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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.
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.
Drill, baby, drill
Going off the grid always sounds so complete and final, but couldn't they set up _some_ amount of solar panels that pump into raised storage tanks during the day, then irrigate with that water during the night? Seems like any power saved is good for the wallet (and, vs. diesel, good for the planet).
Or, pump the water to an elevated tank during the day with solar?
-Unresolved symbol? Byte me!
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.
Learn to love Alaska
If you are using electricity to pump water; and want the water at night, why would you use batteries; rather than 'gravity'? You don't need to elevate water much to get it to flow downhill; and storing water a few meters above ground level is cheaper and more mature than battery tech by a substantial margin.
(Now, anyone for a bet on how many years these guys have before 'finding groundwater that still exists' becomes a markedly more exciting challenge than 'pumping it' is?)
Irrigation pump for a pivot are on the order of hundreds of horsepower. A bunch of solar panels and a battery are not going to cut it.
The electric utility might increase prices even more if folks reduce their electricity usage. The company will want to maintain profits if it's a private company or if publicly owned, maintain its current income. If fewer KWHrs are being consumed but fixed costs remain constant, the company will have less income, so will need to raise rates. The size of any increase would probably depend on the fraction of use of these farmers.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
If a farmer can run a diesel pump, then a power company can run a diesel plant for even less. Either the government's diesel subsidies are too high or they let the power company get too greedy.
Windmills are still being used to pump water in my part of the US - the Colorado Plains and Western Nebraska. The water, though, is not for cops but for cattle watering. For crops, including corn, it seems there's a mixture of motorized pumps and electric I'd guess depending on the availability of electricity.
I wonder why sugar cane is being grown in what I assume is a pretty dry climate using irrigation. The Aussies might want to look at the history of irrigation farming in places like West Texas where wells kept getting deeper and deeper until it was economically unsustainable to pump water from the Ogallala Aquifer thousands of feed down. The destruction of this water supply has had major economic consequences. Of course in Texas, there's something else that can be pumped from the ground: black gold.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Why don't they just water their crops with utopian idealism? Or they could power their pumps with apocalyptic predictions of the distant future. Since these are the things that matter most, surely they must make crops grow.
Do a remake of Mad Max, roaming the center of Australia, looking for a charge for his Tesla.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
At least in Ontario, electricity prices have become obscenely expensive recently to try and get people to reduce consumption.
The solution our factories have come up with is to close up shop, lay off their workforces and move to Mexico.
It does reduce electricity use though, so the government is happy.
Sounds good to me, as long as I can pretend that the last one never happened.
What do you have against Beyond Thunderdome? :-D
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Sadly, the green mythology is pervasive even beyond slashdot. Back here in reality, if wind and solar were economical, they would be used. The trouble is, the artificially low prices touted by greens after gaming the market can't hide the true cost. Including storage and other balancing costs makes renewables hideously expensive by any honest accounting. Obviously more expensive even than diesel in this case.
It's like Enron all over again. Economist Bill Mitchell goes into detail. http://bilbo.economicoutlook.n...
Queensland, particularly the sugarcane fields, has no lack of water. The article isn't about the difficulty in finding water to pump, it's about the increase cost to move the water to where it's needed.
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.
Most of the areas in Queensland where sugar cane is grown get 1,000 to 2,000mm rainfall each year, on average. The southern end of the state is on the lower end and the north is on the high end. It really isn't dry. Irrigation just provides more consistent growing conditions.
Windmills are still used throughout Australia for watering cattle, however, most of them have been replaced with solar powered pumps. The small volume and relative isolation of these watering points makes putting up a few solar panels and a electric pump a worthwhile expense.
Are those diesels, water pumps not generators? A 2,000 gallon per minute diesel pump should use under 6 (us) gallons per hour. And rental rate for a pump that size is around $500 (usd) per month. Not that expensive for pumping a large volume of water.
Passionately Indifferent
Reminds me of this recent story. Tesla wants to install batteries at the Australian utility companies to store power for night.
http://www.reuters.com/article...
Don't worry, Elon Musk will save us.
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Electricity is about $0.50 USD/KWh in Australia (compared to about $0.20 in SF and NYC). For $1 USD you get 2 KWh of energy. A motor turning a pump is about 75% efficient - so you get 1.5 KWh of energy at the water pump.
