Overcoming Apathy in Australia - Project Omelas

Sat, 12/05/2009 - 01:09 | unenergy

2006-07 Australian bushfire season
The 2006-07 Australian bushfire season was one of the most extensive bushfire seasons in Australia's history. Victoria experienced the longest continuously burning bushfire complex in Australia's history, with fires in the Victorian Alps and Gippsland burning over 1 million hectares of land over the course of 69 days.

January 2009
The early 2009 southeastern Australia heat wave was a heat wave that commenced in late January and led to record-breaking prolonged high temperatures in the region. The heat wave is considered one of, if not the most, extreme in the region's history. During the heat wave, 50 separate locations set various records for consecutive, highest daytime and overnight temperatures.

According to a Monash University study of funeral notices, more than 200 people died as a result of the heat wave. A 45% increase in the death rate was noted during the time. A subsequent report by Victoria's chief health officer, Dr John Carnie, put the final figure at 374.

February 2009
As many as 400 individual fires were recorded on 7 February. Following the events of the 7th of February 2009, that date has since been referred to as Black Saturday.

173 people died as a result of the fires and 414 were injured.

November 2009
Senior climatologist Blair Trewin said 68 long-term weather stations recorded their highest November maximum temperature and 39 stations recorded their highest overnight minimum temperature.

''That represents 10.2 per cent of Australia recording record highs, including 41 per cent of NSW and 29 per cent of South Australia,'' Dr Trewin said.

In Adelaide, the eight consecutive days above 35 degrees doubled the previous November record. It also had a record high of 43.

So records are broken, two years later they are broken again. Not the kind of record you want to break though. When temperatures are causing multiple heat related deaths and bushfires causing loss of life and property, you'd think we'd realize something is up with that. And just as Australia is about to head into Summer, we see the same conditions occurring at the start of Summer which we just saw at the end of Summer immediately prior to the worst bushfires in Australia's history earlier this year.

Scary stuff hey?

Yesterday I wrote of my visit to a solar thermal power station in the Nevada Desert, at Boulder City, near Las Vegas. The plant produces 65 MW of electricity which, during the day, would be close to supplying the needs of 65,000 homes.

The accumulation of CO2 emissions we have been told for over 20 years would create conditions like those described above. So from a risk management point of view, seeking alternatives to where the source of those emissions comes from makes sense. In other words reducing or replacing the source of those emissions is the optimum outcome without eliminating the benefit of the plant itself.

What I would like to talk about is what I think Australia can do to meet energy generated from some of these types of means.

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Similar technology to Nevada Solar One is being used at Liddell power station in Australia where mirrors reflect onto steam pipes heating water to steam in this case. The system is connected up to an operating power station saving them money by pre-heating some of the process water for the plant. The temperatures and pressure of the steam is enough to turn a turbine.

We produce steam at 275ºC, 50 Bar, the type of steam necessary to operate a turbine.

There are a number of Australian grown technologies which have been reported on in this documentary.

The company which supplied the system to Liddell, Ausra, has also been negotiating with the Queensland government for a grant to put a much larger version of this trial technology in a new installation at Kogan Creek.

Solar thermal energy company Ausra Inc. and the Queensland state government have applied to the federal government for funding to develop a proposed A$200 million upgrade to a coal-fired power station in Queensland.

The project involves using Ausra's solar thermal technology to preheat the 750-megawatt Kogan Creek power station's feedwater system, increasing its efficiency and generating over 23 megawatts of extra electricity a year - enough to power about 25,000 homes.

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Why is this plant important?

I guess it would seem a little unusual to some having such a keen interest in where new energy technologies are going to lead, but this has been my field of employment in the past. Plus a number of Australia's largest organizations have indicated an interest in this form of electricity producing technology.

$34 Billion of solar thermal proposed plants to be built by 2020 in Australia by BHP and Rio Tinto

WorleyParsons, Australia's biggest engineering company, is studying the construction of the world's biggest project producing power from the sun's heat, tapping incentives for renewable energy generation.

An initial 250-megawatt unit may start up in 2011 at a cost of about $1 billion, Peter Meurs, managing director of WorleyParsons' EcoNomics unit, said today in Sydney. Some $34 billion of projects may be built by 2020, by companies including BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, he said.

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Can this be achieved and should it be pursued in Australia?

For those who have an interest and a bit of time on their hands, I'd invite you to read extended article on the building of Australia's energy infrastructure.

