A 210 kW photovoltaic system in Sacramento, California
Credit: SMUD
CANBERRA: As we head into another drier, hotter summer, we can expect that every scorching day, every drought-beaten farmer, every dust storm, and every bushfire will be cited as more evidence that we should abandon our reliance on fossil-fueled energy and turn to renewable sources to beat global warming.
Let's do that. Let's assume that the government flicks the switch to renewables. Australia's Prime Minister, John Howard, has a penchant for changing policy to match public opinion and snatch political initiative. He is also known for starting election years with announcements of new funding for science.
Let us assume that in January he announces that his Liberal-National coalition government will invest an extra A$1 billion in wind farms and solar power generators over two years, with the first installations happening within six months, so that they kick in before the election is due in 2007 - as the next drier, hotter summer begins.
Let us assume that successor governments increase that commitment so that A$10 billion is spent on renewable energy infrastructure in the next decade. By January 2017 our hills and sea cliffs would be bristling with windmills, our housetops and car parks would glisten with photovoltaic panels, and solar-thermal mirror farms would sparkle alongside old coal-fired power stations.
Now lets swoop ahead to eastern Australia on a hot Friday evening in late January 2017, when most of us are back at work after the summer break. The climate has been warming steadily since 2007 and will continue to do so. Global greenhouse emissions have continued to rise despite efforts by Australia and some other countries to install renewable and nuclear power generation.
It is one of those stifling, humid nights when the air seems like a hot towel and a bed sheet feels like an electric blanket. The weather forecast offers no hope of relief. The Sun is now an obdurate red ball on the western horizon, too far from the huge arrays of solar generators in eastern Australia to tickle any more juice out of them. They have closed down for the night, ready to restart 12 hours later when the morning Sun rises high enough to stir their molecules into motion.
A few wind generators are lazily turning in response to sea breezes and local storms, but most are idle in the sultry air. Those that are turning are producing too little power, too intermittently, to be useful. The eastern grid managers have switched them to bypass mode, so they too have stopped contributing to the electricity supply.
Australia is playing England in a cricket final at the Sydney Olympic Stadium. It is a night match, beginning at 6 pm and finishing around 2 am, a timing shift from earlier years in response to high daytime temperatures that have become commonplace since 2013, the hottest year on record. With players struggling in 40°C-plus afternoons and spectators opting to watch from their air-conditioned homes, the shift to night matches has revived the annual tournament.
But as the solar generators sleep and the wind farms lie fallow, where will the power come from to flood the arena with light? What will power the trains to take spectators to and from the ground?
What will power the trains in all our eastern cities, the trams in Melbourne and the trolley-buses in Brisbane, to take our workers home through the sweltering dusk? What will power the system of lights and switches that keep those public transport systems functioning? What will power all the traffic lights and street lights that make our roads safe? Where will the energy come from to keep essential data systems alive - like the databases of banks and financial institutions, welfare agencies like Centrelink, and our defence and police systems? Where will the power come from to keep our airports functioning, to pump our water and sewage around, to sustain our hospitals and power our mobile phone networks? What will drive the lifts that so many people need to get to their high-rise apartments?
So many essential things rely on electricity. So do many other things we take for granted. Keeping food and drink cold in refrigerators in our homes and shops. Air-conditioning our homes and offices. Running the television studios and their broadcasting networks to transmit their signals across the continent. Running the printing presses that hum through the night to produce our newspapers, the aluminium smelters that require huge power inputs to keep their processes running non-stop, and the dairy processing factories and bakeries that work through the night to provide fresh food for the morning.
The list goes on. What is clear is that we need electricity at night. Solar generators cannot provide that while wind farms may run overnight and during the day but cannot be relied upon. And there is no technology in sight that would enable power from these renewable sources to be stored during the day and efficiently transmitted overnight to meet baseload demand.
The mundane reality is that the power required to run eastern Australia on a hot night in 2017 will come from fossil-fuelled power stations. That will still be the case even if we spend A$10 billion on renewable generation - or even A$20 billion - over the next decade.
And even though we could get some reliable power levels from renewable sources during the day, we will have to build new fossil-fuelled power stations at the same time to keep up with Australia's growing demand for electricity. Those power stations will need to keep their fires burning 24/7 because they cannot be turned on and off quickly. So our fossil-fuel emissions will actually increase, despite the massive investment in renewable energy that the prime minister could initiate in 2007.
