I want you to look at this quite simple diagram, but don’t allow its simplicity to fool you, because it most effectively tells us everything we need to know about actual electrical power consumption. Sometimes because of the perceived simplicity of a diagram, it is often discarded as not being particularly useful in telling us anything, but once you realise what it is actually ‘saying’, it then becomes one of the most important things to look at when discussing electrical power, and because of its perceived simplicity, and with nothing to explain it to lay people, then it has been an easy thing for those people discount or to ignore it completely.

The chart shows the Load Curve for actual electrical power consumption.  Note how simple it is with virtually no information at all on it.  The X axis shows time from midnight through the day and back to Midnight.  The Y Axis is blank, and it is left blank for a purpose, and I’ll explain that.

This diagram is the same for large cities, Sydney, Melbourne, for smaller cities, and even smaller towns, and rural areas.

Scaled up, it is the same across a whole grid for an area being supplied by many power plants.

Scaled up again, it is the same for States, NSW, Queensland, etcetera.

Scaled up even further it is the same for Countries, in fact any Country in the Western World that has a constant and regulated power supply for every use.

Now that’s why the Y axis is left blank because actual total power requirements have different  totals for each of those areas.

It is, however, an indicator as to the total power consumption in those areas with the top of the chart being 100%, or the total maximum power that can be generated.

 Note how there are two curves, one for Summer Power Consumption (orange) and one for Winter power consumption, (blue) and again, I’ll explain that in a second Post.

Now note the dark line across the diagram. That’s at about 60%, and that’s about the only thing that does vary, but only by a few percentage points, usually on the up side, and can be as high as 65%.

Let’s look at the area below that line first.

Notice how the only time electrical power consumption falls below that dark line is for around an hour or so at about 4 AM, when nearly everybody is safely tucked away in bed.  Even then, almost 60% of every Watt of power that could be generated is still being consumed.

That electrical power just has to be there on tap, and for 24 hours of every day, every day.

Where is that power being consumed then?

This brings into play another misconception, that of actual power consumption.

People will more readily equate power consumption with what they personally use, mainly in the residential area, at home.

However, power is consumed in three major areas, with the tiny Transport sector making the fourth, that final 1% of power consumed.

Those sectors are the Residential sector which consumes 38% of all power. Then there is the Commerce sector which consumes 37%, and then the Industrial sector which consumes 24%.

That’s not just the consumption for an isolated area or town or city. It is the same virtually throughout the Western World, everywhere there is a constant and regulated supply of electricity to cater for every need.

The Residential Sector

To save repeating myself, I’ll deal with residential high rise in the Commerce Sector.

The chart is from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and while that date may look to be from a while back now, those segments are still roughly the same, and even while for a U.S. situation, this is basically the same for most residential applications across that Western World where there is a constant and reliable supply of electrical power.

At home, you have large consuming items that are taking power on a 24 hour basis, and as you can see from the pie chart there, almost one quarter of all residential power is consumed by water heating and refrigeration. As you can see from this, household lighting makes up barely 9% of all power consumption at home, and the mantra that changing light bulbs will, as if by magic, lower emissions is quite illusory, as by doing that, all you are saving in reality is just on 1% of your power consumption, and that I can explain that fully in a further Post if you wish, because, as simple as it may sound, it is quite an involved thing to explain correctly.

Again, as is easily seen from this chart, the furphy that Plasmas etc consume vast quantities of power is also misdirection. In that area indicating others are washing machines and dryers, all the electrical white goods used for cooking, etcetera. So, in the residential area, one quarter of all power is required absolutely, hence almost 9% of all power being generated is required on that full 24 hour basis just in this residential sector. (One quarter of that Residential Sector 38%)

The Commerce Sector

This sector also brings into play every level of Government, and that’s not just the operation of those elected officials. It covers every Department of every level of Government.

Think every hospital and health care facility that needs to have their electrical power every hour of every day. Think electric trains that run around the clock. Think motor traffic and the lighting and traffic control measures that also operate on that 24 hour basis.

Now, look at the skyline of any city, of every city, and not just the Capital cities. Look at every building higher than two or three levels, and here, also include those high rise residential living areas as well.

Think of the electricity every one of those buildings require on that 24 hour basis.

Not the lifts, the lighting, the work spaces etcetera, but the water and the air, and the sewerage.

