Australia's Queensland Reverses Policy, Pledges To Keep Using Coal Power At Least Into the 2040s (yahoo.com) 46
Australia's Queensland state government said on Friday it would run coal power plants at least into the 2040s, reversing a previous plan to pivot rapidly to renewables and in turn making national emissions reduction targets harder to achieve. From a report: The centre-right Liberal National Party won last year's election in Queensland, a huge chunk of land in Australia's northeast where more than 60% of electricity comes from coal-fired plants that are mostly owned by the state.
That tracks (Score:2, Insightful)
As soon as I read the headline I was wondering what kind of right-wing morons willing to pay extra money [wikipedia.org] to use coal instead of renewables just won an election there.
Re: That tracks (Score:2, Interesting)
cheaper power has not eventuated in any place where there has been a large scale shift to renewables. because renewables donâ(TM)t cut it in the early evening so you have to either buy imminently expensive storage or fossil fuel capacity to make up the short fall. i live in a jurisdiction that did this conversion and the power price has more than doubled and we have to import power now.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
The cost of adding storage to renewables is minor enough that it doesn't come close to shifting the price in favor of fossil fuels, so either demand is growing faster than supply where you are, or you're getting ripped off.
Here's data on the effect of renewable power on consumer electricity prices: https://www.theclimatebrink.co... [theclimatebrink.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for the link to the article chart, very informative. However wtf is up with California ?!? They have a lot of renewables, but also the 2nd highest prices after Hawaii.
asking rhetorically
Re: (Score:3)
What's up with California is mostly PG&E. They are a for-profit, publicly traded corporation that is basically grandfathered in as a government protected monopoly. It's the whole thing with how the government is not supposed to pick and choose winners and losers in the marketplace, so it isn't supposed to compete with private business, yet, at the same time it has to safeguard power availability for everyone so there are decades or more of all kinds of public giveaways to corporations that provide a pub
Politicans choose economy instead of ideals again (Score:2)
It's all a life or death, do or die right now, the environment is crashing and going to doom us all for the political class ....
Then you find out that it is 100% about the country funding and keeping its military at the forefront of new war fighting technologies like AI, LLM, drones and the electrical grid needed to power them all.
It is the same for each of these countries abandoning decades of politicians 'product placement style' placing 'environment buzzwords' into campaign speeches, donation seeking tou
Re: (Score:1)
Please point to one significant jurisdiction where mass adoption of renewables has made power cheaper.
Re: (Score:2)
The big problem here is how you define making power cheaper. Do you mean cheaper to produce, or cheaper per kWh for the consumer? The market for power is full of monopolies and oligarchies who have achieved significant regulatory capture. Try this as an experiment. Find who the top five (if there are that many and not just say, one) corporations involved in supplying power where you live. Then find out who the top five officials in charge of regulating power in your area are (once again, if there are that m
Re: (Score:2)
Unfortunately you generally can't make electricity cheaper for consumers with cheaper grid power due to how the idiotic regulatory-captured electricity market works (in the UK most notably, electricity prices can't fall until natural gas is eliminated from the grid completely), but until that's fixed, you can shift the money from your local job-intensive renewable producer to authoritarian petrostates with fossil fuels.
So with Queensland having local coal production and politicians on the take from the foss
Re: (Score:3)
cheaper power has not eventuated in any place where there has been a large scale shift to renewables. *snip* i live in a jurisdiction that did this conversion and the power price has more than doubled
Actually it absolutely has gone down. The problem with your energy bill is that is has a fuckton of completely irrelevant non-energy source riders on top of it. Virtually everywhere renewables have actually driven down the wholesale energy price. The retail price goes up due to changes in taxes connection fees, throwing grid maintenance costs and other shit on top. Bonus points if your grid operator has a large stake in traditional generation, then they just slap fees on your retail to make up the loss of p
Re: (Score:2)
cheaper power has not eventuated in any place where there has been a large scale shift to renewables. because renewables donâ(TM)t cut it in the early evening so you have to either buy imminently expensive storage or fossil fuel capacity to make up the short fall.
