Energy Efficiency

The Courier Mail recently ran a politcial press release as a story, with the usual mix of spin of gain to off-set some already released or to be released counter-productive story.

In this case it was the Clive Palmer coal mine touted to create thousands of jobs by the chief spruiker – who is not taken seriously these days at all – Anna (bout time she walked the plank) Bligh.

How does it pan out in simple language?

Well in Queensland, we prosocute shop owners for selling cigarettes to under-age people, yet it’s OK for us to dig up our reducing stockpile of coal and sell to a most prolific GHG emitter, China. Anna says we Queenslanders will earn tens of millions of $’s in royalties, but she is seeking $100 million in federal cash to bring climate-friendly solar power back into the state’s energy mix.

According to the Courier Labor Party, Queensland was once at the forefront of solar power but what sent a shiver down the back of every solar power business was the State Government’s Office of Clean Energy having Stephen Robertson put in charge; if he succeeds in the Energy Department like he did as Health Minister, we can use that big hole Clive Palmer is soon to dig coal from and bury the remains of the photovoltaic industry. Ever since Peter Beattie came up with the ‘smart state’ identity, we’ve all become leery of any government utterence with the word ‘smart’ in it.

Anyhow, we will have a ‘smart grid’ system that uses communications technology to lift energy efficiency, for example by programming appliances to run on off-peak power; how we store the solar power and then change demand from day to night raises the question, is it really off-peak then ?  Mr Robertson said the Queensland Smart Communities project would build a large-scale demonstration smart-grid in Townsville, with several stand-alone projects at Zillmere in Brisbane’s north and in Toowoomba; the project would use solar *thermal-storage technology to capture the sun’s heat and store it for future electricity generation. Korean Government-owned electricity giant KEPCO will provide smart-grid technology knowledge. Mr Robertson said the Government hoped the project would create opportunities for businesses to develop clean-energy products to sell to Asian markets.

USA, German and Japanese technology companies dominate the global solar-power market. The USA Government claims to have strong policies in place aimed at producing cheaper solar power and expects solar plants – by 2020 or earlier – to be able to store 12-17 hours of energy, enabling 24-hour solar power that could replace coal and gas-fired plants. Problem is, that batteries to store such power are very expensive as the rare earth materials used to make them is a small finite supply.

The real dilema for politicians is how do you meet the needs of the people who voted you in by backing an energy source that will take years to be effective and in doing so, cut off the large amount of financial and media support paid for by the companies that profit from coal, oil and gas ? Givernments have squandered pension funds, taxed superannuation funds and provide little tax incentive to spur private funding for a massive rollout of pollution-free technologies that use the sun, wind and wave energy. You can forget geothermal / underground heat.

Australia’s electricity sector is the biggest source of GHG (greenhouse gases) but the electricity generators aren’t investing in a major way in large-scale, clean-energy projects because there is no price on carbon, Australia’s 2020 targets for emission cuts are weak and there are flaws in a current program aimed at increasing clean-energy capacity.

* Solar thermal energy is where the Sun’s heat is used to boil water (hopefully not so much oil) to create energy rather than solar panels which generate electricity directly.