Quite a few arguable assertions here. I agree that carbon credits will continue to be a rort helped by the recent snow job enquiry. The point has been made that gas as a 'transition' fuel has risen in market price far more than any carbon tax would have. Yet coal plants will steadily close because some think we won't need as much gas in future. Recent trends confirm we still need plenty of gas to balance erratic wind and solar and that is unlikely to reduce much. Therefore even without carbon taxes we're shooting ourselves in the foot as far as the cost of electricity is concerned.

I fear the aluminium smelters at Tomago and Portland will be unviable when NSW and Vic close their last coal generators. Even if small nuclear arrives it will be more expensive than coal in recent years. Carbon tariffs on imports from China could help but ultimately all energy is going to cost more. Administrative carbon pricing has missed the bus.

When UN climate policy took centre stage 30 years ago, world population was only 5b. Now it is 8b. Emissions have gone up apace. Quelle surprise!

The whole mess of carbon taxes/credits/offsets, and UN "net zero", is just another proxy for endless growth and human war on the environment.

Germany's grand $45b program for exiting coal by 2038 turned on a dime, once the war threatened their Russian gas supplies. Down Under, Albanese's "43%" emissions reduction is taken seriously. Despite his radical population growth program, heavy fossil fuel reliance, and total reluctance to do anything about logging and land clearing.

With all this, it's disheartening that respected academic Ian Chubb would sign up to give Bowen a whitewash of our dodgy "carbon credits". That's putting ideology first and science second

Not only are such Taxes useless, they're also morally wrong ! We need to demand from our rather well-paid 'Researchers" to work for normal wages until such time that they actually make a useful & viable breakthrough. Way too much money goes to people who literally never warrant the funding spent by them. If a solution is found then yes, reward those instrumental in finding the solution.
Just look at Green technology which is more polluting in its manufacture than it saves in service.
This idiotic hype needs to stop receiving so much taxpayer funding.
The bureaudroids approving such funding need to be made accountable. Elite travel & literally anything associated with their doings is nothing short of hypocritical & criminally irresponsible.
If activities requiring fossil fuel were to be curbed to necessity level there wouldn't be any need for Green technology in the first place.

Agree with most of this, Graham. Except where you say coking coal can't be replaced in steel production. Other sources of replacement carbon including, bailed plastic waste and probably waste tires given the carbon black in rubber.

We confront a future where carbon tariffs will become a trade tool that could be used against us. As for our local emissions we can absorb all we currently create by universally practising regenerative farming practise. A practise which helps drought proof farms and improve most bottom lines.

And that's only the start, other things include using biodegradable plastics as ground cover to control both weeds and evaporation. The hilled land is so covered, and the crop planted through it in the gutters. This means when frosts come the land is warmer with retained heat and the frost melt to also become dew and mists that trickles into the gutters to help with soil moisture retention.

The there's desalination and if done as deionisation dialysis desalination, produce four times the volume for quarter of the cost! And cost effective in broad scale agriculture.

Pumping costs reduced to near zero by employing MSR nuclear waste burners burning ready to use fuel we are paid annual millions to take. Other sane options include MSR thorium and the quite massive medical tourism that would create through the spinoff production of miracle cancer cure, Bismuth 213! Waste burners could bring the cost of power down to as low as 1cent PKWH and MSR thorium to just 3 cents PKW.

One does not need to be Einstein to understand the huge economic upside that would create here for us.

As for our coal, our current export markets demand all we can mine and then some. If we have some left over when the world comes to its senses, there are a number of chemical processes that still need some coal and will likely do so until the turn of the century!
Alan B.

Not actually useless Graham.

They supply a nice boost in funds for ratbag spendthrift lefty governments, so they can subsidise more grid destroying windmills for their mates.

Nuclear power no longer more expensive than coal given current coal/gas prices. But that's only conventional nuclear power/massive power plants that take as long as 30 years to build/cost billions. Burn enriched fuel that is as rare as platinum, as expensive.

Operate at pressures as high as 300 atmospheres to keep super-heated water as a liquid. The enriched fuel is made into small ceramic pellets then loaded into hollow metal rods that are controlled with electromagnets. Power failure for any reason and electromagnets are just large chunks of useless metal. As are coolant pumps. (Fukushima!)

Something as small as a tiny hairline crack in the metal can result in the water flashing immediately to super-heated steam which instantly decomposes to its constituent parts, oxygen and hydrogen as a white-hot explosive mixture, (Chernobyl!)

The central rods taken out and shifted to the outer perimeter every 18 or so months. All rods replaced every 4.5 years with still as much as 90-95% energy quotient retained.

MSR reactors are walk away safe and if adequately shielded produce no more than normal background radiation. Moreover, the operate unpressurized at ambient atmospheric pressure, cannot melt down as they are already molten and designed to operate that way.

