We’re planning to spend $5,000 million on something to smooth out the bumps from unreliable generators. It is entirely unnecessary in a system where coal supplies the baseload and we have not created artificial rules forcing people to use green electrons in preference over stable and predictable ones. Most estimates of costs from wind and solar ignore the hidden costs — the destructive effect on the whole grid.
Energy project financier David Carland — the executive director of Australian Resources Development Limited — argues that once the Snowy Hydro project is operating it will provide only partial back-up energy at a high cost.
Using Snowy Hydro’s modelling assumptions, Dr Carland’s calculations show the “levelised cost of energy” — or unit-cost of electricity over the lifetime of an asset — will deliver power significantly in excess of $90/MWh, after allowing for the cost of storage, cycle losses and the initial cost of buying energy at off-peak prices.
The effect of “cycle losses” means Snowy 2.0 will have to buy around 30 per cent more power in order to pump water uphill than it can generate when water is released from the upper storage.
“Snowy 2.0 is a pump storage operation that is a net user of energy and therefore cannot resolve the longer-term issues of the lack of baseload supply in the national electricity market,” Dr Carland told The Australian. “Based on Snowy Hydro’s own modelling the scenario in which Snowy 2.0 prospers is a world in which average power prices continue to rise.”
Costs are never coming back down
Kiss goodbye to the old $30/MWh average cost of the NEM wholesale electricity market.
….
Why is the NSW old average $50/MWh? I think that’s artificially high. Retail prices fell from 1955-1980 and then held stable for decades. They ominously started rising faster than inflation from 2005 which was when intermittent generation began to build on the grid. There was also a major drought in 2007.
NSW (dark purple). QLD (light purple), SA (red), Vic (grey) and Tas (green)
Those days are gone unless we save our old coal plants and stop favouring green electrons.
The government doesn’t need to build coal plants, it needs to abandon the RET and all pagan attempts to change the weather with our generators.
The market will sort the problem out if the government gets out of the way.
Scientists wondered whether climate change was affecting super high clouds that people rarely see and there is virtually no data on. So they used models which fail on clouds and water vapor only ten kilometers above the Earth and tried to predict what happened to both way up at 80 kilometers up and 150 years ago. They “found” (their phrase, not mine) the increase was man made. So once again, your car exhaust and dinner steak are to blame for changing these night-shining clouds.
How could it be any other way?
This is pure crystal ball science that starts with errors and ends with extrapolations. Researchers are fooling themselves using words like “results”, “indicator” and “significant” as if this was an actual experiment.
PUBLIC RELEASE:
Climate change is making night-shining clouds more visible
AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION
WASHINGTON — Increased water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere due to human activities is making shimmering high-altitude clouds more visible, a new study finds. The results suggest these strange but increasingly common clouds seen only on summer nights are an indicator of human-caused climate change, according to the study’s authors.
Noctilucent, or night-shining, clouds are the highest clouds in Earth’s atmosphere. They form in the middle atmosphere, or mesosphere, roughly 80 kilometers (50 miles) above Earth’s surface. The clouds form when water vapor freezes around specks of dust from incoming meteors. Watch a video about noctilucent clouds here. [Or not, there is no link? – Jo]
Humans first observed noctilucent clouds in 1885, after the eruption of Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia spewed massive amounts of water vapor in the air. Sightings of the clouds became more common during the 20th century, and in the 1990s scientists began to wonder whether climate change was making them more visible.
Or was it just that there were six billion more people to notice the noctilucents? Who can tell?
In a new study, researchers used satellite observations and climate models to simulate how the effects of increased greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels have contributed to noctilucent cloud formation over the past 150 years. Extracting and burning fossil fuels delivers carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor into the atmosphere, all of which are greenhouse gases.
Why bother with satellites, we can just simulate space and history…
In the new study, Lübken and colleagues ran computer simulations to model the Northern Hemisphere’s atmosphere and noctilucent clouds from 1871 to 2008. They wanted to simulate the effects of increased greenhouse gases, including water vapor, on noctilucent cloud formation over this time period.
Who needs observations?
“We speculate that the clouds have always been there, but the chance to see one was very, very poor, in historical times,” said Franz-Josef Lübken, an atmospheric scientist at the Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Kühlungsborn, Germany and lead author of the new study in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
The researchers found the presence of noctilucent clouds fluctuates from year to year and even from decade to decade, depending on atmospheric conditions and the solar cycle. But over the whole study period, the clouds have become significantly more visible.
