The war against renewable energy

[Mofra]

Many ships are diesel electric where the Diesel engines generate electric power which runs as many propellers as the ship needs to manoeuvre . Often directional propellers.

Means less weight and ability to spread weight across the whole ship for stability

Those monster machines which mine coal in open mines use electric

Non-nuke subs generally are generally diesel-electric too - our O boats that served us well for decades certainly were as the electric engines are virtually silent which is a huge tactical advantage.
The bow engines on modern warships are also electric too.

Interesting article on electric aircraft I read a couple of days ago. Australia utilises aircraft travel on one of the highest per-capita basis on the planet so regional routes could benefit greatly although unlike cars which already have re-changing infrastructure being build I imagine the aircraft recharging infrastructure is well behind.

 

[Kwality]

See gas prices are dropping at least in WA, courtesy of the State Labor Govt in the mid 00s, gas reserved for WA - note to all those on the East Coast wanting to blame the Feds for power prices, its consecutive State Govts of both persuasions that have let you down, g'day Dan. Cant blame Anna, shes got coal fired power stations to protect, is that why she's anti Adani, more competition is never good, eh?

https://thewest.com.au/business/energy/synergy-pushes-for-bargain-in-gorgon-gas-deal-ng-b881173779z
A multibillion-dollar gas deal between Synergy and the operators of the massive Gorgon project is set to be renegotiated, with the State-owned utility to drive a hard bargain when its boomtime contract expires.

Figures previously reported, and not disputed by Synergy, suggested the government-controlled group has been shelling out up to $6 or $7 a gigajoule to the operators of Gorgon, which is led by US resources giant Chevron.

However, in the time since Synergy signed the deal with Gorgon gas prices in WA have plummeted as supply from new fields such as Devil Creek, owned by Santos, and BHP’s Macedon have come on stream.

Prices have ranged between $2gj to $3gj at times in the past 12 months, prompting Gas Trading Australia boss Allan McDougall to say they had never been lower in real terms in WA.

 

[Kwality]

Non-nuke subs generally are generally diesel-electric too - our O boats that served us well for decades certainly were as the electric engines are virtually silent which is a huge tactical advantage.
The bow engines on modern warships are also electric too.

Interesting article on electric aircraft I read a couple of days ago. Australia utilises aircraft travel on one of the highest per-capita basis on the planet so regional routes could benefit greatly although unlike cars which already have re-changing infrastructure being build I imagine the aircraft recharging infrastructure is well behind.

Same dance, different step:
Tesla has posted a surprisingly large $US702.1 million ($A987.5 million) net loss in the first quarter as sales of its electric cars slumped and demand appeared to be waning.

The company lost $US4.10 per share from January through March, when deliveries fell 31 per cent from the fourth quarter.

Tesla had warned it would lose money after turning two straight quarterly profits last year for the first time in its 15-year history.
https://thewest.com.au/business/markets/tesla-700m-q1-loss-larger-than-expected-ng-s-1939885

 

[Mofra]

Same dance, different step:
Tesla has posted a surprisingly large $US702.1 million ($A987.5 million) net loss in the first quarter as sales of its electric cars slumped and demand appeared to be waning.

The company lost $US4.10 per share from January through March, when deliveries fell 31 per cent from the fourth quarter.

Tesla had warned it would lose money after turning two straight quarterly profits last year for the first time in its 15-year history.
https://thewest.com.au/business/markets/tesla-700m-q1-loss-larger-than-expected-ng-s-1939885

Tesla are an interesting case - there's some conjecture as to whether they still hold first mover advantage given many 'traditional' car manufacturers are moving into the EV market.
Germany's announcements were a game changer so it's not like Tesla have the segment to themselves. They're suddenly in the middle of one of the most competitive markets on the planet against powerhouses hat have far healthier balance sheets.

 

[Kwality]

Its time will come just like VCRs and Whale Oil.

It does the cause no good over egging the discussion, remember clean coal: what might be or might not.

 

[Mofra]

It does the cause no good over egging the discussion, remember clean coal: what might be or might not.

We will still need coking coal regardless.

 

[Rotayjay]

Nothing wrong with an aspirational target to pump up the Green fringe of the support base, cant see it swinging anyone in the undecided middle.

The perpetually indignated are ..... indignated, no change.

I'm indignated that a minister of the Crown (who is supposed to be serving me) stood there and said 'fifty pacent of them will be driving an ALECTRIC VEHICLE UNDA BILL SHORTEN. We are gunna stand by our tradies and save their utes.' Honestly Ms Cash, that is the kind of lying speech I would expect from a particularly unintelligent teenage boy.

 

[Admiral Byng]

We will still need coking coal regardless.

