The most energy hungry industrial complex in Australia powered by the dirtiest polluting electricity generators is teetering on closing, with the loss of 600 jobs. How much greenhouse gas pollution per job? Surely much better to absorb the displaced workforce into other industries and leave Al smelting to countries that use renewable energy to power them, like Iceland! And use less aluminium, and improve recycling systems.

Correction to my previous post. It is Federal MP for Corio, Richard Marles who has stated that Alcoa will be shielded from 95% of the carbon tax. Shorten has only stated he believes it is possible for Alcoa to survive in Geelong. Later reports have Victoria's Premier Ted Baillieu, saying there are no guarantees. Greg Combet on Insiders said it was the dollar and "input costs" which were causing problems for Alcoa, as if renewable energy targets and countless existing carbon taxes under different guises and names haven't contributed to Alcoa's most significant "input" cost.

Hi Rod,

You claim that China's nuclear developments dwarf electricity generated by its wind and solar efforts. This reflects the situation 5-10 years ago. The situation is now dramatically different.

It long ago became clear that nuclear will make a much smaller contribution to China's power than wind and solar.

Here are the facts & projections :

China's grid ~1000GW (2020 ~1600GW)

Solar: now: 1GW + 100mill homes use solar hot water. By 2015, 10-15GW/yr installation (50-100GW solar by 2020).

Wind : now 45GW, 2020 180-200GW; 2050: 1000GW

Nuclear : now 11GW, 2020 60-80GW.  Unlike wind and solar, where installations are exceeding plans, planned nuclear installations are being scaled back.

 By end of decade virtually all of China's new electricity generation could come from renewables.

China knows it has to get off coal and the rate of new coal plant building is slowing (and inefficient plants are being turned off).  

Hi Rod,

It is really important to base these discussions on facts not just world views.

Australia's performance on renewables (wind, solar):

We could be doing much more, but our politicians (both sides) act as if climate change isn't happening. However, it is a fact that 22% of South Australia's electricity is generated by wind and now the grid needs work to increase that contribution.  This is internationally impressive.

Victoria and NSW could have a much bigger wind capacity if there wasn't such a successful campaign against wind.. makes no sense at all.

Solar has been a long time coming but Australians have installed 1.4GW of power on their roofs (decent sized power station).  Solar PV is about to become cost competitive so expect a big change here.

The solar thermal plants are new, but international activity is impressive. There are structural porblems about solar thermal implementation but they are being addressed. The ACT approach to developing larger scale solar is interesting and it will show that the price structures being used in Govt figures are dramatically overpriced (to make solar uncompetitive).

My point about China is that they are installing renewable energy capacity by 2020 that is 3-6x Australia's energy needs... actual wind farms & solar installed. This doesn't need 1 billion people, it just needs capital. The capital requirements are not impossible for Australia. The alternative is that we go broke importing oil.

Keith I guess you mean the big solar plants like Moree .. not happening or Solar Dawn .. great name still born.  With manufacturing closing down and leaving Australia, the only valid point you do make is that we won't need as much power.  Tragedy is that there won't be as much of the taxpayers money to throw at ludicrously uneconomical plants that can't get up even when we pay for 30% of them.

What is most clear in Australia with 5 years of Labour/Green government is that they have achieved zip in this area.

Always remember to rescale China's activity .. divide by 60 to compare with a Australia.  And I guess when they are rapidly becoming the world's manufacturer they need to throw everything at it.

The comparisons you leave out for China is that their nuclear and thermal coal/gas generated electricity makes their solar and wind developments look tiny.

David,

There are 2 reasons why nuclear won't be acceptable in Australia.

i) People fear living in a contaminated environment.  Fukushima brought back to Germany the shock of a large part of southern Germany becoming contaminated by Chernobyl... not enough radioactivity to make the place uninhabitable, but enough to put nuclear monitors off scale for an extended period and to have all fresh produce banned.  So I'm not surprised Germany has pulled out of nuclear.

ii) You don't need it.  The Germans are the first to acknowledge this.  They will not go back to coal, there is a clear intention to be more aggressive about renewable energy.  In Australia we have the best solar and wind resources.  Apart from the Don Quixote-like actions of the NSW, Victorian (and even Federal Govt) re wind, there is huge public support for both wind and solar. Citizens (not just the rich either) have themselves purchased 1.4GW solar to hedge against rising energy prices. If there is national acceptance the price of energy will go down.

