The Australian Government asked the Productivity Commission to undertake a research study into effective carbon prices that result from emissions-reduction policies in Australia and other key economies.
Key findings include:
1. More than 1000 carbon policy measures were identified in the nine countries studied, ranging from (limited) emissions trading schemes to policies that support particular types of abatement technology. ◦As policies have been particularly targeted at electricity generation and road transport emissions, the Commission analysed major measures in these sectors.
2. While these disparate measures cannot be expressed as an equivalent single price on greenhouse gas emissions, all policies impose costs that someone must pay. The Commission has interpreted ‘effective’ carbon prices broadly to mean the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions – the ‘price’ of abatement achieved by particular policies.
3. The Commission’s estimates essentially provide a snapshot of the current cost and cost effectiveness of major carbon policies. ◦The subsidy equivalent, abatement achieved and implicit abatement subsidy have been calculated for policies and aggregated by sector in each country.
4. As a proportion of GDP, Germany was found to have allocated more resources than other countries to abatement policies in the electricity generation sector, followed by the UK, with Australia, China and the US mid-range.
5. Estimates of abatement relative to counterfactual emissions in the electricity generation sector followed a similar ordering, with Germany significantly ahead, followed by the UK, then Australia, the US and China.
6. The estimated cost per unit of abatement achieved varied widely, both across programs within each country and in aggregate across countries. ◦Emissions trading schemes were found to be relatively cost effective, while policies encouraging small-scale renewable generation and biofuels have generated little abatement for substantially higher cost.
7. The relative cost effectiveness of price-based approaches is illustrated for Australia by stylised modelling that suggests that the abatement from existing policies for electricity could have been achieved at a fraction of the cost. ◦However, the estimates cannot be used to determine the appropriate starting price of a broadly-based carbon pricing scheme.
8. The estimated price effects of supply-side policies have generally been modest, other than for electricity in Germany and the UK. ◦Such price uplifts are of some relevance to assessing carbon leakage and competitiveness impacts, but are very preliminary and substantially more information would be required.
More here: http://pc.gov.au/projects/study/carbon-prices/report
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Hi all, Just because Germany and the UK ect. drank the greens koolaid does not mean that we have to. Lets all be brave enough to say NO to anymore waste on this scam. Call an election now.
Cheers
Could be off the subject a bit.
Read somewhere that Germany’s credits are away in front , Because they shut down all the bad stuff in East Germany. We cannot all do that, and they are already falling by the wayside. Aren’t all the Nuc plants shut down there ? Read the numbers in a year or so.
Thanks for the link, Jennifer
So while pondering the productivity commission report and thinking small
http://theland.farmonline.com.au/news/nationalrural/agribusiness-and-general/general/reduced-grazing-saves-carbon/2182133.aspx?storypage=0
and
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/credit-call-for-the-killing-of-camels/story-fn59niix-1226071988565
juxtaposed with the beef herd building up as the live export gates have been shut ….
And of course I think El Gordo is right – the cold snap proves we’re in a ice age with global cooling. Could those 1970s scientists have been right after all?
Luke ,
There is a neat novel- ‘ The Sixth Winter ” written then . Civilisation is a very thin little thing.
All it will take is for one power plant operator to go under and close the plant.
The grid will now have not enough power to fulfill demand, and so that overload does not cascade into failing the other plants one after the other, power rationing will be introduced.
I can’t wait to hear the excuses when that happens, and just watch as fingers get pointed.
Oh wait.
That can’t happen, can it?
Why?
Because Ross Garnaut specifically designed provisions into his recommendations to, as he puts it, ensure the security of delivery of power, and if a power company gets into difficulties those provisions are to provide loans to those failing power companies.
Now perhaps you can visualise how a Tax on Carbon is designed …. not to actually lower emissions, but to support the Tax itself.
Very clever guys these economists.
Tony.
Is a 5 carat flawless teardrop cut priced differently at Tiffany’s then at Sach’s?
More of the results that the IPCC in 1990 failed to predict. It is of course a total fraud.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/09/comparing-ipcc-1990-predictions-with-2011-data/#more-41371
Tony
“Because Ross Garnaut specifically designed provisions into his recommendations to, as he puts it, ensure the security of delivery of power, and if a power company gets into difficulties those provisions are to provide loans to those failing power companies”
This was the point of my earlier comment on Garnaut making things up as he went along
Whose money will provide these loan facilities ?
AGL bought Loy Yang in the early 2000’s for $3.5 Bn. This was a distressed price and only proceeded when, amongst other parameters, the Bracks Govt suspended Competition Law (ACCC) for the duration of the forced sale. Simply extrapolate this figure across the power generators (especially in the eastern States) – even allowing a generous 30% discount on this extrapolation results in a very scary $$$ number
My specific concern here is that such “Garnaut loans” will be mandated through the superannuation funds. ALP players such as Swan are increasingly commenting on superannuation as a source of infrastructure funding. Superannuation savings are of a size now that “progressive” politicians cannot keep their hands off them, irrespective of who is actually supposed to own the money
Tony’s point, that this is an obvious fraud, is now well taken by most of us, though it certainly bears repeating everywhere.
The danger and solution now are surely political. A Federal Labor government under Gillard and the Greens will bungle everything it touches, yet a carbon tax may well give them a war-chest for one more election. Their extortions may well keep pace with their waste for a few years.
So should we not have an almost-exclusive focus on destabilising one or two independents? An election right now would change the entire conversation. I live in the electorate of the Narcissist-in-Chief, Oakeshott. Could Abbott promise him a deluxe pencil sharpening job in Paris? Ideas for the others?
I know I’m repeating myself, but we need to destabilise the independents, trounce Labor and the Greens at the ballot-box so convincingly that Turnbull and the doctors’ wives are no longer needed. Now or soon.
With a decisive political change, the Watermelon bureaucrats and boffins will look at their salaries and super and decide that the planet is okay after all. Some will go to Fairfax and the ABC and complain about jackboots and Abbott’s swimming togs, but most of these people will sniff the breeze and decide they had better get a job and do it. Time and money might even go to genuine research into climate and conservation – though I know that’s a touch optimistic, because the bulk of such work is strenuous and on-site, far from the cafes and the Hungry Beast rappers.
No suggestion touches off the sensitivities of certain posters on this site as provoking a sudden and radical change of the Federal Government through the ballot-box, right now. Surely that’s a great indicator.
More on this obvious fraud from Henry Ergas in the Australian.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/commentary/climate-policy-a-burning-issue/story-e6frgd0x-1226072611617
‘And of course I think El Gordo is right – the cold snap proves we’re in a ice age with global cooling. Could those 1970s scientists have been right after all?’
Michael Mann and I agree that a LIA starts in a regional way, so I’m putting a prediction up on the fridge, within a decade global warming will be yesterday’s story as the oceans continue to cool.
Gary Banks and the productivity commission should be embarrased that they got railroaded into producing such a pathetic document. It has not looked at what many of our competitors and potential competitors are doing and it has only looked at 8 other countries. At no time does it discuss the actual reductions in co2 and temp that can be attributed to there gaia gestures. I had hoped for so much more from them but i guess you can only cover the brief you are given and the lab/greens obviously phrased it well (BADLY!)
I came across this link recently, its a fascinating read to get an idea of just how dramatically temp can swing and how quickly. Only a nutter could talk about the rate of change as being unprecedented.
http://www.breadandbutterscience.com
it even talks about plants being confused by the seasons and temperatures.
I also recently finished a book called “The year 1000” (1999), about the year 1000 in britain. One of its classic lines is “it was much warmer then than it is now” (and it goes on to list …a wide range of pnats that can no longer be grown there…and i know just cos its written in a book it doesnt make it right but when you ar elooking for real evidence the history books are as good a place as any)
Neville the ergas article is as usual to the point and states what should surely be obvious?!…i particularly liked ydays article about pissant europeans by gary johns
https://www.edumail.vic.gov.au/owa/redir.aspx?C=5b3ea094965048a7ab09c5721266a303&URL=http%3a%2f%2fwww.theaustralian.com.au%2fnational-affairs%2feuropean-pissants-humbug-hypocrisy%2fstory-fn59niix-1226071958175
has to be one of the best articles i have ever read for telling it like it is.
“Pissant is Britain, by subsuming the greatest common law jurisdiction in the world under European human rights law.
Pissant is a Europe that cannot hold together the euro much longer because some of its countries – Greece and Portugal come to mind – cannot balance a budget.
Pissant is a European open-door immigration policy that, combined with its multicultural policy, has been so badly handled that what were once tolerant societies have become far less so.
Pissant is a Germany that has vowed to close its nuclear power stations – talk about a failure of nerve.
Pissant is Britain which, while announcing ever-more heroic targets to decarbonise its economy, cannot collectively boil a kettle after the evening episode of EastEnders because its own power stations cannot cope. It draws on French nuclear power to fill the load. Swapping power across borders is clever; pretending the source of power is part of decarbonisation is not.”
In connection with the upcoming Monckton tour an attempt was made to get him into a private briefing with the independents; we got the runnaround; I don’t think either Windsor or Oakeshott will be persuaded; simple courtesy and decorum prevents me from saying why.
Yeah cohers, the science is settled. Why should they get a second opinion?
Only the future of the country at stake.
Just like Luke’s ideas on pal review and getting published by the Climategators:
http://www.masterresource.org/2011/06/lindzen-choi-special-treatment/
cohenite
Perhaps I lack your courtesy and decorum, but neither Windsor nor Oakeshott will vote in a manner to defeat the current Rainbow Coalition on anything substantive – if they did, the ensuing mess is most likely to provoke an election.
Both of them have double-crossed their electorates big-time (both electorates voted the ALP and Greens a very emphatic last)
An election in the current dishevelled circumstances would at the very least bring back a majority Govt (likely Lib/Nats) where these two would be completely irrelevant; it would also be likely to unseat Oakeshott and perhaps even Windsor
This is their big chance for the “anals” of history. I put their obvious enmity down to the Nats – why do Windsor and Oakeshott hate the Nats so ? That’s a serious question for which there is no hope whatsoever of a reliable answer
Neither of them know any substantial science nor care that they don’t – it’s not an issue for them
What a dead head pile of comments.
Toby is side stepping the issue in a big way with “Impact”.
Cohenite is scraping the barrel with Monckton.
el gordo; tuck this tightly round your nut then say you feel cooler
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/anomsst.shtml
SD keep your gaiters on as you are also in step and marching through it
Ian; I doubt either Independent would play their hand your way.
Tony:I can’t see any power group allowing the grid to go up in smoke because their insurers would have a lot to say after the event if it did happen.
Ian,
Windsor and Oakeshott’s only chance of redemption with their electorates is their rejection of the CT so there is an outside chance. Some of Windsor’s mutterings indicate that he is thinking about it.
If, of course, their intention is to just do the opposition as much damage as they can and then kiss everyone goodbye [which is the way they have been heading since the last election], they aren’t a proposition but it would be a piss-weak performance by any measure let alone of a country rep of Windsor’s vintage.
Interesting times.
Gavin, I have confidence in UNISYS.
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom_new.gif
My thinking is that a double dip La Nina will get the ball rolling in a cooler direction.
Observation over theory.
http://clivebest.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/plotcomp1.png
It’s important not to play the opponent’s game.
I’m guilty myself, in that I talk loosely of a carbon tax instead of a carbon dioxide tax. This helps the Watermelons in one of their principle deceptions: the association of CO2 with soot. Also, we need to stop talking about the tax as something to be bargained or mitigated. There’s no point. Even if it has the legislated limitations of a GST, the take can be easily increased by all manner of fudging. It is a tax that is vaporous in its intent, so all the more lethal in its effect.
The carbon dioxide tax is something which has to be fought by destabilising the government through the independents now, so there is no tax to talk about. I’m not saying it will be easy or even possible, but it’s the primary thing to be attempting now.
The possibility of a shift within the government to a genuine Labor person, possibly Ferguson, is made almost too remote by the coalition with the Greens. Nonetheless, it shouldn’t be counted out.
The Gillard/Green coalition combines the extravagance of Whitlam with the hollowness of Fraser. And it brings along people far worse than Gillard or Brown. To bring it down we need to follow the dictum of a certain cricket captain and do absolutely everything our opponents wish we wouldn’t do. When the Watermelons give friendly advice, eg promote Turnbull, we do the opposite. They suggest we discuss a “carbon tax”, we refuse to recognise the expression, and insist on “carbon dioxide tax”. Then we refuse to discuss that!
We have to play the game they hate, and it can start today by all of us insisting the word “dioxide” be appended every time to the word “carbon”…unless they’re talking about heat beads for the new BBQ.
Baby steps, but they’re steps. Sorry to nag on politics, guys…but, My God, this carbon dioxide economy sucks!
Gavin,
this is a curious response of yours:
“Tony:I can’t see any power group allowing the grid to go up in smoke because their insurers would have a lot to say after the event if it did happen.”
As I mentioned, it is something that would not be allowed to happen, and don’t think Garnaut and his Political string pulling masters didn’t envisage that, hence the loans to, er ‘secure the delivery of power’ and I’d like to get terms similar to what those loans will have.
The grid won’t go ‘up in smoke’ as you say, and gee, even I remember, when living in Newcastle with the Air Force in the mid 70’s, the months of electricity rationing.
However, Gavin did you not think about your statement before you posted about insurers having a lot to say about it.
Let’s for one second think that Garnaut forgot to ‘cover this base’.
A Power Company’s bean counters does all the sums and works out that with the huge sum going out from the imposition of this Tax on CO2, it’s financially more viable to close the plant than keep struggling on, which by the way is in fact the desired result, as emissions actually will be lowered by closing the plant.
This closing of the plant results in the grid not having enough power to fulfill demand, so with the threat of overload causing cascading failure of all plants, the only option is in fact to introduce power rationing.
That rationing causes hardships to consumers who as you envisage might resort to recovering their losses from their insurance companies.
Those insurance companies now seek to offset their losses by litigating for recovery of their payouts from whoever is deemed responsible.
How good would it look for the Government when Insurance Companies would in fact be suing … well, whoever theywould be suing, because of the government seeking to lower CO2 emissions, and with the plant having closed, then those emissions would in fact have decreased.
