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I'd suggest nuclear but the scene above would be the result if Gillard tried to organise that.
Labor's carbon tax lie
- Thread starter drsmith
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I'd suggest nuclear but the scene above would be the result if Gillard tried to organise that.
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Your mob hates coal seam gas as much as they hate coal, and dams for hydro. As for geothermal, wave & solar thermal, I'm afraid you are delusional.:screwy:
Julia
In Memoriam
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Surely Rumpole doesn't believe Australia can generate sufficient baseload power to just depend on the above, doing away with coal fired generation?
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Sigh - left leaning souls seem to have trouble with reality.
Not immediately of course you don't switch power stations on and off like lights, but you start now so that eventually you don't need coal.
A few of these for instance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_cycle
But whatever we build, the money has to come from somewhere. Current infrastructure is getting rundown, and unless its replaced power prices are going up no matter who is in government.
Sigh, so do Right leaning souls. You probably thought the private sector would build our power stations. Where are they ?
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Front page of the Mercury, the main newspaper here in Hobart.
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And what a great policy it is. Clouds of wood smoke billowing from every household, just as we had 20 years ago prior to the big shift to electric heat.
Yep, those were the days. The days when the "clean" air in Tassie was up to 5 times over the national standard for particulates and considered unsafe to breath, with 96% of all pollution coming from domestic wood heaters.
One spanner in the works however is the crisis in the timber industry which, if enough people want it, could make firewood hard to get. Not to worry though, we can always do what a large commercial laundry here has been forced to do, which is to fire the (previously waste sawdust fuelled) boiler with coal. Yep, that's just great. Clouds of black smoke billowing into the air, coal used instead of waste, and someone else will be producing the sawn timber instead. Hmm... I can't quite get my mind around this "green" logic...
It was Labor and their conservationist mates who gave us the woodsmoke problem the first time around, and now they're set to do it once again. Great. Just great...
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Rising gas prices are a big part of the problem...
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To be fair on the CO2 tax issue, much of what people are complaining about here (prices up, investment down) is a direct consequence of the National Electricity Market itself.
We had the 3rd cheapest electricity in the developed world, beaten only by places with lots of cheap hydro. Then some clown decided to embark on something known at the time as "microeconomic reform" and turned the operation of the grid into a forced market.
The great problem is best explained as this. Ask an economist what happens to prices when demand goes down and they will say "easy, demand goes down = price goes down, economics 101 there".
Now go and ask the same question to anyone with an understanding of the power industry and they will explain quite clearly that if demand goes down then prices necessarily go up since that is the reality of utility industry economics and always has been. The industry absolutely depends on scale in order to be viable, such that multiple suppliers "competing" is guaranteed to push prices up rather than down.
Note that in this context, the states of WA, SA and Tas aren't really big enough for one power company to be viable unless it has some natural advantage in its favour. Hence WA and SA historically had higher prices for this very reason, with Tas bailed out only by the natural advantage of hydro.
Elsewhere, Vic and Qld are really only just big enough to each support one company. NSW is a bit bigger, but not big enough for two to be viable. Put the whole country into one and it's still hard to see how more than 2 electricity companies could be viable as we just don't have the scale.
The various state electricity authorities understood this almost 100 years ago, indeed that is the very reason why they were created in the first place. The need to aggregate all loads into a single entity in order to achieve economies of scale.
The whole concept of a "competitive" electricity market in a place like Australia borders on absurd. We're just not big enough to achieve the required economies of scale to make it viable.
Argue all you like about the inefficiencies of state-run enterprise, but the reality is that we're paying more now than we ever did with the old SECV, ETSA, HEC, SEQEB etc.
We had the 3rd cheapest electricity in the developed world, beaten only by places with lots of cheap hydro. Then some clown decided to embark on something known at the time as "microeconomic reform" and turned the operation of the grid into a forced market.
The great problem is best explained as this. Ask an economist what happens to prices when demand goes down and they will say "easy, demand goes down = price goes down, economics 101 there".
Now go and ask the same question to anyone with an understanding of the power industry and they will explain quite clearly that if demand goes down then prices necessarily go up since that is the reality of utility industry economics and always has been. The industry absolutely depends on scale in order to be viable, such that multiple suppliers "competing" is guaranteed to push prices up rather than down.
Note that in this context, the states of WA, SA and Tas aren't really big enough for one power company to be viable unless it has some natural advantage in its favour. Hence WA and SA historically had higher prices for this very reason, with Tas bailed out only by the natural advantage of hydro.
Elsewhere, Vic and Qld are really only just big enough to each support one company. NSW is a bit bigger, but not big enough for two to be viable. Put the whole country into one and it's still hard to see how more than 2 electricity companies could be viable as we just don't have the scale.
The various state electricity authorities understood this almost 100 years ago, indeed that is the very reason why they were created in the first place. The need to aggregate all loads into a single entity in order to achieve economies of scale.
The whole concept of a "competitive" electricity market in a place like Australia borders on absurd. We're just not big enough to achieve the required economies of scale to make it viable.
Argue all you like about the inefficiencies of state-run enterprise, but the reality is that we're paying more now than we ever did with the old SECV, ETSA, HEC, SEQEB etc.
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Where did you get the strange notion that the Carbon Tax would be used for power generation infrastructure?
