Australian (ASX) Stock Market Forum

Resisting Climate Hysteria

Jump to new
Nuclear anyone?

Our future choice of electricity mix will have a significant impact on the Australian economy. Greenhouse gas abatement cost, health damage from burning fossil fuels, electricity cost and the capital investment needed can all have economic consequences. With politicians like federal energy minister Gary Gray supporting a nuclear debate, now is the time to consider the financial implications of using nuclear power.

In late 2012, two government agencies produced models of Australia’s future electricity generation mix out to 2050. DRET released the Energy White Paper (2012) and CSIRO released eFuture. The EWP reflected current government policy and did not include nuclear power, while the CSIRO web-based modelling tool had provision to include nuclear.

The features of these models, and the scenarios from which they are drawn, made it possible to assess their respective impacts on the economy out to 2050 and hence to determine the specific impact of including nuclear energy in the mix.
Click to expand...

http://www.businessspectator.com.au...s/how-nuclear-would-impact-australian-economy

http://australianmap.net/ Check out the capacity we have to generate clean electricity into the future.

http://australianmap.net/kojarena-echelon-base/ to see HOW we listened in on SBY purple circle phones. Shhhhhh they are listening right now !
 
Eh?????????????????????????????

http://www.news.com.au/world/seven-...s-running-out-of/story-fndir2ev-1226777125170

This one might not upset you that much, but for lovers of canned fish, Armageddon is just around the corner. It could soon be very difficult to find a can of sardines on our supermarket shelves.
Sardine populations tend to fluctuate according to water temperature - they require warm waters to breed. But heavy fishing and the cooling of sea temperatures has led to a sardine shortage.
A Canadian fleet of sardine-hunting ships recently returned with empty nets - that's $US32 million worth of potential sales down the drain.
And both the US and Canada haven't done enough to decrease their fishing quotas to sustain the dwindling populations.
We could be in store for several sardine-free decades if sea temperatures don't return to the optimal level required for our salty sea friends.
Click to expand...

Bolds mine
 
ghotib said:
Nope. The North East Pacific is in the cool (negative) phase of a multi-year pattern called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which is a bit like, and also partly related to, ENSO.

Climatologists and oceanographers have terabytes of empirical data on ocean temperatures. Eh Wayne?

Chrs,

Ghoti

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3306684/
Click to expand...


Yeah, missing heat an' all that... must be hiding at the bottom of the ocean. Eh Ghoti?
 
WHAT THE HELL?? I thought we were getting hotter and not colder?

NEWLY analysed data from east Antarctica suggests the remote region has set a record low temperature.

The record is minus 94.7C.

A new look at NASA satellite data says the earth has set a new record for lowest temperature recorded.

It happened in August 2010 when it hit minus 94.7C.

Then on July 31 of this year, it came close again: minus 92.9C.

The old record had been minus 89.2C.

US ice scientist Ted Scambos at the National Snow and Ice Data Center announced the cold facts at the American Geophysical Union scientific meeting in San Francisco on Monday.
Click to expand...

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/ne...rd-of-minus-947c/story-fni0xqlk-1226779678913
 
It has been explained many times that with global warming we have increased evaporation and cloud cover. This makes some areas colder than before. It increases both the hot and cold ends of the scale. Hence the increase in winds and storms that we are experiencing. And of course some new records in cold.

However i do get a laugh out of those on here laughing. :)
 
explod said:
It has been explained many times that with global warming we have increased evaporation and cloud cover. This makes some areas colder than before. It increases both the hot and cold ends of the scale. Hence the increase in winds and storms that we are experiencing. And of course some new records in cold.
Click to expand...

Plod. you might need to go and check up on the empirical science, you are almost entirely incorrect in this post. :rolleyes:
 
wayneL said:
Plod. you might need to go and check up on the empirical science, you are almost entirely incorrect in this post. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Actually Wayne you are totally incorrect with your assertion.
Your welcome to provide evidence to back up your claim.
 
overhang said:
I have driven past wind farms many times that have all turbines off, is this because at this time the grid is at capacity? Seems quite a waste to have the turbines sitting idle while coal is feeding the demand but I guess coal isn't too easy to just throttle back?
Click to expand...
There are basically 4 reasons why a wind turbine is idle.

