Australia's carbon trap
It’s clearly not on the agenda of the front-running, Abbott-led Coalition, but a survey of Australia’s stationary energy emissions underlines the case of why a price on carbon would be a useful tool to reduce emissions.
A report on Australia’s electricity generation and associated emissions from coal, gas, liquid fuel and renewables, undertaken for the Climate Group’s Electricity Generation Report suggests that Australia is both greener and dirtier at the same time.
The country cut both its output and its emissions from stationary energy in 2009, because of falling demand and the increased use of renewable and gas-fired power generation. Power stations generated 208 million megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity, 0.9 per cent less than 2008, and emitted 181 million tonnes of greenhouse gas, a decrease of 2.4 per cent on 2008.
But the cut in emissions could have been so much greater. The irony is that while renewable energy generation increased by 11.2 per cent and gas by 8 per cent, and most of Australia’s cleanest base-load stations reduced their output, Australia’s largest and dirtiest power stations – such as the Hazelwood, Yallourn, and Loy Yang A brown coal power stations in Victoria – increased both their output and their emissions in the past year.
Fossil fuel stations, overall, cut their output by 2.4 per cent, but Hazelwood, the most emission intensive utility in the country with 1.37 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent for every megawatt hour, lifted its output (and its emissions) by 3.4 per cent. The second dirtiest power station in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, Yallourn, increased its output by 2.6 per cent, while the largest, Loy Yang A, lifted its output by 1.0 per cent.
The most carbon intensive power station in South Australia, Playford B, and the most most carbon intensive generator in NSW, Redbank, also increased their output of energy and emissions in 2009.
“We could have had a much better outcome,” says director (Australia) of the Climate Group, Rupert Posner. “This is a clear example of why we need a price on carbon. We need to reduce our dependence on our most greenhouse polluting power stations but without a price on carbon the cheapest, rather than the least-polluting power stations are used first.”
Posner also says that the report highlights why using direct funds to close down installations such as Hazelwood – clearly the intention of the Victorian climate change policy – could be an attractive proposition. The problem most people find with this approach is that it provides a “private carbon price to a select few, when so much more could be achieved with a broader mechanism and, some argue, at a lesser cost."
The report notes that, while renewable power generation has increased the most in the last year, thanks mostly to new wind farms in Victoria and South Australia, it still accounts for just 9.3 per cent of Australia’s energy output: it’s share, according to Posner, is less than it was a decade ago before the Howard government introduced the first mandatory renewable energy target.
The state by state breakdown makes for interesting reading. Victoria, which embarrassed both its own federal Labor Party and the Coalition with the release of its ambitious climate change legislation in the middle of the federal campaign, remains the most energy intensive state, with coal accounting for 98.3 per cent of emissions and 93 per cent of electricity output. Gas output actually fell during the year and has now been overtaken by renewables, courtesy of some new wind farms, including the country’s largest at Waubra. Renewable sources accounted for 4 per cent of Victoria’s electricity generation.
NSW has registered a small shift from coal to gas-fired generation with emissions from coal declining by 4.2 million tonnes, or 6.3 per cent, and the share of gas rising to more than 4 per cent from 1.5 per cent. However, the amount electricity generated from renewable sources in NSW declined 0.7 per cent, mostly due to a decline in hydro-electricity, which still accounted for nearly 80 per cent of the output. Bioenergy grew by almost 17 per cent in 2009 to provide 16 per cent of New South Wales’ renewable electricity.
Queensland was the only other state to report negative growth (minus 0.1 per cent) from renewables, with a small rise in bioenergy, mostly using sugar cane waste, being offset by a decline in hydro. Renewable sources account for just 3.8 per cent of Queensland’s electricity generation in 2009.
South Australia lifted its renewable output by 25 per cent in 2009 as it brought on several new wind power stations, and renewable generation accounted for 17 per cent of total electricity generation in the state.
Tasmania’s vast hydro resources make it the state with the largest share of renewables – 91 per cent. Its largest power generator is the Reece power station which accounts for 12 per cent of the state’s generation. The report says a lack of new sites for hydroelectric dams limits growth in this energy sector, but generation can increase or decline with efficiency improvements or changes in rainfall, and in the past year hydroelectric generation increased by 12 per cent. Wind power grew by 8 per cent and now represents 6 per cent of Tasmania’s total renewable energy for 2009.
