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South Australia Hits 33% Renewal Energy Target 6 Years Early
ferrisoxide.com writes: South Australia has hit its target of 33% renewable energy by 2020, 6 years earlier than expected, delivering clean power to the state through investment in wind, solar and geothermal energy — mothballing one coal-fired power station in the process. Not content to rest on their laurels, the SA government has now announced a new "stretch" target of 50% by 2025. South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill declared that despite initial upfront costs to renewable energy generators such as wind farms, the 50 per cent target will not add one extra dollar to energy prices.
The nice thing about wind plus solar in southern Australia is that peak electricity usage is on hot days in the summer. These are often windy as well as sunny.
That said, this 33% is for South Australia (pop ~ 1.3 mil) which has a much smaller demand than Victoria (pop ~ 6 mil) with well connected grids. So excess power from SA can be readily exported to Victoria.
As renewable engery use in Victoria increases it will likely be harder to shift excess production. The Victoria/SA market may well face the problem Germany has when wholesale electricty prices drop down to zero. We really need large scale grid storage to get a global SA/Vic production up about 30% from renewables.
Since this was a South Australian who made the quote, presumably the term "dollar" refers to an Australian dollars.
I had no idea just how strong or weak the Australian dollar was. After all, if the Australian dollar was worth a million USD greenbacks, then the statement is simply saying that the bills won't rise by a million dollars. So I checked out the price of the Australian dollar to see just how pointless, or not, the statement is.
At the time of this posting, 1 Australian Dollar's worth in American dollars is $0.89 USD.
So since the USD is worth more than the AUD, this means the newer "target will not add" $0.89 USD's worth of cost "to energy prices."
For Americans, the statement turns out to be even more impressive than it sounds.
(This, of course, may be making some assumptions about the relative values of the currencies, which in reality will probably fluctuate over the next 11 years.)
Thanks to our privatized system we generally pay up to 30 cents per kwh. 50 per cent of that goes to network charges and a significant amount towards wholesale and retail profits.
Wind has been bringing down the wholesale price significantly - to the point that the coal industry has seriously kicked their political machines into gear to get renewables stomped on.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
A nation of 24 million that is the 4th or 5th largest coal producer in the world is saying that they can afford wind, solar and geothermal power.
I live here, it's awesome =)
Seriously though, South Australia, while having a reputation for being a "backward" state, is actually one of (if not the) most liberal, progressive states in Australia. Adelaide has a cool startup culture too!
Wow, 6 years ahead of expectations? Sounds a lot like how publicly traded companies set lower goals so they can over-achieve them. Germany already has over 50% renewable electric power on sunny days, while having about the same insolation as Alaska. 50% by 2025 doesn't seem awfully ambitious to me, especially in Australia. They have the sunshine hours and they have the large, unused areas. What the hell is stopping them? I can only guess: lack of political will.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
A lot of SA coal fired plant runs on lignite (brown coal) mined from Leigh Creek in the desert and run down to Port Augusta.
You can't get a coal that is more carbon polluting than Lignite. SA would produce less pollution from 100% anthracite (black coal) than from 50% Lignite & 50% wind
The sun is a finite power source, not renewable.. coal on the other hand is renewable (albeit pretty slowly)
Yeah, that'd be an Abbott Government and the drones who voted them in
The political accolades are deserved as well, but lets face it, southern Australia has a great deal of land and resources relative to the population and demand. I would expect higher standards from those who can meet them. I'm sure Australia will aim high in spite of their clear leadership, and their advantageous location.
120 world leaders meet at the UN this week to try and figure out some sort of plan around climate change. You'd think Australia's PM would bother to show up. Probably wants to avoid the abuse from his peers for canning their working better than expected carbon tax because mining money.
It's a fucking embarrassment.
But at least the individual states are doing something positive.
"...the 50 per cent target will not add one extra dollar to energy prices"
It wouldn't want to. It looks like SA is 5c/kWh more expensive than Victoria as it is. No wonder manufacturing is shutting up shop there.