1. Breakdown or maintenance either of the individual turbine, or of the electrical infrastructure (transformers, transmission lines etc). The latter will affect the entire wind farm or a large part of it, since multiple turbines are connected to common underground cables leading back to a very small number of control equipment, transformers and transmission lines. For example, the recently completed Musselroe wind farm (Tas) has 56 turbines with the entire output fed into the grid along a single transmission line. Whilst transmission lines are reliable, they are available for use 99%+ of the time typically, if it does need to be shut down for repairs or maintenance then that would force the entire wind farm offline.

Why not build a second line? Simply cost. For the less than 1% of the time it would be of any benefit, there's just no point economically in doing it given that it's not critical to power system integrity (that is, wind farms are intermittent sources of energy anyway, so having one offline due to a transmission fault is no different to a situation of no wind).

2. Lack of wind. There's a minimum wind speed below which the turbines can't produce any useful power. In this instance, they'll simply sit idle.

3. Congestion on the transmission network. It's not a major factor in the operation of current wind farms, but typically what happens with building one is that you build the wind farm and a new transmission line connecting to the nearest existing line capable of reasonably handling the output of the wind farm. Since that existing line was built for other purposes (either to supply a load or to connect some other power station), it may not always have adequate capacity.

Transmission line capacity is not itself constant, and varies with temperature, solar exposure and wind speed - the basic issue being temperature of the line itself as well as system stability considerations in operation (basically that means what happens if it fails suddenly - there are limits on power flows on individual lines to avoid a situation where a single fault takes down the entire grid due to flow-on stability effects).

Lines get hot when in use and will physically sag quite significantly if allowed to heat up too much. Sag presents an obvious danger if it gets too bad - worst case you end up with someone walking under the line and being electrocuted due to insufficient clearance (you don't actually need to touch the line to find yourself being blown up, simply getting reasonably close will result in an electrical arc from the line to ground via the person, vehicle, tree or whatever else is forming the path).

Lines can be upgraded or you can build a new line either in addition to, or as a replacement for, the existing one. But it comes down to economics. If you build a 200 MW wind farm and the existing line will be able to take the full 200 MW 95% of the time, then it's just not worth worrying about the few occasions when (1) the line can't take all 200 MW and (2) there's enough wind to actually produce that amount of power. In practice you won't lose 5%, it will be less than 1% in an example like that since rarely would you have both maximum wind generation and insufficient line capacity at the same time. So it's sensible economically to just take the occasional small loss and not worry about it.

4. The other reason a wind farm may be idle is too much wind. The turbines do have a maximum wind speed, above which (depending on specific design) they are shut down.

Design of them is basically a compromise. Build it for high winds and it won't work when there's less wind. Build it for low winds and that costs a fortune and causes problems in high winds. So it's a compromise to maximise power output from the wind available at a particular site.

There's a film of the Musselroe Wind Farm construction here for anyone who is interested which does show most of what's involved, including building the transmission line (which is built on large steel poles rather than towers in this case). This is the official Hydro Tas public video of this project so it's a bit corporate but all in layman's terms. Note that it's 21 minutes long.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZxeQeJ4jW-4
 
burglar said:
Port Augusta PS burns sh!tty brown coal from Leigh Creek.
It was to be shut down under K Rudd's Climate Change policy.
Julia Gillard was unable to close it down. (though I don't know why?)

National Power built a pretty little PS at Pelican Point in 1999.
It burns gas from Moomba in the Cooper Basin.
That's fine you say!
But the gas they were allocated was taken away from Adelaide Brighton Cement.
They, in turn, have been burning sh!tty alternatives to gas.
If you ring and ask, they are burning clean,
but nearby residents claim they sometimes choke on acrid smoke..........
Click to expand...