Over the whole study period? Meaning during the last ten minutes…
Read the introduction of the paper. “Little is known”, “observations are rather challenging” but there is a consensus…
Everyone is talking about the NEG (National Energy Guarantee) which will supposedly attain the mythical trifecta of cheap, reliable, and planet cooling electricity. In terms of meeting our Paris “commitment” Tom Quirk wondered how we are doing in other sectors, like farms, cars, rubbish — and whether we had cut emissions there. Well, ho, ho, here’s that report. Thank you, Tom. Looks like a lot of cows and sheep will have to go. Still, we want to stop storms don’t we?
Key points:
The NEG is not enough on its own to reduce Australian emissions from 608Mt to 444Mt.
Most of our reductions so far have come from just two sectors: the electricity sector and from changes to land-clearing.
We’ve “achieved” nothing in other sectors like agriculture, transport, waste and industry.
Methane emissions from sheep and cattle amount to 60Mt. Trashing the live-export trade may help reduce
With enough bad luck, and poor management, plus some sacrificial lambs on the altar, we might be the only country on Earth that meets its Paris agreement. Rejoice.
This is assuming that our population stops growing and Australia blocks all immigration tomorrow. That’s right, Tom Quirk has not made any allowance for the 250,000 immigrants arriving presently.
These are optimistic best case numbers.
Jo
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Will Australia make it to Paris 2030?
Guest post by Tom Quirk
In 2005 Australia emitted 608 million tonnes (Mt) of CO2 – equivalent greenhouse gases. To achieve a 26 to 28% reduction we must cut emissions to an average of 444 Mt.
Due to accounting changes to land use and forestry, Australia could claim a fall of 104 Mt of CO2 from 2005 to 2012. The emissions from cutting down trees were no longer to be accounted immediately but could be written off over longer periods of years. A most interesting change was for forest fires to be treated as Acts of God and not counted in national emissions. An external issue is whether God is anthropogenic.
Forest and peat fires are a major source of atmospheric CO2. Consider that during the 1997 – 98 El Nino, Indonesia alone was estimated to have produced the equivalent of between 13 – 40% of the annual global fossil fuel emissions and the total estimate for the El Nino was 50% from forest and peat fires.
The changes for Australia are shown in Figure 1 along with the emissions from agriculture. The emissions from agriculture show no changes over the years of land use changes. This may be the result of enteric emissions of methane being some 90% of the agriculture CO2 equivalent emissions.
Figure 1: Emissions for changes in land use and forestry and from agriculture.
The changes in land use and forestry appear to have plateaued from 2012 to 2017. So for this analysis no changes are assumed after 2017. A reassessment would be necessary if there are new government regulations on land use.
The Hockeystick graph rewrote history and was used to justify billions of dollars of expenditure. The people who created it were public servants dedicated to science and writing businesslike emails to each other — which is why they fought tooth and nail and with hundreds of thousands of dollars for 1,763 days to stop you reading them.
Marvel that after 1,000 years of working as thermometers, trees suddenly decalibrated in 1961 just as our national networks of adjistimongered-thermometers were established. See that red line rise…
Arizona Appellate Court Decides Hockey Stick Emails Must Be Released Despite the University’s Appeal.
One thousand seven hundred and sixty-three days ago, on behalf of its client, the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, PLLC (FME Law) asked the University of Arizona to hand over public records that would expose to the world the genesis of what some consider the most influential scientific publication of that decade – the Mann-Bradley-Hughes temperature reconstruction that looks like a hockey stick.
The University refused. …
“This decision by the Appellate Court is much more than a small procedural action,” said Dr. David Schnare, the member-manager of the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, PLLC, who is prosecuting this case. “We asked for the full history of the hockey stick graph and much more. We sought the history of the fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report and the discussions among the scientists as they discussed climate papers and the then burgeoning antagonism between climate scientists not of like mind.” Chaim Mandelbaum, Executive Director of FME Law explains, “This case is not over, but we appear to be at the beginning of the end.”
