Old Koreelah
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Posts posted by Old Koreelah
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Let's hope you're right Bex; its a gamble with pretty high stakes, especially when the precautionary approach could be safer and relatively painless....I'm quite comfortable that in 2050 a "2010 predictions" post will be right there as well. -
...but we already do that.Subsidize coal! -
Well how's this for logic?My electricity supplier installed a smart meter, and supplied wonderful information about how I could use it to reduce my power bill, mainly by using power in the middle of the night.
So I started by buying a Hot Water System - not a cheap one but one designed for Off - ................
A bit like government, Turbs: infested with people who have more expertise in spin than in the area they have been given control over.
Remember the KISS principle. Simple, low-tech passive solar design usually beats the complicated systems salesmen try to sell you. Why are Australians still installing appliances that rely on burning coal to heat water?
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Maybe. Given its location in an advanced country, temperatures in Death Valley have been rigorously measured. For the same reason, it would not be the hottest place for humans: these days anyone passing through would likely be cocooned in air conditioned comfort.Death Valley is the hottest place on earthThere are several locations which are not only arguably hotter, but people live and work there. North-west China's Great Depression, Western Queensland, and worst of all, Ethiopia's Afar Triangle, where poor people live and work in hellish conditions.
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The same old problem; people won't switch to a a new fuel source until everyone else has (or at least enough people to support that fuel's wide distribution. 100 locations might allow it to take off with car drivers, but won't help flyers- especially given the reduced range inherent in alcohol fuels.It's been available in Capital Cities for about 4 years, The link is a brochure suggesting it would be available in 100 locations by 2011.http://www.caltex.com.au/Media Items/BioEflex FAQ.pdf -
Yes, solar electric is the ultimate, but I don't think my wooden Jodel is the ideal platform.I haven't checked the price though, probably 2c/litre cheaper than straight petrol to allow a totally seamless change as post Peak Oil starts to ramp up the cost of petrol price cycles.I'm still waiting for solar-electric
Good luck trying to find these new-fangled fuels at an airport. That's why diesel is so appealing: jetfuel is widely available.
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Probably already is, if I change the jets. My tanks and lines are supposed to be ethanol-tolerant. Why spoil good alcohol with petrochemicals?Looks like it's all over for you dinosaurs, just build an E-flex compatible motor. -
That's great Caltex. Now can we have a lead-free certified-quality petrol?
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Unfortunately true, Dafydd. Our leadership is lousy with lawyers, but very short of people with a good grasp of science and engineering.Well you want to see Mexico - four year olds begging in the street to a prepared script.There are some promising developments in producing bio-fuels via algae, and what better place to set up trial plants than right next to our existing coal-fired power stations. The CO2 could be pumped in and converted to methane- thereby getting double value from every tonne of coal (a bit like when steam engines started adding extra low-pressure cylinders to squeeze a bit moe efficiency from the used steam).
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A lot of America is a mess...and people are still risking their lives to get in!Don't worry too much about the Bible bashers, sure there was a boom in TV shows, which really were money grabbers, but I've never seen much in daily life, or too many churches for that matter; more beggars in the streets, unswept dirty footpaths which we wouldn't tolerate, and dirty piles of snow in the streets all winter. -
...I haven't seen any bible bashing going on; maybe its just random in northern NSW...Any survey of Americans would show a low interest in anything except the town hamburger joint - no trend there; but there always have and always will be some of the most brilliant minds in the world which motivate the others to follow.
Enormous damage caused by a stupid blunder by a few at the IPCC- zealoutry has no place in science.
What I mean by bible-bashing is the huge influence of churches and the hundreds of religious radio and TV stations in the USA. These put faith before reason; to them science is only okay if it doesn't conflict with stories passed down from ancient sheep herders.
I agree with you about the inward-looking nature of most Americans, and also that although the US has some of the worst problems, American enterprise comes up with innovative solutions
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Perhaps the most disturbing aspect is that the anti global warming backlash, well funded by fossil fuel industries, is playing on the growing distrust of science already endemic in the USA. Surveys show alarmingly low levels of scientific knowledge among ordinary Americans. The insidious influence of bible-bashing media is one major cause of this ignorance. An ominous trend for a fading Superpower that Australia has become very much dependent on.
The constant pressure from climate skeptics can only make that ignorance worse.
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Dear me Bex. I had developed quite a bit of respect for people like yourself who are out there developing new products- a process dependent on good science. Now you tell us that scientists are whores. I'm a little confused400,000 to 600,000 years of ice drilling evidence beats 40 to 60 years.Give the same scientists a few million with the promise of continued funding and they'll prove anything you want them too, they are whores.
