Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Our old friend Tim Flannery, whose advice helped convince the Australian Government to squander billions of dollars on useless desalination plants, claims that renewables are a “huge economic opportunity”.
IT IS being hailed as the next big boom that has the potential to revolutionise our economy.
But unless Australia ramps up its commitment, experts warn it could pass us by.
A week before world leaders are set to meet in Paris to discuss setting agreed targets on reducing carbon emissions, the Climate Council of Australia has released a report which it says shows the world is in the midst of a dramatic energy revolution.
According to the research, clean energy investment grew 43 per cent globally, while the number of renewable energy jobs
nearly doubled to 7.7 million worldwide.
Climate Council chief councillor Tim Flannery said plummeting costs of renewables and the creation of jobs meant there was a strong economic case for scaling renewable energy that wasn’t clear in 2009.
“While in the past tackling climate change has been considered a moral imperative, it is now also a huge economic opportunity as countries make very significant commitments to growing renewable energy at the same time that the costs plummet,” Professor Flannery said.
Read more: http://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/climate-change/climate-council-report-finds-clean-energy-investment-grew-by-43-per-cent-over-six-years/news-story/2c6cef52c5de1b4527d3d0cf29342ba1
If costs are “plummeting”, why do renewables need such generous government support to prosper? Could it be that renewables are still ridiculously expensive, despite any alleged price drops?
Britain recently “reset” their energy policy, de-prioritising renewables. Many other European countries have forced renewable subsidy cuts, some of which well and truly left investors stranded.
In my opinion, recent history in the renewables sector more than demonstrates that it is pretty risky investing in a business, whose profitability is wholly dependent on the fickle whims of politicians.
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In common with many failed doom forecasters e.g. Stefan Rahmstorf, Paul Ehrlich, Al Gore, David Viner, David Suzukie etc your Tim Flannery has a hide thicker than an elephant. Flannery shows not a hint of embarrassment despite his long list of failed predictions of climate doom, from his well documented alarmism in hyping a need for desalination plants in Australia to his championing of the merits of one of his own financial investments in Geodynamics Ltd an under performing geothermal generation company in Australia. The Rudd Government even tipped in a cool $90 million grant to prop up Geodyamics, to no avail of course.
Now I know that “their” ABC, Fairfax and The Guardian etc here in Oz do little if anything to hold Flannery to account but if you were thinking of placing a bet based on a Flannery prediction of profitability for renewables, I’d take a good look at the tipsters form guide before laying down any of your hard earned?
Flannery is like the old guy in Shawshank redemption, he has been there so long he has become institutionalized.
So an ‘economic opportunity’ is a government subsided economic opportunity.
At least the old guy was good at bagging shopping.
O/T, but pertinent, good news for once,
Texas And West Virginia Shred Obama’s Climate Plan As ‘Unlawful’
http://dailycaller.com/2015/11/25/state-ags-rip-apart-obamas-unconstitutional-climate-agenda/
On top of everything else, you’d have to pick the right renewable. If you got it wrong, your investment would suffer.
Didn’t they already try this in Spain?
You can be like Reagan and resist throwing money at problems. Or you can be like LBJ and throw a ton of money at problems that can be at least partially solved. Or you can waste it all in efforts that cause terrible problems in addition to the loss.
Why are so many of my fellow liberals so addicted to option 3?
LBJ lost a stupid war on the other side of the planet called Vietnam. He also lost “the war on poverty” by destroying the inner cities and the American family. See Walter Williams or Thomas Sowell on LBJ.
LBJ was a monster.
A Spanish company that received huge subsidies from the US to build a biofuels plant in the midwest has gone bankrupt:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-04/meet-solyndra-20-us-taxpayer-subsidized-spanish-renewables-firm-collapsing
See the more recent story at http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-25/us-taxpayer-faces-230-million-loss-spains-solyndra-files-creditor-protection&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwjUnYy_ga3JAhXFmZQKHeWYDdMQqQIIFzAA&sig2=6dkjPmeHD4S8qh54dR7V9w&usg=AFQjCNHoieOXdxA1ty1193KHX9ifOIhg6A
Eric’s essay post just set off my BS meter. If someone in government says something stupid responding with an equally stupid argument is not a very good way to make a point. For whatever reason, many are concerned about how power is produced. My theory is that not very many city people have even seen a power plant or knows someone who works in the industry. The lack of familiarity causes drama associated with fear of losing electricity that we depend on.