Now do see why Garnaut included loans for the security of electricity supply.
As I mentioned, the CO2 Tax is designed only to ensure the continuation of the CO2 Tax, not to actually lower those emissions.
Tony.
‘It is a tax that is vaporous in its intent, so all the more lethal in its effect.’
Very nice Robert.
Found this on the floor at Menzies House.
‘Earth’s annual production of Carbon Dioxide is almost entirely by Nature, 97%. Human activity including industry and transport produces just 3%.
‘Australian Human activity contributes 1.5% of the 3% of total Human activity or a measly 0.045%
‘Let’s put this factual information into a perspective we can easily understand.
‘The MCG has a Stadium Capacity of approximately 100,000 people.
‘Out of 100,000 people, atmospheric Carbon Dioxide would represent just 38 people.
Out of 100,000 people, Human produced Carbon Dioxide would represent just 1 person.’
Good stuff EG, just wish we could get more of this info out to the average Aussie.
They know they are being dudded but are unsure of the science and therefore are very tentative about offering an opinion.
Here’s just a bit more of this fraudulent madness so loved by Gav, Luke and all the other green loonies.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_save_the_planet_exterminate_the_camels/
BTW Barnaby at least shows how here how hopeless these fools are when trying to explain their CON. What an super expensive sick joke.
The Gav:
“I doubt either Independent would play their hand your way. ”
They already are, whether you doubt it or not
SD:
“Windsor and Oakeshott’s only chance of redemption with their electorates is their rejection of the CT so there is an outside chance. Some of Windsor’s mutterings indicate that he is thinking about it.”
Oakeshott is still young enough to be worried by the prospect of losing his seat, but he is now very deeply unpopular in his electorate. Look at the demographics of his seat – over half are retirees living from Kempsey to Coffs Harbour. My father (who has now passed away) retired to Nambucca Heads and lived there for over 25 years, so I’m very familiar with this demographic from countless visits, clubs, Rotaries etc
Windsor is wealthy enough now not to be too much perturbed – he sold half his farm to Whitehaven so the Werris Creek coal mine could continue to operate
Back on topic. The Productivity Commission report (I’ve managed to read it now) does NOT endorse Gillard’s CO2 tax, rather the older ETS from the pen of Rudderless. It specifically mocks the Greenie preference for village-level sun&wind as extravagantly expensive for no gain. Look at the UK costs it quotes. And it notes that the German solution of buying nuclear-generated power from France is a sleight of hand (the ABC and Fairfax simply do not acknowledge that this is happening)
But most of all, the PC report insists on a market solution, not a Govt-imposed tax
The Bolter starts to pull apart the PC Report. The Solar PV schemes have a real cost of $400+ to $1000+ a tonne. What unbelievably frightening numbers that just proves the madness of this mad CON.
Of course none of these mad schemes will change the climate in the slightest because the same Govt allows coal and natural gas exports to soar.
These exports are OK by me, but then again I’m not a barking mad CAGW fanatic.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/productivity_commission_confirms_weve_been_fed_one_falsehood_after_another/
El Gordo,
I was impressed by the children’s colored version of the Unisys chart. Here is their standard daily fare lacking the alarmist colors:
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.gif
I notice your link has “new” in it. Is that something they are considering as a replacement or the link they give to the IPCC types to keep them happy!! 8>)
Before we get too carried away with Germany’s rhetoric about CO2 emissions here’s a few facts that put a dent in it being serious about reducing them:
Germany is one of the largest consumers of energy in the world. In 2009, it consumed energy from the following sources:[14]
Oil 34.6%
Bituminous coal 11.1%
Lignite 11.4%
Natural gas 21.7%
Nuclear power 11.0%
Hydro- and wind power 1.5%
Others 9.0%
Wiki
And this:
The main source of electricity still remains coal.[10] The recent plan to build 26 new coal plants [11] is controversial in light of Germany’s commitment to curbing emissions.[12] Lignite is extracted in the extreme western and eastern parts of the country, mainly in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Sachsen and Brandenburg. Considerable amounts are burned in coal plants near to the mining areas, to produce electricity. Transporting lignite over far distances is not economically feasible, therefore the plants are located practically next to the extraction sites. Bituminous coal is mined in Nordrhein-Westfalen and Saarland. Most power plants burning bituminous coal operate on imported material, therefore the plants are located not only near to the mining sites, but throughout the country.[1#]
Germany is the fifth largest consumer of oil in the world. Russia, Norway, and the United Kingdom are the largest exporters of oil to Germany, in that order.[15]
Germany is the third largest consumer of natural gas in the world. Because of its location at the center of Europe, Germany is the fourth largest consumer of coal in the world. Germany has the largest market of electricity in Europe.
Wiki
Also known as having your cake and eating it. And the naive warmists imagine carbon taxes have something to do with reducing CO2 emissions and that any industrialised nation takes AGW seriously. Dumb lot those warmists.
One of the difficult things for the average guy in the street to wrap his head around is the amount of coal being consumed by large scale coal fired power plants.
It’s a simple thing to say that they burn around 6 to 8 million tons of coal each year, depending on the age of the plant. (older ones burn more)
That extrapolates to around 16,000 tons a day or one ton of crushed coal being fed into the furnace every four or five seconds.
The reason a lot of coal fired plants are constructed right next to the mine is to somewhat alleviate transportation costs.
The most used means for transportation of coal to plants not near mines is by train.
% Locomotives will haul 100 hoppers each holding 100 tons of coal. That whole train from front to back is one kilometre long.
A large scale coal fired power plant will receive two of these train loads each day.
Hence, it’s more cost effective to build the plant near the mine.
Tony.
That % mark in front of locomotives should read 5.
Tony.
OK then, wrap your heads around this.
20,00 tons of thermal coal a day at $130 per ton, and add to that rail transportation costs.
You do the Maths.
Solar power is ‘free’ from the Sun, and Wind power is ‘free’ from the Wind.
Coal fired power is cheaper than Wind by a factor of between 5 and 7, and coal fired power is cheaper than Solar by a factor between 7 and 10.
Tony.
And electric car owners will have to drive 129,000 klm for a net earning of CO2:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/electric-cars-may-not-be-so-green-after-all-says-british-study/story-e6frg8y6-1226073103576
“Coal fired power is cheaper than Wind by a factor of between 5 and 7, and coal fired power is cheaper than Solar by a factor between 7 and 10.”
True enough TonyOz, but it does not tell the whole story; that comparison is based on when solar and wind are working; they do not work all the time; their international capacity factor is about 20% and the AEMO only rates them at 10%:
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/06/the-looming-energy-disaster
Investment in wind and solar also indisputably causes shrinkage of GDP:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/ets-to-shrink-regional-growth/story-e6frg6nf-1225691476399
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/commentary/climate-policy-a-burning-issue/story-e6frgd0x-1226072611617
Spain and California are the classic examples of this shrinkage; but the real problem with subsidisation of wind and solar is that blackouts will occur.
THERE WILL BE POWER SHORTAGES from the carbon tax regime. As simple as that. That is the message to give to the punters.
cohenite,
not exactly right, but close, and it’s really complex.
Where possible, rather than go by some sites that, er, may ‘say’ one thing, what I have assiduously tried to do is work out things from actual and factual data, and for that purpose I use the Energy Administration Administration’s site, and go there if you want to, but the average guy will not understand that data without a ‘long’ background in the electrical trade.
That data is comprehensively updated with a 3 month lead time, the only Country in the World to do so. Australia’s data is two and three years in the Government reporting.
It’s all based around Capacity factor, the delivery of power to consumers in KWH compared to Nameplate Capacity and the formula is this:
NP X 24 X 365.25 X 1000 where NP is Nameplate Capacity, 24 hours in a day 365.25 days in a year (leap year the .25) and 1000 to convert from MW to KWH.
This gives the total maximum power. Capacity Factor is actual delivery compared to that figure.
You’ll read at Wiki (and never trust them) that coal fired power has a CF of around 62%. Where they get that number is for EVERY coal fired plant, and that is somewhat erroneous to say the least, because a lot of medium and smaller coal fired plants are used for Peaking Power and Load Following, so they are only delivering their power for part of the hours in a day.
Large scale coal fired power averages a CF of 87.5%, and Nuclear is the best averaging around 92.5% Worldwide, but in the US currently around 96%.
For Wind Power, even though you’ll see some places quoting 40% and some as low as 10%, The current best case average is the U.S. with the most recent technology, and the second most of it in total, that average is around 20%.
For Solar , and here I’m lumping it all in together because it is just such a tiny proportion of total power delivered, (around 0.2% at best) that CF is around 12.5% at best.
Now, wherever possible I will use those calculated CF when I do any comparisons.
To be Continued…..
So to build a large scale coal fired plant, around 2000MW, we’re looking at around $2.5 Billion. It can be licensed for originally 50 years, and then out to 60 years and then out to 75 years if needs be.
It will deliver 15.5 Billion KWH a year.
For that same dollar amount you’ll get 900MW of wind power. (300 X 3MW nacelles) This will have a life span of 20 years.
This will deliver 1.55 billion KWH a year.
For Solar, and the same dollar amount, you’ll get 2 x 250MW Concentrating Solar Plants, delivering 50MW each on a close to 24 hour basis, but for the sake of the exercise, they are rated at 150MW for around a 12 hour delivery hence a CF of 50%, and here I’m being very kind. So, that’s 300MW. This also has a life span of 20 years’
This will deliver 1.3 Billion KWH a year
The original cost has to be recovered in the life of the plant, hence the cost of the electricity is worked out from that.
Even adding in the cost of the coal over that 50 years, coal fired power is way, way, cheaper than Wind or Solar.
Tony.
Every day there are more good reasons for the world to pull its head in on renewable energy [nuclear excepted] and wait until the fog clears.
“Freeman Dyson, one of America’s most respected physicists, once went to war in a New York Review of Books piece with scientists who dismissed other scientists skeptical of warming alarms as having nothing important to say. He noted that the majority of scientists have time and again been proven wrong in controversies, adds that warming is less about science than environmentalism as a secular religion, and says fine – the basic ethics add up. What doesn’t add up, he says, is adopting “as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet.”‘
More environmental stupidity.
Good reading for gav and those of like persuasion:
http://netrightdaily.com/2011/06/epa-environmental-propaganda-activists%e2%80%94the-myth-of-killer-mercury/
Normally fanatics like this would be ridiculed off the face of the earth but today they are genuflected to:
http://notrickszone.com/2011/06/09/german-historian-on-schellnhuberwbgu-were-dealing-with-fanatics-here-revolutionary-messianism/
sd,
er, sorry mate, but these are the good guys. Read the article carefully.
The thrust of the article is how the EPA in the US is strangling coal fired power plants by introducing regulations to make them cut back on Mercury emissions.
One part of the article says:
Quote…..
How do America’s coal-burning power plants enter into the picture?
The latest government, university and independent studies reveal that those power plants emit an estimated 41-48 tons of mercury per year. However, U.S. forest fires emit at least 44 tons per year; cremation of human remains discharges 26 tpy; Chinese power plants eject 400 tpy; and volcanoes, subsea vents, geysers and other sources spew out 9,000-10,000 additional tons per year!
All these emissions enter the global atmospheric system and become part of the U.S. air mass.
Thus, U.S. power plants account for less than 0.5 percent of all the mercury in the air Americans breathe. Even eliminating every milligram of this mercury will do nothing about the other 99.5 percent in America’s atmosphere.
And yet, in the face of these minuscule risks, EPA nevertheless demands that utility companies spend billions every year retrofitting coal-fired power plants that produce half of all U.S. electricity, and 70-98 percent of electricity in twelve states. Its regulators simultaneously ignore the positive results of medical studies that clearly show its new restrictions are not needed and will not improve people’s health.
…..End Quote
Tony.
Very interesting, Tony.
What about the real maintenance, access and land-leasing etc costs for the different energy sources?
I’ve seen the vast areas of high country given over to wind in Spain, and most of the units are still new. I know that some people are very well paid to host the turbines, to the point where it looks like a bit of a kickback racket. I also wonder about the true depreciation costs of wind, and whether the extra masses of cabling are counted in the cost. Those Euro-sophisticates have been playing with untold billions of OPM the last few years, and I’m sure they’ve had plenty of practice at making things add up and look good for the OP. Are there any undistorted accounts?
In Spain, they don’t mind clear felling whole hilltops and hilllsides (often of Australian eucalypts), but most of their hillspace was already bare. Has anyone asked whether such land clearance in Oz is possible, because the scale and intrusiveness of wind-power in Spain is just enormous. Bulldozing Australia’s slopes and hilltops on a massive scale is an odd favour to the planet.
I guess the main question I’m pestering you with is: Are we just talking establishment costs, or are true ongoing costs factored in?
And thanks to you and Jen for doing what the paid people ought to be doing.
Watch the video above. Bronowski is brilliant when he says….”when people believe that they have absolute knowledge with no test of reality, this is how they behave”.
“…every judgement in science stands at the brink of error and is personal…”
Tony,
Maybe I didn’t make my point clear enough.
What I meant was; more EPA stupidity.
“Has anyone asked whether such land clearance in Oz is possible, because the scale and intrusiveness of wind-power in Spain is just enormous. Bulldozing Australia’s slopes and hilltops on a massive scale is an odd favour to the planet.”
Robert,
When I was a kid many of the well-forested ranges were cleared for pasture but these days have regrown thickly.
When they were cleared, during wet seasons it was common to see huge break-aways and land slides as a result of clearing this steep country and of course this will happen again.
The usual unintended consequences of foggy environmentalism…
God I’m bored – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfjGRBFd7mQ even slagging off mindless sceptics seems boring today.
If it wasn’t for the latest excellent science article http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v1/n3/full/nclimate1122.html instead of Nev and Spangled’s addiction to blog slops one might even get depressed…. (Willie Soon as source – I kacked – what pure bogosity !)
Anyway time for a little tune in keeping with the tone here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWjeBqHLgSc&feature=related
SD, the clay-loams around here hold up pretty well, but I know there are other soils in Oz that don’t. And in Spain there is plenty of existing cleared ground for all the extra cabling, of which there is so much that its hard to photograph landscapes without it. That’s more land-clearance again for us.
