The height of the decarbonisation hill Australian governments need to climb this decade is underlined in the electricity industry’s just-released annual data.
The Energy Supply Association of Australia’s 2010 yearbook reports that coal-burning to generate power rose again in the 12 months to 30 June last year, a period when the economy was perceived as stressed by the global financial crisis.
The country’s power stations burned 57.1 million tonnes of black coal in 2008-09, up almost 500,000 tonnes from the previous financial year, and 70.5 Mt of brown coal, up 1.4 million tonnes.
To rub in the message, ESAA forecasts that eastern seaboard electricity demand will be almost 20 per cent higher by the end of the decade and Western Australia demand will increase by almost 44 per cent.
This will deliver some 10,000 gigawatt hours more power needs in 2019 than can be met by the Rudd government’s re-approved renewable energy target – the equivalent of what Tasmania or the Hunter Valley requires annually.
On ESAA figures, the big demand push is going to come in the two eastern black coal states, Queensland and New South Wales, where consumption is projected to rise by almost a quarter over the decade.
Coal burning in these states now stands at more than 52 million tonnes compared with 50.5 Mt in 2001. The abatement target set by Rudd requires greenhouse gas emissions to be 5 per cent below the 2000 level by the end of this decade.
One of the notable shifts in the eastern seaboard power scene thrown up in the ESAA forecasts is how Queensland is gunning away from Victoria as an electricity consumer. The two states were level-pegging in demand terms back in 2004-05. Queensland is now 7 per cent ahead and ESAA predicts that its consumption will be nearly a third higher than Victoria’s by the end of the decade.
With electricity generation a major contributor to emissions, the national abatement goal can only be reached if some of the coal-burning plants in South Australia, Victoria, NSW and Queensland are shut down.
However, the NSW government has proposals before it to build another 2,000 MW of coal generation (or 2,400 MW of combined-cycle gas plant) by 2016 to meet the state’s increasingly-urgent need for new baseload capacity.
Queensland, according to ESAA, has more than 8,200 MW of fossil-fuelled capacity under consideration for development by 2017, most of it fired by natural gas or coal seam methane.
Australia-wide, the electricity industry commissioned 2,000 MW of plant in 2008-09 and has 3,134 MW of capacity under construction at present with a further 3,444 MW under advanced planning.
Coal-burning plants now account for 81.2 per cent of generation output, with natural gas delivering 12.2 per cent. Hydro-electric generators have fallen back marginally because of drought impacts to 5 per cent.
The ESAA yearbook also throws light on the relatively slight impact of the global financial crisis on business activity here.
It reports only tiny falls in business demand in NSW and Victoria in 2008-09, no change in WA and rises in consumption in Queensland, SA and Tasmania. Nationally, business demand was 143,174 GWh last financial year – a mere 265 GWh retraction.
Residential consumption kept right on going up, rising another 3.4 per cent, pushing demand to a record 204,300 GWh.
Journalists, please covert jargon quantities into the international units us readers learnt at school. Your articles will make a lot more sense to all of us. Many of us will value the information so-delivered to do mental arithmetic to draw further conclusions.
Passage of energy across a period is measured in watts in the SI system. Not watt-hours per year, not even watt-hours per hour. Any other unit than watts is jargon, or obsolete.
We can appreciate that specialists will push stories to you in jargon units because they value being mysterious and obscure to outsiders. Obfuscation should be a red rag to journos. The specialists may be so dyed in the wool that they dont know how to covert info into the international units. But you do.
For sure, the specialists and their admins will insist that their jargon is traditional, rite, krek and proppa. And the goobbledygook sounds poetic. They may well invoke the image of grandma huddled around a 1930s electric heater. However we’ve gone SI metric since then and the hour isn’t SI.
Please convert info to SI, for those of us who remember our lessons from school. We will respect you as one smart cookie – who writes for intelligent laymen.
I agree with the concept Roger, but SI units aren’t the be all and end all. If the article talked about car speeds in m/s I would criticise it because it has less meaning to most readers than the commonly used unit in Australia, km/h.
The SI unit of energy is the Joule (J) and the SI unit of power (energy per time, rate of energy) is the Watt (W).
kWh, MWh and GWh are very standard units in the industry for electrical energy (check your power bill) and therefore referring to electrical energy in those units is sensible as it relates to something which people are familiar with.
For energy use over a long period of time (not instantaneous) it makes sense to refer to how much energy (eg GWh) over how much time (eg per year) therefore for a nation’s consumption, GWh/yr is a fairly sensible unit. I would argue that 143,174 GWh per year has more meaning to people than 515,426,400 GJ, or 515PJ.
For instantaneous energy use, W with a suitable prefix is the SI unit and is preferable. So when talking about additional base load requirements it makes sense to talk about the additional instantaneous requirement in MW rather than GWh/yr. Again, the unit of MW in terms of electricity generation has more meaning to people than GWh/yr.
I agree with the general criticism that this article and most articles make no effort to standardise units to make them consistant within the article, and therefore make it difficult to make basic and intended comparisons within the article. For example;
“The country’s power stations burned 57.1 million tonnes of black coal in 2008-09, up almost 500,000 tonnes from the previous financial year, and 70.5 Mt of brown coal, up 1.4 million tonnes.”
“million tonnes” in one sentance, “Mt” for the same thing in the next sentence. “500,000 tonnes’ in one sentence, “1.4 million tonnes” in the next. It is all correct, but makes it just a little bit harder to make the intended comparisons and depending on the units used and the expertise of the reader, comparison may not be possible.
Off the hobbyhorse – the article highlights a major issue with the approach to baseload power. For all the talk about renewables, when it comes down to delivering the required energy it is business as usual. The 2000MW of recently installed capacity referred to in the article equates to 17,520 GWh/hr assuming full capacity all year round (unlikely??) . This is 5% of the national consumption and gives an indication of how Australia will be meeting increased demands for electricity…