Energetic Implications of a Post-industrial Information Economy
The decoupling of energy and resources from economic growth is the Holy Grail of sustainable development. The observation that there seems to be a concentration of wealth in Australian localities associated with Information and Communication Technology (ICT) services,...
What does the loss of Hazelwood mean for reliability
Fairfax reported that "Victoria is facing an unprecedented 72 days of possible power supply shortfalls over the next two years following the shutdown of the Hazelwood plant next week." This was picked up by other media but a little more sense was injected by Giles...
EROI of the Australian electricity supply industry
I recently did a presentation on the EROI of the Australian electricity supply industry. The key aims were - Calculate how much energy it takes to build, run and maintain the Australian electricity supply industry Disaggregate the feedstock fuels (coal, gas, etc) from...
Pumped hydro storage – an Australian overview
A pumped hydro primer Nearly all electrical storage to date has been pumped hydro storage (PHS), which makes up 97% or 142 GW of global power capacity for electrical storage. The three leading PHS countries are Japan with 26 GW, China at 24 GW and the US at 22 GW. The...
The social licence of coal
I’m (just) old enough to remember the Australian nuclear disarmament (and associated opposition to nuclear power) rallies from the 1970s, the fervent opposition to the Newport gas-fired power plant in Melbourne, Tasmanian dams protests of the 1980s, along with logging...