That's interesting when you think about, the car manufacturing, the coal generating plant, petrol refineries etc being closed and the renewables that have been installed both roof top and large scale.
www.reuters.com
Yes, I need to look into it further, but just in W.A, there seems to have been a lot of closures of heavy plant and a lot of new renewable plant been put in, so it would be interesting to find out where they get their figures from.Haven't got it at hand but Labours carbon tax ironically did most of the other heavy lifting that Morrison keeps claiming how we are ahead of everyone else saying he wont use tax as a method.
We will be OK as Barnaby is going to build a nuclear power station.
It is possible with renewables, but you need a hell of a lot of it, rule of thumb that I've heard is.
Very true IFocus, as I said IMO it will become self resolving, at the moment renewables are a mile ahead of second place on all metrics.
Comes down to what the objective is.
Our renewables market is immature and planning remains fragmented as State agendas override any sense of a national context.Comes down to what the objective is.
Neither Europe nor the USA are presently planning to go fully renewable. They're planning to go more renewable but they're not doing it so that it scales to 100%.
Hence the massive new investment in natural gas supply to Europe, the ramping up of gas in the US and so on. Nord Stream 2, with the capacity to supply an additional 55 billion cubic metres of gas annually, isn't being built without confidence that the future involves more gas not less.
Where the likes of Snowy 2.0 comes in is if, hypothetically, we wanted to go 100% renewable.
Here's a full year's worth of wind and solar generation for Victoria:
View attachment 128886
Look closely at the winter months and note that, assuming a shift from fossil fuels to electricity for heating, that's the time when consumption will be highest.
Doing that without bulk storage in some form, storage that can be discharged on multiple consecutive days without recharging, and some serious interstate transmission capacity is hugely problematic. Not impossible but it would take massive overbuilding to get those very low days' production up to match demand, noting that demand is set to rise not fall as the direct use of fossil fuels shifts to electricity.
What happened there at the beginning of July isn't a freak occurrence, there's been at least one equivalent scenario each year for as long as we've had significant wind and solar in the grid so it's likely to keep happening. For that matter look closely at June this year, or late April 2021, October 2020 or August 2020 and it's much the same. Multiple consecutive days of very poor wind and solar yield.
The EU and USA solution to that problem is to burn natural gas. That being Russian natural gas in the EU's case hence the politics with the US around it.
Those advocating Snowy 2.0 and similar projects are essentially advocating the use of stored renewable energy to fill those gaps rather than using gas.
Personally I'm firmly in the latter camp that going fully renewable is what we ought to be doing but I'm also well aware it won't actually happen, at least not within my lifetime. In practice it looks like we'll build as much bulk storage as the political process can deliver and fill the rest with open cycle gas turbines and perhaps a few large internal combustion plants running on a mix of local natural gas, imported LNG and diesel.
That's what the private players with $ billions are backing and realistically they're not likely to blow their money, gas isn't going away anytime soon.
My own view for the record could be summarised as:
Do not build new fossil fuel power generating capacity.
Electrify everything in an orderly manner. Eg I'm not suggesting we ban petrol cars but let's get new ones to be electric ASAP, thus bringing an orderly demise of petrol. Same concept with everything where technology permits the adoption of an electrically powered solution.
Don't put renewable energy infrastructure in places where it's going to harm endangered species or destroy unique environments etc. The principle being to avoid impacts of significance that can't be reversed at a later time.
If the land involved is generic and of no unique value and/or if the impact is readily reversible then quite simply we have to accept that some environmental impact from building renewable energy infrastructure is unavoidable, we can't say no to everything, and just get on and build it for the greater good. If society a century from now needs to dismantle some by then obsolete infrastructure and plant some common trees or grasses on the land in order to return it to natural condition well that's a pretty minor problem for us to be handing them versus cooking the planet.
Acknowledged that others will have different priorities but my own view is firmly that the need to reduce emissions is more important than any other impact if it's reversible. Only if the other impact is irreversible, for example nuclear waste or impacts on endangered species, is there anything to debate in my personal view.
Here you are SP. The polite CC protester who Scomo listens to.
Interesting observation. Do you want to share the analysis/information that leads you to that idea ?
I've done that endlessly, I did one yesterday, I have been explaining why trails with BEV's have to be done etc, but alas to no avail.
www.abc.net.au
An interesting article on clothing, the part that caught my attention other than the mountain of clothes in Africa, was the statistics on clothing.
Meanwhile people march and glue themselves to the floor, well worth a read.
'Dead white man's clothes': The dirty secret behind the world's fashion addiction
For decades, the West's unwanted fashion has made its way to used-clothing markets in Africa. Now it's fuelling an environmental catastrophe.
Since 2000, global production of clothing has doubled.
We’re buying 60 per cent more clothes now than we did 15 years ago.
But we’re only keeping them for half as long.
A major survey in the UK six years ago found one in three young women considered garments “old” if they had been worn just twice.
An estimated 85 per cent of all textiles go to the dump every year, according to the World Economic Forum, enough to fill Sydney Harbour annually.
Globally, that’s the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles being burned or going into landfill every second.
These problems have only accelerated with the advent of so-called “fast fashion” — cheap, low-quality clothes produced quickly to respond to changing trends. Where brands once had two fashion seasons a year, many now produce 52 micro-seasons, flooding the market with new styles.
H&M, Zara and Boohoo are among those brands rolling out new fashion lines within days. Boohoo, for example, has more than 36,000 products available at any one time. Three years ago, the company was castigated in the British Parliament for selling five-pound items of such low quality that charity shops were unwilling to resell them.
With factories incentivised to maintain around-the-clock operations, the world’s major fashion houses factor into their budgets huge waste margins. In 2018, Burberry attracted a storm of criticism when it revealed it had destroyed $50 million of stock. The same year, H&M reported an unsold global inventory worth more than $5 billion.
Equally, she believes consumers are “somewhat complicit”. “We have decided that convenience is a human right and we think that when we go shopping we should always be able to find exactly what we want,” she said. “We should find it in our size and the colour that we want. That also contributes to this overproduction.”
Australia, with clothing retail sales in 2020 of about $22 billion, may not have the economic scale of the US or the UK, where combined the industry turned over $468 billion in the same period. But on a per capita basis, Australia is the highest consumer of textiles anywhere in the world outside of the US.
When these clothes fall out of favour with their owners, the vast majority of them end up in landfill. Only 7 per cent of clothes sold in Australia are classified as recycled. But it’s a dubious classification — watching the Kantamanto Market clean-up at days’ end gives its lie.
That is the issue, we can reduce our personal footprint hugely, which in turn reduces our emissions.
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