Building a country's energy infrastructure

One of the main points I made in the article was that the power industry in Australia started with government financing and owning much of our electricity infrastructure. In fact many states still own significant power assets. Most important was that the bulk of these assets were built in the 1960's, 70's and 80's. Respectively these assets are 20, 30 and 40 years old.

New Fossil fuel MW	New Total MW	Decade	Australian population
215MW	1,227.7MW	1950's	8,178,000
3,880MW	6,594.5MW	1960's	10,275,000
9,395MW	11,752.6MW	1970's	12,507,300
12,186MW	13,227MW	1980's	14,695,400
6,133MW	6,371MW	1990's	17,065,100
5,037MW	5,124.1MW	2000's	19,157,000
36,846MW (total)	44,296.9MW (total)
	48,541 MW	2009	22,031,000

Table above showing the electricity generation capacity build by MW per decade in Australia

So what we experienced in Australia was a boom in electricity plant construction during the 1970's and 80's followed by a sharp drop off to half the number of new MW built per decade.

Name	Operator	Plant type	Primary fuel	Year commissioned	Capacity (MW)	State
Morwell	Energy Brix	Steam	Brown coal	1959	195MW	Victoria
Thomas Playford B	NRG Flinders	Steam	Brown coal	1960	240MW	South Australia
Anglesea	Alcoa	Steam	Brown coal	1969	160MW	Victoria
Munmorah	Delta Electricity	Steam	Black coal	1969	600MW	NSW
Kwinana WPC	Verve Energy	Steam	Multi-fuel	1970	880MW	WA
Hazelwood	Hazelwood Power Partnership	Steam	Brown coal	1971	1600MW	Victoria
Liddell	Macquarie Generation	Steam	Black coal	1973	2000MW	NSW
Swanbank B	CS Energy	Steam	Black coal	1973	500MW	Queensland
Yallourn W	TRU Energy	Steam	Brown coal	1975	1480MW	Victoria
Vales Point B	Delta Electricity	Steam	Black coal	1978	1320MW	NSW
Wallerawang C	Delta Electricity	Steam	Black coal	1980	1000MW	NSW
Gladstone	Comalco/NRG	Steam	Black coal	1982	1680MW	Queensland
Eraring	Eraring Energy	Steam	Black coal	1984	2640MW	NSW
Bayswater	Macquarie Generation	Steam	Black coal	1984	2640MW	NSW
Northern	NRG Flinders	Steam	Brown coal	1985	530MW	South Australia
Muja	Verve Energy	Steam	Black coal	1986	1040MW	WA
Tarong	Tarong Energy	Steam	Black coal	1986	1400MW	Queensland
Loy Yang A	Loy Yang Power	Steam	Brown coal	1987	2120MW	Victoria
Callide B	CS Energy	Steam	Black coal	1989	700MW	Queensland
Mt Piper	Delta Electricity	Steam	Black coal	1993	1320MW	NSW
Loy Yang B	IPM Eagle	Steam	Brown coal	1996	1000MW	Victoria
Stanwell	Stanwell Corporation	Steam	Black coal	1996	1400MW	Queensland
Collinsville	Transfield Holdings	Steam	Black coal	1998	188MW	Queensland
Collie	Verve Energy	Steam	Black coal	1999	330MW	WA
Callide C	CS Energy	Steam	Black coal	2001	900MW	Queensland
Redbank	National Power	Steam	Black coal	2001	150MW	NSW
Millmerran	Intergen	Steam	Black coal	2002	852MW	Queensland
Tarong North	Tarong Energy	Steam	Black coal	2002	443MW	Queensland

Listed above are the coal fired base load power stations for Australia.

What is important to note here is that many of these assets are over 20 years old. So irrespective of all the fear mongering over Australia's electricity sector 'suffering' were an emissions trading system bought in, these assets will need refurbishing or replacing. In fact in about 2002 I worked on one of the power stations above in a refurbishment effort.

It is claimed plans for a $100 million upgrade to the Playford power station at Port Augusta, north of Adelaide, are secure, despite a takeover bid for NRG Flinders' parent company.

This project, a refurbishment of a 40 year old station, I will use as a metric for the rest of the industry. The boilers, of which there were 6, were stripped down, the entire bottom of each boiler replaced. There was a massive amount of corrosion and rust throughout the plant due to its age. The entire flue gas handling duct work even now, was significantly corroded. The turbines were stripped down along with a replacement program for much of the automation, including electric, pneumatic actuators and a new control system. In all a project slated to cost $100 million cost $180 million. Although there was talk this amount was higher at $240 million, I cannot find a link to corroborate this.