It's a bit more complex....

SA (and practically all electricity systems, only exceptions being predominantly hydro systems (eg Tas or NZ) which are constrained by water inflows - that is, constrained by total energy output over a given period not by peak production rates) is capacity constrained. So if the Port Augusta plant doesn't operate then, on a hot day at least, some other source of firm supply is needed. And that firm supply, since it must be available, would realistically be coal, oil or gas.

So closing Port Augusta would simply have lead to building another fossil fuel power station to replace it. Solar could do the job, but realistically on that scale it would have been fossil fuel more likely at this point in time.

SA, unlike most Australian states, has a long running issue with the supply of primary energy (fuel) to operate power stations. That is, the gas in the Cooper Basin is a very limited resource based on conventional production techniques (shale gas in the region could unlock more reserves, but "conventional" reserves are substantially depleted already).

That has long been an issue, indeed 35 years ago the last two units at Torrens Island (Adelaide metro area) were designed with future conversion to coal firing in mind for this specific reason. It didn't go ahead, the plant burns gas and can also burn oil, but the boilers were sized to suit future use of coal (realistically it was assumed that this would be coal shipped in from somewhere else, most likely from NSW).

Instead of going ahead with coal at Torrens Island, they built Northern Power Station at Port Augusta instead (commissioned 1985), originally with 500 MW capacity since upgraded slightly to roughly 530 MW. Along with the link to Victoria (1990) they replaced the old (1954) Playford A power station (90 MW) at Port Augusta (closed 1989 after the peak period) and the Osborne B (240MW and dating from the 1940's) plant in Adelaide. Playford A is still physically there at least on the outside (not sure if it's been stripped out internally or not) but Osborne was demolished some years ago. There's a newer plant at Osborne, at the soda plant site, with capacity of 180 MW that was built separately and which burns gas.

The 1960 Playford B (240 MW) plant at Port Augusta remained in service until being mothballed not that long ago. Its' mothballing is basically a response to surplus capacity, the poor economics and physical condition of the plant, the limited coal supply available to it and Northern PS and the carbon tax. In short, it makes more sense to use the very limited economically accessible coal in the more efficient Northern PS rather than using it at Playford B, especially in view of the carbon tax. That said, it's not impossible that Playford B could be returned to service - according to the owners it would take them 10 weeks to get it running. Northern PS is also only operating during the warmer half of the year, when prices are higher, for the duration of the carbon tax - a purely economic decision by the owners.

There is physically still a lot of coal at Leigh Creek (the only coal mine operating in SA) but most of the easily accessible coal has already been mined. Depending on what happens to future electricity prices and carbon pricing, it's entirely possible that most of the remaining coal will be left there and never mined, or that mining will be drastically scaled down with coal stockpiled at Port Augusta to facilitate intermittent operation of the power stations only on high demand days when prices spike high enough to make it profitable. On the other hand, if energy prices are high enough then they could well end up mining the harder to access coal. Or if prices are low enough then they could well decide to abandon it altogether as uneconomic which then raises the question about what replaces the capacity at Northern PS.

Due to the somewhat unique nature of Leigh Creek "coal" (it's not really brown coal as normally defined, although that's what it's usually considered to be, but it certainly doesn't meet any normal definition of black coal either) the boilers at the Port Augusta plants were specifically designed to use it. Converting them to run on some other coal could be done, but it's not as simple as just feeding the coal into the plant and expecting it to work without modifications.

A big issue in SA is the very peaky nature of the load there. On a hot day well over half the total load goes into air-conditioning and refrigeration. On a mild day (ie most of the time) that load simply disappears. Add in that wind supplies a significant amount of the load in SA intermittently, and it leaves a very stop - start type of operation for fossil fuel generation in SA as a whole. Basically, there are quite a few plants in SA that only ever run during a heatwave, and then only if it's also hot in Victoria.

