It’s time for another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
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John Quiggin 
@Val
I think heating can be approached better than we do it now. It will take time though. Houses will have to be designed better for insulation and insolation purposes.
The article Passive solar building design in Wikipedia is a good place to start for an overview.
Yourhome dot gov dot au , passive design orientation is good too.
Nothing wrong with thermal under garments either. Of course, we never need them in Qld. Humid one day, frying the next.
@Val
That sort of evaluation may be fine in the interpersonal sphere, but it’s not germane for publuc figures because you and I can’t know them personally. Politically, she was concerned in the refugee capture and storage trade, pandering to xenophobic angst and also surplus fetishism. She continued the occupation of Afghanistan, double-crossed Wilkie on p0ker machines, through supporting mothers off benefit, denied gay marriage to keep the right happy and even winked at royalty.
That’s not ‘decent’ IMO.
@Val
Surely a combination of good thermal design plus those little column heaters ought to do the trick?
Also, in medium and high density developments there is excellent scope for geothermal heating in which solar PV storage of heated water underground (10M+) and then cycling the water under floors or through walls can maintain adequate ambient temps at low energy and dollar cost. Keeping dwellings non-detached helps a great deal of course.
You will be amused to hear Megan that the spam trap got me! Not sure why.
Test
Also, in medium and high density developments there is excellent scope for geothermal heating in which solar PV storage of heated water underground (10M+) and then cycling the water under floors or through walls can maintain adequate ambient temps at low energy and dollar cost. Keeping dwellings non-detached helps a great deal of course.
Test 2
the water under floors or through walls can maintain adequate ambient temps at low energy and dollar cost. Keeping dwellings non-detached helps a great deal of course.
Test 3
equate ambient temps at low energy and dollar cost. Keeping dwellings non-detached helps a great deal of course.
Test 4
Keeping dwellings non-detached helps a great deal of course.
Ambient
@Val
Surely a combination of good thermal design plus those little column heaters ought to do the trick?
Also, in medium and high density developments there is excellent scope for geothermal heating in which solar PV storage of heated water underground (10M+) and then cycling the water under floors or through walls can maintain adequate @mbient temps at low energy and dollar cost. Keeping dwellings non-detached helps a great deal of course.
Ha! A new tab00 word … @mbient …
It seems that MS&D have released a sed@tive called @mbien (marketed as z0lp|dem) which is now said to be @ddictive. There’s always a reason, even if it’s a stupid one.
Oddly, but for the spam trap, I would never have known of it.
@ Fran the reason I’m pessimistic we can achieve low carbon apart from logistic issues is that the public just threw out mild carbon pricing. Perhaps the US will in 2016 and China will continue b.a.u. Some of these other things which I regard as fanciful (eg cars lending energy to the grid) need incentives like high pricing of carbon. Therefore I doubt they’ll happen on the required scale. My prediction is another 20 years of heavy FF dependence until we bite the bullet.
@ Val trying to check your anomalies but the empowerme site is in n/a mode. A statement from them of their methods would be helpful.
@Hermit
Possibly if you just wait a few seconds the site will come up.
Goodness, yet more front bench MPs coming out and lambasting Obama for speaking about climate change; this time, Andrew Robb steps up into the fray. I’m fast concluding that the cabinet’s brains are a whole lot of weaponised stupid. When it blows up, it has a good chance of taking Australia with it.
@Fran Barlow
Fran the point about Julia Gillard is that I did know her personally. I worked with her for years in the very difficult conditions of Opposition staff in the Victorian Parliament in the Kennett era, when she was John Brumby’s chief of staff and I was a researcher/adviser in health and social policy. She was extremely good – focused, level headed, and with a great sense of humour, which was much needed in those trying times.
I’ve mentioned that several times on this site and elsewhere, but I think people tend to forget it because it doesn’t suit the narrative of ‘biased feminist’ that various people have tried to construct about me. I think most people who actually worked with Julia felt a strong sense of respect and loyalty to her, and are disappointed that she was never really given a fair go because she had a lot to offer. Politically and socially, she is more conservative than I am, and as I have often said, I do not agree with everything she did. But she had a lot going for her.
