If there's anywhere in the world that solar makes sense, it's Australia. Vast stretches of land, more sunshine than you can throw a stick at. Good to see it's starting to happen.
Just a thought, what if Australia had ways to use excess power and export the result. e.g. refining ores and exporting metals instead of exporting ores. You don't need to literally "export electricity" in order to leverage a surplus of energy, for export.
I've had this discussion around why we export iron ore and coal rather than steel. Which seems ridiculous to me. Why are we building huge port facilities for vast shipments of coal and iron ore, and not smelters with much smaller port facilities for shipping steel?
The answer I got was that smelters are hugely expensive and last longer than the mines, and so it makes sense to build the smelter near the factories, and ship the raw materials to the smelter from wherever they are being mined currently, rather than building the smelter near the mines and then having to ship raw materials there anyway once the mines run out. I've always thought this was a bit dubious (why is commercially viable to build smelters in Korea but not Aus?), but it does kinda make sense.
So the problem isn't "not enough excess power" but "insufficient infrastructure" coupled with "insufficient government willpower to build a decent manufacturing base here".
A good mate of mine runs 5B, the company that may end up deploying all the panels if it goes ahead. He’s a legend and if it happens throughly deserves the success. Would totally change australia!
It would be a good start, if australia would not burn so much coal anymore. Apart from that ... build energy intensive industry, anything with metal. And then if you still have a surpluss (very possible) export hydrogen or biofuel. Or build high voltage direct current power lines to asia.
Australia biggest export is iron ore, followed by coal.
If you have a lot of energy and iron, a great way to combine the two is steel. Sweden is currently experimenting with the idea of green steel, using hydrogen as an replacement for coal.
It’s like any other exchange of electricity between grids, which already takes place within larger countries. You just need to run a cable to create an export grid. Offshore wind farms have to run high voltage marine cables to the shore, for example. It is laid using the same techniques as underwater communication cables - with specialized ships.
Unfortunately we have a government that has so clearly been bought and paid for by the existing money.
Our Prime Minister brought coal into Parliament and extolled it's virtues, going on and on about how it's the future. Right now they're building a $600M gas power plant[1], and Victoria is the only jurisdiction in the world where you are actively fined for driving an EV. [2]
Hyperbolic statements like this are unhelpful; The government has implemented a distance based tax on EVs (road pricing) to offset losses from the existing fuel excise taxes. It's certainly not progressive but it is not and never has been a "fine"
Yes, that is one form of taxation. But taxes for road use are to pay for the roads, ie consider them a "network usage" fee.
Having it be distance based is because there is currently a petrol tax that is also distance based, because it is per litre of fuel.
What should happen is that all vehicles should have the same distance based fee applied, with the additional cost of the CO2 output as a multiple. Make EVs the base fee.
Personally, I'd keep the EV tax as is, remove the subsidy, and significantly increase the ICE tax. Cars are awful, and their negative externalities don't stop at CO2 emissions.
No, a per-km charge is really regressive and poorly designed. People in regional areas need to drive much further but have worse maintained roads and don’t cause anything like the congestion metro drivers do, and don’t cause anything like the road wear the big trucks do. A state like Victoria shouldn’t be charging somebody driving in, say, South Australia either.
To do it properly, you’d need different zones (higher charge in congested areas for example), but that would require creepy GPS tracking, or creepy ANPR everywhere. Really not a road we want to be going down as a society I think.
They could just double the cost of rego for everyone if they’re so concerned about not getting a tax they don’t get already (Fed Govt does).
I have yet to decide if I consider ANPR more creepy than parking when ANPR is used for taxation or road tolls. Both require some form of payment system when a car is located at some specific place and when computers are involved they store records of license plates and locations. Both would benefit from tight data regulation to prevent abuse and data retention.
The only major difference is that sometimes you can not avoid going pass a road toll. However the same can also be said about finding a parking space, and parking data is likely much more detailed information than passing the edge of a traffic zone. Many parking spaces in the city where I live have also moved over to use ANPR, which kind of mean the two concepts has already merged to a degree.
The per km thing is a bit creepy even if it's just reading the odometer, and as you say a bad deal for regional residents.
It's also very viable to not own a car in the city. I don't have one. But in the country, what behavior are you trying to encourage? So that complicates things.
It should probably be means tested too.
I just object to the idea that EVs should be subsidized rather than ICEs punished. It puts the finger on the scale away from even better solutions like riding, walking or public transport.
