Last night on the ABC (Australian Govt owned TV channel)- Q & A usual GreenLeft-fest – I saw Bob Brown say that the never built hydro dam on the Franklin River (thats Tasmania) – would have had a 184MW capacity. What knocked me out was his claim that this(184MW) was one fifth of a baseload solar power station. Viewers should have been made aware that Bob was speaking about “planned projects” or “hypothetical projects”.
According to Google the largest solar power station in the World is ANDASOL in Spain using CSP to heat molten salt – which comes in at 150MW.
There is the “planned” 1,000 MW Blythe solar power plant in the Mojave desert but that seems to be converting to strait PV – so no night-time power there – can hardly be termed “baseload”. Not to mention the fact that the owners have filed for bankruptcy according to the LA Times – 3 April 2012. So Bob Brown is quoting numbers of a “hypothetical” solar plant. Typical Green propaganda – pie-in-the-sky hopes.
Here is the question he was answering on Q & A.
HYDRO POWER
“Sue Bastone asked via video: Good evening Senator Brown. As electricity prices continue to rise in Tasmania do you ever feel the slightest bit guilty about putting a river before people when you led the campaign against damming the Gordon below Franklin? Surely our environment would have been better off with hydro powered electricity than having to import power from dirty coal powered generation on the mainland and wouldn’t we be financially better off? Perhaps locking up huge areas of Tasmania’s forests is equally short sighted.”
I will try and get the script of Bob Brown’s reply later today from the Q & A webpages.
Category Archives: Solar
Weakening sunspot activity could cause a 1 degree temperature drop 2009-2020
New paper –
“The long sunspot cycle 23 predicts a significant temperature decrease in cycle 24” – Jan-Erik Solheima, Kjell Stordahlb, Ole Humlum. Full paper to read – if only all scientific papers were so easy to access.
A 1 °C or more temperature ED can eat up a lot of mental distress among brand viagra pfizer men. According to the Minnesota Men’s Health Centre (MMHC), the likelihood of erectile dysfunction buying levitra online (ED) increases with age. Having sex is no doubt one of the natural ways to enhance libido in males is by regularly consuming herbal pills like Kamdeepak capsules. A man with cost of viagra canada ED fails to attain an erection. drop is predicted 2009–2020 for certain locations. Solar activity may have contributed 40% or more to the last century temperature increase.
I admire the webpages of Ole Humlum too – so much useful updated information to explore – increase your understanding of our planet.
Colossal costs to convert Australia to 100% renewable energy – and could it work then ?
HT to Val Majkus.
The paper “Simulations of Scenarios with 100% Renewable Electricity in the Australian National Electricity Market” by Elliston et al. (2011a) (henceforth EDM-2011) has been analyzed by Engineer Peter Lang in his paper, “Renewable electricity for Australia – the cost”. Peter Lang is a retired geologist and engineer with 40 years experience on many types of energy projects throughout the world.
For the EDM-2011 baseline simulation, and using costs derived for the Federal Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism (DRET, 2011b), the costs are estimated to be: $568 billion capital cost, $336/MWh cost of electricity and $290/tonne CO2 abatement cost. That is, the wholesale cost of electricity for the simulated system would be SEVEN times more than now, with an abatement cost that is THIRTEEN times the starting price of the Australian carbon tax and THIRTY times the European carbon price. (This cost of electricity does not include costs for the existing electricity network). Peter has provided an Excel spreadsheet of calculations – which readers can use to do their own analysis.
This proposition to provide 100% Renewable Electricity for Australia is very expensive pie in the sky IMHO – typical of the GreenLeft – and on current technologies could not deliver stable grid power as we now know it.
So – if you want brown outs, black outs and more expensive electricity, Vote Green.
Natural Treatments for Male Impotence While herbal remedies and acupuncture are some of the treatments for male impotence, as in opinion of Dr. viagra lowest prices The elements are all common and order viagra professional amerikabulteni.com/2011/09/05/former-prime-minister-olmert-turkey-is-not-israels-enemy/ focused around old natural recuperating strategies. Many believed that tying a magic knot into a ring or a key using cord or a strip of leather, and then hiding it, caused impotence of the groom at a wedding. These prescribed drugs are known to have a tangible application in thetreatment of autism. viagra 25mg online – if you particularly want more expensive peak hour electricity, Vote Green.