To put it into perspective, here's some actual production data from 2pm (SA time) on Friday afternoon. This is for fossil fuel plants in SA only.

Angaston (50 MW, oil) = idle
Hallet (228 MW, gas) = idle
Dry Creek (156 MW, gas) = idle
Mintaro (90MW, gas) = idle
Playford B (240 MW, coal, mothballed) = idle
Port Lincoln (73.5 MW, oil) = idle
Quarantine (224 MW, gas) = idle
Snuggery (63 MW, oil) = idle

Ladbroke Grove (80 MW, gas) 39 MW
Northern Power Station (530 MW, coal) = 246 MW
Osborne (180 MW, gas) = 184 MW
Pelican Point (478 MW, gas) = 231 MW
Torrens Island (1280 MW, gas) = 120 MW

So overall you have:

Coal = 770 MW capacity of which 530 MW is operational and 240 MW is are mothballed. Actual output was 246 MW, all of which came from a single unit online at Northern Power Station.

Gas = 2716 MW capacity, actual output of 574 MW.

Oil = 187 MW, none of which was operating.

This was just a regular working weekday in SA with mild weather. Demand was 1335 MW, well under half what it gets to on a very hot day, with 820 MW being supplied by SA coal and gas generation. 39 MW came from Victoria, and the rest mostly from wind.

Note that the above figures do not include distributed generation (primarily residential rooftop solar) and that power station capacities are influenced by weather, with the stated capacities based on hot weather conditions which is when it matters. Hence the Osborne plant producing slightly over it's stated capacity as it wasn't a hot day.

So SA has a situation that's very different to elsewhere. A very peaky load, right up there amongst the worst in the world actually, and a limited remaining supply of coal and gas from currently developed resources. Playford B power station is pretty much worn out, and much of the gas-fired generation (eg Torrens Island) isn't exactly new either - it was commissioned 1967 to the early 1980's in 8 stages. Suffice to say that WA and Tas have both scrapped plants of similar age and technology to TI in recent times (Kwinana in WA and Bell Bay in Tas) and NSW and Qld have both scrapped coal-fired plants of similar age. That's not to say TI is worn out, technically it can be kept going for a while yet, but it's a massive plant relative to SA's overall electricity industry and it's getting old.

Carbon issues aside, Qld and NSW can carry on with black coal and, assuming they're willing to pay the likely much higher prices for it, gas for the foreseeable future. They're not running out of coal within the lifetime of a new power station built today.

Arguments about a gas shortage in NSW are basically about price - there's plenty of gas in Qld but it goes to the highest bidder and that's about to be exports overseas not to NSW. But physically, building a gas pipe to Moomba (SA) which already has pipelines to Sydney and Adelaide is technically very straightforward. Likewise you could build a pipeline from offshore gas fields in WA or NT to Moomba. Or just build a pipeline from Qld to somewhere suitable in NSW. Lots of options there - it's an economic question largely. That's assuming that shale gas in the Cooper Basin doesn't produce enough in an economic manner - it may well do so but that remains to be seen on a large scale (but it will still be sold at the export parity price given the option of exporting it is becoming available).

Meanwhile the odds are that it won't stop raining or blowing in Tasmania. The state has always (since the 1890's) relied primarily on hydro for electricity and that's not likely to change. There could be some economic issues associated with the little bit that comes from gas, but the lights in Hobart won't be going out due to any physical resource problem.

Vic and SA are in a very different position however. Both heavily reliant on coal and gas from sources which are relatively limited going forward. They're not running out tomorrow, but there's a definite limit. Both Vic and SA have plenty of coal in undeveloped deposits, massive amounts of it actually, but using it requires an equally massive commitment. Nobody's going to develop a new coal mine and associated power station (and brown coal plants are hugely expensive to build) if there isn't some certainty about running it for 30 years at a minimum. And they're not going to develop baseload gas unless electricity prices are quite a bit higher than they are today given the known future need to pay export parity prices for the gas. So there's a significant question about future energy supplies in both Vic and SA - there are options but it's not clear what's actually going to happen.