“ridiculously expensive”
As an engineer, I am trained to check the assumptions used in a calculation. Working in the power industry, I have been attacked by those making claims about their high electric bill. Of course they can never can tell me how many kwh they use or the cents/kwh they are charged. One case was a woman living in a 5000 square foot house holding a $4 cup of coffee talking about the ‘greedy’ electric company.
At my house, a long hot shower costs 25 cents and air conditioning $1 per day. A pot of coffee costs 50 cents and I do not have to stand in line.
The bottom line is that electricity is a very cheap commodity in a modern productive society. Wind and solar done correctly is only marginally more expensive.
So not that expensive.
For utility management, part of doing correctly is educating politicians. When George Bush was governor of Texas a modest programs for wind generation was part of building needed fossil plants. California politicians went to stupid school.
Of course, generating equipment is capital intensive with the most factors being capacity factor and how long the equipment will last. Sticker shock is to be expected. Market share is important. Replacement with a large nuke will be a big change. Adding a few wind turbines will be minor.
I am skeptical that wind or solar will ever be anything to worry about as far as overall system cost because of the small share of the mix.
“One case was a woman living in a 5000 square foot house holding a $4 cup of coffee talking about the ‘greedy’ electric company.”
You need to understand that you wrote a ridiculous sentence.
“The bottom line is that electricity is a very cheap commodity in a modern productive society.”
Meaningless, ridiculous.
“Wind and solar done correctly is only marginally more expensive.”
Bis
Solar on a personal scale, in special circumstances – sure, I have no problem with that.
Anthony has solar panels at his house. Living in the tropical sunshine, I’m seriously considering getting solar panels, to insulate myself from over the top price rises, and the sometimes unreliable rural electricity supply.
But how much would it cost to say supply say the 400TWh / year of reliable power required for smelting the world’s aluminium?
Expensive energy has real consequences. Australia has expensive energy, and an awful lot of lost manufacturing jobs. Contrast that to America, and jobs have been coming back to the USA – because of cheap energy.
Sorry, make that 700TWh of reliable power required for smelting the world’s Aluminium.
Eric:
Your comment above doesn’t quite capture the entire story. The 400TWh is just the portion of total smelting electricity (690TWh) that is generated by coal in 2014 — in other words around 58%. Most of the rest of the world’s aluminum that year was smelted using hydro power (31%).
Basically all the “renewable power sources excluding hydro”[1] produced in the entire world in 2013 couldn’t replace just the coal-generated portion of total smelting electricity. World aluminum output would have been 13% less in that year if we tried to substitute renewables for coal, not even considering the negative effects of intermittent power on output.
Aluminum is only the second most used industrial metal — roughly 53 million tonnes of new aluminum in 2014 vs. 1,650 million tonnes of new steel. Both metals are heavily recycled, so annual world consumption is higher in both cases. I don’t have figures handy, but given the much larger volume, I have to assume that total energy devoted to making steel dwarfs that used for aluminum.
If we depend on the favored kinds of “renewable” power, industrial civilization collapses simply from not producing enough steel and aluminum.
[1] Figure comes from the EIA for 2013 here.
Eric:
Sorry, I did not refresh my page while I was posting my earlier reply so I missed your correction.
The other point the aluminum smelting figures make clear is the effect of shutting down coal plants guarantees steel and aluminum production will continue to shift to China, and other countries who keep coal plants running.
The Initial Non Recurring Engineering Costs would be about $145 Billion to install enough PV to provide 700 TWH of electricity using PV Panels @ur momisugly $.50/ watt (which is what individuals can buy panels for so it is not unreasonable given the economy of scale) assuming 2400 hours of usable sunshine a year (places like the Atacama – the US Southwest ETC.