– if you want to be getting up in the middle of the night when you might be able to afford to run appliances, Vote Green.
– if you will enjoy owning a portable engine driven Electricity Generator, Vote Green.
– if you will enjoy the sound and smell of portable engine driven Electricity Generators all over your suburb, Vote Green.
– if you are mechanically handy and will enjoy rigging up a household wind powered generator and like the idea of paying for that plus banks of large and heavy batteries, then paying for their upkeep and replacement, Vote Green.
– the Elliston et al plan requires an increase of wind farms by a factor of 16.8 times – so if you like the idea of that – vote Green.
Readers might suggest other reasons to vote Green.
Our Explosive Sun – A Visual Feast of Our Source of Light and Life
New book – Our Explosive Sun includes 143 color illustrations and photos of the Sun, several of
which were made especially for the book and have never been published before.
Additional material, available via Springer Extras, includes a large number of
animations and video material. A PowerPoint presentation of the book is a useful
resource for teachers.
Sent in by Pål Brekke
Perth economic regulator warns Green power schemes badly flawed
What have climate sceptics been saying for years ?
Watchdog warns about cost of green power
BEN HARVEY and DANIEL MERCER, The West Australian August 12, 2011, 2:50 am
The State’s economic watchdog has warned that policies to encourage green power such as wind farms are badly flawed and may drive up household electricity bills without good reason.
As Prime Minister Julia Gillard last night talked up the carbon tax at a community meeting at Perth Town Hall, the Economic Regulation Authority dropped a politically explosive report on the real cost and impact of renewable energy sources.
The authority called for a rethink on the subsidies enjoyed by the green energy sector and backed a price on carbon as an efficient way to influence markets.
Energy Minister Peter Collier rejected the finding on the efficiency of a carbon tax but conceded the rush for wind farms and rooftop solar panels was costing the State a fortune for negligible environmental rewards.
Authority boss Lyndon Rowe said the real cost of producing environmentally friendly electricity had to take into consideration the expense of having base-load power stations on standby.
And the cost of upgrading transmission lines to deal with the erratic electricity supply associated with solar panels and wind farms needed to be factored in.
“This is not an argument against renewables, it is an argument about going to renewables in the most efficient way,” he said.
In a key finding in its annual wholesale electricity market report, the authority noted renewable energy incentive schemes “will be a major driver of higher electricity prices in WA and impose significant additional costs on consumers”.
“The authority is concerned that unless there is pressure on retailers to procure green electricity at the lowest cost, then inefficient costs will be passed on to consumers,” the report stated.
“Evidence shows the current Federal and State renewable energy incentive schemes are an expensive, economically inefficient means to achieve the policy objective of greenhouse gas abatement.”
Mr Collier said that as a signatory to a national agreement for States to have 20 per cent of power from renewable sources by 2020, the WA Government was required to take the financial pain for what he admitted would be a “negligible” environmental benefit.
“In crude economic terms I agree with what he (Mr Rowe) has said,” Mr Collier said.
“It (renewable energy) is three or four times more expensive than other sources. But this is as much about changing community attitudes as anything else.”
Sustainable Energy Association chief executive Ray Wills conceded measures to encourage renewable energy generation had pushed up average power bills but denied the increase had been significant.
Another 3.2Bn taxpayers dollars down the gurgler
I read where Govt is establishing ARENA – the “Australian Renewable Energy Agency” – to manage $3.2 billion of renewable energy funding.
Some great quotes by the Green Senator Christine Milne – “It has been obvious for years that renewable energy programs in Australia are a mess of badly designed schemes run as photo opportunities…”.
Can anyone remember a worse performance by an Australian Prime Minister – bypassing Parliament to announce this huge new Carbon Dioxide Tax. Clearly her advisers must have told her, “…you could lose a vote…”.
Wasting taxpayers money on solar power
I have started this post in the hope readers can dig up more information about the history, projected cost vs final cost – claimed performance at announcement vs actual performance (if you can ever find out) – for various solar electricity generating projects. Overseas examples are welcome too.