Nine years ago the Australian Liberals were on the verge of splitting. Turnbull was about to give the Labor Party a free pass on the Emissions Trading Scheme and sell Australia out to the EU. Climategate broke (thank you FOIA) and the party rebelled and tossed out Turnbull. Now, after three elections where the people voted No to carbon taxes every time they could, we have an emissions trading scheme, a Renewable Energy Target, and one of the most crippling Paris targets of any nation. This is despite our rapidly growing population, huge distances and massive resources and the failure of almost every other nation to even achieve their Paris goals. We are The Global Patsy, obediently sacrificing competitive advantage, GDP, and lifestyle – all so Julie Bishop and Malcolm Turnbull get invited to the right parties. Economic carnage in a glorious quest to make the weather nicer.
Delivering his most strident attack to date on his government’s own energy policy, the former prime minister has warned Liberal colleagues they risk a repeat of a split that almost destroyed the party a decade ago.
Less than four weeks before five critical by-elections, Mr Abbott has sought to escalate the internal campaign against the national energy guarantee ahead of a pivotal August meeting of COAG in which the government will seek support from Labor states.
“Does the Liberal Party nine years on realise the wheel has turned full circle and we are back to where we were in late 2009, with Malcolm Turnbull trying to do a deal with the Labor Party on emissions reduction,” Mr Abbott told The Australian, ahead of a speech tonight to the climate sceptic-think tank, the Australian Environment Foundation.
It’s a fight, not a negotiation because there is no negotiating with witchcraft. Abbott is spot on:
“It’s not a circle you can square with the Labor Party … it is a fight that has to be won. There can be no consensus on climate change … you either win or lose … and at the moment we are losing.”
Abbott is discussing scientific points. This is rare from a politician — he’s not just debating the dismal economics, he’s confident, and right, about science. This is good. We want a science debate every bit as much as they don’t want one:
Latika Bourke, Sydney Morning Herald
He said despite the rate of carbon in the atmosphere increasing from 300 to 400 parts per million there had been no “dramatic consequences” on the climate.
“Storms are not more severe; droughts are not more prolonged; floods are not greater; and fires are not more intense than a century ago – despite hyperventilating reportage and over-the-top claims from Green politicians,” the former prime minister said…
“Sea levels have hardly risen and temperatures are still below those of the medieval warm period.
“Over time, temperature change seems to correlate rather more with sun spot activity than with carbon dioxide levels,” he claimed…
Unlike other politicians Abbott is unloading the past, cleaning the slate
The former PM now says he never anticipated the climate change reduction targets he signed up would be binding. ..
Mr Abbott said both he and John Howard had been in the dark about the full implications of their own climate change mitigation policies including the renewable energy target and the international emissions reductions pledges.
“I’m not sure that the Howard government fully anticipated where the renewable energy target would lead when it first made the decision to impose one,” he said.
When Abbott was PM he worked to get his direct action plan implemented (a cheap auction system that actually works to reduce carbon for bargain prices like $14/ton). Then up pops the macabre combo of Clive Palmer and Al Gore, and Palmer was got at. The coal miner suddenly “had” to have a seemingly empty clause leaving the door open for an emissions trading plan. The clause would only came into effect if all the other major world economies acted together which everyone knew would never happen. But that clause was the thin edge of the wedge, and when the Paris Agreement was crafted, all those big nations (India, China) agreed to do nothing, but officially, they agreed to do it together. The Paris deal was meaningless but they signed it, triggering sub clauses in domestic legislation in Australia, and probably in other Patsy Nations too.
When he was prime minister, Mr Abbott signed Australia up to reducing emissions to 26-28 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030. But he said on Tuesday that was only ever intended to be an aspiration.
“I certainly didn’t anticipate, as prime minister, how the aspirational targets we agreed to at Paris would, in different hands, become binding commitments,” he said.
The word trickery had paved the way for Turnbull to claim he was sticking to Abbott’s plan even as Turnbull did the exact opposite of the spirit of everything Abbott had gone to the election with. He sold the nation out. He has to go.
h/t Pat
Australia tried too hard to please,
The U.N., the E.U. and appease,
The Green beast that roared,
Which should now be ignored,
And begin to rise up off its knees.
Climate protestors put their best argument forward:
It’s taken thirty years and $100 billion in scientific research to get here.
They think they can stop droughts.
Now we know that the best thing about climate protestors is their cardboard.
Australians will surely now poke,
Fun at each bare-bottomed bloke,
Who sought coal-mining closure,
By their rear end exposure,
With each now the butt of a joke.
–Ruairi
I don’t think these guys realize the upper tropospheric hot spot is missing. They are going to feel pretty silly when they find out someone tricked them into standing naked in the main street of Melbourne.
