8 thoughts on “Monday Message Board”

  1. The diseconomies of scale are starting to affect the rollout of alternate energy. The best example of this is wind farms. These are vital for the achievement of net zero by 2050. Their ability to feed the grid, especially when solar power is not being generated, is essential to maintain energy supplies at peak times of use. They are also one of the cheapest sources of energy. But they are bulky and intrusive into natural environments. The externalities of wind farm include increased noise pollution, disruptions to the flight path of birds and visual pollution. Now this may seem tame when compared to coal fired power stations. They are also not as bulky or intrusive as pumped hydro schemes. But it is their location that makes all their externalities more difficult to justify.

    The decision to largely base wind mill towers on land, and east coast land in particular, has been poorly imagined. In these most densely populated areas of Australia, the externalities of wind farms promotes strong public opposition. The poorly planned roll out of wind farms has not helped the situation. But it is the land based option that is haunting wind farm proponents.

    In the northern hemisphere there are more wind mill towers out to sea. The old adage of “Out of sight, out of mind.” explains why there is less complaints about this option when wind farms are located out to sea. Now there may be good reasons why this is not possible in Australia. The only issue then would be concern that these problems have not been explained well enough to the general public.

    Unless more transparency is used to establish the need for wind farms, other alternatives may win public support. Most of these alternatives are either absurd or retro. But the public at large is not convinced by current explanations as to why so many wind farms are necessary. This must be addressed if any emissions target is to be reached and maintained.

  3. Gregory J McKenzie:

    “..densely populated parts of Australia.. ” Something of an oxymoron, surely.

    Maggie Thatcher conducted an involuntary controlled experiment on compensation for real or imagined nuisance from wind farms. She nationalised business rates in England, to get back at left-wing local authorities in Liverpool and elsewhere, but for some reason not in Scotland. It turned out that spoiled views of the glens were a lot less damaging than those of the Lake District. Scotland now has so much onshore wind that it is often over 100% of demand, while larger England has hardly any. The Ockham’s Razor inference is that English local planning authorities had no incentive to stand up to even a little pressure by well-connected local cranks opposed to wind farms, while in Scotland the tax benefits were enough to hearten their Scottish counterparts to tell the cranks to get lost. I suspect the same dynamic is at work in pro-wind Iowa and rural Spain, and on the negative side in France.

    Personally, I like to see wind farms working frugally and elegantly away. The one major case of real nuisance is the flashing red lights put up to protect a handful of careless pilots of light aircraft. With universal GPS these are becoming unnecessary.

  4. I am sympathetic to those who want to preserve the view – however, it is an emergency CC situation right now. Perhaps some day when we humans get our act together, we can re-visit some of these installations.

    Having said that, I have always rather liked the look of those giant orange “volleyballs” that they string in our valleys here, to warn pilots. (I have a thing for orange. Whereas, yellow can often be … tooooo much.)

    I like the power towers too – they look like friendly beings. And they make a nice humming sound when you are close.

    People here are getting in a bunch about desert solar farms. I don’t know that they know that panels can go right up next to the crops – no one seems to be talking about that here. (Or maybe I remembered that wrong.)

  5. Tony Abbott once committed the LNP to a 2030 emissions reduction target in the range of 26 to 28 per cent.

    In a way Dutton is saying that there’s no point in the LNP making targets when they have no intention of keeping them.

  6. The ABC published an explainer on 11 Jun 2024 (updated 12 Jun 2024) by energy reporter Daniel Mercer and climate lead Tim Leslie headlined Does nuclear power have a future in Australia? These numbers will help cut through the debate (see the link provided by Roger_f above at JUNE 11, 2024 AT 9:57 AM). It included some quotes from John Quiggin re the UAE’s reactor units (bold text my emphasis):

    “But of course, they had low-paid workers, there’s been a fair bit of inflation since they started … and they have a lot of advantages in siting because they can just plonk the thing in the desert, on the coast somewhere they didn’t have to worry about, for example, emergency planning zones, and so forth.

    Nuclear power plants can be around for many decades to perhaps over a century; well over a decade or perhaps two to get-up-and-running, then operational for perhaps up to several decades, and then perhaps more decades to fully decommission. I’d suggest one aspect that’s probably not being considered for the locations of any new nuclear plants is the increasing threat of accelerating and relentless sea level rise (SLR).