The fuel excise and these road usage charges are not equivalent, because the former is charged by the states and the latter by the Federal Government just into general revenue.
We already pay registration fees which are supposed to be a road usage tax. While they have cried poor about the loss of a tax they don’t even collect, at the end of the day this is literally just a cash grab by some States. (Luckily mine isn’t even talking about doing it, but I just think anything to discourage EVs is so idiotic policy and I really hate it being justified by half-truths and misleading info about the fuel excise).
That’s what they say, but it’s actually misleading and inaccurate. The fuel excise is a Federal tax that just goes into general revenue (same as, say, income tax, alcohol excises, the tobacco excise, etc.). It’s the states that are implementing the EV taxes. They don’t automatically or directly get any money from the fuel excise.
The EV tax is a new, different, and not equivalent tax. They’ve hastily brought it in now before enough people have EVs to realise - which explains why it’s so badly designed (take, for instance, rural drivers that need to drive much further distances than city folk but have worse maintained roads and don’t really cause significant road wear or congestion. They’ll pay far more than the city dwellers! Or if you drive half the time in a different state, like people in regional areas who live on the border, you’ll pay a state tax for driving on another state’s roads!).
To be fair, people in regional areas that travel long distances already pay far more fuel related taxes than those in cities on account of using more fuel per capita.
Your statement, whilst true in direct translation is false in spirit. It's a fine in a tax's clothing. It is a tax wielded as weapon intended to inhibit uptake of EV's.
Australia should be subsidising EV purchases, not hastily implementing a new tax that further suppresses progress in a country falling ever further behind the rest of the world.
If I look at the rules here in Sweden I find that EV owners also have to pay a car tax as any other car owners. They do get the first 5 years as free as tax bonus, but after that they pay just as any other car owner. The tax is a base value (~36$ per year) and then an additional value based on the emissions and attributes of the car.
Car ownership is taxed because there is road usage, parking, health care, and other costs associated with car ownership. There are also pollution created by the wheels, oils, cleaning products, and so on. To be honest, 36$ per year seems pretty cheap as a base value considering all the cost to society and should probably be raised when more cars become EV and less money is gotten from gas and car taxes. The alternative is to raise other taxes like income in order to fill the gap in the budget or lower the budget of road maintenance.
This farm grows a huge amount of tomatoes in the desert. It has its own water desalination plant powered by solar. Unlike most of the stuff you see, this isn't PV solar generating electricity, but just a bunch of mirrors pointed at a single point to collect a huge amount of heat to generate fresh water.
Just look at the land in the photo on wikipedia and imagine how much food could be produced in this space.
I've always thought that the vast aquifer in the centre of Aus, plus abundant sunlight, should make for easy desalination and irrigation. Glad to see someone's working on it :)
But they can chuck the leftover salt back into the ocean. That's harder to do away from the coast.
Solar power has all sorts of downsides when you start looking at who makes it, the complexity of the process, it's reliance on fossil fuel, its intermittence which brings up a whole new problem of mass scale storage, etc
Headlines like this make it seem like "some countries are making progress, why is anyone not following faster?".
Solar strikes me as a bad direction to go in. There is no magic want for energy that doesn't impact our environment. The most impactful, and actually sustainable approach is to reduce our usage of energy.
Ban crypto mining waste for instance. That's 10% of global electricity these days. That's a whole lot of power plants you suddenly don't have to build using "green" energy that's nothing but green.
It is testament to solar power that Australia has been able to achieve this given the decade of constant government sponsored FUD aimed at suppressing renewables whilst simultaneously actually encouraging, and attempting to provide financial backing for, new coal-fired power plants.
But how is it a good thing though. It's really not a simple "solar > coal". Solar has its own set of downside. And solar supply chain is heavy on fossil fuel right now, so you may have the same burning of coal behind the scene to make that solar energy. I've read reports where it was actually worse than directly burning the coal.
Some people wave solar and wind like it's some miracle no-impact tech. It's heavy duty tech that impacts the environment at every step of its lifecycle, and for which even CO2 emissions are not a clear winner once you look at the full picture.
And solar supply chain is heavy on fossil fuel right now, so you may have the same burning of coal behind the scene to make that solar energy. I've read reports where it was actually worse than directly burning the coal.
Those reports are incorrect. The energy payback time for a PV installation including structures, cabling etc is typically 2 years.