7E+14 watt hours/2400hours = 2.91666 E+11 * $0.50 per installed watt = 1.45E+11 — $145 Billion
at 1200 hours usable sun a day that $290 Billion
WITHOUT SUBSIDY — 1 or 2 years of the US COST Iraq and Afghan Wars
After that it’s maitenance and ZERO FUEL COSTS
The US Paid $730 Billion in 1 year for oil @ur momisugly $100/ Barrel
At $0.10 per KWnh — the YEARLY COST to smelt the aluminum is $70 Billion per YEAR — EVERY YEAR
??? Oil does not provide electricity. Oil provides transportation and petrochemical feedstock.
And your solar assumptions are incorrect.
2400 and 1200 hours of sun a year — obviously a typo
At 200 w/square meter you would need 2.9166E+11/200 square meters = 1.458E+09 square meters
=1458 square kilometers = a square 23 miles on a side
Now, you have to show “how” you are going to get 200 watts/m^2.
How many hours a day will you get 200 w/hr??
How many days a year are you going to get that much power?
At what latitude?
What humidity and what cloud cover are you assuming?
How are you tracking or cleaning or controlling the arrays?
Average solar Insolation is 1000 w/square meter in many areas of the world– many current PV panels are 20- 22% efficient
Just out of curiosity “Retired Kit P”, where did you go to school and when ?
“The bottom line is that electricity is a very cheap commodity in a modern productive society …”.
==============================
Compared with say Canada, a comparable country with abundant natural resources, electricity in Australia is outrageously expensive.
http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/electricprices.gif
I have to question that graph as I know in Nigeria, Lagos in particular, most people pay to be connected to the supply, but because that supply is so unreliable, they use small petrol powered generators. So they do pay connection fees, but there is no actual reliable measure of cost and consumption. Australia, is a basket case, in particular South Australia which has the highest cost due to…the subsidies paid to the green “reneweable” boondoggle.
Chris
Electricity is still a cheap commodity especially in Australia. Of course the taxes government puts on energy (because they think it is evil) are not so cheap.
I know it is confusing. The shift workers at the coal plant keeping the lights on are the good guys. The government workers paying themselves with high taxes think they are protecting you.
“Retired Kit P
November 26, 2015 at 12:03 am
Chris
Electricity is still a cheap commodity especially in Australia.”
I will agree to that to a point, just. It is *NOT* cheap but cheaper than compared to New Zealand or the UK. If the greens have their way, there would be no RELIABLE power generation in Australia. None! But that is OK because in Australia we are doing a much better job of sending industry offshore than any other country I have lived in.
“Wind and solar done correctly is only marginally more expensive.”
On what planet?
IN MD USA the retail cost of electricity for a homeowner — not renewable (you can choose to pay extra for that), is $0.155 per KWh — at today’s PV costs without subsidy — the payback for a properly sized system is less than 10 years
Flannery on green tech: “experts warn it could pass us by.”
What does that even mean in the context of the real world?
That somehow a technology will come and go and be forgotten or incapable of being used in Australia? Flannery strings together an incoherent catch phrase more at home on the home shopping channel than a dialogue on energy and technology. I’d like Flannery to name any single instance in history of a technology that wasn’t adopted and then passed anybody by! It’s an intriguing glimpse into how he must view the world. He seems breathtakingly ignorant on the history and workings of this world. The history of technology and economics shows us that where individuals have been free to pursue their own business ideas, prosperity follows. I wish the Flanneries of this world would simply use their own capital to pursue their ideas and leave my capital alone! The Golden Rule that so many forget when they leave kindergarten: Don’t hurt people and don’t take their stuff.
It means that great Greenie Plague of economic death will pass by, as long as you paint a big “C” (for capitalism) on your doorways.
“…the number of renewable energy jobs nearly doubled to 7.7 million worldwide.” [so says, “Climate Council of Australia”]
I say, show us the details.
One place converted a diesel engine city bus to propane, then classified the bus driver as a green energy worker.
Another city put batteries in city buses and so made them green. Drivers often found the batteries did not get the job done and so shut them off. The buses are again diesel but the city reaped the good press of going green.
If you force the closure of a coal plant and move a welder to a wind tower does welding become a renewable energy job?
