As a bit of background, my reason for posting the above data was due to my post in one of the stock threads (Leigh Creek Energy) where I stated the size of the gas market so as to put the company's recently announced reserves into perspective.
Looking at what I'd posted, my thought was that further explanation of the broader issue was required since it's not intuitive. Someone just reading that post would likely be somewhat doubtful that SA really does use almost as much gas as NSW or that the NT uses about 4 times as much as Tasmania. Those aren't intuitive, considering the population of NSW versus SA or that everyone knows Tas is far colder than the NT.
So I thought I'd just post a lot of data in an easily understandable form and that would prompt some thinking.
I say that with the notion that if I were to ask a hundred random people then I suspect most would be somewhat surprised to find that there is any coal used in SA or Tas at all. Likewise many would be surprised that Vic uses as much gas as NSW, SA and Tas combined. Also many wouldn't associate oil as a resource used to generate electricity.
So what I've done is taken official Australian Government statistics and very slightly simplified them. By that I mean I just grouped all types of coal together and called it "coal" since that's what it is. And if it came from oil (petrol, diesel etc) the I've just called it "oil" to keep it simple. Beyond that minor simplification however I've simply posted government data. Should you wish to see the raw data, it's in the spreadsheets at
www.energy.gov.au which is an Australian Government site.
With regard to renewables being lower than most were expecting, the simple answer there is that the direct use of liquid and gas fuels by end users (homes, industry, etc) is greater than the use of electricity and firewood. That's a constraint on the share of renewables since most renewables produce electricity or are in the form of wood, with minor exceptions they're not generally in the form of liquids or gases.
Looking at electricity as a % of energy supplied to consumers by state:
WA = 15%
NT = 17%
Vic = 17%
Qld = 19%
SA = 20%
NSW = 23%
Tas = 39%
The simple explanation there is that transport accounts for 39.5% of all energy use nationally with over 98% of that supplied by oil. Apart from suburban trains and a few freight lines, electricity isn't in that market to any meaningful extent at the present time. Electric vehicles might be common at some future time but at present they account for a very minor portion of the transport task.
Then consider things like furnaces and boilers in industry (gas, oil, coal), gas cookers and hot water systems, central heating and so on all of which use lots of energy which isn't at present coming from electricity and you start to understand why electricity as a % of the total is far less than you were expecting. Agriculture is another one that uses quite a bit of energy but very little in the form of electricity (it's mostly diesel).
So that's how we have (for example) just over 50% of the electricity in SA coming from renewable sources but only 11% of total energy from that source. It all adds up once you realise that electricity is only 20% of the energy used by end users in SA and a bit of firewood and trivial amounts of ethanol added to petrol (E10 fuel is a niche thing in SA - it exists but most servos don't sell it) accounts for the remainder of the renewables.
Whilst my intent here is to avoid politics and stick to facts, I'll make the observation that if we're going to use a greater share of renewables then there's a limit to how far that can go just replacing other means of generating electricity. We also need to shift more of the energy use to electricity - electric vehicles instead of petrol, fast trains instead of planes between cities (aviation accounts for 19.7% of transport energy use) and so on.
Some of the barriers there are technical, battery powered planes aren't an idea that's ready yet, but some are economic. For example, about half of all the coal used in Tasmania is used at one industrial facility to fire the kilns. That's not generating electricity or even boiling water, it's just coal straight in and burned to produce high grade heat and that's it. The cost of that is around $15 per megawatt hour and there's no way any form of electricity (or gas or oil) comes anywhere near to being competitive hence the coal. And since most of that product is shipped out of the state, they can't simply raise the price unless either their competitors likewise raise production costs or we go down the route of tariffs etc which is a whole debate in itself.
As I said, I've aimed to just stick to facts here not politics - too much politics is the trouble with all this in the first place.