Reports that it’s worse than burning coal are ridiculous and incorrect. That wouldn’t have been true 10 years ago, and things are far better now. The carbon payback is months, and that will continue to reduce as more renewables are put in use (as the energy used to make panels themselves will be more and more from renewables). This will be the same with wind - first commercial steel made with green hydrogen (instead of coking coal) was delivered just this month. The development of that will have exciting consequences.
If someone calls for a ban for using electricity, they go into a weird place in my list. You pay for using electricity, simple use whatever you want. Market dynamics control supply and demand, not anybody's wishes or self-righteousness
Yeah also part of being an individualist society, is despite not being able to agree give respect others rights and freedom, not calling for bans for things you don't like. Keep rolling on the downvote. lol
Cults are wrong most of the time, ask any cults or mob mentality. Oh wait they can't cause they don't think for themselves. Ok. Btw I don't really give a shit what others think of me, you are mistaken to think otherwise, if they have no value in my life.
I only have a problem when someone tries to propose blanket ban/control of anybody. Yes, because this country has too many rules and a shit-show for doing business. Not that the cult-like mentality of the general public is helping.
How is photovoltaics reliant on fossil fuels? Reducing electricity use sure is important but has its limits.
Photovoltaics and wind are the cheapest way to produce that electricity in a clean way.
> The production of photovoltaic panels still has an important carbon footprint and creates a series of waste, liquid and gaseous by-products that are harmful to the environment.
I advise you look into the manufacturing process of these panels. Then how they end up after they stop working. This is not a sustainable loop for multiple reasons. Some of them even have a clear negative energy output today as it takes more energy to make them than they'll produce in their lifetime.
It's not enough to look at the things from when you receive them. You have to account for how it's produced, and sustainable are the parts
I doubt it. The Australian GDP is up on 2019 (although QE might be distorting the figures somewhat).
This is more of a long term trend. Solar power generation has been increasing for years in Australia, and meanwhile large generators have been mothballing coal plants. The energy grid is shifting rapidly to a mixture of solar, wind, hydro and gas/batteries for load balancing.
Generation across the NEM is on par with a year ago.
It's more about a combination of long term factors (the slowly achanging generation mix) and short term ones (a slightly more windy than usual August pushing a bit more coal out of the market).
Pretty remarkable considering the governments pro-coal and anti-renewables tone and policy. Australia still generates more than half of its electricity using coal and even brown coal. Inevitably the same dynamics that are killing the coal power generation elsewhere will play out in Australia as well.
Basically, periodic over supply of electricity because of solar leads to temporary shut downs of plants. That is expensive and makes these plants less profitable. That over supply comes both from renewable energy generated on the grid and home owners putting solar on their roofs. Each year there's more of it. And Australia gets a lot of sunny days. So, the pressure to shut down more coal plants just keeps on growing.
There is no such thing as pro-coal. There is pro-money.
The more militant arm of the renewable lobby has been lying for decades, claiming that they are cheaper than fossil fuels. There is still a bit of confusion because now it might actually be true and a lot of people are reorienting.
Nothing in particular stands between Australian businesses from going the most profitable (ie, cheapest to produce in a total cost sense) form of power. The Liberals just aren't going to subsidise it.
No. They did, but one of the first things the (yes, actually literally pro-coal) current Government did after being elected in 2013 was abolish the carbon price.
Gillard, ironically, had fucking balls. Australia is a decade behind where it was 10 years ago - so, yep, we're fucking 20 years behind where we should be.
And these corrupt cunts will be voted in again, I'm sure of it.
Not sure how 'no such thing as pro-coal' squares with passing a lump of coal around parliament and - instead of working on legislation - putting forward motions to praise how wonderful the stuff is.
As far as it being a free market? For infrastructure projects of that scale there's no such thing. Policy dictates what is (and what is not) economical to build every bit as much as the underlying fundamentals.
Photo of the honorable Prime Minister of Australia (only the Treasurer at the time however), Scott Morrison, proudly holding up a lump of coal in Australia's parliament.[0] I believe "don't be scared" was what his party said to the opposition at the time.
And Barnaby Joyce, the deputy Prime Minister and leader of the conservative Nationals who stand for Christian family values, holding the very same lump of coal[1]. At this time, 2017, he probably hadn't yet publically admitted to having an affair with one of his assistants - who later got pregnant[2].
