If there’s one thing which we know is true in Australia it’s that there’s absolutely no way that we could possibly use renewable energy to power our energy grid.
It’s not just there’s no sun or wind in Australia – an obvious fact which everyone recognises every time they step out into the typical eerily still, pitch-black Australian outdoors – but alas, in any case the technology to turn those things into useable electricity simply don’t exist. Maybe in some sci-fi future, but not now or probably ever.
After all, just look at NSW, thanks to the real-time data at OpenNEM, the site that visualises data from the National Energy Market :
Hooo, that’s a lot of black coal.
Over 75 per cent of power from black coal! God, look at that pitiful amount of solar! Why are we letting the Liverpool Plains remain undue? Agriculture be damned, those Opera House projections need powering!
And Queensland! Black coal burning is the only thing keeping the lights on!
Oh dear god, how do Queenslanders breathe?
If anything, we need to dig up MORE Galilee Basins, and quickly!
Victoria, your brown coalfields might be an environmental disaster, but imagine if they went away tomorrow – you’d be huddled around burning garbage piles outside your hipster bars and thriving live music scene!
Big bad ‘n brown.
Tasmanian data is incomplete and WA isn’t part of the NEM at all, but at least we have good numbers for South Australia, whose idiot previous state governments went on and on about their fancy “Tesla battery” that would supposedly store and dispatch solar and wind energy for the entire state, and of course was a complete…
B-b-but how? HOW? IS IT WITCHCRAFT?
Um, that can’t be right. Going off this you’d think that all of SA was being powered by wind and solar, with a tiny bit of gas backup in peak periods.
And anyway, SA has the most expensive power in the nation! It’s because of the renewables, right?
Ahhh. Hmmm.
Hmm. Going by that graph you’d conclude that prices seemingly soared before the explosion of renewables, when the state was reliant on what amounted to a cartel of power providers, and the high price of gas fired plants, plus the eye-wateringly complicated system underpinning the national grid (you can go down that rabbit hole thanks to The Conversation.)
What’s less complicated is that prices have been going down over the last year and a bit, a period which happens to coincide with the whole “Telsa Battery” thing being operational. Still: must be a coincidence.
And sure, you might think that the fact that an entire state of our proud Federation is being consistently powered by zero-emission generation might be a proof of concept for the rest of the nation, but there’s probably some reason it’s not.
That moment last year when Scott Morrison – Australia's new PM – held up a piece of coal in parliament and claimed it was a "sustainable" source of energy.
(By coincidence, last year also saw one coal-mining lobby group spend $2.5m on a "Coal – It's an Amazing Thing" campaign) pic.twitter.com/nQN2QKJ8hS
— Leo Hickman (@LeoHickman) August 24, 2018
No idea why that might be. Weird.