Solar power in Australia outstrips coal-fired electricity for first time
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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.
https://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://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.
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!
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).
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…
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.
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.