You acknowledge that wind is mature.  South Australia has one of the highest wind energy generation % in the world (22%). We can do this without the fear of nuclear accidents.

Rod's fear that solar and wind are incapable of significant energy generation illustrates the effectiveness of the fossil fuel lobbies.  It doesn't reflect reality.

 I suspect rising costs of purchasing oil, plus more obvious global warming effects may trigger the change within a decade.

I have pointed out to you before Peter, that our views are not as different as you seem to think they are.

I am in favour of NP, but I would prefer that we start with Gen IV reactors, rather than conventional BWRs.

Consequently I am hanging out for favourable press coming from the raft of FBRs under construction in Russia, China, and India.

Thanks to the Fukushima disaster and TEPCO's incredible incompetence, we, unfortunately, are going to get quite a few years before the public debate over NP can become rational.  So waiting isn't actually an option.

Unlike you, I think we need to act more quickly than the public can be expected to warm to the idea of NP. 

I am confident that sometime in the next 10-20 years we will start to bring NP plants online in this country, but not at a fast rate.  We will get a single 1GW plant, and then a few years later we'll start to build the 2nd, and maybe they will start to roll them out then - but that will be 2030, and they'll still produce less electricity than we currently get from Hydro.

Rod,

We need maybe 100GW to cover most of our needs (others will have the actual numbers). China will have 200GW wind by 2020 and around 100GW solar by 2020.  So the power needs of Australia are not a big deal in terms of what is being done around the world now (approx 1/3rd of what China will be generating by wind and solar in 2020).

What do you think happens when you burn coal ... you heat up water to turn turbines to generate electricity? The reason solar thermal is being considered in Sth Australia is that it can bolt it on to a coal plant, instead of burning coal you get your heat via the sun.  This is also the reason that France's big nuclear group has invested in solar as the back end is the same be it for coal, nuclear or solar.  

Thing is that wind and solar are direct-drive in capturing energy from the sun. With PV, turning solar energy into electricity and using that to drive cars is pretty efficient. (Compare efficiencies of a petrol and electric car).

300MW solar thermal plants are being built now and it is just the beginning. 

I'm not suggesting this is anything other than transforming, but it is being done around the world now.  We are stuck in a time warp tilting at windmills (literally) at the moment ... while China plans for 1000GW of wind power by 2050.

Time to wake up.

Even if there was bipartisan support tomorrow to start building NP stations, there would need to be a public education process first.

In the late 30's, the majority of British parliamentarians knew that war was coming.  It was deeply unpopular with the people, and so without a crisis, not much was going to happen.  NP is in the same state.

So, let us assume it takes another 1-2 electoral cycles for public opinion to swing.

Then we are faced with "where does the first one go".  I have more chance of a date with a supermodel than there is a chance that the first one will go somewhere logical.

The logical place is to put it where you've just decommissioned an old coal power station, because the soil is already contaminated, there is coolant (water), and big power lines.

It will take years of enquiries before that is settled, and the first one will be placed in a spot no-one cares about - the middle of nowhere.

NP has to happen, in my opinion, it just isn't going to happen fast enough.

Right now wind power is ready.  It can be built quickly, and it isn't all that expensive.  We need lots of them, and spread as far and wide as we can.  They needs lots of EHV and/or UHV lines, but so does NP.

In fact such EHV and UHV lines can be economically justified, right now, simply in their ability to reduce the cost burden of localised peak demands.

David leComte – Sorry on all counts,

Yes, I did misinterpret what you were saying.  My apologies.

Why are you attacking me Peter for doing some simple arithmetic, based on the most optimistic assumptions I can find, and yet which still shows that PVA can't power just one small aluminium smelter?

If you attack people who agree with you this way, how do you treat people who don't?

If you wish to comment on my articles - at least read them.

Oh, and by the way, my surname is leComte - not leConte. My French-Canadian forebears left France long before it became fashionable to change the spelling to the more modern form.

The reason I am concentrating on just one small smelter is because that is what the article is about - what could or should be done, or not be done, about this Pt Henry plant.

