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The Forum > Article Comments > Can we move to a low carbon economy without a carbon price? > Comments

Can we move to a low carbon economy without a carbon price? : Comments

By Ben Rose, published 1/6/2011

The Liberal Party is proposing some of the most expensive and least accountable solutions to carbon pollution.

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Roses1,

Re Kyoto, you haven’t read the papers this week have you?

By public debate I mean you nominate you favorite scientists, the CSIRO, IPCC and the entire Climate Change Committee and I’ll nominate Bob Carter and yes, let’s have it on the ABC. Seems fair to me?

Roses do tend to attract Aphids and Black Spot but don’t worry, there is a cure!
Posted by spindoc, Wednesday, 1 June 2011 12:20:51 PM
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Curmudgeon,

Having been involved in several industries using biomass, the issue is the supply and quality of the fuel.

Much of the biomass is seasonal, and things like rain affect its calorific value. Ensuring reliable supply requires huge storage and fluctuating prices. Biomass is far more reliable than wind or solar, but not nearly as much as coal, gas or nuclear.
Posted by Shadow Minister, Wednesday, 1 June 2011 12:23:37 PM
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To answer some of the better comments :
Shadow Minister (can I assume by your non de plume you work for the Libs / Greg Hunt?). Yes once the RET scheme, in which taxpayers pay generators about $38 per KWh for renewable energy, is wound down an increased carbon price would take over and that price would be $60-70 / tCO2. That is because 1 MWh of coal (steam thermal) generation roughly equates to 1 tonne of CO2 emissions (about 0.9 for cleaner plants to 1.4 for the brown coal plants in Vic). So what if we have to pay 6-7 c more for electricity and 15-20c more for petrol? Hello! Europeans pay more than that now and has the sky fallen in on them? They are certainly wasting less energy than we do.
Thankyou Curm, you rightly pointed out that biomass power is base load. I can assure you my figures are well researched and the costs (capital plus operating plus feedstocks) of biomass generation from tree crops is well documented by RIRDC and others at $120 – 180 per MWh; I used $170 in the table .
My chapter 20 in The Biochar Revolution explains how 10% of wheat/ wool belt land (4m ha) planted to woody coppice crops (native mallee trees) could conservatively generate 4% of Australia’s electricity as well as providing other energy or charcoal products. If tropical grazing were included and more productive land used this could of course be greatly increased.
There are already several bagasse (sugar cane waste) power stations in Qld totaling over 300MW ; they already viable as the feedstock is essentially free. Biomass (including wood heating) already provides 5% of our primary energy . Here is a good referenece http://aie.org.au/Content/NavigationMenu/Resources/SchoolProjects/FS8_BIOMASS.pdf
All up I reckon biomass could economically provide 10-15% of our energy needs but mostly with small dispersed 20-30 MW plants to minimize transport costs; co-firing in existing coal plants is also an option, but not a good one as they are very inefficient. Contrary to your sugestion Curm this would equate to many large coal powered stations.
Posted by Roses1, Wednesday, 1 June 2011 12:45:10 PM
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Rosie,

If the few countries who have indicated they were not going to join the race to reduce carbon dioxide emissions were Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Ghana, Jamacia, East Timor, and New Zealand your disparaging remarks indicating an unlikely negative effect on a trade in Carbon Dioxide emissions would be valid. But they aren't. The few countries that are not to become involved in this idiodic race are the US, China, Japan, France, South Korea, India, Canada or most of the worlds biggest economies and emitters of carbon dioxide.

We're leaping into the carbon dioxide reductionists fire with the small fry and that doesn't sit well with an increasing number of Australians.
Posted by imajulianutter, Wednesday, 1 June 2011 1:55:49 PM
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Shadow Minister - take your point. Fair enough.

Roses1/Ben - now I'm even more confused. You say $170 MWh (which sounds right)in your post, but the figure on the table in the article is for $106, if that's the figure you're talking about.

As for the 10-15 per cent of energy needs coming from lots of small scale biomass plants... Bwwwhahahahahah! Okay, we've had our laugh. That's a very serious amount of biomass. It is very difficult to see just how that much biomass could be generated in Aus each year.

Your post refers to a piece of green agit-prop. Go and look at it. The biomass use it refers to is mostly in non-OECD countries. I think you'll also find, if you investigate the figures, that most of it comes from places like Haiti. Is it third world cooking fires? I'd have to go and check this for myself, as I can't rmmeber what I read on this, but I was under the distinct impression it was something like that.

Doubt if you'd find any advanced country with biomass contributing more than 1 per cent of energy requirements. Its mostly small scale stuff, somewhat more useful than the rest of the alternates, but unlikely to contibute much.
Posted by Curmudgeon, Wednesday, 1 June 2011 2:12:30 PM
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For once Mark, I find myself largely agreeing with you. Biomass will not replace our coal plants. For those that doubt this, I estimate you would need 120,000 km2 of land to do this. We have 260,000 km2 of crop land. So we would need to take almost half our crop land to replace coal with biomass cropping. ABARE in its Energy Projections to 2029-30 didn’t even include biomass in its future technologies.

To Roses, I live in Northern NSW and we have two relatively new bagasse power plants built with generous government subsidy. They are now in receivership as they are not financially viable – even after the subsidy and the RECs.

To Ben, I think there is a bit of smoke and mirrors at play in using the least cost non-variable renewable energy source in your example. It might leave the uninformed reader with the idea that all we need for renewable baseload is a carbon price of $63. If you had used the more scalable solar thermal with storage (as you mentioned) the price would have looked very different. ABARE has the generation cost between $300-600/MWh for solar – 3 to 6 times the example you gave.
Posted by Martin N, Wednesday, 1 June 2011 4:12:49 PM
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