Serious action to reduce CO2 emissions has been stymied in Australia and the US for the moment. So, to get an idea of what is likely to be feasible, and on what timescale, we have to look at Europe, which has both a working Emissions Trading Scheme and a bunch of special incentives to promote renewable energy. At least on the latter point, there is some cause for optimism.
Here’s a graph of new installed capacity and decommissioned capacity for 2009 from The European Wind Energy Association (link here was broken and is now fixed-JQ). The results pretty much speak for themselves, but I’ll add a couple of observations.
The fact that solar PV was a major source of new installed capacity surprised me. Until now, solar (along with fusion) has been one of the contenders for the tag “the energy source of the future and always will be”. But, on current trends, solar is set to be a major contributor in the future. Of course, the outcome so far has been the result of large subsidies, such as feed-in tariffs. But, even as the subsidies are cut back the volume of installations continues to grow. Before long, solar could be competitive with coal on the basis of the ETS and peak-load pricing, without the need for an extra “renewable” subsidy. Gas is likely to be cheapest for some time to come, but there are sound reasons for not wanting to depend entirely on an energy source that can be cut off at short notice.
The other point is that for coal (and also, less surprisingly for nuclear) installed capacity showed a net decline. The combination of the ETS and strong political opposition has made the construction of new coal-fired power stations in Europe almost impossible, at least without a commitment to CCS or some other sweetener.
On this issue, where Europe has led, the rest of the world will follow sooner or later. The big question is whether it will be too late. The good outcomes we are seeing in Europe suggest that, even with a few years’ slippage, big reductions in emissions will be possible in time to stabilise global climate.
John Quiggin 
India’s steel industry appears to be dependent on Australia coking coal and China’s recent surge in coal imports tends to support theories of an imminent (2015) domestic coal peak. However they use 10X Australia’s total coal exports. I suggest Australia should either carbon tax coal and LNG exports to those greenhouse ‘rogue nations’ or slap a punitive carbon tariff on their finished goods. Those countries can claim the money back if they put forward a list of green projects the money will go to. At $20 a tonne of CO2 I estimate the export carbon levy would be about $48 a tonne on thermal coal, recent spot price $90, and $27 on LNG, recent spot price $400 a tonne. If China and India think they can source enough of these commodities elsewhere let them.
Of course Australia cannot morally impose a carbon export levy unless an ETS is in full swing at home. This would also require a review of trade protected status. It would be most odd if steel was smelted in Australia using carbon taxed Australian coal and steel was smelted in China using Australian coal that was not carbon taxed.
I think China’s resistance to what was on offer was quite understandable. After all, in the west we have achieved our standard of living without paying for the greenhouse gases we emitted or the damage they have caused. We also got first bite at a variety of resources when they were cheap and plentiful. Also, the behaviour of the west toward the rest during those two hundred years was not exemplary. What China probably wants is what they would consider an evenhanded deal. This is definitely not what the US is willing to offer, and it seems that unwillingness is shared by other western countries.
The best way forward is to come to some equitable agreement, but not so much equitable for China as equitable for the third world as well. Failing that tariffs will have to be resorted to, but that is likely to become very messy, and even to achieve some effectiveness with tariffs, the west will have to muster considerably more agreement than it has been able to muster so far.
@hix
Obviously I have failed to cause you to think about the issues and, using contemporary education practice, it would have to be my fault. So I’ll try again. But only once more.
a) ghg emissions affect the entire world in a complex manner. Lets call it a universal negative externality. Hence the idea of having a global ‘price’ for ghg emissions is not a silly one, even though it is not easily implementable for a host of reasons that have been discussed on this blog-site and elsewhere many times.
b) wind turbines (not windmills) have two negative externalities, relative to solar, noise and visual pollution. However, these negative externalities are local. Putting wind turbines in a totally unpopulated area that is big enough such that people can’t hear or see it. Then there is no negative externality (setting aside any potential effects on wildlife and flora, if any). Thus, if one wants to be fair toward all people in a geopolitically defined country, then some other information than production cost is required.
c) ‘Visual pollution’ is not necessarily a question of aesthetics (‘ugly’) only. For example, a flickering TV screen is visual pollution and people don’t like it. It is an empirical question to find out how important visual pollution is in a particular location.
d) In practice compromises are made. But to try to focus on production costs only is not a compromise but a corporatist view of the world where the survival and welfare of a corporation or an industry is the objective. Perhaps this now goes a little beyond what is technically necessary.