Top 20 power stations* by CO2 emissions in 2009
*All are coal fired
Comments on this article
What about some due diligence?
There is a thoroughly alarming tendency for calls for action and significant investment with what I can only consider a frighteningly cavalier disregard for due diligence.
Global warming is paraded as the great motivator so let us use the tools provided by the UNFCCC’s IPCC to see just what we are buying with our investment.
From their Simplified expression Radiative forcing, ∆F (Wm-2) found here: http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/w..., which reads: “CO2 ∆F = αln(C/C_0) where α = 5.35, C is carbon dioxide in parts per million and C_0 is the unperturbed concentration”. This means we can calculate the expected change in forcing between two CO2 values like this: 5.35*LN(high_value/low_value), which I’ll do in a few examples in a moment.
In 2007, the IPCC’s Assessment Report 4 (AR4, WGI) indicated increases in atmospheric CO2, CH4, N2O and sundry halocarbons added a total of 2.64 W/m2 for the period 1750-2005 and that this resulted in less than 1°C warming (the wording is rather different in AR4 from previous reports but states:
”The total temperature increase from 1850–1899 to 2001–2005 is 0.76°C [0.57°C to 0.95°C].” -- Summary for Policy Makers (p5, ar4-wg1-spm.pdf here: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-spm.pdf)
Regardless, we are concerned with 20th Century temperature change as human-driven and can use the change in forcing and the resultant change in Earth’s effective emission temperature to show that each additional Watt in forcing delivers less than 0.4°C warming (mid-range estimates suggests each additional W/m2 delivers just 0.29°C but we are using worst-case plus here).
All we need now is to know how much CO2 emission delivers 1 ppm in the atmosphere, which we get from the Carbon Dioxide information Analysis Center (http://cdiac.ornl.gov/), see the FAQ here http://cdiac.ornl.gov/pns/faq.html:
Q. In terms of mass, how much carbon does 1 part per million by volume of atmospheric CO2 represent?
A. Using 5.137 x 10^18 kg as the mass of the atmosphere (Trenberth, 1981 JGR 86:5238-46), 1 ppmv of CO2 = 2.13 Gt of carbon.
and convert carbon to carbon dioxide:
Q. Why do some estimates of CO2 emissions seem to be about 3 1/2 times as large as others?
A. When looking at CO2 emissions estimates, it is important to look at the units in which they are expressed. The numbers are sometimes expressed as mass of CO2 but are listed in all of our estimates only in terms of the mass of the C (carbon). Because C cycles through the atmosphere, oceans, plants, fuels, etc. and changes the ways in which it is combined with other elements, it is often easier to keep track only of the flows of carbon. Emissions expressed in units of C can be easily converted to emissions in CO2 units by adjusting for the mass of the attached oxygen atoms, that is by multiplying by the ratios of the molecular weights, 44/12, or 3.67.
So we know 1ppm CO2 = 7.81Gt (not allowing for any sequestration at all, although the same document states only 40% of emissions remain in the atmosphere, so really 19.5Gt anthropogenic emissions = +1ppm atmospheric carbon dioxide).
Now we can convert emissions not made (“saved”) to future warming averted.
So, how much are we going to spend to avert how much emission and what will it achieve?
A table of possible saving is a snap, first in Watts, then in °C on 3 scenarios in 3 savings of 50, 25 and 10 ppm involving emissions of 390Gt, 195Gt and 78Gt respectively, with no allowance for any sequestration:
Limit to 500 rather than 550ppm = 0.51W/m2 or 0.20°C
525 rather than 550ppm = 0.25W/m2 or 0.10°C
540 rather than 550ppm = 0.10W/m2 or 0.04°C
600 rather than 650ppm = 0.43W/m2 or 0.17°C
625 rather than 650ppm = 0.21W/m2 or 0.08°C
640 rather than 650ppm = 0.08W/m2 or 0.03°C
700 rather than 750ppm = 0.37W/m2 or 0.15°C
725 rather than 750ppm = 0.18W/m2 or 0.07°C
740 rather than 750ppm = 0.07W/m2 or 0.03°C
Bear in mind that the world is still sequestering a portion of our emissions so carbon restraint actually needs to be far greater than the listed avoided emissions. By CDIAC’s calculations only 40% of anthropogenic emissions are persistent in the atmosphere so the required “savings” above are really 975Gt, 488Gt and 195Gt emissions not made respectively.
