Well, the government has split the renewable energy target from the CPRS. Perhaps a small win for the Opposition; more to the point, it’s a victory for common sense. If renewable energy targets are to be a substantial part of greenhouse mitigation, it makes sense to provide legislative certainty as soon as possible so that the investments can happen.
There is one interesting amendment being sought by the Opposition – a proposal that 25% of the RET be met from potential baseload sources of electricity.
This is an issue because, at this point in time, the cheapest form of renewable energy available on a large scale is wind. But, both from an environmental and economic perspective, there are considerable doubts about the viability of wind as a substantial replacement for fossil fuels. There’s been a debate going on at Barry Brook’s blog about it, where retired power engineer Peter Lang has made the rather provocative claim that wind power will avoid bugger-all climate emissions. Why is this so? Because, he claims, that wind power, even when you distribute wind turbines across large parts of Australia>, is highly variable in its output. He’s got a nifty graph to back this up, too, with data from existing wind farms across south-eastern Australia that shows extended periods where they were producing virtually no power. There isn’t nearly enough hydroelectric capacity in Australia to back up the hydro, so that means that backup will come from plants that can be switched on and off quickly and easily – and have a low capital cost. That means “open-cycle” gas turbines, which are cheap but not terribly efficient. If the wind power didn’t exist, Lang’s argument is that the would almost be provided by combined-cycle gas turbines, which are far more efficient but are too costly to have sitting around idle. Hence, the CO2 reduction is far more marginal and expensive than you might assume.
There is a very spirited debate on the topic on Brook’s site; the details get complex, including the amount to which fossil fuel power stations of various types can and will be “throttled”, the viability of wind energy storage, and the extent to which “demand management” can be used to help manage the intermittent nature of wind. One thing I find pretty surprising about the debate is that there doesn’t seem to be any fully-fledged studies explicitly examining the greenhouse implications of large-scale wind power in Australia at a system level. This study from the now-merged VENCorp (the Victorian government’s electricity market manager, now part of the AEMO) examines in great detail the technical consequences of integrating wind power into the Victorian energy grid. But their analysis wasn’t extended to the net effect on emissions.
In any case, wind power remains rather problematic as a major component of a replacement for existing dirty generation, as we ultimately need, and it would be good risk management to have expertise in a wider range of renewable technologies than just wind.
There are a number of other ways in which renewable technologies other than wind are supported, through a variety of direct government grants, and, in the case of small-scale solar, the special provisions in the RET that mean they’re worth about five times as many renewable energy credits as they would be purely on the amount of energy they produce. But if we are to have a renewable energy target to encourage the sector, we may as well use it to encourage the development of a variety of types, particularly those which don’t suffer from wind’s variability drawback.
I reckon this amendment is something that Labor should seriously consider.
I agree Robert. I’m not so convinced of the need for baseload sources per se, but what I think we need is multiple sources that are independent in when they produce.
If you rely on wind, there will be a lot of time when it is not blowing. There will be even more time when the sun doesn’t shine. But the time when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine is a lot less. Add in tides and waves (although they partly correlate with wind unfortunately) and you can get to a situation where there are only rare periods where none of these sources are adequate – and hydro may be able to fill those gaps.
Promoting alternatives, rather than going for the cheapest current option, is a good idea. One wonders how the Opposition stumbled upon it.
Feral @1, totally agree with the comment that “we need multiple sources that are independent in when they produce”.
It seems as if the people arguing about baseload capacity tend to be arguing for Black or White, 100% one thing or the other. It seems like a dinosaur approach, ideally suited to the coal and nuclear lobbies.
We already use multiple systems to solve problems in other areas. For example, there is no unique solution for freighting goods from A to B; we use a range of systems including different sizes and types of ships, rail transport, and many sizes of freight trucks and utes, fit for purpose. We never think to argue for a single solution.
Why not also use a range of systems in power supply?
It’s a good outcome, but for me the next common sense victory has to be making consumer choices to use green power separate from the ETS cap. I can’t believe that households’ choices to use renewable energy are resulting in cost savings to high polluters. Talk about demoralising!
What they are really on about is nuclear power. Baseload generation = code for nuclear. No doubt the Greens will be totally dumb enough to fall for it.
Huggy.
Huggy, I don’t think so in this case.
As far as I can tell this is very much Greg Hunt’s personal effort.
Remember targets and gateways lock in emissions! MRET was double counted for the NSW GGAS Scheme – be on the lookout for equivalent fudging of figures with eRET…
I thought about you reading this interview with James Lovelock, Robert.
