Thw Age has reported that the Victorian Government is considering closing two of the Hazelwood power station’s eight power units. The La Trobe Valley power plant produces almost a quarter of Victoria’s electricity from brown coal and is regarded as Australia’s dirtiest power plant – some environmental groups claim that it is the dirtiest power plant in the developed world.
Closing a quarter of the plant would cut of 4 million tonnes of carbon emissions a year – just over 3% of Victoria’s annual emissions and 0.7% of annual national emissions.
A complete closure of Hazelwood would only go ahead once an emissions trading scheme – or an alternative federal opposition climate plan – is in place.
Victorian power utilities, United Energy Distribution and Jemena, have selected the American company Silver Spring Networks to roll out smart meters to over a million Victorian homes over the next four years.
Victoria’s "smart grid" plan will give 2.5 million Victorians the ability to monitor their own energy use and allow utilities to read, connect or disconnect meters remotely.
United Energy Distribution provides power in South-East Melbourne and on the Mornington Peninsula while Jemena serves North and Inner-West Melbourne. Three more power utilities are expected to roll-out smart metering technology in other parts of Victoria in the same time frame.
The CSIRO and five Australian Universities yesterday launched the Intelligent Grid Research Program to investigate "technologies and practices to make our electricity networks smart, greener and more efficient".
The group’s 3-year research program aims to find ways to develop an electricity network that uses distributed energy resources and advanced communication and control technologies to deliver electricity more cost-effectively, with lower greenhouse intensity and better response to consumer needs.
Small generators including wind turbines, solar panels, micro turbines, fuel cells and cogeneration can be closer to the users, may rely on renewable energy with no greenhouse emissions and may make more efficient use of conventional power generated from coal. However, intelligent grid technologies are needed to seamlessly integrate these intermittent renewable energy sources into the wider network.
The Intelligent Grid Program will contribute to the CSIRO Energy Transformed Flagship’s research goal of halving greenhouse gas emissions and doubling the efficiency of the nation’s new energy generation, supply and end-use technologies.
In Sydney last night, Allan Jones, Chief Development Officer of the London Climate Change Agency, described some of the initiatives which have made London a leader in reducing carbon emissions and dependence on coal and nuclear power stations.
The key to the strategy is the use of cogeneration and trigeneration power plants. These are small local electricity generators which capture the heat which is wasted in conventional power stations to provide heating and, in the case of trigeneration system, cooling, Recently, systems which also capture waste water have been developed. Most co- and tri-generation systems currently run on natural gas but London is increasingly using methane, produced from the city’s waste, to power the systems. Mr Jones believes that half of London’s electricity could be generated from waste.
Co- and tri-generation systems are best suited to supplying power for mixed communities of residential and commercial consumers which have their electricity peak requirements at different times. Restricting distribution to a local community also avoids the huge overheads in supplying power across a national grid and creates a system which is much less vulnerable to natural disasters or terrorist attack.
South Australia has passed landmark legislation to introduce feed-in tariffs for solar power while New South Wales has ignored advice from Zhengrong Shi, an Australian citizen who is China’s richest man, to do likewise.
A feed-in tariff is a payment, usually above the normal retail rate, which is paid for electricity which is fed into the power grid. Under the South Australian system, 44 cents per kilowatt hour will be paid to consumers and small businesses which feed power from solar photovoltaic systems back into the grid. The payment is twice the retail cost of electricity in South Australia but will apply only to the excess produced over the amount consumed, rather than to the whole amount generated.
The New South Wales Government was recently urged to adopt a similar scheme by Zhengrong Shi. Dr Shi is an Australian trained scientist who has gone from an academic position at the University of New South Wales to become the wealthiest man in mainland China in just seven years. Dr Shi has urged NSW Premier, Morris Iemma, to adopt a system of feed-in tariffs, pointing out that variations of the system operate in most European counties, Canada, Japan and China. A spokesman for the Primary Industries Minister, Ian Macdonald, said that NSW was not considering feed-in tariffs, "instead, NSW is seeking national consistency on this matter."
However, the Federal Cliamte Change Minister, Penny Wong, has stated that, while she does not want to legislate the measures, she does want the states to develop their own feed-in tariff systems within a nationally consistent framework.
The Queensland Government has responded to Senator Wong’s call by stating that it is considering implementing a program of feed-in tariffs. Details are expected to be announced in the next State budget on June 3.
Source: SA Government News, Sydney Morning Herald and Brisbane Courier-Mail
Work has begun on Australia’s second largest rooftop solar power system. By mid-year, the solar panels on Terminal 1 at Adelaide Airport should be capable of producing 114 kilowatts – sufficient to power about 30 households. This will not be sufficient to power the entire airport but it will reduce greenhouse gas emission by about 160 tonnes a year.
The rooftop system will be the largest in South Australia and the second largest in the country, next to the Queen Victoria Markets in Melbourne.