Color me skeptical.
re: I say, show us the details.
Well they cite this report.
re: One place converted a diesel engine city bus to propane, then classified the bus driver as a green energy worker.</
If you think they overcounted by one, in one place, you should provide the details to IRENA. If you recall where “One Place” is, they could check their figures, and maybe report an estimated only 7,699,999 green jobs worldwide.
> If you force the closure of a coal plant and move a welder to a wind tower does welding become a renewable energy job?
Yes. They’re counting tradesmen employed in the installation and maintenance of renewable energy infrastructure.
“renewable energy”
There is no such thing.
FAIL!
“They’re counting tradesmen employed in the installation and maintenance of renewable energy infrastructure …”:
http://www.wind-watch.org/alerts/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/090511_cartoon_a_a14072_p465.gif
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/06/06/issa-obama-administration-classifies-jobs-with-political-purpose.html
Just a reminder: Whenever the government gets involved in the economy, it creates a surplus in one sector, a shortage in another, and the taxpayer is left holding the bag.
I’m afraid renewables will be a very, very big bag.
solar panel fires for the State of Queensland in Australia only:
18 June: Brisbane Times: Madonna King: Solar panels installations in Queensland spark a fire every week
More than 200 fires have started in Queensland as a direct result of solar PV installations.
The startling figure, tracing fires between September 210 and June 2015, shows almost one fire a week is prompted by faulty inverters, wiring connectors or dc isolators…
Of the 201 fires tracked by the Electrical Safety Office, 78 of them relate to devices that have been recalled.
These include the brands Avanco, PVPower, Gen3, NHP and ISOMAX.
The recalled dc isolators have a design fault, which means the internal switch contacts can overheat.
The problem has been exacerbated by the fact that, at least in one case, the supplier of the brand has been placed in liquidation and cannot complete the recall…
Suppliers are bringing some in from overseas, and they don’t meet Australian standards.
Perhaps Australian standards need to be toughened too. And a bigger compliance stick might not hurt either.
In the meantime, a fire a week related to PV installations is an alarm bell that should be ringing in every Queensland suburb.
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/madonna-king-solar-panels-installations–in-queensland-spark-a-fire-every-week-20150617-ghqt0t.html
“Can you name the nuclear incentives?”
Sure! Loan guarantees and and the same PTC that wind gets for a certain amount of capacity. Four new reactors are under construction.
Check out the 2005 Energy Bill.
What is a “PTC”? Who’s 2005 energy bill?
Production tax credit. USA
“Retired Kit P
November 26, 2015 at 12:11 am”
This site is read by many NON-USA citizens. It is usually prudent for acronyms to be qualified. So the energy bill you refer to is a US 2005 energy bill. Just so we are all clear what it is you are talking about.
Did anyone use the loan guarantees? Are they usable?
Is this nuclear incentive anything but smoke and mirrors?
Will the government do something to minimize radiation fears and establish trust?
Retired Kit P.
Are you aware that nuclear power plants pay, That’s right PAY for that “Loan Guarantee” and “unreliables” get the loan guarantee FREE? Further, the Nuclear loan guarantees are limited to “New Technology” due to the possibility of rework, design changes, startup problems, etc. It does not go to same-old plants designed long ago and built today. If YOU have (had) a home loan that is backed by FHA, VA, etc., YOU TOO have a subsidy – and that includes the majority of all home loans.
The BIGEST so called “Nuclear Subsidy” is nothing more than the tax write off given every company and or . business in the USA. Even garbage dumps get a Subsidy equal to greater than the nuclear subsidy everyone complains about.
Now that you are retired do some critical research and quit reading the Anti Nuclear Hate pages. If you are really serious about reducing CO2 emissions the ONLY possible method is extensive expansion in the use of nuclear power. PERIOD.
Yes I am aware. Note, I used the word ‘incentives’. The power industry and nuclear in particular is not subsidized. Huge amounts of taxes are paid into government coffers.
My point is that is that new nukes were not an option under Clinton but became an option under Bush.
I am not interested in in reducing CO2. My interest is producing electricity. Nuclear is a very good way to produce power, especially in the absence of the absence of other natural resources such as hydro, coal, or natural gas.
