21.02 Environment Destruction – The Dark Side to Renewable Energy
Clearing a park for a solar farm in Spain
Purpose. To indicate that the expansion of RE will have serious environmental impacts.
The Critical Issue. All the major parties are in favour of increasing the supply of electric power from wind and solar energy but the environmental impacts of wind turbines and solar farms have not been adequately taken into account.
Extracts.
“Most of the world’s rare earth ores are extracted near Baotou, Inner Mongolia by pumping acid into the ground, then processed using more acids and chemicals. Producing one ton of rare earth metals releases up to 420,000 cubic feet of toxic gases, 2,600 cubic feet of acidic wastewater, and a ton of radioactive waste.”
“This report documents the
21.01 A Review of the CSIRO Gencost study 2018
Purpose : To challenge the view that electricity generated by wind farms is less expensive than coal fired generation.
Background: Governments and other agencies have generally accepted the advice in the CSIRO publication GenCost 2018 (updated in 2020) that the cost of wind and solar power is less than that of coal fired power stations.
Critical Issues:
1.The GenCost study does not include the costs to ‘firm’ (balance) wind farms when the intermittency of wind causes their power outputs to reduce dramatically.
2. Wind farm output intermittency is currently masked by the availability of coal fired or gas fired power stations to compensate. These coal fired power stations will be progressively decommissioned, which means that
20.06 Planning the Green Energy Transition. The AEMO Integrated System Plan
Purpose: To explain the purpose of the ISP, its scenarios and assumptions
The Critical Issues:
- Scheduled retirement of scheduled generators (coal, gas, battery), with construction of intermittent wind and solar:
| Period | Retired dispatchable MW | Built dispatchable MW | Intermittent MW |
| 2010-2020 | 2,500 | 7,100 built | |
| 2020-2030 | 5,800 | 2,400 (incl Snowy 2) | 10,500 underway |
| 2030-2040 | 14,000 | 39,000 announced | |
| 2040-2050 | 12,000 |
(2) The ISP is the official National Electricity Market transmission network plan. It requires network operators to begin planning the transmission projects that AEMO wants. It is designed to encourage more wind and solar into the network.
This is central
20.05 Lessons from the Californian Blackouts
Heatwave conditions in the USA and wildfires in California have recently precipitated a state of emergency with rolling power blackouts. California’s conventional power capacity has been run down in recent years while they promoted renewable energy from the sun and the wind.
California will not go completely black because they have extension cords running into several adjacent states.
In Australia we cannot turn to neighbours for power when we are short. This means we will have to maintain 100% of our conventional power sources to avoid outages whenever the wind is low and the doesn’t shine.
This applies especially at dinner time when the demand for power peaks. The NemWatch widget shows that hot dinners depend very much on conventional power
20.04 This is a warning to all leaders.
The world depends on modern shipping travelling from country to country to support international trade delivering cargo. The ship in Figure 1 in 2019 was the largest in the world with a cargo capacity of more than 200,000 tons but even so it achieves a speed of a constant 21 kn. It is diesel fuelled which many claim should be curtailed because of CO2 gas emissions, but our modern economies cannot go back to sail.
It used to be that cargo was carried place to place by sailing ships. This all but ceased in the 19th century and it is obvious why. First there is the size, see figure 2 “County of Peebles”. It was launched in 1875 and was one of the very last sailing ships. At the time it competed with steamships which then were quite small