Tristan,

Yours is a brilliant, sane article - backed by research - that deals with the facts of what is needed to maintain a healthy and sustainable energy grid in Australia.

You opened my eyes to information about countries and provinces where certain fuels are working or failing.

I need to hear more of your balanced research on climate change and what is the way forward for Australia.

Should the new government promote clean-coal, gas and nuclear power generation as renewables alone will not meet the demands of the energy grid?

This is an interesting article about Australia's energy policies and the misinformation frequently spread about fossil fuels, renewables, and nuclear power.

One thing that obvious is that Australia has a large and dry landmass, where solar farms could be scattered so that if there is cloud cover in one area there would be a number of places where the sun is still shining. Let us build redundancy into out PV grid: when the grid is delivering all the energy it can, let us divert some of that energy into electrolytically splitting water into oxygen, vented to the atmosphere, and Hydrogen which can be stored and used somewhere else at some other time.

Having solar PV farms close to the eastern coast, some in the middle of the continent, and some more close to the western coast means that we can capture solar energy for a longer period each day.

Tristan:
Suggest that people aspire to have electricity is to completely misrepresent the issue! If you yourself was one of those folk that live in a household with no washing machine and you yourself were tasked with the entire families laundry needs!?

This essay wouldn't look like just another academic dissertation from the lofty heights of some far distant ivory tower! And just so out of touch to be intensely offensive!

Which is so typical of left-leaning environmentalists who clearly live in a bubble world of their own and completely out of touch with reality! ASPIRE!! Which is used by folk just like you to replace the word NEED in your DISASSOCIATED INDIFFERENT vocabulary!

Moreover, most green commentators ignore the real solution to climate change is a carbon-free nuclear power. Conflate it with nuclear bombs and nuclear destruction! Because you have no real understanding of it and how we can very safely use it even in our very own backyards!

Here I am referring to MSR thorium And burning up the world's stockpile of nuclear waste to reduce the half-life to just 300 years and power the entire world for at least a thousand years as we do so.

Left to the anti-nuclear diotic idealogues who inhabit the extreme left of domestic politics, we are left with no other option for ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL BASE LOAD POWER THAN COAL!

Do you even comprehend or take responsibility for what you are actually responsible for, i.e., the current climate change and energy policies!

By the sheer simplicity of demanding absolute purity and totally unaffordable solutions that come with their share of toxic pollution!

All one can add as an indictment on this sort of article is, BAH HUMBUG!
Alan B.

Renewable energy targets or portfolio standards are an expensive and inadequate way to attack emissions. That has been confirmed for a decade most recently in the US with the study by Greenstone and Nath. It found that the cost of CO2 avoided by US state standards was $130 per Mwh
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3374942
Contrast that to the $54 found Australia's 2014 RET Review.

Firstly here there are the direct subsidies such as feed-in tariffs, LGCs and STCs and government grants. Then there are indirect costs such as frequency correction. line losses and congestion for remote generators then the fuel premium for balancing by open cycle gas balancing and fast ramped coal. In future battery storage could add say $100 per Mwh. Instead of a subsidy wind and commercial solar plants should pay all these costs.

The German federal audit office recently concluded that carbon pricing would be more effective than renewable subsidies. That would give nuclear a look in with combined cycle gas and pumped hydro. The public is in thrall to 100% renewables but doesn't grasp the real costs.

Similar thinking should be applied to our capture of wind power. I see the tall, horizontal axis wind turbines as being the first stage of wind turbine design. Holidaying in Stanley I noticed two things: one was that it was always windy and the second was that one house in every three had a roof-mounted vertical axis wind turbine.

In many ways, the state of development of renewables parallels that of the internal combustion engine in the period 1880-1910. Expensive, high-maintenance, and relatively low efficiency but capable of considerable development so the cost per unit of power delivered gets smaller and smaller. Again, with wind farms widely scattered the problem of the wind not blowing in any one place vanishes when it is realised that the wind is blowing in other places.

When it comes to looking at better ways to handle human excrement than flushing it all out to sea, and committing three environmental crimes at one go*, it was proved some 40 years ago that a sealed anaerobic septic tank could produce large quantities of methane. Just as with Hydrogen, this methane could be stored for use elsewhere at a different time, if more was produced than was needed.

* 3 environmental crimes are (1)wasting a perfectly good fertiliser, (2)using drinking water to flush it away, and (3)polluting the ocean with our high nitrogen wastes.

