Australian Farmers Switch To Diesel Power As Electricity Prices Soar (abc.net.au)

"As power prices rise, some farmers have been forced to turn off the pumps," reports the Australian Broadcast Corporation. Long-time Slashdot reader connect4 shared their report from the coast of Queensland, where the price of pumping water to sugarcane fields has doubled. Local irrigators council representative, Dale Hollis, says right now, irrigators have two options. "They have to switch off the pumps and go back to dryland [cropping], and that impacts upon the productivity of the region and impacts on jobs" he said. "The second option is to go off the grid and look at alternatives." Another option is solar and there are plenty of farmers installing panels, but many growers irrigate at night and can't afford the millions of dollars it could take to buy battery storage. That's pushing many of them back to a dirtier option. "Right now, diesel stacks up," Mr Hollis said.
The head of farm operations for a sugar producer says it's now 30% cheaper to pump water with diesel than electricity, even before you count the subsidy from the federal government, and they expect to save even more money as energy prices go up.

Comments

Why aren't the generators using Diesel?

[AK Marc]

If a home user (including light industrial like farms) can generate for less than the grid cost, why isn't the grid using Diesel and doing it cheaper?

This isn't about "Diesel", this is about the abuses of a privatized utility.

Re:Why aren't the generators using Diesel?

[HornWumpus]

That's what Australia did. Apparently, it is _not_ cheaper in actual real world cases.

Re:Why aren't the generators using Diesel?

[iris-n]

GP was being sarcastic: burning diesel is rather expensive, about any other form of producing power is cheaper. And Australia uses mostly the cheapest of all, coal. The fact that it for these farmers it is cheaper to burn diesel than to buy electricity from a power plant shows how thoroughly fucked up the market there is.

Re:Why would you use batteries?

[Kohath]

You mean it's not enough to say "elevated storage tanks" (and then feel smugly self-superior)? They don't just appear, along with the solar cells to fill them, and start operating magically?

Because I'm guessing a farmer can just make a call and rent a diesel generator, and have it delivered to his farm within 2-3 days. And make another call to setup periodic refueling.

Market manipulation driving up electricity costs.

[zking]

It's like Enron all over again. Economist Bill Mitchell goes into detail. http://bilbo.economicoutlook.n...

Re:They should go solar

[quonset]

if wind and solar were economical, they would be used.

You mean like in the Republican-led state of Kansas which generates roughly 30% of its electric needs from wind? Those Republicans must really love spending taxpayer money on all those subsidies.

At the rate wind generated electricity is growing, Kansas may have export electricity in the next decade. How horrible wind is so uneconomical.

Population growing faster than Bangladesh (in %)

[Anonymous Coward]

In Australia the population is growing faster than Bangladesh in %, mostly through legal immigration. Major cities needed desalination plants. The supply of energy is struggling to keep up in some states and energy costs went up 20%/yr for many years to "improve the network".
Housing cost is through the roof (13-14x average salary in Sydney and Melbourne) and salaries are stagnating.
All this is done fo rthe benefit of big interests and screwing the populace.
The populace is itself ignorant about this : none even remotely talks about it. The few that do are immediately shouted down as racist. Quality of life is going down very fast.

Re:They should go solar

[guruevi]

The problem here is that the country DID go solar/wind etc. (green) and forcibly shut down all coal/oil and now these 'green' plants can't supply the demand plus they have to amortize all the costs of building and maintaining an underperforming, green setup, hence the pricing.