If Australia's political class hadn't already jumped the shark, this was it.
Probably the coal promoter who handed it to them had washed it, and maybe waxed it or covered it in fixative to make the publicity stunt work better. Bit of a metaphor for the whole process.
They want coal miners to vote for them. But they want everyone to vote for them. The Greens and Labour party are both actively hostile to coal; it was a simple political stunt to sweep up some easy votes.
Doesn't mean they're going down with the ship. Sit down and think it through - the Liberals aren't going to waste political capital on coal if it isn't a money spinner. There isn't anything to gain. There are all of 10-15 people in Australia who are ideologically wedded to the idea of coal for its own sake.
> The Greens and Labour party are both actively hostile to coal ...
That's not true.
The Labor (note spelling) party in AU is actively pro-coal.
Sadly most stories are paywalled - but check [0] for the gist - "Labor drops hostility to coal", "Labor backs coal beyond 2050", "AU Labor Party backs coal, gas .." and so on -- there are precious few contra-examples because, basically, the AU Labor party is pro-coal, for much the same set of reasons that the AU Liberal/National party is pro-coal.
That one seems to be dated April of this year. I see I'm not alone in perceiving Labor (thanks, forgot) to be anti-coal.
They're in a tricky position, trying to placate the nearly-Greens voters on one flank and the CFMEU on the other. Which is why the Liberals are pulling political stunts like waving coal around - it is very hard for Labor to respond to. They have a nasty split in ideology there that they have to manage and it makes political sense to pressure it.
None of that represents ideological commitment to coal by Morrison. The Liberals don't especially care where the power comes from as long as it is cheap. Coal, gas, solar, nuclear. Mice in wheels fed a steady diet of sugar. They aren't going to subside environmentalists though, but that is a pro-market ideology, not pro-coal.
'drops hostility to coal' is perhaps not the embrace of green energy that you may hope.
{sigh}
From March 2021 [0] "The Australian Labor Party will support an expansion of Australia’s gas industry" ,
From April 2021 [1] "abandon any carbon emissions reduction target for 2030" , "recommit any Labor government to continuing to support the mining giants based on the lucrative extraction of the main fossil fuels—coal, gas and oil."
From June 2021 [2] "The Labor leader will use a speech to the Minerals Council of Australia to reassure mining companies that the opposition supports the continuing export of fossil fuels." ,
And so on
> They're in a tricky position, trying to placate the nearly-Greens voters on one flank and the CFMEU on the other. Which is why the Liberals are pulling political stunts like waving coal around - it is very hard for Labor to respond to. They have a nasty split in ideology there that they have to manage and it makes political sense to pressure it.
They're not 'in a tricky position' so much as 'they are a collective of people with substantively differentiating viewpoints but a common interest in power and money' - hence the friction.
I envy your idealistic take on Scott Morrison's impartiality towards his largest donors.
> I envy your idealistic take on Scott Morrison's impartiality towards his largest donors.
What, are solar farms banned from making political donations? Bankers can do sums, the price of electricity is common across the market. If solar is honestly cheaper then they can move fairly quickly to make more profit and afford a better class of political influence than the coal mines. That is how the game is played.
I was talking to a friend the other day about how to invest in coal mines, because I think the survivors might be in a pretty good position. But if someone has an idea for a solar plant with better margins than a coal mine then I'll invest there instead. The idea that anyone is pro-coal because they have a thing for carbon is absurd. The last 50 years have proven conclusively that not that many people care about where the electricity is coming from. Everyone cares about profit margins.
Solar is a tiny industry compared with coal and brings in approximately zero export dollars.
For most of the past decade, coal has been Australia's second largest resource export, after iron ore, and since 2015 has averaged around one-quarter of annual resource export values and 14 per cent of total export values (Graph 2). In 2018, the value of coal exports was $67 billion, equivalent to 3½ per cent of nominal GDP. Australia's coal exports consist of different grades of black coal: metallurgical coal, which has a relatively high energy content and is used for industrial purposes (primarily steel making); and lower-energy content thermal coal used for electricity generation.
No the government actually is pro coal. Its their whole marketing image and they have been trying to warp the market to stop the death of coal. AGL wanted out because it wasn't profitable and the government wouldn't allow it. They also tried to ban investment companies from not investing in fossil fuels because coal mine projects where having a hard time getting funding.
