SAY NO TO A NUCLEAR AUSTRALIA

Can We Rely on Renewable Energy?

1:49 PM, Tue 15 Apr 2008 .. Posted in Technology of Today .. 2 comments .. Link

"But can we really rely on renewable energy? What happens when the sun stops shining or the wind stops blowing?"

This is a question that was asked of me some time ago. I had all intentions of answering at the time, but couldn't because of our absence from the net. So, expanding on the groundwork I initially put in, here is my response.

Well, there are many different renewable energy sources. Some, like wind power and rooftop solar panels, are intermittent at a local level. But when they are spread over a sufficiently large area, with different climatic conditions, they are barely more intermittent than coal. It is unlikely that there will be no sun or wind anywhere across the electricity network of Australia. By deploying wind and solar across the landscape we can reduce any intermittency of wind and solar generators. And using these technologies in the home has the added advantage of producing electricity where it is used, so less energy is lost in transmission. On the subject of lost energy, did you know that about 11 per cent of the electricity produced at a big coal-fired power station is lost while being transported to the end user? So it seems that the problem of transporting power is something that all deliverers of power have to combat.

So yes, both wind and solar power are subject to the weather. However, weather forecasting is very reliable and, in most cases, any lack of sun or wind can be predicted and compensated for (for instance, by cranking up hydro and biomass generation). But in contrast, coal-fired generation suffers unpredictable outages and breakdowns that can and do plunge the electricity grid into crisis.

Solar power is particularly useful for delivering power at times of peak demand. Hot, sunny days when people are using their air conditioner, will generally be days when there is plenty of solar energy generated. And consider this... Solar water heating is hugely underused in sunburnt Australia. Less than five per cent of houses have a solar water heater. Some other countries, Israel, Spain and Ireland, are making solar water heating mandatory, while China has over 60 per cent of the world's installed solar water heating capacity.

Now, some technologies, like hydro power are highly predictable and controllable. They can be deployed when it is most useful, providing either baseload or peak power. Eraring Energy has a number of hydro-electric plants and the Stanwell corporation is also using power derived by means of hydro generation. As for Tasmania... well, we've all heard about the successful use of hydro power in the Derwent River catchment.

Bioenergy is another source of power that is being currently utilised in Australia. Woodlawn, near Sydney is Australia's largest bioreactor landfill. Veolia Environmental Services produces power generated by the methane that our waste produces. They also have plans in the works to incorporate a large scale windfarm on the Woodlawn site.

Emerging technologies, like geothermal could theoretically provide large quantities of baseload power in Australia long before a single nuclear reactor can be built (they take 10-15 years) or a commercially feasible carbon capture and storage coal-fired power station could be developed. Geodynamics is a Brisbane-based company currently researching hot-rock technologies in the Cooper Basin.

Solar thermal is another promising technology being researched by the Stanwell Corporation, one which I want to expand on soon. You can download a PDF file by the Environmental Protection Agency outlining the Stanwell Solar Concentrator here.

So why is it that people still think that renewable energy sources are not viable when all these technologies are available? It seems to be hard for many to accept, but solar and wind are not the only alternative sources available to us. With a combination of several or all of these methods we are completely able to supply power in a safe and renewable way. We just have to get over the idea that it has to be either one technology or another.
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You've done nothing to address base load issues

2:07 AM, Thu 5 Jun 2008 .. Posted by Anonymous
You missed a very big point:
- base load means it will not vary depending on weather (which solar and wind both do).
and another big point:
- transmission costs of electricity over distance

Yep, so it's both sunny and windy in Perth and cloudy and dead still in Sydney. Where's your "base load" for sydney coming from now? What if it is cloudy and still in perth too?

Wind and solar can not be base load, they require a reliable, unvarying power supply to fill in the gaps. Storage of energy of the amounts necessary is problematic and low yield.
That means coal, geothermal, hydro or nuclear. Now why are you so anti-nuclear when it has effectively no greenhouse emissions and a vastly better safety record than coal? Drag your thinking out of the 1970s nuclear war doom and gloom scenarios.
Hydro: wrecks massive tracts of land via dams. Also relies on rainfall, something Australia isn't so great on.
Geothermal: great, if you can get to it. As a pretty geologically boring place Oz isn't so well equipped for taking advantage of this.

This is why people like you shouldn't comment on energy production: you're fundamentalists when it comes to nuclear.

The big and urgent problem currently is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions: which nuclear does rather well. We have oodles of uranium and we need something to get us off coal. Windfarms: well we have another type of niche fundamentalist environmental types protesting to stop them on account of the one orange breasted parrot that might possibly die per year.

Wake up and realise that nuclear is an option and one to consider.

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SAY NO TO A NUCLEAR AUSTRALIA

Can We Rely on Renewable Energy?

You've done nothing to address base load issues

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