Hit him on his bonce with a cricket bat, Ernestine!
@Ernestine Gross
The notion of an “externality” carries with it the notion of property. What would it mean, for example, to say that the damage to wildlife — such as birds and bats — from wind turbines was an “externality”? It would mean that we were saying that birds and bats were the property of someone other than the operator of the turbines.
Typically, though not always, externalities are costs to the commons. If an industrial plant gets to dump its waste into a river for free (or at any rate cheaper than full stewardship would imply), then the loss of amenity in the river and any other impositions on the commons associated with the dumping is the cost of allowing the plant to dump its waste, less the cost the plant has paid to that stakeholder community.
As you say, if wind turbines don’t impose loss of amenity, then they aren’t really an externality. In a tidy and equitable system, all industrial processes would fully internalise their costs, but this is probably easier to say than achieve, since this can be complex to0 design and audit. Certainly a move in that direction would be a worthwhile exercise however.
Perhaps the most serious “externality” associated with wind are the greenhouse gases emitted by the redundant capacity associated with covering the slews implicit in using intermittent sources like wind. A windfarm with a CF od say 33% but which periuodically produces output at 10% requires back yup for the differential every time that lower output matches a likely demand period where average CF would be wanted. i.e the difference between actual output and demand.
This wouldn’t be such a problem if there were a serious price on CO2 emissions — one reflecting how much this externality cost because then that would be factored into the price of wind. We’d also be able to easily see how much it cost to mitigate one tonne of carbon emissions using wind or any other source.
We need to remember it is not physically possible for China and India to have the same per capita emissions as Australia. 1.3 + 1.2 = 2.5 bn combined population for those two countries. I believe Aussies now account for 20 tonnes of CO2 per year. Thus 2.5 X 20 = 50 bn tonnes of CO2 well above the current global figure of 28 bn tonnes of anthropogenic CO2.
In my view the bottom 50% in China and India will never make it to the middle class unless some radical clean energy source is implemented. The world’s existing middle classes will also have to tighten their energy belts, be it efficiency or rationing.
Re 32#, the whole thrust of neoliberalism has been to ensure that costs are anything but internalised,; rather these are fobbed off onto th rest of the world, as the GFM bailout most recently demonstrated.
“Public Bads”?
Roll em out; sooner or later the public realises vaguely that something been put over them and consultation was just a tactic, as ever.
@Hermit
And really, the best and most plausible candidate energy production on that scale is nuclear power, especially of the fast spectrum variety …
No other source can be built in those jurisdictions at the speed and CO2 footprint required, and even leaving aside CO2 coal (which could be built at about the speed needed) would poison their cities and by 2062 or so run up against resource depletion challenges. Then of course there would be the problems with water.
where’d I get #32 : meant #5.
“The sleep of reason brings forth dingbats…”
@Fran Barlow
“The notion of an “externality” carries with it the notion of property”
Please provide reference. I have given a precise definition of ‘externality’ some time back; it is independent on any notion of ‘property’.
I am afraid, the remainder of your post has too many adjectives and its style is polemic. This is not my area of expertise.
You needn’t be too concerned there, Fran. Casting a quick eye around the internet on the subject of managing renewables, it is clear that there many options and a whole new class of professional. The list of strategies includes geographical placement, broadly connected systems, complementary flexible delivery systems (such as pumped hydro, biomass, storage CSP, Geothermal, wind), forecasting, variable off peak management, and market based demand management. The broader and larger the renewables sector becomes the more baseload stable it becomes. The electricity industry is traditionally a very spikey demand business, and Natural Gas will be the final load balancer for many years to come.
How is China doing on renewables?
http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2010/04/12/gwec-china-is-the-second-largest-producer-of-wind-energy/
@Fran Barlow
@BilB
I note that your list avoids calculating the cost of each unit of Co2 or other pollution abatement in each mix. In the end, it doesn’t matter if, in theory one could produce x% of load by a suite of take-your-pick technologies. What will be the marginal cost of abatement? How quickly will each be rolled out? On your reckoning, your explict admission, natural Gas will be the final load balancer for many years to come. So after all the argy bargy, your advocacy for renewables comes down to an argument for natural gas. That is indubitably better than coal, in the short run, but how is it enough, in the long run? Indeed, how can it even be sustainable, in the long run?
Indeed, if it were, why bother with renewables which are after all, many times the price?
