Adults only announcement on energy

It is with great sadness that I have to make an announcement. The solar and wind energy dream is over.

It is my responsibility to make this announcement because nobody else can.

The last time I felt like this was when I had to fess up to my children that there is no Santa Claus – it was always just me and your mum. Those nasty kids at school who teased you for believing, I’m afraid, where right all along. “I’m really sorry honey for not telling you earlier, but I didn’t have the heart. You so wanted to believe it’s true.”

It’s the same with society’s love affair with solar and wind energy.

All the major energy corporations of the world have known this for a long time. But whenever they try to say it they just become the “nasty kids at school”. Saying hurtful things like: “Solar is the energy of the future – and always will be.”

All the politicians who have known this for some time can’t say it, because if they did you wouldn’t believe them and they would just be voted out of office. As the global financial crisis bites our politicians are trying to quietly creep away from all the grandiose solar promises they made.

The major institutional investment firms that underwrite the energy industry have known, but why should they tell, it’s none of their business. They just go on investing our pension funds in fossil fuels like they always have.

This doesn’t mean to say that we won’t see wind turbines or solar panels anymore, we will. Wind and solar is beautiful, clean energy and we should use as much as we can afford. But it’s time we realised it is not the panacea for the imperative problems facing civilization today.

Wind and solar will always be to energy what bicycles are to transport.

It all has to do with one word – capacity. Those mentioned above – and engineers everywhere – understand the importance of this word. But the rest of us in the egosphere are easily confused by it.

For example, I can ride my bicycle down a steep hill at probably 100 kilometres an hour (60 miles per hour). So the speed capacity of my bike is 100kmh. But that doesn’t mean that I can ride my bike 100 kilometres in one hour. In fact I don’t think I could ride 100 kilometres in a week.

A little motorbike, on the other hand, that has a top speed of 100kmh, has the same speed capacity as my bike. However, it could feasibly travel 100 kilometres in one hour.

My bike and a motorbike can have the same speed capacity – 100kmh – but very different “capacity ratios”.

Over any 100 kilometre stretch the capacity ratio of me on my bike – that is the percentage of the journey I could do at my speed capacity of 100kmh – would be about 1 to 2 percent provided there were some really steep downhills. Whereas the capacity ratio of the motorbike would be closer to 100 percent.

A 100kmh-capacity bicycle is not the equivalent of a 100kmh motorbike, and for the same reasons a 100 megawatt windfarm is not the same as a 100 megawatt gas turbine.

Bicycle technology keeps getting better. Today’s bicycles are significantly faster and lighter than bikes 20 years ago.  In fact, bike speed capacity has reached 220kmh (Eric Barone, downhill on snow, in 2000). But this doesn’t mean that it’s only a matter of time before bicycles will be competing in the motorcycle Grand Prix.

In the same way wind and solar technology is getting better and better, but, sadly, it will never be competing with fossil fuels.

Politicians have long been playing to delusions about energy promising to deliver a “clean energy future” based on renewable energy. Here in Australia we have one of the, if not the, most conducive environments for solar energy.

Politicians here have no problem getting the public, journalists and even academics to believe we are about to switch over to a “Solar Dawn” any day soon – a “Clean Energy Future”.

But in its current Draft Energy White Paper it gazes into a crystal ball to model what we could have in the year 2050. The best it could dream up for solar is 3 percent of our electricity by 2050. Three percent, and only if there are some technology breakthroughs.

I’m really sorry kids, but there you have it.

The competition in the motorcycle market is between names like Ducati, Honda, Suzuki and Yamaha. There will never be bicycles competing here.

Competing in the power generation market is coal, gas and nuclear. Right now there is no viable alternative. There will never be wind and solar in this league. There is some renewable energy making a marginal contribution, but this is almost entirely hydroelectricity and biomass, essentially wood-fired power generation.

Yes, there will have to be a new energy frontier sometime. But there is no way of predicting what that will be or when. In the meantime we have to work with what we’ve got. Wind and solar are not new energy sources for the future – they’re old energy sources. They have both been around longer than bicycles and we have tried so hard, particularly in the past 30 years, to make them work. But they just can’t do it.

