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  • Cold snap blows out energy supply

    18 July: Victoria gas blackout; up to 1000 households have gas supplies interrupted after second day of near-record consumption "one-in-20 year demand"

    EnergyAustralia’s losses come as eastern Australia was gripped by a cold snap that led to Sydney’s lowest minimum temperature in 21 years on Tuesday and a record power use that night, surpassing the mark set 24 hours earlier, reported The Australian (19/7/2007, p.5).

    NSW electricity assets for sale? The losses come amid a review of the NSW Government’s electricity resources. A report was expected to be released by the end of August and would recommend the privatisation of the state’s retail electricity assets, which include EnergyAustralia, regional Country Energy and outer-Sydney-focused Integral Energy. These assets could fetch between $3 billion and $4 billion. EnergyAustralia has more than 1.5 million customers and is believed to be bleeding money as wholesale prices of electricity blow out.

    EnergyAustralia in massive losses? To buy a base-load hedge contract for electricity in NSW for 2008 costs $70.95 a megawatt hour. In March, the same contract cost $45, while in January it was less than $40. An EnergyAustralia spokesperson would not comment on the losses: "It is commercial and in confidence. What I can say is the current wholesale market is challenging and EnergyAustralia exceeded its targets for the last financial year." The company sold a 50 per cent stake in a retail operator to its joint-venture partner International Power in May for $147 million. A spokesman for NSW Energy Minister Ian Macdonald would not say if the publicly owned EnergyAustralia was losing money or what the Government intended to do about it.

    Momentum Energy offloads 15,000 customers: Another retailer, Momentum Energy, was forced on 6 July to offload its customer base of 15,000 accounts to Australian Power and Gas. The company said it had to lose the domestic customers because of rising wholesale costs.

    Vic gas interruption as consumption nears record: In Victoria, up to 1000 households had gas supplies interrupted after a second day of near-record consumption. Gas supplies to about 1000 homes were also affected after householders turned up the heat to protect themselves against the cold conditions. "There was something like 12,080 terajoules of gas used," Energy Network Association head Andrew Blyth said yesterday. "This is a one-in-20year demand."

    Snow stops play: Snow covered parts of the Dandenong Ranges and forced the closure of schools across western Victoria. However, conditions improved slightly in Sydney, which recorded its coldest day for 21 years on Tuesday. The coldest temperature in NSW was at Charlotte Pass, with -9C. Ice and snow caused road closures around Orange and Oberon in the central-west.

    NSW need for power: Electricity consumption in NSW remained at near-record levels after the state churned through more than 13,000 megawatts of power yesterday.

    The Australian, 19/7/2007, p. 5

    Source: Erisk Net  

  • Blackout hits Sydney Children’s Hospital

    18 July: power blackout hits services at Children’s Hospital in Westmead, Sydney A Power blackout hit services at the Children’s Hospital in Westmead on the night of 18 July, reported The Australian (19/7/2007, p.11).

    Waiting rooms resort to floodlights: Power was lost in the emergency department, affecting computers, lighting and diagnostic equipment at 8.32pm. The emergency department experienced significant inconvenience as staff could not access patient records. Floodlights were brought in to light the waiting room.

    No worries, staff insist: No wards were affected and hospital staff said the blackout did not compromise patient, care with only one orthopaedic patient waiting for theatre. ‘This was managed without difficulty," a spokesman said.

    Back at 10: Power was restored about 10pm.

    The Australian, 19/7/2007, p. 11

    Source: Erisk Net  

  • NSW’s demand for heat breaks records

    17 July: Melbourne records coldest day in nine years; NSW hunger for heat on 16 July drives consumption on national grid to record 33,027 megawatts

    Melbourne on 17 July recorded its coldest day in nine years. The temperature hovered around 6 degrees for most of the afternoon, dipping to 5.4 degrees at 6pm, reported The Age (18/7/2007, p.3). The top was 9.2 degrees at 9.48am, well below the July average top of 13.7 degrees.

    Coldest Sydney night in 21 years: In Sydney, meanwhile, residents on Monday shivered through the city’s coldest night in 21 years.

    NSW record peaks: NSW was using 13,825 megawatts of electricity to keep warm, surpassing even summer’s demand peak, and easily breaking the two previous records set on 27 June and 20 June.

    National grid record-breaker: NSW’s hunger for heat on 16 July drove consumption on the national grid to a record 33,027 megawatts, smashing the previous peak of 32,579 megawatts, set on 20 June.

    The Age, 18/7/2007, p. 3

    Source: Erisk Net

     

  • US military build up in Africa

    "It’s like going back to a Cold War era of politics where the US backs one political faction because their political profile suits their requirements", said Patrick Smith, editor of the newsletter Africa Confidential, widely read in policy circles, reported The Australian Financial Review (22/6/2007, p.3).

    US moves into Africa: "It’s a move away from criteria of good governance to what is diplomatically convenient," according to Nicholas Shaxson, author of Poisoned Wells: the Dirty Politics of African Oil (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). At present, the US has 1500 troops stationed in Africa, principally at its military base in Djibouti, in the eastern horn. That could well double. The US was already conducting naval exercises off the Gulf of Guinea, in part with the intention of stopping Delta insurgents reaching offshore oil rigs.

    Licence to oppress: It also planned to beef-up the military capacity of African governments to handle their dissidents, with additional "rapid reaction" US forces available if needed. But – echoing charges levelled at US allies elsewhere in the "war on terror" – there were fears that the many authoritarian governments in sub-Saharan Africa might use such units to crack down on internal dissent.