And where/how are these systems you suggest going to step in in places like Brazil, Japan, India, China, Pakistan, Mexico and Indonesia? The thermal systems all require water for maximum efficiency. Wind and solar also require serious quantities of land not far from demand and water. And right now, with the exception of Japan, the countries listed are at the bottom of their intended per capita consumption.
@Ernestine Gross
Externalities refers to situations when the effect of production or consumption of goods and services imposes costs or benefits on others which are not reflected in the prices charged for the goods and services being provided
http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=3215
Is access to the air and the water a form of property right, Ernestine?
Its true that the windmills costs are higher than those 9,2 cent, especially when they are used on a very broad scale. Photovoltaic can help to balance the output here. That all doesnt change that the current European installations are 90% driven by a very inefficient subsidy regime in Germany.
For a positive example that doesnt matter much for the aggregate European numbers due to the small country sice look at Denmark. They have a logical aproach, they dont subsidice coal mines with 2 billion a year and allow unlimited speed at the Autobahn. They dont pick “green” energies based on whats good for rich farmers, but rather based on whats good for the environment.
They use 20% windmills, cogeneration with gas and oil, no coal, very high taxes on everyone that wants to buy a big car to brag. Thats an aproach that works right now to lower environmental damage without large costs.
Well, Fran, your OECD definition of the term externality does not depend on ‘property’. So your statement @5, p2, which I queried, is wrong.
Please formulate your question in paragraph 2 in a manner that indicates you understand what you are talking about.
Gosh, Fran, that is all a bit desperate there @14. The purpose for using gas as a final load balancer is that gas works most conveniently in gas turbines for rapid and variable power generation when there is insufficient hydro available to do the load balancing job. It doesn’t have to be natural gas, as gas turbines will run on just about any fuel including biomass (a bit harder) or slurried crushed coal. There is no “explicit admission” here, that is simply the reality.
We are still on the same thread that began with a graph of Europe’s renewable energy infrastructure rollout, aren’t we? The one that proved that renewables were growing out of sight and nuclear was taking a nose dive, just as Dr Franz Trieb had stated in his interview on the ABC? And anyway much of this is just today’s picture. The information that I am seeing, as I have stated several times before is that at least 50% of future energy needs will come from distributed PV, in most countries of the world, and this will not cost the government a cent, or require massive industry investment to achieve this, or even a price on carbon. The major electricity suppliers will see a decline in their industry gross turnover of about 30% and CSP will become a major part of the new order of electricity generation along with wind, geothermal, hydro, biomass and natural gas. One of my partners who is designing a new ultra efficient inverter system (his technology) phoned me excitedly today because he had to crunch the numbers on this system for a presentation on Thursday, and it suddenly dawned on him just how achievable all of this is. And that is on top our realisation that what had been looming as a major headache suddenly turned into a huge benefit, with some new information that came to light on airconditioning systems, which means that on top of the high electrical output from our system, up to 10Kw of airconditioning comes energy free. I’m happy for that to sound like so much gobbledy gook and not be believeable. That is the way it will have to stay for the time being. All I can say here is that the future offers free electricity for households and free transport energy for at least 1 medium range electric vehicle along with free non grid airconditioning. No new technology required other than the knowledge of how to put the current available technologies together.
@Ernestine Gross
Of course it does. Those costs on others are impositions on a form of property right. You and I for example, have a right to breathe the air. It’s essential to our right to life. If the air becomes less suitable for maintaining our lives — i.e. because it is composed of irritants or toxics — then our enjoyment of that property right has been diminished in a way analogous to the enclosures. An enterprise that does not contaminate the air or water thus respects the property right all of humanity has in the commons. Its manner of doing business internalises those costs.
To return to our windfarm, the windfarm’s footprint is limited to the lifecycle impositions associated with manufacturing the hardware, installing it, maintaining it, shadowing its output and ultimately decommissioning it. If this turns out to be less than some other suite of technologies per unit of output, then its imposition on the property of others has been smaller and we can calculate the cost in the reduction of this in relative terms.
That is my point. You can’t talk intelligibly about externalities except as impositions on the property rights of others. Occasionally, these impositions may fall largely on small numbers of private stakeholders — the obvious example might be someone who operates a hotel the patrons of which occupy all the parking spots in the street, make a lot of noise leaving late and use the front lawn and bench of the house next door to sleep it off on summer nights. The amenity given to the patrons is “sold” to the patrons as an inducement to pay the pub for its service, but it is at the expense of the neighbours. The pub pays nothing for it instead forcing the neighbours to pay, so the cost is externalised.