He’s a big fan of nuclear too. and whilst I know it’s contentious, I certainly see it as a damned competitive option atm.
it stripped my link! see here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/09/interview-james-lovelock
dk: nobody would invest a cent in renewable energy without government mandates of one kind or other.
Let’s take another look at the ‘plundering the commons’ scorecard with the EITEs:
Climate: effectively exempt and set to gain significant windfall profits from BAU technological improvements
Electricity: Exempt from the eRET because “it would seem incongruous to offer exemptions to businesses under the CPRS and then subject them to higher costs under the RET”
Water: more subsidies, the costs of which will be born by households.
I’d say they’re pretty much ungovernable.
Robert, Tasmania exists almost solely on hydro – the exception being the Bell Bay gas power stations (supplied by Basslink). The majority of South Australia’s power comes from gas-fired power stations (Remember the effect the problems with the Santos gas supply had onSA power?). The coal-rich states of NSW, Victoria and Queensland have long advanced the myth that coal is the only effective fuel for baseload power. Yet both hydro and gas are the baseload power sources in Tasmania and South Australia. The other point about gas, contrary to the argument you cite, is that it can be fired up quickly (unlike coal).
Greg Hunt ??
Oh dear I feel really sick. His web site is pure vomit making. So nice, so young so good, so green , so pure blehhh.
If baseload power is interpreted as burning Methane in a combined cycle system I am all for it. Geothermal too.
Huggy
JohnL:
1) There won’t be any new substantial contributions to generation from hydroelectricity in Australia. Wild rivers in the north, no more water in the south.
2) of course gas can be fired up quickly. But if you’re running a gas-fired plant on an irregular basis, you buy a cheap but less efficient open-cycle plant. If you’re running it more often, you pay for a combined-cycle plant which costs more but is more thermally efficient. The net result of putting wind on the grid is likely to be more open-cycle gas plants and fewer combined-cycle plants.
Incidentally, I did a calculation a few months ago that indicated a small EV car could be fully charged using about 2.6 kW of solar panels, i.e. 2 rows of 6 panels @ 215W/panel (e.g. SunPower 215).
This is not an unthinkably large amount of roof area. We already have one row of 6 panels on our roof, and could fit another 2 rows, all in less area than the roof area over our kitchen.
The total cost would be no more than a kitchen reno, and probably be delivering useful results for at least as long. Who keeps kitchens older than 20 years these days?
It seems to be a perfectly do-able proposition, when we run short of the oily stuff.
EVs &/or plug-in hybrids may be needed sooner than we might imagine, given that the Chinese and Indians have been taking to car ownership with gusto and are now overtaking the US in new cars/year…
http://www.environment.gov.au/settlements/renewable/publications/pubs/wind-power.pdf
National Wind Power Study
An estimate of readily accepted wind energy in the National
Electricity Market
“The purpose of this paper is to discuss readily accepted wind energy penetration in the Australian
National Electricity Market (NEM).”
“An analysis of international case studies and consideration of power system control strategies
suggests that the NEM could readily accept 8000MW of wind farms under certain conditions.”
That’s fine, Steve. But that study doesn’t appear to say anything about the emissions consequences of doing so.
Nick Xenephon is concerned about geothermal. So am I and not just because I’ve got shares in Geodynamics.
Combet was babbling on about the market. I think they should bring all the technologies to the boil as it were and let them go from there. Unless there are clear winners to be discerned long-term, in which case they should pick them.
From a low income perspective,that certainly won’t improve,if the quality of argument here,in Parliament and elsewhere stays like it is,[including Brooks], I have little faith that anyone who claims a right to expertise is anywhere near that.Then I just heard Harry Clark’s latest swansong against economic models for road users,if any,on low income users…seeing the endless drab dribble about an ageing population continues,as another point against economic modelling,I think we are already in Cloud Cuckoo Senile Land.I say stop having a problem with Carbon Dioxide in its various forms and use it.And as for congestion in cities,look at the road car truck interface…material science.For example,if we have enough sand deposits that soak up diesel spills,why doesn’t someone with a little nous,just ask a very simple question like”Why has there been an assumption that a solid surface road is more practical and safe for city conditions than something less than a solid surface!? With the reality that congestion isn’t going away,why is that some sort of liability if one is simply talking surface interfaces!? Cars and vehicles were designed to work,so are heavy road making rollers..the substantial difference between a car and a heavy roller is the damned rollers aren’t affixed to cars! If sand was tested in all traffic conditions,per known traffic use,and extra thought went into how to reduce skid[there was stuff one use to use to put on one's hands before playing tennis]then surely the problem is then how to plan for environmentally benign sand and other added solutions recycling at street scape!?If sand was an answer!?” A summary of a simple question.So I reckon all this is part of the Scaredy Cats approach prior to a potential early election,a sort of dictatorial requirement needed at government level because the invented word Complex is so easily used today,about almost every thing.The Scaredy Cats approach only allows the soundings of what seems difficult and complex…rather than reality being ascertained and thus built on as a means to solve the problem peculiarities.