The water has to be pumped from ground level into all those high rises with huge pumps that draw a lot of electrical power.

However, by far the largest consumer of electrical power in any building higher than that two/three levels is for the air. Here, it is often misconstrued as air conditioning, in other words heating and cooling.

In every one of those tall buildings, just walk across to the window and open it up to let in the fresh air for people to breathe. You can=t, because those windows are all sealed, and in most cases, they form part of the structure of those high rise buildings.

People work in those buildings and every one of them requires air to breathe, a constantly circulating supply of fresh breathing air ….. ‘conditioned’ air, and that’s where people have an incorrect perception of it. They look upon it as they do in their home. That conditioner unit supplies cold air inside the home, well, really, it is a unit that sucks the heat and humidity out of that space, and the fan re-circulates the air, giving the impression of cooling.

However, in those high rise buildings, those huge units on the roof are actually supplying a constant source of breathing air into that building, removing the stale air and recirculating new fresh air. The temperature is in nearly every case set to the same for all year round, and in Winter it ‘feels’ warmer, and in Summer, ‘feels’ cooler.

Those units cannot be turned off overnight after the workers go home, because the air inside them must stay fresh. Just turning them on and off is an entirely inefficient way to operate them because the air goes stale, the building heats up or cools, and if turned back on in the morning those compressors would have to run flat out to try and recirculate fresh air into the building, and to get the temperature back to the set level, if that even could be achieved, hence they are left running all the time, as that is how they operate at their best efficiency. The huge compressors that drive those units suck up a huge amount of power, and when you see how many of those high rise buildings there are, you can see that a lot of power is being consumed, and in fact, is needed around the clock as well.

Also in this Commerce sector is every shop, in every town or city. Those major Supermarkets, Coles and Woolies, don’t turn off their food and drink coolers overnight, and even with subdued lighting at night, nearly every shop you can see in every city or town is lit.

So, as you can see, this Commerce sector uses a lot of its power on that 24 hour basis.

The Industry Sector

Even though this sector only consumes 24% of all power being generated, most big industry operates on a 24 hour basis, so most of this sector uses nearly all its power on that 24 hour basis.

If most of the power in the Commerce and Industrial sectors is being consumed on that 24 hour basis, it now becomes easy to see that the absolute requirement for power is quite easily up around that 60 to 65% level.

That is the absolute requirement. This is the Base Load, load being the term used to describe actual physical consumption.

That level of power can only be supplied by plants that can run for 24 hours of every day, and currently those plants are those large coal fired power plants.

Let’s just take one large plant in isolation, say, Eraring in NSW. It has 4 huge 1300 ton generators and has a Nameplate Capacity of nearly 2700MW. It just hums along 24 hours a day all day, every day, supplying its power to the grid. The only carefully planned down time is for routine maintenance, one generator at a time, so as not to remove all its power from the grid at that time.

Let’s then look at a wind equivalent. Each Nacelle atop those huge towers has a 3MW generator inside, that runs, and supplies its full power while ever that 3 bladed fan is rotating. So, here you’ll need 900 of those towers to give the same Nameplate Capacity, and yes, read that again.

900 huge towers, just for that one plant, Eraring.

That’s not the end of it though.

The best those wind towers can deliver their power is at around 33% (claimed by proposers of these schemes), and the current Worldwide average is around 20%, but let’s split the difference and call it 25%.

Hence, those wind towers are only delivering their power for around 6 hours a day, and Eraring will deliver four times the power to the grids that all those wind towers will.

Eraring can deliver power to assist in fulfilling a Base Load requirement, with other large scale plants adding to that delivered from Eraring for the grid in that area.

If 60 to 65% of all power being generated is required on a 24 hour basis, then wind can never deliver this, no matter what, so just blindly claiming that wind power will end up replacing coal fired power is a lie, and there’s just no other way to say it.

That is what Base Load Power is. It’s not an adjective.

It’s a physical requirement.

In the next Post, I’ll explain Peaking Power, and for an early insight look at the Blue line on that Load Curve, and notice the times when it peaks.

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To read more from Tony click and scroll here: http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/author/tony/

The Carbon Price and Coal-Fired Power:  A Note from Tony

We are being told that the introduction of this ‘Carbon Price’ will drive down the emissions of the offending greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide.

When those politicians stand at the podium and tell you this, it indicates only that they have no idea whatsoever of how electrical power is generated.