What a cheap political statement there. It's easy to keep the energy bills people receive in the mail low as you switch to renewables. Just subsidize them with "government" funds that come out of everyone's taxes. It's just shifting the energy bill over to the tax bill so that people can't pin it directly on the renewables as easily. (And we all know those dollars get spent *so* much more efficiently when they pass through government hands first!)
When renewable advocates boast about energy production, the numbers are inevitable inflated by huge amounts of biomass, or meaningless capacity numbers which do not represent actual energy delivered. Leveling forests to burn for fuel is not environmentally friendly, and not even carbon neutral on the time scales that matter. In some cases, forests are pelletized and shipped over seas, making the carbon impact even worse than burning coal. Unfortunately, aside from hydro, it is the only renewable that is reliable, and thus forms an integral part of "renewable" plans. More typically though, coal and gas take up the slack.
Read more about Australia specifically, or bioenergy in general. Sadly there is only one form of clean energy that is environmentally friendly and scalable, and the renewable fanatics will have nothing to do with it, instead promoting a world of poverty and mass environmental devastation. While solar and wind have their place, it would be much more effective to complement them with nuclear instead.
See http://www.windpower.org/da/ak... (2013), or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (28% 2011).
Now that is renewable. Of course the rest is made of coal power to fill the energy holes both in Denmark and in Sweden that is using hydro and nuclear only, and therefore can't supply peak energy on it own.
SA is the state which continues to conjur up all the "think of the children" laws, banning of games, censorship of things and what have you.
I mean the place is referred to as the "city of churches" so, you know?....
None the less good on them for doing something good, for a change.
Sounds like there are significantly fewer hire-purchase politicians and bureaucrats (from whatever combination of energy companies and unions) in SA than in the USofA. Shows what can be done by government initiative.
You mean "they predict they will hit the target in six years." They hit 31.5%, and might have hit the 33% - if you believe a government spokesman.
This is only "locally-generated" power, by the way: they don't count the power imported from other states, and fail to mention that overall power generation in South Australia is expected to decline due to cheaper power imported from places like Victoria.
They also won't add "one additional dollar to energy prices" by adding the many additional dollars to taxes levied by the federal government.
Either you were drunk writing this or you're in dire need of a new keyboard...
The soon to be defunct Holdens plant at Elizabeth could become a manufacturing plant for the Ambri liquid metal battery
In the mad rush to implement these so-called "renewable" energy sources, governments and utilities have completely glossed over the fact that they are still taking energy from one thing and putting it into something else. There has been little or no study on the effects of taking massive amounts of energy out of the wind, which does in fact change prevailing wind patterns (it slows down the wind). Nobody has bothered to look at what the long term effects might be - pollen won't carry as far, insects may change their travel patterns, moisture transfer characteristics change, dust/sediment is deposited earlier, movement of heat changes, and so on. Of course, there is the mass killing of migratory birds that has been documented and proven, and hastily ignored.
Same goes for geothermal. What happens when we take energy out of the ground in large amounts, or put energy into it as is the case with geothermal air cooling? In the case of shallow geothermal heat transfer systems, changing the temperature of the soil even by a few tenths of a degree can cause grass and other vegetation to germinate too early, or too late. It can also change the hibernation periods and breeding patterns of subterranean insects and other animals.
Even hydroelectric dams have been proven to be catastrophic to both local and remote ecosystems, not to mention changing the rotational characteristics of the Earth itself.
The long term effects of these changes could be significant or even dire.
The solution to global climate change is not "MOAR ENERGY!" It's less. A lot less. Humanity must adjust its lifestyle to reduce its impact on the environment. Simply changing the source of energy from one environmentally-catastrophic source to another is not going to work.
As a direct result of the renewables, the cost of power in South Australia is one of the most expensive rates in the world. I commonly have power bills exceeding ~US$300 per month.
This is great news. Since maintenance of systems like this cost practically nothing compared to buying oil, gas, and coal, I bet in 10 years they'll be one the richest companies with a booming economy simply because energy is practically free. Once you spend the money, you're just playing the long game and it pays off in the end. The US should seriously be dumping even more money into it.