JohnL, I think you’ll find that Tasmania is run on more brown coal than you think… and this isn’t going to change anytime soon, with reduced rainfall expected.
FS, multiply redundant electricity generation sources suggest we’ll need nameplate generating capacity at three or four times anticipated demand. Somewhat pricey…
Others of you appear to be handwaving at the probelm of baseload power. Our economy is geared up to use electricity pretty constantly. Networks are really really hard to manage with major ins and out – if we were plugging in electric cars all night then that would swallow night-time dips in consumption.
The inclusion of solar hot water (can you believe they’re counting this efficiency technology as renewable energy!) and the phantom RECs issue where PV solar is valued at 5 times its capacity for the first 5 years of the scheme is a real danger here. In the first year, its estimated that shw and PV will account for 54% of the total mandated renewables supply.
As the scheme stands, the 5-to-1 PV RECs are counted for the first 5 years which squeezes the amount of mandated supply that can be filled with other technologies. As Robert says, there’s pretty much only room for cheap wind.
The threshold increases until 2020 when it plateaus and then decreases after 2025 because, get this, the carbon price will drive the whole show. Needless to say, that’s many election cycles away so let’s see how it pans out.
The short answer is that if SHW and phantom PV RECs are excluded there’s more room for technologies that are more expensive now to get a look in before the scheme peters out.
Wilful, yes its not going to be cheap to have multiple sources, but not necessarily as expensive as might be assumed. For one thing we already have to have a lot higher maximum production than we actually use to allow for a station being down for maintenance. With multiple small producers this is much less of a problem than with a few giant power stations as we have at the moment.
What is more, smart meters will increasingly allow some of our demand to be shifted to times when the energy is more available. CSIRO are trialling a system like this for commercial fridges, which should eventually be available for home use. Plug in electric cars will take longer, but would provide a massive increase in our capacity to shift demand to match supply.
Oh and Huggybunny, if the Libs think this is a wedge for solar they’re fooling themselves. It’s hugely expensive to build just one solar station – to be remotely economically feasible we’d need the cost savings associated with building several. If we do that we’re looking at amounts of power way above the 25% of 20% Hunt’s proposing, even if nuclear was classified that way. Geothermal, solar thermal and biomass will be the beneficiaries. I have concerns about the last, but giving the first two a boost would be fantastic.
Wilful,
As FS says, demand management, AIUI, is not actually as hard as you might imagine. The fridge thing is going to be big, because there are so many of them, in houses, supermarkets or wherever. Fridges don’t need to run all the time, just enough of the time, and that fact, combined with their high power use, makes them a great candidate for demand management.
All this is, in the simplest terms (and I would love to be corrected) is the fridge having a tiny computer chip inside (to add to the many others already there) that measures the voltage drop that comes with a spike in demand, and simply checks whether the fridge temp. can survive it being ‘put to sleep’ for a time. In most cases this will be possible, unless a teenager has been standing in front of it with the door open for half an hour, contemplating the food on offer.
With any luck, manufacturers can start making little retrofit kits, easily installed by the owner or a friendly electrician.
Yaz, demand management from fridges is certainly doable, but I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that.
One problem with a naive scheme like you mention is that a heap of fridges will all drop in and out of the grid at the same time, causing grid instability. There’s ways around this problem (a variant of which occurs with domestic grid-tied solar panels as well because of various dumb ideas in their control electronics) though.
But the problem with wind energy isn’t just momentary dips and troughs, it’s day-long periods of no wind which you can see in the graph I linked to. It’s kind of difficult to cope with that kind of thing by demand management.
Electric cars would indeed make a big difference. Another attractive possibility is compressed air storage for wind power.
For those who missed it this morning, here is Christine Milne on RN Breakfast talking about the negotiations between Wong & other parties on the MRET.
Her two key points:
why is it that the gov’t will consider amendments that provide yet more subsidy to non-renewable industries (such as the agreement to include the burning of waste methane from coal) but won’t consider ‘top ups’ to the target for geniune renewable industries; and
why are non-renewable energy sources such as burning methane and more critically, burning woodchips from native forests to produce energy being included in the MRET.