Just an example, one of my daughters at the time was going through a very hard time, because she ended up doing her articles in a conservative law firm (long story) and wasn’t sure she could stick it out. I talked to Julia about it, and she was happy to have lunch with my daughter and talk to her about it, and of the stuff she (Julia) had had to go through. It’s that kind of personal kindness, for no direct benefit, that people who know her are aware of. It’s interesting too, that my views were so readily dismissed, both here and on LP, but I won’t say more because I know JQ doesn’t like this being ventilated too much.
@Fran Barlow
Weird. So now I also am aware of @mbien when I would probably never have been! Clever reverse psychology marketing thanks to a stupidly designed filter.
I’m off to buy some!
Seriously, I still can’t understand the “logic” of this. Surely any pharma-spam (is it really a big issue?) that really wanted to advertise, say, @mbien could just use fillers like we have to? Conversely, I can’t understand why all words containing that string would be banned rather than only the precise whole word – the marketers are hardly going to advertise “@mbient” if they’re trying to sell “@mbien”.
@Val
Thus you were and are a partial judge not an impartial judge on this matter. Your personal loyalty is commendable but you cannot expect everyone, even on the left, to share your positive assessment of JG in the political sense. Others also have the right to a different opinion about the political tactics and strategies of Labor at that time.
I second Fran’s judgement of Julia Gillard’s political and humanitarian credentials.
“Politically, she was concerned in the refugee capture and storage trade, pandering to xenophobic angst and also surplus fetishism. She continued the occupation of Afghanistan, double-crossed Wilkie on p0ker machines, through supporting mothers off benefit, denied gay marriage to keep the right happy and even winked at royalty.”
I would add Julia Gillard caved in to the mining oligarchs. Mind you, all these above faults are shared across the board by all LNP and LAB federal politicians, male and female, of any note for the last 2 decades about. So one is not particularly targetting on JG in this matter.
@Megan
I’m thinking I need to draw up a list of controversial drugs and work out how many have strings that are contained in other common words and then test them in short posts excluding those I can see people using regularly.
A bit of a research project!
Interestingly it’s the hottest Sydney Day on record … (for November) … richmond 45.3 degC
Whew … I did get two loads of bedding washed and dried plus a few other things too. The lounge cushions and the mattress got a great airing!
@Ikonoclast
Your criticisms don’t apply Ikon as I am not defending JG on policy grounds. I find it perfectly acceptable for you or anyone else to disagree with her on policy grounds, I do so myself.
It was the personal and counter-productive nature of the criticisms that you and others made of her – that she was deceitful, personally ambitious to an illegitimate degree, that she had sacrificed principle in order to achieve her personal ambition of overthrowing Rudd, and that she was incompetent – none of those things fitted with the woman I knew, and all them fed into the sexist narrative of the Libs.
You may note J Bishop crowing today about how she and Rudd were good friends. That makes the ‘boganvillea’ story more credible – if you haven’t heard about that, you should find out about it. It is a disgraceful story of disloyalty by Rudd in Parliament, if true.
I won’t say more, for the reasons I’ve given before. But I do hope and believe that you will come to see that I was not just the biased or emotional feminist supporter – or indeed, trouble-maker – that you and others seemed to think. There is a huge amount of evidence that women still face difficulty in being treated fairly in leadership positions, and we should all be on guard about this.
I do think that some people are – even if not openly admitting it – aware that there is much that is concerning about the way JG was treated, and will be more careful in future. One thing that women also suffer from is being put on a pedestal as the golden girl – like Plibersek – and then being torn down when it becomes apparent they are human, and do make mistakes, so I think that is something else to think about.
On a lighter note, it is funny to read the idolisation of J Bishop in Latika Bourke’s article in the Age today. It would be funny beyond words if T Abbott was eventually made to step down in favour of J Bishop!
@Fran Barlow
Fran I think what you are talking about at #3 sounds like the heat transfer system I mentioned. It sounds like a good idea for new builds, but difficult to retrofit.
Interesting (in a horrifying, but also ‘well deniers how long can you keep pretending this isn’t happening?’ way) that it’s the hottest Sydney November day on record. I’m not sure if we are having a record breaking November, but it’s certainly pretty warm.
@Val
I will ‘third’, to Ikon’s second, what Fran wrote about criticism of JG on policy and actions, which has nothing to do with gender or whether she was decent on a personal level.