MSR thorium delivers all that fusion promises in a fusion powered future, today! And can be manufactured in a facility that could turn out a finished ready to operate, product each week. At a cost per unit roughly equivalent to a very large diesel engine.

All the claimed bugs, corrosion, tritium production have been ironed out along with all the, too long too expensive, excuses for not acting. Waste produced by MSR thorium is as little as 5-10% and even then, eminently suitable as long-life space batteries.

Power failure for any reason in MSR thorium or MSR NBR, the medium automatically drains into purpose-built tanks that separate the medium, so no critical mass is possible, the liquid allowed to cool naturally to a safe solid. That is why they are walk away safe.
Alan B.

NBR should read, NWBR nuclear waste burner.
Alan.

Why pay a tax when you can simply reduce operations by 4.9% a year?

Let the Carbonites rack their brains as they face increasing shortages of your product!

Have a look at the israeli-built AQUARIUS engine ! That technology is already here, it's the mindset of people that is left in its wake !
It'd be interesting to what the Palestinians come up with.

Alan,

Steelmaking needs a pure form of carbon, waste plastic etc needs a lot of treatment before it can be used and considering the amount required this could double the cost of steel.

Also, note wind generators built in 2000-2003 are being scrapped and sent to landfill and the 200t of concrete used to support them is being left in place.

This is a rather stupid article, as there are many technological breakthroughs. We could always do with more, of course, and the government should help a lot by increasing science funding. But carbon taxes will increase the incentive to take advantage of technological breakthroughs.

Aidan,

What breakthroughs? The only financially viable means of generating renewable power are:

Hydro,
Solar,
Wind,
Biomass,
Geothermal,

All of which have been around for decades.

Solar & wind are free but the equipment is expensive & highly polluting to produce.

Shadow,
>What breakthroughs?
The ones that make the means of generating renewable power more economic to build and more efficient to operate!
And of course it's not just generation but also storage. Battery technology has improved substantially and is continuing to do so. Likewise electrolysers for hydrogen production.

Then there are new ways of making steel. Electric arc furnaces, use of hydrogen to produce sponge iron, and (though it's got a long way to go before it's commercialised) molten oxide electrolysis.

Though metal refineries need to operate continuously, they don't need to operate at constant output. Instead they can pause their operations (but keep the metal hot) when they electricity is expensive, and do more when it's cheap.

And of course metallurgy isn't the only industry where these kinds of breakthroughs are occurring. There aren't many industries that won't be able to take advantage of cheap electricity and hydrogen.

Aidan,

These are not breakthroughs they are systems that have been known for years but are not even close to being economically viable.

As for slowing production to moderate electricity consumption, the problem is that most of the costs are there irrespective of your production rate.

Shadow,
IWTF do you think" technological breakthrough" means? Did you confuse them with scientific breakthroughs?

And the only one of them not even close to being economically viable is molten oxide electrolysis. But even there it's a matter of when not if. The more is invested in R&D, the faster it will become viable.

>the problem is that most of the costs are there irrespective of your production rate.
That depends on what you're doing. Where energy costs dominate, the statement is false. Where staffing costs dominate, the statement is true. Where equipment costs dominate, it depends on interest rates.

Aiden,

I do know what a "breakthrough" is and it is not simply doing the same thing slightly better or cheaper. Solar panels are cheaper but the greater cost of installing them and connecting them to the network hasn't.

Similarly, wind turbines have become cheaper per unit of power, but being rotating equipment installed at a height they still have a limited lifespan and massive decommissioning costs as well as safety issues. That they need power networks designed for their full capacity while on average they deliver 30% makes their distribution costs vastly higher.

Both of these are unreliable and need nearly 100% backup supply from reliable and dispatchable supplies such as fossil fuels, hydro or the vastly expensive batteries.

Shadow,
A technological breakthrough is the implementation of an idea that results in doing the same thing slightly better or cheaper. For instance giving wind turbine blades an internal truss structure makes them stronger, and this is one of the developments which has enabled them to be bigger.

And yes, there are occasionally bigger technological breakthroughs that enable completely new things to be done, but the small breakthroughs together are far more important than the big ones.

>Solar panels are cheaper but the greater cost of installing them and connecting them to the network hasn't
AIUI it has, though not to such great an extent. And they've also got more efficient.

>That [wind turbines] need power networks designed for their full capacity while on
>average they deliver 30% makes their distribution costs vastly higher.
Higher than they otherwise would be, but fossil fuel capacity factor is also often low.

>Both of these are unreliable
No they're not. Coal fired power stations break down far more often, with more severe consequences.