When I try and explain that what they say is incorrect, that is somehow perceived as my taking a political standpoint by disagreeing with the politics of either the Labor Government who are introducing this, or The Australian Greens Party, who are in fact driving the Labor Government on this matter.

To effectively understand what effect a ‘price on carbon’ will have on coal fired power generation, you need to understand how a coal fired power plant produces its electrical power, and once you can visualise this, then it becomes patently obvious that just placing a price on those emissions will not lower those emissions by any amount whatsoever.

Consider the electrical power that, er, ‘comes out of the hole in the wall’ at your house. It’s a regulated 240 Volts at 50 Hertz, (HZ) or 50 cycles per second, and that second part is what I want you to keep in mind here.

Here comes some pretty basic electrical theory here.

If you pass a wire capable of carrying an electrical current through a magnetic field, a small flow of electrons will occur in that wire. This flow of electrons is the flow of electrical current.
It then stands to reason that if the magnetic field was much larger, that current flow would be larger. The same applies for the wire. If there were a lot of wires, then the current flow would be larger. The same also applies for the speed at which those wires are passed through that magnetic field. The faster they are moved, then that current flow would be larger.

This is how electrical power is generate with a, well, generator, in the most basic of terms.

Let’s then scale it up.

Huge electromagnets are placed around a shaft. They are heavy and are made out of materials that best conduct high magnetic fields, so it’s not just the old iron magnets you remember from school. To further increase this magnetic field, these magnetic ‘cores’ have heavy gauge wire wrapped around them, and a current is then passed through these wires. This then intensifies that magnetic field, a classic electromagnet. To even further enhance that magnetic field, those cores can also be supercooled, as extreme cold also increases and intensifies that magnetic field.
Each wire wound magnetic core can be anything up to 6 feet in length. This ‘core’ is then attached to the shaft. Around that shaft there are numerous of these cores, an even number, (sometimes as many as 16 of them) because the same core directly opposite is the South Pole of the North Pole on the direct opposite side.   These ‘cores’ are arranged around the shaft with respect to their magnetic polar orientation, North South North South etcetera.

Then, along that shaft other assemblies of these cores are placed. This final assembly of all those magnetic cores is called the rotor, and for a large scale generator, this rotor can be up around 80 metres in length.

 
You can see how the weight has become pretty substantial now. A large scale generator can weigh anything up to 1300 tons, and read that again, 1300 tons. That’s around 900 Toyota Land Cruisers.

The rotor, well, rotates.

In the housing around that rotor are wrapped huge amounts of wire arranged so that the rotating magnetic field, induces a current flow in them. This is the stator, and that is where the power that is eventually transmitted is generated.

Back to the rotor.

That immense weight now rotates at high speed inducing the current flow into the stator. That speed is 3,000 RPM, and just consider that for a minute 3,000 RPM. That’s 50 rotations every second, or 50 cycles per second, or 50 Hertz.

Sound familiar?

That’s the electrical power that ‘comes out of the hole in the wall’ at your home.

That 3,000 RPM has to be maintained and maintained exactly. It cannot go up or down from that speed at all, because the electrical power it supplies must be at that exact regulated frequency, 50Hz.

So now, you must drive this 1300 tons at that 3000 RPM. That’s 1300 tons rotating 50 times a second.

Snap your fingers and then snap them again. 1300 tons and 50 rotations.

Consider the generator (really an alternator) in your car. It produces all the electrical power your car needs. It is driven by a fanbelt attached to your car’s engine. The engine drives the generator.

The same applies here.

To drive that huge generator, a huge turbine is needed. This is a multi-stage turbine. It’s sort of similar to a jet engine turbine, with many blades around the shaft, and many rows of blades, and there are three separate stages of many rows of many blades, those rows of blades diminishing in size with the length of each stage.

This huge turbine can be anything up to 300 metres in length.

That huge weight of the generator is added to by the weight of the turbine as well.

To drive that turbine, in this case, the most efficient way is by using high pressure and consequently very high temperature steam.

That steam is ‘generated’ in a huge boiler.

 
The high pressure steam drives stage one. Some of the steam is then diverted straight back to the boiler, and the remainder goes to stage two, where again some is diverted back to the boiler, and the remainder to stage three, and again, some steam is diverted back to the boiler, and the remainder goes to the pond under the huge cooling towers where you see that ‘white stuff’ rising from the top, that being just cooling steam. This is the classic three stage steam turbine.