Australia’s total annual emissions are less than 0.5Gt so we need to avoid all our current emissions for at least 150 years to avoid 10ppm and “save” perhaps a few hundredths of one degree.
Note well that these are not numbers presented by “big carbon” or anyone with a vested interest in fossil fuels but are the most extreme case generated by UNFCCC’s IPCC Working Group 1 (The Physical Science Basis) and undisputed numbers from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC).
Who thinks avoiding almost a trillion tons of carbon dioxide emissions is doable? Is it a good exchange for at best two-tenths of one degree “saving”? How much should society pay to aspire to such trivial results?
Instead of arm waving and demands for taxpayer-funded restructuring of the energy supply -- and society generally -- what about some due diligence? What, exactly, are we supposed to be getting for our money?
Gas is cheap to build, expensive to operate
Gas turbines are relatively cheap to build at around $1/W nameplate depending on the size of the turbine or less than half a modern super critical coal fired power station. However gas is far more expensive than coal today for every MW/h produced. The cost of gas is between $2.5 and $5/GJ. This cost is likely to rise steeply over the next few years as the infrastructure to export large quantities of gas from Queensland becomes available. Already Gas turbines are used as peaking plants that only operate when the wholesale price gets above about $80/MWh. In the future it will have to go much higher.
Regarding the comment that Nuclear Power station technology has come a long way since Chernobly and Three Mile Island. I am not sure where you are getting your information. The commercial reactors being built in India and China today are all based on the same designs as used in the state of the art Chernobyl and Three Mile Island reactors. While there has been some development of next generation reactors over the past 30 years, most of the people that were involved in the massive R&D that followed the development of the bomb have long since retired and with them has gone much of the knowledge and experience that was developed in that era.
As the death toll from Chernobyl continues to rise it is difficult to put an exact figure on the number of casualties. However it is widely accepted that more than 100,000 people have lost their lives to date. The economic cost of Chernobyl is several hundred billion dollars and continues to rise with the Ukraine spending more than 5% of its annual budget on Chernobyl related expenditure. This is in addition to the large area of land rendered uninhabitable for at least the next 250,000 years.
Forget the impossible
As I write, the only two comments to this story are pro-nuclear, which is a bit of a shame. Nuclear powered electricity generation is not going to happen in Australia because it will never be publicly acceptable.
Apart from the NIMBYs with a short-term safety risk objection, there are also many with a long-term objection to polluting the country with unnecessary radioactive waste. Until there is a proper plan to ensure that the waste can never become a public-purse problem (like carbon has) then there is no justification for choosing nuclear over renewables. There are so many clean alternatives available in Australia that nuclear just makes no sense.
Re Australia's carbon
Re Australia's carbon trap:
Those who would have us believe the dangers of nuclear power should get their minds into the 21st century. Nuclear power technology has much advanced since 3MileIsland and Chernobyl.
India and Norway are two countries researching and developing Thorium as a cleaner, greener nuclear power fuel. Uranium is so last century.
We have the scientists with the expertise, we have 3 times more Thorium than Uranium. What we don't have is the politicians with the foresight and initiative to fund the project.
By the way, electricity itself has killed more people than nuclear power stations ever have. Also think of the coal miners killed over the years mining the coal for power stations.
A few sites to ponder.
http://www.abc.net.au/quantum/scripts98/9820/thoriumscpt.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2006/04/14/1616391.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/counterpoint/stories/2010/2852923.htm
More greenwash
Giles,
You say: "But the cut in emissions could have been so much greater."
I agree. But for a different reason. If we had not blocked nuclear power for 40 odd years, especially for 20 years since the "Ecologically Sustainable Development" policies in Australia in the early 1990s banned consideration of nuclear, we'd now be well on the way towards achieving low emissions electricity generation - just like France, which has 75% of its electricity generated by nuclear power and emits less than 10% of our emissions from electricity.
Regarding Hazelwood, the cost to replace it with wind and gas is about twice the cost to replace it with gas alone. Wind and gas would save little more emissions than gas alone. The cost per tonne of emissions avoided by wind and gas is far higher than with gas alone.
http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/05/29/replacing-hazelwood-coal/
Wind power makes absolutely rational sense.