Once again, it really saddens me to have to announce that this dream is over. And the ones I feel the most for are the Greens.

I know how much of their platform relies on, particularly, their solar energy vision, and I hate to have to tell them that the big corporations – those “nasty kids in the playground” – were right all along. There is no Santa and there is no solar energy future.

So why am I doing this? Why am I bursting their balloon?

Because I am a big admirer of the Greens and the environmental movement as a whole. I have been voting Greens for as long as Australian Governments have been throwing refugees into jail.

As far as I’m concerned, the Greens are the only party with a grown-up approach to the many social issues that are important to me. I want to see them adopt this same grown-up approach to energy.

We face some very serious energy challenges today and solar dreamers are poisoning the debates and preventing the discussions we really need to have.

The Greens have been a powerful political force in Germany since 1980. Germany has adopted one of the most aggressive attempts to make solar power generation work. It has spent billions over the years and yet today it only gets about 1 percent of its electricity from solar.

Greens have done a lot over the years to improve our environment and raise environmental awareness. Now we need them championing rational approaches to the huge problem of supplying the world’s growing need for real energy while, at the same time, reducing our emissions.

PM is right. We are being fed crap on climate change

The most effective way for me to reduce my domestic greenhouse gas emissions would be to kick my family out of the house and live alone. Then I could walk up and down the street waving my greatly reduced energy bills and proclaiming what a wonderful greenie I am.

It would be a fraud, of course, just like most of Australia’s attempts to tackle climate change.

Australia is shirking its responsibility in this global challenge because our policies are dominated be ignorant egotists who have deluded themselves into believing they are greenies.

We are not leading the world on climate change – far from it.

Ignorant, loud-mouthed, egotistical ‘greenies’ and deluded journalists and politicians are keeping this country splashing around in the kiddies paddling pool instead of assisting with the big issues in the deep end.

The climate change policies of both major parties are stuck in our domestic electorate. Climate change is a global problem. Australia is a minor energy consumer in this world, but we are a major energy producer and this is where our efforts should focus.

We are a major energy producer in the fastest growing region of the globe – Asia Pacific. There are hundreds of millions of people living in poverty across the Asia Pacific region.

I recently visited communities that have infant mortality rates that make even our worst Aboriginal communities seem like Shangri La. The reason is even remote Aboriginal communities have access to medical care when their children get really sick. In many communities in our region of the world there is no medical care, there is no Flying Doctor, no ambulance, no ‘intervention’. So parents regularly bury children, who die of routine illnesses like pneumonia, diarrhoea, or malaria.

But, the good news is things are improving. Countries are working hard to raise their living standards to levels we take for granted. The bad news is achieving this requires capital and energy – lots of it. As a result Asia’s energy demand is growing at roughly the equivalent of a new ‘Australia’ joining the region every 18 months.

Naturally these countries are going for the most affordable energy and that is coal. Australia, being the world’s largest coal exporter, is therefore doing OK out of all this humanitarian endeavour. It helped us dodge the GFC.

When I hear the Australian Government pledge to reducing our domestic greenhouse emissions by five per cent, I say ‘so what.’

We are going to increase the amount of renewable energy in our power generation to 20 per cent – big deal. We might as well pour money into Morris Dancing – at least it would create more jobs.

If we really believed that climate change was serious, if we really believed that it required urgent action, we would stop wasting money on mirrors and propellers and instead concentrate on trying to improve coal-fired power generation.

If we could develop a one percent improvement in the world’s future coal-fired power generation this would dwarf anything Australia did in our puny domestic market. Yet the Gillard Government’s latest climate-change policy had nothing in this area.

And when a company in Victoria, HRL, embarked on an ambitious project to build a pilot-plant to attempt to prove technology with the potential to reduce emissions from coal-fired power by 30 per cent, so-called “environmentalists” turned on them like rabid dogs. Where were our politicians or journalists who could have put this outrageous attack into perspective?

If this project has been killed, then it is not beyond credibility to say that those responsible have dealt a severe blow to the world’s efforts to combat climate change. They clearly believe that their own egotistical agenda is more important than truly tackling climate change. They have no awareness of the real challenge and are quite content to just ‘kick their family out of the house’.