You could summarise all this quite simply. Gas is going to get expensive and it's about to happen in the very near future. It's not an option for future baseload electricity generation unless we're prepared to pay significantly higher prices for electricity.

Looking into Smurf's crystal ball, there will end up being a crisis. No sane company is going to build new baseload generation if a change of government makes it uneconomic. There is uncertainty about the CO2 emissions issue. There is uncertainty about support for renewable energy. There is uncertainty about the extent of future shale and especially coal seam gas extraction that will be permitted. There is also a definite possibility that a future government might directly intervene in the wholesale gas market. Or they might not intervene in the gas market. There is also the possibility of a politically-inspired nuclear or "clean coal" plant being built. Or there might not be a nuclear or clean coal plant built with taxpayer funds. Etc - there's just too much uncertainty due to the level of political involvement.

A baseload plant is a fixed investment. You can't easily relocate a coal or combined cycle gas (or a nuclear or hydro) plant once it's built. At best, you can salvage some main components and demolish the rest - but there's a huge financial loss in doing so.

In contrast, a peaking plant can be moved without too much hassle. There's a 300 MW one in Victoria that was relocated from New Zealand and converted from oil to gas firing. There's a 120 MW one in Tasmania that was previously in operation in the USA. The Hallet plant in SA is simply a collection of several gas turbines, each independent of each other, which were previously in operation in Finland, Chile and the Canary Islands. So you can certainly relocate a peaking plant quite easily, indeed the one in Tas actually made a return trip to the US at one point.

Wind also stacks up surprisingly well in this environment. With the ongoing uncertainty, it's a reasonably safe bet that wholesale electricity prices aren't likely to collapse in the near future. A wind farm has a relatively short life (25 years) and the subsidies which make them viable were introduced by a Liberal government and strongly supported by Labor and the Greens. It's not totally without risk, but the risk is low enough relative to returns that wind farms are being built.

So overall, there's a willingness to build wind and to build peaking plants but you'd be crazy, or at least a big gambler, to build new baseload generation. Keep doing that and eventually we end up with a crisis once the existing plants wear out and/or their specific fuel source is depleted. I suspect that we won't see any real policy action until such time as the crisis is clearly in sight (at best) or actually happens (at worst). Then we'll see a panic, the outcome of which will come down to politics.

As for the cement works in Adelaide, I was in Adelaide last week (only came back home on Thursday) and I did notice some smoke coming out of that plant when flying into Adelaide. I wasn't consciously looking for it, just noticed the smoke then tried to figure out where it was coming from (thinking initially that it was one of the nearby power stations) but it looked to be the cement plant. I don't know a huge amount about that operation, although I know that they do burn waste carbon dust from the aluminium industry and also timber in the cement kilns as well as gas. The carbon dust should burn cleanly, it's just carbon, but the timber could produce some nasty fumes depending on combustion efficiency.

There's a big cement works here in Tas that burns only coal, to the point that they also own the coal mines and they use roughly half of all coal in Tas in that plant. I haven't spent much time nearby, but I've never noticed anything that could be considered objectionable in terms of emissions. The coal mined in Tas is low grade black coal, all of which is used in manufacturing industry since there are no coal-fired power stations in Tas.
 
wayneL said:
Ref. Pielke Jnr et al, inter alia.
Click to expand...

Details please Wayne. Evidence to show that in fact we don't have significant global warming and that temperatures around the world arn't increasing at rates that havn't been seen for tens of thousands of years.
 
basilio said:
Details please Wayne. Evidence to show that in fact we don't have significant global warming and that temperatures around the world arn't increasing at rates that havn't been seen for tens of thousands of years.
Click to expand...

That wasn't the question though was is basilio. Plod made two erroneous points

1/ that extreme weather is increasing.

2/ that cold events are evidence of global warming, vis a vis, confusing feedback mechanisms.

1/ is categorically incorrect as shown by Roger

2/ cannot be stated in such simplistic terms.