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Actually Bex, you should have reported the full story. Arctic ice cap has been decreasing at an alarming rate. The continental Antarctic glaciers are moving faster into the ocean (where they will melt) but Antarctic sea ice is currently expanding due to local, short-term reason. The trend is ominous.The Polar Ice Caps are currently increasing in size and have been doing so for a while - and it's been pissing off the GW radicals that they have been doing so
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Not so, Captain. While I agree totally about good farmland given over to pampered racehorses, your points about base load and nuclear power may be out of date.Just remember, everyone, the next time your house or office is a bit cold, turn those heaters off and go put on warm sox, or the next time it is a bit hot, make sure you turn off those fans or AC units.Adjust your fridge/freezer so that you aren't selfishly keeping your food cold, and turn your pool pumps off too so that you don't use too much power.
We all need to do our bit, you know, to stop that naughty coal fired power stations from supplying the power that the community needs.
In the meantime the horse racing industry on the "prime agricultural land" in the Hunter will continue to induce the great unwashed masses to binge-drink & blow their cash gambling on racing while the new landed gentry squattocracy & a couple of Saudis with our best interests at heart continue to control that industry ......... while all flying in on their Gulfstreams.
The old bumper sticker said "Ban Mining. Let the masses freeze in the dark." Well just wait until there are rolling blackouts here in a year or 2 and watch how the average citizen insists on and votes for secure base-load power.
It is secure base-load power that underpins & provides almost all that we have and the only 2 real options are coal or nuclear. Your choice.
Nuclear power has only ever been economical when subsidised by a large national nuclear defence effort. (While being an opponent of nuclear energy, I must admit it ain't all bad; without it's by-products, the Voyager space probes would have died decades ago.)
Johnny Howard was a scathing critic of many good ideas, including solar power. He claimed renewables would never provide base load electricity. They have done so for decades in Tasmania and recent progress with renewables is very promising- unless it's undercut by subsidised coal.
You seem to be with the coal lobby, which readily resorts to scare-mongering about blackouts and huge power bills. The reality is that recent increases are mainly due to over-investments in the network. They did not anticipate the reduction in electricity consumption due to the boom in rooftop PVs.
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...which shows your selective reading (which we all suffer from). Perhaps you should become a little more open-minded and give those emails the attention they deserve.I tend to speed read the emails from my sustainable friends and then quickly delete them, but I recall one study which reported that cell life may be shorter than the pay back point for a lot of systems. -
Exactly, Soleair. You are on the money.It seems crazy to me that not every house in Australia is fitted with rooftop solar arrays. Certainly this should be the case for all new builds...-More than a decade ago PV roof tiles were developed by Prof. Green's team at UNSW. Then Sydney had a hailstorm and spent $800 million replacing broken roof tiles with the same old thing. For a similar sort of money we could have had a "generational" leap in efficiency.
The world laughed at Brazil when they mandated the use of locally-produce ethanol instead of imported petrol.
Why can't this country show the same sort of vision?
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Perhaps a Desal plant should be tossed into the "strategic defence" category, along with submarines etc; we may never need them, but if we do we'll be grateful for someone's foresight. Meanwhile, local high-tech industry gets a boost.I wonder if experts actually sit down and do cost benefit analyses, or whether Cabinet just put it on the agenda and use their own collective wisdom. I keep hearing the Victorian desal plant go the go ahead because one member of cabinet said "But what if it doesn't rain again" which was used to write off further dam capacity. -
One thing which gets up my nose is the hundreds of years supply we have of natural gas in Bass Strait-
... Lithium Propane gas price for vehicles is pushed up as far as the market will bear - in fact above that since LP Gas...
Good point Turbs (I'm sure you meant "Liquified" Propane Gas). We should reserve a big slice of our gas to sustain and promote our own industry, rather than selling it off cheap. The trouble is that any fossil fuel, even gas, is not renewable and releases loads of greenhouse gasses. While we focus our investment on petrochemicals they will undercut renewables and stymie the development of safer energy sources. Lobbyists from the coal and gas industries have been quite successful in ensuring our economy becomes dependent on exporting coal and gas. For the sake of our children, well-informed scientists are telling us we need to leave most of it in the ground.
We need to quickly adapt our economy to Australia's truly limitless resource- solar energy.