As reported by EchonetDaily (whoever they are, they don’t appear to be a satirical site). This weekend in Melbourne …. sometime when it was very very dark and there were no pedestrians. (Or maybe it was photoshopped and they were never there at all?)
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.
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.
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 four banks do — ask Greenpeace for investment advice
In 2015, the National Australia Bank and Commonwealth bank announced they were refusing to finance Adani’s Carmichael Coal Mine. Then the ANZ agreed, and finally Westpac jumped on the anti-coal bandwagon too. Apparently, “Australian coal is an unbankable deposit”, at least according to Daid Holmes, Senior Lecturer, Communications and Media Studies. But what would he know? About as much as our four biggest bankers.
So none of our big banks would finance a major project in our largest export industry.
Last Chance to Book for Tony Abbott Lecture: Melbourne, 3 July 2018
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The place to be on Tuesday night.
“Climate Change & Restraining Greenhouse Gas Emissions“
Last days to book your tickets for the Bob Carter Commemorative Lecture given by the Hon. Tony Abbott—the former PM and current MHR for Warringah in NSW—on 3 July 2018.
Tickets: Book them through Eventbrite. Tickets:$35 for AEF members and $42 for others.
What costs $1,500m, makes no electricity, but “saves money”?
South Australia has used federal subsidies to build more wind power than it can use. They’ve spent half a billion already on diesel powered jet engines and a battery that can power the state for “minutes”. For 139 hours last year the state produced so much wind power it supplied 100% of the states electricity needs and then some, and the problem of excess electricity is only getting worse as wind generation keeps increasing and solar PV uptake is rampant.
When government rules and regs have created an inefficient, expensive problem, what do we do? More of it. A new report suggests that South Australia needs a direct transmission line to NSW which will cost $1.5b. We could spend that on a reliable generator instead, or get the government out of the way and let the private sector do it for us, but instead we need to pay for another transmission line to connect up different zones-of-subsidy-rent seekers and hope we get $30 off the bill? It’s a savings in the statistic margin of error…
South Australia didn’t even have an interconnector til 1990. Now with decentralized and renewable power they need two?
It’s another hidden cost of unreliable power. Put the interconnector on the “Renewables Tab”. It appears to be the direct line from the wind farms that are supposed to change the weather to the proposed Hydro 2.0 scheme we didn’t need.
Consumers will save up to $30 on their power bills if a new interconnector between NSW and South Australia is built, electricity transmission company ElectraNet says in a draft report into the Marshall government’s proposal.
The report, released by ElectraNet today, finds a new electricity transmission link “would deliver substantial economic benefits”.
ElectraNet chief executive Steve Masters said net market benefits were estimated to be around $1 billion over 21 years. But on current estimates, Mr Masters said a new interconnector would cost $1.5bn across both states. The link would be operational between 2022 and 2024.
From Anero.id we can see why SA now wants an interconnector that it didn’t need.
The total demand in SA is around 2,000MW, so we can appreciate the fun the guys must be having in the control rooms of the SA network as 1,400MW comes and mostly goes. (Graph below).
The megawatt mayhem in South Australia was backed up with Victorian brown coal. Now that Hazelwood is shut, they need coal power from Queensland, or if there is any to spare, from NSW. SA has excess renewable power to sell (sometimes) to collect those renewable forced RET payments from too.
SA Wind power, graph, June 2018
As TonyfromOz says on THIRTEEN occasions this month (so far), the ENTIRE 1800+ MW wind turbine capacity in SA failed to generate 50 MW of electricity.
South Australia already has more renewable power than it can use
All up SA has 1,806MW of wind power and then there is 781MW of rooftop solar meaning on a sunny, windy day at midday SA needs to dump some excess on other states. This works like mosquito repellent for any reliable baseload generator, effectively sucking all the fun out of owning a billion dollar resource.
Wind penetration was over 100% [in SA] for 139 hours across the 2016–17 year, on 30 separate days across the year. On these occasions, South Australia could have supplied its local demand entirely from wind generation, with surplus wind generation available to export to Victoria.
This excess power is spread over 30 separate days, usually isn’t during peak loads (when it might be useful), it creates volatility in the pricing, and helps to drive out the cheapest baseload players.The excess unreliable power is forecast to increase as even more wind and solar projects come into play.
“Over the next year, the 220MW Bungala solar project and the 212MW Lincoln Gap wind farm, both near Port Augusta, will also come on line, taking the state up towards 65 per cent renewables, and there are numerous other projects said to be near the point of financial close.