Makes our Australian coal and powerlines look mighty clean and environmental, doesn’t it?
Like I’ve said: I don’t just live with coal-power. As a wilderness type, I bloody love it.
Ah well Luke hang around , you’ll wake up one day, perhaps.
I see even the dumb bums of the CFMEU are starting to have some light and reason penetrate their thick noggins.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/the_price_of_its_alarmism_suddenly_becomes_clear_to_the_cfmeu/
I think to be consistent, they should have benchmarked our major competitor, like Brazil and Canada
Robert,
I’ve never ventured into that area of land, kickbacks for hosting, subsidies etc.
In the main, the pricing comparisons just for plant construction and recovery of those costs over the life of the plant are more than enough to make the point of cost effectiveness.
Maintenance costs are more expensive for Wind plants, because all the ‘mechanics’ are in what is an exceedingly confined space in that small nacelle atop those towers, and instead of having the one plant in the one place, you can have anything up to hundreds of them.
Maintenance costs for Solar are also commensurately higher as well, because what people ‘conveniently’ forget is that those tens of thousands of mirrors for concentrating solar and Solar PV need to be kept pristinely polished, not just hosed down but totally clean, because any film from dust and you lose anything up to one third of generating capacity. Most panels and mirror complexes for the solar tower, and solar trough, and solar PV are also mounted on heliostat ‘Sun trackers’ each electrically driven making for more complexity.
By far, (and here I mean far and away, so far and away it is absolutely ridiculous) the cheapest form of electrical power generation is Nuclear Electrical Power Generation.
Those costings include initial construction, refit for licence extension out to 60 years, and then further refit for extension out to 75 years, plant and site cleanup at the end of those 75 years, all the fuel required, all the maintenance, all the fuel rod storage and disposal to long term storage.
The big killer that the no nukes rely on (other than that one word ‘Nuclear’) is the up front cost, but extrapolated out over the whole of plant life, those costs for unit of electricity are even less, and much less, than for the next cheapest, coal fired power.
Tony.
BTW Luke how do you suggest we stop the PH of the pacific dropping below 7.8 if you believe it to be a problem?
The OECD will only increase co2 levels by 0.1% pa while the non OECD will power ahead at 2.0% for decades and China at 2.7%.
So do you think China and India will just ignore 1.5Billion of their populations and tell them to get stuffed and live without energy and all of the mod cons for decades into the future?
Your musical tastes are pretty grim Luke, that strange blighter howling at the moon doesn’t really do it for me.
But like Macca of ABC AAO fame I like a good C and W and one of his favourites is a favourite of mine as well.
Good ol boy singing about his partner who has left for a taste of the big city.
But I don’t think I’d like to receive his power bill, particularly under Juliar’s future plans.
So nukes, as well as being pretty pieces of engineering, are the most economical.
Wind-turbines, on the other hand, involve massive cost, waste and land degradation – far, far more than anyone is letting on.
No wonder our Green Betters love wind.
“Willie Soon as source – I kacked”
Luke, me old pal, what a blistering response!
Care to attack the science rather than Willie’s shins?
Now here is some definite crap from Nature geoscience:
“Our findings suggest that humankind may be causing atmospheric carbon dioxide to increase at rates never previously seen on Earth, which would suggest that current temperatures will potentially rise much faster than they did during the PETM,” concluded Dr Harding.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/09/paleopessimism-by-proxy/
Amazing that Germany wants to close down Nuclear PS because of Fukushima, yet 33 people have just died there through deadly organic food supply.
But Monbiot ( a CAGW hard leftie)has been won over because of the very endurance of the infrastructure since the Quake and Tsunami at Fukushima.
Organic food seems so leftwing and natural and yet can be very dangerous and a deadly killer.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/organic_farming_is_deadlier_than_fukushima/
Tony
Please be aware that your quoted price of AUD$130/tonne for thermal coal is for high quality export thermal: ~15% ash, SE 25-26 Mj/jg, sulphur < 0.5%, moisture < 10%
Aus domestic thermal is up to 26-28% ash, SE 18-23Mj/kg, sulphur the same, moisture up to 20%. This sells domestically for ~ AUD$35-40/tonne. This low domestic price is why Whitehaven recently refused to deal with the previous NSW Govt when it tried to find a miner to supply coal for Mt Piper, Bayswater et al (current supply contracts terminate in a year or two)
Ian,
thanks for that.
I’ve actually been looking for that for donkey’s ages now, and the only thing I could find was the current price of that $130 that I have consistently used.
What this effectively does is lower the ‘all up’ costs for coal fired power even further.
Interestingly, one of the oft quoted things used by those ‘renewable power urgers’ is that the more and more renewable plants come on line, then the unit price for the electricity they sell to the grid will come down to a point where is becomes competitive with coal fired power.
As you can see from my costings on the previous page, those construction costs for both renewables are extrapolated out over the life of the plant, making their electricity so expensive.
The construction costs for those plants will not come down, and over the last three years of ramping up of construction in the US, those costs are in fact increasing.
Those costings are driving up the unit price of electricity.
If more of them are constructed, then that unit cost of electricity will only rise.
What is keeping it low is the fact that coal fired power (and Nuclear power in the US) is so cheap it is keeping the price ‘reasonable’.
If the intent is to close coal fired power plants, then you are taking the cheap power out of the price structure, and no matter what, electricity costs per unit of electricity can ONLY go in one direction, and that is not in the direction of the cheaper power that those ‘urgers’ tell us.
Tony.
Nigel Lawson is on our side.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2002333/Nigel-Lawson-says-Coalitions-absurd-energy-policy-damaging-industry-adding-hundreds-pounds-familys-fuel-bills.html
Gavin, I admit to being in error about the heat content of the oceans – it’s flat.
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
Renewables are useless and expensive.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/end-renewable-schemes-now-big-emitters/story-fn59niix-1226073269190
EG, it’s not flat; both OHC and SST have been declining since accurate measurements began in 2003:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2003/trend
To explain that AGW theory has to stick its head further up its bum and claim that aerosols have been cooling at TWICE the rate the GCMs have estimated:
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/1031292.html
I was speaking with a lawyer acquaintance today; solid middle class, informed through our abc and fairfax; he wouldn’t entertain any contradiction to the idea that the science was settled based on the consensus paradigm; he voted green and scoffed at the idea that electricity would be rationed; it is this typical, arrogant idiocy which sustains AGW.
Here is the government website where the calculations of the carbon credits for culling camels can be made:
http://www.climatechange.gov.au/government/initiatives/carbon-farming-initative/methodology-development/methodologies-under-consideration/management-of-feral-herbivores.aspx
This is insane.
Jeez Bob,
c’mon mate! You’ve got the power!
Show some conviction.
Just shut ’em down.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/06/11/3241587.htm
Tony.
I’ve just put this comment on Warwick Hughes blog but relevant here too:
The more suckers on the subsidisation teat the harder the winding back becomes
here’s just one example:
The New South Wales Government has been forced into a major backdown over its planned cuts to a solar rebate scheme. The Government had intended to retrospectively reduce payments for energy generated under the Solar Bonus Scheme from 60 cents per kilowatt hour to 40 cents.
But the plan led to a major public backlash, as well as pressure from the solar industry, the Opposition and the Government’s own backbenchers.
see http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/06/07/3237267.htm
As James Delingpole says at http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100091710/vote-blue-go-green-ruin-britain/
and the article it links to is a must read
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2001244/Gas-prices-Fuel-bills-increase-crackpot-green-taxes-youre-told-about.html
one quote:
AND the benefits? To the UK? To the climate? Not a mention!!!
Climategate superstar Phil Jones is trying hard to wriggle out of his ” no statistically significant warming since 1995″ statement last year.
But Lucia has crunched the numbers and found there is still “no statistically significant warming” from 1995 to 2011.
Poor old Phil , must be worried about his funding and pressure from his lying peers, but now everyone knows that there has been zero SS warming for at least 16 years.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/statistical-significance-since-1995-not-with-hadcrut/
BTW that period of 16 years is halfway through the period that is sometimes attributed to climate or a period of 30 years.
I’d like to know what some of the better brains here think of Lucia’s post?
Thanks cohenite, it’s sad to think otherwise intelligent people could have swallowed the green pill. Propaganda appeals to the emotion and not the intellect.
Gavin, in light of this new information do you have anything to say?
I know the proposition of killing camels to prevent AGW seems like a crazy idea especially in light of our ban on live cattle exports to stop animal cruelty [personal involvement in brumby culling tells me that you can’t shoot animals in large numbers from a distance and get 100% kill rate and so you can get badly wounded animals living for days] and also because the CO2 budget on animals is poorly understood [I’d be very surprised if killing any wild browsers would have any net effect on CO2].
But in actual fact feral camels, donkeys, brumbies, dogs, foxes etc have been destroying our fragile arid wilderness for over a century and a complete cull of these would be a great move.
If it did happen, it would be only a resulting irony of the current madness.
On camel silly comments – firstly they are an introduced pest (much like sceptics) wreaking havoc on Australian rangelands – strangely forgotten by Bolt and other boofhead commentators. Yep they’ll be eating pretty coarse stuff and their methane emissions are likely to be high. So their methane emissions are simply worth whatever the aggregated number is. Whether they can be dispatched humanely is another question. Professional buffalo shooters when asked doing eradication in the NT would say yes. The proposition is before the DOIC as I understand – asking for the emission reductions to be potentially counted as an offset (which there are strict criteria for). It can be rejected. Of course we bait wild dogs and dingoes – I imagine they don’t die quickly either.
Neville and Gordon – while the numbers fall as they may – you do need to know what the term significance implies. The significance level is not an absolute thing – it reflects what the probability is that any trend could be simply be by chance. 95% is common but 90% is also used … and even lower probabilities can be used in context. It is also common to report significance at various levels e.g. ***, ** and * for various levels.
Suggest you do some reading before ranting about significance levels. And the statistical test also depends on the structure of the data being analysed e.g. auto-correlation and normality .
You slur on Phil be worried about is funding is a disgrace from turds like yourself. Somehow I don’t Phil Jones’s life has been about money and given his proximity to retirement an unlikely motivator. Don’t confuse your own grubby morals with his motivations. If you want to call him a liar don’t be chicken – put it in a paper with your name on it.
You’ll probably think this may actually ‘seem’ to be a little ‘out there’, but this bears some thought.
The aimed for end result of this CO2 cost imposition is for an ETS, where they can impose a price on many GHG other than for CO2.
One of those gases is Methane, which immediately brings into play all ruminant animals. The bulk of the Methane is ‘burped’ as part of the breakdown of green matter in one compartment of the ruminant’s stomach.
All those GHG will be priced according to their volatility when compared with CO2, and Methane will be priced at around 25 times that of the cost for CO2.
Keep in mind that this is the emission of Methane, not on the burning of it, eg Natural Gas.
Probably a light bulb is flickering in your collective minds now that this ETS now brings the farming and grazing communities squarely under the umbrella of this ETS.
Individual farmers, eg croppers, and graziers of ruminant animals can now effectively be taxed because those methane emissions can be calculated (average based) per animal, and per crop.
So now we have the camels. These ones mentioned are feral, hence not owned by anyone who can be taxed. See the point.
So, to offset emissions, feral camels can be given a levy for credit purposes if you can see that point. The shooter can now trade his credits to the highest bidder.
As Baldrick said to Lieutenant Blackadder in the trenches:
“I have a cunning plan!”
Cunning guys these politicians.
Tony.
Tony – your memory serves you poorly. Indeed it was mooted that agriculture would not be directly taxed under an ETS but would receive carbon sequestration benefits from tree planting, possibly soil carbon (maybe), and other novel ideas with nitrogenous fertilisers. The tests are that any sequestration mechanism is objectively measurable and passes additionality, permanence and leakage assessments. Politicians haven’t been the drivers here – rangeland ecologists have been investigating carbon fluxes in rangelands for decades. Frankly I wouldn’t get even excited unless the DOIC says yes. You’re extrapolating heavily and running away with yourself. Word has it that they are likely to be tough in their assessment for listing under CFI. Many exotic ideas won’t get up ! See the offsets integrity standards http://www.climatechange.gov.au/government/initiatives/carbon-farming-initative/methodology-development/methodology-guidelines.aspx
But also explains why rumen ecologists have been looking at methanogenic suppressants, different gut fauna (like kangaroos but wits have suggested wouldn’t actual use of the roos be easier) and the impact of food quality on methane production (coarser, high lignin, poorer quality fodder makes it worse). However, previous Euro assumptions may indeed be wrong http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/05/27/3229303.htm
But yea – methane and NOx from fertiliser emissions, ruminants, high intensity late season savanna fires and rotting vegetation in dams are all up for some consideration in these schemes – however how much of a role they will eventually play is a very open question.
Hitler and Stalin allusions when attacking leaders in Western democracies are usually emotive and childish. Yet there is one thing Maoist about the present government, and I’m not referring to any leftist policies. Mao was simultaneously the greatest maintainer of personal power and the most stupendous bungler of everything else. He was even able to use his own bungling to increase his personal power, to the point that there was no reason to get anything right. His magic persists. There are even conservatives who, to this day, express their respect for the greatest cocker-up in human history.
When incompetence reaches a critical level – and Gillard and Brown reached that level by their first nappy change – all aspiration to govern sensibly is abandoned. It’s now just a case of waiting for other ministers to give up trying. Concentration then goes to the maintenance of power to the exclusion of all else, and concentration is a wondrous thing.
I’m not saying that we are in danger of becoming a Marxist or totalitarian state. I certainly don’t think Brown and Gillard are wicked people. I’m saying that with an enormous war-chest looted from industry, and nothing else but power on its mind, the present Federal government could survive. Its sheer incompetence could start working for it. Targeted giveaways and intricate wealth-shuffling could pull it off, if they could just find the money.
Enter a carbon dioxide tax.
“and rotting vegetation in dams”
Luke, how is rotting veg in dams any different from rotting veg in bogs, wetlands, lakes and oceans?
What would we do without the good ol’ IPCC?
