If there was ever a renewable energy I respect it would have to be hydro-electricty, of course South Australia is a great example that would kill to be able to have a hydro-electricty dam somewhere in its state but it just can't, but it is rumored to be looking at the idea of concreting the crap out of one of its lovely treed areas around the coast and filling it up with sea-water for a mini-hydro setup.
Anyway, I am surprised when following the news just how frequently these things run out of water even in Tasmania or Africa.
One extra thing to note, only 8% of Malawi are lucky enough to have electricity, so already not enough.
Malawi suffers blackouts as drought exposes 98% reliance on hydro power
Shire river, which generates almost all of the country’s power, has fallen to critical levels, leaving major cities struggling
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/08/malawi-blackouts-drought-hydro-power?utm_content=buffer57003&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
One thing I have realized that helps hide the problems if Australian electricty prices is the fact a lot of NSW and QLD electricty recently got privatised thus when renewable energy subsidies came in at the same time people didn't blame subsidies they just assumed it was the purely just privatisation.
Victoria has been fully privatised since the 1990s from the Kennet government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Kennett#Privatisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Electricity_Commission_of_Victoria#Demise
And electricity prices never changed, the only started to go up in recent years and its all the fault of renewable energy subsidies which completely pervert the free market and encourage coal to be shut down as its more profitable.
Its so obvious subsidies have caused epic perversion of the electricity market because AGL refuse to sell Liddel Power-station to anyone else they only want to shut it down and destroy it so it can never be used again, a normal business would at least try to find a supposedly 'sucker buyer' but not AGL, it wants to shut it down and blow it up.
https://youtu.be/Z81hPg-vma0
[youtube]Z81hPg-vma0[/youtube]
https://twitter.com/SkyNewsAust/status/942210444223062016
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/backing-selfinterest-while-trying-to-look-virtuous-thats-agl/news-story/aad81fe87790d1826ef6e3720afff727
And let’s be upfront: the closure of the Liddell plant in the Hunter Valley (capacity 2000 megawatts) is all about making even more money by further squeezing dispatchable power sources, many owned by AGL. It’s the “last man standing” strategy, which is known to many wily business people.
There is absolutely no doubt that when AGL purchased the Liddell plant (and other assets) from the NSW government in 2014, the company had no intention of closing it down in 2022. In fact, the plans that the previous management had to extend the life of the plant were one of the attractions of the purchase.
But a change of management has meant a change of strategy and cashing in on government policy that puts emissions reductions and subsidisation of renewable energy ahead of electricity reliability and affordability. (Recall that the Renewable Energy Target runs to 2030.)
While subsidies from the federal government are supposedly coming to an end there is a new more insane government that has found a way to restart the madness and that's state-level subsidies.
Dan Andrews is now creating a state energy Renewable Energy Target with state-level granted subsidies to deform and pervert the market to new levels so that its more advantageous to shutdown coal-power stations and hope the wind can provide electricity and if it doesn't then buy electricity off the spot market at around $450 a MWh or from diesel generators.
The Yallourn brown coal power station in the Latrobe Valley could close early under Victoria’s renewable energy scheme, as part of which the Andrews Labor government has just launched reverse auctions to underwrite $1.3 billion of new wind and solar by 2020.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/yallourn-coal-plant-faces-threat-of-early-closure-under-andrews-ret/news-story/a7735edcd63be47905d1c75e13dc603f
The only equally as dumb clueless thing Dan Andrew has done is when he suddenly tripled the royalty price of mining coal for Hazelwood because hes desperate for money and was so clueless about the electricity market that he then gave a rant/warning to Hazelwoods owners daring them to increase electricity prices because of it, not understanding that they would make more money if the owners of Hazelwood just shut down to make electricity more scarce and profitable from their other power-stations. Hazelwood was doing the Victorian government/people a big favour being open and Dan Andrews simply had no idea because he only gets his views of the world from Facebook renewable energy memes or things of that nature.
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/victorias-own-mining-tax-to-triple-as-treasurer-gouges-brown-coal-for-revenue-20160422-gocymk.html
billvon said:
TheBeastie said:
Sure but the carbon cycle is a bit of red herring in the face of having a population of 10billion people and because carbon is the 4th most abundant element in the universe after Oxygen.
Definitely true; much of our planet is made of carbon. And if we as a society decide to leave it in the ground rather than putting it into the air by the gigaton, then we're good.
So its no surprise humans are spewing so many billions of tons of carbon dioxide from breath from our bodies.
Acid rain doesn't come from co2 but from other emissions from burning fossil fuels like nitrogen oxide which can be converted into co2 with a catalytic converter
Actually, the bigger problem comes from SO2 which cannot be converted to CO2 by a catalytic converter. SO2 plus water becomes sulfuric acid, which you generally don't want in your lungs.