    Per the Hansen et al. (2023) paper titled Global warming in the pipeline (bold text my emphasis):

    Discussion [184] with field glaciologists¹³ 20 years ago revealed frustration with IPCC’s ice sheet assessment. One glaciologist said—about a photo [185] of a moulin (a vertical shaft that carries meltwater to the base of the Greenland ice sheet)—‘the whole ice sheet is going down that damned hole!’ Concern was based on observed ice sheet changes and paleoclimate evidence of sea level rise by several meters in a century, implying that ice sheet collapse is an exponential process. Thus, as an alternative to ice sheet models, we carried out a study described in Ice Melt [13]. In a GCM simulation, we added a growing freshwater flux to the ocean surface mixed layer around Greenland and Antarctica, with the flux in the early 21st century based on estimates from in situ glaciological studies [186] and satellite data on sea level trends near Antarctica [187]. Doubling times of 10 and 20 years were used for the growth of freshwater flux. One merit of our GCM was reduced, more realistic, small-scale ocean mixing, with a result that Antarctic Bottom Water formed close to the Antarctic coast [13], as in the real world. Growth of meltwater and GHG emissions led to shutdown of the North Atlantic and Southern Ocean overturning circulations, amplified warming at the foot of the ice shelves that buttress the ice sheets, and other feedbacks consistent with ‘nonlinearly growing sea level rise, reaching several meters in 50–150 years’ [13]. Shutdown of ocean overturning circulation occurs this century, as early as midcentury. The 50–150-year time scale for multimeter sea level rise is consistent with the 10–20-year range for ice melt doubling time. Real-world ice melt will not follow a smooth curve, but its growth rate is likely to accelerate in coming years due to increasing heat flux into the ocean (Fig. 25).

    In the journal Atmos. Chem. Phys., 16, 3761–3812, 2016, is a paper by James Hansen et al., titled Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2°C global warming could be dangerous, included (on page 3766):

    A sea level rise of 5m in a century is about the most extreme in the paleo-record (Fairbanks, 1989; Deschamps et al., 2012), but the assumed 21st century climate forcing is also more rapidly growing than any known natural forcing.

    It seems around 5 m of SLR has previously occurred within a timescale of a century according to the paleo-record, and the current climate forcing is more rapidly growing than at any time in the paleo-record, so I’d suggest it’s not unreasonable to expect a similar accelerating multi-metre SLR within this century.

    The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) published their report titled State of the Global Climate on 19 Mar 2024, where in Fig 6 (on page 6) indicated that the SLR rate of an average of 4.77 mm/year was observed over the period Jan 2014 through Dec 2023, with an acceleration at 0.12 ± 0.05 mm/y². This suggests the SLR rate is now around 5 mm/y in 2024. The SLR doubling rate since satellite altimetry data began in Jan 1993 has been around 18 years. So an SLR rate of 5 mm/y now, in less than 2 decades then accelerates to 10 mm/y, and then 20 mm/y, etc.

    The Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI) has more than doubled since 2000, which suggests the doubling time for the rate of SLR in the near future is likely to reduce significantly. Thus:

    • The 10-year doubling scenario curve exceeds 1 m around 2063 and 2 m around 2072;
    • The 13-year doubling scenario curve exceeds 1 m around 2070.

    See also Table 3.2 in NOAA’s Feb 2022 report on SLR, which projects a global mean SLR of between 0.15 m (for a low emissions scenario) up to 0.43 m (for a high emissions scenario) by year-2050 relative to a year-2000 baseline.

    On 22 August 2022, at the Cryosphere 2022 Symposium at the Harpa Conference Centre Reykjavik, Iceland, glaciologist Professor Jason Box said in a YouTube video titled Arctic climate system catastrophe – a wide ranging tour – long version, from time interval 0:15:27:

    “And at this level of CO₂, this rough approximation suggests that we’ve committed already to more than 20 metres of sea level rise. So, obviously it would help to remove a hell-of-a-lot of CO₂ from the atmosphere, and I don’t hear that conversation very much, because we’re still adding 35 gigatonnes per year.”

    That raises critical questions about whether it would be worthwhile to continue defending coastal infrastructure/property, or instead, abandon them and retreat. How do you defend against an apparently relentless SLR?

    The only way to stop more SLR is to cool the planet. That requires urgently to: Reduce, Remove, Repair.

    Nuclear technologies are too slow to deploy to save us!

  7. Gregory J McKenzie says: “The externalities of wind farm include increased noise pollution, disruptions to the flight path of birds and visual pollution…” not to mention the worst: large areas of often pristine, often the last refuge, habitat destruction.

  8. Free event: Does ‘Green Steel’ threaten our coal exports? – InQueensland (inqld.com.au)

    “The coal industry tells us that the outlook for Australian metallurgical coal – most of which comes from Queensland – is bright. Coal miners even link demand for met coal with the transition to renewable energy, insisting that that met coal is essential to make steel and, therefore, to make wind turbines.

    This gets parroted by government ministers trying to justify their approval of more metallurgical coal mines. However, the Federal government forecasts that global metallurgical coal trade is in decline. It also forecasts that Australia’s met coal exports will peak in 2026 before going into decline…”

    As the scheduled 2026 Pilbara Killer from West Africa also ramps up construction is Queensland to be the most trashed of all the poor wh1te trash of Asia?

    Does ‘Green Steel’ really threaten coal? – Queensland Conservation Council

    Green Steel and Future Risk of Metallurgical Coal | Humanitix

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