Just in passing, I see that the NSW Greens are campaigning against new coal power and electricity privatization.
Figuring out the details of exactly what the Labor government is proposing to sell off in its “privatisation you have when you’re not having a privatisation” of the state’s generators is rather opaque, but it appears that they are offering the rights to build and operate fossil fuel baseload plants of the owner rights holder’s favourite fuel on several sites around the state. While there are applications for both coal and gas, at least one of the sites apparently doesn’t have gas conveniently available.
Aside from the sheer environmental vandalism of building new coal-fired power, I don’t see how the economics of new-build coal make sense for private owners contracted operators. Building coal is a multi-billion dollar bet against any substantial carbon price. I can’t help wondering, like with Victoria and the smelter contract, whether the NSW’s government has found some way to sneak long-term multi billion dollar carbon risks onto its books for the purposes of political expediency.
New South Walers hate privatisation of power, and the Greens are only begrudgingly coming towards market economics, but I don’t really understand all that, I have no problem whatsoever with private power generation.
As for no new coal powered electricity, well it’s a pity that has to be a policy by a fringe party. It’s hardly worth a post to say that this is Greens policy, I would be shocked if it were otherwise. But really, why can’t Labor or Libs have this as a policy?
of course, if you just put a price on carbon…
Wilful, the point I’m trying to make is that if this was a striaght-out private power deal, I can’t see how coal would even be considered in the current and immediately foreseeable regulatory climate.
But given the complexity of the contracting arrangements, I have to wonder whether there’s some get-out clause for the private operators in the event the carbon price gets too high for their tastes.
Oh I completely agree Robert.
But sovereign risk, hopefully a responsible government in the future will be able to just walk away from these evil deals, tell the investors in death that they should have known a lot better.
Legally, Australia has been covered since 1992 when we signed the UNFCCC. Nobody should get any compensation past that point.
You mean these are all plays to put in place massive obligations which they hope the federales will have to meet? Jeez .. makes me want to weep with frustration that gaming the state/fed funding model with a big f**k you to the environment is the heights that these pollies aspire to.
“You mean these are all plays to put in place massive obligations which they hope the federales will have to meet”
This is also what is wrong with the CPRS which locked in no change for 15 years. This is all shirking environmental and public responsibility and pandering to the market model, a model which created the problem in the first place.
There is a case for new coal fired power as long as the only fuel is waste streams that would otherwise oxidize without producing any power and gas. Otherwise any proposal for coal fired should fail the environmental test. Kevin Rudd should be saying this now so that people don’t waste time on coal fired proposals.
There is a case for new gas fired as part of the transition to clean power. It may make sense in terms of both reducing the cost of cleanup and providing the back-up for variable clean power sources such as wind and solar.
I would be interested to see what would happen if a new nuclear plant were proposed to be built, say, somewhere out near Broken Hill. From there you could supply Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales.
Good idea Andrew. Do you reckon the Greens would go for it?
The NSW Govt gets a billion dollars a year in royalties from coal. I’m not saying you’re wrong to oppose growth in the coal industry, but I don’t believe it’s a battle you can win until Fiji is underwater and the Antarctic is a desert.
Jenny, the Antarctic is already a desert :/
But seriously, I don’t think it’s worth trying to fight the export of coal (aside from anything else, there’s plenty more of it in other countries). What’s worth fighting, in my view, is the domestic consumption of coal for electricity production.
So … since Copenhagen failed and climate change has been waning in the polls, we’ve had:
- A 25-year brown coal deal with the smelters in Victoria
- Two new (almost certainly) black coal power stations approved in NSW
- Garrett’s insulation scheme shut down
- The CPRS as good as dead
Does anyone get the feeling the authorities were just waiting for this climate change fad to pass, so they could get on with things again?
JohnD @6, totally agree!
Robert Merkel @10, totally agree also!
We cannot fight all battles at once. We will need to choose the strategic battles which are winnable without too many casualties.
The day will probably come when nobody wants our coal, and there will be no export market. Alternatively, at an earlier stage, enough countries will be facing severe outcomes from climate change and their anger will translate into trade sanctions against countries still involved in the trade. That day is not soon. In the meantime, shutting down coal mines by decree would be political suicide. It is a battle that is not winnable at this stage.
