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Business Council chief Jennifer Westacott warned a “calm and informed” debate was needed to bring about a national consensus on energy policy.
“We need the state and federal governments and the business community to come together and say, ‘How do we make sure that we can give that security and reliability, and, of course, the affordability that households and businesses are looking for?’,” she told the ABC.
Three state Liberal opposition leaders in Queensland, SA and Victoria say the solution lies in a single national renewable energy target, rather than the states going it alone.
Labor environment spokesman Mark Butler said the opposition supported a national renewable energy target beyond 2020.
“This is a national system that requires national policy,” he told reporters in Canberra.
“We would like to see a position where there is an emissions intensity scheme that is recommended by the National Energy Markets Commission, the chief scientist, the CSIRO, all of the industry and all state governments, as the centrepiece of a national policy that allows investors to start to renew and to rebuild our electricity generation.”
Mr Butler said the Liberals’ attack on renewable energy would mean fewer jobs, higher power prices and more pollution.
The Business Council was one of 18 groups involved in a joint statement calling for an end to finger-pointing and the start of a new mature debate.
kaffeeklatscher
February 14, 2017 at 7:38 PM
2gravel
Abbott had already done a good job of destroying it. There were 10s of billions of $ waiting to be poured into replacing old coal power stations with newer more efficient ones ones and a myriad of clean energy projects backed by the big end of town ready to go. Labor gave them the certainty to make the investment but Abbott and his “roll back” threats destroyed that.
At a guess some of the blackouts this summer would be related to projects that did not go ahead , conventional and renewable, because of the well founded fear of change to Labor’s legislation by the fecking knuckle draggers and Koch Bros political prostitutes of the Coalition.
In an interview with the ABC's AM earlier this week, Finance Minister Mathias Cormann – who ought to have a head for numbers – listed energy affordability and reducing emissions as key energy policy considerations, and then went on to pledge support for coal technologies that will either put our national emissions targets out of reach or cost about 70 per cent more to build and operate than conventional coal. And those are CCS costs cited by a US academic who is relatively optimistic about its prospects.
The unfortunate but undeniable reality is that, when it comes to CCS, it's easier to list the projects that have been terminated than those that have come to fruition. There's no question, in fact, that the technology is struggling – the only matter in doubt is how many of the Liberal Party's rank and file have had their heads in the sand while CCS projects worldwide have gone belly up. A goodly number, it would seem.
And what about those CCS projects that have succeeded? Boundary Dam in Saskatchewan, Canada, for instance, the first full-scale post-combustion coal CCS project, which opened in September 2014. Well, despite a steady stream of upbeat media releases from operator SaskPower, leaked documents reveal that Boundary Dam has been beset by ongoing problems, shutdowns, escalating costs and capture rates that fall a long way short of what was projected.
Based on official figures from the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute – the group that promotes the technology – Boundary Dam's carbon dioxide capture rates are, on average, almost 25 per cent below what was initially projected, and the operator has been embroiled in a protracted multimillion dollar lawsuit over unresolved – possibly unresolvable – technical issues.
In short, the only commercial-scale CCS coal plant in the world – until the commissioning of Petra Nova in Texas last month – has overpromised and underdelivered. And if Finance Minister Mathias Cormann would like to take a quick look at the figures, which are disappointing to say the least, he'd see the costs associated with cleaning the carbon are fully four times higher than anticipated, according to SaskPower's CEO Mike Marsh.
And that's just the good news. We haven't even touched on the real imponderables yet, such as where to store the gargantuan volumes of carbon dioxide that would need to be disposed of if CCS were deployed globally to reduce fossil fuel emissions. Based on analysis by researchers at Utrecht University, that figure would be about 60 billion cubic metres a year – or about 120 times the capacity of Sydney Harbour.
There's not much talk, either, about the colossal water consumption associated with CCS – which almost doubles when the technology is installed – nor, worse still, the health impacts of carcinogenic pollutants stemming from the solvents used to scrub carbon from the exhaust stream.
All of which probably explains why Jeff Erikson, general manager at the Global CCS Institute, concedes that while carbon capture and storage may have a role to play in bringing down emissions from other sources, it won't rescue the coal industry. No kidding. But as the polls show, most of us have already grasped that inescapable reality. All we need, now, is for someone to please explain it to the government.
A publicly owned electricity grid is the only way to put a cap on costs, keep energy competitive and solve the country's energy crisis, according to an economics expert.
Professor John Quiggin says the creation of the National Electricity Market has been a failure, and governments should start buying back electricity transmission networks.
He argues without the need to generate private rates of return, public ownership of the electricity grid would push costs down, leading to cheaper prices for consumers.
"It's about the failure of the electricity network as a whole to deliver the kind of outcomes that have been promised for the last 25 years or so," Professor Quiggin said.
"The starting point for fixing things is a proper, publicly owned national grid."
Senior executives from AGL Energy have given evidence that the main issue causing problems with reliable energy supply in South Australia is “dysfunction” in the gas market – not too many windfarms making the grid unreliable.
Executives from AGL told a Senate inquiry in Melbourne on Tuesday they would like to build a new gas-fired power station in South Australia to increase base load capacity in the state, but gas supply was chronically unreliable in the eastern states.
Richard Wrightson, AGL’s general manager of wholesale markets, told Tuesday’s hearing the problem was so dire the company was contemplating building its own LNG hub in Queensland to help secure reliable supply downstream.
“Dysfunction in the gas market is causing most of the systemic problems we are seeing in South Australia,” Wrightson told the Senate select committee into resilience of electricity infrastructure in a warming world. “We would love to be able to contract more in that marketplace but the main restriction on being able to do that is access to flexible gas contracts that we are able to trade in an out of.”
“I’ve lost count of how many folks that have complained about various solutions to the east coast gas crisis triggering the dreaded “sovereign risk” for the companies involved. To them I say just one thing today, any nation that cannot rely upon the production of energy is not sovereign at all. Energy is essential to security, to health, to civil order, to industry and standards of living. Energy is not some random market. It is the lifeblood of every modern nation.”
REALLY need action by the Fed govt now, a decision on nuclear power or a national ultra high voltage DC grid or something. We won’t get it tho.
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