Robert Llewellyn’s “Almost Breaking News” is entirely positive for the pre-Christmas show:
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[this] reflects the reality that during the bulk of daylight hours in Victoria the average price paid to all power generators is rapidly approaching zero. It’s not just you, the little householder, it’s everyone.
Celtic rainforests being established in Devon. Not a huge area, but a nice boost for local bugs and other small beings
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Robert Llewellyn of the Fully Charged Show and Giles Parkinson of Renew Economy got together for a chat:
Very enjoyable, you’ll feel more educated at the end of an hour.
The podcast is also available on a number of other platforms if you prefer:
Good news: We’ve hit peak oil demand. Driven mainly by China’s aggressive energy transition away from oil and coal. As a result of overproduction, the oil markets are expected to sink lower, making US and European oil production unprofitable.
Bad news: The decline in oil consumption is not steep enough. There’s already too much carbon in the atmosphere, and more will continue to be added as the transition is halting or stalled elsewhere.
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From what I’ve read (which is bad news so not relevant to this thread) the UK is about there for 1.5C. Go UK!
Solar can be good for the local wildlife:
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Lots of EVs make cities less deadly:
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Also fewer cars overall
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Just talking to a friend last night who works w/ the Oz federal govt on transition to renewables. Their job is to get us to our target of 82% renewables for electricity production by 2030. He says it’s looking more likely that this will actually happen.
Re the Trump admin’s trashing of any environmental standards, he says one outcome of this is they expect the cost of solar cells to drop even further in the short term as USians cancel orders w/ China. At least to some degree, those orders will be purchased by others including Oz.
The Oz policy is technology-neutral, so they just go with the best offer that will help the transition. He says that in effect that means solar cells with batteries, both of which continue to drop in price. Wind also plays a role, but the cost is not dropping, which means it is getting more expensive relative to solar/batteries. The reason for that is that wind requires massive physical infrastructure to be built in remote areas, hence labor and material costs. Still, it does help top balance the load.
He also opined that the nuclear proposal is really just a cover for the fossil fuel industry.
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How so?
(extra characters for the software)
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Basically it will take decades to build any nuclear power stations, so we’ll have to keep using coal/gas/oil until then. Nuclear, of course, is already an expensive source of power, and it isn’t getting any cheaper. Installing solar is cheap and immediate.
This proposal is by Peter Dutton, leader of the far right, which has long been captured by the fossil fuel industry. (Personally I think this is only part of the story. I think what he really wants is for Australia to become nuclear-armed.)
FWIW I don’t have any huge ideological objections to nuclear power, and I think it can be a good fit in some circumstances. But Australia is incredibly abundant in clean energy, so using nuclear here is nonsense.
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I’ve noticed the air seems cleaner in Shanghai and they issue less air pollution alerts now that electric vehicles look to be more popular than combustion engine vehicles.
Compare this to 7 years ago when going outside meant cleaning black snot out in the shower upon return.
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It’s not very sophisticated really. Just repeat “44%” cheaper!" over and over again.
As it stands, we get a huge amount of energy just from rooftop solar. Large scale solar and wind are being rolled out at a reasonable pace and we’ll likely get to 82% easily enough. That makes certain people grumpy. These people have a fair amount of political capture here.
So what is actually going on?
Along with the nuclear they “tear up the contracts”, especially for offshore wind. We wait for about 20 years to get one running. That’s a pretty reasonable time frame given the western countries that are presently building new nuclear and the fact that we’ve never done it before here in Australia. State and federal laws need to be repealed, an entire regulatory scheme and accompanying departments, etc, etc.
Our coal plants keep running, though they’re all scheduled to close by the early 2030s. So price spikes and reliability issues along the way. Then you’re left with gas. You burn a lot of it.
Meanwhile, the good news, is that the cost of rooftop solar installations is about 1/6th of the USA. A fair percentage of residential buildings already have it and there’s major potential in the commercial & industrial sector: big roofs, high demand. Cold storage for example. Battery storage is approaching the point where they make economic sense to your average household.
Not sure why we need socialised nuclear power. Maybe because socialised coal power is a bit of a hard sell.
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I mean yeah, nuclear power is subsidised heavily in order to develop weapons programs. But you’ll need a breeder reactor for that. Once those are built I’m sure Mr Dutton will be cheering from his chair in the nursing home. Easier just to buy a few nukes I think.
In the long run, this is the reason, unless you want to keep burning a lot of gas forever.