROVEMENT IF WE FOCUS ON HARNESSING CONVENIENTLY LOCATED CURRENTS.
- Wave and geothermal power: Leave comments to the experts.
wbb @ 68 I don’t know about generators, but when we were in Amsterdam last year the rest of the family went on a trip to Volendam and saw a beautiful old windmill doing real work. They have to keep the water table down as the salt water seeps in so this old thing was pumping salt water over the dike back into the sea at the rate of three swimming pools a minute, or something like that.
While the rellies were out in the country my wife and I were slumming around the Rijksmuseum.
John D: cheap solar PV is a bit like fusion – it’s been a decade away for a couple of decades now.
Kiashu, you’re welcome to comment and your comments are welcome, but there is a touch of arrogance at times. Robert put up what was essentially a discussion starter on the greenness of the budget. It turned into mainly a discussion about the merits of various forms of renewable energy, a topic that has had many outings on this blog, albeit always with some new information and ideas.
wilful @ 5, I thought Robert’s Geodynamics link was broken so I went into edit mode and fixed it like this.
I forget who was worried about water, but it doesn’t need much as it is a closed system and there is actually plenty of water down there amongst the fractured hot rock at great pressure.
I understand that Geodynamics reckon the can build the grid connection and still be competitive when they come to market in 2015.
I’d like to see the government put a formal moratorium on any new coal-fired power stations. I fancy they won’t have to, because the lenders will be afraid of stranded assets. I’d like to see all forms of technically viable renewables that have any prospect of being competitive brought to market with government help if necessary, and then have the government strategically withdraw.
On the budget in relation to climate change I’d give it somewhere between a conceded pass and 6 out of 10, if viewed from the perspective being adopted by the rest of the world including Obama, ie that we can do this at our leisure by 2050 as long as we don’t go above 2C and 450ppm. And to get there we’ll adopt policies that stand at least a 50% chance of failing.
The assumptions behind that perspective are false, I think. Nevertheless the first big step is to limit emissions and start to turn them down. The Rudd government might just achieve that by 2015 if still in power, but they are no certainties.
But I do think that Rudd and Co are roughly where the electorate wants them to be. It’s just that they lack leadership and there are no signs of a whole-of-government approach.
So to sum up they are doing passably well on the wrong strategy.
I was actually pretty pissed off when I read in the Fin Review that $2.5bn from the Education Investment Fund earmarked for schools was redirected to ‘clean’ energy. BTW, Mark Diesendorf reckons that the purpose of the flagship thermal solar initiative is to keep solar in demonstration mode and leave the real work to fossil fuels.
Random question Robert.
What are transmissions losses like and is there benefits/efficiences in tailoring the solar systems grant and other distributed power systems to the bush first rather than wealthy inner-city electorates?
I know it already happens in real remote areas, but wondering if the costs are achanging…
Wouldn’t a distributed system be ideally suited to the remote North, West, FNQ and centre of Aus (which are, coincidentally, rather sunny places?)
rumrebellious @77
Transmission losses can reach over 10% also someone has to supply the VARS to provide for voltage drop, these are not technically “real”. Not sure how NEMMCO is handling these at the present.
Huggy
“John D: cheap solar PV is a bit like fusion – it’s been a decade away for a couple of decades now”.
Rather like nuclear fission for the last 70 years actually.
Huggy
Well it ain’t my field Helen, but that’s what I thought. A perfect place to throw buckets of money at to experiment with different technologies – and if one is viable, start creeping towards the coast taking rural communities away from transmissions lines off-line altogether.
Admit though, I failed high-school physics, have no idea how electricity decides where it wants to go on the grid, and this is all based on an assumption removing serveral thousand kms of lineage in western qld would provide additional energy efficiency gains from reducing transmissions losses (as well as reducing overall useage).
As I said, comments from a lay person. But real remote communities already use generators, PV cells etc, and I have driven through parts of rural qld, and once houses start getting several kms apart and at least a km back from the road, one does wonder at what densities does locally independent systems become cost-effective. It might be the transmissions losses are negligible compared to the actual energy used in running a computer beyond the back of Bourke and the reason they use generators in places like that already are simply infrastructure costs. Either way, if the price of technologies is going to change, it never hurts to start small before you go big if our goal is reducing emissions now. And I don’t understand why so much discussion has focused on that.
The problem is, Helen, that in FNQ and the North generally, there are extnded periods during the wet season when the sun doesn’t shine. But I understand that along the most of the east coast 150km inland is considered prime solar territory. And id the Surat Basin certainly and the Bowen Basin probably there is a fair bit of gas for backup. Not sure about geothermal, but where Geodynamics is, if you connected to Sydney and Brisbane you would go through prime solar territory.
Distributed systems could come in handy if a solar storm fried the grid! You’d need distributed storage facilities, though.
Cheers Huggy… Got some reading to do obviously.
If you want to know how bad the situation is in North Queensland have a look at the Distribution Loss Factors for Ergon http://www.aer.gov.au/content/item.phtml?itemId=719520&nodeId=63b57b09c1cc96a5146aa9623c867d81&fn=Ergon%20Energy%20200809%20DLFs.pdf
They are probably among the worst in Australia. (Ergon is the utility that serves this area).
However even when you factor these in, the network is more efficient than the average isolated system.
Huggy
Australia leads the world in the installation of Single Wire Earth Return (SWER): Although the Kiwis think they invented it (along with heavier than air flight and animal husbandry). Ergon has a squillion km of the stuff and it works well enough. Mostly it is fed off one phase of a 33 kV line giving 19.1 kV line to ground. (The neutral star point of the 3 phase system is grounded) The consumer has a transformer that brings it to 240 V (actually 480V with a centre tap).
If a solar storm hit that system it would simply explode all over the state – probably.
If you can keep the consumption down to < 4 kWh it is possible to do a PV only system that works well and is cost effective. As one power engineer told me “Good enough for ferals”.
Huggy
Soz Huggy, when you say more efficient, do you mean cost or energy or both?
Also with DLF’s, how did Ergon get uniform reductions and if this isn’t really important, why are they used to calculate price?
Its not the first time I’ve been called feral.
Not green enough to stop Labor’s slump in the polls today.
http://www.smh.com.au/national/labor-counts-the-cost-of-global-crisis-20090517-b7ee.html
rumrebellious @ 86
The cost of energy from the network is about 20% of that from a small stand alone system depending on size etc. A 2-4 kWh day PV system is probably the best option but you will either have to go without refrigeration or install a gas fridge.
The DLF is a rort, we pay (taxpayers) for the losses in the networks. The network owners have no incentive to to mitigate these. Don’t get me started on DLF’s, basically they exist in some weird Friedmanite fantasy land, I am too terrified to go there.
Huggy