Another CCS project is getting underway in Australia, this time in Queensland. This time, the project involves retrofitting the Callide A power station with oxyfuel technology. This is the same technology used in the pilot plant in Germany mentioned in an earlier story. At the time, I thought that oxyfuel was most likely only to be used for new power plants, not retrofitting existing ones. However, just because an existing power station is used for a pilot project doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be economic to retrofit commercial-scale ones (if indeed CCS using this technology is economic at all). The project website is remarkably uninformative on this point. The pilot project should be fully operational in 2011 and may operate for up to five years.
Meanwhile, in the renewables world, one of the major limitations of wind turbines is that they only operate efficiently in a very narrow range of wind speeds, meaning much of the time they produce very little power, requiring expensive energy storage systems or backup generation to support them if they become a substantial fraction of an energy grid. There are already a number of ways to reduce this impact – turbine blades that adjust their pitch, mechanical gearboxes, and, most recently, fitting multiple generators to wind turbines, and only engaging some subset of them when the wind is weak. MIT Technology Review reports on a company developing a new approach – an a new generator design. Essentially, generators use the rotating shaft to move magnets past coils of wire to produce electricity. The new design has many independent coils, which can be switched on or off by electronic switches. If the wind is low, only a few coils are connected, allowing the blades to keep turning and generating at least some electriity. As wind speed increases, more coils can be enabled, requiring more energy to turn the blades, and thus generating more energy while the blades continue to operate at similar speeds. According to the company’s simulations, the new generators could increase annual power output by 50 to 100%, depending on the site – obviously, the more variable the winds at a site, the bigger the improvement. Now all they need is to actually deploy a prototype, scheduled for “early next year”. Sounds very promising, but as usual be prepared for a big gap between the press release and the reality.
Finally, the BP Solar cell factory in Sydney is closing because it’s too small to compete against plants overseas, and it’s too far away from its suppliers of things like ultrapure silicon. The government isn’t raising a finger to save this manufacturing facility. You might very well ask why the car industry deserves support and the solar cell industry doesn’t.
I just want to raise an issue with wind energy. If we are sucking energy from the wind and turning it into electricity, aren’t we changing the atmosphere’s energy amount and distribution? now obviously, i would estimate that it’s only by some tiny tiny fraction, but i’d like to see some numbers to confirm that. ditto tidal energy i suppose.
Tyro: yes, you are making a difference, bu it’s a pretty tiny one compared to the effects of land clearing and buildings. This report suggests it’s a pretty small effect. At a global scale, it seems that you’d need to deploy absolutely ridiculous numbers of wind turbines to get much effect on the climate.
And ask indeed I do re BP Solar & Fed inaction. As I listened to the happy chappies spilling out of the local government lovefest earlier this week, one after another informing us that their $300 million dollars from Kevin would be spent on sports fields, sports facilities, swimming pools, sports fields and more sports facilities, I took to banging my head on the table.
Forget touchy feely arty farty, forget chronically under-funded public libraries, forget equally under-funded childcare centres & clinics.
Imagine the kickstart to useful scales of economy that $300 million would have meant if councils fitted solar to their rooftops, or established local wind power generation projects aka Bairnsdale or….
Then later that day, the BP Solar announcement… at which I was yelling at Garrett to buy the plant from BP, immediately announce fixed 20 year contracts re feed-in tariffs, local community development of solar collector plants, increase funding for CSIRO’s the ultra-battery project….
Strangely, he couldn’t seem to hear me over the torrent of thanks from the Japanese Whaling Association….
Bernice: For what it’s worth, I don’t think it was worth investing money to support either.
The BP solar plant was a tiny manufacturing facility which had to import all its raw materials from north Asia anyway.
Solar panels are essentially commodity products which need to be churned out in enormous quantities to be cost-competitive.
As for solar panels on roofs, I maintain that it’s populist greenwash and that much more could be achieved for the money by any number of other measures.
Solar PV may well have poor economics at the moment, but it is the only thing we individuals can do to match money and mouth. My hope is that if investment the PV industry continues to be supported the cost-effectiveness of the technology will continue improving. Progress to date is encouraging.
I think the most promising solution for base-load generation in the medium term future is geothermal power.
