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August 20, 2009
The Australian Academy of Science has been putting on a public lecture series on Australia's renewable energy future. Will the transition to this future be something along the lines of wind, solar and nuclear in the future with natural gas replacing coal quickly and eventually solar and nuclear replacing natural gas.
Mostly what we hear from the policy suits that hang around Canberra is an energy policy consisting of a little bit of renewables here, a little bit of that (gas) there and, 'Oh, let's get back to coal.' This policy of the miners and the coal fired power stations etc --is in opposition to the massive change to a renewable system. Their view when stated in the flat earth newspaper, The Australian, are characterised by the following: climate change caused by humans is fiction; coal power is the cheapest on the planet and should be developed to meet our energy needs; though solar and wind power will make some advances, they will supply only a small amount of energy compared to the gas, coal, and nuclear power supplies already operating.The reality is this low carbon economy will have a vastly different structure and composition than the one we have now.
The Australia's renewable energy future series was kicked off by Barney Foran's Australia's renewable energy future paper, in which he outlines the transition to a low energy carbon future. Foran says:
One of the transitions I am going to talk about tonight is the renewables transition. On your left is a graphical representation of the types of energy technologies that, if we just sit here, like we normally do in Australia, doing nothing much and just watching the Olympics and so on, we would be having brown coal, black coal, a bit of gas and all those sorts of things. The world that I am shifting Australia into through my numbers is that bigger one there where we try to get to a 20 per cent representation of our electricity production, in this case, from wind, solar thermal, solar photovoltaics and biomass. You will see there that we still have a bit of combined cycle gas turbines, the hydro we have already and also we transition out of the old coals into advanced coals.
He refers to big gaps in our GDP due to issues like our domestic oil running out in about 2025 and our gas getting very thin on the ground – or under the ground, if you like – by 2040 to 2045 because we have exported most of it.
Foran adds that the transition:
will be a pretty bumpy ride for the first human generation or so of making this scenario. The pressure of making such a massive change through our economy and replacing effectively very economically efficient generation infrastructure with stuff that is a lot more diffuse and collects sun and wind and so on certainly puts our GDP growth rates down. But, as we get into the second half of the transition – our children's children, if you like – Australia starts to encounter some potential problems caused by running out of gas and so on, and you will see that the scenario jumps up and is almost too buoyant.
He says that there is quite a range of issues on which people could attack this renewables transition and there is the question of storage, buffering and balancing. That is, can we keep our electricity network viable as well as keep my computer going while doing this sort of thing?
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