>and need nearly 100% backup supply from reliable and dispatchable supplies
Nowhere near 100%, as solar and wind are quite strongly anticorrelated.

>such as fossil fuels, hydro or the vastly expensive batteries.
And technological breakthroughs are making batteries much cheaper.
There's also the possibility of demand management.

Aidan,

Apparent the dictionaries and I differ significantly with you on the meaning of breakthrough.

Incremental improvements and mass production have reduced the unit cost and efficiency of solar panels and wind turbines. What they haven't done is reduce the cost of distribution networks required, the short lifespan of wind turbines or the inability to guarantee generation at any point in time.

For example, any wind turbine built prior to 2023 has either been scrapped or is about to be. Germany's fleet of wind turbines and solar panels has for a week or two generated 100% of the country's requirements but has also for a week or two generated next to zero power. The only reason its network hasn't collapsed is the ability to import power from France's nuclear reactors and Germany's fleet of coal and gas power stations.

I suppose that Aiden is going to invest family and friends money in his pie in the sky energy ideas. Good luck in his venture- probably won't have many friends soon. It's hard to argue with success or failure.

Shadow,
I think it's more a case of you misinterpreting what dictionaries say than my disagreeing with them.

>ncremental improvements and mass production have reduced the unit cost and
>efficiency of solar panels and wind turbines. What they haven't done is reduce the
>cost of distribution networks required,
They have for HVDC, even if they haven't for AC.

>the short lifespan of wind turbines
They've tended to prioritise capability over longevity, but you seem to be greatly underestimated their lifespans. Though I can't be sure how short you think they are, as 2023 is quite obviously a typo!

>or the inability to guarantee generation at any point in time.
But they can achieve an equivalent outcome with storage.

>Germany's fleet of wind turbines and solar panels has for a week or two generated
>100% of the country's requirements but has also for a week or two generated next to
>zero power
What is your source for that claim?

>The only reason its network hasn't collapsed is the ability to import power from
>France's nuclear reactors and Germany's fleet of coal and gas power stations.
Why single out France when Germany trades electricity with all its neighbours?

_________________________________________________________________________

Canem,
I'm not investing anyone's money and not planning to. I'm a transport engineer, not an electrical or power systems engineer. But being an engineer I do keep abreast of developments, so while the feeble minded on this board dismiss the last decade's developments as pie in the sky, I'm more aware of what's already practical and many of the things which will soon become practical.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Disadvantages

Aiden- With respect and without going into details there are a few people on this forum that have significant engineering knowledge- in many cases more than myself- and try to stay abreast of technological developments. The fact that you know what a truss and the forces on it means that you've studied "Statics". When investigating electrical networks- network analysis tools are useful. My understanding of HV 2 and 3 phase power is a bit spotty but the above Wiki article is fairly informative. At least I know what transformers and rectifiers are. In mechanical systems linkages seem understandable to me- but in electrical systems linkages seem to have complex feedback effects- HVDC and UHVDC seem interesting but seem to only apply over distances greater than one thousand kilometres- it's only recently in Australia that electricity has been exchanged between states.

It's a bit hard to know what your level of skill is- and I don't care. To sell an expensive and unknown product to the public requires convincing information and percentage significant benefits to offset the various risks- sometimes these risks can be absorbed into the supply chain. Renewable technology is relatively new and while there are opportunities there are also risks- and some technology doesn't scale well- in a sense no one knows what will work and what won't work until a project has been done.

Large scale engineering projects require teams of engineers each with specialist expertise.

Despite your claims I am not confident in renewable technology in the scenarios you are proposing and will not be relying on it if I have a choice- though I may make incremental changes- and so should the state infrastructure.

One of my concerns is that tracking technology improvements with population increases and political pressure seems to indicate accelerating shortfalls and crisis similar to those described by Malthuse

I remember the VFT Train Eastern Corridor Project where all sorts of tactics were attempted to justify the project but it still hasn't been done.

Similarly if we need to take a leap of faith from our current system to renewables in order for the economics to work- it makes me concerned.

Once in a while project contractors come out of the woodwork to promote some construction- but I'm not always convinced that the public is getting value for money.

Aidan,

Yes, it was a typo. Typically, the lifespan of wind turbines is about 20 years, meaning those installed before 2003 have either been decommissioned or will be soon.

HVDC is 40 years old and is not as cheap as you think.

http://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE

This will show German generation by source over the last decades. You can clearly see periods of zero wind/solar generation.

As Germany's neighbours being so close also share similar weather, when Germany's renewables sag so do theirs and the only country with decent baseload is France. But yes they all do trade.

And while you are a transport engineer, I am an electrical / power systems engineer.

I get the impression that windmills need a similar maintainence schedule to aircraft due to the stresses in the airframe.