About $180 million was spent on refurbishing the Playford Station

So going on those metrics, if every 40 year old coal fired power station need to be refurbished at a cost approaching $1 Watt, is there value for money going down this path? Remembering the end result at Playford, may only extend the life of the plant by 10-15 years.

Based on these rough figures, beginning in 2010 - 2020 11,752.6MW of coal fired power stations turn 40. At $1 per watt this is almost $12 Billion. And in 2020 - 2030 13,227MW or $13 Billion. In the next 2 decades we are looking at around $25 Billion needed to refurbish what we already own NOT including additional generation capacity we are bound to require.

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High temperatures and water shortages

Victorias electricity grid is being badly affected in places with the excessive high temperatures they have been experiencing. During the February 2009 heatwave the electric grid suffered a number of failures:

2 out of 3 major transmission lines fail which feed Melbourne

Major transformers are blowing up

And forced load shedding affecting 3 states with blackouts

So there are potential benefits of incentivizing the de-centralization of power generation. This makes a lot of sense particularly in areas like Victoria which are already feeling the effects of climate change.

There is a secondary concern and this equally applies to nuclear power generation which it appears will be the new Federal Opposition parties position after a week of turmoil in Australian politics.

Already population centres around Australia are being forced to adopt expensive mitigation efforts due to water shortages. The fast tracking of Desalination plants has occurred in many places. With Perth x 2, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane/Gold Coast, Adelaide, all now having built or building desalination plants.

These desalination plants are not a cheap thing to build either, with many with a multi-billion dollar price tag.

Upcoming Projects in Australia
Project	Investment AUD	Employee numbers construction
Sydney Desalination Plant	$1.9 Billion	600
Wonthaggi Desalination Plant	$3 Billion	3180
WA Desalination Plant	$1 Billion	500
Adelaide desalination plant	$1.83 Billion	2000

And they will need to be operated constanly in order to provide a return on investment, bumping up people's water charges. Further the desalination process is a massive user of electricity and without going into detail, I expect will increase the demand on the grid potentially triggering the need for new generation assets.

But not only are we building fresh water plants, a large amount of water is required to cool our existing coal fired plants. In other words we are using massive amounts of water producing electricity to desalinate water, to produce water.

Massive amounts of clean cooling water which evaporates off in their Rankine cycle coal power stations.
Here are the links to the major power stations supplying Victoria.

Yallourn

Loy Yang

Hazelwood

In 2006, Loy Yang Power used 23 gigalitres from its allocated catchment areas (Latrobe River and Blue Rock Dam), and 11 gigalitres from artesian supplies - a total of 34 gigalitres.

This is one of 3 major power stations which averages out to 93 Ml per day. Know how much water the new $3.1 Billion dollar desalination plant will make?

150 Gigalitres per year.

So the question I have been asking myself :

is solar generated electricity a feasible alternative? Either on every roof or in large stations in order to retire these power stations, freeing up the water wasted and not require refurbishment.

Power stations have a voracious appetite for water, and the shortage is affecting production in NSW, Victoria and Queensland, despite an abundance of coal and gas supplies.

"Australia has never factored in the cost of water, which is why it has some of the cheapest power in the world," the market expert told the Herald.

"Eventually, where there is not enough water for power in the Snowy, they will not be able meet their contractual obligations."

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Does it always have to be base load?

Australia's population is unevenly distributed.

State	Population
New South Wales	7,076,500
Victoria	5,402,600
Queensland	4,380,400
South Australia	1,618,200
Western Australia	2,224,300
Tasmania	501,800
Northern Territory	223,100
Australian Capital Territory	349,900
Australia Total	21,779,100

Although the populations vary greatly, each States power demand reflects the other. What you can see by the New South Wales power demand is at about 8,000 MW at 6am. This rises to a peak of around 10,000 MW at 6pm and rapidly drops off.

Victoria is around 6,000MW at 6am up to 7,000MW at 6pm and then back down.

Queensland is pretty much the same as Victoria at 6,000MW at 6am, but its peak is higher at 7,800 GW.

Real time data is available at Australian Energy Market Operator site.

So what we have during daylight hours is about 4,800 MW of extra load which is not required during the evening/night. If you look at the power generation capacity, our generation capacity in Australia has been designed that we have predominantly 'base load' coal. In fact if you look at the first 3 power stations which will turn 40, you find Hazelwood Power Partnership in Victoria at 1600MW, Liddell in NSW at 2000MW Swanbank B in Queensland at 500MW. 4,100MW of generation.