Which is why he won't do that. He may announce a few hundred million dollars towards renewable energy research - perhaps skewed to assist potentially reliable sources such as geothermal energy and thermal towers - and for research into storage technologies.
But he knows that if there is A$10 billion to be spent on new greenhouse-neutral power sources in Australia over the next decade, the best bet is nuclear power.
Simon Grose is the science editor of The Canberra Times, in which this article first appeared.
How did you cost nuclear?
Take the cost of managing a High Level Waste Repository for one million years (minimum!) with all the security and physical protections required with highly trained staff, divide that by the number of "reactor years" that will be produced in Australia for as long as nuclear energy is likely to have sufficient supplies of fissionable material and then and only then shall we be in a position to actually calculate the true financial cost of a nuclear future!
Please also show me somewhere in the world where these costs are actually paid for by the industry (or ACTUALLY fully budgeted for by anyone)! In Sweden, they pay US$0.0013 per kWh generated for ALL waste disposal, and a mere 25% of this goes to long term High Level Waste management! In the US it is US$0.0010 per kWh and in France they charge a mere 10% of the reactor CONSTRUCTION cost! Entirely arbitrary amounts with no real connection to the actual costs to be incurred by 'somebody else'!
Just because AN amount is charged, does NOT mean All OF the costs are fully factored in!
If no one can get the financial math right, how can we have confidence the more complicated stuff is being done correctly and safely?
False Dawn of Solar
You are most certainly a science "editor".
You have no concience, do you Mr Grose?
Missing the point
You are missing one important fact, we are HUMANS! If we do keep going the way we are going we will all die from either loss of oxygen, so we will all suffocate from all the carbon dioxide floating about in the air or we will all die from being over-heated. We are human beings and as human beings our body can only take a certain amount of things. If we keep burning fossil fuels, destroy the land we live on and keep melting the ice caps, we will all be DEAD, we will all die, SLOWLY and PAINFULLY, everyday hoping it would be our last. Global warming his happening and fossil fuel is a big contributer to it. Solar power, wind power, wave power and hydro-electric power are our only options, they are renewable energy sources, the sun, wind, water, we use it everyday. We can't use nuclear power because it would still kill us, it would just take longer and it could end up being worse, having serious consequences on us all. No one wants their kids growing up gasping for air or with unexplained deformities. We have other options, they may not be as good but they are the only ones we have left. Imporve them instead of shortening our days.
would it be that hard to
would it be that hard to store the energy produced in the day in a battery?i think not you idiot
Oversimplistic Hogwash!
Assuming solar truly cannot provide ALL of the power needs of our society, why is that being presented as a reason to reject it?
This article appears to be incredibly poorly considered!
Power CAN be stored in batteries! Yes, there are limitations, but it is illogical to disregard anything on that basis! ALL technologies have their limitations! Coal and gas have their limitations, and one of them is their heavy contribution to global warming!
THE Australian National University's new Sliver cells show that photovoltaic cells are a technology which is open to major advances, with related advantages in cost!
There are other innovations coming out, such as photovoltaic paint as described by the National Geographic Society website.
Why also are we still thinking in terms of centralised power? Solar offers option for the decentralisation of power generation, with consequent reductions in distribution losses. That is, because solar panels may be affixed to the rooves of our homes, offices and public buildings, we can have the power generated right where it is used, thus significantly reducing the sheer amount of power lost as it presently is via resistance in power cabling from the generator to the end user!
Solar does NOT have to be used on its own! With decentralised solar and wind as well as geothermal and whatever else happens to be around in each particular locality, there should be no actual problem with solar!
The ridiculous nuclear option doesn't seem to factor in the FULL AND ACTUAL costs of long term high level waste! Then again, show me any nuclear industry anywhere on the planet that does, and I'll dance the best version of a mamba I can muster in the middle of Federation Square wearing a pink tutu and shouting out "I am a complete prat!"
The US experience in which the proposed Yucca Mountains Repository was effectively scrapped is proof of that! The US Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia ruled that the proposal to actively monitor stored waste 'for only ten thousand years' was found to be inconsistent with the scientific evidence. Not long after the US EPA recommended a 'compromise solution' - active monitoring for one MILLION years, Yucca Mountains has been regarded as unviable.
It is very interesting that our Our Prime Minister returned from a State visit to the US and was 'suddenly' preaching the 'need' for a nuclear future! This was when our PM initiated the 'unbiased' committee which later recommended the establishment of a nuclear industry!