    The Australian Financial Review, 22/6/2007, p. 3

  • Water piped to Goulburn

    Long-term strategy: The city now used about five million litres a day, compared with 13.5 million litres a day in a "normal period". Currently, council grounds, such as soccer fields, are watered with treated sewage water; industries use backwash water, which was previously charged into the Wollondilly River, and swimming pools are filled from house tanks – or not at all. Federal Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, Malcolm Turnbull, said while the pipeline would help secure water supply for Goulburn in the short term, it was critically important the project was part of a long-term supply strategy for the region.

    Delay in funding: "That’s why federal funding is also contingent on the Goulburn Mulwaree Council and the NSW Government undertaking to complete water supply planning to solve Goulburn’s long-term water supply problem," Turnbull said. NSW Water Utilities Minister, Nathan Rees, while welcoming the federal funding, went on the attack for the federal delay in funding the project.

    The Land, 21/6/2007, p. 1

  • How mirrors can light up the world

    CSP technology is not new. There has been a plant in the Mojave desert in California for the past 15 years. Others are being built in Nevada, southern Spain and Australia. There are different forms of CSP but all share in common the use of mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays on a pipe or vessel containing some sort of gas or liquid that heats up to around 400C (752F) and is used to power conventional steam turbines.

    The mirrors are very large and create shaded areas underneath which can be used for horticulture irrigated by desalinated water generated by the plants. The cold water that can also be produced for air conditioning means there are three benefits. "It is this triple use of the energy which really boost the overall energy efficiency of these kinds of plants up to 80% to 90%," says Dr Knies.

    This form of solar power is also attractive because the hot liquid can be stored in large vessels which can keep the turbines running for hours after the sun has gone down, avoiding the problems association with other forms of solar power.

    Competitive with oil

    The German reports put an approximate cost on power derived from CSP. This is now around $50 per barrel of oil equivalent for the cost of building a plant. That cost is likely to fall sharply, to about $20, as the production of the mirrors reaches industrial levels. It is about half the equivalent cost of using the photovoltaic cells that people have on their roofs. So CSP is competitive with oil, currently priced around $60 a barrel.

    Dr Knies says CSP is not yet competitive with natural gas for producing electricity alone. But if desalination and air conditioning are added CSP undercuts gas and that is without taking into account the cost of the carbon emissions from fossil fuels. The researchers say a relatively small amount of the world’s hot deserts -only about half a percent – would need to be covered in solar collectors to provide the entire world’s electrical needs (see map).

    The desert land is plentiful and cheap but, more importantly, there is roughly three times as much sunlight in hot deserts as in northern Europe. This is why the reports recommend a collaboration between countries of Europe, the Middle East and Africa to construct a high-voltage direct current (HVDC) grid for the sharing of carbon-free energy. Alternating current cables, which now form the main electricity grids in Europe, are not suitable for long distance transport of electricity because too much is lost on the way. Dr Trieb, of the German Air and Space Agency, says the advantage of DC cables is that the loss in transport is only about 3% per 1,000 kilometres, meaning losses between North Africa and Britain of about 10%.

    "Contrary to what is commonly supposed it is entirely feasible, and cost-effective, to transmit solar electricity over long distances. Solar electricity imported to Europe would be amongst the cheapest source of electricity and that includes transporting it," he says. "CSP imports would be much less vulnerable to interruption than are current imports of gas, oil and uranium."

    Algeria already exports huge quantities of oil and gas to Europe via pipelines but has a vast potential resource in sunlight that could make it a complete energy supplier to Europe. Many members of the Opec oil cartel, which have worried that alternative energies would kill demand for their oil, are blessed with hot, sunny deserts that could become a further source of energy income.

    The two reports make it clear that an HVDC grid around Europe and North Africa could provide enough electricity by 2050 to make it possible to phase out nuclear power and hugely reduce use of fossil fuels.

    An umbrella group of scientists has been formed across the region called the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (Trec) but the idea has yet to excite the imagination of the British government in spite of the recent Stern review on climate change.

    Neil Crumpton, renewables specialist at Friends of the Earth, said: "Most politicians on the world stage, particularly Tony Blair and George Bush, appear to have little or no awareness of CSP’s potential let alone a strategic vision for using it to help build global energy and climate security."

    European commission president José Manuel Barroso said recently that he wanted to see the European Union develop a common energy strategy based on low carbon emissions. The Trec scientists hope German chancellor Angela Merkel will use next year’s joint presidency of the EU and Group of Eight leading economies to push for an agreement on a European DC grid and the launch of a widespread CSP programme.

    The outlook is not promising. More than 30 countries last week agreed to spend £7bn on an experimental fusion reactor in France which critics say will not produce any electricity for 50 years, if at all.

    That amount of money would provide a lot of CSP power, a proven, working and simple technology that would work now, not in 2056.

    Safer and cheaper

    Dan Lewis, energy expert at the Economic Research Council, calculates that CSP costs $3-5m per installed megawatt, one-fifth the cost of fusion. "Fusion is basically a job creation scheme for plasma physicists."

    Mr Crumpton agreed: "Nuclear power accounts for just 3.1% of global energy supply and would be hard pushed to provide more. Yet CSP could supply 30% or 300% of future energy demand far more simply, safely and cost effectively. In the wake of the Stern report the enlightened investment is on hot deserts, not uranium mines or oil wells."