To generate that immense requirement of steam, a supercritical furnace is required to generate the immense heat required to make that steam.

This furnace uses coal as the fuel.

Crushed coal is fed into the furnace, and here’s where people have no concept of the amounts needed for a large scale coal fired power plant.

On this scale, for around a 2,000 MegaWatt (MW) plant, and they would typically have anything from 2 to 4 generators, some more, depending upon the size of the generator, the amount of power it can produce.

The amount of coal needed for something like this is around 6 million tons per annum, and work that out. It comes to around one ton of crushed coal being burned every five seconds.

Now, each ton of coal produces 2.86 tons of CO2, and that’s not complex science, but basic first year high school science.

Each atom of carbon combines (in the furnace) with two atoms of oxygen (CO2) and oxygen is slightly heavier than carbon, virtually tripling its weight, and as coal is basically all carbon with other elements in it as well, then that multiplier is in fact 2.86.

So, 6 million tons of coal burned each year produces 17.2 million tons of CO2, that direct target of this proposed ‘carbon price’.

The ‘people’ who operate the plant have to buy that steaming coal. That’s at around a cost of $100 per ton, so you can see that their costs just for the fuel are quite high. That price varies.

Hence, they operate the plant as ‘leanly’ as possible with the coal they consume, knowing exactly how much is needed to keep the required amount of steam up to the turbine enough to keep driving that generator at the exact 3000 RPM.

Because of the immense weight, a generator like this cannot easily run up and down in speed, well, it has to remain exactly at that 3000 RPM anyway.

The only time it runs down is for scheduled maintenance, one generator at a time, so the furnaces still need to be fed with coal to keep the others running. Before running it down, that power it provides to the grid is turned off, and then the generator runs down, never completely stopping as that immense weight could bend the shaft, making the generator then inoperable.
When that power is removed from the grid, other plants, mainly natural gas fired plants have to run up to provide the power that has now been removed from the grid.

So, that amount of coal that the plant burns is exactly regulated, because the plant must run at such exact tolerances.

So, when a politician stands at the podium and tells you that placing this ‘price on carbon’ will drive down emissions like those from these coal fired power plants, this shows me specifically that they have no concept whatsoever about how a plant of this nature works.

The plant is either running at its full production or it is not running at all. There is no middle ground. They cannot consume less coal, hence emit less CO2.

 
The introduction of this ‘price on carbon’ in this case is the most blatant grab for money from a target that cannot reduce what it emits, at any time.

Do not allow yourself to be taken in by warm and fluffy statements that this is for the good of the environment, or that imposing this ‘price on carbon’ will drive those emissions down, because it will not.

These politicians seeking to introduce this can only be one of two things.   They are either lying outright, or they are hopelessly misinformed. It has to be one or the other, and either way it proves conclusively that they are misleading the public they represent.

When you understand how a plant of this nature works, then it becomes patently obvious that this is only about one thing.

The money.

This plant must burn 6 million tons of coal to operate at its capacity of delivery of electrical power. That coal consumption produces 17.2 million tons of CO2. This large scale plant, at Ross Garnaut’s figure of $26 per ton, will now see an increase on their bottom line of almost $450 million per year.

They cannot burn less coal.

They either pay that $450 million extra, or stop completely, and if they pay that extra, that will then be passed directly down to consumers.

There are 8 of these large scale plants in Australia, and 15 medium sized plants as well. All of them burn an exact required amount of coal, because the electricity they provide just has to be there.

What I have said here has nothing whatsoever to do with a political point of view.

These are incontrovertible facts, that even when explained like this, they will still be called into question by people with a political agenda. 

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To read more from Tony scroll and click here: http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/author/tony/

With the aid of the Wivenhoe dam capacity diagrams, it is possible to determine that during the recent major drought, Wivenhoe went from 100 percent down to its low point of 15 percent.  That took eight and a half years, and there were no restrictions, and water was always plentiful for every use, be that residential, commercial or industrial use.

The cost of that water at the time was also cheap, in fact, the cost was almost negligible. However, as that low point of 15 percent approached, firstly the Beattie Government, and then the following Bligh Government, started to ramp up the prices and impose progressively more draconian restrictions upon the consumption of that water.