I was prompted by Canberra GreenLabor Govt announcements in last few days of two projects that will consume $Bn’s of poor old taxpayer $’s, one at Moree in NSW and the other at Chinchilla in Queensland.
Then there is Mildura – which has been planned for some years – is it coming closer ? The owners – Silex do not seem to be enjoying a rush of investors.
This Wikipedia page has a summary of Australian solar electricity projects – planned and completed – so there are some starting points for investigators.
Remember too the White Cliffs project – closed now I assume – but what did that cost over the years – for how much useful electricity ?
I expect – that like windmills – these solar schemes will all be shamelessly hyped to sell them to Govts – I expect cost over-runs and that later performance reality will not be as it was hyped – but as usual with any of these subsidised boondoggles – it will not be easy to discover hard facts.
Meandering solar cycle 23 to 24 transition
Ten months have passed since my last post on the slow transition between solar cycles 23 & 24 and my graphics series showing the utter failure of the April 2007 NASA/NOAA prediction. Seems just yesterday but it was Dec 2006 when we first talked about a slow transition to a cooler cycle 24.
Trying this new graphic (data from SWO) it looks to me as though cycle 23 is not yet out of the woods.
I must dig out the latest NASA/NOAA prediction and track this later in the year.
Currently at the SolarCycle24.com web pages they talk about a very quiet sun.
Solar means Cost Blowouts & Power Blackouts for Consumers
Contribution from Viv Forbes
“Solar power – a subsidised appendage”.
Australian electricity consumers can look forward to soaring charges for electricity and blackouts if state and federal politicians continue to undermine the power grid by mandating and subsidising solar power generation.
Solar power can never produce continuous, predictable, low cost power. It must always be supported by expensive power storage systems or by reliable power sources such as coal, gas, hydro or nuclear.
No matter how many millions of taxpayer money is poured into “research”, it can never solve the two fatal flaws of solar power.
Firstly, sunlight energy arrives in very dilute form, and thus needs vast areas of collectors to harvest significant energy. This results in high capital costs and much environmental disturbance. Solar power can light one 75-watt bulb for every card table of collectors (in the middle of the day only). How many card tables do we need to run the trains, factories, fridges, homes, heaters, hospitals and tools of a big city?
Secondly, the solar energy produced during daylight hours is constantly variable and unpredictable, and zero power is generated at night. As a result, solar power farms seldom produce more than an average of 15% of their rated capacity over a year and as low as 1% for a day or so.
In Australia, the maximum electricity demand occurs at about 6.30 pm in mid-winter in the big southern cities. However, the maximum solar power is generated at noon in mid-summer in clear northern deserts. If the nightly solar curfew is to be supplied by solar power, this necessitates a vast area of collectors to provide daytime grid power as well as charging a storage backup which supplies power at night. The scattered solar collectors also need a huge new transmission network. Such a system is inefficient and very costly.
More likely, however, is that the solar farms will be backed up by gas or coal power stations on standby, wasting fuel and capital until they are needed to supply power on cloudy days or during the nightly solar blackouts.
Solar energy has useful applications, but supplying the power grid is NOT one of them. Solar power can never supply the reliable low cost electricity needed for Australian cities and industries. In that application, it can only exist as a subsidised and troublesome appendage propped up by serious power sources such as coal, gas, nuclear or hydro.
Viv Forbes Chairman
The Carbon Sense Coalition
MS 23 Rosewood Qld 4340 Australia 0754 640 533
www.carbon-sense.com info@carbon-sense.com
For a detailed look at Solar Power Realities, with actual performance figures see:
Viv, the ACT regulatory commission agrees with you.
Also see my: Canberra solar PV gross feed scheme is a foolish and expensive experiment with our electricity system
April 19th, 2009 by Warwick Hughes
NOAA/NASA sunspot prediction increasingly irrelevant in mid 2009
Updating my January 2009 post, the ROYAL OBSERVATORY OF BELGIUM have published their June RI number at 2.6. Space Weather Operations in Boulder CO are yet to publish their SWO number.
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Timo Niroma has an update, scroll down to his “ALERT: A PROBABLE NEW SUPERMINIMUM” So the evidence is quietly building that earth is headed for cooler decades.