Diesel in Australia is about $1 USD per liter to farmers who don't pay road taxes. A liter of diesel has about 10 KWh of energy, and a diesel engine is about 45% efficient. So for $1 USD you get 4.5 KWh of energy at the pump - 3x cheaper than electricity.
But if the diesel engine has to turn a generator, which then powers an electric motor for the pump, you probably loose about 40%. So for $1 USD you get about 2.5 KWh of energy at the water pump - still better than buying electricity.
And as someone else here said - it seems the Australia electricity market is under heavy market/political forces - like electric supplies holding back supply when they know that prices will soar and brown/black outs will occur.
They are farmers, why not use Canola oil, like Rudolph Diesel did when he invented that engine?
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.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Had you read TFA, you would know that the problem is that the charge for use of the transmission lines is the part that's skyrocketing, not the cost of the electricity that is being transmitted. That's why prices continue rising even as actual use falls.
I work in the electric industry, and I can safely say that I have never met a liberal who is well-informed on energy issues. They don't exist.
The irrigators in Bunderberg are using less than 8% groundwater. Most of their supply comes through an irrigation system built between the 70s and 2005 made up of dams, channels, and a shitload of pipelines. The cost they are complaining about is pumping of water horizontally.
Why is it grown using irrigation? Why do we use fertiliser? Yields.
Or why is sugar cane grown in general? Well it has been since the 1800s
But asking Aussies to look to Texas for water management is a bit silly. They are a country hugely dependent on centralised water management and the Great Artesian Basin is one of the most carefully studied ground water supplies in the world and current estimates is that levels will increase rather than decrease in the coming decades.
Modern nuclear makes as much electricity as you need - and can desalinate water as well.
The power company has priced themselves right out of the market. There is absolutely no way, what with economies of scale, government subsidies, etc. that I as a private citizen should be able to produce electricity cheaper than a power company. But hey, power companies are government enforced monopolies, so it stands to reason that eventually they forget how to make money, keep putting expenses up and keep raising prices. Until this happens. Now they're going to scream for government protection to outlaw diesel generators and force people to pay much more than any sort of fair market value for their energy, just to keep the inefficient power company inefficient. Because jobs, you know...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Because you cannot think critically?
Because the cost of electricity contains a lot more than just the cost of generation?
Because the farmers are using diesel is not generating electricity (which is lower efficiency) but running the pumps directly.
Not difficult there, was it.
You need to go and look at a topo map of the area.
Due to pipe flow losses, you actually need quite a significant height advantage for gravity fed water to work, and australia is pretty much flat, impressively flat in general.
Plus the infrastructure costs would be LARGE, farmers run on small margins and are cash poor. There is no venture capital swill-trough or 'investment angels' in outback farming.
A quick bit of Googling on Bill leads to this:
Wikipedia: 'Bill Mitchell (economist)
Wikipedia: Modern Monetary Theory
Put simply, so you can understand: He is a fucking moron, who should forever be ignored. Unless you get a chance to kick him square in the nuts.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It might have something to do with "Kansas adopted the Renewable Energy Standards Act in 2009, which required the state’s utility companies to generate or purchase 20 percent of their energy from renewable sources – like wind and solar – by 2020." That is, they forced themselves to do it -- regardless of the price. Not saying it wasn't cheaper, but that they would have switched regardless of whether it were cheaper or not in the end.
The thing is that different energy sources are going to have different prices and efficacy depending on where you are. I'm sure that fossil fuels are still cheaper per kilowatt hour in northern Canada than solar is, and that wind power in San Francisco is going to be more expensive than in Texas.
"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session." -- Judge Gideon J. Tucker
Instead of fossil diesel, they could, for instance, use the kind of fuel that Rudolf Diesel intended his engine design to burn to begin with before the oil moguls got their fingers in: biodiesel.
Good point. Not sure if the engines are running a generator that operates an electric well pump. The ultimate source of energy, though, is Diesel fuel. When liquid fuel was very expensive a few years ago I remember a problem with these systems - the fuel was being stolen at night so the farmers needed to go out and empty the fuel tanks when irrigation was finished. I think they typically irrigated during the day.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
why isn't the grid using Diesel and doing it cheaper?