Now that I am retired, my research is where we will park the motorhome next. I still get to make electricity with gasoline. No I do not use solar or wind when off grid.
If you go to energy.anero.id.au you can see real time the the output of all the wind farms from Port Lincoln SA to Cullen Range NSW in both MW’s and percentage of nameplate capacity. Even more important is the output over time is graphed and has as many peaks and troughs as the Rockies.
A stark illustration of how variable the output is.
And citing Iceland and Norway as 100% renewables is PROPGANDA to the max.
Iceland is tiny and nearly all geothermal because its sit right on a volcanic rift… Flannery has PROVEN that geothermal isn’t economical in Australia.
And Norway is 98% hydro… yet earns something like 2/3 of its GDP from North Sea oil
Flannery is a PROPAGANDA FOOL !!!
ps.. the five main geothermal power plants in Iceland have a TOTAL capacity of around 660MW.
That’s less than a single turbine of a modern coal fired power station
“AndyG55
November 25, 2015 at 11:37 pm
“…yet earns something like 2/3 of its GDP from North Sea oil”
It does at the moment, but that revenue is drying up. Norway will have a massive problem in 20-30 years, or less, where it simply cannot pay for it’s massive and lucrative welfare state that people have become dependent on.
No it won’t because it has a massive fund of all the past huge profits. You seem to be unaware that Norway is a country with a small population, two-thirds of the population of New South Wales.
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is nearly a trillion US dollars and is the largest in the world, equivalent to about $165,000 for every man woman and child in Norway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway
Maybe, maybe not. Any kind of fund like this requires some form of continuous revenue input. No oil, no revenue. No taxpayers, no revenue. And if this is based purely on revenue from north sea oil, then why isn’t there a similar system in the UK?
The UK has 15 times as many people for a similar amount of oil revenue. The revenue was instead frittered away by politicians over many years.
Big hydro doesn’t count as renewable in California. So, Norway, by some standards, it not using renewable power.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/12017695/UK-plans-small-modular-nuclear-reactor-in-2020s.html
Flannery;
“But unless Australia ramps up its commitment, experts warn it could pass us by.”
Wot? Like an iceberg?
I have noted that increasingly studies done by the International Energy Agency are deliberately designed to under-estimate the costs of technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to deliberately exaggerate the benefits. With respect to studies of the comparative capital and operating costs of alternative electricity generating technologies, the techniques used to under-estimate the costs of renewables and over-estimate the costs of fossil fuel sources are: to assume that the lowest costs achieved in ideal locations for wind and solar are, or will soon become, the average costs of plants located everywhere; to exclude from the cost calculation the connection and balancing costs associated with the use of intermittent sources; to ignore the costs of constructing backup capacity; to ignore the losses often caused when renewables are given “first-to-the-grid” rights and generation exceeds domestic demand (thus causing exported power at deep discount prices); and to include an assumed U.S. $30 per tonne carbon tax on all fossil fuel-based generation. Such studies naturally ignore the immense subsidies provided by governments through publicly-funded research and development and through generous treatment of investments in the tax system.The game is being rigged and the public does not understand this.
nations are going about their own business, according to their own economic interests. good:
26 Nov: BusinessStandardIndia: Nitin Sethi: Climate talk: India hits back at John Kerry’s remark
Kerry had in a statement to FT.Com said India was “a little more restrained in its embrace of this new paradigm, and it’s a challenge… We’ve got a lot of focus on India right now, to try to bring them along.” He was additionally quoted as saying India wanted to increase its dependence on ***domestic coal rather than ***import what he said was better quality coal, and this was not the right way.