My point is that, for this plant, I see little benefit us doing anything.

On a grander scale, though, that is a different story altogether, but not relevant to the article.

Think terra watts not megawatts.  Think nuclear, coal, etc .. solar thermal is just solar that "loses energy in the transfer to thermal storage".

The real issue is mathematics education.  Clearly some people can't do the maths.

Your comment shows a lack of understanding.  It is pointless trying to explain to people who are more interested in promoting their ideological beliefs than in trying to understand what is being explained.

You say "PVA costs about $1/watt, installed in large amounts.

You can get close to 4Wh/day (average) from a 1W PVA system."

So what? How much does PV provide at night?  How much when overcast?  How much overbuild capacity is needed to provide reliable power 24/7.  What is the storage cost? What is the cost of transmission?

You could learn by reading the Elliston et al. paper and the critique links provided earlier today. 

Your comment about power for one plant is nonsense.  The argument is about the least cost way to reduce emissions from electricity, not for just one plant.  However, if we want aluminium smelters, and other manufacturing industries, to survive be sustainable we need to maintain our natural advantages of low cost energy.  If we also want low emissions electricity, then we need low cost, low emissions electricity.  The only technology that can do that is nuclear - but only if we remove the impediments that make expensive in the western democracies, and especially in Australia.

Aluminium is often referred to as liquid electricity. It is strategically imperative for any aluminium producer to find the cheapest, most reliable electricity supply. Better still if electricity can be secured on very long term (eg government-underwriten) contracts.  For the ethically challenged, such imperatives will outweigh environmental considerations. (The idea of a social licence to operate is not universally shared - so the playing field is far from level).

The killer line in the articel is: "This plant is particularly vulnerable because of its age, scale and product mix". And therein lies the dilemma for governments. What is the strategic objective for the business  and is it really sustainable? Is there a market for higher purity aluminium and if this can be achieved economcially, will the plant (or a successor) have the scale and the cost base to be really sustainable - especially under a carbon mechanism where we pay overseas producers to improve the efficiency of their plants. (Or is "more sustainable" just a vague term used to justify short term handouts to dampen the poliical falliout) I realise that 600 jobs  (times at least 10 times more with multiplier effects) are at stake, but there is a responsibility on behalf of the tax payer as well as the employees to support long term wealth creation - which is the only sustainable way toward "job security" - as far as that is possible in a global economy.

David,

you make a good point.

Given where the price of oil is going (and drain on balance of payments), perhaps a better use of resources would be to get behind electrifying Australia's transport system powered by renewables.

Peter,

Numbers mean nothing re nuclear because noone can build without Govt being prepared to pick up the bill for an accident.  Also the shutdown/waste disposal costs can't even be addressed in a meaningful way (or they never are as they blow the budget). Nuclear would need bipartisan support. It won't happen in Australia, so why waste time on theoreticals?

The estimate for costs of upgrading the French power plants comes from a Jan 2012, major page report re Fukushima reaction by the French nuclear safety watchdog. 

Why do you try to smear when you are confronted with facts you don't like?

" .... Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire concluded that no plants needed to be shut down immediately but that steps should be taken as "soon as possible" to improve safety at France's 58 reactors."... cost estimate by the authority was 10 bill euro.

In response to Keith Williams.

PVA costs about $1/watt, installed in large amounts.

You can get close to 4Wh/day (average) from a 1W PVA system.

That means you need 2GW of installed PVA (around $2B) to generate enough power (on average) for just one very small aluminium smelter.

Alcan's facility in Qld for instance, is three times the size, and Alcoa's plant in Portland is twice the size.

Panels are rated for about 10 years, inverters and the like for only 5.  Assuming a relatively conservative amount of depreciation, say 12%, you are looking at this power costing you around $240M/year, ie 8.2c per kWh just in depeciation.  Running costs, and transmission costs would probably double that.

These costs are in the right ball park to be considered feasible (especially as panels get cheaper and more efficient).

Note that to get reasonable capacity factors you would need to use power from many smaller PVA plants dispersed over a large part of Australia (and in dry parts of the country).  Given the poor capacity, and efficiency, of Australia's current "National Grid", transmission across State borders is effectively very limited, and indirectly, expensive.  Hence transmission costs would be high.