At the same time, the Government also introduced measures and legislation to ‘secure our future water’ with the construction of a ‘water grid’, all this at enormous expense. The Water Minister at the time said that drought was the new norm we would all have to get used to, and that large dams like this would never be full again, adding that we all needed to pull together on this, and that all this expense was imperative if we were to have enough water. 

The cost to consumers for water usage was also ramped up, and here I’m not talking just minor inflationary upward pressures, but with the introduction of considerable increases for the cost of water.

There is a current forward plan for water costings which will be progressively staged in over the next (now) 6 years and at the end of that time water will cost consumers $2.75 per Kilolitre (KL).

Extrapolating that out from what it costs now until then, those costs will average around $2.25 a KL.  The current holdings of all dams in the South East corner water grid amount to 2.3 million Megalitres (ML), half of that alone stored behind a 100 percent full Wivenhoe.  That makes the current worth of that resource to the Queensland Government $5.2 Billion, in today’s dollars. 

It only stands to reason that the best practice for the Government is to have those dams as close to 100 percent as is possible to protect that huge income for the Government.  Anything above that 100 percent is flood mitigation capacity, and must be discharged into the rivers as soon as is practicable after the rain event that fills those flood mitigation compartments of some of those dams. However, any discharges will only take that specific dam level back to the 100 percent, and here you seriously wonder if this is not a Government directive, not to discharge to a point lower than that 100 percent.

With clever management of that water resource and the construction of a vast network of pipelines connecting major dams, then water can be moved from dam to dam to keep those major dams at, or close to 100 percent, which is the water supply total, and the water that is then sold to consumers, that Government resource, in effect, a ‘Tax on God’.

To reduce those major dam levels to a level where they can better mitigate large rain events that might cause flooding then becomes a case of flushing a valuable resource (for the Government) into the river and out into the ocean.

If (as shown by that chart in my previous post) the water in Wivenhoe took eight and a half years to get from 100 percent down to the low point of 15 percent with no restrictions whatsoever, then in the current mindset of the highest level of restrictions on water usage, that 100 percent now will take a lot longer to decay to that low level, even were we to enter another period of prolonged drought, and might even stretch out well beyond 10 years, if there is little, or even no rainfall whatsoever.

That’s not to say that lowering the level of Wivenhoe well down below 100 percent would have helped in this flood, because so much water went through the 5 gates at Wivenhoe, but the intent of the Government is plain to see here.  Keep those levels at or as close as possible to that 100 percent, because it is a source of large amounts of revenue for the Government.

Those water costs are the base price calculated at a rate of 140 litres per person per day.  Any water usage over and above that amount extrapolated out over the year becomes excess water usage and there is a (considerable) extra cost for excess water consumption, no matter who the consumer is, at the residential, commercial and industrial level.

Of that total water resource for the South East corner, half of it is contained behind the wall of Wivenhoe, so that monster dam contains water worth $2.6 Billion for the Government.
Now perhaps you can see why they maintain the level at 100 percent. 

PS  It seems that at SEQ Water Home Page, they have changed the way they explain the amount of water being released from Wivenhoe to now read as follows:
We are currently releasing 90 cubic metres per second through one gate and also using the hydro to release a total of around 100 cubic metres per second downstream for water supply purposes and dropping levels back to Full Supply Level.
 Wivenhoe Dam is currently 101.2%. Twin Bridges is inundated.
Depending on inflows, this flow will continue during this week.
Local Councils have been consulted in relation to the release strategy.

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For Tony’s earlier contributions scroll down here: http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/author/tony/

There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that this monster dam played an absolutely crucial role in preventing what could have been an even worse disaster. I have mentioned earlier that this huge dam held back water that would have made this flood something not worth even contemplating.

Water was flowing into Wivenhoe at a greater rate than could be released with all five spillway gates open at their maximum. At one stage, water was pouring down those spillways at a rate of around 650,000 megalitres per day, and that is what caused the initial flood devastation in Brisbane. Had they not released that water at that rate, there was the very real probability that the flood would have been even more devastating, only a few days later, perhaps right in the middle of those King tides.

That initial huge release was due to the fact that releases of water from an already filled Somerset Dam, (directly upstream, and itself at 175% capacity and rising, and also filling faster than it too could release, and with all its flood mitigation compartments full) were rapidly filling those flood mitigation compartments in Wivenhoe itself.