We can however start with a low-C economy, as JohnD suggests. We can also start the transition to a sustainable energy strategy, for our domestic market in the first instance.
That is a winnable battle, and it can create new jobs for the future. Including export jobs which may be needed when our coal export industry is finally on the international nose.
Commissioning of Bayswater 2 is expected around 2014. Without an ETS of some substance by that time – or really well before – then it is virtually certain this will be coal fired. The same would apply to the Lithgow base load station. The existing infrastructure – black steaming coal, rail sidings, even the 100 metre deep open cut voids to dump the fly ash – make it a clayton’s choice. The closeness of this decision to the Vic Government-Loy Yang – ALCOA agreement suggest both governments are playing hard ball with Rudd and Wong on AGW.
Elise: I am not sure that trade sanctions against high per capita emitters are “not soon”. When the yanks get a be in their bonnets they can get self righteous awfully fast. Once they realize Australia would have to reduce its emissions by 9% to match their very high per capita…….
Andrew – the ideal place to build a new nuclear power station would be near the coast. That way you could use the excess heat for desalination whilst also reducing tranmission losses by being closer to population centres. With a little imagination the new desalination plant in Sydney could have been pumping out electricity as well fresh water.
I don’t like the idea of new coal fired power stations being built.
But let’s be realistic about it. If there is a real need for additional baseload generation plant, then there is a real need for additional baseload generation plant.
We don’t have any more rivers to dam for hydroelectricity, and natural gas is an extremely expensive fuel. Nobody uses natural gas for baseload electricity because it’s such an expensive fuel. And we have absurd laws in place specifically prohibiting energy companies for using nuclear even if they deem that to be in their best interests.
What choice do we have? Build coal plants, embrace nuclear energy, or use natural gas, which means extremely expensive electricity which still has very large CO2 emissions.
Luke Weston @16, we already use natural gas routinely in power stations. It is the peaking power generation. Pilbara iron ore mines use power from gas fired turbines. It is not exactly a new and unused concept.
Extremely expensive is actually about 3 times off-peak costs, in retail terms. I believe most of Europe already has power at rates similar to our peak rates. Please correct me if I am wrong.
The world wouldn’t end, if we switched over to gas-fired power. Especially if it were CCGT generation, which is vastly more efficient than coal-fired power.
Terje, while I agree that the ideal place for nukes is along the coast (seawater cooling is the go) the whole “waste heat desal” idea is not as big a deal as you might think.
The amount of water you can actually get isn’t that high.
That’s part of the problem here. There is no proof that there is an urgent need for these plants. The urgency is an important factor, because if the real need is actually in the distant future, then we have the opportunity to develop renewables instead.
The concept of “baseload” requirements is a construct due to the nature of coal and gas fired stations. Renewables technology could handle peak daytime demand and a lot of nighttime demand is artificially driven by off-peak prices. Off-peak prices only exist because it is not practical to turn off combustion based power plants at night.
Near the coast would be the operational ideal place for a nuke plant. But I wonder if it would even be possible to build a nuke power plant in the outback if you wanted to go for ideal NIMBY avoidance?
Not enough water for cooling.
I wonder if a broken hill power station would need to buy water rights off irrigators?
Andd the additional cost for transmission infrastructure to get the power back to the big cities might preclude it too. The existing 220kV line to broken hill couldn’t handle the 2GW output of a nuke power station.
With present technology, not without gas backup at anything like an affordable price. And if you’re using gas backup, you’ll build open-cycle turbines rather than combined cycle. The gas turbines will be less efficient than combined cycle. And so your wind farms and solar panels actually abate a hell of a lot less carbon than you’d think.
Yes, solar thermal with storage, or geothermal…but we’ve yet to see solar thermal with storage actually scale up, and hot rock geothermal is still a highly experimental technology.
Robert Merkel @21: “And if you’re using gas backup, you’ll build open-cycle turbines rather than combined cycle.”
We seem to be going backwards and forwards over baseload versus peaking power and turning the argument into a giant porridge.