Finally, the BP Solar cell factory in Sydney is closing because it’s too small to compete against plants overseas, and it’s too far away from its suppliers of things like ultrapure silicon. The government isn’t raising a finger to save this manufacturing facility. You might very well ask why the car industry deserves support and the solar cell industry doesn’t.
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Yeah.
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The mantra that industry policy doesn’t work has many examples disproving it. I don’t think any of them come from Australia. Starting with Marino wool there’s a certain tendency in this country to specialize in high quality goods. (Justifies our impossibly high living standards) but the govt doesn’t get this. And neither do most of us. In the 80s when the Fairlight computer was invented here, the inventors could find no backing. Why? Because the Oz hegemony govt and business are a bunch of entrenched small minded twerps who won’t do anything unless it’s already old hat in Nebraska. Fairlight computers, the techniques that revolutionized music production and who own that now? Clue: not us.
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Why is Kevvie shafting solar? Why did John do likewise? ‘Cause they’re too busy taking care of their mates to actually, um, look at the future of the country. Kevvie’s priority is to have the blue-collar bunch thinkin’ Labor gives a toss about them again. So what does he do? He gives away our money to fucking Toyota. Well done Kevvie! That’ll guarantee Aussie jobs for the next five minutes!
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We could have a serious New Energy industries in this country except what Horne said still goes: mediocre elites. Or as I’d say it: Suits with Shit For Brains! Kevvie had the Jabberfest of the Chosen Kilo and all he had to do was read The Lucky Country and understand it.
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Kevvie: Get a job!
“You might very well ask why the car industry deserves support and the solar cell industry doesn’t…”
You might well ask, but I doubt you’ll get an answer.
In re Adrien’s point about industry policy, I recall a story Barry Jones used to tell some years ago:
A local scientific team had developed a innovative new technique for fiddling with genes, slicing them from one organism so that they could be inserted into another. I’m no scientist, but apparently it was quite revolutionary, with potentially both medical and agricultural uses.
They called it Gene Shears.
Anyhow, the scientists went to Jones seeking his assistance in getting funding from industry to permit them to further research their discovery and perhaps develop it into some sort of useable commodity. Jones, an ex-whizz-kid, knew immediately the implications of what they had discovered and was quite excited. He arranged meetings with various heads of Australian Industry, including the then board of BHP.
Unfortunately, things didn’t go so well from there.
When he guys in white lab coats turned-up to give their audio-visual presentation to the BHP board in Melbourne, they were greeted politely by the Grandees but advised, as Jones tells it: “We’re a resource company. Why would we be interested in something only of use in the clothing industry?”
Once scientific jaws were hurriedly picked-up off the floor and replaced in position, explaining the potential usages of their discovery to the blockheads in suits changed nothing.
They couldn’t find a local backer and eventually licensed their discovery to an overseas Agri-Chem giant, which went-on the make a mozza out of it.
All this, of course, happened many years ago.
What’s changed?
Robert, the problem of power matching with wind turbines has been basically solved for at least the last 10 years, the technology you describe is old news. Power from the wind follows a cube law, thus when the wind speed drops significantly (there is stuff all energy in wind below 7ms BTW) the energy generated drops rather rapidly. The real issue for wind turbines is that they must be synchronous with the grid, there at least 3 mainstream technologies that deal with this. My favorite is back to back inverters that share a dc link thus the input is decoupled from the grid connection and the turbine can generate at any speed with the effective “speed” at the grid being constant. I trust this makes sense.
Bernice,
On BP solar, they have been making plans to move manufacturing out of Australia for about 10 years; they would just love some really dumb Government to buy their totally obsolete plant. It would be basically useless.
The real problem here is that there is no-one in this Government who knows any-thing at all about Solar, Wind and all the rest. The public service wankers get their advice from hairy palmed greens who know even less.
If we want to make serious progress in this field we should immediately abandon consumer subsidies of all forms. (sorry all you readers who are begging for middle class welfare). Instead of consumer subsidies which in the end only support inefficient and obsolete manufacturing plants we should be supporting a manufacturing excellence push that brings together industry and advanced design concepts in various fields including power electronics for consumer side efficiency and for advanced generation technologies including wind solar and geo-thermal. Please no blabber about the Hydrogen economy – that is the biggest load of utter bullshit ever concocted BTW.
Huggy
Peter Smith: But supporting the BP solar factory would be a silly way to support solar PV. Solar power makes most sense in places that aren’t grid-connected, which still covers considerable parts of the third world. Supplying solar panels as foreign aid might be the best way to support the industry. Huggybunny has pointed out additional problems with the factory that I wasn’t aware of.