“AEMO also expects the amount of rooftop solar capacity in South Australia to double and reach over 1500 MW by 2025, by which time the state’s minimum demand could on occasions be met entirely by rooftop solar…” — Renew Economy
At all times the wind and solar power need almost complete back up standing by at the ready. Wind power is constrained if there is not enough back up sitting around waiting to spring into action.
The entire point of all this extra infrastructure is to reduce CO2 emissions and change the climate for our grandchildren. The electricity it produces is virtually always surplus to what existing infrastructure could produce.
Thought of the day
Through some freak of nature, even though South Australia has the *cheapest* electricity generators known to mankind, it also has the most expensive electricity in the world.
This is serious. The World Cup cometh, and the United Kingdom is running out of beer.
The UK emits over one million tons of CO2 each day but bottles of flood-drought-n-coral-killing CO2 are in short supply.
Trade journal Gas World, which first revealed there was a problem last week, said it was the “worst supply situation to hit the European carbon dioxide business in decades”.
Carbon capture is the way of the future, which is a shame. If it worked now, people wouldn’t be running out of beer, bacon, coke and even crumpets.
We spend billions to take pollution out of the sky and stuff it into deep holes. Then we pay people to generate the same pollution and put it in our food. Someone, join the dots. Cut out the middle man and move Heineken next to Drax!
As much of Germany’s nearly 30,000 strong fleet of wind turbines approach 20 or more years in age, the list of catastrophic collapses is growing more rapidly. The turbines are now being viewed by technical experts as “ticking time bombs”.
According to a commentary by Daniel Wetzel of online German Daily ‘Die Welt’, the aging rickety wind turbines are poorly inspected and maintained and thus are now posing a huge risk.
Over the past months alone there’s been a flurry of reports over wind turbines failing catastrophically and collapsing to the ground, e.g. see here, here and here.
Industrial systems in Germany need to get technical inspections and safety approvals, but wind turbines don’t…
Australia is figuring out how to change the global climate and power up the nation. It’s the old “have cake: eat cake: sell cake and build a sea-wall with cake” dilemma. The PM, Malcolm Turnbull, has come up with a plan called the National Energy Guarantee (NEG), which will manage to hurt the environment, jobs and industry at the same time.
Who benefits? Gas companies, Renewables Co. Who loses? Everyone else.
One of the key ideas is that we should have an average emissions target of 0.4 magical tons of CO2 per MWh, because “storms”. Tom Quirk has laid out our current situation below and how (theoretically) we might meet that target. (Especially if clouds start raining money, thinks Jo, preferably in USD and filling Lake Eyre.)
The “good news” is that South Australia can stop already, it’s there. The bad news is that the rest of Australia will need to catch up with South Australia, including the size of the electricity bills (and then some).
In 12 years Australia needs to shut nearly every single coal plant thus turning black coal into white elephants. The one last black coal plant or two will operate barely at break-even point, sitting on a utilization rate of 68% (thereby doing nothing 32% of the time, and being a part time white-elephant).
By 2030 we “need” to build four times as many wind farms as we already have. And four times as many gas plants. Somehow we need to get six times as much gas as we already use and do that without fracking or even exploring for gas in some states where both are banned. Since the Northern Territory has just permitted fracking perhaps we can get it all from there. Especially if the NT drillers can get the horizontal frack pipes to extend 2,000 miles underground.
Thanks to Tom for all the data and calculations, and to all the people who helped him.
— Jo
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Guest Post by Tom Quirk
NEG – The white elephant in the room
When the King of Siam wished to rid himself of a troublesome courtier, he would send a white elephant as a first sign of oncoming ruin. Our federal government has served up a troublesome elephant of a plan, the NEG that might ruin our country.
The information used in this analysis is sourced from the Department of the Environment and Energy, Australian Energy Statistics, and gives the sources of electricity generation for the calendar year 2017. The generation plant data comes from the AEMO.
This note will explore what could happen were one of the key conditions of the NEG was actually met – the condition that CO2 emissions from electricity generation should move to average 0.4 tonnes of CO2 per megawatt hour of electrical energy.
South Australia has already achieved this NEG goal but at great cost to consumers whether domestic or business.
The table below lays out the mix of generators. Coal fired generation has ceased, wind farm energy takes priority in the market and the inter-connectors to the Victorian power system keeps South Australia from having too many blackouts by supplying some 15% of demand.