The argument was that you could not use gas turbines economically for BASELOAD. In that case, we should be talking about the most efficient system, namely CCGT. Then all of a sudden you are talking about the cost of open-cycle turbines, and saying that they have to be open-cycle for peaking loads. What???
Are we talking about baseload, or are you just trying to shoot down the gas option, for some hidden agenda?
Just to give a number, I believe the cost of CCGT power is about 5 c/kWh. Please correct me if I am wrong.
That does not strike me as an “unaffordable” price for power.
Elise, to clarify, I’m not opposing gas. I’m merely noting that renewables + open-cycle gas (the most likely outcome from mass building of renewables) is little better than straight combined-cycle gas.
Robert @24, and the problem with that is???
One fine day, Robert, we will run out of gas. When that happens, gas + renewables will look a whole lot better than gas alone.
Don’t you think we should start on something else low-C and renewable, now? Even in a small way? Otherwise the transition will be a very bumpy ride.
According to here about 3000mW of OCGT have been developed vs 2500mW of CCGT so it is a bit hard to claim that most of it has been OCGT. The driver for this surge in gas has been incentives like the Qld gas scheme. If Tallawara is an example, about 60% of the power comes from the gas turbine which suggests that a CCGT could get at least 60% of its capacity on line as fast as an OCGT. (Anyone out here who knows more about this?)
Given that CCGT produces about 25% of the emissions per kWh as brown coal fired power there is no reason why CCGT cannot be considered as an option for reducing emissions as long as investors understand that a point will be reached when it will be time for gas to be ramped down. (Unless geo-sequestration becomes viable for gas fired.)
I think the problem could be Robert that you are going to need a mix of gas technologies. Using closed cycle is more efficient than open cycle but not if you are handling significant slews. Rapidly changing output of CCGTs diminishes the life of the plant — so you need some OCGT to buffer.
Really with renewables you are going to need all three and you will probably want all three even without renewables anyway.
JohnD @26: Good points.
“Unless geo-sequestration becomes viable for gas fired.”
Or bio-sequestration, e.g. growing green algae with the waste gas, to make “green diesel” for transport? Cut-n-Come-Again magic pudding style use of carbon?
Actually, we are likely to virtually run out of natural gas in 2-3 decades, before people get around to enforcing sequestration of any description.
The geo-sequestration guys might have a few pilot plants running by then, with suitable MSM coverage showing how hard they are trying to solve the problem…
The bio-sequestration guys will be still applying for funding in vain…
Of course, there will always be some methane around, e.g. from anerobic digesters in sewage treatment, and assorted other biological sources. However, it may not be enough to supply the kind of power we have become accostomed to using.
Regardless, I can’t see a way around needing to convert to gas-fired power as a transition step in the next few decades. We also need to think about the step after that, though. A decade goes by awful fast, in my subjective experience!
In an attempt to answer your original question Robert I’ll try to relay something that I was told by John Kaye a few weeks ago. I think I’m remembering correctly here, but I can’t be sure.
Basically, these new power stations are to be “offset” with carbon certificates from India. These certificates were earned by Indian power generators for upgrading old coal fired power stations to new “more efficient” coal fired power stations.
So the new coal fired power stations in NSW are to be offset by new coal fired power stations in India.
Which is so perverse I couldn’t make it up, so I think I must be remembering correctly. I’ll try to chase a source for this to verify.
I followed this up and found out that I had my wires crossed. There is no direct connection between the Indian power station and these new ones being proposed in NSW.
The Indian power station is related to the 5% CPRS targets as it is a source of some of the few international carbon certificates available to Australian polluters under the CPRS.
Elise: Your field not mine but my understanding is that there is an awful lot of coal seam gas out there and that companies like Santos have found that there reserves have been significantly boosted by technologies that extract gas from tight shales. Agree that installing CCGT now should be justified on the assumption that it will a transition strategy. Decisions re geo-sequestration can be made in 10 to 20 yrs time.
The other advantage of developing geo-sequestration are that, at the moment, it is the only strategy that could be used to achieve major reductions in cement and steel production or to achieve negative power production emissions by running power stations on bio-fuel.