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You make valid points, Geoff. Our national grid still has some way to go, but governments have been happy to spend heaps on power lines in the past. One former NSW government minister was asked to approve about $150k to upgrade the White Cliffs solar power station. Instead he closed it and ordered the construction of a power line to bring in coal-fired electricity. (The plonker was rewarded for his ministerial ineptitude with a cushy job in London.)For transmission of solar power from sunny Alice to cloudy Melbourne you are going to use what? The German comparison thing just wont cut the mustard due to two facts (at least) .We live on a continent of 7,7 MILLION km2 , Germany is 360 THOUSAND km2. Australian population density is 3 people per km2 ...........For Germany it's 235!............ These two facts conspire to make it IMPOSSIBLE to compare power consumption prices and usage. Yes you could cover the Simpson Desert with solar panels and wind farms. So how you going to get the power across a continent, say 2000 kms .in each direction....Want to pay for that in your next bill?......................You can live off solar energy alone, part time..... My mate did it for 20 years. (12 panels and batteries) But don't ask what time he went to bed or how much TV he watched....or how much LPG and diesel he consumed.....It wasn't cheap...My airco is 5kw....... How many panels would I need to run that?......Oh Dear, I can't have solar panels cause the council wont let me cut down any trees. "Bad for the environment " they said!....Several technologies show promise for short-term storage of solar power, including some Australian -invented capacitors.
As Robin Williams' Science Show predicted a few years back, when electric cars become common and are plugged in when parked, their battery packs can be used as a distributed storage system. One thing about the future- it will surprise us.
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How embarrassing: with a tiny fraction of our average sunlight, the Germans are years ahead of us.
Australia, the land of "could have beens". We could have been champions.
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Turbs you seem a mite disgruntled by recent changes and price increases. We all want a clean environment, but that comes at a price.
It's easy to forget what enables our comfortable lifestyle (our grandparents were only starting to use fossil fuels; their living standard depended more on muscle power). The inescapable fact is that we have had it easy for a long time; cheap oil is gone and now there are several billion more people to share those dwindling supplies with. We have to pay more, or adapt.
Australia has plenty of coal, and we have become far too dependent on exporting it, instead of developing smart new industries to employ and sustain our people.
People like yourself and the Captain have had your heads down achieving great things within the economy as it currently stands. I applaud your success. Meanwhile many of us have been beavering away for decades trying to awaken people to how much better this country could be.
If you are not aware how much our economy has been distorted (and perverted) by fossil fuels, the following sources may help:
http://theconversation.com/coal-curse-the-black-side-of-the-subsidised-resources-boom-7801
http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/11/01/nsws-great-big-coal-subsidy-scandal/
http://www.takesteps.org/empower/exhibition/B1g_s4.1-4_c4_SUBSIDIZING%20Destruction.html
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Oh Captain, my Captain! I thought you were better than this.All that Australia and other countries have perfected is how to subsidise these alternative power generation methods.They don't stack up in the real world.
Relatively few of the existing installations would have gone in without the rest of us being forced to kick the can on cost and all the people that I know who have these ugly units blighting the rooves of their houses and sheds would not have gone ahead without the rest of the community partly paying for it.
The entire economic model for government subsidy has been, and will continue to be, an economic disaster and burden, just to make a few radicals & activists feel warm and fuzzy.
Ditto for wind-farms too, which are about as attractive as a roof-full of solar panels.
In my humble opinion.
Like Uncle Joe Hockey, you seem to despise the look of wind turbines. I presume you are okey with the ugly mess made of our land by coal mines and their associated facilities and power stations.
As for the community paying for these new solar panels, we got a great deal! Compared to so many other government schemes, the public investment in roof-top solar has been a phenomenal success, and worth every penny. Our dependence on dirty fossil fuels has been reduced and now the big electricity companies are running scared. They are spending up big to maintain their cosy monopoly.
Australia continues to subsidise old fossil fuel industries, yet our scientists struggle to get local funding to develop their world-leading renewable technologies, especially photo voltaics. They get more support from overseas, where even the oil-rich Arabs see a future we cannot. Solar panels and the other renewables can save mankind from the inevitable disaster that will result from our accelerating use of fossil fuels. Yet Abbott and his yes men are winding back the clock.
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Built the hanger around it?They often used to use stock footage of B52 gear going down. Just another annoying inaccuracy of aviation in movies over the years! On a side note, just visited the Aviation Heritage Museum in Darwin today which has a B52 on display. I'd love to know how they put it in that hangarSome of the other items there are just as impressive. One of the highlights of Darwin.
How Australia Perfected Solar Power and Then Went Back to Coal
in General Discussion
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When my teenager began endless showers I rigged the water pump to my wife's exercise bike. Before she had a shower, the kid had to pump enough water up to the gravity tank!