Herald Sun
Friday 27/3/2009 Page: 65
THE hidden costs of power station emissions to public health and to the environment can no longer be ignored, according to the nation's peak engineers' body. The impact on human and environmental health from pollution, or what the industry calls "externalities", should be "quantified in monetary terms", as it is in Europe, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering says.
In a report to be released today, ATSE calls on the Federal Government to encourage investment grade data on costs to be collected and analysed, to "inform policy and optimise the future portfolio of generating technologies". The burden on the health budget from increased respiratory and cardiovascular disease linked to proximity to power generators should be accounted for in future energy policies, ATSE believes.
It said environmental and social costs are not accounted for in the market price of electricity. Pricing in these factors would add a notional $52 a MW hour to the cost of power from brown coalfired generators, the report estimated. For black coal it would be $42 extra, and $19 for natural gas. In a scenario where carbon could be captured and stored, the external cost for black coal power would be just over $10 more.
Nuclear power's price over and above capital and production costs would be an extra $7. Solar technologies and wind energy would each attract less than an extra $5. With billion-dollar investments at stake, more work was needed to reduce the uncertainties of these extra costs of prospective technologies for reducing carbon emissions, ATSE said.
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