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/06/11/how-much-harm-to-humans-is-ok/
‘I’m not saying that we are in danger of becoming a Marxist or totalitarian state.’
There is little chance of that in a robust democracy, although I do see an agrarian socialist movement arising out of the ashes of the next election.
Well the “German Disease” is having unintended consequences:
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/06/09/pm-germany-turns-back-to-fossil-fuel-plants
Pardon? Germany is already a fossil fuel dominated country. Wind and solar account for around 1.5%
el gordo
I do see an agrarian socialist movement arising out of the ashes of the next election.
Maybe not, but if it happens I can’t say I’m against it.
Not FOR it mind you, but I keep one important fact in my mind at all times, “we have to eat to live”.
Food does not come from ideology or technology, although the latter helps a lot.
Sure, we all enjoy the niceties of our advanced technological age, but when the supermarket shelves are empty, no amount of computing power will fill the stomachs of people.
I suppose it helps if one has parents who lived through the war and paid attention to their stories.
John,
As opposed to this:
http://notrickszone.com/2011/06/09/german-historian-on-schellnhuberwbgu-were-dealing-with-fanatics-here-revolutionary-messianism/
One of the tools of people seeking to tax in a wide, flexible way is to keep people thinking in a narrow and compartmental way. The more fuss over the details of farting or rotting or fertilising in one corner of taxable ground, the less focus on obvious balancing factors in modern agriculture. And there is one mighty balancing factor that is so big that few see it. Inner-city Watermelons don’t get to see it, rural people ignore it because it is like the sky: it’s huge and it’s just there.
The thing I’m talking about is regrowth. Regrowth is a very embarrassing word that a lot of people don’t want to hear. While boffins talk about how many football fields of forest are disappearing each hour in Brazil, and while creative types make jokes about showing their grandchildren what a tree used to look like, enormous tracts of Australia are going back to scrub, because once you remove the economic imperative to clear, the wattles start doing their thing within months.
Efficiencies in agriculture have taken away the need to clear and keep clear. Really, it’s too hard. And if you have an eReader or iPad, you know the technology is not perfect…but you must also know that paper and newsprint may not have the future we thought they had a couple of decades ago.
It’s important not to get bogged down in the details of a carbon dioxide tax, thus playing the opponents’ game. Nobody I have ever met has shown any sincerity about reducing CO2 emissions. The more they preach, the more they emit. (Imagine Carbon Cate’s battery bill for the new mansion in Vanuatu!) If belief is mindless conformity, then some believe. If belief is reflected in action, then there are no believers.
As Tony says, it’s about money. It’s about giving the most money possible to the worst possible managers of that money.
As Germany plans to remove itself from Nuclear power generation and move to coal fired power generation, therein lies the dilemma.
As mentioned in the Bob Brown ABC piece I linked to above, the ‘talking heads’ in Government quote ‘infrastructure’ as being one of the problems for the increase in electricity prices.
That infrastructure failure, front and centre, is the lack of any Government of any persuasion in every State constructing new large scale power plants.
Probably the most recent large scale plants to go in were those huge coal fired plants in NSW in the mid 70’s. At that time there was enough contingency to cover all consumption.
That consumption has increased at an average rate of around 7% per annum, so now we are approaching the stage when all the power being generated is not enough to cover consumption.
Those governments have steadfastly neglected to construct new large scale plants, and now it’s too late as any new large scale plant will die at the thought bubble stage.
Large scale coal fired plants have a life span of around 50 years, and can be extended out to 60 and then to 75 years.
Even those most recent plants are now approaching 40, and are old technology.
The grumbling is of China and their (sarc on ) filthy dirty (sarc off) coal fired plants. Those new Chinese large scale plants deliver the same power as our old plants. They are however half the size, and burn commensurately less coal, and they’re bringing them on line at the rate of one every seven days.
Were we to bite the bullet, and construct a new coal fired plant, (Huh! As if!) we would have to use that technology they are now World leaders at.
It happened in the Snowys when earlier plants were US, English, and one of the last to go in Tumut 3, was with the smaller and higher powered Japanese generators.
They can ‘modernise’ (as they put it) the grids, the wiring, the sub stations, whatever, but the ‘real’ infrastructure needed is new large scale power plants, and in this political climate that is something that just will not happen, even if the argument is overwhelming.
Have you noticed TV ads from all power providers exhorting us to use less, and there’s talk of installing ‘smart meters’ etc. That’s not for the sake of the environment. They know that they’re running out of power.
We all lose, or the real truth may just be that we’ve already lost.
Build all the renewable plants you want, at enormous cost, and still 7 to 10 years away if they started right now, but until new large scale plants go in that actually can deliver power 24/7/365, we are placing more stress on already aging old style plants, and we take electricity for granted as a staple of life.
The point is this.
Those coal fired plants just have to be kept working at close to their maximum for years to come. They will not reduce the emissions from them.
The only plan is to make huge scads of money from them in the mean time.
Dramatic, Tony, you all say, but this is what it’s coming to.
Tony.
Yes Tony, you can see what’s coming and I have been looking at the possibilities of going off-grid as I am with water but it is generally pretty complex, not to mention expensive, for the pleasure of being independent from the craziness to come.
Hopefully gas-fired power will get on top of the problem to some degree.
Although carbon sequestration sounds good in theory and on paper, it will deliver no benefit to agriculture in practice.
The complicated rules and calculations that accompany it and therefore the compliance regulations etc that will be the outcome, will completely negate any benefits. There are supposedly tax trade offs but they will also be negated by the other activities that will always cause emissions.
It is also ridiculous that farmers may have things like rotting vegetation in dams and methane emissions from stock counted, when right next door there will be wetlands and native fauna and flora doing exactly the same thing. (Also feral animals that have been allowed to run wildly out of control in state and national parks….including camels).
It is unlikely that they will tax themselves!
The tree planting scam has been tried before.
It was not just farmers who lost money on those, several superanuation companies have lost rather large sums of capital in these schemes. The advertised tax benefits were not realised.
The new rules that apply to this particular idea will cause further difficulties to farmers because the legislators want to put 300 metre buffer zones around these areas. They are not intending to buy and manage those buffer zones, they are intending to just stop farmers being able to effectively farm those areas.
I also disagree with Luke’s assertion that politicians have not been the drivers here. That is completely incorrect. Where does he think the rangeland ecologists got their funding to conduct these studies etc?
All of these schemes and all of these studies are relying on government largesse and tax payer funding.
If ‘private’ organisations are named on these studies, you don’t need to dig very far to find out where the funding came from to run these studies and courses.
There is no end product that is wanted in the market so therefore there is a dead end at the finish of program. They can only survive if they’re continuously propped up by government (ie tax payer) funding.
As Robert and Tony have explained, all of these schemes are about raising money and having it managed by governments via bureaucrats, bankers & brokers.
When has that ever, ever, ever been succesful?
Jonathan I see Labor being devastated at the next election and they will take their junior coalition partners with them. The Lib/Nat team will run the country for at least a decade, supported by the agrarian socialist movement – miners, farmers and graziers.
I’ve just deleted 9 comments in a row because they were either off topic (Gavin) or rude (all the others). Please try and be civil (polite and courteous) even when provoked. 🙂
You are quite right, Jen. I reacted to the poster. No excuse.
The sole justification for a carbon tax and all the attendant dislocation in our and indeed the world’s economies and societies is that the “science is settled” and that we are in peril from AGW due to the continued emissions of CO2 from the most plentiful and cheapest form of energy.
This is wrong and the expression “the science is settled” encapsulates a perversion of science and standards of scientific ethics.
Lindzena and Choi have just had their 2011 version of their study of the ocean/TOA OLR coupling published.
http://www.masterresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Lindzen_Choi_APJAS_final.pdf
This study shows that in direct opposition to AGW, heating of the ocean does not cause less OLR but more. The ramifications for climate sensitivity, both transient and equilibrium, are profound and should lead to an immediate suspension of all planned economic responses to AGW, especially the huge diversion of valuable funds into the delusion fo renewable energy.
In addition to the Lindzen and Choi paper Dr David Stockwell has just submitted his latest research to GRL; this is the Abstract:
Abstract
Here we present evidence and theory in support of the view that
the dynamics of global temperature change, from the annual to the
glacial time scale, is dominated by the accumulation of variations in
solar irradiance. In a simple model composed of one free parameter, the temperature rises or falls when solar irradiance is greater or less than an equilibrium value of 1356.9 Watts per square meter at top-of-atmosphere. In a simple recurrence matrix model of the
atmosphere/surface/deep ocean system, temperature changes are due
to (1) the size of a forcing, (2) its duration (due to accumulation of
heat), and (3) the depth in the atmosphere/surface/deep ocean sys
tem where a forcing is applied (due to increasing mixing losses and
increasing intrinsic gain with depth). The model explains most of the
rise in temperature since 1950, and more than 70% of the variance
with correct phase shift of the 11-year solar cycle. Global temperature
displays the characteristics of an accumulative system over 6 temporal
orders of magnitude, as shown by a linear f
That abstract did not reproduce fully, I’ll try again.
Here we present evidence and theory in support of the view that
6 the dynamics of global temperature change, from the annual to the
7 glacial time scale, is dominated by the accumulation of variations in
8 solar irradiance. In a simple model composed of one free parame9
ter, the temperature rises or falls when solar irradiance is greater or
10 less than an equilibrium value of 1356.9 Watts per square meter at
11 top-of-atmosphere. In a simple recurrence matrix model of the at1
2 mosphere/surface/deep ocean system, temperature changes are due
13 to (1) the size of a forcing, (2) its duration (due to accumulation of
14 heat), and (3) the depth in the atmosphere/surface/deep ocean sys1
5 tem where a forcing is applied (due to increasing mixing losses and
16 increasing intrinsic gain with depth). The model explains most of the
17 rise in temperature since 1950, and more than 70% of the variance
18 with correct phase shift of the 11-year solar cycle. Global temperature
19 displays the characteristics of an accumulative system over 6 tempo2
0 ral orders of magnitude, as shown by a linear f
This is the excluded part of the abstract:
The notion of
23 ‘climate sensitivity’ is super
uous in the model inasmuch as system
24 behavior is dominated by a very slow characteristic time scale of the
25 order of 3500 years, and so does not require a range of special feedback
26 and lag parameters, and atmospheric forcings by greenhouse gasses are
27 greatly attenuated by mixing losses. Thus recent warming may be ex2
8 plained without recourse to increases in heat-trapping gases produced
29 by human activities.
“I also disagree with Luke’s assertion that politicians have not been the drivers here. That is completely incorrect. Where does he think the rangeland ecologists got their funding to conduct these studies etc?”
Debbie needs to substantiate or retract ! The assertion of collusion is libelous and a disgrace.
And if you’re going to delete on “off-topic” Cohenite is off-topic.
Rubbish luke, I have never been off topic; before I introduced the Lindzen paper and the Stockwell abstract I said this:
“The sole justification for a carbon tax and all the attendant dislocation in our and indeed the world’s economies and societies is that the “science is settled” and that we are in peril from AGW due to the continued emissions of CO2 from the most plentiful and cheapest form of energy.
This is wrong and the expression “the science is settled” encapsulates a perversion of science and standards of scientific ethics.”
How is that off topic?
ROFL
Luke,
Please go back and read at least one half of your comments on this entire blog space about other people and your opinion of their motivations.
My comment was extremely tame compared to the majority of yours.
Also,
What would you like me to retract?
Are you saying that the majority of the programs and studies about carbon and climate change are NOT funded by government grants and therefore tax payer money?
Perhaps I should retract the word ‘all’ from my comment and replace it with ‘most’ or ‘the majority’.
I admit that perhaps that particular word was ‘over the top’ re this discussion.
I was simply pointing out that these studies are propped up by government funding and therefore tax payer money.
The aim appears to be the instigation of a global ETS based on an artificially produced value on CO2 emissions. It also appears it will be run by governments via bureaucrats, bankers and brokers.
Their justification is ‘the settled science’.
The vast majority of available funding in the Agriculture sector at the moment has a definite ‘climate change’ tag attached to it.
Look up the grants available through RDA etc and that may help you to understand my point.
(1) this thread is about carbon policy not climatology
(2) we don’t want to see your unpublished rat dirt – get it published first (which it won’t be in GRL). You guys have no record for publishing anywhere serious.
(3) and as usual sceptics being too prissy and “special” have run to off elsewhere to get “published”. It’ll be hit for six soon like the last effort.
You have the opportunity to retract Debbie – or maintain the insult. Your previous comments on carbon sequestration in agriculture are incorrect and puerile. As usual so-called sceptics can spray anything without substantiation. You have suggested that rangeland scientists and other scientists working on rumen methanogenesis, methane production by dams and atmospheric loss of nitrous oxides from nitrogenous fertiliser are on the take.
As for methane production from water storages being rot – well yes it is “rot” – vegetation rot. In one system enough methane to consider harvesting it to produce more power http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6638705.stm
No Luke,
I definitely did not suggest they are ‘on the take’.
I said they are propped up by government funding and therefore tax payer money.
Are you saying that is incorrect?
re methane:
I have already been involved in 3 separate ‘power from methane’ projects.
Those projects can’t survive without extra funding either.
Nearly all of these ideas sound amazing in theory and they can be made to look successful on paper.
It is the practical application and the ‘real value’ of the marketable commodity at the end which remains highly questionable.
I’m not against the basic idea, I am against the way it is being managed and funded.
If they can’t fund themselves in a reasonable time frame then they need to go back to the drawing board.
Otherwise, as Tony, Robert and others have explained, they become a burden on the tax payer and a burden on the Australian economy.
More diversionary nonsense Debbie – you well know the prior discussion is not about markets for methane power.
“If they can’t fund themselves in a reasonable time frame then they need to go back to the drawing board.’ I assume you’re talking about agrarian socialist funded agriculture. When you lot have paid back your billions in drought aid we’ll chat.
“ratdirt”? How do you know it won’t get published at GRL? As for relevancy if it were not for the ‘false’ climatology supporting AGW we would not ‘need’ a carbon policy. David has developed a simple model which explains accumulated solar heat and its dominant role in climate; I believe you had one of the earlier versions; it has been tightened considerably; it is exhaustive, parsimonious and works at all intervals; for that reason you and your buddies in the know have good reason to be concerned.