One of the reasons this is happening in Australia is because the price of electricity has been rising quite sharply for over a decade now and that makes solar more attractive.
It turns out one of the main reasons for these price rises has price gouging by the newly privatized energy companies.
Well, they are trying. Problem is they can only fight the market so much. Especially when economics are so much in solar’s favour - the levelised cost (which includes the CAPEX of building) of battery backed solar will cost less than just the fuel for coal power per MWh in a couple of years (LCOE of solar and onshore wind by themselves already is less)!
Hah! That's pretty funny. By screwing the Australian public with the poles and wires investment guarantee they accidentally heralded 'the great consumer protest' of the fastest worldwide uptake of residential solar panel installations.
Something something law of unintended consequences...
To compound the shame of it, all the money spent on the 'poles and wires' initiative did nothing to contribute to the grid's ability to cope with the influx of power from the volume of rooftop solar installations, and so all that investment has just smeared problems around, and now there's a whole lot more planning and likely investment necessary to migrate to a rooftop solar heavy grid. Maybe that's all part of the plan (I don't believe that - never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence).
And that's a good thing as that increases the speed of solar adoption.
Governments should increase taxes on oil and coal (and electricity generated from oil and coal). That's the only way to speed up adoption of other energy sources.
The income from this tax could be used to build wind and solar power, energy research or paid back as incentives to people installing solar panels.
It’s baseload, and having fixed baseload is just one operating model, not a requirement. The future is VRE + storage + dispatchables, with a bit of demand management.
In addition to being tone-deaf and/or incompetent on basically every big-ticket issue facing us, our (AU) power grid (mis)management is almost on a par with the US's E[R]COT debacle ... just stretched out over a few more decades, so it's harder to notice.
This story from 2014 [0] describes a sequence of events that could, if you were feeling sanguine, be attributed to generic incompetence, even if they smell more like congenital corruption.
In any case, AU citizens pay a bucketload for power, way more than it costs to generate (domestically).
Combine that with active disincentives at the large-scale (to develop sensible power generation / storage systems) and small-scale (witness the recent regularly change [1] to allow primarily fossil-fuel based power companies to charge residential solar subscribers a fee to feed-in power).
Reminder: this sort of metric is sensational but hardly relevant. The relevant metric is how much fossil production is left, not how much low-carbon production we add. All the more so because production peaks of renewables tend to be outliers.
This was a result of both, though: the same dispatch interval also set a new record low level of coal-fired generation in the NEM (9,365MW - the previous low being 9,507MW in October 2020).
Our grid demand has been fairly steady (obviously it varies by season) since 2008 or so (probably due in part to some economic slowdown back then, but also energy efficiency improvements e.g. LED lighting, as well as behind the meter solar etc.) so all renewables added is displacing gas and coal in our electricity market.
Looking at OpenNEM, coal peaked in 2007 at 84.9% of all power generated (averaged per month), and in July was 63.4% (record low was October 2020 with 62.5%). Gas looks to have peaked in Jan 2014 with 13%. Recent peak was June with 10.4% and record low was February with 4.6%. Renewables are now 29% over the last month, up from around 6% in 2008. Still a long way to go!
Sure, but the power would cost about double per MWh than the wind, solar and (projected) storage - in 12 or so years which is the earliest one could be finished…
I’m not opposed to nuclear in principal but without some kind of huge advance, the economics and time frames don’t really stack up…
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[ 6.6 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_primary_a...
Of course Australia also sells a lot of bauxite to China.
The answer I got was that smelters are hugely expensive and last longer than the mines, and so it makes sense to build the smelter near the factories, and ship the raw materials to the smelter from wherever they are being mined currently, rather than building the smelter near the mines and then having to ship raw materials there anyway once the mines run out. I've always thought this was a bit dubious (why is commercially viable to build smelters in Korea but not Aus?), but it does kinda make sense.
So the problem isn't "not enough excess power" but "insufficient infrastructure" coupled with "insufficient government willpower to build a decent manufacturing base here".
https://suncable.sg/
https://www.aemc.gov.au/hydrogen-new-australian-manufacturin...
Ultra high voltage DC ultra long distance submarine cables.
If you have a lot of energy and iron, a great way to combine the two is steel. Sweden is currently experimenting with the idea of green steel, using hydrogen as an replacement for coal.
Unfortunately we have a government that has so clearly been bought and paid for by the existing money.