The bright eco-geeks of Beyond Zero Emissions have convinced me that solar thermal can be scaled up – particularly given the 16 hour storage of the new Spanish power plants.
They are currently more expensive (what’s new?) but they calculate the cost to replace our entire energy supply with wind and solar thermal as about 3.5% of GDP, far less than we currently spend on the military. Sounds like a good deal to me, but then, I am no engineer.
I applauded Origin Energy’s opening of a new gas-fired power plant here in Victoria, but I’d like these to be merely a transition arrangement, as JohnD noted above.
Do go and read their very long paper on this issue…
The bright eco-geeks of BZE are indeed bright and geeks, but I think they represent very much the optimistic end of punditry.
I’d be curious to know who represents the negative end of punditry – everyone else?
I know AGW’s the end of the world as we know it, but why aren’t we trying to do something about that? And yesterday?
Optimistic in their views on the likely immediate prospects for renewable energy, I mean.
I suppose I, personally, represent a more pessimistic take – it shows promise, but the costs are still worryingly high and history shows they don’t come down as quickly as we’d like. Then, at the other end of the scale, you’ve got the Moncktons of this world who simply can’t see how energy can be generated by anything other than fossil fuels.
Most types of solar thermal need water for steam generation too, in addition to the pressing need to minimise costs by not being too far from existing transmission infrastructure = near the coast, not in the middle of the desert like often seems to be the best place for it.
Bernard Keane: Our love affair with coal: hotter than ever
As support for action on climate change rapidly dwindles, TPTB are dusting off their plans for new coal power, plans that have been shelved for 3-4 years while they waited out this climate change “scare”.
The day Turnbull lost the leadership (by one vote!) will be remembered as the closest Australia came to real action. What is it about Turnbull and honourable causes narrowly defeated by dark conservative forces? Republic. Climate change. What next?
Frankly, Australians simply don’t care. You can blame the politicians all you like, but the root cause of inaction is public indifference. The Australia of 2010 is mightily relieved we avoided recession, and thankful the Chinese are buying our resources. We’ve forgotten about the great climate change scare of 2006-2007 and we’re back to our favourite pastime: Borrowing beyond our means and speculating on real estate.
One aspect of the problem with AGW that gets relatively little attention, given its importance is surely the inventory question.
It is all very well arguing the merits of non-fossil fuel energy sources — but until we stop not merely combusting fossil fuels, but harvesting them, we are going to struggle to cut emissions.
Ultimately, the two processes are linked of course but not as closely as some seem to imply. If for example, starting tomorrow everyone in Australia cut their fossil energy usage by, say, 20% for the next year, what effect would this have on the harvest of fossil fuels?
Probably none. There would be a slight downward pressure on the price of oil, gas and coal, which would make it cheaper for others to use it and might even get us into Jevons Paradox territory. But even if this didn’t occur, it’s not as if recoveries of coal, gas and oil would immediately decline. Mines and wells are viable within a bigger price range that a few dollars here or there, and the marginal cost of recovery is still going to make it profitable to recover. In fact, it might make sense to recover even faster to keep revenues up. If people thought that oil was on the way out, the more you sell the more you get out of your asset. Sell before the price goes down even more.
Just as importantly, that open mine or well will continue to release sump gas. Those inventories of coal will continue to oxidise to CO2 while they await combustion. Sure they will oxidise more slowly if not burned but left there long enough they would eventually surrender their entire load. In a sense, the problem is the same kind of one people often cite with nuclear hazmat — future generations are going to have to deal with fossil fuel waste — and since its mass is much larger and CO2 (unlike nuclear hazmat) will still be cycling about the biosphere in 50,000 years time, the challenge will be to secure the stuff cheaply from the biosphere. Classic legacy debt.
What we should probably be working towards are actual mine and well closures on a timeline matching the ramp up of near zero emissions technologies.
The fact that your car or energy plant emits no CO2 starts making a serious long term difference when it affects the front end of the fossil fuel process — harvest and its inventory. In the meantime, while not combusting gives us more time to solve the problem, it’s only a partial answer.