So what could we do instead to generate power from 6am to 6pm in alternative ways?

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Solar coverage

If you look at the map of Australia above you will recognize it is a pretty large country. In fact there are three time zones with a difference of 2 hours across the country.

If we look at Brisbane sunrise and sunset times we have an earliest on 1 December at around 4:45am with the latest sunset at 6:48pm on 10 Jan. Latest sunrise on 1 July at 6:39 with earliest sunset at 5:00pm on 10 July, however....

Remembering that the country is in three time zones with a difference of 2 hours, this extends the upper end of sunlight in the Western State to an equivalent 8:48pm and 7pm equivalent time in the Eastern States.

sunrise/sunset
The further West you go, the better the time. For instance Perth on 1 December sunset is at 7:07pm which would equate to 9:07pm in the Eastern States.

What this means is that with an electricity grid which ran from the Eastern States to the Western States, capable of carrying these levels of power, the coverage window for Solar power would be much better if significant assets were installed in the Western States to supply the Eastern States with evening load. Alternatively for early morning load in the Western States, install solar to provide this in the East.

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Transmission

A great map of Renewable energy potential has been put together by the Australian Government. You can find the map here via a link.

Below is one of the layers extracted to show the transmission lines as they currently stand for Australia. As expected, what you see is the East Coast where much of Australia's population lives, well serviced by an electricity grid, with large breaks from Adelaide area to the North and to the West where our other major population center is, Perth.

If a transmission line were to be built across to the Western states enabling better coverage for generation methods such as solar, how much would it cost?

If you look closely at the map above you can see that to the top right of Adelaide a number of transmission lines converge. These lines go across to Sydney and Melbourne. The area is known as Mildura and would be a great area to build solar power stations, with two solar companies I know of having indicated they were planning on building there.

Mildura to Perth is 2,937 km. There will be transmission losses, however from a brief look on Google, a transmission line of this length would be cost effective.

As of 1980, the longest cost-effective distance for electricity was 7,000 km (4,300 mi), although all present transmission lines are considerably shorter.

And as a very raw estimate, it would cost around $1 Million per km to build a line over this distance. Depending on where costs are incurred, it may be less than this as the route across Australia is largely unihabited, flat land making applications for permits and land preparation for transmission tower footings a little less complex.

$1.5 million per mile for 345kV lines and upward from there

So based on 1 mile = 1.6km and factoring in US/Australia exchange rates, $1 Million is close enough for these purposes.
So to build a transmission line across Australia, if we use the 2,937 figure, we'd be looking at around $3 Billion.
Which is of course the cost of just ONE of those desalination plants mentioned above. But the economic benefits from it would be immense for opening up new areas for geothermal, solar, wind and wave power prospects.

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Solar Resource

One of the great things about the Renewable energy map is the ability to apply layers which show the potential for different technologies. Below in this layer is the Solar power potential for Australia.

Map of Renewable potential

As you can see much of Australia has good prospects for solar power. Located in the Center of Australia, the Australian Government has had an operational test bed for solar technologies running for a number of years.

This has real time data of various forms of solar power including

CdTe Thin Film

CIGS Thin Film

Amorphous Silicon

Back Contact Silicon

Solar Water System

Solar Compass

Roof Mounted Array

Silicon Monocrystalline A & B

Silicon Polycrystalline

Solar Forest Fixed, 1 & 2 Axis, Hydraulic

Large Scale Tracking

This site is a great resource for anyone wishing to do either a real time or historical dataset comparison of the various types of solar panel.

Desert Knowledge Solar

I will come back to discussing a few more solar technologies in upcoming diaries but here is why solar, along with other renewable energy is something we should be researching.

World Energy use = 16TW per year

Non-renewable resources estimates remaining:

Natural Gas 215TW

Petroleum 240TW

Uranium 90-300TW

Coal 900TW

Renewable, non-depletable resources all per year:

Wind 25-70TW

Waves 0.2-2TW

Biomass 206TW

Hydro 3-4TW

Geothermal 0.3-2TW

Tides 0.3TW

Other Technologies 3-11TW

SOLAR 23,000TW

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Can Australia afford a new electricity system?

According to the Energy Supply Association of Australia current installed electricity assets for the entirety of the country are $109 Billion as at 2004/2005.
Total installed capacity of grid connected generation is 48,541 MW with a grid circuit totalling 888,735km.