The typical household power usage in Australia is about 20 kWh or lower. This is pretty in line with most of the developed world except the US which is maybe around 50% higher. The current battery cost per kWh is $115 (USD, not AUD), If we assume a fifteen year battery lifetime and 40% loss of battery power over that lifetime and assume a roughly linear decline, that works out to $9.58 USD per kWh per year, so that would be about $192 per year for the batteries for a single household, or $15.97 USD per mont
Coal vs batteries (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, renewables don't cost much to run. When they are running. A recent report suggests that a 100% renewable grid in Australia would need 3 days of backup to avoid one in 10 year dunkelflautes. The Australian grid averages 24 GW, so 1728 GWh of batteries. That would cost about 75% of Australia's GDP, and would need replacing every 15 years, ie on average a 5% donation of GDP to China every year. Well I guess it's what the young uns want, they'll be paying for it for all of their lives. And of course it wi
batteries are not the only option (Score:3)
You don't have any other storage options?
Especially hydro can scale really well. Existing dams can often be re-purposed to a higher degree of load regulation, saving stored water for periods of neither wind nor sun enough. Pumped storage may also be a possibility. Either in an existing hydro installation, or in a "pure" pumped storage solution, were water is moved to a higher reservoir only by excess production in the electricity net, without any existing river doing resupply.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Like the Snowy 2.0.... which started off as a $2 billion dollar project.... that is currently at $10-12 billion and likely heading to $20 billion dollars before it is finished?
Re: (Score:2)
As others have pointed out, for the GPs ridiculous doomsday scenario and incorrect inflated figures, hydro storage is not really a solution because Australia is pretty dry overall. On the other hand, you don't actually need fresh water for hydro storage. You really just need geography and water and it doesn't really matter if it's fresh water or salt water and it's not like there's a crippling shortage of ocean water around Australia. So, if there is geography near the coast somewhere that they could turn i
ocean-based storage could be possible (Score:2)
It does not even have to be mountains, or a location at land. You could for example construct a dike at sea to create a polder (as done in the Netherlands) and use the potential of different water levels inside and outside the dike for energy storage. Cost of dike building should be roughly approximate to circumference of the polder, while energy storage potential is proportional to area of the polder - thus a technology that scales well with large storage requirements.
Or you could possibly use the water pr
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, that fraunhofer project is interesting. It is thematically similar to the idea of pumping compressed air into underground caverns for storage. That certainly could potentially be usable for the kind of storage system considered here. Of course, the challenge given was three days of power storage for the whole country for rare, once in a decade instances where it would need to be usable. For any sort of pumped hydro system, or indeed most systems that rely on spinning a generator for power, you do have t
Re: (Score:3)
Just so I have that clear what you're saying.
Lifecycle emissions analysis:
Solar PV electricity + Li-ION BESS is on the order of 50 grams CO2-eq embedded emissions per kWh of electric energy.
Coal electricity is on the order of 1,000 grams CO2-eq per kWh.
So coal is 20 times more CO2-emitting per unit of energy generated.
Yet you're claiming that if Australia, and other countries in the world r
Re: (Score:2)
A recent report suggests that a 100% renewable grid in Australia would need 3 days of backup to avoid one in 10 year dunkelflautes. The Australian grid averages 24 GW, so 1728 GWh of batteries.
Assuming that those rare drops in power production even need to be dealt with (it's not as if it is uncommon in many places to have power outages lasting up to days once a decade or so anyway) and that they can't be dealt with through other methods (smart grid appliances with emergency power saving options, temporary shutdowns of heavy power users in business and government, etc.) let's look at the figures provided. The average Australian home uses 60 kWh in three days and there are 11.3 million homes which
Re: (Score:2)
Your cost numbers are horrifically inflated. Utility scale LFP batteries with BESS cost less than $100/kWh now. 1728 gWh comes to $1.728 billion when rounding up. Australia’s 2024 GDP was $1.72 trillion. That’s literally .1% of annual GDP to supply the entire country with 3 days of battery storage. CATL is going to release sodium ion batteries next year estimated to cost $40/kWh. That cuts the price of storage to less than half.
