On the NEG — Turnbull, Frydenberg: Who is running this country? You or Andrew Vesey?

End the taboo: The obvious solution to our expensive unreliable electricity is to fix old coal plants

The proposed NEG (National Energy Guarantee) will cut a pathetic sliver off our obscene bills. Malcolm Turnbull thinks Australians will be grateful for $100 off. We pay $3,700 a year for an average 4 bed house (and it’s heated with gas)? Are they kidding?

No one is even discussing the most obvious, cheap way to cut our electricity bills. Fix the old coal plants. As Ian Waters, engineer, says “Enlightened, motivated people can do it!” Just getting Liddell back up to full power would deliver another 800MW of cheap, despatchable, and reliable power. Wouldn’t that be “handy”?

All the talk of new coal ignores the cheapest source of electricity around the nation. Our star infrastructure, gift of the older generation to the younger, are our old coal power stations, paid off over decades and still powering the nation.

Ian Waters, describes below how the NEG serves the big retailers not the consumers, and it’s in their interest to run old coal plants into the dust. (Our electricity market is so screwed thanks to the […]

Turnbull to consider new Coal power in Australia (ten years too late)

Last week only fringe loonies who were clinging to a dead technology were calling for a coal revival (mock mock mock). But now that the ACCC has spent months investigating and 400 pages reporting, they discovered that Tony Abbott and Craig Kelly and the Monash group were, hey, all right all along.

This is Turnbulls get-out-of-jail card, if he used it as an excuse to be sensible. He has in the past taken those cards and set fire to them. In a best case, he might, with arm twisted in a one-spare-seat-government, “build new coal” sometime in the far distant future, but whatever he does he won’t do anything other than minor hand waving about the Crony Green-Theft runaway train profits.

Turnbull weighs coal fix for energy wars

Simon Benson and Ben Packham, The Australian

A proposal for the federal government to financially guarantee the construction and operation of new dispatchable power generation, which could include clean coal-fired plants, is expected to be taken to cabinet with the backing of the Prime Minister.

Malcolm Turnbull yesterday confirmed he would seriously consider the key recommendation of a report by the competition watchdog to underwrite and […]

Coal, a dying industry, just became Australia’s number one export (again)

Coal is a dying industry, but luckily for the Australian economy, the rest of the world is not as smart as The Australian Greens and Labor Party and they are still buying it.

Coal is set to regain its spot as the nation’s biggest export earner amid higher prices and surging demand from Asia, sparking fresh calls from the Turnbull government for Labor to end its “war on coal”.

The Department of Industry, Innovation and Science figures show total coal exports are forecast to reach $58.1 billion in 2018-19, overtaking iron ore ($57.7bn) for the first time in ­almost a decade.

We’ve only got 300 years of these kind of coal profits to go.

The big question, do we open up more coal mines now and rake in the dough, or try to make the weather nicer in one thousand years time? Tricky…

Resources Minister Matthew Canavan said new export forecasts strengthened the investment case for Adani’s proposed $16.5 billion Carmichael coalmine and the development of Queensland’s Galilee Basin, which federal Labor has opposed. “Opening up the Galilee would generate 16,000 direct mining jobs and tens of billions in taxes.”

What do Australia’s big […]

Renewables Fail: fossil fuels, coal, same dominance of our energy mix as 20 years ago

Despite 20 years of non-stop propaganda and belligerent namecalling, strangely, expert green policies have achieved exactly nothing of what they said they aimed for. Coal provided 38% of our power in 1998 and it is still the same 38% in 2017. The non-fossil fuel sector has actually declined slightly as nukes decrease.

We spent billions doing exactly what was asked. Perhaps following the advice of people who think the debate is over and “denier” is a scientific term might not be the best national energy policy?

Fuel shares in global power generation for the last 20 years | BP Energy Review, 2018.

Long-term dominance of fossil fuels unchallenged

Graham Lloyd, The Australian

Global demand for coal and gas to generate electricity was back on the rise last year …

Most striking had been the failure of renewable energy to make an impact on the fossil fuels share of power generation, BP group chief economist Spencer Dale said.

“Despite the extraordinary (global) growth in renewables in recent years, and the huge policy efforts to encourage a shift away from coal into cleaner, lower carbon fuels, there has been almost no improvement in […]

Energy Crisis: NSW can’t keep coal plants, or aluminium smelters running, prices hit $14,000MW/hr

It’s not even summer.