@BilB
BilB
It sounds much like vapourware and magic pudding to me. Unless someone can put a cost per unit of abatement and unit of output on their system and it can scale to something like what we use now and will use in the future, there’s simply no way one can take it seriously.
Sure there is inefficiency in the system Sure some jurisdictions can manage demand better, slowing the per capita growth in demand for energy. But it won’t reduce it. New capacity in large quantities will still have to be sourced in addition to replacing the old dirty capacity. Contrary to what you suggest I can’t begin to imagine how any of this new capacity can be built without very significant investment from somebody. Can you really be saying that 50% of output will be in “distributed PV” without very significant investment?
It sounds to good to be true, and one is urged to conclude that this is indeed the case.
Well spoken Fran!
Has me in mind of the old framework of “positive” versus “negative” freedoms.
You are entitled to freedom, including property, but how about when the execution of your freedoms materially/adversely affects bystanders, eg as collateral damage; any way that seriously jeopardises the same sort of life you’d allow for these and yourself ?
Follow the fracture lines.
Indeed it does, Fran. But as the saying goes “not all generalisations are false, including this one”. Some “too good to be true’s” are in fact good and true. We don’t know absoluty yet, but every time we review the details it becomes more solid. On the other hand this technology is already available in installable units, just not the way we have done it. And the air conditioning system has been in the market for 20 years. Anyway time will tell. What I am comfortable with myself now is that all of these energy worries will evaporate.
“Can you really be saying that 50% of output will be in “distributed PV” without very significant investment”
Absolutely. And the reason is so simple it is glaring you in the face. Distributed generation capacity also means distributed investment.
@Fran Barlow
“That is my point. You can’t talk intelligibly about externalities except as impositions on the property rights of others. ”
No, Fran, you got everything mixed up.
It is not I who can’t talk intelligently about externalities except as impositions on the property rights of others.” It is you who says you can’t do it. This is your problem, not mine.
The fact remains that your OECD definition of the term externality does not depend on ‘property’. So your statement @5, p2, which I queried, is wrong.
I see no point reading on if line one in your voluminous writings is wrong, irrespective of the elogoquece with which you present your confusions.
@BilB
Astonishing. A gallon of water is a lot less when you tip it from the bucket onto the floor fllows the same reasoning.
@Ernestine Gross
It is clear that you either have some sort of receptive reading problem or a concept processing problem and on that basis I agree that discussing this matter with you can lead nowhere useful. Your failure to recognise “you” in its generic form points to the former inference, but the inability to see that all rights over access to assets (including ecosystem assets) are property rights points to the latter.
@Fran Barlow
I happily agree not to discuss anything with you because I am interested in environmental economics and not in creative essay writing.
No, Fran. The amount of water is the same, however its weight is distributed over a much larger area. The same reasoning.
@BilB
That observation is in direct conflict with your response to this question:
Can you really be saying that 50% of output will be in “distributed PV” without very significant investment”
“Absolutely.” you said.
From the point of view of the burden system it makes no difference at all how a given investment is shared just as in a household whether one person does all the work or everyone pitches in doesn’t really make a difference to the total amount of work done.
If introducing 12GWe of PV costs $AUS120billion whether we get it from taxes or user charges or FiT or state loans — it still diverts spending from all the other places that $AUS120billion or its debt service cost could be spent.
You are going to have a problem understanding this because I can’t spell it out absolutely definitively for you, and because you have a preconceived belief structure on what things cost. But here it is, the cost of the investment is paid for by avoided service charges. ie the householder/business pays the same amount for their electricity as they would normally pay only it is as repayments for their installation until it is paid out. Thereafter they have no electricity bills and most will receive some income from their household to grid electricity sales. What makes this possible? The energy itself, the fuel, is absolutely free. There will be maintenance costs and a distributed grid will have to be making contributions to maintain the grid connection. Apart from that electricity thereafter is free. I have said all off this for your benefit before, Fran, in pretty much the same words. It really does not matter to me if you believe this or not. The only thing that I would suggest is that you would be better served to divest yourself of your Nuclear energy industry shares now, if you have any.
@BilB
I have no such shares BilB, never have had and am unlikely to ever acquire any, unless it is by accident through my super.
Yes the “fuel” is free, but the collection devices are not, nor are the devices for sending that power someplace or the fuel for the complementary redundant capacity, and so someone(s) must ultimately pay for them. It doesn’t matter how you burden share. Someone has to be paid to do these things. There is no free ride.