Luke, way above here I mentioned how the end result of taxing those CO2 emissions is an ETS, and that will also bring the farming and grazing communities under that umbrella, that main target for that sector being Methane.
You passed it off, and I left it alone as we were drifting off the topic, but it is in fact germane to other Countries placing a cost on (all) emissions per se, as those other Countries with an ETS in place have indeed brought that sector under the umbrella, especially in respect of those Methane emissions.
You later disparagingly referred mainly to areas where those greens concentrate on, the snide ‘dig’ at farmers with dams on their properties, and mentioned diet change for ruminants, which, even you must admit is tinkering at the edges, and would only produce marginal reductions at best.
Be aware that I rarely use Wikipedia because of the intense ‘green’ bias where only ‘acceptable’ amendments at that site get Posted, so ‘real’ information is somewhat slanted to say the least. However, I know that the ‘green’ urgers use this source as a virtual Bible, so I’ll post some links from that site for all of us to read to see what even they say about those emissions.
This first shows the real impact of those Methane emissions from livestock.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_production#Fossil_fuel_consumption_and_greenhouse_gas_emissions
They come in at 20% Worldwide, which incidentally is 3% higher than for all World fuel driven vehicles, road, rail, ship and air.
This second link shows the impact of Cropping, rice especially, and how all cropping contributes 15% of all Methane emissions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice#Environmental_impacts
This third link shows
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#Emissions_accounting_of_methane
Wetlands (including rice cropping) are by far the largest emitters of Methane. No mention of dams there. However, scroll down a little below that chart there, and read all the entries under the heading:
Natural sources of atmospheric methane
There, you’ll see sections dealing with farm animals and also rice agriculture.
Under farm animals it says:
Quote:
Farming also acts to increase atmospheric methane through ruminant farm animals, such as sheep or cows. The amount of methane emitted by farm animals alone exceeded that of the iron, steel, and cement industries combined. End Quote.
Under rice agriculture it says:
Quote.
Due to the swamp-like environment of rice fields, this crop alone is responsible for approximately 50-100 million metric tons of methane emission each year. End quote.
If CO2 is priced at $26 per ton, and Methane is priced at CO2 X 23, then that ETS on Methane on a World wide basis could net in total almost $30 to 60 Billion.
Now perhaps you can gain some inkling of why the end result, an ETS becomes so attractive, and the current proposal for this tax on CO2 emissions is just a starting point only.
Tony.
$30 to 60 Billion? Other People’s Money?
Tony, I get it.
Luke,
I’m fairly sure it was you who brought up the Methane issue with your link and also some of the comments you made aboout it?
I was just responding to your posts.
And no…I was definitely talking about the government funded alternative power schemes and in the particular post you are referring to, I was talking about methane power plants because of your link.
Other than that, I don’t think I need to add any more to what Tony has posted and clearly outlined.
Robert,
keep in mind that’s just the rice cropping part of overall Anthropogenic Methane production.
Multiply that by a factor of ten to fifteen for all areas that ‘can’ be taxed, add in the CO2, and add in the other 20 or so GHG and you get the real picture of how much an ETS will generate.
All just revenue raising, as any lowering of all those emissions is not only just tinkering at the edges, but taking but one crumb from the overall whole Cake.
Tony.
Tony, all those transactions will require some very good financial heads. Lehman Brothers were pioneers in this area, but they’re now unavailable. I hope others are keen to assist. Goldman Sachs? GIM? Do we have a good banker in our Federal Parliament?
One feels confident the UN will help out with managing and distributing some of the vasts sums you describe.
Robert,
er, perhaps the introduction of any mechanism for costing emissions of GHG relates directly back to the original Kyoto Protocol from 1997 as shown at this link, again Wikipedia, so sorry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Framework_Convention_on_Climate_Change#1997_.E2.80.93_COP_3.2C_The_Kyoto_Protocol_on_Climate_Change
Read that carefully.
Then extrapolating that out, one of my own Posts, so sorry for that also, and one I have linked to here a few times as well.
http://papundits.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/bthe-un-and-climate-change-ten-fateful-wordsb/
Tony.
…this thread is about carbon policy not climatology…’
That’s the pity, we are at risk of missing the greatest show on earth.
TonyFromOz
Recently I read this http://bravenewclimate.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/peter-lang-wind-power.pdf The main thrust of it is that in order to have Wind generation you must also have co-generation probably gas. If you don’t then all sorts of problems eventuate. Do you give credence to his reasoning? If so your prices for wind should be increased markedly. Solar is just not worth considering. Personally I think we are headed for blackouts on the Australian eastern grid. Let us hope the Greens are blamed, they should be.
BTW I know Luke from old he is best ignored, if I ran this blog he would have been banned long ago. Not because he is of the warmist view but more to the point that there is little rational argument from him. For years he has only been a spoiler not a contributer.
‘If I ran this blog he would have been banned long ago.’
Good thing you’re not running the show then. If I ran this blog Luke Walker would get an occasional guest post.
Tony and Robert, with 60% not paying any income tax and the top 10% paying most, there is the potential for govts to corrupt democracy and increase taxes ad infinitum.
A little bit of background always helps to get things into perspective.
Robert, are these your comments BTW?
http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/home/9016-the-global-warmingclimate-change-paradox-why-co2-has-not-is-not-nor-will-not-be-an-issue
MikeO,
I wholeheartedly agree with the thrust of Peter’s work on this subject.
Yes, that cost factor is commensurately increased, but what I have attempted to do is to paint renewables in the light of isolation without adding in those costs for extra generation.
When shown in isolation, it starkly shows that they are not economically viable as stand alone power generation, and the direct comparisons I use tend to make its own point.
As to banning Luke, NO WAY!
It’s refreshing to have people at blogs like this.
Without him, we would all just agree with each other.
What Luke does, well, what he does for me anyway, is to drive me to find information, not for him, but for the rest of us, mainly about just what the result might be if we were to just blindly give in to what is being called for by those of his following.
Without Luke,and Gavin as well, there’s no way known that a Post like this one, and others would reach more than a hundred comments.
I understand something like this makes it difficult for Jennifer, as evidenced yesterday, but the more people who do come in and comment, the more we all learn, especially from each other, and yes, we even learn from Luke and Gavin.
He won’t change the way we think, and we won’t change the way he thinks, but I’m willing to wager that even he has learned things from us.
Tony.
You are too modest TonyOz; we have all learned from you; your nuts and bolts appraoch to the deception of wind and solar has been particularly instructive; in some ways the carbon tax as a method of eradicating fossils could have been palatable if the greens had had the wit to mask their misanthropy by championing a VIABLE alternative grid power source such as nuclear; by concentrating on wind and solar they have revealed their punitive attitude towards humanity’s ‘excesses’ and have alienated people who may otherwise have supported them.
Keep up the good work.
MikeO – apologies for being ornery (my treatment of Cohers shabby perhaps but we know each other) but we are discussed matters of pith and moment here and thanks to support from my fellow combatants. Just remember MikeO – I don’t support a uni-lateral carbon tax and I don’t think agriculture could withstand a carbon tax on livestock. MikeO wouldn’t it be great if AGW wasn’t happening. V8’s with no guilt !
However, I do take umbrage to Deb’s innuendo that the scientists doing work on such matters are on the take. Often they are a career peaks and done a lot of hard yards to be in the science roles they are. They’re not making things up to please Julia ! Indeed many like Bill Burrows have done work in spite of the guvmint trying to suppress their reports.
Do we think this guy is “on the take” http://theland.farmonline.com.au/news/nationalrural/agribusiness-and-general/general/woody-weeds-love-co2/1729857.aspx?storypage=0 and does this look like an attempt at industry defence based on science http://www.dpi.qld.gov.au/documents/AnimalIndustries_Beef/Net-carbon-beef-industry.pdf ?
Despite Debs fears so of us may have even spent entire lives trying to improve her bottom line.
Here is the conclusion.
Contrary to the consensus view, the historic temperature record displays high sensitivity to solar variations when related by slow equilibration dynamics. A range of results suggest that incorrect specification of the relationship between between forcings and temperature may be at the heart of previous studies finding low correlations of solar variation to temperature. The accumulation model is a credible alternative mechanism for explaining both paleoclimatic temperature variability and present-day warming without recourse to increases in heat-trapping gases produced by human activities. The grounds on which a solar explanation for late 20th century warming is dismissed should be reconsidered.
Sounds like a reasonable conclusion to me, David.
More corrupt democracy:
http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/green-economy-stillborn
This might be helpful.
http://landshape.org/enm/files/2011/06/article-005.png
Helpful EG, it’s devastating!
“Robert, are these your comments BTW?”
No, SD. You know me, no strong language, just the odd sarcasm.
Interesting site though. I tend to agree with most of the sentiments.
ianl8888
You say that the domestic thermal sells at $35-40/tonne, do you have a reference for that. Swan has been saying that the CO2 tax will only be a small part of the coal price. Your figure indicates it to be a lie. Are you also saying the price will rise substantially in a year or two? If so then does a doubling in the price of coal mean a doubling of the price of electricity?
Mike of Canberra
TonyfromOz
I have looked did you give a costing of Gas? If not do you know where I might find such information? Your costing on coal surely would be affected by refurbishment over such a long period? Another problem that needs to be addressed in all this is how long they take to be built. The business world is saying it is already too late there will be significant power shortages. My guess is then will be a mad scramble to gas power stations, is that viable? Certainly politically we are also headed for blood in the streets.
As to the overall question of environmentalism I urge you all to read http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Greenpeace-Dropout-Sensible-Environmentalist/dp/0986480827/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1308000507&sr=1-1 as all this is not about CO2.
A book soon to be published is http://www.connorcourt.com/catalog1/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=7&products_id=165 it will be worth reading I think.
As to AGW we should also all study this http://www.biocab.org/carbon_dioxide_geological_timescale.html If we can actually warm the planet significantly (probably not) lets go for it, CO2 is far too low and the planet too cool.
I used to frequent this blog a lot but now only occasionally. I think many left the blog because of L uke and his many problems. I am glad you see some value I never did because of the large volume of his posts and efforts to only disrupt.
Mike of Canberra “If it works it is not Green”
Good links MikeO.
MikeO
I cannot give references to the public on pricing – if I do, lawyers will come and take my house (confidentiality agreements, I’m still working in the energy supply industry). However, you may track down the press reports in the Fin Review about 6 months ago on the aborted discussions between the then State ALP Govt and Whitehaven Pty Ltd on the Govt attempting to find a mining company to develop a deposit for supply to the generators at the price I noted
[No post here as far as I can tell has yet asked an obvious question: “What is the cost of production?” I have spreadsheets on this going back over 20 years, but again these cannot be publicised]
The CO2 tax on coal mining is in fact NOT a tax on CO2 emissions, but rather on emissions of methane CH4 seam gas from the mining process (even Swanee has admitted that in a flick-off statement). There are a few problems with this sleight of hand:
1) most coal seams used for energy production in Aus, at current operating depths, are very minor emitters of CH4 (2-3 cu m/tonne)
2) generally, although not invariably, the gassier seams ( > 6 cu m/tonne) are also the most economically valuable in that they are used for coking coal (technically, it’s related to the rank of the coal). Underground mine operators here are moving emphatically towards underground collection of these CH4 emissions to use on the surface for small-scale power plants. Quite a few operators are already there. Swanee pretends that CH4 emissions from open cut mines are not an issue under his proposal, but cu m/tonne does not respect the mining method
On the pricing of domestic thermal coal in NSW, the current supply contracts will expire in the next few years. The renewal supply prices will be higher, since mine operators have the opportunity to export if they wish (provided they have access to port capacity). Again, look at the Fin Review reports about 3-4 months ago during the buy-out of Centennial Coal by Banpu (Thailand) – domestic supply pricing as against export pricing rates very prominently in the muted sparring
Doubling the price of domestic supply does not mean a doubling in domestic power prices. But it does mean a significant increase. This is exactly why the previous State ALP Govt was attempting to lock Whitehaven into a low domestic supply sale price
I know this is a longer post, but if you get the picture that the situation is SNAFU because of the obduracy of taxing CO2 emissions without a viable alternative for energy supply (especially for the cities), then you’re well on track to grasp the mess Gillard and Brown have wrought
OOPS “My guess is that then will be a mad scramble to build gas power stations, is that viable?”
MikeO,
The major problem with Power plants is the ‘hey presto’ problem, and you hit the nail on the head with this when you said:
‘Another problem that needs to be addressed in all this is how long they take to be built.’
Therein lies the problem.
It’s the same with The Greens, and I just hate harping on what they say when they say a move to renewables is the direction we need to be going in.
If every single duck lined up, any renewable will take at the minimum 7 years to get from thought bubble to actual power delivery, and currently a lot of them are actually taking longer.
Now, the same applies with any form of power plant.
So, there can be a mad scramble to gas fired power production, and provided that also starts RIGHT NOW, you’re still looking at that 7 years.
In the interim, those coal fired plants just have to keep doing what they are doing, providing the power that is ABSOLUTELY essential.
So, as Ian says, if that price of Thermal coal is rising, then the cost of electricity will also rise.
Keep in mind that to cut out the coal transportation middle man, most of the most recent plants have been constructed at the site of the coal mine.
Plant operator ‘bean counters’ may soon do the sums on MRRT and Carbon Tax and find it is cheaper (for them) to export the coal to China than it is to consume it at their own power plant.
Now, as to plant design. I have always said that the problem is one of working backwards from the generator.
Large scale coal fired power, say Eraring and Bayswater have generators weighing 1300tons rotating at 3000RPM, or 50 times a second, hence needing a huge driving turbine, hence huge amounts of high pressure steam to drive that turbine.
The design of Gas fired plants is that you cannot just hook up that 1300 ton generator to a gas turbine. It won’t even begin to move.
Hence, gas fired plants are smaller, and because of that they have a smaller output. Eraring and Bayswater both at 2640MW.
A typical large scale gas fired plant is around 500MW, so, you will need 5 of them just to replace the one Bayswater.
