www.news.com.au
August 20, 2009
YABBA dabba doo! They're back, for one last rerun. The fossil fools and their Bedrock dogma have pumped up the volume to tell us we should stop demonising carbon dioxide. Like trying to wrestle a bone from The Flintstones canine Dino, the climate sceptics don't want to let go of burning their fuels for electricity, even though, we could all profit from renewable energy's lower short run marginal costs. But this columnist is not quite sure why these fans of the Lavoisier Group and the greenhouse mafia, as represented by the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network's big polluting companies, are complaining.
They are getting everything they desire: a carbon pollution reduction scheme that does not reduce carbon pollution and a Renewable Energy Target that doesn't target them. The RET the government proposed was too weak to begin with: just 20 per cent of electricity was to come from renewables by 2020. It could have been much, much higher, carving out a secure slice of the electricity pie for solar thermal, wind and ocean energy companies. But this week it was made dirtier. Now it will count methane" target="_blank">coal seam methane as a renewable energy when it is used to produce electricity.
This greenhouse gas that spews out during mining operations is not renewable and it is not clean. Capturing it is a good thing while mining coal continues, but burning it to produce electricity still causes pollution. And as for it being renewable, that's baloney. Only the sun, wind and the sea (and hydro when it rains or snows melt) can create energy that is replenished. Even hot dry rock geothermal, which is often touted as a renewable energy, is not truly renewable because the deep underground wells and caverns cool down as water is injected into them to create steam.
Estimates indicate their high-temperature energy is depleted within a decade or two. A strong mandatory RET could have created a vibrant renewable energy sector that eventually would have delivered electricity more cheaply than coal. Until then, renewable energy would smooth the peaks in the wholesale electricity market that are created when demand is high or coal power plants are shut down for repairs, leading to the firing up of standby gas power plants.
The gas peaking plants charge a fortune for their electricity - - up to $10,000 a MW hour compared with $40 to $50 a MW hour when demand is stable. More than 30 per cent of the revenue generated by the wholesale electricity market in a year is created by these gas peaking events. But if you have renewable energy feeding into the grid, such as wind or concentrating solar thermal with storage, like they have in Spain, the supply better matches demand without the need for expensive gas peaking plants.
These findings were explored and confirmed in three reports commissioned by the energy sector and big business. The reports are by ROAM Consulting (issue 11), CRA International (for the National Generators Forum) and Port Jackson Partners (for the Business Council of Australia). It is extraordinary that these findings have been consistently ignored by industry and politicians. Well, actually it is not surprising that industry has ignored the data. By pretending they have to pay more for RET electricity, these rent seekers have convinced politicians they need help to pay their power bills.
This greed has further undermined a RET that is already diluted. The RET should have incentivised large-scale renewable energy infrastructure of the sort being rolled out around the world. Instead, too much of the target will be soaked up by allowing the contribution of rooftop solar panels, solar hot water systems, methane" target="_blank">coal seam methane and possibly biomass (burning of logging waste) to count towards the target, leaving little room for large-scale renewables.
Malcolm Turnbull was right when he said in a press release: "Labor's renewable energy announcement.., confirms it is not serious about climate change." Problem is, he believed this in October 2007. But this week, the Liberals showed they were even less serious about global warming than the government by securing concessions from the RET for their big-polluting mates. These dinosaurs and their Bedrock mindset belong in museums, not wandering around Canberra.
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