As for geothermal, I agree, that’s why I’ve bought shares in Geodynamics (including in entitlement offers, so I’m actually tipping in new capital). I figure if I’m going to use money to support the development of renewable energy, that’s a better place to send my corporate welfare.
Robert, excellent on geo thermal. The Government should also be putting in serious money over and above the present investment. Yes PV systems as foreign aid is an excellent idea and has been applied successfully in PNG and other countries. Emphasis here should be on the systems and design for the needs of the people.
BP Solar and Solarex (now owned by BP) have always made a good product it’s just that the technology has moved on since they started back in the late 80′s. The plant is old and the manufacturing techniques they use equally so.
I don’t have the exact figures to hand but Australia has somewhere between 16 and 19 MW of rooftop grid connected PV. If you consider the fact that the East coat generation capacity is about 40GW the percentage of PV energy delivered to the network is basically not measurable, its effect on GG emissions in minute and probably negative if you factor in all the trees that have been removed to gain solar access for the solar pioneers. Even 10 times this figure would be a joke.
Huggy
Regarding windmills there has also been some very good research done on the knobs that can be seen on whale’s fins. These have the effect of improving the efficiency of a foil in variable flow conditions, and improve the stall angle of attack from (for a test foil shape) from 11 degrees to 17 degrees. When applied to wind generator blades this technology (those very clever whales) is expected to improve blade performance in light wind conditions and turbulent conditions.
Wind generator technology has come a massive way forward since Jimmy Carter’s very far sighted enabling legislation.
Does anyone happen to know what percentage of their electricity Germany gets from PV solar, since they are always being held up as the model to follow?
Possibly it makes more sense there, because concentrated solar doesn’t work so well in their climate. But then they might be better setting up concentrated solar in Africa and importing it from there.
As of 2007, about 1% of all electricity used in Germany.
Brian,
Your suggestion has been Germany’s plan for many years. It is all laid out in this document http://www.solar-thermie.org/hintergruende/documents/cspnow.pdf . The only fly in the ointment is Engela Merkel, whose election brought the programme to a snails pace.
If you google the writer of the document (who is also centrally involved in the development of the European CSP programme), Dr Franz Trieb, he is very approachable and would be the foremost authority on the subject of renewable electrical power in Europe. He also has a lot to say about the relative benefits of CSP over biofuels for solar energy conversion, and CSP water desalination.
Brian,
To save you some keystrokes
profile
http://www.zoominfo.com/people/Trieb_Franz_1145639871.aspx
contact information
http://www.kfas.com/information_pages/pdf-news/Dr-Franz-Trieb.pdf
more up to date publication
http://www.desertec.org/downloads/articles/press_release_en_01.pdf
You could link the high insolation areas of the globe with a high voltage dc link and supply solar power on a more or less continuous basis from large solar thermal plants. The advantage of large scale solar thermal is that it is at least twice as efficient and much lower cost per MW installed than PV.
Politically it could be seen as a new wave of European solar imperialism (Germany – the thousand year solar reich?? Any-one?)I suspect that these are the considerations that concern Angela Merkle.
According to the New York Times the contribution from PV to the German grid is about 0.5%. Since Germany has over 80 GW of installed conventional capacity that number sounds about right.
To be brutally frank the German PV program is just feel-good middle class welfare. At one stage the government would lend the good citizens (professors and the like) most of the cost of the installation and then pay them the equivalent of ONE AUSTRALIAN DOLLAR per kWH. Lots of professors have retired on the proceeds.
Ironically; Germany sits on a massive underground lake of very hot water that contains enough easily recoverable energy to supply all of Europe for 600 years. Not sexy enough for the Greens is my guess. They want PV and hydrogen.
I have this suggestion:
We could fund the Greens in a Hydrogen research institute – located well away from any populated center – and give them a huge amount of hydrogen to experiment with. That would be an explosive resolution of that issue.