In the medium term. Most installed capacity for iron and steel making is blast furnace type that requires coke. There is another way to process iron ore using syngas as a reducing agent. Syngas can be made from natural gas or biomass as well as coal. Expect a slow switch in the long term.

 

[Baltimore Jack]

 

[Pessimistic]

I'm indignated that a minister of the Crown (who is supposed to be serving me) stood there and said 'fifty pacent of them will be driving an ALECTRIC VEHICLE UNDA BILL SHORTEN. We are gunna stand by our tradies and save their utes.' Honestly Ms Cash, that is the kind of lying speech I would expect from a particularly unintelligent teenage boy.

She’s all that’s left.

 

[Rotayjay]

In the medium term. Most installed capacity for iron and steel making is blast furnace type that requires coke. There is another way to process iron ore using syngas as a reducing agent. Syngas can be made from natural gas or biomass as well as coal. Expect a slow switch in the long term.

What percentage of the world's mined coal is used for coking at the moment?

 

[Admiral Byng]

What percentage of the world's mined coal is used for coking at the moment?

About 20%, depending on which sources you read.

 

[Power Raid]

A World Bank report “The Growing Role of Minerals and Metals for a Low-Carbon Future” which found that a low-carbon future will be significantly more mineral intensive than a business as usual scenario. Global demand for “strategic minerals” such as lithium, graphite and nickel will skyrocket by 965%, 383% and 108% respectively by 2050.*



puts to bed the nonsense that the minerals industry is against renewables. Gas, lithium, copper, cobalt, nickel, graphite, vanadium, magnesium, silver, bauxite etc etc are all beneficiaries

 

[Pessimistic]

So the hand wringing over mining jobs is fake too?

 

[Maggie5]

Here is some news...

Britain has gone a week without using coal to generate electricity for the first time since Queen Victoria was on the throne, in a landmark moment in the transition away from the heavily polluting fuel.

The last coal generator came off the system at 1.24pm on 1 May, meaning the UK reached a week without coal at 1.24pm on Wednesday, according to the National Grid Electricity System Operator, which runs the network in England, Scotland and Wales.

Coal-fired power stations still play a major part in the UK’s energy system as a backup during high demand but the increasing use of renewable energy sources such as wind power means it is required less. High international coal prices have also made the fuel a less attractive source of energy.

The latest achievement – the first coal-free week since 1882, when a plant opened at Holborn in London – comes only two years after Britain’s first coal-free day since the Industrial Revolution.

Burning coal to generate electricity is thought to be incompatible with avoiding catastrophic climate change, and the UK government has committed to phasing out coal-fired power by 2025.

Reductions in coal use in the UK have been responsible for halving electricity generation emissionssince 2013, according to the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), whose report last week called for the UK to pursue a target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Fintan Slye, the director of National Grid ESO, said he believed Britain’s electricity system could be run with zero carbon as soon as 2025.

 

[Generalissimo]

Australia needs to realise that coal power generation worldwide is about to drop off a cliff and start planning for a post-fossil future. There's no sense in handcuffing ourselves to a dying industry.

 

[Pessimistic]

Fossil fuel still important in chemical industry

 

[its free real estate]

Here is some news...

Britain has gone a week without using coal to generate electricity for the first time since Queen Victoria was on the throne, in a landmark moment in the transition away from the heavily polluting fuel.

The last coal generator came off the system at 1.24pm on 1 May, meaning the UK reached a week without coal at 1.24pm on Wednesday, according to the National Grid Electricity System Operator, which runs the network in England, Scotland and Wales.

Coal-fired power stations still play a major part in the UK’s energy system as a backup during high demand but the increasing use of renewable energy sources such as wind power means it is required less. High international coal prices have also made the fuel a less attractive source of energy.

The latest achievement – the first coal-free week since 1882, when a plant opened at Holborn in London – comes only two years after Britain’s first coal-free day since the Industrial Revolution.

Burning coal to generate electricity is thought to be incompatible with avoiding catastrophic climate change, and the UK government has committed to phasing out coal-fired power by 2025.

Reductions in coal use in the UK have been responsible for halving electricity generation emissionssince 2013, according to the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), whose report last week called for the UK to pursue a target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Fintan Slye, the director of National Grid ESO, said he believed Britain’s electricity system could be run with zero carbon as soon as 2025.

20% nuclear generation.

 

[Generalissimo]

20% nuclear generation.

Yeah, I don't have the same phobia of nuclear that others do. I don't see it as an option for Australia though. We have no nuclear plants currently; it'd take decades and billions of dollars to build a fission plant, and by that time we'll have fusion. In the mean time renewables backed by pumped hydro storage will be fine. We have no shortage of suitable sites.