Now referring back to the statement that many of Australias coal fired power stations will reach the 40 year old mark in the next 10-20 years, and that refurbishment will cost upward of $1 per watt, it seems prudent to prepare for this eventuality.

We have just had a mechanism put up in Australian parliament which would have bought additional funds into the electricity sector through investment because of a price on carbon. In fact it would have equated out to around $12 Billion per year. As the Asset base as it stands in the next 20 years will seriously deteriorate, this $12 Billion would, it seems, have been enough inflow into the sector to replace the $109 Billion of generation over the next 10 years.

However we now have an obstructionist opposition who are going to avoid making long term energy policy in consultation with the government, instead opting to become the party of 'NO'.

The new Opposition Leader will harness discontent in the community over the emissions trading scheme and turn the Coalition into an obstructionist force prepared to block Labor's agenda at almost every turn.

So I'll briefly detail two possibilities for bringing investment into the electricity sector. The first would be a tax incentive. Where we currently incentivize long term investment in forestry by allowing a tax deduction straight up on the capital cost of planting a lot of trees, we could introduce a similar policy for investment in sustainable energy.

Plantation tax deduction
Because of the nature of growing a forest crop, by far the biggest proportion of tax-deductible expenditure in a plantation cycle occurs in the establishment years (i.e. years one and two), with much lesser costs also arising at significant intervals over the life of the plantation.

The other possibility is Australia has a pension scheme where 9% of people's wages are invested until they reach retirement age. The scheme is a government mandated, privately operated one where in 2008, during the economic downturn, still managed to receive $120 Billion worth of new investment.

Superannuation contributions to June 2007 totalled $166.9 billion.

Superannuation contributions to June 2008 totalled $120.4 billion.

Total superannuation assets decreased by 2.1 per cent during the year to 30 June 2008 to $1.17 trillion.

So all it would take to raise the $12 Billion necessary to ensure Australia's electricity future would be government incentivizing shifting but 10% of these superannuation flows into long term investments in energy infrastructure.

Alternatively an increase of 1% on the base superannuation rate with the express intent on investing in energy infrastructure would raise similar funds.

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Overcoming Apathy

I've been reasearching the issue of energy and climate for well over a year. It is not an easy thing to wrap your head around for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that the extraction and combustion of hydrocarbons is such a big industry and so well established, entrenched in every part of the economy, that instead of seeing an opportunity to shift their energy business to new forms of generation out of necessity, the fossil fuel organizations appear to have declared war on science, scientists and sustainable energy practices.

I have written in my last diary of a group of firefighters, front line defenders who fought those bushfires I wrote about at the start of the article here, who have banded together to raise funds for a group which will look at possible solutions to the upcoming energy and climate crisis we are being rushed headlong into because of short term, short sighted thinking.

Despite the ongoing attacks and demonization of scientists by the climate skeptics, it doesn't matter to these firefighters. Because you can't argue with what you see with your own eyes. What you have fought by putting your own safety and life on the line.

I'm on their side on this one as this fire season is shaping up to be 'catastrophic'.

We cannot pretend doing nothing is a solution when all of these things I have just described above are the future which is here already.

Close to the end of their 6,000km (3,728mile) run around Australia one of the participants said this, which explains the title of my diary.

In the long run for the planet … do we care?

But the runners did encounter apathy and were disappointed with how few people turned up at the community events.

Many people, they said, did not know much about climate change. ''No one cares, seriously,'' says Senior Constable Hynes. ''They just brush it off.'

I've written about this excellent example of getting active over these myriad of issues in this article.

Rain to Save Our Earth

Which at the end I declared I'd be selling what I could to raise funds for this group who will look for climate solutions. Well the developments of the past week have increased the urgency to become involved so although current bids for the items I'm selling have reached about $250, I'm upping the ante and adding higher value items over the next few days.

Here is my cause:

Project Omelas - Finding a cause to support

But there may be something people can do to help.

Thinking about the fires which ravaged Victoria and took all those lives earlier in the year, and the impending signs that it could be even worse this year, what I thought I'd do is if anyone wants me to donate the books and DVD's I've currently got up on Ebay, to the fire stations on the front line, to help them fill in the time between emergencies, I'm willing to take the items to their front doors. And I will get photos as well if you do this.

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Below is a map of where the worst fires have been over the past decade in Victoria. You will see the 2009 fires were mainly to the North East of Melbourne and a place called Morwell.