Huggy
Basics on Wind energy:
The first thing to know is a Law called the Betz law, which states that you cannot extract any more than 59% of the energy available in the wind with open airfoil systems (basically 100% 0f present technology) – under any conditions. A proof of this law can be found here: http://www.windpower.org/en/stat/betzpro.htm
No amount if design fiddle will alter this. The second thing to know is that the energy in wind is proportional to the cube of the wind speed, this means that if the wind speed doubles the energy available increases by 16 times. Conversely if the wind speed drops even a small increment below the design wind speed the power available declines rapidly. In fact the problem for wind turbines in good wind regimes such as the North Sea is wind gusts that can deliver 100′s of times the design energy into the system. Designing large structures and aerofoils that can stand up to these is no trivial task.
Huggy
I’ve seen the more ambitious proposals for a global energy grid. It’s technically feasible, but there’s no way it’s economically or geopolitically feasible.
huggybunny @ 16 – the subsidies for PV have been very large in Germany – an acquaintance commented after a visit to Germany that there are people who have installed PV systems which only get a couple of hours sunlight a day.
Peter Smith @ 5 – there are many ways that individual can act before installing PV power. Energy efficiency is the big one (insulation!), but not nearly as sexy. Solar hot water systems are another. And buying green power to help fund larger scale green energy production.
Robert @ 9 – I wasn’t protesting the BP closure, but arguing for PV solar in general, which we are considering right now. (If we read this thread a couple more times, we might change our minds.)
I agree with you and can match you re GDY.
Chris @ 19 – Our Brisbane house needs no heating or cooling, so is pretty efficient. Solar HW is on the list, but I am not sure about “green power” – how do we know that the extra money is actually buying renewable power? Sounds a bit like the “carbon offset” scams to me.
Peter Smith @ 20 – you’d need to look at exactly what your power company does, but they use the money to either buy for fund the development of wind power for example. Its a lot easier to audit than carbon offset schemes as they can easily demonstrate how much green power they have generated or bought and how much they have sold. And they amount of CO2 you’ll reduce per dollar spent will be better compared to PV on your own home.
Like to support Chris on the Green energy schemes. Carbon offsets are so subject to manipulation as as to be really suspect. If your provider will specify the plant that you are investing in, go for it if it is wind, solar or even certain types of hydro. Like the Chris said it should be possible to accurately measure it. Geothermal is good also.
The worst investment is PV panels on your domestic roof, its an amazing sop to the sanctimonious green lobby and a total waste of money. The government did the right thing means testing the subsidy; if they had any balls at all they would withdraw it altogether.
Huggy
Did anyone notice the NSW govt announced a feed-in tariff on the weekend?
PV will only make a significant contribution when it becomes incredibly cheap, and you can just spray it on existing rooftops for a few hundred dollars per house. There is some long-term potential for that, but how you get from outrageously expensive to super-cheap without government largesse, I don’t know.
Big nukes are geopolitically impossible as well, at least for the next decade or so.
Carbonsink. One way to do it would be to offer a feed in tariff of say $2:00 per kWh for the first to install on-site generating systems that costs less than $1:00 per Watt plus a cash bonus.That should excite people.
The present subsidy and even the feed in tariffs just reward mediocrity.
Huggy
Thanks for the information on Germany, folks. Robert, I understood that PV solar does not require direct sunlight. Though I’d expect that the power produced would be considerably reduced.
It would be interesting to see stats on sunlight hours in Germany. The precipitation pattern seems to favour the summer months and some stats I saw suggested some rain every second day on average throughout the year.
I can’t find a reference, but I was under the impression that Geodynamics had a project in Germany on it’s books. Maybe we’ll end up colonising them!
Interesting, Huggybunny, but my guess is that such a scheme is more likely to provoke creative financial engineering than any other type of engineering.
Brian, the output voltage of a PV array is proportional to the log of the solar intensity (insolation). They are indeed a poor thing at reduced light levels. Feed in inverters will incorporate a maximum power point tracker that places the inverter on the knee of the power curve which varies throughout the day. Insolation follows a half sinusoidal pattern and is averaged over a day to give a figure known as sun hours. This is further averaged to give the annual average daily sun hours. This is related to latitude and cloud cover etc. Much of Germany has about 2-3 sunhours/day. Brisbane has about 6. Another way to put this is to specify it in terms of Annual Capacity factor. A coal fired plant may have an ACF of 96% which means it generates for 8400 hours out of the 8760. A solar power plant in Western Queensland will have an ACF of about 12-14%. In Germany maybe 6%.
These are not figures you will get from the PV rooftop boys or the myopic green touts.