But the issue is - something that others keep missing - can the investment be justified just to keep one small, old, aluminium smelter operating.  I think not.

Keith Williams,  As usual, you are chattering complete nonsense.

Provide directly comparable costs for a system to achieve stated objectives with solar and with nuclear.  Stop pulling bits of irrelevant and unrelated statistics from Greenpeace and the other anti-nuke sites.  Provide properly comparable costs, then you could have a sensible discussion.  Intil then you are simply babbling idelogical nonsense.

No one has considered whether international trade in aluminium will be feasible in the slightly distant future.

What is known is that everything will become local including manufacturing as globalisation winds down. If aluminium remains expensive enough sea transport with sailing ships may well be feasible, or though large nuclear powered cargo ships are also under study.

If for various economic reasons international trade is not possible then aluminium manufacture would be much smaller.

This consideration is close enough that it should influence any major developments in processing and power generation.

Peter,

France is now contemplating a further $13 bill spend just to fix the backup systems on its nuclear plants.

Germany is out of the game.

No company has the resources to build a nuclear plant without Govt underwriting the risks.

How do you think Australia will get to build a nuclear plant within the next decade?

At least solar and wind plants can be started tomorrow.

Watch the ACT for today's price for solar.  This will get rid of lots of silly commentary on actual costs of solar.

David,

I wasn't suggesting that all of the power come from solar-thermal.  Surely solar PV could do a lot of heavy lifting much more cost effectively and let wind and solar thermal take slack.

Whatever, this would be a really big project, but if you want to keep this industry in Victoria the energy requirement needs to be addressed.

I think BZE has done a study for solar substitution on the Adelaide coal plants, Matthew what were the metrics there and was it just solar thermal or was there a solar PV component?

As we have learned from the recent history, solar thermal is vastly more expensive per watt than almost any other form of energy generation.

In the absence of ENORMOUS government subsidies it's is also sub-economic. (spare me the fossil fuel 'subsidy' pablum)

Just saying it doesn't mean it will get cheaper.  Vested interests have been using this mantra since the late 80's.

Solar thermal requires specific geographic and environmental pre-conditions...none of which are present at Geelong or Portland.

Then there's the not insignificant problem of having enough MW to drive the turbines required to generate sufficient energy to run an aluminium smelter.

For it to work anywhere near minimum there needs to be a coal or gas-fired augmentation plant located nearby to pick up the slack.  Where is it?

Solar thermal fails on all counts:

- Highest capital cost per watt amongst renewables

- Low capacity factors (<20%)

- Excessive land usage

- Excessive water usage

- no discernible emissions reduction and as environmentally efficacious as carbon capture & storage

Maybe someone could outline how many of these plants exist in Australia and detail their level of commercial success?

The Federal government is susbsidising the Kogan Creek Solar Project to the tune of ~$105 million and counting.

The project will generate ~1.8% of QLD's daily energy needs.

A look at the numbers show the cost of Kogan Creek Solar = $2,380MWh.

This compares to the current average cost of QLD electricity of $38MWh

Winner. winner. winner.

In response to Keith Williams:

Pt Henry requires about 8GWh per day depending on the efficiency of the plant.  Given that it is old, I would expect that 8GWh/day is conservative.

Even if I assume 300MW solar plants, these would average around 0.9 - 1.2GWh/day.

So we would be looking at having around 8 of these, not one as you suggest.

The largest system I know (operating) is the SEGS system in the Mojave desert (354MW peak).  It consists of 9 plants, but the largest are only 80MW (SEGS VIII and SEGS IX).

Matthew, are you following this thread?  Do you know of any larger ones?

Hi David,

I don't claim to be up-to-date, but there seem to be several solar thermal plants bigger than 300MW under construction, so I don't see why you would build small (50MW) facilities for Aluminium production.

Given the dramatic decline in the cost of solar PV, I assumed that if you were to go solar, it would be a combination of solar PV and solar thermal, where the thermal plant(s) might be used solely for bridging power generation.  In this case you might need just 1 plant around the 300MW size, with a wind contribution too.

Surely it makes sense to explore this kind of approach as the area is perfect for solar & wind?

It is time for Aussie ingenuity to be tapped.

Point taken about whether Aluminium is too cheap at the moment.

