In Issue 432 it is reported that calls are being made to close Eraring in 2025.
Eraring represents some 20 per cent of the electricity generation capacity of NSW, and it is dispatchable electricity, available on demand, not on the vagaries of the weather.
We do not have, in place, an equivalent dispatchable generating capacity to replace it.
AEMO warns that we are in danger of not having enough generation capacity, even intermittent generation, in the near future.
Without something equivalent to replace it, closure of Eraring would put the grid at risk, especially during peak load times, when electricity is required the most.
Perhaps to assist in avoiding this shortfall predicted by AEMO, we could require, in order to get our cars and trucked re-registered, that we install a solar panel, or two, and a wind turbine on our vehicles.
Nevertheless this would not be dispatchable power, but only intermittent.
Claims about the health dangers of the “filthy, last century polluters” (coal-fired power stations) would seem fanciful to the lowly paid Chinese who make the majority of solar panels using coal-fired electricity.
The atmosphere around Eraring would seem pristine to them.
A square metre of solar panel requires somewhere between 400 KWh and 800 KWh of electricity (most produced by coal-fired electricity).
No electricity generator, even the nearly-sanctified intermittent renewables, is really clean and green.
Intermittent renewables do not cause emissions in operation and are like nuclear in that sense but they must be manufactured and disposed of at the end of their useful lives (25+years).
Queensland has already banned used solar panels in landfill.
All generating types require mining to acquire the necessary specialised, critical and scarce minerals, materials and energy for the manufacture of their facilities.
This results in environmental degradation, sometimes permanent.
Just focusing on coal-fired power is mere cherry picking by zealots who want a cause.
What most seem to forget is that net zero considered out of context can be seen as suicidal activity.
The metric that really counts is global atmospheric CO2 and this is common to all humanity as CO2 is a miscible gas.
The Mauna Loa facility in Hawaii, credited with first realising the anthropogenic CO2 effect in the atmosphere, predicts that atmospheric CO2 will reach 424 ppm in 2024, presently increasing at the rate of approximately 3 ppm per annum.
Even if Australia became net zero at the end of this financial year, the effect of this wonderful achievement, at whatever cost, will be zero, not net zero in relation to global atmospheric CO2 concentration, even in far-away Australia.
Email, Mar 30
Charles Hemmings, Woy Woy