Our Prime Minister brought coal into Parliament and extolled it's virtues, going on and on about how it's the future. Right now they're building a $600M gas power plant[1], and Victoria is the only jurisdiction in the world where you are actively fined for driving an EV. [2]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/aug/23/solar...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-22/victoria-electric-veh...
Hyperbolic statements like this are unhelpful; The government has implemented a distance based tax on EVs (road pricing) to offset losses from the existing fuel excise taxes. It's certainly not progressive but it is not and never has been a "fine"
Having it be distance based is because there is currently a petrol tax that is also distance based, because it is per litre of fuel.
What should happen is that all vehicles should have the same distance based fee applied, with the additional cost of the CO2 output as a multiple. Make EVs the base fee.
Oh, wait, that's exactly what Victoria has done: https://www.solar.vic.gov.au/zero-emissions-vehicle-subsidy
Personally, I'd keep the EV tax as is, remove the subsidy, and significantly increase the ICE tax. Cars are awful, and their negative externalities don't stop at CO2 emissions.
To do it properly, you’d need different zones (higher charge in congested areas for example), but that would require creepy GPS tracking, or creepy ANPR everywhere. Really not a road we want to be going down as a society I think.
They could just double the cost of rego for everyone if they’re so concerned about not getting a tax they don’t get already (Fed Govt does).
The only major difference is that sometimes you can not avoid going pass a road toll. However the same can also be said about finding a parking space, and parking data is likely much more detailed information than passing the edge of a traffic zone. Many parking spaces in the city where I live have also moved over to use ANPR, which kind of mean the two concepts has already merged to a degree.
The per km thing is a bit creepy even if it's just reading the odometer, and as you say a bad deal for regional residents.
It's also very viable to not own a car in the city. I don't have one. But in the country, what behavior are you trying to encourage? So that complicates things.
It should probably be means tested too.
I just object to the idea that EVs should be subsidized rather than ICEs punished. It puts the finger on the scale away from even better solutions like riding, walking or public transport.
We already pay registration fees which are supposed to be a road usage tax. While they have cried poor about the loss of a tax they don’t even collect, at the end of the day this is literally just a cash grab by some States. (Luckily mine isn’t even talking about doing it, but I just think anything to discourage EVs is so idiotic policy and I really hate it being justified by half-truths and misleading info about the fuel excise).
The EV tax is a new, different, and not equivalent tax. They’ve hastily brought it in now before enough people have EVs to realise - which explains why it’s so badly designed (take, for instance, rural drivers that need to drive much further distances than city folk but have worse maintained roads and don’t really cause significant road wear or congestion. They’ll pay far more than the city dwellers! Or if you drive half the time in a different state, like people in regional areas who live on the border, you’ll pay a state tax for driving on another state’s roads!).
Australia should be subsidising EV purchases, not hastily implementing a new tax that further suppresses progress in a country falling ever further behind the rest of the world.
If I look at the rules here in Sweden I find that EV owners also have to pay a car tax as any other car owners. They do get the first 5 years as free as tax bonus, but after that they pay just as any other car owner. The tax is a base value (~36$ per year) and then an additional value based on the emissions and attributes of the car.
Car ownership is taxed because there is road usage, parking, health care, and other costs associated with car ownership. There are also pollution created by the wheels, oils, cleaning products, and so on. To be honest, 36$ per year seems pretty cheap as a base value considering all the cost to society and should probably be raised when more cars become EV and less money is gotten from gas and car taxes. The alternative is to raise other taxes like income in order to fill the gap in the budget or lower the budget of road maintenance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_registration#Aus...
This farm grows a huge amount of tomatoes in the desert. It has its own water desalination plant powered by solar. Unlike most of the stuff you see, this isn't PV solar generating electricity, but just a bunch of mirrors pointed at a single point to collect a huge amount of heat to generate fresh water.
Just look at the land in the photo on wikipedia and imagine how much food could be produced in this space.
But they can chuck the leftover salt back into the ocean. That's harder to do away from the coast.
Headlines like this make it seem like "some countries are making progress, why is anyone not following faster?".
Solar strikes me as a bad direction to go in. There is no magic want for energy that doesn't impact our environment. The most impactful, and actually sustainable approach is to reduce our usage of energy.
Ban crypto mining waste for instance. That's 10% of global electricity these days. That's a whole lot of power plants you suddenly don't have to build using "green" energy that's nothing but green.