Renewables meet 37% of demand while Victoria supplies 15% and the NEG target is achieved with an average of 0.38 tonnes CO2 per MWh.
…
So turning to the other states, New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania and Victoria that are in the National Energy Market, the table below is for the same period as the South Australian analysis above.
In these states renewables generate 15% of supply with half coming from hydro plants. Coal and gas provide 85% of supply and the CO2 emissions average of 0.890.78 tonnes CO2 per MWh is well above the NEG target of 0.4 tonnes CO2 per MWh.
….
So what might happen if this same energy were to be generated under the NEG target of 0.4 tonnes CO2 per MWh?
The final table shows what changes to generator plant might be made up to 2030 to reach the NEG emission target while generating the same energy as in 2017.
NEG, Table, Generation, renewables, 2030, NSW, Vic, Tas, Qld.
A comparison of the present and the desired outcome points to the following:
15,000 MW of black coal burning power stations have been closed. This leaves 3,000 MW of plant that operate with 71% utilisation (in AEMO speak – Capacity Factor). For low cost base load power, these plants need 70% or more utilisation, ideally 87% (IEA figure).
1,000 MW of brown coal burning power station (Loy Yang B) remains in Victoria. As a base load power station it will only supply 25% of the steady 4,000 MW demand during the early morning hours in Victoria.
Natural gas usage has increased six-fold with a four-fold increase in plant, much of it OCGT (Open Cycle Gas Turbine). Generators are no longer simply meeting demand changes in periods of high demand but are having to meet sudden changes from intermittent supply sources. How the extra gas will be sought is a mystery with governments stopping the search for new gas sources. Perhaps LNG will be shipped from Queensland or Western Australia.
Wind farms have increased from 2,600 to 10,000 MW. The Victorian government wants to add 4,000 MW of wind farm. This is sufficient to destroy the high utilisation necessary for baseload generation. Other states may be just as ambitious. The southern states of New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria all share common weather patterns so there will be periods where correlated wind farm generation will fall towards zero. This has already been seen. No allowance for backup supply has been considered in this analysis but new inter-connections will not be much help balancing coherent wind power variations.
Hydro has been increased assuming “Snow you too” is built. This scheme, like batteries in South Australia, depends on buying low and selling high where you must buy 20% more energy than you sell. If there is little baseload pricing in the wholesale market this may be an NBN-like venture as the operating surplus will have to meet financing costs.
Small scale solar photo voltaic systems are a completely uncontrollable source of demand variation. Encouraged by direct state grants this has been a religious indulgence for the better-off.
No attempt has been made to estimate the costs for these changes or the prices consumers would pay. But if South Australia is setting an example then the prices will be amongst the highest in the world. The consequence will be smelters closing and other energy intensive processes moving elsewhere in the world.
The conclusion from this analysis is that the political and policy-making class have taken us and the white elephant into a labyrinth of regulations that will further disrupt electricity supply. Whether we meet the Minotaur or the elephant, like Theseus has a piece of string to help us escape remains to be seen.
*Edited 6pm with more accurate numbers, highlighted in tables.
Oh the dilemma. When faced with a crocodile do you get out a gun or put up a windmill?
It could be that natural cycles change animal habitats as they have for millions of years. It could be that we made crocodiles a protected species and stopped hunting and killing the wild ones in Queensland from 1974, but whatever, it must be climate, climate, climate. Buy an EV and stop the spread of crocodiles!
ABC “Science” By environment reporter Nick Kilvert
The chances of limiting climate change appear to be growing slimmer by the day — and this may have big implications for Australia’s wildlife.
Recently a number of crocodiles have been trapped in the Mary River, just 105 kilometres north of Noosa and 250km south of their usual range.
Irukandji jellyfish too, appear to be expanding south, with 10 suspected stings near Fraser Island and a child stung at Mooloolaba last year.
Numerous tropical fish have been recorded up to 1,000 kilometres south of their traditional range, such as the Great Barrier Reef’s lemon-peel angelfish which turned up on Lord Howe Island in 2009, and habitat-modifying sea urchins have landed in Tasmania.
According to Climate Action Tracker (CAT), the world is not reducing emissions sufficiently to limit warming to below 2 degrees.
So how will warming of 2 degrees affect the distribution of Australian animals?
Will we have crocodiles sunning themselves on the beaches at Noosa and Irukandji in Byron Bay? And what happens when rare species clinging to mountain tops run out of room to climb?