 

[Power Raid]

Interesting article but wrong...............Labor has authorised Australia's first nuclear power


https://www.forbes.com/sites/michae...pfToIZs42e_9r0zwENaLV8cZpJYgIAdE#4a8cf028ea2b


By Robert Parker – Nuclear For Climate Australia – 10/5/2019


Climate Change policies are for me the key issue of this Federal Election but I have grown increasingly angry about “aspirational” policies that result in no effective action.


These policies that are scattered over the voters like pixie dust. This election is no different, with Labor promising to reduce Australia’s carbon pollution by 45 percent on 2005 levels by 2030, and to reach net zero pollution by 2050. Their policy requires that 50 per cent of the nation’s electricity is to be sourced from renewable energy by 2030 while at the same time targeting 50% of Australia’s motor vehicle sales to be electric vehicles by that year.


Like pixie dust, these policies are an illusion that has no successful International precedent. They are dangerous policies because, while the Coalition Parties make no pretence to properly address carbon reductions Labor prolongs the agony by holding out false hope. No major industrial nation with an isolated grid such as Australia’s has yet succeeded in generating electricity using wind and solar at levels even exceeding 20% wind and solar let alone 50%.


I really want to see Australia achieve a rapid and cost effective draw down of our carbon emissions but so far only nuclear energy and hydropower have enabled countries to reduce their emissions to around the 50 gr CO2/kWh required for effective climate action.


Australia’s hydropower resources are fully exploited and in any event the environmental impacts of hydropower can be disastrous both for rivers and climate change. Nuclear energy is the only electricity generating source that has proven capable of meeting our climate change targets in a costs effective way with an incredibly small environmental footprint.


Labor outlaws nuclear energy and has clearly taken the bait from German policies on carbon reductions. Over the last decade, journalists and climate change activists have held up Germany’s renewables energy transition, the Energiewende, as an environmental model for the world.


“Many poor countries, once intent on building coal-fired power plants to bring electricity to their people, are discussing whether they might leapfrog the fossil age and build clean grids from the outset,” thanks to the Energiewende, wrote a New York Times reporter in 2014.


But then, last year, Germany was forced to acknowledge that it had to delay its phase-out of coal, and would not meet its 2020 greenhouse gas reduction commitments. It announced plans to bulldoze an ancient church and forest in order to get at the coal underneath it.


But Germany didn’t just fall short of its climate targets. Its emissions have flat-lined since 2009.

Now comes a major article in the country’s largest newsweekly magazine, Der Spiegel, titled, “A Botched Job in Germany” (“Murks in Germany“). The magazine’s cover shows broken wind turbines and incomplete electrical transmission towers against a dark silhouette of Berlin.


“The Energiewende — the biggest political project since reunification — threatens to fail,” write Der Spiegel’s Frank Dohmen, Alexander Jung, Stefan Schultz, Gerald Traufetter in their a 5,700-word investigative story (the article can be read in English here).


Over the past five years alone, the Energiewende has cost Germany €32 billion ($36 billion) annually, and opposition to renewables is growing in the German countryside. “The politicians fear citizen resistance” Der Spiegel reports. “There is hardly a wind energy project that is not fought.”


In response, politicians sometimes order “electrical lines be buried underground but that is many times more expensive and takes years longer.”


As a result, the deployment of renewables and related transmission lines is slowing rapidly. Less than half as many wind turbines (743) were installed in 2018 as were installed in 2017, and just 30 kilometres of new transmission were added in 2017.


Solar and wind advocates say cheaper solar panels and wind turbines will make the future growth in renewables cheaper than past growth but there are reasons to believe the opposite will be the case.


Der Spiegel cites a recent estimate that it would cost Germany “€3.4 trillion ($3.8 trillion),” or seven times more than it spent from 2000 to 2025, to increase solar and wind three to five-fold by 2050.


Between 2000 and 2019, Germany grew renewables from 7% to 35% of its electricity. And as much of Germany’s renewable electricity comes from biomass, which scientists view as polluting and environmentally degrading, as from solar.


Of the 7,700 new kilometres of transmission lines needed, only 8% have been built, while large-scale electricity storage remains inefficient and expensive. “A large part of the energy used is lost,” the reporters note of a much-hyped hydrogen gas project, “and the efficiency is below 40%… No viable business model can be developed from this.”


Yet this is the type of technology currently being advocated by CSIRO, our Chief Scientist and ARENA for use in Australia.


Meanwhile, the 20-year subsidies granted to wind, solar, and biogas since 2000 will start coming to an end next year. “The wind power boom is over,” Der Spiegel concludes.