Robert, a scheme that is based upon measurable and peer reviewed results is way better than the present schemes which are being rorted in the extreme – right now.
Huggy
One for Qld greenish types: In The House, Anna Bligh has just dumped the traveston crossing dam idea, and opened the door for canning the drinking water/sewage recycling plan.
Danny, bloody beaudy! It will probably mean more stormwater harvesting and another desal plant or two, this time hopefully with green energy for a change.
The real issue for all these water re-cycling and even desalination (apart from the massive saline plumes) is the coroners court. If you design/install a Reverse Osmosis system for sewage for example and an epidemic of cholera that kills say 1000 babies is traced back to your plant. “Better get a lawyer son, better get a real good one.” Thing about the rain is that there is no-one to blame.
Huggy
Brian: re: Stormwater harvesting
I’m in Weste End, ( anna’s electorate) where we are about to have 10,000 or so riverside high-rise super-urbanites foisted upon us, (and their f’n boutique 4wds no doubt, which they will still insist on driving even though it’s a 15 min stroll into town, can’t be without the aircon y’know) , so for not much longer will a genteel daily walk of the dog along riverside drive be a pleasant experience. One of the things one sees when walking thence, are the stormwater->river down&out pipes meant to cope with the runoff from the massively impermeabile skin the roofs and concrete aprons and roads these housing devoplments are covering the peninsula with. Them’s serious diameter pipes, suggesting they could be used to collect a helluva lot of storm water run off… I reckon the riverside developers, and they are the big guys, should be “encouraged” to incorporate riverside storm water harvest and local reticulation infrastructure, so at least the denizens of their concrete canyons will no longer being flushing toilets with drinking water.
Danny I too live in West End and see (fear)the rise and rise of the uber urbanites.
Harvesting storm water should be bloody mandatory, the developers should be forced to put rainwater tanks in 10-20% of the space allocated for parking for the 4WD,s.
Let’s face it Danny West end is about to be totally fucked over by the giant pram and monster 4WD set with the “baby on board” stickers. Is this a misogynist rant?
Huggy
Misanthropic maybe.
Here’s a link for the story. It sounds like Garrett gave her a way out: “(it’s) unlikely to receive Federal Government approval, unless there is environmental rehabilitiation of the site”. She’s being a bit clever, framing it as causing a delay which puts the purified recycled water/sewage project in a new light.
Anna is offloading reponsibility for that decision to Queensland Water Commission, chaired by Elizabeth Nosworthy , who Crikey points out seems to have the anti-Midas touch. Except for her personal remuneration, which is pretty damn good, it’s just the companies she touches that tank. We’d better hope the trail of destruction that follows her doesn’t include a dud decision with our drinking water.
Why an ex-lawyer, second-rate, corporate-vulture type should have carriage of decisions that will plausibly and massively negatively impact on the health of population at large is beyond me, unless she’s there to make sure there is a culpability escape clause for them all when it goes pear-shaped because of the inevitable eventual human-error.
Yes Mr/s Bunny, the potential for reading your rant as anti-”BoB-set” is a tad off-putting, I’m guessing you object to the size, and cradle-to-graveness, of their vehicular addictions, not that they have takeaway offspring per se.
I struck, or was struck by, my first oversized pram last week in the supermarket. It’s bedding/recreational platform was indeed generous, it drew my attention, and not just because of the wound it inflicted. I figure they are designed to be able to transport several of the little Nero’s and their accessories, at once. I reckon someone will come up with a wheelbarrow adaptive module for the prams for after the scion/ettes decide they are almost happy to walk themselves while directing consumption. It’ll be about the right size to carry all the power tools for the reno’s, and I don’t imagine folks who are in the market for these monsters would be seen dead with a second hand one, so they will have little resale value. Hell, I might get one off Ebay for the dog, I’d be one up at DogPark.
Seriously tho, on the weekend I witnessed a bit of a nasty scene when someone at a nearby table outraged someone else by referring to the Churchie Mothers who lethally collapsed the Ascot
Verandadeck as ‘Tory Breeders’, and somehow less worthy of sympathy. It’s a worrying trend, epitomised by Gerry Harvey’s headlining of a callous and ungenerous us’n'them attitude .FDB,Yes I confess to misanthropic tendencies. Misogyny no – I was concerned that my remarks might be seen as gender biased. Danny, Perhaps the giant pram could evolve into an electrically powered inner urban personal transport vehicle.