Apart from the genuinely 'green' alternatives (as distinct from the very 'ungreen' nuclear obscenity) renewables have much potential to reduce carbon emissions - and the new, 'cleaner' coal technologies are still available to take up any slack!
The assertion which lays at the core of the argument presented in this article is fundamentally flawed: solar does NOT have to be used in isolation!
This article appears not to have been given much thought!
Regarding "much thought",
Regarding "much thought", this article has been given very much thought.
Firstly, I wish we didn't have to consider Nuclear Power.
What is needed is everyone looking at ALL the possibilities. Everyone, including our Prime Minister does not want Nuclear Power. However, what our Prime Minister is doing what he has been elected to do. And that is to look at all the facts and make an informed descision based on that information.
God help us if we get a Government that doesn't act responsibly in this way. Peter Garrett has said absolutely no to nuclear - This is a catastrophic disaster in what we expect from our politicians. What if he was the other way and his mindset was nothing but nuclear? Is that what people want or do we want politicians that will look at all the facts and possibilities and then make an informed descision. If you agree about Peter Garrett's personal views, that's absolutely fine. However, that is not what we need from our Politicians.
Maybe the Government should ask its people, are we prepared to go without power for certain times of the day. That is no fidge, no phone, no power at all.
If we as a majority are NOT prepared to live without the power, then Nuclear must be part of the debate when it comes to reducing greenhouse gases at least in the short term, while we develop and grow the renewable sources.
Yes, lets grow Renewables as fast as we can but we still need power until we have developed viable renewable alternatives.
Let's also consider the countries that do not have natural resources and abundance of land that we do. France has 58 Nuclear Power Stations and export excess power to Britain, Germany and Italy. France has 60 million people. Can some of these renewable "experts" please explain how countries like France would be able to implement renewables to meet their power needs. Considering their lack of natural resources and land. Is anyone saying lets not develop renewables. No, not a single person. We ALL want cleaner power.
Unless we turn off the power, we still have to get to that point.
Nuclear: Revisiting Past Maladaptive Irresponsible Reasoning
The basic problem with nuclear is that no one has solved the waste problem!
What do we do with this waste, assuming we are to actually take GENUINE responsibility for it?
How responsible is it to knowingly produce toxins for which there is no known solution? If we are talking short term, 'cleaner' coal technologies are very much to be preferred over nuclear, for there are at least 'technologies' in existence to counter carbon emissions - these 'technologies' are called 'trees'! Are there any waste emission countering technologies that have an analogous demonstrable ability to actually work in relation to radioisotopic wastes for the time they shall pose a real threat to humankind and the environment?
The suggestion that we have to switch off the grid from time to time is utter nonsense!
If a SUSTAINABLE and RESPONSIBLE, SCIENTIFICALLY TESTED solution can be found to the long term waste problem, then I'd be persuaded to SUPPORT nuclear, and I would submit there are many other people out there as well!
At present, no such solution actually exists!
I would argue that it is preferable to stay with coal in the short term, and install the equipment needed to make it cleaner, rather than switch from one brand of reckless irresponsibility to another!
To quote Einstein, “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”
Our past thinking has been that "the little bit of smoke and soot we churn out won't do any lasting damage to the planet, and we probably won't be around if it does". The thinking on high level waste is that "the little bit of high level waste we churn out won't do any lasting damage to the planet, and we probably won't be around if it does!" What spectacular progress in the brave development of a sense of responsibility!
Former generations can at least offer the excuse of relative ignorance! What's going to be our excuse?
On second thoughts, lets for sake of argument agree we'll need to switch off the power occasionally (no matter how implausible) - to that I say, "go ahead!" At least that means WE are paying for this problem, and we are NOT foisting it onto future generations as past ones have to us!
Well. You guys all put a lot
Well. You guys all put a lot of thought into this, haven't you? Mmmm. I think you guys are all a load of d*$#heads. You pi*%% me off, just by talking. On and on and on that article went. I didn't even read all of it, got too boring. So I thought I would drop by and let you know. Seems pathetic just to post a flame, but I couldn't help it. You had to know somehow didn't you?
Flaming
Yes, it does seem pathetic. Particularly as you are admitting hat you haven't read the whole story here, but are quite willing to dump on it publicly. Just makes you look like a fool.
propaganda
I think Cosmos is supposed to be a science magazine, not something for the fossil fuel/nuclear lobbyists to peddle their bullsh*t. Seriously, this is not a science article and does not belong here.