Because Australian politicians deemed the most crucial thing for the power companies to do, was to use green sources of energy.
Even if it can't meet demand.
The government privatized the electrical system for the most money it could get to fix its budget woes, and in return gave the private power companies an almost unlimited rape, loot and pillage license to raise power prices.
No mention of Lumo Energy, the private corporation that is charging these prices to its customers. Why is the Australian government standing by while its citizens are being right-royally shafted by Lumo Energy. Didn't a similar thing happen with Enron in California not so long ago?
Your link is from 2012 and it's predictions have already failed miserably. How right could it be?
Absolute bollocks.
We have very little renewable energy production in Australia and was has been built had to beg for scraps of subsidies. Coal fired plants get more public money.
The ridiculous rise in costs is due to privatization, and infrastructure overbuilds. In many states electric utilities were allowed to build infrastructure and charge the consumers for it, so they turned that into a revenue stream by overbuilding and charging excessively. In some cases whole substations sat idle.
Because Australian politicians deemed the most crucial thing for the power companies to do, was to use green sources of energy.
Even if it can't meet demand.
See: http://www.smh.com.au/business...
So your unsupported supposition is untrue - it's not a problem with producing the power, it's the high cost of a centralized for profit utility that's the problem.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
"The Aussies" are growing the stuff in places where only occasional irrigation is needed.
Droughts happen.
Good points but wrong aquifer.
Epic fail - Queensland runs on coal and Australian politicians are pushing hard for more coal use. They even passed a lump of it around in Federal Parliment a couple of months ago as some sort of political stunt.
Is there nothing that you don't blame on windmills?
Not could - are.
You can get economists to say _anything_. It's called the dismal science for a reason.
I'm proud to say I'm not an economist. Which means I know you can't print money forever. Like I say: if you meet that moron, kick him square in the nuts.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That's a secondary effect. The primary reason is outright price gouging and the government that is supposed to be regulating the price benefiting from the raised price. Most of the utilities are government owned. I left the electricity industry in 1996 when this stupid fake market shit was first coming in.
Worse than that, they only partially privatized it. Every time the price goes up the government wins. Guess who gets to decide if the price is too high?
In Queensland it's close to total government ownership of the entire generation, transmission and distribution systems. The only major exception is the Gladstone power station.
No.
It's Queensland, Australia.
Coal with a bit of gas to cover peaks and one hydro plant of note.
Why spread misinformation about something you do not know about? Are you being a Good Party Komrade or is there something else behind it? My paycheck depends on the coal industry, so maybe you think you are helping me out, but I'd rather not have people pushing stupid lies for the sake of The Party doing it. Why don't you go and "help" someone else on a topic you actually know something about using truth instead of stupid lies?
That's a pretty good rainfall - 40 to 80 inches per year. Perhaps a bit off topic, but for comparison in the US state of Iowa, where my in laws live, the main crops are corn (maize) and soybeans, the rainfall averages 34 inches (plus or minus a few inches) per year, and there is generally no irrigation. Of course, some of that precipitation is in the form of snow. In much of the state the soil is incredibly deep and rich and seems to hold onto its water. Even with that much rain many of the fields I'm familiar with need good underground tiles (French drains?) for drainage because a there's too much water most years. Maybe sugar cane needs more and continuous watering. I didn't realize the sugar cane farmers didn't really pump well water but move it horizontally - a big difference from what goes on in some parts of the Great Plains of the US where water is drawn from wells.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Ironically it was another Australian economist from a very small university (Alan Fells from Griffith University at the time) who dreamed up the stupid fake electricity market that has resulted in this price gouging. He's been well rewarded for making some people very rich at the vast expense of energy consumers.
We have a few fucking morons who should forever be ignored among the ranks of Australian economists. The guy that proposed a massive sheep cull to drive up the price of wool (it didn't work - he forgot that cotton exists) is another that should have been ignored (he wasn't - massive rural hardship resulted).
It also has lots of coal and uranium.