Just to try and forestall some potential comments, her point on burning waste methane from coal was that there are other ways to protect those jobs and encourage this practice rather than muddying the MRET and granting yet more largesse to the coal industry.
Wilful at 19: I don’t know where you get your information from, but it does not agree with industry statistics. I refer you to http://www.energytoday.com.au/contentid74.html which shows no brown coal power stations in Tasmania.
JohnL: I believe wilful is referring to Basslink, which links the Tasmanian electricity grid with the east coast grid.
Robert, Yes, but Basslink does not transport brown coal – it is a gas pipeline.
Robert, Oops sorry, Basslink does connect Victoria and Tasmania electricity. But is is not one-way traffic. Quite often Basslink has more going north than going south, though overall
Labor’s grubby political maneouvre to link the long overdue (MRET) target with the failed CPRS has now thankfully been reversed.
An MRET of 20% renewable energy by 2020 was an election promise by Labor in 2007 – it is an indictment of their lack of action on clean energy that it has taken two years to get to this point.
Unfortunately, Labor is now bending and redefine what renewable energy is, in a breathtaking display of yet more political maneouvring. The draft MRET legislation deal between the Govenment and the Opposition now includes as “renewable energy” sources:
* Burning woodchips from native forests, including old growth forests.
* Coal seam methane as a ‘renewable’ gas
Both are quite obviously not renewable. This is scam.
Our forests should be protected as carbon stores rather than woodchipped and burnt.
And coal seam methane is no more renewable than coal itself.
RM @23
I am happy to wear the ‘naive’ label, as this is not my area of expertise. What you describe hardly sounds like an insurmountable problem, though. It seems like almost as trivial an engineering feat to make those same fridges respond to a voltage drop by gradually winding back their electricity usage.
As it is, don’t the grid supremos have to cope with ‘half-time at the Grand Final electric kettle surges’ and such like, and seem to do okay?
Please enlighten my naivety…
Dear Yaz… all i know is the commonly espoused figure in the media is that over 20% of electricity from variable sources will be problematic. I’m quite sure this is why 20% is the magic number being discussed for RET at the moment as abov ethis figure storage is needed and is when things start getting expensive: for the time being they are expensive, atleast!
…the physics of the whole thing I would be mildy interested in if anyone cares to try and enlighten me!
PeterC@29
I agree with the thrust of your comments and particularly so on native forest woodchips. Indeed even plantation would not necessarily be near zero net emissions.
The Coal seam bed methane is more tricky because while certainly not renewable (and thus shouldn’t be counted in the MRET) some of this would be fugitive emissions. Using this to supplant other coal combustion or other fossil gas harvest (if that’s what was proposed) might be rational. I understand that one of the oproposed Origin plants would sit more or less atop an existing coal mine and use those emissions to generate onsite power for the grid.
Can someone confirm/refute?
A substantial number of fugitive methane emissions arise this way in China, and so if they captured and used these, this would be relatively rational, given that coal is likely to be required for quite some time yet, especially for steel making, for example.
Sorry, Yaz, that was not meant as a personal slam, I slipped into geekspeak by mistake. “Naive” has rather less perjorative implications in the engineering/computer science world, where it usually just means the “first, simplest idea considered”, which often needs additional refinement to deal with the real world.
This link http://www.photon-magazine.com/
Gives avery good overview of developemnts inthe pV industry.
Expect to see really big PV systems on big rooftops soon.
Huggy
Robert Merkel @13: “The net result of putting wind on the grid is likely to be more open-cycle gas plants and fewer combined-cycle plants.”
Why not build combined-cycle plants with some open-cycle turbines in the same power station? It uses the same raw material, and produces the same product (electricity). Then build both solar and wind capacity to feed into the same grid?
Fine weather is good for solar, lousy weather is usually good for wind (in my limited experience, at least). On the coast, even on fine days you also get coastal breezes in the mornings and evenings, which would extend the daytime power peak from solar into the evenings on most days.
Building BOTH solar and wind should be complementary in many cases, and significantly improve the overall carbon-efficiency of electricity generation to the grid. The open-cycle turbines would then take up the slack from the combined renewable energy, while combined-cycle turbines provide the carbon-efficient baseload?
Fran Barlow @32, while we are on the topic of “fugitive methane emissions”, when are those farmers going to strap methane capture devices onto all their ruminants?
After all, I believe they already collect the raw material for HRT (hormone replacement therapy) by strapping bags onto horses.
The bags would have to be emptied regularly, of course. Puts a new meaning into “milking” cows!