If I offer you a mercedes with a magical battery that will operate for a million km without recharge and you use it as a taxi, unless you pay the right price for the vehicle the recurrent debt service costs may mean that operating it won’t make good economic sense even if the revenue stream is adequate to maintain the payments. If for example, the vehicle cost ten times the cost of a regular mercedes then the debt service cost alone might exceeds the value of the energy savings in each year.
You are trying to do a magic pudding trick here, but in the end the only way to compare things is to examine the life cycle cost per unit of output over its most likely useful life. For PV, this is variously reckoned to be between 10 and 30 times the current cost of coal. Now coal of course, as we have seen, externalises some very serious costs to humanity because almost none of its environmental costs are considered. Yet PV is not without its environmental footprint either. While it is a fraction of that of coal it is not inconsiderable. It’s also unlikely that most newly installed PV will be around in 25 years time and working.
So if society invests in PV, it pretty much has to recover its investment in 25 years, and probably closer to 15.
Nuclear on the hand can last for nearly 60 years, its fuel is highly energy-intensive (about 1 million-3 million times that of coal per unit of mass) and thus very cheap per unit of output and is available 90% of the time so its lifecycle costs per unit of output are quite low. With IFR, which uses existing waste it is even closer to zero-carbon.
What that means is that each tonne of abatement comes cheaper with nuclear than with renewables.
“Yes the “fuel” is free, but the collection devices are not, nor are the devices for sending that power someplace or the fuel for the complementary redundant capacity, and so someone(s) must ultimately pay for them. It doesn’t matter how you burden share. Someone has to be paid to do these things”
In the near future most households will be paying 2500 to 3500 per annum for their electricity, small businesses even more. That is the budget from which the repayment money comes. If the installed system provides the entire household needs then this full “budget” is available for capital repayment.
“There is no free ride”
Yes there is a free ride, that is what solar energy is all about.
Repayment period? We are designing for 3 to 8 years.
Fran,
You and I do not often agree – but you are correct on this one. PV cells deteriorate over time, they need to be washed to keep the surfaces clean to maintain power output.
The one thing you have missed is that the use of the simplistic payback method somewhat understates the financial impact – an NPV (net present value – which takes into account time value) is a much better method. To achieve a positive NPV at a reasonable discount rate you are normally looking to about a 5 year payback period.
Generating electricity using PV just does not get there. Of the “low carbon” technologies, nuclear, despite the huge up front costs can (under certain conditions) get there due to the large generating capacity once it is built.
BilB,
If I need to spend that much to get a “free ride” then I, for one, would hesitate to pay. I would expect most people on lower incomes than mine would do likewise.
Then this system is not for you. You will be a customer of those who have the system, buying their surplus output. So if your situation requires an electricity consumption of just $1200 per year then your 50 year electricity requirement is $60,000 ignoring inflation. However if you install a 19200 kilowatt pa unit and your requirement is just one third of that then you are foregoing and earning power of $2500 pa which is a net gain of $125,000 over the same 50 year period ie nearly as much as your superannuation. But that is ok, we all make our choices (calculations based on a per unit price of 19 cents).
@Andrew Reynolds
I’d have no problem extending that pay back time to seven years or even ten years providing there is no subsidy needed to do that. To me that sounds borderline reasonable.
Mind you, I just think it would be a lot simpler if we junked all the subsidies, abandoned MRETs and RECs, decided what the true cost to the community of the various externalities associated with energy and industrial production were and either charged them as taxes or constructed a trading scheme around them. Ideally you would get as close to the process causing the externality as feasible. Thus, the cost of remediating after mining would be charged against the extractor of the valuable resource (eg coal, iron, steel, copper, uranium, gold, zinc or whatever). Proper management of overburden and tailings would also be a charge that you’d force the miner to internalise. Combustion of coal at stationary plants lends itself well to a cap and trade system with an underpinning set of punitive charges for those who fail to keep to their cap. Motor vehicles would be charged at the tailpipe. Batteries for electric engines would have a cost based in part on recovery and decommissioning by some organisation. Ditto packaging. Goods that landed on our docks that did not have these costs internalised in a way that met our standards would have them imposed at the dock. If a supplier could show that they had made adequate provision they could be relieved.