I am reserving my fourth post to rebut any sensible comments: any shrill, personal comments I will ignore!

A full two-thirds of the households of this world are places where there are no washing machines and even where there are, some households can barely afford the power they use! Over 40% of Australian households now live below the poverty line. And what tax they pay, is often partly plundered to pay increasingly unaffordable franking credits and negative gearing etc.

It's ok the grandkids will never miss it as they fry on a planet that is allowed to go past a point of no return, tipping point! There are other power options beside MSR thorium, but none as cheap to just roll out. A solar thermal power plant would only need to occupy a square mile in our arid interior, I'm informed to power the whole of Australia? And given economies of scale and the automated production of the reflectors for comparable costs to similar coal-fired plants. Moreover, the fuel forever free and for longer than human habitation on the planet! But undoable due to the upfront cost and the thousands of miles of wires that would consume as much as 80% of the daylight hours power generation.

Another option is to rollout household waste digesters and use that to power our domestic domiciles and doable, With at least a 50% saleable surplus If converted to 24/7 power with ceramic fuel cells!

Hardly for the masses, without government funding and rollout due to the considerable upfront costs.

Coal can be used for mostly carbon-free power and here I refer you to commentary I've presented here in the past two days. We are saddled with ratbags, I believe, with absolutely no future vision and no real concern for our fellow Australians Just as long as they're doing well and their bank accounts nicely padded?
Alan B.

What an utterly bereft article. Not a single mention or accounting of the cost of global warming.

No mention of the criminal exporting of abundant natural gas reserves which should have been able to provide a lower carbon intensive means to compliment our renewable sector, gas we are now looking to import back from Japan.

Moreover it links to a 'paper' from another of those shadowy climate change skeptic organisations the Energy Innovation Reform Project whose CEO Sam Thernstrom served in the Bush administration.

More propaganda from vested interests I'm afraid. Time to move on.

Alan,

You raise a crucial point: if the inner-city elites could dictate to the world, would they allow the people of India to aspire to better lives ? Should they have similar rights to those elites to comfortable, long lives with all the mod cons that the elites take for granted (even the world trips) ? Should they have electricity and modern infrastructure (and even electric cars) like other people ? Or should they sacrifice themselves for the presence of mind of those elites ?

Unfortunately, since the kale-and-chinoa circle can't dictate to the world (Oh, the injustice !), India will seek sources of energy to drive its electrification. There's crappy coal, and there's high-quality black coal from the Galilee Basin. If they don't take Australian coal, they'll quite naturally get it from somewhere else. China too.

Yes, one degree temperature rise every 160 years, and one inch sea-level rise every decade will have serious effects - an extension of growing areas and longer growing seasons across the entire northern hemisphere, for example. More CO2 in the atmosphere will mean faster plant growth, including crops, and more oxygen returned to the atmosphere.

With one-metre tides twice a day (are they teaching that to the littlies these days ?), that inch per decade might not sound much but it gradually mounts up: if we live to be five hundred, it would be up to our shoulders ! And we can't tell yet whether technology will counter that one-degree rise every 160 years either ! Anyway, technology is capitalist and therefore evil.

Except renewable energy capitalism in which, I assume quite unfairly, affluent environmentalists are happily investing.

Joe

One day the obvious penny may drop that while we can clean the environment up and minnimise polution we have never and will never control the weather. It may come as a surprise to many these days that we are not god. Australia will continue to have floods, droughts, snow and no amount of fiddling computer models will change that. The high priests of gw can't even predict next month's weather accurately let alone 10 years in advance. We certainly do never learn from history as people refuse to even look at the total failures of past predictions. Somehow I think the models used to predict the election on the weekend are similar to models used for future predictions of climate. Pathetically flawed!

Dear Loudmouth,

Mate you really are ignorant on this stuff aren't you.

India puts Australia to bloody shame.

"India is one of the countries with the largest production of energy from renewable sources. In the electricity sector, renewable energy account for 34.6% of the total installed power capacity. Large hydro installed capacity was 45.399 GW as of 31 March 2019, contributing to 13% of the total power capacity.[1] The remaining renewable energy sources accounted for 22% of the total installed power capacity (77.641 GW) as of 31 March 2019."