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry I meant $172 billion. So 10% of GDP.
Re: (Score:2)
In Sydney, that have the problem of too much solar, with prices going negative. Too much rooftop solar back feeding local distribution networks.
The politicians are too far in the pockets of the mining industry to step away from coal.
Re: (Score:2)
1) You can use 2000 to 3000km HVDC power transmission lines to ship it to where it's needed e.g. ship the power east west to different timezones where it's a different time of day. e.g. ship mid-afternoon peak solar to a place where it is late afternoon/evening hours peak demand.
2) You can use li-ion (or soon, sodium-ion) batteries, or vanadium redox flow batteries or liquid/gaseous CO2 storage, or thermal storage, or even very inefficient
Re: (Score:2)
Translated: Just spend a shit ton of money building infrastructure
Re: (Score:2)
Sydney is on the east coast, so there's nowhere experiencing the peak of the duck curve when it's getting mid-afternoon sun. As more lamp post EV chargers are installed, that might help a little, but people seem to mostly use them at night (they're slow chargers, so you need hours). There isn't a good way to use the power without a lot of expensive batteries.
Re: (Score:2)
https://energydome.com/co2-battery/
https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/long-term-energy-storage/
Idiots (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
because of spurious "community opposition".
Like the anti-nuclear people do?
Re: (Score:2)
No, the anti-nuclear people aren't spurious in Australia, they are universal and backed by anti-nuke legislation in every state and territory. A nuclear project doesn't even get off the ground there (it legally can't), much less well down the planning pipeline.
Re: (Score:3)
They screwing themselves and future generations. Australia has massive amounts of solar and wind energy available, and is geographically positioned to export much of it. By delaying they are letting rivals overtake them, and once those international distribution networks are built with other countries, they aren't going to bother with ones to Australia.
If only there was a way (Score:5, Insightful)
There should be a reverse trust-fund to allocate the blame, where leaders act against global heating mitigation in full knowledge (see IPCC reports) of the consequences.
Maybe that would stop a few from making grievously irresponsible decisions like this one,.
Re: (Score:3)
If one felt really strongly about punishing Australia, one could always stop doing business with Australia.
Re: (Score:2)
If one felt really strongly about punishing Australia, one could always stop doing business with Australia.
But ... but ... how would that be as fun as emoting on the internet?!?!?
Environmental Annie again? (Score:2)
Current QLD price: -$33.73 (Score:4, Interesting)
I live in QLD. Writing this and the spot price for power is
-$33.73 / MWh, largely because of solar deployments in the state.
The sun is, as usual, beating done - we're the "Sunshine State" here, and in fact we're having the driest spring in almost 40 years at the moment. Solar is having a great time.
Battery prices are tumbling, so now it's possible to make decent money being paid to charge your battery for several hours off the grid during times like this then sell it back in the evening at peak time. People are building businesses around this while our dipshit (conservative) government is doing this posturing for our wealthy coal mining magnates and companies.
Everyone else that can is just going solar, and batteries are next especially with more incentives to deploy them in homes. It's possible to be almost completely independent of the grid for a one off spend of about 2 percent of the value of the median home here now.
Yeh, yeh, not everyone can do this. I rent and just asked my landlord if she'd put solar on and she has refused (she doesn't yet know there's a government programme about to drop that incentivised landlords to deploy solar, which may change her mind, but I want to be out of here before then anyway).
Coal is still a core part of our grid but it's clearly on life support.
Re:Current QLD price: -$33.73 (Score:4, Interesting)
On top of that the CSIRO's 2024 generation report showed that solar + fuckton of batteries is cheaper than the cost of black coal. In 2024 even with the added cost of batteries renewables is now cheaper and the most economically sane approach.
The anti-renewables people are running out of edge cases to hide in.
WHOOP! (Score:1)
This makes the most sense, until they get nuclear built/deployed and/or we get nuclear fusion working.
Ferret