All of which raises a question: if renewables can’t cheaply power Germany, one of the richest and most technologically advanced countries in the world, how could mid level economies and developing nations possibly succeed?


Germans, who will have spent $580 billion on renewables and related infrastructure by 2025, express great pride in the Energiewende. “It’s our gift to the world,” a renewables advocate told The Times.


Tragically, many Germans appear to have believed that the billions they spent on renewables would redeem them. “Germans would then at last feel that they have gone from being world-destroyers in the 20th century to world-saviours in the 21st,” noted a reporter.


Many Germans will, like Der Spiegel, claim the renewables transition was merely “botched,” but it wasn’t. The transition to renewables was doomed because modern industrial people, no matter how Romantic they are, do not want to return to pre-modern life.


In Australia we need to recognise that the reason renewables can’t power modern civilization is because they were never meant to. One interesting question is why anybody ever thought they could.


Acknowledgement: This article has drawn from a Forbes article of the 6th May by Michael Shellenberger available here: Forbes 6th May


https://www.forbes.com/sites/michae...pfToIZs42e_9r0zwENaLV8cZpJYgIAdE#4a8cf028ea2b

 

[Baltimore Jack]

 

[Baltimore Jack]

 

[Power Raid]

One of the world’s leading global warming gurus has changed his mind and turned on renewable energy.

Michael Shellenberger was named Time Magazine’s “Hero of the Environment,” in 2008 and is the Founder and President of Environmental Progress, an independent research and policy organization.


https://quillette.com/2019/02/27/why-renewables-cant-save-the-planet/
Consider California. Between 2011–17 the cost of solar panels declined about 75 percent, and yet our electricity prices rose five times more than they did in the rest of the U.S. It’s the same story in Germany, the world leader in solar and wind energy. Its electricity prices increased 50 percent between 2006–17, as it scaled up renewables.

Germany’s carbon emissions have been flat since 2009, despite an investment of $580 billion by 2025 in a renewables-heavy electrical grid, a 50 percent rise in electricity cost.

Meanwhile, France produces one-tenth the carbon emissions per unit of electricity as Germany and pays little more than half for its electricity. How? Through nuclear power.

Then, under pressure from Germany, France spent $33 billion on renewables, over the last decade. What was the result? A rise in the carbon intensity of its electricity supply, and higher electricity prices, too.

 

[Power Raid]

The world is waking up to fake economics and creative accountants

https://quillette.com/2019/02/27/why-renewables-cant-save-the-planet/

What about all the headlines about expensive nuclear and cheap solar and wind? They are largely an illusion resulting from the fact that 70 to 80 percent of the costs of building nuclear plants are up-front, whereas the costs given for solar and wind don’t include the high cost of transmission lines, new dams, or other forms of battery.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04...ment-maybe-heading-from-boom-to-bust/11041964
"We estimate that a wind farm costing $2,000/kW (kilowatt) with a $55/MWh offtake contract over the first 15 years, then reverting to a merchant power price of $75/MWh for the remaining 10-year life of the plant, would achieve a nominal internal rate of return of five per cent," Mr Busuttil said.


resulting in capital market paralysis
https://www.smh.com.au/business/the...-and-renewables-iea-says-20190514-p51n3x.html
The IEA also noted that while investment in coal had increased by 2 per cent to $US80 billion, driven mostly by China, India and Australia, shareholders activists were pushing investors away.
"The bottom line is that the world is not investing enough in traditional elements of supply to maintain today’s consumption patterns, nor is it investing enough in cleaner energy technologies to change course. Whichever way you look, we are storing up risks for the future."



So we have three choices. Do nothing and cop CO2. Follow renewable pathway of Germany and continue to see electricity prices increase and CO2 emmissions maintained or increased. Follow a pathway that is tried tested and proven to be the only way to reduce CO2 and save the planet.

 

[HurleyHepsHird]

Yes, for material scientists, 2004 represented a paradigm shift for graphene manufacture, but in terms of impact it's going to represent an evolutionary change rather than revolutionary.

For example, one of the major hype areas was batteries. Charge in seconds, huge capacity yadda yadda yadda. So what happened? Well, graphene balls are actually being used in batteries, but in combination with more traditional lithium ion technology. Samsung's next range of smartphones will likely have them, as the prototypes are ready for commercialisation. Fast charge will be upto 5x that of a conventional lithium ion battery and battery life will be reasonably longer.

It's the Japanese car companies that I would be looking to for big advances in battery technology though. Honda with Fluoride ion batteries and Toyota with solid state lithium batteries. But when it comes to commercialisation, to shift a whole supply chain a product needs to not just be better, but significantly better, which is why most companies focus R&D on incremental improvements to preexisting technologies.