Everyone should know there are plenty of SO2/Sulfur dioxide scrubber technology on coal power-stations that clean all that stuff up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flue-gas_desulfurization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrubber
And there are a constant stream of new scrubber technologies coming that make it even more efficient https://www.wired.com/2016/03/new-tech-give-coal-scrubbing-renewables-ready/
billvon said:
So grow grass under them. Grasses process far more CO2 per pound than trees do, and they are quite happy under solar arrays (check out any solar farm that's been there for a while.)
This whole insane argument about trees etc giving up all their CO2 must stop, where the hell do you think coal and oil come from? The very well known fact is that it comes from prehistoric dead vegetation from the energy that plants absorbed from the sun millions of years ago, they very reason why coal and oil exists is that plants absorb and trap and store co2, god help us all if we can't get past that.
Accuse me of conspiracy theories but please if you can't accept coal/oil come dead plants/forests stored in the ground than that is a really big problem of being in denial. And yes Solarfarms are epically evil in doing that, the fact they are building a huge solar farm between two koala inhabited forests in Queensland that could easily be one big forest is insane and destructive to the environment.
The environmental destruction of solar farms is epic from so many perspectives, I think its incredible people don't accept REAL WORLD DATA on the worlds most expensive most advanced solar farms, you gotta get in the real world.
Then there is the epic greenhouse gases the manufacturing of these solar panels and green tech cause the creation of that completely blows away co2, if not for the fact they are 1000's of times more warming then its the epic lifetime they are expected to stay in the air like 3,200 years, that is abhorrent amount of time. If you guys actually cared about GHG you wouldn't support solar at all.
2015-2017 data on both greenhouse gases. Notice how CO2 drops significantly during the months of the northern hemisphere summer via photosynthesis and SF6 just goes higher and higher, not even a hint of SF6 dropping. SF6 really is 23,900 times more potent than co2 and has an incredible atmospheric lifetime of 3,200 years, you can see it in the relentless going higher charts, far more than co2.
Look for your self https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/dv/iadv/graph.php?code=MLO&program=hats&type=ts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_trifluoride#Greenhouse_gas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_hexafluoride#Greenhouse_gas
https://youtu.be/v6uVnyjTb58?t=12m48s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm
There are so many flaws in Solarfarms aside from epic environmental vandalism like this video points out https://youtu.be/EJ8L9EAWF3E
The epic size for the tiny amount of power and there is almost no place where they are being put where they don't displace life and thus crucial co2 sequestration https://phys.org/news/2016-12-solar-panels-repay-energy-debt.html
That other obvious flaw is the time it takes to replace a single conventional power-station.
If you need to build 27 Topaz Solar farms to replace a single power-station as talked about here https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=89002&start=1100#p1337725
Then according to the time it took to build Topaz Solar farm on Wikipedia it took 3 years which is very quick for a solar farm of that size most take 4 years for around that size.
3 x 27 = 81 years to replace a single power-station. If you're going to try and squeeze it into a really tiny amount of land so only a few panels can be installed at once then its probably going to be 4 x 27 = 108 years for a single power-station replacement, it probably increases the larger the farm gets.
Topaz with its $2.4billion cost x 27 = $64 billion to replace a single power-station and that's without an epic battery.
If it takes 108 years for the solar panels to be laid how much time energy and effort will it take to build a decent battery to go with it? So much that no one so far is silly enough to bother trying, I guess we will have to wait for the latest Facebook memes that are full of epic lies to cause the public to vote someone into power to try and build such a mess, but probably getting close to half a trillion dollars? Never mind the money you say? I agree you should be hanging your heads in shame covering that much land that can support real life and co2 sequestration.
Look at the latest 20700 cell life cycles, the fact is if you use these batteries a lot then you're going to find your self needing to replacing them quickly enough. Only 400cycles before the capacity is halved, sure you can use a lot more together so it all lasts longer but the fact is those cells are dying everytime they are used, you can make a nuclear or coal power-station last for over 60 years with enough maintenance. Hazelwood was originally expected to shut down in 2030, it opened in 1964 thus 66years. Only reason it was closed early was because of the reasons I mentioned/articles above https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelwood_Power_Station
Like I said there are constantly new technologies on the way to deal with CO2 emissions.
Like this new carbonate fuel cell technology that uses fuel cells to capture carbon.
http://corporate.exxonmobil.com/en/technology/carbon-capture-and-storage/advanced-carbonate-fuel-cell-technology/advanced-carbonate-fuel-cell-technology
Advancing economic and sustainable technologies to capture carbon dioxide from large emitters such as power plants is an important part of ExxonMobil’s suite of research into lower-emissions solutions to mitigate the risk of climate change.
These videos came out a few weeks ago.
https://youtu.be/9i41P68YgOI
[youtube]9i41P68YgOI[/youtube]
https://youtu.be/592lX78baGk
[youtube]592lX78baGk[/youtube]