The design of gas fired plants is for best operation as Peaking Power, eg, five/six hours a day.
They also have less life span that large scale coal fired power plants.
So, in the interim, while new plants are being constructed, those coal fired plants just HAVE to keep doing what they are doing.
The very second one of them closes down, as uneconomically viable, ther will be, as you quite rightly say, blood on the streets.
Therein lies the cunning. Those politicians know this, well, I guess they know it, so in effect, what they are doing is taking aim at a captive target, knowing it has to keep doing what it is doing, only now, they’ll be making a motza from it.
I mentioned earlier that all it would take to kill this CO2 tax stone motherless dead is for those plants to just shut up shop and show people what it would be like to have a CO2 free society. That’s a destructive thing to actually say, because of the immense damage it would cause to that society, but all talk of CO2 costings would just stop dead in the water.
Long reply I know, but as you can see, it’s a lot more complex than Bob or Christine telling us we need to move to renewables.
Tony.
Link to Bayswater stats: http://www.macgen.com.au/GenerationPortfolio/BayswaterPowerStation.aspx
Link to Earring stats (pdf): http://www.eraring-energy.com.au/Uploads/Documents/Eraring-power-station-fact-sheet_20090102111544.pdf
See also now the problem with renewable power.
You can’t put one of those 1300 ton generators producing 660MW on top of a pole with a big fan out the front. The best they can manage is 5KW and the most common is between 3 and 3.5MW.
With Solar, they best they can manage is 250MW which produces 50MW from all solar means, still only 18 to 19 hours out of every 24.
Tony.
Chuckle! 🙂
Luke,
It is amusing me that you regularly make snide remarks, to the point of being outright rude, about farmers and your broad definition of sceptics and then become insulted and highly moralistic when you perceive the same is being done in reverse?
Thankyou for reiterating your position on a unilateral Carbon (O2) tax and the veracity of the livestock industry having a carbon tax.
I repeat that I did not say that scientists were ‘on the take’ but I did say that the work that is being done with carbon, emissions trading etc via scientific studies is heavily reliant on government funding.
It also appears to be attached to a political agenda that has an ETS as its ultimate goal.
Of course ‘the scientists’ are mostly very good and sincere people and of course they have worked hard to be where they are.
It doesn’t change the fact that the government funding is increasingly tagged with ‘climate change’ as part of the requirement.
Even the 2 links you attached are further proof that these studies are propped up by government funding.
Please take note of Tony’s points about the calculations of agricultural emissions. He has explained this very well indeed. I don’t think I need to add to this detailed description of the issue we are facing.
Whether you understand or not, Australian Agriculture is right in the cross hairs of this debate.
TonyfromOz (& IanI888 above) you might be interested in my comment at Warwick Hughes http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=1043
Part the way down Page 2 on this Post, I linked to an ABC article where Bob Brown mentions that if the coal fired power industry was not heavily subsidised, Renewable power would become more attractive.
As I have attempted to explain, Renewable Power can NEVER be made attractive with respect to coal fired power.
Bob erroneously uses the word ‘heavily, and later, hugely’ in reference to subsidised.
These subsidies were ‘cryptically’ alluded to by Ian, mainly in the cost of Thermal Coal prices, and how, if those plants are put into a situation where they have to pay the same price as for the ‘Export’ price of that Thermal Coal, that $130 per ton I alluded to.
In every case, every calculation I made as to the overall lifetime of Plant cost analyses, I have used that price of $130 per ton, in other words what I have done is to paint the worst possible scenario for coal, and to make a comparison, I have tried to make Wind and Solar as reasonable as I could with respect to costings.
Those relative comparisons of Wind at 7 times more expensive, and Solar 10 times more expensive were all based on that subsidised figures, so Brown and Milne’s argument just does not stack up.
Either way, anywhere in the World where those renewable plants are being constructed, it is only because (a) they are heavily subsidsed at the front end with cheap loans, Government’s paying half and half, and (b) heavily subsidising the cost of the generated electricity to the grid, in other words, if the electricity costs 60 cents per KWH to generate, then the government pays the generator the amount to get that price down to just 20 cents per KWH.
The ONLY reason so many of these Wind especially in the US and Solar plants are being constructed is so the the entrepreneurs/Companies moving into them can get their hands on all the Government Taxpayer money.
So, the idea that ‘heavily’ subsidising coal fired power will make renewables more attractive is, and there’s no other word for it, a flat out misrepresentation.
As to the export cost of that Thermal coal. I mentioned that most power plants are at the mine. The coal is mined and dumped at the site Bulldozers move it to the feed line for the Crusher and then the Critical furnace. For export its dumped at the rail head, moved by rail to the port, dumped, bulldozed to the feed line and then shipped off where it is unloaded and then transported to where it is used. Of course it’s cheaper at the plant site than the exporting, so again, more misdirection about subsidising coal fired power by making them pay the higher price.
Heavily subsidised coal fired power is a furphy.
Tony.
TonyfromOz
Thank you for the links. Your statements about Solar puzzle me.
“With Solar, they best they can manage is 250MW which produces 50MW from all solar means, still only 18 to 19 hours out of every 24”
I have gone through the exercise of calculating what an individual would have to do pay their way as it were with solar cells. It was worthwhile because many in this fondly imagine if only everyone would put cells on their roof all would be solved. I took the electricity generated currently and divided by the population. I found that if I put a 1 KW unit on my roof I would get only 5 KW hours a day at most. This is because there only 5 hours of generation per day at full capacity effectively, you are saying 18 to 19?
My calculation ended up at 27 KW per person which would seem very high for most who seem to think it is their own personal use that is important. When one understands that households only use 11% one can understand the futility of personal home solar cells. There are also of course many other problems with this “solution”.
Subsidies are argued by the Greens but they fail to come up with valid reasons. If you look in the Greens site there is a three part document by Lee Rhiannon from a few years back. It is poorly put together and I did not examine it in detail but she seems to be saying the NSW government spent money on power generation at the same time as they owned it! Bob Brown has said since the power industry only pays the business rate of tax, 30c in the dollar, it is subsidised. He fails to understand that if it were 47.5c the maximum tax rate then that would just mean the users of electricity have to pay it. His mantra of make the big polluters pay is nonsense, business will pass it on or close if the profit margin is too low.
MikeO,
The calculation I used was for Concentrating Solar Power, mirrors focussing the Sun’s heat onto a compound which goes molten, this used to boil water to steam to drive a turbine which drives the generator.
The calculation you use is for Solar PV where the Sun shines on cells which generate electricity. This is commensurately higher cost than for Concentrating Solar (Solar Thermal Power), and not even particularly suited for household power generation let alone for large scale plants; as shown at this link:
http://papundits.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/floridas-new-solar-power-plant/
Tony.
For some Costings, I have a comparison for Nuclear versus both renewables. Don’t get the idea that I am advocating Nuclear for Australia, because that just will not happen, but it does give insight into relative costings.
http://papundits.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/nuclear-electrical-power-generation-%E2%80%93-why-the-fuss-part-8/
This next one is for Nuclear versus Coal fired Power, and from that you can refer it back to the earlier Post, and see that coal fired power is not only cheaper by a large margin, but that renewables can never be made to compete. The pricing for coal uses data more than a year old as the date of both posts shows.
http://papundits.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/power-plant-costings-analysis-nuclear-versus-coal-fired/
The imposition of a price on carbon we are told will drive the move to renewables and that of itself will drive down the cost of those renewables. Keep in mind that the huge up front price of those renewable plants needs to be extrapolated out over the life of the plant, so the cost per unit of electricity will always be higher no matter what.
Tony.
Great work TonyOz; but despite all the cost comparisons still the elephant in the room is the inability of renewables to supply sustained grid power and the inevitability of power rationing.
TonyfromOz
My are you just sitting there waiting for a comment to come in?
Thanks for the links but haven’t looked yet at all. Maybe I wasn’t clear enough but my puzzlement is that you don’t get anywhere near 18 to 19 hours sunlight a day. I do understand that PV cells are the dearest way to do it but there is a lot of focus by Green thinking on them. I looked at a solar power station once that used molten salts, are you saying it is practical to build such a station and produce steady power 18 to 19 hours a day. I thought we were nowhere near that for anything of a useful size.
I also gather costings for gas power stations are difficult to come by. Peter Lang gives a new entry cost of $36.2/MWh for coal, $50.9/MWh for CCGT and $109/MWh for OCGT. Is he calculating an end delivery cost for new plant here? I am not sure what is meant I suspect it is close to what you orginally were saying about relative cost, you were estimating the recovery of capital costs.
The only “subsidy” coal miners receive is exactly the same as farmers and other primary producers receive. Indeed it is known in shorthand as the Primary Producer subsidy
It comprises two simple parts: 1) a fuel rebate for the operating of the machinery necessary for production; 2) an accelerated discount rate for write-off of capital expenses in buying the machinery to start with
Both farmers and miners are entitled to this as primary producers, and have been for much longer than I’ve been alive
Again, this fact is not admitted to Brown et al
Tony: there is no price subsidy to producers for domestic coal supply to the generators. If one cannot produce and sell to the generators at a profit with the sale price as it is pre-determined, one simply does not bid for such a supply contract, or walks away from trying to develop the deposit (happened plenty of times)
In fact, the State Govts of Q’ld, NSW, SA and WA control the price of domestic power through their various quangos. They claim these quangos are independent, but we have all witnessed the sacking/replacing of people in those quangos when a decision was made that the Govts did not want to live with
MikeO,
no, but having been doing this for more than three years now, I have a list of around 500 or more Posts on this and related matters.
When someone needs information, all I have to do is find the relevant Post and link to it, and I apologise that it looks like I’m just drumming up visits to the site where I contribute, but these Posts are now spread over three years, so it’s old stuff that has been visited plenty of times already.
I was given the opportunity to start contributing there at that US based site, and rather than start my own Blog, I just did it all there, hence the emphasis on the situation in the US, but as it is the same wherever this renewable madness is being pushed, then the information is the same no matter where.
As to your question about the situation with molten salts, this is Concentrating Solar, and this Post effectively explains that situation.
http://papundits.wordpress.com/2011/06/05/co2-emissions-concentrating-solar-power-the-failed-saviour/
Tony.
ianl8888
I understand your reasons for not giving references no problem. You amaze me though saying that the tax is in fact on fugitive emissions. Open cut mining would mostly be the target then, that is exports surely? Could it be because methane is classed as more potent GHG so therefore it is easier?
Yes I think I do understand that the Labor/Green coalition has really FOOBARed the electricity sector. I think the government is a dead man walking, when the S.. Hits the Fan event happens guess who will be blamed! I have bought my candles and portable heating, suspect I will be needing them soon.
The Skeptic side often says that it is not GHG coming out of power station cooling stacks. In fact it is since water vapour is the most potent GHG. I suppose next there will people wanting to ban water because it is a pollutant. Makes as much sense as the rest of it.
Tony thanks understand what you are saying. Clearly it won’t happen but the realization will be very painful since as Ian says it is SNAFU personally I prefer FOOBAR!
Twaddle Debs – as usual – much of this work has started long before government thought it was sexy and much might might be funded by GRDC and MLA because of production interests.
It’s enjoying watching Mike O slip all the old sceptics ruses through – “only skepos understand that power station steam is water vapour” and Nasif’s bunk on CO2 was 20 times more in the dim dark past. Carefully omitting what the solar forcing or continental configurations may have been. Dreary me.
As to how you price carbon, we already have “carbon” taxes plus the ever rising price of fuel and power.
Has anyone noticed if they have reduced our emissions?
Are they likely to?
Or just raise our COL?
I saw on ACA tonight how you can buy a two star electric dryer for $300 or a six star ED [which might save you $50 a year in electricity] for $3,000.
How’s that for pricing carbon? [but at least it’s voluntary]
MikeO re methane see my comments here http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=1043
Some people incluing IPCC claim that CH4 is a more powerfull supposed “greenhouse gas” but it is not true. Look at graphs of energy flux, or relative absorptivity versus wavelength for CO2 & CH4, the latter has an area under the curve of about one fifth of CO2.
Tony, as long as it’s okay with Jen, you shouldn’t be shy of linking to things posted elsewhere.
However, I can only hope you’ve missed a decimal point and that your calculations of the inefficiency of “baseload solar” are inflated ten times. That way we’re only buying 5.3 turkeys for one Bayswater. Of course, the much faster obsolescence of the turkeys should be taken into account. And we’ll have to expatriate masses of coal to be burnt elsewhere to pay for not burning coal here. But still burn heaps of gas and coal here anyway…
All of which does weaken one’s faith in the rationality of humans.
But please assure me that we’re not looking at a ratio of 53 to 1. I can’t bear to think that the creatures who would implement such a scheme are my fellow bipeds.
Robert,
I think you might be referring to what I mentioned above when comparing Natural Gas Fired plants to Bayswater.
The average large scale Natural gas fired plant is 500MW, hence 5 large NG plants for one Bayswater.
When it comes to Concentrating Solar, and how I detest that phrase from Bob and Christine when they refer to it as Solar baseload, that I linked to, they can provide 50MW firm, from just Solar for 18/19 hours if the molten compound is diverted solely to stay molten enough to make the steam to drive the turbine.
If they can provide that 50MW, then you will need the 53 Plants, and the big joke is the part of that equation they don’t tell you.
A plant of this nature costs $1.45 Billion, hence $77 Billion, and just to replace the one plant, Bayswater, and you still only get power for 19 hours tops each day.
Bayswater just hums along all day every day, year in year out, as it has for the last 26 years with another 26 still to come, with the (probability) that it’s going to keep doing what it always has been doing.
It’s trouble enough to get one Solar plant of this nature into planning, let alone 53 of them.
As to that $77 Billion, that has to be recovered over the life of the plant, so you can just imagine what the cost per unit of electricity will be, so when Bob and Christine tell you hand on heart that it will be price equivalent with coal fired power, only the insane will believe that.
Tony.
Robert
“All of which does weaken one’s faith in the rationality of humans.”
