Brilliant talk at the Alternative Technology Association last night on QLD’s energy policies.
The guest speaker was Trevor Berrill well-known educator in sustainable energy technology.
Trevor had done something which I wish more people were capable of and were prepared to put the effort into doing. But let’s face it what he did is extraordinarily difficult for most of us to even imagine how you would begin to locate and put together this sort of valuable information.
He has hunted out the QLD Government budget documents and reports and political party policies and asked the key questions then hunted for the figures (the quantities the $$$$$ values) to be able to quantify what is happening with energy in QLD now (and in the past) and what the future holds.
It wasn’t possible to transcribe fast enough and we have asked Trevor to supply an electronic copy of the presentation slides.
Here are some highlights:
[ul]
[li]The current QLD Government policy if continued could transition the electricity sector in QLD to a low-energy policy over 20 years.[/li]
[li]*******It looks as if Queensland won’t get a return on investment (ROI) out of the coal and coal seam gas mining industry. ******* Put simply QLD taxpayers will pay more (quite a bit in the order of billions) [for the industry infrastructure damage and higher prices and damage to other industries] than they get out of it.[/li]
[li]Real cost of generting power by coal in Queensland is 22cents/kWh[/li]
[li]Queenslanders are the highest producers of greenhouse gas per capita in the world (QLD 44tonnes/capita; Australia 28tonnes/capita; USA 27tonnes/capita) [I’m still struggling with this one][/li]
[li]1 unit of energy produced from a coal plant = 1 job; 1 unit of energy produced from wind = 3 jobs[/li]
[li]Mines are moving to robotisation (trucks and trains) to reduce jobs[/li]
[li]We desperately need large scale renewable energy projects to get off the ground. It is very political.[/li]
[li]40000 CSG wells are planned on the Darling Downs each one equating to 1square kilometre of lost farmland (40000 square kilometres in total of what has been described as the best farmland in the world)[/li]
[li]Electricity cost trends: Retail high and going steadily up; PV coming down rapidly; coal and gas rising rapidly; solar and wind & biomass fallen a long way and going down rapidly.[/li]
[li]Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) is a very important measure. Three levels – EROEI at the mine mouth (mm) EROEI at the point of use (pou) and EROEI extended (ext). The last two include the energy used to get the fuel to the point of use. EROEI includes the energy required to use it and to dispose of and manage the waste.[/li]
[li]We are well down the Net Energy Cliff. Historic oil & gas fields had an EROEI close to 100:1. New oil & gas is less. Solar PV 9:1; Hydro 100:1; Solar Hot Water 10:1; Wind 20:1; Sugar Cane Ethanol 10:1; Nuclear 10:1; Tar sands 10:1; Biomass 1.3:1; Hot rock geothermal 3:1 [As a mathematician I translate this to: We are now in the “turbulance zone where things are chaotic” for the energy types we are prepared to exploit and we are prepared to take extraordinary risks and absorb extraordinary costs and consequences to get the low EROEI sources of energy because the high EROEI sources of energy are gone.][/li]
[/ul]