Energy & Nuclear

From Tuesday (1 July), businesses emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases will be required to monitor and measure the emissions ahead of reporting them to the Government by October next year.

Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator Penny Wong, said the requirements were part of Australia’s new National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting System.

“The National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting System will be an important part of our efforts to tackle climate change as we move to establish an emissions trading scheme,” Senator Wong said.

“The emissions trading scheme is at the heart of the Rudd Government’s plan to reduce greenhouse emissions. It is the best way to tackle climate change at lowest cost to families and business.

“This new system will play an important role by more precisely quantifying the greenhouse gases Australia produces. It will also, for the first time, provide robust and comparable information to the public on the greenhouse and energy profiles of Australia’s large corporations.”

From 1 July, corporate groups that emit 125 kilotonnes or more of greenhouse gases each year, or produce or consume 500 terajoules or more of energy, will be required to collect data to meet annual reporting requirements. Corporations controlling facilities that emit more than 25 kilotonnes of greenhouse gases, or use or produce 100 terajoules or more of energy, will also need to collect data.

(25 kilotonnes of greenhouse gas emissions is equivalent to the annual emissions of more than 6,200 cars. 100 terajoules equates to the annual energy use of around 1900 households.)

While the Act governing the system comes into effect on 1 July 2008, relevant corporations will have until 31 August 2009 to apply to register under the scheme, and until 31 October 2009 to submit their first annual greenhouse and energy report.

“Many of these corporations already report their emissions and energy use to meet investor demands under existing programs, or as part of a growing corporate commitment to social responsibility and sustainability,” Senator Wong said.

“But others may be unsure as to whether or not they are covered by the system, and the Department of Climate Change will work closely with them to ensure they can comply.”

The Department of Climate Change has developed an online calculator to help businesses work out whether the system applies to them. The department will continue to run information sessions and provide guidance on using the online reporting system, along with a ‘reporting hotline’.

In an ongoing effort to get through to the Queensland Government, our local ratepayers association is considering a full-page advertisement in the environmental liftout of a local newspaper. It would include an open letter to the Premier of Queensland, the Hon. Anna Bligh MP:

Dear Madam Premier,

Residents and business operators within the Daintree rainforest take their custodial responsibilities very seriously; after all, it is also their own futures they are protecting. They possess an extraordinary knowledge of the area’s global environmental significance and understand the importance of
sustaining a world-class ecotourism economy.

Every year, over sixty businesses attempt to showcase their bona fides as environmental custodians to the half-million or so travellers from the world-over, but the all-important partnership between the host community and its ecotourism clientele, is undermined by the disgrace and impropriety of the world’s worst-practice electricity supply; hundreds of concurrently running engine-generators spewing pollutants into the last remnant of the oldest surviving rainforest in the world. It is anathema to the custodial community and travel altruism is understandably incensed. It is also economically crippling, with fuel prices fast approaching $2/litre; a single family’s modest electrical needs may cost around $170/week for the fuel alone to generate electricity through an internal combustion engine.

Any justification for adherence to the existing policy of excision, as a development choke, is redundant, as the Daintree is now more rigorously regulated than probably anywhere else on the planet. The local community calls upon the Queensland Government to embrace a new partnership, that protects, to the greatest possible extent, the exceptional environmental and ecotourism values, including the people and communities, through renewable optimisation, innovation, development and provision of world’s best-practice electricity supply.

Together we can do much better.
Your faithful partners in protection,
etc.,

I’ve often thought that maybe the Kyoto Protocol could have been more aptly named the ‘Don Quixote Protocol.’ Why? Because ‘Kyoto’ sounds like ‘Quixote’ and, in the novel by Miguel de Cervantes, Quixote fought an imaginary enemy of giants that turned out to be windmills. Today, our imaginary enemy is ‘big warming’ driven by CO2 conjured up in computer models. One of the consequences of fighting this phantom menace is the UK’s looming energy gap. Instead of windmills, we have wind turbines. This brings me to a new report by the Centre for Policy Studies entitled: ‘Wind Chill’

The summary states:

Britain faces an energy gap of up 32 GW by 2015 as older coal and nuclear power stations are paid off. At the same time, Britain has made a binding commitment to deliver 15% of all its energy consumption from renewable energy sources by 2020.

Government policy is based on using wind power both to help close the energy gap and to meet its renewable energy targets

If the Government is to meet its renewables target, then the amount of electricity to be generated by wind farms
will have to increase by more than 20 times.

Expensive

This will be very expensive. Electricity generated by wind turbines already enjoys huge subsidies and tax breaks
through the Renewables Obligation scheme.

The Government has now accepted that the total costs of meeting the 2020 target will be £100 billion. This is the
equivalent of £4,000 for every household in the country.

WIND CHILL

The Royal Academy of Engineering has calculated that wind energy is two and a half times more expensive than other forms of electricity generation in the UK.

Unreliable

Wind generation does not provide a reliable supply of power. It must be backed up by other baseload sources.

Greater reliance on wind power could lead to electricity supply disruptions if the wind does not blow, blows too hard or does not blow where wind farms are located.