JG was the Prime Minister of Australia.
I don’t believe I have ever criticized her for anything other than her actions and decisions in that position. I can’t see what she “had to offer” but was prevented from offering, or how she was prevented??
She was the PM and did some things that I consider unforgiveable regardless of who did them (especially regarding refugees, but there are several others).
I realise you have known her personally and have a great like for her at that level, but from outside I’m afraid that is irrelevant.
Was the hottest Oct on record (global). Big snow in NY makes it okay though. Richmond (Sydney, NSW) recorded its all time record for a November day today, smashing the previous record for November—set in 2013. Must be due for a downturn.
Temps trending upwards on twitter, climate scientist rebuked for tweeting from work 🙂
@Megan
Megan it’s not about personal liking. I respected her and found her a decent person. A lot of people here and on LP portrayed her as dishonest and incompetent in a way that I believe was influenced by sexist attitudes. It has nothing to do with policies that, like you, I disagree with. It’s about the personal attacks. I honestly cannot put it any more plainly than that, so if you refuse to understand what I’m saying, so be it.
Ikonoclast, you wrote that you haven’t seen any references to peer reviewed scientific data and analyses from me yet. It may be foolish of me, but I am going to attempt to use the concept of bigger than without falling back on such resources.
If you look at Australian uranium reserves you’ll see that, provided the nuclear power industry continues its current decline and provided uranium production doesn’t get diverted into murder weapons, Australian reserves alone are probably enough to meet all demand from the nuclear power industry ever. They are probably bigger than what the total future demand will be.
World reserves as a whole are definitely bigger than likely future uranium demand.
And if you look at the total amount of uranium at Olympic Dam, the total amount not the reserves, then that appears to be bigger than the entire likely future uranium demand. The ore there is mostly low quality and not considered to be economical to extract but it could be extracted if people were willing to pay the extra cost of refining it. Currently no one is willing to pay to extract it and that is fortunate because if they were willing it would mean they were crazy. But it does mean there is no shortage of uranium provided people are willing to pay for it. And so far they have been.
As you mentioned and as I mentioned earlier to Fran, peak uranium was back in 1979 and of course the highest peak since then has probably happened because the production of nuclear energy is going down and hopefully no one is going to stock up on a few thousand nuclear warheads as an anti-shirt fronting deterrant. (Putin has bombs, he didn’t get shirt fronted. Draw your own conclusions.)
@Val
I wouldn’t say that I “refuse” to understand what you are saying. In fact I am trying to understand the point.
If I’m getting it – regardless of her policies, actions, decisions etc.. as PM (which we may agree we are against and regard as ‘bad’), she was subjected to sexist and personal attacks (which we agree are bad and also have nothing to do with the former).
I don’t understand what the personal and gender attacks have to do with the non-personal and non-gender criticism. They are not intertwined.
JG was the PM. You say she wasn’t given a “fair go” and that she had a “lot to offer”. But you seem to agree with a lot of the policy criticism.
How would she have been given a fair go, and how would things have been different then (such as with refugees)?
@Val
Or, on reflection, is it that it would make no difference?
I mean, the policies and actions would be the same – but people against those policies and actions would keep their criticism focused on that alone.
The biggest ‘haters’ of Gillard were people, such as News Ltd with whom she famously had a secret dinner, who agreed with and promoted the policies the rest of us criticized AND they were the most sexist and critical of her on the personal level.
@26 and 27
Thanks Megan. As far as I recall, your criticisms of Julia Gillard were always about policy rather than person, so you wouldn’t be included amongst those who criticised her in personal terms. Yes, exactly, focusing on the policy rather than the person would have been a start. If you want to remind yourself of the kind of rhetoric people (on the left, here) were using, I’ve collected some on my blog at the ‘sexism and left wing politics – the work in progress page’ (scroll down to the bottom of current page, the link is on the right).
I don’t know when I’ll finish the analysis, and I won’t talk about it more now, but I hope to do it properly one day.
oh no! now the Age has an article about Julie Bishop using emoticons!???
I mean emoji, whoops
Val: “Also the list of market participants doesn’t include any solar, from what I can see, but they show it in the graph (usually very small amount) So is that an estimate of roof top solar, or what?”