Some people wave solar and wind like it's some miracle no-impact tech. It's heavy duty tech that impacts the environment at every step of its lifecycle, and for which even CO2 emissions are not a clear winner once you look at the full picture.
Those reports are incorrect. The energy payback time for a PV installation including structures, cabling etc is typically 2 years.
This is real advice. Stop shielding your ego and blistering when people reject you. You’re not fooling anyone.
I only have a problem when someone tries to propose blanket ban/control of anybody. Yes, because this country has too many rules and a shit-show for doing business. Not that the cult-like mentality of the general public is helping.
https://www.onlynaturalenergy.com/the-true-carbon-footprint-...
> The production of photovoltaic panels still has an important carbon footprint and creates a series of waste, liquid and gaseous by-products that are harmful to the environment.
This is getting better and better, with lower carbon footprint each new generation. With payback times as low as 4 months, this is misleadingly true.
It's not enough to look at the things from when you receive them. You have to account for how it's produced, and sustainable are the parts
Obvious yet hard do be heard in this.
Yes ...
> That's 10% of global electricity these days.
No, this isn't true at all. Although if it was it would make the ban more urgent.
This is more of a long term trend. Solar power generation has been increasing for years in Australia, and meanwhile large generators have been mothballing coal plants. The energy grid is shifting rapidly to a mixture of solar, wind, hydro and gas/batteries for load balancing.
It's more about a combination of long term factors (the slowly achanging generation mix) and short term ones (a slightly more windy than usual August pushing a bit more coal out of the market).
Basically, periodic over supply of electricity because of solar leads to temporary shut downs of plants. That is expensive and makes these plants less profitable. That over supply comes both from renewable energy generated on the grid and home owners putting solar on their roofs. Each year there's more of it. And Australia gets a lot of sunny days. So, the pressure to shut down more coal plants just keeps on growing.
The more militant arm of the renewable lobby has been lying for decades, claiming that they are cheaper than fossil fuels. There is still a bit of confusion because now it might actually be true and a lot of people are reorienting.
Nothing in particular stands between Australian businesses from going the most profitable (ie, cheapest to produce in a total cost sense) form of power. The Liberals just aren't going to subsidise it.
And these corrupt cunts will be voted in again, I'm sure of it.
cough Off-topic, but... NBN cough
As far as it being a free market? For infrastructure projects of that scale there's no such thing. Policy dictates what is (and what is not) economical to build every bit as much as the underlying fundamentals.
And Barnaby Joyce, the deputy Prime Minister and leader of the conservative Nationals who stand for Christian family values, holding the very same lump of coal[1]. At this time, 2017, he probably hadn't yet publically admitted to having an affair with one of his assistants - who later got pregnant[2].
If Australia's political class hadn't already jumped the shark, this was it.
[0]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-14/scott-morrison-holds-...
[1]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-07/barnaby-joyce-holds-a...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/feb/07/barna...
Doesn't mean they're going down with the ship. Sit down and think it through - the Liberals aren't going to waste political capital on coal if it isn't a money spinner. There isn't anything to gain. There are all of 10-15 people in Australia who are ideologically wedded to the idea of coal for its own sake.
That's not true.
The Labor (note spelling) party in AU is actively pro-coal.
Sadly most stories are paywalled - but check [0] for the gist - "Labor drops hostility to coal", "Labor backs coal beyond 2050", "AU Labor Party backs coal, gas .." and so on -- there are precious few contra-examples because, basically, the AU Labor party is pro-coal, for much the same set of reasons that the AU Liberal/National party is pro-coal.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=labor+australia+coal+policy
That one seems to be dated April of this year. I see I'm not alone in perceiving Labor (thanks, forgot) to be anti-coal.
They're in a tricky position, trying to placate the nearly-Greens voters on one flank and the CFMEU on the other. Which is why the Liberals are pulling political stunts like waving coal around - it is very hard for Labor to respond to. They have a nasty split in ideology there that they have to manage and it makes political sense to pressure it.
None of that represents ideological commitment to coal by Morrison. The Liberals don't especially care where the power comes from as long as it is cheap. Coal, gas, solar, nuclear. Mice in wheels fed a steady diet of sugar. They aren't going to subside environmentalists though, but that is a pro-market ideology, not pro-coal.