Wivenhoe was also filling from runoff in its own catchment as well as what it was receiving from Somerset, and at one stage water was flowing into Wivenhoe at a greater rate than what they were releasing at that maximum I mentioned above.

That initial outflow was eased back after 24 hours, and that initial huge release is what caused the flood damage in Brisbane. The release was eased back to a rate of around 215,000 megalitres a day and stayed at that rate for 2 days.

Now that the major flood peak has passed in Brisbane with the advent of the two king tides, that release from Wivenhoe has increased again to around 320,000 megalitres a day. With the river in Brisbane dropping from its major peak, that release will keep the river (relatively) high, but at a controlled level.

Those current releases from Wivenhoe just have to be kept at that level so they can empty the flood mitigation compartments of this monster dam, now sitting at a level around 192% of capacity. Those releases will continue for days until those flood mitigation compartments are empty.

The reason for this is that if there is another major rain event, and there have been some forecasts for a Cyclone that could move back towards the Coast around the Brisbane to NSW border area late next week, then those compartments will have room in them to actually fill again.

If all that water from that earlier rain event of such huge proportions was kept in Wivenhoe, then any subsequent rain event will see Wivenhoe, already topped out at its maximum holding of around 225% totally full, and then Wivenhoe, and its engineers already performing a huge juggling act will have nothing left to do but let monumentally huge amounts of water flow down the river and into Brisbane, causing an unspeakable tragedy of a far greater proportion than it has already caused now, something that is not worth even contemplating.

UPDATE  18TH JANUARY

Now that the inquiry has been called, I suspect that, (and please don’t think of me as a conspiracy theorist) some aspects of that SEQWater website might be removed from public access.

What I am referring to here is not the home page information, or even the dam levels page, but a small part of that latter page that not many people might even refer to.

http://seqwater.com.au/public/dam-levels

If you visit that Dam level page, at the bottom, you’ll see a small interactive chart detailing the current water levels across the whole storage. If you go there, you can navigate around, so there’s no real need for me to explain how to use it.

The default setting shows the tick in the right column set to grid three, but you can add individual dam levels so that the level for that dam overlays the main image of total level.

Tick the square alongside Wivenhoe, and the level for that dam appears on the chart.
Now, untick the default Grid three so only the Wivenhoe level shows there.
Now, scroll your mouse slowly along the line and the levels for each day show up as a percentage.
Get close to where the upwards spike starts and carefully roll the mouse up the spike.
At the bottom is the level for Friday at 106.3%.
No entries for Saturday and Sunday as has always been the case, and I can understand that it’s the weekend and the person tasked with updating the website is away, naturally.
The next reading is for Monday at 148.4%
Then Tuesday 11 Jan (9AM) it is at 175.9%
Wednesday (9AM) it is at 188.5%
Thursday (9AM) it is at 186.5%
Friday (9AM) it is at 179%
Then nothing more until Monday and Tuesday, (today) as levels spike back downwards as those flood mitigation compartments are emptied back out.

The huge rain event in the catchment started Monday PM, and went until Tuesday PM, and I watched it on and off for most of the day on the BOM Mt Stapylton map set to 128Km.

Look at the levels from Friday until Monday, and it rose steeply, and on Tuesday AM was close to its maximum.

The releases obviously started on the Monday, accelerated on the Tuesday to that 645,000 ML rate, and the peak in Brisbane arrived 36 hours later and was then added to by the high tide.

However, it would ‘seem’ (term used very carefully here) that from Friday to Monday, not very much was released, until the levels had become alarmingly high.

For more information:

Link to article on Fed Govt releasing flood maps:
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/features/maps-show-southeast-queensland-climate-change-flooding/story-e6freowx-1225971661224

Link to flood maps. This is local SEQ, and above that there are maps for all major cities in Australia. The maps take you to further maps and you can click on individual areas and get three scanarios for each area. (pdf document maps)
http://www.ozcoasts.org.au/climate/Map_images/SthEastQld/mapLevel2.jsp

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Tony is a Rockhampton-based blogger who mostly writes for a US-based audience.  

To read more from Tony you can find links to main posts and updates here:  http://papundits.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/brisbane-and-queensland-flood-crisis-with-updates/

Learn more about Tony here: 
http://papundits.wordpress.com/views-expressed-by-writers-are-their-own-and-do-not/tonyfromoz/