NSW has been hit by clouds and a lack of reliable coal power. Prices are soaring. In NSW the Tomago Aluminium Smelter consumes about 10% of the state’s electricity. It has been forced to switch off three times in the last week because there was not enough reserve power on the grid.

The boss of Tomago, Mr Howell, said Australia is “at a crisis point with our energy system”.

“This is not summer with extreme demand. This is the likely future of our energy grid as once reliable baseload generators exit the [NEM] and are mostly replaced with intermittent wind and solar projects with no practical storage to speak of,” Mr Howell said. “Our energy debate should not advocate either renewables or conventional thermal,” he said.

— SMH, Peter Hannam,

Aluminum pot lines can only sit idle for a few hours before they cool too far and the damage becomes permanent and wildly expensive as the aluminum becomes solid.

Renewables-fans blame the emergency on the unreliability of coal

See @TheAustraliaInstitute. Suddenly Australia is the only western nation on Earth with coal resources that can’t […]

Global Patsy Australia — largest coal exporter in world — still has 300 years of coal left

Australia must surely be The Global Patsy Is any country acting so decisively against its own interests?

Last chance to book for the Friedman conference! I’ll be speaking with Ian Plimer next weekend. It’s a great line up of speakers on May 25-27, or come for the Gala dinner. Get a 10% discount with the code Nova18. Bookings close this Sunday.

We, the Global Crash Test Dummies of Renewable Energy, have the fourth largest known reserves of coal in the world. We have so much coal we can keep digging it up at the current rate for the next 294 years (assuming we don’t discover more, which we will)1. If we didn’t export three quarters of our coal, but used it all ourselves, it could power Australia for the next 1,000 years. (But we’d miss the money– better to sell the stuff before nukes make it worthless).

We have so much more coal than we need, most years we are the world’s largest exporter of coal.[2] Indeed, Australia contributes fully one third of the entire global coal export trade. (Three other countries, China, India and the US — dig up more than we do, but they use it themselves.)

[…]

Burn coal not wood if you care about the climate

Go Coal. Wood-fired electricity produces *more* CO2 for the next hundred years…

h/t NoTricksZone

Any day now the giant tree-eating-machine called Drax will be shifting back to coal as Greens and politicians realize they’ve made a planet killing mistake. Lordy! At the moment, Drax is supposed to be saving the world and making electricity for the UK by burning trees cut down and shipped from the US.

This temple to carbon neutrality happens to be the largest plant in the UK . It generates about 7% of all the megawatts used there. But a new study by Sterman et al, suggests the Drax plan is backfiring badly.

When is carbon neutrality not neutral? When the carbon debt is not paid off in our lifetimes…

Burning forests instead of coal deposits raises CO2, and in so many ways: Wood is a less efficient fuel. Megawatt for megawatt, wood produces more CO2 than coal. In terms of efficiencies, the combustion efficiency of wood is 25% compared to coal at 35%. Processing losses to supply wood are around 27%, while losses to supply coal are 11%. (NEA 2011, IEA 2016, Roder 2015) This is the slow road to carbon neutrality. It takes […]

Gamechanger: Chinese Crypto Miners can get 8c cheap electricity in Australia using our coal power

Wow. Wait til word gets out. This is dynamite.

Chinese Bitcoin miners are reopening the Hunter Valley coal power station called Redbank in NSW. They have a deal that gets around our gargantuan, mismanaged grid by buying coal power direct for 8c/kWh, while Australians in the same place pay 28c/kWh.

This is exactly the nightmare the head of the Australian Energy Management Organisation (AEMO) spoke of just last week — that “big players could abandon the grid”. That’s a degenerate spiral leaving a shrinking pool of suckers to pay for the inefficient, bird-killing, blackout prone, witchdoctor grid.

Bitcoin mining’s growing demand for cheap energy revived a shuttered coal mine

Ashat Rathi, Quartz

Consumers there pay, on average, $A0.28 ($0.22) per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for electricity. But Hunter Energy, which owns Redbank, are offering the crypto miners electricity at a fraction of the cost. The “first-of-its-kind” deal, as the Age puts it, will see the crypto miners pay only A$0.08 per kWh in the day and A$0.05 per kWh at night. Hunter Energy told the Age that the price is feasible because the electricity produced at the coal power plant would go straight to the crypto miners, bypassing—and […]

A not so dead stranded asset: India chooses more coal, cancels 57 nuclear plants.