"Wind power capacity was 36,625 MW as of 31 March 2019, making India the fourth-largest wind power producer in the world. The country has a strong manufacturing base in wind power with 20 manufactures of 53 different wind turbine models of international quality up to 3 MW in size with exports to Europe, the United States and other countries.[3] Wind or Solar PV paired with four-hour battery storage systems is already cost competitive, without subsidy, as a source of dispatchable generation compared with new coal and new gas plants in India."
Wikipedia

Our renewables are well less than half of theirs as a percentage of energy production. We had some very bright minds come out of our universities and we could have been exporting solar and wind technology around the world. These people were not supported and instead had to go to other countries like India and China where they have driven high levels of renewable sector industries.

What a bunch of ideologically driven, coal industry financed, idiots we have in this country supported but the likes of you.

At least one billionaire has called them out.
http://www.afr.com/news/experts-back-mike-cannonbrookes-australia-can-be-clean-energy-superpower-20181102-h17fjn

I'm afraid I agree with former PM Bob Hawke and that we should embrace both nuclear power and taking other folk's nuclear waste and storing it here.

But not before we've very safely extracted the unspent energy still stored in it 98+%!

And transmit it where ever we want using graphene under our roads. The first consequence would be power price for domestic and industrial use alike, below a cent PKWH! Add in future maximised automation and no other nation will be able to hold a candle to our manufacturing and production capacity!

Rather than see the countryside dotted with solar farms and windmills. And given these (superconductor) highways replace the entirety of our high tension power distribution also double as an endless, recharge on the go, for our future electric vehicle fleet.

MSR thorium will also allow us to become the cancer cure capital of the world, with the lowest real taxes and with the most prosperous population. And the preferred place for all the high tech manufacturer of the world. As for financing it? We already have super funds over 2.5 trillion dollars and with that could easily lever 2 trillion more to work here for us!

Good managers Hasbeen?

Like those who used to run our foreign control banking sector? Well, I bet you used to think the sun shone out of their collective annus sphincters?
Alan B.

“Sadly, Labor and the Greens have failed to disclose to the public the cost, both in economic, and in environmental terms, of their utopian vision of a cleaner and greener Australia powered by variable renewable energy.”

That's because they don't know. If it's 'nice’ they want it. Someone else will pay. They are just like kids who want something that the adults know they can't afford.

Does anybody know what Labor's Climate Change policy is ?

One might well ask Morrison et al the same question and get the same answer.
David

I was apprehensive of a labor win, and greatly relieved on the result.
The community is so rotten that a majority voted to give perverts and their supporters the means to destroy the institution of marriage, so They are rotten enough to vote labor, but, fortunately, did not.

That is a very "Christian" attitude to take.
David

.

As a simple citizen, it makes sense to me to anticipate the phasing out of fossil fuels and the diversification of our energy sources.

I understand that our existing electricity grid spans over 5,000 kilometers and is one of the largest interconnected power systems in the world. That is a given which, for obvious reasons, should probably be largely preserved.

However, the existing power stations are usually located near energy sources such as coal mines, natural gas production plants, or hydro-electric plants – much of which would probably not be preserved in the new configuration. The new power sources may require relocation of production.

Strategic planning should take into account this and many other factors relating, not only to the means of generating electricity, but also whether we want a centralised or decentralised system for political, economic, security and environmental reasons.

If we want to preserve reasonably good living conditions, it seems we don't have much choice but to favour renewable energy in the long term, probably complemented and completed by small to medium nuclear power reactors in a largely decentralised network.

Alain B’s suggestion of thorium-based (instead of uranium-based) nuclear power reactors is worth investigating. I understand they are still in the development stage at present and, like everything else, have advantages and disadvantages. Provided the disadvantages are not prohibitive, thorium would seem to be a more viable long-term solution than uranium.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are 4.2 million deaths every year as a result of exposure to ambient (outdoor) air pollution. Land, air and sea motorised vehicles running on fossil fuels are major polluters. They also produce greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming.

There’s no simple solution to the problem, no easy substitute for fossil fuels. According to the experts, large scale production and disposal of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles would also pose a major pollution problem as would all other known alternative fuels.

I guess we’ll just have to manage the problem as best we can, adapting our lifestyles and developing new, improved and more efficient technology.

.

