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The Forum > Article Comments > Death of the CET > Comments

Death of the CET : Comments

By Graeme McLeay, published 19/9/2017

Coalition talk of dumping Finkel's Clean Energy Target leaves Australia's climate policy in tatters.

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He is talking the usual rubbish vented by spoiled rich kids who love to dictate to the rest of us. Ordering us around and bullying others is what gets him his jollies!
I suggest a very large brown coal plant in the Latrobe Valley, where I live. None of this electricity for trendy Adelaide they can enjoy paying for wind and solar and diesel generation when needed
Posted by JBowyer, Tuesday, 19 September 2017 7:02:14 AM
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Good thing...now to wind back the clock to a time when power was affordable to more than a select few at the top!
Renationalise essential services quickly!
Posted by diver dan, Tuesday, 19 September 2017 7:24:18 AM
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I don't know how Turnbull can lie straight in bed after years of tough talk about emissions, including at the Paris climate conference. Since Aussies don't like bull artists you'd think he will be punished at the polls for changing his tune.

More of the the same is not going to work. The RET is costing us billions yet emissions are going up along with power bills. Some of these places (Germany, California) that talk about 100% renewables are facing the same problems, namely same or increased CO2 along with power price rises. Meanwhile France has 5% of Australia's electricity emissions intensity with stable power prices. Perhaps we're not seeing the obvious.
Posted by Taswegian, Tuesday, 19 September 2017 7:40:59 AM
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The author, perhaps due to his evident enthusiasm for a cause, has exaggerated.

First, "dispatchable" is not at all a new term - it has been in use for decades to describe that which intermittent electricity sources such as wind turbines do not provide - electricity on demand 24/7/365. Added bulk storage such as pumped hydro is needed in order for renewables to achieve that goal. Even world-class batteries as are being installed in SA won't provide dispatchability. Without being backed by substantial dedicated storage neither solar PV nor wind power is able to be classed as either baseload or dispatchable. Why argue the difference between these two terms, neither of which describes that which is being recommended? There is no point to the argument.

Second, China has not announced plans to ban the internal combustion engine for cars. It has announced an intention to phase out manufacture and sales of most petrol and diesel internal combustion engines over an unspecified period, perhaps 50 years, to be replaced in the market by NEV's, which term includes hybrids such as Toyota's Prius, which has been manufactured for 20 years.

On current expectations, internal combustion engines will still be in use in China until the end of this century.

I accept that the goal is to achieve zero-carbon electricity and transport. Unfortunately, we are not heading in a direction that could rationally be expected to achieve that goal. Solar and wind may be components of such a system but will never suffice.

As for "old technology term" Vs "new technology term": while perhaps new to this author, in fact they are both established english terms.
Posted by SingletonEngineer, Tuesday, 19 September 2017 7:44:31 AM
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Deaths that are far more important are the deaths of coal miners, due to black lung disease. But their votes count along with the monumental control of a threatened fossil fuel industry!

And this is where it gets conflated by competing interests/ideologies! Many sounding like foaming at the mouth recalcitrant intransigent ideologues, going ballistic! The second the word nuclear is uttered!

Others listening in grim faced attention as they mentally compose their best rebuttal! As has been the case now for a couple of decades!

As we slide further down the list of banana republics going somewhere to happen? Why? Because brainwashed nincompoops, refuse to desert their fondly held, fact free mantras and fear based crap!

So, We are torn between so called renewables, and the mountain of toxic waste their manufacture creates, along with astronomical power bills and subsidies we pay, in order to placate a massively misinformed moronic (don't give a rat's) mob?

Or folks (gutless wonders) who are welded to cheap coal fired energy? Because it is the cheapest? No!

But because we have mountains of the stuff and others are willing to buy it! Moreover, we know how to build power stations that burn this relatively cheap stuff, while keeping a couple or three thousand folks, gainfully employed. Mostly by tax avoiding, profit repatriating, price gouging foreigners?

This industry has gone from bad to worse with moribund (sell your soul and economic sovereignty to the devil) privatisation!
TBC. Alan B.
Posted by Alan B., Tuesday, 19 September 2017 8:45:59 AM
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Continued: Down to me, this outcome would be very very different!

We're uniquely placed as one of the few industrialized countries without a nuclear industry! Which is largely centred around fuel fabrication and where the real money is, for them!

Because we don't yet have a nuclear industry, we can take advantage of some older fifties technology. Walk away safe, molten salt thorium reactors that will allow us to do many things currently withheld!

Provide cost effective, desalinated water, cheap enough to drought proof a nation, while turning our most arid dust bowls into our most productive regions.

Provide the world's cheapest most reliable CARBON FREE power! and at least for the next 1,000 years!

AND EARN ANNUAL BILLIONS REPROCESSING OTHER FOLK'S NUCLEAR WASTE WHILE DOING IT! And thereby reduce reduce the half life of what can't yet be reprocessed, to just 300 years! No bull!

With a median price of $1.98PKH (Prof.Hargreaves, "Cheaper than coal, thorium") as available nuclear sourced, not for profit, industrial power. As an integral part of that bargain.

Some of which could be employed to power the arc furnaces of 24/7 highly automated, single step steel production, which in turn, would not just be the lowest costing, but with the lowest possible carbon footprint!

Ditto Aluminum and all light metals. Imagine what the entrepreneurs/family enterprise/co-ops among us could do, if given a fibre to the kerb NBN, the world's cheapest electricity, and genuine tax reform!

We'd have to employ people to hold/beat them back, with a stick!

Can we afford to do this? Yes we can! However, the real question should be, can we really truly, afford not to?

With that answered!? The next question surely has to be, why vote for folks who want anything else, or the self inflicted, status quo!?
Alan B.
Posted by Alan B., Tuesday, 19 September 2017 9:24:22 AM
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