South Australia has hit its target of 33% renewable energy by 2020, 6 years earlier than expected
Good job Australia!
Unfortunately there are too many corrupt politicians for that to ever happen in the US. Many US states are currently working on outlawing (or adding excessive "taxes" to) such evil technologies as solar power because it interferes with the profits (and thus "campaign contributions") of oil, gas and coal.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/08/10/1421239/floridian-and-southern-governmental-regulations-are-unfriendly-to-solar-power
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/04/28/0347225/the-koch-brothers-attack-on-solar-energy
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/04/21/207201/oklahoma-moves-to-discourage-solar-and-wind-power
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/11/22/1716216/a-war-over-solar-power-is-raging-within-the-gop
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/11/16/1422227/arizona-approves-grid-connection-fees-for-solar-rooftops - I know that Washington state and Hawaii have recently also added "connection fees" for solar power as well.
The Oconee Nuclear station built a pumped storage facility nearby so that the nuke could be leveled, with excess power generation used to pump and peak load met by the hydro station.
The Bad Creek Hydroelectric Station is a 1,065-megawatt pumped-storage facility located in Oconee County, eight miles north of Salem, S.C. The four-unit station began generating electricity in 1991, and is the largest hydroelectric station on the Duke Energy system. It is named for the two streams, Bad Creek and West Bad Creek, which were dammed to create the Bad Creek reservoir.
The Bad Creek facility utilizes two reservoirs (or lakes) to generate electricity: an upper reservoir and a lower reservoir. Water stored in an upper lake is released into underground power tunnels. The water rushes down the tunnels, driving huge turbines, which are underground at the base of a dam. The spinning turbines are connected to large generators, which produce the electricity. The water then flows through draft tubes into a lower lake.
A pumped-storage hydroelectric station uses the same water over and over again, making more efficient use of water resources. When demand for electricity is low, operators can refill the lake, as if they were “recharging” a battery. Using power from other generating stations, the generators act as electric motors spinning the huge turbines backward. This pumps water back up the power tunnels into the upper lake. Water is generally pumped back to the upper reservoir at night and on weekends.
This would be like saying South Korea has faster internet than the USA. The population of Australia is mainly around the edges of the continent. The interior of the continent is pretty sparse. Their population, compared to other countries is less also.
If they have excess unused capacity, they should use it to desalinate seawater, turn Austrailailaila into a garden of eden.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
> While solar and wind have their place, it would be much more effective to complement them with nuclear instead.
And as soon as you figure out a way to reduce CAPEX by four times, it will.
Every reactor under construction in a country where we can believe the accounting is currently running late, and thus overbudget, and the average CAPEX is around $9/W. A wind turbine goes in for just over $1. That's just the way it is, and until someone fixes that, its going to keep being that way.
Burning trees is carbon neutral. Adding trees is carbon neutral.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
$9/W based on watt capacity not watts generated ever time.
That number is often used as a scare tactic to make people thing they will pay 9$ W.
Assuming you're build plants to produce more the 1 GW over time. Ob. if you were to shut it down after producing 1GW, it would need to cost$9 a watt.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I have it straight from the US government that we have the greatest nation on Earth. The foolish idea that nations such as Germany or Australia have done better at alternate energy projects is simply not possible as the US has not done it first. And the three students from Cork, Ireland developing a better method of agriculture must be a lie as we all know that the Irish are all drunks and that schools in Europe simply do not compare with the US. Suggesting that the US does not have the leading Pakistani students in our science courses is about like suggesting that the US does not lead in having the best, black, football and basketball stars. The only good things to come from elsewhere are Pizza and Chinese food. Sadly many Americans think about like the above paragraph.
I wanted a Mad-Max style gasoline-fueled hellscape. It's like they're actively trying to prevent that from happening :(
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
What is the "upfront cost"? How is it paid for? This sounds like it can be distributed over time (bonds, etc), but would save enough to cover this.
Which makes it about $9 to $3(wind) when you figure % of usage.
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