Which brings us back to the real solution which is nuclear http://www.theage.com.au/national/union-boss-calls-for-nuclear-energy-20090818-ep4b.html

But if one's attitudes are rooted in times past then people of present (and future) suffer.

Pete

Politicians do not care about anything but the grand gesture. The present crop will all be gone long before any of this fluff looks even remotely like coming to fruition. Now talk about their pensions and perks and watch them all jump up and down, even the Greens. Our politics is certainly based on the absurd and unsustainable Public Service Pensions.
Follow Paul Keating's lead and put an assets test on ALL public pensions. You have lots of money you do not need any of our hard earned coin. Also you have to make the tax on ALL fringe benefits payable by the recipient.
This is an excellent piece showing the stupidity of politicians why not give them something else to consider, like right now!

Thanks for this Martin.

It highlights the point about politicians not being good at the long term solution.

Secondly, it is a little bit disappointing that the television and print media have not asked the simple question "If you are proposing X, then how do you plan to get it done." The Greens propose 30%. How will they get it done? The Rudd government proposes 20%. How will they get it done? The Rudd goverment is even boosting immigration making it even harder to hit these targets because we will need more and more power for the rapidly increasing population. Rudd believes that high immigration boosts his re-election chances and that is much more important than Australia's future.

The lack of follow-up on the "magical solutions" and "grand gestures" is highlighted well in this article, but it is common in almost any political situation. Somebody escapes from gaol and the shadow minister is on TV in a flash saying that the pertinent government minister should resign. The TV interviewer never asks him "So if you were in power how would you prevent this from happening. Do you plan to stand guard at each prison yourself? Would you increase the budget for prisons and if so, would you then increase taxes or take money from schools and hospitals." You don't have to have any solutions or ways of getting the grand gesture done. You just have to stand up and talk and everybody nods their head and says "Oh, yes, good idea." TV and newspapers have really dropped the ball on this.

Setting these policies and making them work isn't easy. It is really hard. The public needs to be aware of that and the government needs to let the public know that there is not a glib answer for every problem.

The author of the article is quite right to say that large amounts of renewable energy may destabilise any grid the energy supplies, so typically it has to be backed up by conventional power sources. This happens with the German power company E.On Netz GmbH, which has substantial amounts of wind power on its grid. Whenever the wind stations are contributing energy, the company typically has the equivalent of 80 per cent worth of that energy in conventional power stations still operating but off the grid. In other words, when wind towers are operating the emissions they offset are typically only 20 per cent of whatever they are producing.
In other words, if the energy retailers are forced to buy 20 per cent of electricity from renewable sources, this won't avoid 20 per cent of emissions, it will avoid just 4 per cent. For various reasons the actual result may be much less than that.
When this problem is pointed out, the Greens usually refer to how wind forecasting systems or smart networks, or how spreading the wind towaers around Australia will reduce the problem of backup generation. It will? What studies have been done? How successful are these wind forecasting systems? Will a wind tower in Queensland be able to substitute for a wind tower in SA when the wind in SA dies? Answer: nope, but basically not a scrap of work has been done on any of these problems in the Australian setting, and they certainly haven't been solved in Europe.
The renewables policy is activist-driven madness and the sooner it is abandoned the better everyone will be.

And politicians wonder why we don't trust them! If they stopped talking nonsense that would help.

But the sinister side to these 'magical' solutions is that they empower governments and their agents to take draconian measures against people who are simply behaving rationally. Like the 'magical' anti-terrorist policies which resulted in the Haneef case, these will result in bizarre politically-motivated stunts which cause pain and distress to ordinary people going about their daily lives. Many efficient and reasonable business operators and researchers will suffer as a result of these absurd targets; and the Rudd government will be out of power long before the inevitable backfire.

Magical solutions are a tax on common sense.

Two months ago, this article would have attracted a horde of posts denigrating the author. Today the whole of Australia seems to have taken a deep breath and stepped back a couple of paces.

The wish bone is never going to replace the backbone, and the engineers with ther practical slant on things are having their say. This is reality and the lawyers, Penny Wong, Peter Garrett and Malcolm Turnbull have just got their dreams brought back to earth.

Good article and the reality of inertia versus the imagined magical properties of legislation, seems to have hit home. Merlin may have been a magician, but that was 1400 years ago. You may say the tsunami of uninformed public opinion has dashed its hopes on the reality of a very rocky shore

I agree with Peter. I expected to get more criticism for this article than I have received so far. Perhaps it is still to come.

In response to Curmudgeon's point about wind power, The Greens haven't yet caught up with the US wind industry's view of their own place in the world. In a DOE report titled "20% Wind Energy by 2030" put out last year and formally assessed by the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) they state the following:

"Wind is an energy resource, not a capacity resource. Capacity resources are those that can be available on demand, particularly to meet system peak loads. Because only a fraction of total wind capacity has a high probability of running consistently, wind generators have limited capacity value."

and

"It is not appropriate to think in terms of “backing up” the wind because the wind capacity was installed to generate, low-emissions energy, but not to meet load growth requirements. Wind power cannot replace the need for many “capacity resources,” which are generators and dispatchable load that are available to be used when needed to meet peak load. If wind has some capacity value for reliability planning purposes, that should be viewed as a bonus, but not a necessity."

Breathtaking stuff for all those wind advocates who have worked so hard to prove that wind power can compare to conventional generators.

All of which says don't expect to decommission any coal, gas or nuclear plants to any great degree from installing lots of wind power.

mythical problems require magical solutions.

Escellent article which makes you think hard about the complexity of the issue.