Eastern Queensland is tropical. Think Florida with hills. They grow the sugar cane in the river valleys near the coast (or at least they used to). LOTS of water in the Summer rainy season, not so much in their Winter.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Trouble is that it's unlimited clean energy 30% of the time. Without vast amounts of cheap storage -- which looks to be 20-40 years away, overdependence on wind and solar power doesn't work very well. South Australia is fast becoming a poster child for why one should not let ideolouges -- right or left -- engineer stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
"Er, they're growing sugar, can't they process some to ethanol and fuel their own pumps?"
Good thought. Brazil makes ethanol from sugar refining waste and it is alleged to be a lot less of a economic fiasco than the ill considered US corn ethanol program. The latter turns out (as was predicted at the time it was proposed) to be an elaborate way to turn fossil fuels used for plowing, irrigation, and distillation into roughly energy equivalent amounts a not especially desirable liquid fuel that can't be used full strength in most existing engines
"Can you make a biodiesel from sugar?"
Not easily and not economically. Better to grow some crop that yields an oil that can be used in a diesel engine with little or no processing. Or so I'm told anyway.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
A map showing where sugar cane is grown in Australia will correct that assumption that appears to have grown from watching Mad Max movies. It's a LOT wetter than Nebraska in those places.
With respect AC, 12.5 MW is fuckall power that is around half the output of a single 1950s jet engine hooked up to a generator set.
If electricity is that expensive, then convert the fields to Wind and Solar and farm power instead. Supply and demand bitches.... that's how this works. If electricity is worth more than the food, then you're making the wrong thing.
No, trolll: no one thinks windmills are free and unlimited. They have moving parts which need to be maintained and replaced from time to time. .. but so do the diesel and natural gas generators you apparently tout. The obvious difference, of course, is that wind mills rely on their energy for wind, which IS free, non-polluting, and does not need to be extracted from the earth at great cost. The energy your fossil fuels supply are responsible for the kinds of strife we see in Standing Rock, and the hundreds of pipeline leaks the oil companies are only partially successful in keeping out of the mass media; no, you will not see such horrendous, ugly leaks on FOX, CNN, or other MSM; but the tremendous damage is readily found by googling OIL PIPELINE LEAKS or any other such search criteria. There are an average of more than one such leak daily somewhere here in the country, and the damage is never completely mitigated. No, windmills are not free or unlimited, buy do not try to suggest that anyone says they are, and do not be so asinine as to imply the alternatives are any better or cheaper.
"Of course in Texas, there's something else that can be pumped from the ground: black gold." Ugggh... gold? Far from it... we could liken it more to the ills from Pandora's Box--- and what kind of idiot are you to think that pumping oil is a substitute for pumping water? You are going to irrigate your crops with crude?!? It's that kind of wacko logic that has allowed the oil industry to stave off its eventual death for just a little while longer... fossil fuel is not sustainable... wind and solar is.
You can happily run those pumps by pouring Bundy Rum into it.
I thought that was the point. No aquifer.
Yes. You'd lose too much efficiency running diesel generators for electric pumps.
There are several along the coast, they are just not the Great Artesian Basin and are very shallow. Since it only makes up a tiny bit of the water used (and is replenished from the rivers anyway) it's not really relevant. Sorry I work with geophysicists and there are maps of this stuff all over the walls so I needlessly nitpicked.
Oh right. Got it now. Wires crossed :-)
Not actually sure about the smaller aquifers, I assume those would be managed by government water groups as well, but I have nothing to back that up. Certainly the Great Artesian Basin is no where near Bunderberg.
Remember Enron in California? Privatised energy companies deliberately suppressing supply to jack up the prices.
A good example was on display in South Australia during the load shedding in the Feb heatwave. There was spare capacity at the Pelican Point power station that the SA government ordered turned on, but AEMO did not bring it online. AEMO is a private company, btw, as is NEM.
And you can sell the excess hydropower to New York. Thanks!
Maybe I'm missing a key point here, but if solar power isn't practical for night irrigation because of the cost of energy storage equipment, why not pump the water up into a tank (or tanks) during the day, and let it flow out at night?
Is it because the tanks would have to be too big? Too tall, and we're talking a lot of pressure in the pipes. Too wide (a covered reservoir, perhaps) and much cropland is taken out of use.
Those don't seem to be insurmountable problems. Capital-intensive though, and if electric costs may come back down, not practical, perhaps.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
I've got an idea. Pour the rum into some people, and have them peddle a bicycle-style pump all day.