All of this has been in hard discussion amongst empirical scientists and engineers for well over 20 years now – literally
Yet not one pointed debate on this was ever hosted by the MSM. In fact, populist media outlets went out of their way to ensure that details on this topic were NOT published (Fairfax and the ABC just censored it). A very incurious general populace preferred the tinsel of “Reality TV” in any case
And here we are
Yesterday June 14, the IPPC released a paper claiming that 80% of the world’s energy supply can be met with wind and solar renewabubbles
Here is the link to this PDF:
http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/press/content/potential-of-renewable-energy-outlined-report-by-the-intergovernmental-panel-on-climate-change
Discussion on Climate Audit by Steve McIntyre:
http://climateaudit.org/2011/06/14/ipcc-wg3-and-the-greenpeace-karaoke/
NOTE:
1) the article defining 164 scenarios is referenced to a just-published and paywalled article by two of the Lead Authors (Krey and Clarke, 2011, Climate Policy) … of course it’s paywalled
2) an earlier referenced article by the one of the Lead Authors is here:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/nu354g4p6576l238/fulltext.pdf
So we have a Greenpeace employee peer-reviewing his own work and then publishing the critical Greenpeace scenario as an IPPC-imprimatured guarantee of objectivity
I have posted this to prevent weak-minded crowing by AGW wishfuls. I expect Tony may have fun with it
Could this bring about the end of the greatest CON in the last 100 years?
Perhaps we may be encouraging the use of carbon within a few years and not penalising people/ companies/ govts for their use of fossil fuels.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/14/all-three-of-these-lines-of-research-to-point-to-the-familiar-sunspot-cycle-shutting-down-for-a-while/#more-41680
Ian and all of you,
80% renewables by 2050 will never be achieved.
Big Call.
I take you back to one of my Guest posts here at Jennifer’s site:
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2011/03/the-base-load-misconception-part-1/
The critical part in this whole 80% renewable madness is that simple looking diagram for the Load Curve, and if you click on it, it will open in a larger format.
60 to 65% of every Watt of power being generated is required absolutely, 24/7/365, and until they can actually do that with renewables, the whole argument falls over.
They ‘may’ be able to achieve it with Concentrating Solar, but currently they can get 19 hours at 50MW from a 250MW total plant. There is hope that this might extend to ‘perhaps’ a 1000MW plant in 20 years or so, but until they can find a way to keep the compound molten enough to make steam for the full 24 hours at that maximum rate, then they cannot rely on Solar to achieve this. Solar PV is currently averaging around 4 to 5 hours, and can still only make electricity while the Sun is actually shining. Wind is averaging 5 to 6 hours and best case scenario for that is 9 hours.
Note in that document how Nuclear power does not rate a mention. Hydro Power, well try getting a new dam up in the Western World in the current ‘climate’, and China is the only Country powering ahead with Hydro, where 22% of their current power comes from Hydro, U.S. and Australia in the low single figures. Geothermal is debatable, well, on the scale required anyway. Biomass is a tiny percentage.
So now, let’s look at the largest electricity consumer with current data, the U.S. and scale that up for a Whole of World scenario, assuming of course this document is referring to whole of world, and not just the current Western World.
The U.S. currently consumes 4,000TWH of electrical power each year. Population 320 Million.
China just a little more than that. Population 1,350 Million
India around one third of that U.S. total. Population 1,150 Million.
Rest of the Third World considerably less than one third of that U.S. total. Population around 2,000 Million.
U.S. has a tad more than 47% of power from Coal, 20% from Nuclear, 21% from Natural Gas, Oil derivatives 1%. The rest is from renewables, Hydro around 7.1% of that. Wind and Solar barely 2.25%, nearly all of it Wind.
So take out coal and Nuclear, almost 70%.
Let’s keep Natural Gas because this document says 80% renewables, and Natural Gas only emits one third the CO2 on a watt for watt basis that coal emits.
Scale that up now so that the whole of the World has access to electrical power like we do in the Western World, which I would assume that the IPCC would want.
Now, if you can imagine, the cost, and the time frame involved, considering my earlier comments.
The only conclusion I can come to is that this document suggesting 80% renewables calls for the vast bulk of humanity to have any future expansion totally and utterly stifled completely, and also for us to go back and join them. (If I could place this last single paragraph in Bold, I would, because this is the most important thing in this whole debate.)
Read the linked Post at Jennifer’s site very carefully, because it all hinges on that Load Curve, something every ‘green urger’ fails so utterly to comprehend.
Climate change Science is wonderful, but until you become cognizant of the ramifications I concentrate on, then you are not seeing the full picture.
Tony.
Do you seriously think that new perfectly functional coal fired plants just opening in China at the rate of one a week, and with an effective life span of 50 to 75 years will closed down, as with new Nuclear plants.
Meanwhile back at the UN. Their subsidiary, the World Bank is spending Billions in the Third World on the construction of, and wait for this, Coal fired power plants.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6836112.ece
I’m reminded of the old adage about the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing.
Tony.
Tony
I’m aware of all of that – for over 20 years now.I’m way ahead of the curve here. I spend a considerable proportion of my professional time in China, since 2004, analysing and advising on exactly this issue
My post above was sardonic. It was designed to push the more curious into reading the bubbleland blurbs that Greenpeace tout, now openly endorsed by the IPCC, in the probably forlorn hope that people would begin to appreciate the depth of disinformation being deliberately marketed. It was also designed to pre-empt triumphal Greenie posts
Noted as well is the now routine and utterly disgraceful modus operandi adopted by the IPCC of publishing the market tinsel of “Summary for Policy Makers” well ahead of any detailed reports (which always turn out to be paywalled). This allows the MSM to promote the fantasy of “solutions are at hand” without actually needing to examine the detail
I do hope that you don’t lack a sense of satire. That would disappoint me.The ability to laugh out loud at them is potent
And I’m afraid that your quote: ” … Natural Gas only emits one third the CO2 on a watt for watt basis that coal emits” is misleading. The actual range here is from 20% to 35% improvement on a watt for watt basis, depending on the purity of the CH4 being burnt as compared to the ash (mineral) and water contents of the coal being burnt. There are coals (NZ deposits are a well known example) with only 1-2% ash and moisture, directly comparable to commercial CH4 deposits in specific energy, which are almost watt for watt with CH4. Such coal deposits tend to be used for either coking or filtration purposes (coal rank dependent) as these deposits are not all that common and are considered too valuable for power generation (I posted on this earlier, but as I’ve noted, people are determined to remain geologically ignorant)
I urge you all to read Patrick Moore’s book. This thread has been an interesting discussion of the relative costs of power generation but do we miss the main game?
The environmental movement’s key beliefs are misanthropic it is a neo pagan religion. See this link http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/do-not-feel-afraid-gaia-is-with-us/story-fn6b3v4f-1225980669696 about our climate commissioner. This is common they also talk of the pollution of the virus of humanity and sometimes talk in public of reducing the population to one billion. I know probably you are now thinking that could not be. Well name solutions of the environmentalist that are practical alternatives. The discussion here says “alternative power” is not and that any saved emissions are marginal. Patrick Moore left Greenpeace because it wanted to ban chlorine (it still does). They are trying to ban CO2 this is lunacy of the first order. In fact if green policies where accepted and followed all aspects of our civilisation would be greatly diminished.
We can discuss the detrimental aspects of green ideas but it is buy designed not ignorance. There is just too much of it to think otherwise. Think of them as a fundamentalist religious sect which wants to greatly diminished civilisation.
Here is what Patrick Moore thinks about the movement http://www.greenspirit.com/key_issues.cfm?msid=34&page=3 He is one of many that are saying this, know the enemy for they truly are. Logic and empirical fact mean very little to this religious cult.
Ian,
off topic I know, but whilst on coal for a minute.
Relating to the deposits in the vast Bowen Basin, still much of it unmined, I’ve heard that it’s the best black coal on the Planet and is highly sought after, mainly for Coking as, when you mention that it’s so valuable, it’s not used for Thermal purposes, hence it’s exported to gain the best prices.
This same Bowen Basin coal is also the best burning coal I have also heard.
Are these things correct?
Also, is that costing structure the only reason it’s not used as Thermal coal?
I can’t see any Government with such known vast reserves cutting it’s own Royalty throat for perceived reductions in CO2 emissions.
Tony.
Damn I thought I had made my last comment on this thread. Stop it Ian and Tony!
http://www.capitalvue.com/home/CE-news/inset/@10063/post/1202723
I wonder what they will do with all that coal?
I have seen figures where China is bringing on line 2 coal stations a week and plans for a further 560. Business journals claim that only thing that will stop this is that soon they will not be able to dig or import enough to keep expanding and then nuclear is the only answer. Truth is communist countries can hide what happens internally. It is the West that is on this suicidal bent the rest of the world will pay lip service.
As for predictions Oz will not achieve the RET or reduce emissions unless the figures are massaged.
TonyOz; your information and knowledge needs to be available to the general public. Do you want to be interviewed on radio; if you would want to do this please send your details through Jennifer to me and I will arrange such an interview.
Good idea, cohers. Tony has commonsense and vision, and is able to explain complex issues so that they are easily understood by us ordinary folk.
I need to very careful how I say this because the ‘green lobby’ will straight away scream ‘conspiracy theory’.
However, I prefer to think of it more as logic.
Can you gain some inkling how all of this is aimed squarely at the already Developed World.
This whole ‘Pricing Carbon’ – ETS debate harkens back to COP3 of the UNFCCC and their meeting in Kyoto, which gave us the Kyoto protocol as shown at these 2 links.
UNFCCC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Framework_Convention_on_Climate_Change
Kyoto Protocol: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol
When I started out, I wanted to concentrate on what adherence to Kyoto meant for the electricity generation sector.
The initial design of the Kyoto Protocol is what the whole problem has become NOW.
In it, they broke the World up into 2 Annexes, Developed and Developing, and in effect, the Haves and the Have Nots.
Annex 1 was 41 Developed Countries, and Annex 2 culled from Annex 1, 23 Countries, and their obligation was to introduce that pricing mechanism for all emissions, CO2 just one among them, and the major target. Those 23 Countries also had to pay ALL the costs, not only in their own Country, but collectively for all the other Countries, all 154 of them, and those 154 Countries, well, their only obligation was to report their emissions. Full stop. Just Report.
I’ll repeat that those 23 Countries had to pay all costs for those other 154, eg costs to implement measures to lower emissions, and all costs and technologies to enable their move to low emission power industrialisation etc.
Great intent at the time Kyoto was brought in, 1997.
Kyoto’s intent was for it to be replaced by 2012.
Scroll forward to Copenhagen and Cancun, and the abject failure of both.
The problem was that Kyoto was an existing LEGAL document, the only one they had, and NOW, why would any one of those Countries want to change that.
By now, those 23 Countries saw what all this was going to mean, and to cost, and they desperately wanted it changed to include China, now the biggest emitter, and India, and the rest of the Third World.
Those 154 Countries did not want it changed because that would be extremely disadvantageous to them, and why would they want to change when ALL their costs were to be met by those 23 Countries, and all they had to do was report.
Hence Copenhagen and Cancun failed.
Now we have what is being cobbled together as Kyoto 2, and Countries (in the group of 23) are starting to say they won’t be part of it.
Only 1 Country, the U.S. is th only Country not to add that all important second signature, ratifying Kyoto, something Rudd did with a flourish after he was elected.
So, while the U.S. is the only Country not subject to Kyoto, they are the biggest target, obviously, because the perception is that they have the only economy able to support ALL the rest.
Hence, now the IPCC is desperately trying to reinforce the UNFCCC with what it is releasing.
As explained earlier, if those already Developed Countries cannot afford to move to Renewables in their own Country, so how can they afford ALL costs for those other 154 Countries. (AN ALREADY EXISTING LEGAL DOCUMENT)
Is the expectation such that we allow those other 154 Countries to remain in the dark (literally) and to lower those emissions, we go back and join them, or status quo, we go on as we are, and deny them access to what we have and take so much for granted.
See how all of this is aimed at those 23 Developed Countries.
This is no conspiracy theory at all.
It actually is simple logic, that is, if you are aware of the situation.
Again, sorry to take so much space here, but can you see now how complex all of this is. It actually is MORE than just the ‘Science’.
Tony.
Thanks for the vote of confidence gentlemen, but gee, where would you start?
It’s so involved and complex, that you could speak for hours, and become boring after minutes, and still not scratch the surface.
One comment would open up another three or four.
The format would be short, as radio would demand that, so it would only leave listeners as just another person speaking from a political viewpoint, which is what it has come down to.
That’s why I am so thankful to Jennifer, because, a format like this is indeed a good one because my guess is that readers here would actually be becoming aware of just how complex it really is.
A blog format like I contribute at is OK, but I have to rely on linking into those Posts in other formats, mainly within the US, and here at Bolt’s site.
However, now Jennifer has opened up her Posts to allow the steady stream of incoming comments, something a lot of blogs won’t attempt to do, it gives me especially the opportunity to actually ‘reach’ people, who ask questions, and my task is then to find where I have that info, and link back to it.
The major problem is trying to explain something of a technical nature in a way that actually can be understood by readers with no background in what I am attempting to explain.
So, radio’s fine, but again, it would have to be so well structured as to the Q and A.
Again, thanks, and if you think it can be achieved, then I could do that, but again, it would realistically be to a small base, similar to what is getting the same result here, and to a lesser degree at Jo Nova’s site, and (now) even lesser at Bolt’s.
Tony.
Tony
It seems we have to stop meeting like this, MikeO wants to stop reading 🙂
re:
“is that costing structure the only reason it’s not used as Thermal coal?