Banjo. A couple of your points deserve comment/clarification.
Your suggestion about nuclear power is useful, except that the stations will probably need to be quite large. Also, researchers have been trying to produce useful amounts of energy from thorium since the 1960s. In theory it is a simple process, just add U233 to Thorium and away it goes, but the actual physical problems have so far been difficult. With regard to electric cars, I suspect that shortly, they will be run on electricity derived from Hydrogen via very efficient fuel cells. At the moment, both Hyundai and Toyota both have a car running in Australia. There are also some private individuals working in this area too It takes 41.4 KwHours to produce 1 kg of H2. That is probably a bit too much for a home solar system to support a daily commute.
David

One might well ask Morrison et al the same question and get the same answer.
VK3AUU,
If you're referring to my post then where did Morrison spruik to no end about Climate Change targets like Shorten did.
So, your reply is in fact utterly pointless.

He might not have spruiked about then during the election campaign, but the governments practical solutions are also as useful as the tits on a bull.
David

but the governments practical solutions are also as useful as the tits on a bull.
VK3AUU,
So, what'd be your idea of a practical solution ?

Individual.
Easy. Build a couple of nuclear power stations at Hazelwood and another couple at Liddell and one in Queensland. And we had better stsrt on them now before the old coal fired power stations are closed down. We have already lost Hazelwood and Liddell is due to go in 2022.
David

VK3AUU,
I'm not against nuclear power but I'm against having them too close to inhabited area just in case.
As I'm a total ignoramus re nuke power, I was wondering what the viability would be of several small stations rather than just a few big ones. Would there be any advantage from a safety point of view ? Sort of like having nuclear powered Navy ships but on land.
Some posters here appear to be qualified to comment on that suggestion.
I'd like to think that a mishap in a small plant would be less of a problem than in a huge one.
Is the cooling water from a Nuke power station radioactive & how much water would be constantly required ? Could a Bradfied scheme cope with the amount needed ?

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/how-an-oak-ridge-lab-group-hopes-to-extend-the-lives-of-aging-nuclear-reactors/?fbclid=IwAR2qNwJncaHtDFZMrAyQzhCihTB9pCAHlpY3yHb4wcpXW3BuljYM2Lp9ySE
Individual
There are a few more links on this page which you might find interesting.
David

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country

VK3AUU,
I'm checking on what these countries' environmental records are now. For time being, have a look at this list.

the top 20 countries with the smartest high school kids.
Switzerland. ...
Estonia. Average Score: 531. ...
Finland. Average Score: 532.1. ...
Chinese Taiwan. Average Score: 541.6. ...
Japan. AverageeckiScore: 541.6. ...
Korea. Average Score: 545.8. ...
Hong Kong – China. Average Score: 558.1. ...
Singapore. Average Score: 562.5.

https://wriorg.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/uploads/WRI15_BRO_Country-Action-v8.pdf?_ga=2.119177673.1925323424.1558820580-2137857249.1558820580

Countries with climate change targets. I suppose we'll need to wait 25 years to see if they work.

It is all very well setting targets. Neither the Libs, Labor or Greens have got a clue as to what will actually be needed to meet any target that they might pull out of a hat.
Meanwhile I am keeping my 2KVA generator fueled up for those hot summer days when the grid goes down.
David.

My mother is dying, although she is not what we would consider old. She's been in decline for years but has not told us in the hope that she'd recover through "thoughts and prayers" and perhaps never need to sadden us with the news. On Sunday, my brother and I find out over lunch, and rush her to the emergency admissions desk at the nearest hospital. After the usual preliminary tests and a chat with a sympathetic doctor, we find out that she can be taken to the operating theatre tomorrow morning to try and remove the malignant growths inside her, or we can buy some painkillers from the pharmacy, go home and take two tablets after meals. The painkillers cost $17.40 but the doctor can't put a cost on the operation. She won't know the extent of the damage until she operates with other experts at her side, but the minimum cost will be in the tens of thousands of dollars. My brother - his name's Tristan too - is worried about the cost of the operation, and feels more comfortable with the pharmaceutical option. I disagree and feel we should act now, even if it means having to sell our home or take up extra part-time jobs.

I disagree and feel we should act now, even if it means having to sell our home or take up extra part-time jobs.
MSCAU,
I'm certain she wouldn't want you to sacrifice all that for a definite maybe for her recovery.

Something to watch on storage in California, which says it's going 100% renewables if you count hydro http://tinyurl.com/y3rmgvw6