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Thats right, we all know it's to make up for some of the outrageous waste of Labor.
http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/fu.../9764441/2b-from-carbon-tax-for-clean-energy/
Carbon tax totalling $2 billion a year will be put into a renewable energy fund to drive a 17-fold increase in Australia's use of clean power, in a key Gillard Government concession to the Greens.
The West Australian understands the fund will be managed by an independent commission and provide seed funding for solar, wind and other clean energy projects.
But proponents of clean energy generation projects part-funded by the scheme would be expected to repay the investment over time, once the project becomes commercially viable.
The renewable energy fund has been one of the Greens' key demands in climate change negotiations which are nearing conclusion ahead of an announcement within a week.
In tandem with greater emphasis on renewable energy, the multi-party climate change committee is believed to have agreed on offering financial incentives for the nation's dirtiest coal-fired power stations to close or switch to gas.
Three brown coal power stations in Victoria - Hazelwood, Yallourn and Loy Yang - and South Australia's Playford B power station will be the top targets for early closure or retrofitting to gas-fired.
It is also understood the committee has agreed to a starting carbon price that is much closer to $20 than $30 in an acknowledgment that a "soft start" is crucial for the Government. Treasurer Wayne Swan yesterday revealed that renewable energy sources, excluding hydro electricity, would comprise 40 per cent of Australia's energy mix by 2050, up 1700 per cent. This would translate to a 60 per cent cut in emissions from the electricity sector, on current levels.
The renewable energy investment fund would operate independently of government, along the same lines as the Future Fund.
Industry estimates suggest that for every $1 of government money, $2 to $4 could be leveraged from the private sector, with the cash vital to help underwrite investor risk before projects make a profit.
The Government's top climate adviser Ross Garnaut recommended between $2 billion and $3 billion revenue to be spent on renewables, while the Australian Conservation Foundation has been pushing for a stand-alone $2 billion a year financing corporation that would help companies get new projects off the ground and boost energy efficiency measures.
ACF climate change campaigner Claire Maries said at least $100 billion was needed over the next decade for clean energy projects but any funding must be limited to real renewable energy sources, such as solar, wave and geothermal.
The Greens have resisted allowing carbon capture and storage projects being eligible for funding under the scheme.
The Clean Energy Council's Kane Thornton said use of carbon price revenue would "kick-start a range of emerging early stage renewable technologies".
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I hope all goes tp plan because I don't think Abbotts plan of reversing it will be possible by the time he gets the chance to do so.
I've always felt that we should clean up our act, rivers, waste in general, but his is huge and the science is debatable, not to mention we are a grain of sand in the scheme of things globally but our poorest will bear the brunt of the cost of this policy based on theory.
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If we had done this some years ago then we would already have run out of gas in Bass Strait.
Worth noting also that conservationists vigorously campaigned against the Newport D power station in the 1970's largely on the point that it was to squander a precious resource (gas) when far more plentiful coal could be used instead.
Newport D, as originally proposed, was to be 1000 MW although only half was ever built. On the other hand, Loy Yang A, Loy Yang B, Hazelwood and Yallourn W between them are about 6350 MW between them. There goes the gas...
With the oil situation as it is, what are we going to use for transport fuel in the future if we burn all the gas to generate electricity (and export the rest?)? This is a blunder of monumental proportions - wait 20 years (or less) and we'll be building facilities to turn brown coal into gas and petrol with all the pollution that entails.
Meanwhile, there are proposals at various stages to export coal from Tas (which presently does not export coal), SA (likewise) and Vic (if they can work out how to economically dry brown coal in order to ship it). In the case of Vic, that will almost certainly end up being coal from Morwell (Hazelwood), Yallourn and Loy Yang mines.
The end result of all that is that emissions go up rather than down. The coal still gets burnt (in another country with the added environmental impact of shipping) plus we burn a huge amount of gas as well. That's an increase in emissions, not a decrease.
wayneL
VIVA LA LIBERTAD, CARAJO!
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Ideology meets the real world on ASF.
Fantastic factual posts there Smurf, as per usual.
Fantastic factual posts there Smurf, as per usual.
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Bob Brown and Christine Milne's $10 billion pie in the sky clean energy scheme, which they extorted from Julia Gillard for their support, will whittle away the money on fanciful projects that are dear to their hearts, in the same way as the BER.
What they won't do is prevent your power bills from soaring in your life time. It will be a cold day in hell before renewables will provide affordable electricity.
Knobby22
Mmmmmm 2nd breakfast
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Rumpole, Smurf made this point a while back. It is a good one.
The tax isn't going to achieve what the Green's hope. We need a different approach. My view is that we should be changing our economy to be more efficient and especially developing technologies and not continually selling out to China (solar cells) and Germany (gas fuel cells) as two examples.
The trouble with the tax is that it is too expensive to implement and too blunt.
I don't think under Gillard we would have gone this route if her hand wasn't forced but we have it now. I think there will be another direction, but it won't be Australia leading the way.
The tax isn't going to achieve what the Green's hope. We need a different approach. My view is that we should be changing our economy to be more efficient and especially developing technologies and not continually selling out to China (solar cells) and Germany (gas fuel cells) as two examples.
The trouble with the tax is that it is too expensive to implement and too blunt.
I don't think under Gillard we would have gone this route if her hand wasn't forced but we have it now. I think there will be another direction, but it won't be Australia leading the way.