{sigh}
From March 2021 [0] "The Australian Labor Party will support an expansion of Australia’s gas industry" ,
From April 2021 [1] "abandon any carbon emissions reduction target for 2030" , "recommit any Labor government to continuing to support the mining giants based on the lucrative extraction of the main fossil fuels—coal, gas and oil."
From June 2021 [2] "The Labor leader will use a speech to the Minerals Council of Australia to reassure mining companies that the opposition supports the continuing export of fossil fuels." ,
And so on
> They're in a tricky position, trying to placate the nearly-Greens voters on one flank and the CFMEU on the other. Which is why the Liberals are pulling political stunts like waving coal around - it is very hard for Labor to respond to. They have a nasty split in ideology there that they have to manage and it makes political sense to pressure it.
They're not 'in a tricky position' so much as 'they are a collective of people with substantively differentiating viewpoints but a common interest in power and money' - hence the friction.
I envy your idealistic take on Scott Morrison's impartiality towards his largest donors.
[0] https://reneweconomy.com.au/labor-to-support-gas-and-ccs-alo...
[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/02/labo-a02.html
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jun/02/coali...
What, are solar farms banned from making political donations? Bankers can do sums, the price of electricity is common across the market. If solar is honestly cheaper then they can move fairly quickly to make more profit and afford a better class of political influence than the coal mines. That is how the game is played.
I was talking to a friend the other day about how to invest in coal mines, because I think the survivors might be in a pretty good position. But if someone has an idea for a solar plant with better margins than a coal mine then I'll invest there instead. The idea that anyone is pro-coal because they have a thing for carbon is absurd. The last 50 years have proven conclusively that not that many people care about where the electricity is coming from. Everyone cares about profit margins.
For most of the past decade, coal has been Australia's second largest resource export, after iron ore, and since 2015 has averaged around one-quarter of annual resource export values and 14 per cent of total export values (Graph 2). In 2018, the value of coal exports was $67 billion, equivalent to 3½ per cent of nominal GDP. Australia's coal exports consist of different grades of black coal: metallurgical coal, which has a relatively high energy content and is used for industrial purposes (primarily steel making); and lower-energy content thermal coal used for electricity generation.
https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2019/sep/the-ch...
The two have very different cost structures, but until recently it wasn't cheaper. It's just necessary if Australia doesn't want to get any hotter.
Australia could stop emitting CO2 tomorrow and it’d have approximately no impact.
It turns out one of the main reasons for these price rises has price gouging by the newly privatized energy companies.
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/accc-overspending-on-pole...
Basically these energy companies have been screwing their customers for decades and successive governments have been letting them get away with it.
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Australian_think_tanks...
Something something law of unintended consequences...
To compound the shame of it, all the money spent on the 'poles and wires' initiative did nothing to contribute to the grid's ability to cope with the influx of power from the volume of rooftop solar installations, and so all that investment has just smeared problems around, and now there's a whole lot more planning and likely investment necessary to migrate to a rooftop solar heavy grid. Maybe that's all part of the plan (I don't believe that - never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence).
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/what-the-us-can...
https://www.csiro.au/en/news/news-releases/2021/australia-in...
https://theconversation.com/australia-is-the-runaway-global-...
Governments should increase taxes on oil and coal (and electricity generated from oil and coal). That's the only way to speed up adoption of other energy sources.
The income from this tax could be used to build wind and solar power, energy research or paid back as incentives to people installing solar panels.
This story from 2014 [0] describes a sequence of events that could, if you were feeling sanguine, be attributed to generic incompetence, even if they smell more like congenital corruption.
In any case, AU citizens pay a bucketload for power, way more than it costs to generate (domestically).
Combine that with active disincentives at the large-scale (to develop sensible power generation / storage systems) and small-scale (witness the recent regularly change [1] to allow primarily fossil-fuel based power companies to charge residential solar subscribers a fee to feed-in power).
[0] https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/july/1404136800/jes...
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-12/power-companies-to-ch...
Looking at OpenNEM, coal peaked in 2007 at 84.9% of all power generated (averaged per month), and in July was 63.4% (record low was October 2020 with 62.5%). Gas looks to have peaked in Jan 2014 with 13%. Recent peak was June with 10.4% and record low was February with 4.6%. Renewables are now 29% over the last month, up from around 6% in 2008. Still a long way to go!
I’m not opposed to nuclear in principal but without some kind of huge advance, the economics and time frames don’t really stack up…