Australia is so irrelevant. India is cancelling fifty times as many nuclear power plants as Australians ever dreamed of building.

Let’s build another million wind farms.

If we abandoned the country and talked our Kiwi and Canadian friends into moving to Mars with us, we could not make up the carbon credits this decision just vaporized.

Energy Post – thanks to GWPF.

The Financial Express, one of India’s major newspapers, reports that the Narendra Modi government, which had set an ambitious 63,000 MW nuclear power capacity addition target by the year 2031-32, has cut it to 22,480 MW, or by roughly two-thirds.

The drastic reduction in planned construction of new reactors will diminish India’s plans to rely on nuclear energy from 25% of electrical generation to about 8-10%. The balance of new power requirements will likely be met by use of India’s enormous coal deposits.

Please tell us again how coal is a stranded asset?

The country accounts for eight percent of world’s total coal consumption. About two-thirds of India’s electricity generation comes from coal.

India holds the fifth biggest coal reserves in the world. The country’s proved coal reserves are […]

In a fake free market 2000MW = 1000MW and Liddell coal is worth more destroyed than sold

The Australian Fake Free market is so screwed. What asset is worth more in the trash-can than sold to a willing bidder? AGL is the definition of Predatory Capitalism.

Everyone is talking about Liddell. The old coal plant is on the chopping block in 2022 and we can see the electricity price rise coming from here.

People in Australia are going without their veggies to pay for electricity. Liddell coal plant makes cheap electricity (like old coal plants everywhere). This is a problem that would solve itself if not for Malcolm Turnbull, the RET, and the AEMO. It takes a lot of money and whole fleets of bureaucrats to stop the free market fixing this by default.

AGL is the largest coal-fired producer in Australia, but it’s also the largest generator in toto and the largest investor in renewable energy on the Australian Stock Exchange. Spot the conflict of interest? The company controls 30% of the generation in our two largest states, and 40% in South Australia. The man in charge of AGL – Andy Vesey — formerly of New York, earns $6.9 million a year, and can probably afford to pay his own electricity bill. But as Tony Cox […]

Love those 30 year old coal and nuclear plants — nothing gives cheaper electricity

The gold-plated stars of our national grid are the old coal plants we’ve built and paid off.

A US report (thanks Lance) shows how fantastically cheap and bountiful old coal and nuclear plants are. The LCOE or the Levelized Cost of Electricity includes the costs of the concrete, turbines, car parks and coal, plus the maintenance and salaries. It reveals that thirty year old, and even fifty year old coal plants, are the gift from past generations — enormous infrastructure, built and paid for, and ready to churn out bargain electrons. Or in crazy-land, ready to be blown up.

Look how long it takes to pay off the capital cost of building them (the red sector in the graph), and look how wonderfully cheap that electricity is from a 30 year old plant. Watch the pea. All those “investigative news stories” that compare the cost of building new coal to the cost of solar or wind are hiding the most brilliant and essential assets on our grid. Reopen Hazelwood now. (!)

Both sides of politics are choosing to destroy the family jewels in the hope of controlling global weather.

….

From the report by Stacy and Taylor, of the […]

Surprise: Australia closed a cheap coal generator and electricity got 85% more expensive

Last year one of our largest coal power plants suddenly closed, with only five months warning, catching the market by surprise and taking out 5% of our cheapest generation. (This kind of improbable anti-free-market feat shows just how screwed our national market is). The Australian Energy Regulator (AER) has looked at the effect the closure of Hazelwood had on electricity prices and concluded that closing cheap brown-coal plants and replacing them with black coal and gas will make electricity prices rise. This will come as no surprise to anyone who can count to 100.

Dan Harrison at the ABC reports:

A year on from the closure of the 1600 megawatt-sized plant in the Latrobe Valley, the report from the Australian Energy Regulator found wholesale prices in Victoria were up 85 per cent on 2016.