Empowerme sources pv output and contribution estimates from here: pv-map.apvi.org.au/live
Which in turn sources output data from: pvoutput.org
The site author is a former Melb Uni masters student, who clearly comes across as supporting decarbonisation. The project is open source: github.com/hsenot/empower.me
So all of its methods are openly available to critique.
I’d say the empowerme site uses some times series smoothing which may give rise to quirks, one being solar output starting before dawn. The criticism that state peak demands are not quite proportional to population may be explained by differences in local weather and time zones.
The take home message of the site must be that eastern mainland Australia is utterly dependent on coal for electricity. We can check this anytime when the info is refreshed
http://empowerme.org.au/market.html#
@Nick
Perhaps because I’m looking at it on my iPad, I don’t see any of that information. I’m not suggesting they are deliberately distorting data, but it is strange, if it’s actually demand, that Victoria shows such lower peaks and troughs than other states – if you look at Victoria the brown coal component doesn’t seem to change at all.
I will look at the site on a computer when I get back to Monash and see if there is more info
Hermit, if you had been back in the day when the first steam engine was first invented, you would have said: “So little of our transport power comes from coal. The take home message is that we are utterly dependent on horses.”
What you don’t seem to understand is exponential growth from a low base. Early on, it looks like it is making little impact. But given time such growth compounds enormously. Solar and wind power are experiencing explosive exponential growth (worldwide) right now. Soon you will see it making a massive difference worldwide.
It may take a little longer in Australia due to the moronic, obstructive, fossil-fool Dinosaur Luddites in our business (mining oligarchs) and political elites.
Ikon PV installations have slowed since the 2011 peak
http://ret.cleanenergyregulator.gov.au/REC-Registry/Data-reports
That’s not exponential growth, not in Australia anyway. Big wind builds like King Island have been cancelled.
The possibility to consider is that of a niche or sweet spot. We may have 2m solar roofs but may never get to 3m. Nutritionists may tell us to eat raw carrots and sure enough they benefit but it doesn’t mean to consume them 100%.
@Hermit
??? What have lithium batteries got to do with it? I didn’t even mention them.
@Tim Macknay
Advocates for energy storage nominate them as the big hope to wit Panasonic/Tesla will build what is claimed to be the world’s largest factory in Nevada. The batteries will go in both cars and houses at prices cheaper than lead-acid it is claimed. A California utility is to invite tenders for the world’s largest battery array of 0.4 Gwh capacity based on smaller lithium ion batteries. It will occupy a multistorey building. Other forms of energy storage have physical constraints such as pumped hydro and flywheels. Some are optimistic the bulk energy storage problem will be solved but I think we should wait and see.
@Hermit
Bollocks. Advocates of rooftop PV think cheaper lithium batteries will lead to grid defection.
This may or may not happen, but in any case it has little to do with the larger question of whether or not economically viable large-scale energy storage technologies can or will be developed.
So you agree with me, then that (to paraphrase your earlier remark) “We’ll either have 4th generation fission, fusion, economic collapse or maybe even renewables with storage”. A sensible position to take.
@Hermit
Australia is irrelevant and its current crop of politicians are making it more irrelevant everyday. It’s the world and the big players of the world that count.
“China installed 12 GW of new solar PV power generation capacity in 2013, a whopping 232 percent year-over-year increase.” – cleantechnica.
“It’s no secret to those who work in energy that the solar industry is among the fastest-growing power sectors in this country (often the fastest-growing one), as well as worldwide. And many people don’t realize it, but US solar power growth has a hugely positive impact on employment. In 2013 alone, the global solar industry expanded by 100%, amounting to 2.3 million jobs worldwide.” – cleantechnica.
You always want to shift what is a big-picture issue and debate on to one minuscule, irrelevant point with a passingly tiny influence on the major global trend. Not sure why your mind works that way. I guess it’s the nitpicking cherry picking result of strong, very confused and unempirical prior beliefs.
Do you have any idea of the results of 100% or 200% growth if sustained? Mind you if we make even 20% growth per annum globally in renewables it will rapidly make a very big difference.