... From the husband couch, cites later including new MWP data.
 
Smurf1976 said:
A big issue in SA is the very peaky nature of the load there. On a hot day well over half the total load goes into air-conditioning and refrigeration. On a mild day (ie most of the time) that load simply disappears. Add in that wind supplies a significant amount of the load in SA intermittently, and it leaves a very stop - start type of operation for fossil fuel generation in SA as a whole. Basically, there are quite a few plants in SA that only ever run during a heatwave, and then only if it's also hot in Victoria.

To put it into perspective, here's some actual production data from 2pm (SA time) on Friday afternoon. This is for fossil fuel plants in SA only......
Click to expand...
Things will look a lot different this Thursday to how they were just 6 days earlier. Forecast is for 40 degrees in both Adelaide and Melbourne, 36 in Hobart and 34 in Canberra.

The hot weather is of no major consequence (electrically) in Tas since 60% of Tassie homes don't have air-conditioning but it's the key driver of the power industry in SA and Vic that's for sure.

That'll get a few more generating units online in SA, if only for a day or so. Assuming the hot weather actually happens, I'll post production data for the peak period. :)
 
Smurf1976 said:
Things will look a lot different this Thursday to how they were just 6 days earlier. Forecast is for 40 degrees in both Adelaide and Melbourne, 36 in Hobart and 34 in Canberra.

The hot weather is of no major consequence (electrically) in Tas since 60% of Tassie homes don't have air-conditioning but it's the key driver of the power industry in SA and Vic that's for sure.

That'll get a few more generating units online in SA, if only for a day or so. Assuming the hot weather actually happens, I'll post production data for the peak period. :)
Click to expand...

We usually use gas for heating and cooking but after last summer here in Hobart we put in a 7.5 kw ac downstairs and a 5 kw ac upstairs . They will running on full bore in the next few days for sure , hope the grid can handle it . :)
 
wayneL said:
That wasn't the question though was is basilio. Plod made two erroneous points

1/ that extreme weather is increasing.

2/ that cold events are evidence of global warming, vis a vis, confusing feedback mechanisms.

1/ is categorically incorrect as shown by Roger

2/ cannot be stated in such simplistic terms.

... From the husband couch, cites later including new MWP data.
Click to expand...

Erroneous in your view Champ, we are all entitled to that.

There are the scientists, the governments and then; general consensus. The latter group makes for healthy discussions such as this one.

Very strange cold wind from the east here this morning. More mushrooms on the village green too. Most people one runs into, (an elderly population here, mostly off farms) are saying, "this weather is very strange"

Just some, (have quoted many other in the past) anecdotal indicators of course, that we may be (I said "may be" Wayne) ON THE WRONG PATHWAY.

Notice Coal is becoming a bit expensive too. Will economics force the hand of the standover monetary powers to now embrace alternative cleaner energy. We have always been very innovative as engineers in Australia. Working on alternatives could be a wonderful way out for our loss of the car industry. Production of food is going to be a very big one too, and one could go on.....

With the festive cheers flowing it would be a great time for you to join us wayneL. Do you go out walking Champ? Apart from the exercise it is wonderful watching nature (what is left of it of course) and discussing it with others who one meets taking it all in too.

So instead of going crook all the time lets have a think about what we can do to make the world better for everyone.
 

Similar threads

ducati916
August 2024 DDD
2 3 4
Replies
75
Views
19K
ducati916
ducati916
ducati916
February 2025
2
Replies
29
Views
2K
ducati916
ducati916
divs4ever
ZYAU - S&P/ASX 300 High Yield Plus ETF
Replies
0
Views
1K
divs4ever
divs4ever
basilio
How do we deal with bushfires in a warming climate?
8 9 10
Replies
199
Views
11K
basilio
basilio
kahuna1
All trading needs to cease for 14 days prior to Monday open in Sydney
2 3 4
Replies
75
Views
11K
divs4ever
divs4ever
Top