I can’t see any Government with such known vast reserves cutting it’s own Royalty throat for perceived reductions in CO2 emissions”
1) yes – coking coal is used to make steel so downstream products have a greater perceived value than just turning on your kitchen light (we’ll see – if pushed to it, I’d rather have on-demand cheap reliable power than the ability to buy yet another Ford)
2) Bowen Basin coals have a quite large range – from world-class benchmark coking coal to very ordinary indeed ho-hum thermal coal. The best burning coal I’ve ever seen (world-wide) is from the Mangatini Seam on the west coast of NZ South Island (used dramatically in British steam-powered destroyers in WWI to outmanouevre German hunting patrols in typhoons) … just placed a few shavings of this raw coal on a newspaper page and lit the page. The shavings caught alight in a few seconds. 1-2% ash; 2% H2O and 36-37 Mj/kg specific energy; low sulphur
3) ROYALTIES belong to the State Govts by Constitutional fiat – absolute, no wriggle room. The Feds extract company tax and have the right to grant/prevent export licences under the Corporate Powers as re-defined by the High Court. But you are correct in guessing that no Fed Govt will try to stop this (Connor in the Whitlam Govt did try – he wanted much more money than he was entitled to – and caused the Khemlani affair)
Apologies to Jennifer for the length of these posts
TonyOz; one of the big issues I have been raising in my comments on radio is the inevitable shortage of electricity due to the diversion of funding towards non-viable energy sources such as wind and solar; most people and radio hosts regard this as farfetched but it is starting to trickle through the media hive mind.
Right now the msm reagrds the science as settled but the solutions as formative especially the energy alternatives. I see that as an opportunity. If you can demolish the preferred energy solutions then the emphasis goes back to the science; at the very least you can legitimately say: well if they were wrong about wind and solar then maybe they are wrong about AGW.
The approach has to be VERY simple; basic shortcomings of wind and solar, relative costs and then a comparison with coal, gas and nuclear in respect of cost and base-load capability.
I don’t have the background or the ready facts to keep that coversation going but at the network where I comment, which reaches into QLD and NSW, they have responded to my recommendations to get relevant experts on and have interviewed Stuart Franks and Barry Brooks [about nuclear; I have to appear even-handed about AGW!].
I grew up on a farm which had no power; I surely don’t want to go back to that circumstance because the msm hasn’t the information to act on. But TonyOz, only consider it if you are comfortable with the idea. Incidentally, what is your area of expertise?
cohenite,
if Jennifer does not mind, here is the link to my Bio at the site I contribute at.
http://papundits.wordpress.com/views-expressed-by-writers-are-their-own-and-do-not/tonyfromoz/
Tony.
O/T
How times have changed, National Geographic features global cooling.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/06/110614-sun-hibernation-solar-cycle-sunspots-space-science/
Tony, since you’re happy to be plagued with questions for a bit longer:
If one was to to build a new major coal power generator, how much better could it be than older models, and in what respects?
Perhaps if people could get excited about having an improved version of something that is already terrific, that would be a nice foil to the thought of implementing lame alternatives at absurd cost.
I remember walking around our local industrial estate at the end of the insulation scheme. The yellow wisps of disintegrating batts were blowing about the streets like tumbleweeds in an old Western. At least they weren’t in my roof cavity. (We had the most notorious of all the installers active in our region.)
I don’t want to see something like that again, only much worse. I don’t want to be walking over hillsides of busted up, obsolete wind-turbines, knowing that the implementers of the madness have gone on to media, banking or UN careers – while the bush and countryside I love have been junked for generations.
Ian,
sorry to remain OT like this, and thanks for that mention of the NZ coal, as that indeed was interesting.
As you are aware, I use that average multiplier CO2 from coal as 2.86, which is indeed referenced and not something I just ‘plucked’ out of the air.
Lignite, or brown coal has the lowest carbon content.
Then, from low to high, it is: sub bituminous, and then bituminous and then Anthracite.
My perception as to brown coal being the dirtiest is because at the lowest Carbon content it has those other elements that make the emissions ‘dirtier’, and at the lower burn temperature, then much more of it needs to be used to achieve the high furnace temperature to make the steam.
The other three are used as Thermal coal, but mainly sub bituminous.
Would the higher carbon content coals, still used extensively as Thermal coals (steaming coal) become too expensive to use for power plants.
The trade off I perceive is that the higher up the carbon content, the higher the burn temperature, hence less coal burned for … greater heat … for steam production … to drive the turbine, hence the trade off, less coal burned, hence less emissions.
Am I (somewhat) correct in this, because I see plants of the same power output 2640MW, eg Eraring (Lake Macquarie) burning considerably less coal than Bayswater (Musswellbrook)
Is something like burning that better quality coal an economically viable proposition?
Tony.
Robert,
as I have mentioned earlier, what you have to do is to work backwards from the generator itself.
Take Bayswater.
One unit produces 660MW. It weighs 1340 Tons.
As I mentioned with the Snowys, earlier generators produced less power than the most recent Japanese ones at Tumut 3. Better Francis turbines, smaller generators.
As technology advances, so do those generators.
In the mid 70’s Bayswater was state of the art.
Scroll forwards to Now.
For the Rotor: Better permanent magnets using superconductors, this term referring to the conduction of the magnetic field itself. Better wiring around them to further increase the magnetic field, your classic electromagnet. Then supercool that rotor to further increase the magnetic field.
Better wiring in the Stator where the power is actually generated.
Hence the generator now can produce (significantly) more power.
To generate that same 660MW now, those generators are around half the size of those at Bayswater.
Hence a huge weight saving.
Hence a smaller driving turbine.
Hence less steam needed to drive that turbine.
Hence a lot less crushed coal being burned.
Hence less emissions.
See how it all works backwards from the generator.
Working backwards even from the generator itself, better turbines, better steam boilers, better, (and now considerably better critical furnaces) air injection techniques, and better coal crusher/pulverisers.
Currently, only the Chinese are building these new smaller large scale plants. We’re too scared, and now it’s too late.
Those Chinese plants are getting the same power output for, in some cases, half the coal burned, hence half the emissions.
Tony.
Tony
Perhaps not so O/T, as we are talking about various aspects of taxing (pricing ?) CO2
As a trend, the less mineral (ash) and water content in a coal, the higher its’ specific energy and so the more heat it produces on burn
But the actual heat content produced depends not only the levels of non-carbon in it, but also the efficiency of the actual burn that takes place. Power station design (as you noted in an earlier post) is improving constantly, so the burn may be made more efficient (ie. less actual C is wasted)
Most coal-fired stations in Aus are designed to burn middle-of-the-road to lower value thermal coals. The better quality thermal coals are generally designated as export, since this sells for a considerably higher price. The alumina smelters in Vic were built there precisely to try and extract export earnings form the very low rank peats (brown coal) in LaTrobe
I recently inspected a boiler designed for peat in a town in Central Siberia. It had been decided (unwisely) to try a load of much higher specific energy black coal from a deposit that was under consideration for development. Predictably, the trial had finished with a bloody big hole in the under-designed boiler
Using higher quality coals will improve the efficiency of well-designed power stations, sometimes quite markedly, but will increase the price of the power generated as these coals cost more to produce (washing costs, mostly). So the trade-off is actually more efficient burns (less GHG, mainly water) for a higher production cost
Putting together some interesting comments from Ian and Tony, I’m thinking that money spent now on coal power would be something we have not seen for a while in Oz: money well spent. I wonder if what is in our minds isn’t also in the mind of Martin Ferguson.
I’m not suggesting that we should be raping prime agricultural land for coal and gas. In fact, a prosperous, energy rich Australia could afford to make genuine conservation a priority.
Remember conservation?
Tony you could try to summarise your argument e.g. 5 line table to compare replacing say 30% of Australia’s energy generation capacity with ….
Old gen coal technology
New coal technology
New nuclear
Best baseload solar
Wind turbines
Columns ((1) brief technical description, (2) cost, (3) % baseload handled, (4) side effects – e.g. nuclear material, dead birds, (5) emissions and (6) comment notes)
i.e. go for a communicative and comparative table?
BTW for those who are mooting a low activity sun – pretty basic less solar – also less greenhouse effect. CO2 doesn’t do greenhouse without radiation !
Luke,
thanks for the idea.
It’s something I would have to do at my site and then link to it from here.
Might take a day or so! Mostly Admin, working out the table size etc.
Tony.
TonyOz; thanks for the background.
For once I agree with lukey boy; that would be a valuable resource.
Yes, very incisive, comrade Luke.
Incidentally, what do you think of this blueprint for securing future electricity supply?
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2759240.html
Tony and Ian, interesting discussion.
Can anyone quantify the net benefit of so-called green power from burning bio-mass [crop waste]?
It always seems to me like a poor fuel source as well as robbing soil of sequesterable carbon while emitting more into the air plus the work and CO2 expended in gathering and transporting it.
Yet it is an accredited method of green power.
Can they burn this stuff without emitting CO2 at high temperatures? And if so why can’t they apply the same tech to other FFs?
ianI888, you make a couple of interesting points- sorry had to go out before finishing reply so this is late
1) Coking coal makes up the largest portion of Australia’s coal exports. You, no doubt, realise but others may not that there are various grades of coking coal. Some properties which affect the quality and price are swell number, coke type, fluidity, volatiles, reflectance, sulphur and of course ash (ash can reduce swell, reflectance & fluidity). As well as I can remember the Japanese used about 500kg coke/tonne of steel in their blast furnaces. They could reduce the coking coal usage by blending in a semi-coking coal or directly injecting the semi-coking coal which is a high volatile (low ash) bituminous coal as mined in the Hunter Valley.
2) Most of the export Queensland steam coal (exceptions such as Blair Athol and Newlands) is high ash coking quality coal and is OK for use in a power station but not much use in the boiler of a steam engine. (the coal is washed –the low ash 6-8% is coking coal the 15-17% ash is steam coal) The NZ coal, (long ago I tested some samples) I recall, is a bit of a strange beast. I thought it was similar to Collie coal (which has ash less than 6%, mostly less than 4%) but slightly higher rank (lower AD moisture) – ie semi-bituminous. Some would argue that selected or washed low ash Lithgow seam coal was the best in the world for (rail) steam engines.
3) Royalties –agree. Minerals on land and upto 3km from the normal high tide shoreline are a state property. Most royalties are now based on revenue (ie sale price*volume) rather than a fixed $/t amount. All states have been moving that way. I believe that some state royalties are profit based contrary to the bleating of the Greens and Swan.
cementafriend
Yes, I didn’t see the need to go much deeper than I have – not much point with the audience here. Oodles more, of course
“I believe that some state royalties are profit based contrary to the bleating of the Greens and Swan”
Not only that, but Broken Hill in its’ heyday (own Stock Exchange, Opera House etc) was taxed by the then NSW Govt purely on profit (the price of silver was very high)
I find it amusing that the lefties will not acknowledge that the State Govts own the minerals – the High Court has decided on this quite a few times now – this was even the rock upon which the Native Title wishup foundered. Whitlam (Connor), Keating (Native Title) and now Rudderless/Gillard have tried it. It’s not hard to see the pattern … whenever there’s money being made, the lefties want large dollops of it, irrespective of the stink of sovereign risk being splattered world-wide
If the Feds increase the company tax for iron ore/coal miners, the message to the world is: “Please invest here, and if you are successful we will reward you by savagely increasing your taxation”. Cute
Juliar’s guru Garnaut just confirms what silly Timmy said about the effect of pricing co2 emissions on the world’s temp.
This time he admits on the ABC that our pricing of co2 will have little or zero effect if the big emitters don’t play ball.
We know they’re not playing ball so why go first and guarantee all that pain for zero gain?
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/garnaut_confirms_no_gain_for_all_this_pain/
Meanwhile, I see that the IPCC is up to its disreptuable best.
They have no shame these people.
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/06/15/ipcc-these-people-havent-learned-a-thing/
Tony, MikeO et al
Today (Thursday June 16) p.20 of the Fin Review reports another chapter in the Griffin Coal saga
Of interest here is the reported contract price for domestic coal to the two Bluewater power stations near the Griffin mines – AUD$33/tonne (unwashed) with new Indian mine owner Lanco insisting on AUD$62/tonne
Clearly I have more information here but that is constrained through confidentiality agreements. The Fin Review report is reasonably accurate as far as it goes, however
OT but can’t find explanation,
cohanite or anyone with a link.
Some people maintain that the volcanic eruptions like the present Chilean one put more CO2 into the atmosphere than humans do in many years.
Yet here is an “official” looking link,
T.M.Gerlach (1991, American Geophysical Union) notes that human-made CO2 exceeds the estimated global release of CO2 from volcanoes by at least 150 times.
Who is right or wrong?
Mark A,
For my two cent’s worth this is really a known unknown. The warmers claim to know but many geologists claim that with an unknown number [but suspected possibly 3 million] undersea vents there is huge uncertainty. Even measuring known vents has uncertainty.
Just another aspect of “the science is settled”.
Thanks SD,
I was a bit surprised by his number of “150 times” considering that even the warmists agree, the direct human contribution is around 3%, and the huge eruptions we had recently surely must contain more CO2 amongst other GHGs than the 3%?
Mark A
Use http://gerlach1991.geologist-1011.mobi/ in Google Scholar
Gerlach’s full text etc are online there, including a list all the “known unknowns”
Thank you ianl8888,
I read it and I understand Gerlach estimates the same number ie. 150*human induced CO2.
However there are so many disclaimers, that I’m not sure?
The CO2 discharge during an active eruption never been measured or even an attempt made to measure.
Neither were the sub ocean volcano outputs measured accurately, only estimated.
I can see his reasoning and have no problem with it, just wondered where the notion of volcano release of CO2 came from.
Mark A
” … wondered where the notion of volcano release of CO2 came from.”
Well, because volcanic eruptions do indeed release CO2 – and heaps of other gases. The concentrations of these vary enormously, according to the composition of the actual erupting magma.
The mid-ocean ridges are in quiescent eruption all the time (causing tectonic plate movements) and produce sea-bed deposits of various metallic minerals that are absolutely fascinating
Gerlach’s paper lists a number of references. I encourage you to track some of them, as you have indeed by first reading Gerlach
Good to see Garnaut copping some flak:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/electricity-tsar-aemc-lashes-ross-garnaut/story-fn59niix-1226075995450
But in spite of CAGWers and carbon taxes, King Coal is still in his castle:
http://www.caseyresearch.com/cdd/world-supply-and-demand-coal
TonyfromOz
So gummit is going to put our forward to build solar PS oh so dumb probably this is it https://majorprojects.affinitylive.com/public/ab3a9b1a66fb9a20261e5221bcb44ef2/Appendix%204%20-%20Ecology%20Report%20-%20Ozark.pdf
Note it is a PV array and looks to be a 5 hour a day job, any thoughts?