The experience of Denmark – often hailed for its pioneering development of wind farms – is that wind energy is expensive, inefficient and not even particularly “green”. There are signs that other countries are losing some of their enthusiasm for wind power.

Unpopular

There is no evidence that people are prepared to pay for wind power. Only 15% of people say that they are fairly or very willing to pay higher electricity bills if the extra money funds renewable power sources such as wind. The figures for “very unwilling” and “fairly unwilling” are 37% and 24% respectively.

This over-reliance on expensive wind energy, coupled with rising gas prices, will drive six million households
into fuel poverty.

Disrupting

Present wind farm planning applications do not take into consideration the economic viability of the project or whether the topography and meteorological conditions are suitable.

The planning system already favours wind farm developers. But if the Government is to meet its renewable target by 2020, then current planning regulations will have to be weighted even further in favour of wind farm suppliers.

The Ministry of Defence has recently lodged last minute objections to at least four onshore wind farms claiming
the turbines will interfere with their national air defence radar.

The alternative

The energy gap must be filled with equivalent baseload capacity as quickly as possible.

The UK should therefore now develop its nuclear, clean coal (including coal gasification) and other renewable supplies of energy (particularly tidal).

Wind energy, in contrast, should only play a negligible role in plugging Britain’s looming energy gap.

There is also an article about the report in the Daily Mail: Wind turbines are ‘unreliable and will cost each home £4,000’ claims think-tank

Oh! the joy of living under the Soviet EU and policies driven by global warming alarmism:

The unexpected shutdown of two power stations on Tuesday, May 29, led to the worst disruption to the UK’s power network in more than 20 years, prompting new concerns over the stability of Britain’s ageing power grid.

However, industry sources say that a key factor was the European Union’s Large Combustion Plant Directive (LCPD), which sets strict limits on the number of hours that some of Britain’s largest and most heavily polluting coal and oil-fired power stations can operate before they have to close in 2015. The time is measured in “stack hours” — the length of time that chimney stacks, rather than individual generation units, are in use.

The Times: EU rule kept half a million homes in the dark

On 10th June we learned that Australia’s first locally manufactured hybrid car will roll off Toyota’s production line in less than two years, in a deal Victorian Premier John Brumby has heralded as a ‘coup’.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Toyota’s president Katsuaki Watanabe made the announcement today in Japan.

ABC News: Brumby lauds $35m Toyota hybrid ‘coup’

I don’t have any axe to grind over Hybrid cars, I’d just like to know the truth about how ‘green’ they really are. In the US and UK there has been some controversy over the ‘dust to dust’ or ‘life cycle’ CO2 emissions, costs and energy useage of the Toyota Prius. Toyota supposedly produced their own report, which to the best of my knowledge has never been made public. A CNW Marketing report claimed that the dust to dust cost per mile for a Toyota Prius was $3.249, compared to $3.027 for Hummer H2. There is more in a balanced article from the UK Telegraph from 2007 entitled: Who are you kidding?

This news has reached Australia:

As more Australians scramble to buy hybrid petrol/electric cars, Britain’s biggest-selling auto magazine has taken a swipe at them, saying hybrids are no better for emissions than an efficient diesel or petrol-driven car.

The magazine Auto Express says none of the hybrids’ advertised emissions figures were borne out in their test drives.

ABC News: Hybrid cars ‘not so green’

Meanwhile, Toyota are promising a ‘plug-in’ hybrid for 2010.

Thanks to Luke for alerting me to Australia embracing the hybrid car, while I was on holiday in Spain – I’m still catching up!

There is a new paper (in press) in the journal Climatic Change by Peter Sheenan of the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia entitled: ‘The new global growth path: implications for climate change analysis and policy’

The Abstract states:

In recent years the world has moved to a new path of rapid global growth, largely driven by the developing countries, which is energy intensive and heavily reliant on the use of coal—global coal use will rise by nearly 60% over the decade to 2010. It is likely that, without changes to the policies in place in 2006, global CO2 emissions from fuel combustion would nearly double their 2000 level by 2020 and would continue to rise beyond 2030. Neither the SRES marker scenarios nor the reference cases assembled in recent studies using integrated assessment models capture this abrupt shift to rapid growth based on fossil fuels, centred in key Asian countries. While policy changes must and will occur, the realism of the reference case is critical for analysis and policy formulation. Using such a reference path will have significant effects on impact and damage estimates, on the analysis of achievable stabilisation paths and on estimates of the costs of achieving stabilisation at a given GHG concentration level. Use of a realistic reference path is also essential for the international negotiations, arising out of the COP13 meeting in Bali, to achieve widely desired stabilisation goals: both the level of emission reductions to be achieved, and the preferred distribution of those reductions over countries and regions, will be heavily influenced by the reference case assumed.

Meanwhile, China has clearly overtaken the United States as the world’s leading emitter of carbon dioxide, a new study has found, its emissions increasing 8 percent in 2007. The Chinese increase accounted for two-thirds of the growth in the year’s global greenhouse gas emissions.

As UK Aussie Rolf Harris would say, “Can you tell what it is yet?”

Hat tip to Prometheus.