The problem of myth is bigger than you think and in my view the problem is that we no longer have frank honest inquiring journos vetting our Govt .

The press is overwhelmed with extreme left journos so smitten with Rudd that truth and realism means agnosticism .

ShazBaz001,

I have to agree with examinator's general perspective on this one. Issue not about left or right. My own view is we do need to do something about environment. Strength of this article is that it provides real evidence to show why some of the grand ideas are problematic.

Chris Lewis

So the publics distorted view matters not .

I am not rooting for Turnbull , I am questioning the Independence and Integrity of our free(?) Press .

ShazBaz001,

Meant to say that the left needs to cite evidence based on reality to support its case, much in the same way that this article uses evidence to question sources of renewable energy.

Martin, the glaring absence of consideration of the costs and consequences of failure to limit emissions is at the heart of what's wrong with your arguments; you don't appear to consider consequences to be that damaging or even very likely. That's not what science tells us.
Conversion to clean energy only if clean is cheaper than dirty is policy designed to fail. It's imperative we don't fail. Besides, anyone who thinks of natural gas as a potential solution can't be looking past Stage One of keeping overall warming under 1C or 2C - it would see us stuck with new gas plants when Stage Two emissions targets will be required.
Meanwhile the attempt to blame Greens for the failure of mainstream politics is unwarranted; make no mistake, it's mainstream politics that's given us fluff and greenwash. I think they'll end up vilified by future generations for the willfully ignoring scientific advice on this. Perhaps the Greens will be vilified for their anti nuclear stance but let's see mass takup of new gen nuclear around the world before we say no to renewables.

Martin,

I am of the opinion that neither the federal government nor the state governments are capable of meeting this challenge.

We need electricity, we need a reliable supply at a sensible price. What we do not need is an industry owned in part by overseas corporations that have no interest in Australia other than it is a place to generate a profit.

If say the local city or joint ventures between smaller municipalities owned the electricity supply and distribution systems the answers might come from other vested interests, this time the people.

At least then we would be acting locally. And there is much more to this argument than which technology should supply. We are on the verge of the "smart" and coupled with that we have made so little effort to curtail our waste of energy. Of course not, the corporations do not want us to.

Martin,

You are correct when you say there is no "magical solution". However, like all systems our system of power generation can change over time. It can change to favour non polluting forms of energy. This can be done with no extra cost to the community and in fact with a reduction in energy costs.

This method is to bias the cost of money for the construction of new power generating facilities that do not burn fossil fuels compared to the cost of money to build new fossil burning power plants.

If the cost of money (both in terms of lower interest) and in terms of repayment schedules is lowered energy from nuclear, solar thermal, geothermal, all today become cheaper than energy from existing fossil burning power stations.

This bias will rapidly make it not only profitable to increase power generation from non polluting sources but will make existing power sources less profitable with the likelihood of their rapid closure as the price of oil, gas and coal increases.

Reducing the cost of money for such investments will result in a reduction in pressure on existing asset prices and so the "cost" to the community will come in a reduction in the rate of increase of prices of existing assets - like houses. In other words the new investment will be paid for by a reduction in future asset values of existing investments.

Martin, Professor David Mackay of Cambridge University, in his book Sustainable Energy – Without Hot Air ( www.withouthotair) estimates total sustainable energy production of theoretical or practical renewable resources in the UK at 18 kWh per day per person against a base demand of 125 kWh per day p.p.

Tide: 3 kWh/d
Offshore: 4 kWh/d
Hydro: 0.3 kWh/d
Biomass: 4 kWh/d
Solar PV: 2 kWh/d
Solar HW: 2 kWh/d
Wind: 3 kWh/d

His analysis is supported by the Institute of Electrical Engineers, the Tyndall Centre, the Interdepartmental Analysts Group, the Performance and Innovation Unit; and the proposals from the Centre for Alternative Technology’s plan.

Granted that this is for the UK but I can’t imagine Australia bettering their potential for sustainable alternative energy contributions, yet we are proposing 20% or even 30% MRET’s. Surely it’s time someone publicly voiced the stupidity of such targets.

Good article, thanks

Spindoc I think you would find there are those that would disagree with you about your comparison between the UK and Australia about the potential for renewable energy. Particularly for solar power as the whole of the UK is further away from the equator than anywhere in Australia.

Having said that, I am yet to find an engineer who is confident about us achieving 20% renewable energy by 2020 for electricity generation.

I am trying to voice my concerns by writing articles like this one but often the press also believe the magical solutions before reasoned argument.

Martin,

I'll add another disturbing comment relating in part to the media and to MacKay's excellent book.

I was nuisance called by a PV system sales person yesterday after waffling on about the "ecosystem" and how much I was going to do to help if I invested in his company's product. I asked him how much electricity his proposed 0.9kW array was going produce every day. I asked him guess. I also mentioned that the normal daily demand is around 20kWh and more (mine is 5). He had no idea whatsoever what I was talking about.

This is all quite simple boys and girls. The politicians want more of our money so they need a new tax and have worked out that air (Carbon tax) and Water (Increased water pricing as its a government monopoly) will do the trick.
We need to hack into them at every opportunity keep harping on about fringe benefits tax being charged to the recipient which means Public servants and politicians and ex politicians. Also means test all government pensions for the same people and see how they like that!

There’s one thing we can’t do and that’s to keep on expecting the planet’s to increase its capacity to provide non renewable resources and process an increasing quantity of pollutant. We also are exploiting vital renewable resources beyond the ability of nature to replenish. The result of the present economical system will be catastrophic and could end life on earth according to James Hanson.
I’m afraid, Martin Nicholson’ article is back to front, therefore its worst than useless.