This way we would have a level playing field in which the true cost of all the industrial activities was internalised in output. As improbable as I think it would be, if, despite such robust provisions, PV or solar thermal or wind or wave power or biomass were commercially competitive enough to compete nuclear power out of business, I’d have no objection at all. Notwithstanding all I’ve said, there remains a part of me that just likes the idea of renewables — they seem so much more aesthetically pleasing — so I’d be more than pleased.
My problem is that I can’t see how that can be true.
While the sample is small, the answer at present is No.
But we need nuclear (for weapons purposes and to power our otherwise unimpressive fleet of submarines) if we are to have any street cred.
@iain
Most recently the Saudis have signalled their intent to augment with nuclear and as most know the UAE recently signed for 4*1400MWe reactors. For some reason, despite all that insolated land solar didn’t quite make it.
@Freelander
No we don’t.
Why build an expensive commercial energy reactor when you could build an much less expensive research reactor to produce weapons-grade material? Wasting that Pu239 on energy makes no sense, if you are after weapons.
In case it has slipped some memories, the heading of the crucial figure in the thread is:
“New Installed Capacity and De-Commissioned Capacity in EU 2009 in MW, Total 25963 MW”
The data shows that net capacity (new installed – de-commissioned) was negative for coal and nuclear, in this order. Net capacity was positive for wind, natural gas, pv and other renewables in this order.
We need them. We are the only continent without them, ignoring Antarctica of course. We need them to cover our nakedness; to underscore our presence on the world stage; to get better trade concessions. Hell, we need them to heavy our nearest neighbours.
Like most readers I never thought to click on the graph. With wind and solar we have to ask
1) how much of the increase is due to subsidies?
2) can it keep increasing at this impressive rate?
3) how do these figures compare to existing capacity?
Intermittent energy sources have to be accommodated by a mix of intermediate and peak load power that takes up the slack during extensive lulls. World wide I believe wind power produces about 25% of its nominal installed capacity while solar produces just 16% over 24 hours. If policies in EU countries force or over-reward the grid for taking wind and solar power that means equivalent backup electricity sources are needed. That could be French nuclear, Norwegian hydro or local gas peaking plant increasingly fuelled by gas from Siberia.
I suggest that wind and solar have a niche contribution that limits their expansion beyond perhaps 20% of the grid. Take away subsidies (feed-in tariffs, green quotas, saleable offsets, compulsory purchase etc) and there may already be over-investment in these technologies. That could explain why Germany wants to build several new coal fired plants and why they are anxious about their dependence on Russian gas. Australia would be stupid beyond belief to repeat the energy policies of Germany.
“Australia would be stupid beyond belief to repeat the energy policies of Germany.”
Of course it would be silly for Australia to import gas from Russia!
Good grief, Hermit. You pose a bunch of questions, make wild assumptions, do no research, make guesses, add no new insights, draw conclusions, then make a political policy statement. All in two paragraphs.
It would also be silly for Australia to contribute toward the development of large scale solar power generation in North Africa to import its output!
And, Hermit, what use is it to have a European Union if trade in power supply across country borders is noteworthy?
To me the discussion here is also about alternatives and the degree to which they can (must) be improved upon, also Hermit’s proposition could be about not putting too many eggs in one basket as to sources. On another level, of course, it might be just be a justification of the frantic modern conception of capitalism as”growth”, consumerism and exchange value rather than as a necessity to the “real” human task that also accounts for sustainability.
I’d rather see a cultural shift away from heavy usage of fossil fuels, which also might entail a cultural shift away from the wasteful way power is generated and used, these times.
btw, Ernestine, surely there are hypothetical situations involving cost in which it would be right to buy gas from Siberia?
anyway, #45 covers it well enough, I guess.
South Australia currently gets 20% of its electricity from wind and this figures appears likely to double over the next five years. SA lacks cheap coal and wind power is competitive with the current main source of electricity, natural gas.
That is good news, Ronald.
@Ronald Brak
I think you’ll find that windpower lets SA down very badly in heat waves when all the air conditioners are on. The last figures I recall were installed windpower capacity of 867 MW (mostly in the south east) which output something like 80 MW during a period of 45C temperatures. This can be verified from the archives on the AEMO website. Adelaide had to import a lot of power to cover the shortfall such as peak hydro from NSW and Tasmania. Note the Pt Stanvac desalination plant has a direct connector to the Torrens Island gas fired baseload power station. What happens when Cooper Basin runs out of gas?
What do you pay for your power there in SA Ronald, per unit?