Because electricity retailers use hedging for wholesale prices, the rise in retail prices is still feeding through. In the wash, the wholesale increase is expected to add 16% to retail prices this financial year compared to last year. After that, through some miracle, the AEMC expects prices to come back down from Exorbitant to Slightly Lower Than Exorbitant in the next two years thanks […]

South Australia blows up cheap electricity, jobs, wealth, in ideological anti-coal quest

Today the South Australian government destroyed the smoke stack of the Playford B Plant, one more part of what’s left of the cheapest base-load electricity generators in the state.

For about $8 million a year over three years, they could have kept some coal power going and wouldn’t have needed to spend $400 million on emergency diesel generators they don’t want to use, and over $100 million on a battery that can supply 4% of the state for one hour. They also would’ve paid less than $120 million for two days of electricity last week.

On the upside, they can feel good and pretend to be “world leaders”. Virtue signalling is expensive, eh?

….

The plant employed 185 people, the coal mine 200. Other businesses in the town, who knows? People are leaving.

SA, a star in the race away from being a competitive, powerhouse rich state. Creating wealth and jobs in China.

Last South Australian coal-fired power station demolition nears completion

The Australian, Luke Griffiths:

The concrete and brick structure at the 240MW Playford B power station, named after long-serving South Australian premier Sir Thomas Playford and mothballed in 2012, leaves only […]

Peak heat: Electricity prices lifting off; industry shutting off in Australia. Hospitals switching off lights, “Code Yellow Alert”.

UPDATE: MELBOURNE hospitals are enacting emergency procedures to prepare for the potential loss of power. Hospitals are switching off non-essential electrical equipment, including some lights, to minimize energy use. This is a “Code Yellow” alert asking hospitals to check their back up generators are ready. The Victorian Minister insists this is not about the “threat” of blackouts, but because hospitals need to be “good corporate citizens”. Pull the other one. At the very least, this is about reducing electricity bills. h/t Chris in Hervey Bay.

See further UPDATES on “The art of blaming coal” at the bottom.

How much fun can you have? The AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator) projects that as temperatures hit 42C in Victoria, prices are forecast to rise over 100 fold. The AEMO is furiously busy issuing market notices.

The ABC tells us it is 42C, that Portland Alumina has reduced production, but for an ‘undisclosed price’ (why can’t taxpayers know what they are paying this group, not to produce aluminium today?) Meanwhile the AEMO has put the RERT plan into action: “Under the RERT scheme, AEMO has contracted 884 megawatts of “demand side response” across Victoria, NSW and South Australia.” Translated, […]

Here is what’s holding back China’s plans for world domination

Australia may be the worlds largest exporter of coal, sending out 388 million tons in 2015, but China’s production of coal the same year was 3,747 million tons — nearly ten times as much, and nearly half of global coal production. But the Chinese coal boom is turning. David Archibald describes the geopolitical ramifications. For me, the next question is what stops China doing nukes? — Jo

PS: There is a rumor that Australia has only 4-5 days of fuel stocks today, and is especially low on aviation fuel. Anyone with info, please comment or email joanne AT this site.

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Here is what’s holding back China’s plans for world domination

Guest post By David Archibald

One of the reasons that China produces the world’s cheapest solar panels, for example, is because it has some of the world’s cheapest coal-fired power

There is no doubt that China wants to subjugate Asia, echoing Japan’s role during World War II. For those who think China’s economy might overtake the United States economy, and thus make China a more formidable adversary, this article aims to provide detail on China’s main constraint in that ambition: that its domestic coal production is near its peak […]

Everyone cutting coal use except for most of the world and most of the banks

The situation with our most hated energy asset

Australia’s big four banks are fighting over themselves to turn down the chance to profit from coal loans and tell the world. Months ago, Westpac went on a low-coal diet, declaring like a kind of vegan-keto-banker that they won’t consider a loan unless the coal mined has at least 6,300 kilocalories per kilogram. Presumably they will lose weight, or at least lighten up by a few shareholders. Last week our National Australia Bank announced they are waiting for the carbon capture fairy to conquer some laws of chemistry and economics before they finance coal mines again. (Though they limit themselves to spurning only new customers and “thermal coal” in a kind of have-cake-eat-half-the-cake policy.)

But while the small-fish Australian banks advertise their doogooder star status, financial institutions in Canada are putting $2.9 billion towards building new coal plants overseas. And in the last three years, Chinese banks have casually smashed $630 billion dollars into coal. (Notably, even the Chinese don’t want to put money into Adani coal in Australia, the political environment here is that bad.)