Or maybe there are just lots more crocs since we don’t shoot them anymore?
…there is uncertainty about whether the recent instances of crocodiles in southern waters is climate related or due to increasing numbers.
Crocodile populations have dramatically recovered from the brink of extinction since the 1970s, and the need for new territory may push some individuals to move outside their natural range.
A Queensland Department of Environment and Science (DES) spokesperson said they currently “don’t have evidence” to suggest crocodiles are expanding south.
Jellyfish are coming, spreading and deadly because “climate”
It was cooler in 1970 for reasons climate models don’t understand, but if you compare a naturally cooler part of recent history to a naturally warmer time, it’s clear (like sump water) that the cause is coal plants, cars and air conditioners.
Despite there being limited knowledge of Irukandji biology, toxinologist associate professor Jamie Seymour from JCU who has studied them extensively, said they were already responding to warming conditions.
“We looked at how far south the stings were 50 years ago and they were around about the Whitsundays. And we looked at where we’re getting stings now, which is the southern end of Fraser Island.”
Solar panels across Australia reduce our emissions by almost nothing.
The ABC is whipping Gorgon for not getting carbon sequestration to work, claiming that this is a crisis that will wipe out the entire “gain” from installing two million solar panels across Australia. What the ABC don’t say is that the entire infrastructure of solar panels (on 20% of Australian homes) is only reducing our CO2 emissions by one pointless percent. So the Gorgon delay in achieving the impossible is likewise irrelevant. Australian emissions are rising at 1.5% pa now anyhow.
In terms of our national emissions, the real question is if we shut every solar panel in the nation would anyone notice?
Despite the $1.1b budget, the ABC could have got this bigger and more useful perspective for free from any number of skeptics, none of whom it tried to interview.
With minimal training in arithmetic ABC staff could even have figured it out for themselves. Instead, as per usual, the ABC provides free advertorials for green-industry hacks, with no hard questions and little research.
Can someone please explain to ABC investigative journalists the difference between a megaton and a ton? All they had to do was graph the solar contribution on the same graph or even in the same units…
Almost 2 million Australian households have installed solar panels to cut their power bills while also doing their bit for the environment. Households account for most of the country’s total solar panel emission savings.
Look how useful solar panels are — there are lots of zeroes on that axis when we use the odd units like “tons of carbon”. What nation graphs anything in tons?
…
The whole Renewable Energy Target (RET) cuts total emissions by around 5%
The ABC helpfully provides the dismal detail:
“If the RET is met and 33,000 gigawatt-hours of renewable electricity is generated in 2020, this would represent avoided emissions of about 26 million tonnes of CO2-e [a standard unit for measuring carbon footprints] per year,” Dr Hare said.
“These reductions in emissions from the power sector are unfortunately almost completely offset by the estimated increase emissions from the LNG sector.”
How easy is it for ABC readers to compare the value of solar panels in terms of our total emissions as measured in the standard megaton unit? How many readers didn’t see the fine print at the bottom explaining the units?
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Our Paris targets are obscenely ambitious. See the graph below regarding how much we have to cut. And there is no allowance for having one of the highest population growth rates in the West.
Still, the Paris agreement is a nonbinding, ineffectual plan that almost every other nation is going to fail to meet. So “whatever”. We can bail out at no cost apart from being called a few names.
Chevron predicted that process would have seen between 5.5 and 8 million tonnes of CO2 injected into the ground during the plant’s first two years of production from the Gorgon field, making it one of the largest carbon abatement activities in the world.
Instead, technical problems with seals and corrosion issues in the infrastructure have delayed CO2 storage and the Federal Government, which contributed $60 million towards the green technology, is not expecting the problem to be rectified until March 2019 — about two years after production began from the Gorgon gas field.
By that point, experts including energy consultancy firm Energetics predict the additional CO2 emitted into the atmosphere will be roughly equivalent to the 6.2 million tonnes in emissions saved in a year by all the solar panels in the country combined — from small household rooftop systems to major commercial installations.
Let’s calculate the cost per ton “saved”
Can someone with some time to spare add up the cost of all those solar panels? I’d like to know how much we spent to achieve something so insignificant.
No nation should ever feel bound,
To store CO2 in the ground,
While hungry plants need,
A good CO2 feed,
When there isn’t enough to go ’round.
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t at the Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Kühlungsborn, Germany and lead author of the new study in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
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