My 3 kids all made do with a second hand pram and the same little folding pusher that you can still see in really poverty stricken developing countries. These neat little machines have been driven out of the market by huge, expensive and immensely raw material consuming contrivances pushed by lentil eating, environmentally footprint conscious, Pilates
addicted narcissists.
Huggy
HB: “Perhaps the giant pram could evolve into an electrically powered inner urban personal transport vehicle.”…. Nice recovery, finessing back onto thread topic!! You’re could be onto something there, I reckon if I assumed the lotus position, I could easily fit in the one I saw.
What do you reckon about recycling them as Personal Pods which can be picked up and carried into town on the Grant McLennan Bridge to Kurilpa Bridge chairlift/monorail that’s being planned?
We’ll never get the aspirant consumptive classes to use a perfectly utilitarian, but uniformly styled, service/structure, they’ll need to “individualise” and have marques. Having the translocatory engine system designed such that they can attach their own stylish BMW/Porsche/Audi/SAAB/Ikea-oid pods to de-stinguish them from the publicly available standard WECA green plebs’ pods. As long as the coupling mecahnism is a standard design, it’s a go-er I reckon, we can be the first suburb where internal combustion cars are banned. As the Snowy Mtn’s become less snowy, there should be a few chairlifts going cheap, maybe turning up on Ebay. The footprint for the towers is only about 10 sq meters, will easily dynabolt onto the Boundary Street Carbon Neutral Mall road surface.
So you just get in your BrightSpark PramPod, zip down to the nearest pick up point, and get literally picked up and taken via the skyway to the edge of town. Hell, the Tosser Towers themselves, the river side highrises, could be pylons for the riparian branch line , with rooftop PramPodParking and solar charging stations.
I find it really wierd that Labor has introduced notions of class warfare into energy policy. I guess that’s what happens when a 19C institution tries to grapple with a 21C lifestyle.
Robert, your crusade against solar PV is getting kinda boring. Solar PV’s reduce emissions – its a proven fact. If some of our wealth is directed towards this measure – along with a mix of other genuine renewable (or geothermal) energy, then that has to be a good thing. Better that some peole spend their money on solar for their roof than buying an 8KW airconditioner and/or a new V8 Mercedes.
Another example: they are now fitting solar PVs to new speed restriction light signs in Melbourne – its obviously cost effective to do so.
Danny you are brilliant.The idea of hooking a giant pram derivative to a cable to travel across the river is great. Some of the prams I have seen would have enough room for at least a baby and a small pony. Throw the pony out and make it walk I say. That would leave room for a real person.
PeterC
Sorry but PV on domestic rooftops has very little impact on carbon emissions in Australia – how can it when the energy contribution so far is smaller then the “noise” in the network. It is trivial.
No-one should install air conditioners in Qld – full stop. House design will do the job. I was once invited to Saudi Arabia to advise them on the feasibility of solar powered air conditioners. My report pointed out that for as long as they covered the flat roofs of the uninsulated two story dwellings with grey pebbles there was no way they could get enough power o drive an air conditioner.
Huggy
Huggy, I have no idea what you are talking about. Noise on the network? Our 1.5KW of solar panels produce 75% of the energy we consume, which is a 75% reduction in our carbon emissions associated with electricity. This is not trivial.
House design anyware in Australia can remove the need for an AC. But our lame “5 star” building standards don’t enforce enough rigour to ensure this [link].
We need 7 stars, like Europe has already. No action from governments (Federal or State) on this either, even though it is a good fit under “efficiency measures” policy. The housing (and maybe power) industry lobbies to stop this happening.
Petrc, I meant to bang on about what “noise”means but I decided to keep it brief.
You are certainly correct that from your point of attachment to the network and from your personal perspective you have reduced your carbon emissions and it is not trivial. However when we come to measure the total energy flux in the total electrical network (grid) on the East Coast of OZ we encounter “noise” in the system. Basically this “noise” is inevitable in any large and constantly changing system; it sets a limit on the measurement accuracy that can be achieved. If we assume ( generously) that there is 20 MW of PV installed in OZ it amounts to about 0.25% of the total generation capacity and about .01% percent of the total energy – well inside the “noise” induced margin of error.
Huggy
The standards definitely need looking at. I currently live in a 6 star house, but don’t consider it even close to good enough.