The Queensland Government will bulk-buy solar power systems in order to resell them to householders at heavily discounted prices.
Premier Anna Bligh announced today that the Government would purchase at least 1,000 solar power systems and sell them back to Queenslanders. Under the scheme, householders are expected to save up to $3,500. This should reduce the average cost of a one kilowatt installation from $13,000 to $9,500. Homeowners will still be eligible for the Federal Government’s $8,000 rebate – reducing their total outlay to just $1,500.
The scheme was proposed by the Queensland Council for Climate Change which includes Dr Tim Flannery, 2007 Australian of the Year.
The Premier also announced that, in future, all proposals to the Queensland Cabinet must include an assessment of climate change impacts by the Office of Climate Change and that these assessments will be made public.
A project to build the what is claimed will be world’s largest solar power generating plant has been launched by the Australian Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong.
The plant, expected to cost $420 million, will be built in the Swan Hill and Mildura region of northern Victoria. When complete, it will generate 154 megawatts – enough electricity to power about 45,000 homes, using heliostat-concentrated photovoltaic generators.
The project was originally promised by the former Howard government but it could not proceed without commitment of funding from private enterprise. The Victorian energy retailer, TRUenergy, has now committed $290 million to the project and the Victorian Government has added $50 million to the Commonwealth contribution of $80 million. TRUenergy is a subsidiary of CLP Holdings, a Hong Kong power utility. The project is being led by Melbourne-based Solar Systems in which TRUenergy has a 20% stake.
Construction will begin in 2009 with the plant beginning to generate power in 2010 and being fully operational in 2013. It will create 950 construction jobs and 44 long-term jobs.
Update (April 14, 2008):
The Boeing Company today announced a third multimillion-dollar contract with Solar Systems for concentrator photovoltaic cell assemblies. Under the terms of the new contract, Spectrolab Inc, a wholly owned Boeing subsidiary, will provide solar cell assemblies capable of generating more than 350 megawatts of electricity. The cells will be used in the new 154-megawatt solar power station to be built in Victoria and in other power stations located throughout Australia and the United States.
In what is believed to be a world first, purified graphite is being used for energy storage in systems being installed at Lake Cargellico in New South Wales and Cloncurry in Queensland. The Queensland installation will make Cloncurry, which has a population of about 2,400, the first town in Australia to rely exclusively on solar power.
The purified graphite technology was invented by Australian Scientist, Bob Lloyd, while working for the Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation. A separate company, Lloyd Energy Systems, was set up to develop the technology.
The Company’s research has led to a $5 million contract for an advanced energy storage system for Lake Cargellico and an agreement with Ergon Energy to build a $30 million plant in Cloncurry.
The Cloncurry system will rely exclusively on a concentrated solar power system containing almost 7,200 mirrors. The mirrors will guide the sun’s rays into holes in the bases of 54 elevated graphite blocks, heating them to 1800 degrees celsius. The stored heat will be used to produce steam which will drive turbines on demand.
The Lake Cargellico installation will have 2,200 mirrors and 16 graphite blocks.
The graphite blocks are each the size of a shipping container – making the system easily deployed to remote locations. Other heat storege systems, which use water or underground compressed air, cannot be relocated.
A third graphite-storage system is planned for King Island off the North coast of Tasmania. This installation, a joint venture with Hydro Tasmania, will use wind power to generate the stored heat.
The system’s mobility and flexibility has also caught the attention of the mining industry.
(The picture shows a demonstration graphite storage system located near Cooma, NSW.)
At last nights meeting of the Australian & New Zealand Solar Energy Society NSW Barnch, Simon Troman gave some further insight into the Solar Energy Demonstration Facility being constructed near Alice Springs.
The $3 million Facility will initially include fifteen different solar photovoltaic systems designed to showcase and compare different solar power technologies. Installations will include solar concentrator dishes utilising the latest in waterless cooling systems, large scale tracking arrays and a variety of photovoltaic technologies.
The facility will provide a place to train students in the use and maintenance of solar installations and will allow visitors to see, first-hand, how the techologies work. There will be no fencing of exhibits, so that visitors can touch the equipment if it is safe to do so. Output will be monitored in real-time and displayed openly to the public on screens at the Facility and over the Internet.
The location of the facility, at the Desert Knowledge Pricinct in Alice Springs, which is already a centre for research and business development, will enable testing of the robustness of the equuipment and its suitability for Australia’s harsh environment.
Solar contrator power station at Hermannsburg, near Alice Springs
In Sydney last night, Allan Jones, Chief Development Officer of the London Climate Change Agency, described some of the initiatives which have made London a leader in reducing carbon emissions and dependence on coal and nuclear power stations.
South Australia has passed landmark legislation to introduce feed-in tariffs for solar power while New South Wales has ignored advice from Zhengrong Shi, an Australian citizen who is China’s richest man, to do likewise.