Funny how cuts of ostensibly 5% lead to job losses of 10% at the ABC; same thing happened at CSIRO, a “minor” trim leads to well over 10% of jobs eventually being lost. Both ABC and CSIRO are running much smaller staff than several years ago (never mind a decade or more ago), and are undeniably doing less as a result. In the ABC’s case, I’d go out on a limb and suggest that while they’ve spread across several different channels, including mobile platforms and digital web platforms, the actual content itself has diminished in quality, through no fault of the presenters and producers. If you don’t have the staff on the ground, you simply can’t produce as much original content, or put as much effort into providing the essential background information to fully appreciating the story (in the case of news): this leads to false choices as to how to improve while cutting, so things happen like a snappier presentation—it is cheap to give that a boost up—and hollowed out reheats of the same shallow news story all through the day and night. The same behaviour has occurred across much of the media landscape, which has the unfortunate effect of indoctrinating today’s graduates into believing that what we currently see is what reporting and journalism always was and will be. I would have thought that the ABC is the one place where graduates could be shown that journalism can be so much more than a quick set of cuts and cues, more than a few talking head shots. With cuts of the magnitude that the current fascists have made, the ABC is going to bleed badly, no matter what choices they make. The LNP love to chip things until they break, then point to it and say why are we funding stuff that public servants are hopeless at managing; it is their standard M.O.
Still waiting for the Putin shirt-front, Tony…or was that a lie as well?
Earlier this month, the minister Malcolm Turnbull was telling us that the efficiency cuts could come from behind the shop front, leaving content unmolested. Well, the ABC’s board seems to have a different view, given the 100 redundancies from the news division. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this weren’t a softening up for a much bigger carve-up down the track. Endless re-runs of “The Bill,” “Midsomer Murders”, “Poirot,” and “Spicks-n-Specks,” here we come. Or a test pattern.
Mind you, I still can’t fathom how someone like Paul Barry is on >$191K a year for hosting a 10-15min segment once a week. Very nice money if you can get it.
Val, I had to dig through the code a bit to find those sources.
The demand shown is simply the output meter data from each power station in a given state, not where it ends up in the national energy market.
The interconnect meter data is available here: http://www.nemweb.com.au/reports/current/dispatch_reports/
But it’s not accounted for at all in Empowerme.
The world bank is saying it will no longer fund coal projects outside of “circumstances of extreme need”, choosing instead to focus efforts on delivering clean, renewable energy.
There is more about this here
– hope that link works
This is the better link http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2014/11/23/climate-report-finds-temperature-rise-locked-in-risks-rising?cid=CCG_TTccgEN_D_EXT&hootPostID=e0995af56ebf3b3cd9077778e83870a3
@Nick
thanks Nick – that is all quite complex, I probably need to ask you some more questions. However if you look at empowerme right now, it looks like something very strange is happening in South Australia.
Ronald is always bragging about how much solar energy they produce – but you should see this graph …
@Val
Val, it is supposed to be clear tomorrow and assuming it is, looking at predicted grid demand rooftop solar should supply about 22% of total electricity use at around noon tomorrow in South Australia. Maybe more. South Australia has about 580 megawatts of rooftop PV now.
@Ronald Brak
Sorry Ronald the previous comment was just my silly joke about Empowerme, which obviously last night had a glitch that was making it show a solar spike in SA up to some absurd figure, like about 22MW. No other forms of energy were shown, and the graph only showed solar between about 4-6 PM. It was just a glitch but it looked funny – I thought you might have looked at it and had a chuckle.
I enjoy all your updates about what SA is doing, I lived in SA till I was twenty and still have friends and family there, so I think it’s great the progress SA is making with wind and solar and wish other states would follow suit. Cheers
Erm that should be 22,000 MW
@Ikonoclast
Perhaps other countries will get out the starting blocks quickly then slow their renewable build dramatically as we have. In 2013 some 4.4% of Australia’s electricity was produced by wind and solar, with Australia now having the worlds cheapest home solar prices I believe. Despite this the current trend here is negative growth in the installation rate. Talk of sustained 20% growth rates here or elsewhere seems rather fanciful.
Despite all the teeth gnashing it seems likely Australia’s emissions will actually increase in 2015. As for energy storage at the Gwh level no mostly flat country has come anywhere near it. Time to get real.