PetrC I made an error; the installed base of PV in Australia is about .005% of the conventional base and about .000042% of the energy input. On a good day -often it is zero.
Huggy,
I love your contributions but don’t understand the Green-bashing. As a Green myself I know we have our share of starry-eyed idealists, but we ain’t all that way. What gives?
I vote for a party who I think is likely to do the most they can about climate change. The Greens are that party for me.
More on thread, I agree about closing the solar plant in Sydney. We should more profitably be spending that money on the building industry, helping kick along some serious energy-efficiency measures. I won’t bang on about that any more than I ordinarily do, though…
Yaz, we are basically in heated agreement here. Sorry about the Green bashing.
I admit to pandering to the most reactionary elements in society just to make funny. I really don’t mean all of it.
Huggy
Huggy,
I suspected that was so. Perhaps it would be therapeutic for me to do the same from time to time too!
Must get back to tumble-drying my organic cotton sheets, with that lovely eco-fabric softener I bought last week…
HB: In your dystopic enthusiasm, which I’m happy to indulge, as long as it’s rigorous, are you sure you’re not pulling a few rhetorical swifties, such as:
You say coal ACF ->8400 hrs/yr = 96%, western qld solar-> ~12%, ie about an an eighth, and an eighth of 8400 hrs is about 1000 hrs/yr, which would be about 3 hrs per day, average, ball park.
Is that a worst case, for out in western queensland, where men are men, and sheep are
nervoussunburnt, or are you just doing your best to support your arguement?Sorry. 12% ACF is the national average based upon population (including tassie). Longreach is about 24% ACF. 6 hours + for a fixed array… More of course for a tracking array.
One of the reasons for a poor average on a population basis is that the population tends to cluster around the coast where the cloud cover is greatest.
I mostly write these posts in between other tasks – that’s my excuse.
“the population tends to cluster around the coast where the cloud cover is greatest”..
and so does the $8k/(theoretical, rated) 1 kW PV subsidy. Thus, with the $2k+ contribution by the punters, we get less than 1kW per $10k investment, so it will be more than $100 million per 10 effective megawatts generated.
On the other hand, what if there were Girt-By-Sea Green Bonds which so-inclined punters could invest their $2k stakes in, and attracting a similar $8K co-contribution, like happens with Super, which could be used to finance Sunburnt Country Utility-Scale Green Power installs, like the Cloncurry concentrated solar thermal one? It’s rated as 10MW, will be a $31 mill spend, ie at least a three fold more green bang for buck being delivered into the grid, delivering 2-3 kw for a notional $10k overall contribution.
I should be able to give Ergon, or Lloyd, a check for $2K, have the gummint kick in the extra $8k just like they do with PV, and I get my 2-3 kw allowence, however those units work. Dontcha think?
Danny, fecken exactly: except that its even worse than you say, Its 10 MW installed which is equivalent to (let’s be generous) 2MW 0f conventional generation on an ACF basis. Some-one at treasury must have done the numbers and decided that spending $80 million to get 2MW of generation is an expensive joke.
Your idea for building large scale solar out in the desert in high insolation regimes is a very good one. Similar schemes have seen a massive investment in solar farms in Spain for example. These farms are multi MW and many use tracking PV. Vastly more cost effective than the individual rooftop systems.
Huggy
Danny @ 49 – well it would certainly give a better return, but I think you see the take up rates of that sort of scheme much lower than for a residential PV system. At least part of the reason people do it is so they can publicly demonstrate that they are doing something. I’ve been thinking that these green power schemes need to give away bumper stickers and t-shirts so that people can brag a bit about their commitment.
There’s also a bit of the independence, anti-corporation thing, though unfortunately you still can’t use the power if the grid fails unless you install more sophisticated equipment. I know its argued that with enough residential PV we’d also save on grid infrastructure, but I’m yet to be convinced of that.
Oh don’t get me started on grid infrastructure . Because the totally fuck-witted morons in the leading Solar Nation decided ” ve think zat current controlled inverters are ze vay to go yah?” (Guess where they came from ?) The inverters in universal use today actually seriously pollute the grid. They operate at unity power factor certainly but have a serious tendency to push the network voltage up. So bad has it become that now they have to shut down during the solar peak . Oh fucking derr – no wonder they lost the fucking war.
Huggy.