Not in Russia and China .. where most of the aluminium is produced.  And not in India either.

Think the only people who are living in denial are the people who say "the world is embarking on a low carbon path".

"Here I review the paper “Simulations of Scenarios with 100% Renewable Electricity in the Australian National Electricity Market” by Elliston et al. (2011a)(henceforth EDM-2011).  That paper does not analyse costs, so I have also made a crude estimate of the cost of the scenario simulated and three variants of it.

For the EDM-2011 baseline simulation, and using costs derived for the Federal Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism (DRET, 2011b), the costs are estimated to be: $568 billion capital cost, $336/MWh cost of electricity and $290/tonne CO2 abatement cost.

That is, the wholesale cost of electricity for the simulated system would be seven times more than now, with an abatement cost that is 13 times the starting price of the Australian carbon tax and 30 times the European carbon price.  (This cost of electricity does not include costs for the existing electricity network).

Although it ignores costings, the EDM-2011 study is a useful contribution.  It demonstrates that, even with highly optimistic assumptions, renewable energy cannot realistically provide 100% of Australia’s electricity generation.  Their scenario does not have sufficient capacity to meet peak winter demand, has no capacity reserve and is dependent on a technology – ‘gas turbines running on biofuels’ - that exist only at small scale and at high cost."

http://bravenewclimate.com/2012/02/09/100-renewable-electricity-for-australia-the-cost/#comment-150150

There are some very silly statements, for example advocating solar and saying nuclear is too expensive.  Do those saying such thinks have any idea about the real costs?

David leConte says: “No Peter, I cant see that it would be worth all that effort just to support one small, aging, plant.”

What a silly statement.  The argument for nuclear is that if we want low emissions electricity, nuclear is by far the least cost way to supply it.

Regarding renewables to generate our electricity, they are totally uneconomic:

I encourage anyone with a browser to look where companies such as Alcan and Alcoa have their bigger plants.  Ie dont just look where their plants are, look at the sizes as well.

If they can see a strong correlation between the relative cost of wholesale power and these locations then I must have missed something.

The age of the plant is also important, as it seems older plants need around 19kWh/kg, and the newest ones only 12.8 kW/kg.

Including the purchase and transport of Bauxite and Alumina, and the extraction of Alumina from Bauxite, the electricity costs are only supposed to constitute around 20% of total costs.

Thus the cost of capital to build a new efficient, and mechanised, plant is probably at least as important as the cost of electricity.

The Pt Henry plant is quite small.  It only outputs 190 kt/yr.

That requires around 15*190,000 MWh, ie around 2,850,000 MWh.  That is an average of 7808MWh/day.

Most of the larger solar thermal plants, operating, are around 50MW peak.  They probably output around 200MWh/day.

So, forty such solar thermal plants would be needed to power just one very small aluminium smelter.  Even then operation would be intermittent, and would need to be crammed into a single shift that was shorter in winter than it was in summer.

It doesn't seem viable to me.

It highlights the trap that we have built for ourselves. Because fossil fuels have given us such an incredibly cheap form of energy, we have used that to create products, such as aluminium soft-drink cans.

Now we realise that we cannot continue to burn fossil fuels.

As a consequence we need to reconsider the value we place on things like Aluminium.  Maybe we need to go back to steel cans?  Maybe we need to start paying people 5c to return their Aluminium cans?  Each Aluminium can costs us around 0.25 kWh, ie around 5c at retail electricity prices.

Bill,

You mention coal and nuclear.

Nuclear is a bridge too far. It is clear that Governments must guarantee nuclear plants and they are getting more and more expensive.  Just look at the additional costs (multiple billions) that France is contemplating to make their existing plants safer. It isn't realistic in Australia when we have such good resources of safe and readily implementable renewable sources (wind, solar). 

Coal. You assume that global warming doesn't matter.  The experts say we are heading for disaster sooner rather than later. Coal has to become more expensive as a prelude to phase out.  Europe is rapidly moving to have new energy plants dominated by renewables now. 

Solar : Watch what happens in the ACT before you conclude that solar is too expensive.  We shall have a real estimate of costs very soon... they are clearly dramatically lower than current Govt figures which are predicated on protecting fossil fuel expansion.