The Best Pollution Money Can Buy
Watching ABC's Media Watch last night, I think I learned a thing or two about the insanity behind Victoria's "green" electricity generation.
Fact 1: Victoria has a bunch of wind farms generating a significant amount of clean, green electricity.
Fact 2: Victoria uses very dirty brown coal in its electricity generators for their baseload supply.
Fact 3: Victoria exports the electricity generated by the wind farms to South Australia and New South Wales. Both SA and NSW use cleaner (but more expensive) black coal in their generators for their baseload supply.
If it was about making the biggest impact on reducing carbon pollution, you'd think Victoria would use their wind turbines to allow them to reduce the output from their very dirty brown coal generators, wouldn't you?
So why do they export it instead to SA and NSW? "D'oh...it's the money, stupid!" They get a bit more money from generators who can reduce the amount of black coal they consume.
Carbon targets be damned! It's about money!
And that reminds me of THIS >>>
Fact 1: Victoria has a bunch of wind farms generating a significant amount of clean, green electricity.
Fact 2: Victoria uses very dirty brown coal in its electricity generators for their baseload supply.
Fact 3: Victoria exports the electricity generated by the wind farms to South Australia and New South Wales. Both SA and NSW use cleaner (but more expensive) black coal in their generators for their baseload supply.
If it was about making the biggest impact on reducing carbon pollution, you'd think Victoria would use their wind turbines to allow them to reduce the output from their very dirty brown coal generators, wouldn't you?
So why do they export it instead to SA and NSW? "D'oh...it's the money, stupid!" They get a bit more money from generators who can reduce the amount of black coal they consume.
Carbon targets be damned! It's about money!
And that reminds me of THIS >>>
posted by The Editor at
8:47 PM
6 Comments:
My understanding is that fossil-fuel powered generating plants produce the minimum CO2 per kW when running at full power, and become increasingly polluting as they are throttled back. In fact, I think some plant designs can't be throttled back; they're either running full bore or not at all. This makes it very difficult for the operators to scale back generation.
Gerry, do you have any idea how that misnamed Carbon Tax (it's a carbon dioxide tax, yes?) is supposed to work in this environment?
Well, Andrew, if what you say holds true, then why is wind powered energy being used to cut back on black coal generator use? Why could this not be applied to the much more polluting brown coal generators?
How is the carbon tax supposed to work in this environment? Well, I assume it's supposed to make things like wind power more financially feasible. But that's really a non sequitur to the issue I'm trying to hunt down and kill here.
@Gerry: I don't think the wind powered energy is cutting back on black coal generation. I think it's providing additional capacity to avoid building additional coal power stations.
I disagree that the entire brown coal generation scene can't be cut back to offset wind generated electricity. I'd like to hear from an expert on this.
Maybe this article sheds new light on my issue:
http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2012/08/09/3564105.htm
And this article clears a few things up as well:
http://www.climatespectator.com.au/commentary/emissions-gone-wind
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