The rest of the world is definitely not watching the Australian Banks. Global coal consumption has […]

Not Powering Past Coal: 20 countries that didn’t use much coal, agree to not use much coal

Get excited everyone — the South Pacific Island of Nuie, with a population of 1,625 people has vowed not to build a coal plant. The nation is so small it is not even a member of the UN. This champion of the move away from coal is 98% powered by diesel. Everybody Cheer!

Powering Past Coal Alliance: 20 countries sign up to phase out coal power by 2030

Twenty countries including Britain, Canada and New Zealand have joined an international alliance to phase out coal from power generation before 2030.

The list includes none of the top 15 coal producers in the world. It’s non-binding. Nearly all the countries that have signed up to “Power Past Coal” are already powered by hydro, gas, nuclear or some combination of renewables (with interconnector back up). The Marshall Islands are powered by almost 100% diesel, with a hint of coconut oil. Luxembourg barely even generates electricity — importing 98% from other countries. And 68% of the people in Angola don’t even have access to electricity. It shouldn’t be too hard to get to fifty countries to sign this if they offer a free conference dinner to half the South Pacific, Central […]

Aussies eating junk to get better weather, old coal plant increases 73,000% in value in two years

Funny things happening today in Australia:

Australians are cutting back on Fruit and Veges to pay electricity bills:

Since eating raw fruit and vege is associated with lower mortality, efforts to stop people dying of climate change in 2100 may be killing people today:

Australians are cutting back on basic things like fresh fruit and vegies in order to keep the lights on with the National Debt Helpline taking 14,000 calls in September — a record for the month, and up 14 per cent on the same time last year.

Dying stranded coal plant increases in value by 73,000% in 2 years:

The NSW government sold Vale Point power for $1m two years ago. It’s now valued at $730m:

In November 2015, the NSW Government offloaded Vales Point Power Station — an old, polluting coal-fired plant on the shores of Lake Macquarie — for $1 million.

Last week,… Sunset Power quietly released its latest financial reports — revaluing the Vales Point Power Plant at a cool $730 million.

Over the past year, Vale Points’ owners gained $380 million from electricity sales from the power station, compared to $270 million for energy generated […]

Australians forced to pay $60b for expensive “green” electricity

The cost of Going Green, The Australian, Cover, September 1, 2017.

The Australian calculates the total bill will be in the order of $60b for green electricity.

It’s not like we could have done something better with that.

Read it all (if you can), then write to your MP and Senator. Ask why — if they are serious about helping reduce CO2 — we don’t have a USC coal plant like so many other countries, and why we don’t have nuclear power. Then ask why, if they are concerned about the poor, about health, about education, we are wasting $60b dollars to try to change the weather in 2100 that we could be spending on these critical areas right now?

Taxpayers hit with a $60bn power bill

The Australian, Adam Creighton

Taxpayers will have paid more than $60 billion through federal renewable energy subsidies by 2030, about twice what the crumbling car industry received over 15 years and enough to build about 10 large nuclear reactors.

The government’s large and small-scale renewable energy ­targets, which will compel energy retailers to buy 33 terawatt hours of wind, solar and hydro energy by 2030, will […]

Coal Boom: 1600 new plants in 62 countries around the world – increasing 43%

“End-Coal” Global Coal Tracker does a magnificent job of showing how essential coal is around the world, and which countries are pathetically backwards in developing new coal plants. It’s probably not what the “CoalSwarm” team was hoping to achieve, but this map is a real asset to those of us who want to show how tiny Australia’s coal fired assets are compared to the rest of the world. The site itself is a fancy-pants high gloss major database and website that also shows how much money is in the “anti-coal” movement. Oh, that skeptics should have even 2% of these funds. Heffa Schücking, the director of Urgewald, which created the maps, calls it a “cycle of coal dependency”. Normal people call it “freedom and wealth”.

Chinese companies build coal plants — NY Times

These Chinese corporations are building or planning to build more than 700 new coal plants at home and around the world, some in countries that today burn little or no coal, according to tallies compiled by Urgewald, an environmental group based in Berlin. Many of the plants are in China, but by capacity, roughly a fifth of these new coal power stations are […]