Climate change exposes a fundamental flaw in our democratic system – policies are formed by egotists. However, tackling climate change requires technically sophisticated collaborators – engineers.

They are essentially excluded from the debate.

This is a multi-faceted, complex, technical problem -- we won’t get the answers from focus groups.

Greenhouse Myths and politicians

Twenty years from now we Australians will be getting 0.3 percent of our energy from solar power. Says who?

 Says the Government.

But they don’t say it out loud because the Greens might hear. Instead they talk about our bright green, renewable energy future and all the jobs that will be created as we “switch over” to “clean” energy.

Such energy myths have destroyed the world’s ability to make any credible attempt to deal with climate change.

We Australians have pledged to reduce our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by five percent of 2000 levels by 2020. Both major parties agree on this goal – yet it will not be met. Australia has no chance of reducing its GHG emissions at all in the next nine years.

If the Government seriously pursued this goal, we the people, would turf them out of office.

The only way we will meet this commitment is by buying credits from overseas. We will find a way to buy licences to continue business as usual.

Again, this is another fact you will not hear the Government – or the Opposition – saying out loud.

The Gillard Government has announced (ever so quietly) that we will be getting 13 percent of our electricity from wind and solar in 20 years – one percent of this will be solar.

But haven’t we got bi-partisan agreement on sourcing 20 percent of our electricity from renewables in just nine years time? Yes we have.  But this is just more myth and spin.

As the current Government, like those before it, make clear – if you ask quietly – wind and solar, geothermal, wave energy, these are all extras on the renewable energy set and will be for the foreseeable future. The stars are wood and hydro dams – but, again, don’t say that out loud or the Greens might hear and there will be hell to pay.

The Government’s carbon tax is, sadly, dead. It has drowned in this sea of myth and spin. The only question for Julia Gillard is how to get back to what Kevin Rudd has led us to believe was her original position without getting the blame.  If she cans the tax the Greens will throw a tantrum and her fragile Government will collapse.

However, if she lets the Greens have a big input into drafting the legislation it will become political poison for the other independents who will vote it down in the House. She will get away Scot free and will be able to claim the high moral ground going into the next election. Brilliant politics!

But, once again, a sad day for the future of the planet and our attempts to tackle climate change.

So let’s kill a few more persistent myths in the hope we can apply CPR to this “CPRS” and get the tax over the line.

Myth: Corporations are the “Big Polluters” and the tax will make them pay.

 Fact: We are the big polluters – we the “working families”.

Corporations have been working hard to become more energy efficient since the oil shocks of the ‘70s. That’s when there was a step change energy costs and so reducing their energy consumption has meant big bucks for big business.

The carbon tax is not designed to make big corporations pay – it’s designed to make us pay more for our energy in the hope we will use less. Any corporate costs will be passed on to us, the consumers, one way or another – just like the GST.

Making us more energy efficient will achieve a great deal more than our solar pipe dreams.

For example, if we can improve the efficiency of our car fleet by just one percent, that would be equivalent in terms of GHG reductions to our entire national solar power generation.

Running our cars with the right air pressure in our tyres would improve the fleet by about 3 percent. Improving our driving habits – that is less speeding and accelerating – can deliver improvements anywhere up to 33 percent.

Myth: The carbon tax will lead to a revolution in renewable energy.

Fact: The Government says that all renewable energy will account for only 8 per cent of Australia’s energy consumption in 20 years time. The other 92 percent will still be fossil fuels.

The tax will, however, tilt the scales back in favour of the planet so that over the next 100 years or so, we will improve the impact of our growing energy use a little sooner than might otherwise be the case.

We journalists, politicians, economists and academics will never produce the solutions to our energy challenges – these will have to come from our engineers and scientists.

The best we can do is work towards creating the political and fiscal environment that will support and assist our engineers and scientists. For starters we can certainly encourage more of our youth into the maths-science stream.  We desperately need more engineers – as opposed to more models and rock stars.

Now is the time to start getting real about this climate challenge.