Said a senior official Business Standard spoke to: “You have to break Kerry’s statement into two halves. One is about the Paris agreement and the other is ***looking to create a market for its coal in India. That, again, is a decision India would take based on relative trade-offs at different states of the developing economy.”…
***India would, by government estimates, require to quadruple the use of coal by 2030 to meet its energy needs…
http://wap.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/climate-talk-india-hits-back-at-john-kerry-s-remark-115112500886_1.html
26 Nov: Japan Times: Japan to push coal technology despite OECD subsidy cut, Japan’s environment minister says
by Reuters, Bloomberg
Many developing countries will continue to look to coal-fired power plants to meet their energy requirements and the key issue is to use efficient technology to curb greenhouse gas emissions, (Environment Minister) Tamayo Marukawa said in an interview Tuesday…
Japan, wary of regional competition from China, was at the vanguard of opposition to phasing out coal export credits that benefit companies such as Toshiba Corp…
“The OECD agreement basically approved the use of high-efficiency coal-fired power plants,” she said.
“There are countries that have no choice but to build coal-fired power stations due to cost. Countries other than Japan have also been exporting coal-fired power stations to these countries,” she said…
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged in 2013 to triple the country’s export of infrastructure that includes power stations to about 30 trillion Yen by 2020.
Asked whether Japan’s export of coal-fired power stations will rise further, Marukawa said: “It may rise, but it may not if we lose in cost competition against other countries. It depends on the market.”…
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/11/26/national/politics-diplomacy/japan-push-coal-technology-despite-oecd-subsidy-cut-japans-environment-minister-says/
25 Nov: Manilla Bulletin: AP: Coal not going away anytime soon despite renewables push
Beijing – Coal: Can’t live with it and can’t live without it — at least not yet…
There are vast parts of the developing world that will continue to see growth in demand for electricity, driven by sales of televisions, refrigerators and the construction of highways and malls as incomes increase, said Xizhou Zhou, the China chief for energy consultants IHS Energy.
“The cheapest way to provide electricity in many of these places is still coal-based,” Zhou said…
Still, coal provides more than 40 percent of the world’s electricity and 29 percent of its energy supply, second only to oil at 31 percent, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency. The agency projects coal consumption to continue growing somewhat in coming years, largely owing to increased coal demand in India and Southeast Asia…
http://www.mb.com.ph/coal-not-going-away-anytime-soon-despite-renewables-push-2/
don’t let the CAGW crowd win on this one:
22 Nov: Bellingham Herald: Melissa Santos: Coal export terminals: A source of jobs, or coal dust and climate change?
Two coal terminals proposed in Washington State would roughly double nation’s coal exports
Proponents say terminals will provide much-needed jobs locally, as well as in Wyoming and Montana
Critics say increased train traffic will decrease air quality, send wrong message on climate change
Chapman, whose company is proposing to build the coal export terminal in Longview, said if US coal isn’t available to the Chinese, China will just import coal from other countries such as Australia…
http://www.bellinghamherald.com/news/local/article45648606.html
Anthony etal for sure the cartoon person herein.
Get the photo of Obama in the long blue coat he wore at a reception in Turkey today.
We can only hope he wears this same git up at the Climate summit.
Very close to deranged if not total there already.
oops, with the guy from Turkey today
He is right in one way , nothing is has easy to farm has ‘subsides’ and nothing else is a profitable to farm ,other than drugs which carries others risks, after all there are even times when you get paid ‘not to produced.
So we could miss out on the boom? Costs are plummeting?
I don’t get it. How do we “miss out”? Is Papua NG or NZ going to build all these ultra low-cost wind farms and then sell the power to us through an interconnect? Surely if it’s so great we could build on 6 months after the model is proven?
If the price is plummeting, wouldn’t our economics be even better 6 months later?
None of this is rational.
I always refer to him as Tim ‘ghost metropolis’ Flannery.
Tim Flannery; he who lost a buck load of money investing in geothermal energy. I thought he would have learnt by now.
When at his peak, predicting sea level rise, forever droughts and the loss of the capital cities due to water shortage, Tim bought a sea level water front property, and the block next door. So I copied him, I bought a water front sea level beach shack. Then I bought big water tanks, and right on schedule it rained and filled them.
Trust Tim. Trust his actions, not his words.
“Peter
November 26, 2015 at 1:27 am”
He, himself, lost no money at all. It was all Govn’t money. Taxpayers again!
Wellllll, he LOST the money. The fact that the govt gave it to him, he still did the losing for them.
If anyone else said a technology was fairly easy to commercialise, would ASIC charge them?