Canberra - City of Powerstations?

Mr Evil said :

Jessica’s looking lovely, isn’t she!

nothing a few billion beers couldn’t fix.

Jessica’s looking lovely, isn’t she!

Looks like she positively hung over!

I agree with RuffnReady. BUT. We installed evap A/C a few years back because my wife was (still is) at home with small children. The hot weather is unbearable at home all day with small kids who have to sleep during the day etc. We would get the house as cool as we could at night and then shut up as soon as it got hot. But by 2pm it would be in the high 20s inside, but really really humid and nasty. She would have to open windows even though it was hotter outside as the humidity was a killer.

We bough a BreezeAir ducted evap cooler system and it is brilliant. They have a very efficient motor design that uses relatively low amounts of power when he fan is not running full bore. Basically we didn’t notice the difference on our electricity bill. The other really nice feature is you can readily utilise the natural cooling of an easterly change by just venting in the cool air. Works a treat.

Obviously it would be better if we had a properly designed solar passive house (my in-laws do and it is brilliant, particularly in winter, but still a little too hot in summer). But we bought a 30 year old Jennings home and there is not much more we can do to make it perform better. We have blow in wall insulation, and roof insulation, but I haven’t retrofitted a reflective foil layer in the roof, yet.

We need a local mob to offer a complete solar hot water/absorption chiller unit like this:

http://www.solarpanelsplus.com/yazaki-solar-HVAC/

Absolute game-changer. Most solar hot water installations make way more hot water than they need in the summer so as to be able to get close to the demand during winter. By using, essentially, waste summer heat to run an absorption chiller it would be a win win situation. The chilled water circuit could be retrofitted to existing evap cooler units relatively easily to dramatically increase their effectiveness. Might even be too cold …

New Yeah said :

tortfeaser said :

The public agreed this was where we wanted to go as we decided we all needed air conditioning.

You’re being to generous – the public never agreed! There was never a vote on this. Rather, individuals have decided to stay cool by using a/c. This is an attractive lifestyle choice that has been made possible by a/c manufacturers and gas companies. While these companies do their best to improve the efficiency of their products (particularly by ensuring installation by trained fridgies), the way things are at the mo'(especially through poorly designed buildings), a/c is going to continue sucking up plenty of power.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that

I agree. It gets bloody hot in summer but we just need to be smarter about how we deal with it.

Surely three extra power stations is overkill. Wouldn’t one larger station do the trick?

1) IMHO, a/c is SOFT. Yes, in the workplace it makes sense, but otherwise it is a soft option. Many of us grew up without it and were just as happy to sweat for a few days in summer. We as a society have become extremely soft, and it is the environment that pays since we don’t pay for the cost of the pollution. We now consider many ‘wants’ to be ‘needs’, and that is to the detriment of the greater environment and future generations.

2) A/c manufacturers DO NOT do their best to improve efficiency. They do the minimum required by things like Mandatory Energy Performance Standards. MEPS are a start, but manufacturers can do far more. And worse, the stated (on the label) energy performance of many imported appliances has been shown to be far lower than the actual performance. This can easily be checked with a Powermate, but there are limited resources to enforce these standards.

3) Totally agree on housing design. By incorporating seven basic principles you can build a house that needs very little heating/cooling, uses a fraction of the energy, but we rarely apply them. Proper orientation and building form, appropriate thermal mass, glazing, shading, ventilation and landscaping. Building a house? Get it right from the start and it will be more comfortable with half the energy bill.

4) Want to buy personal a/c, you should have to buy the solar cells to power it at the same time – you use your a/c when the sun is shining! Since PV cells are so expensive, and a/cs suck so much power (typically 2.5kW+), that would be a huge incentive for manufacturers to make more efficient units, and within 5 years we’d have reasonably priced solar-powered a/cs on the market, you can guarantee it…

However, governments are benign and lobby-controlled, people want what they want while conveniently ignoring the consequences, and the status quo remains… c’est la vie.

heinous said :

Nice to see RiotACT has an unbiased greenhouse alarmist at the helm.

Please, let’s debate the science. I will own you, because I have read it. It is as robust as science gets.

Try reading from real scientific journals and not fossil-fuel sponsored garbage sites like junkscience.org.

I could write 15 pages on this, but I’ll just make a few quick points.

1) that map is annoying – the points should link to details of the individual developments. I want to know how big they are, and this should be easily accessible public information. I’ll look elsewhere.
2) gas is still a fossil fuel, and still polluting, but it is far better than coal for 2 reasons: a) it is significantly less polluting than coal, and thus a reasonable transition technology, and, b) it can be switched on and off very quickly and thus it could be part of a move away from the wasteful 24-hour-a-day baseload paradigm we currently operate under due to the primacy of inflexible coal-fired generation which makes up 82% of the 47.4GW national grid capacity.
3) I’m far more concerned about all those new coal plants being built – it reinforces a wasteful and highly polluting paradigm. Why isn’t the Federal Government mandating no more coal-fired plants, and a focus on electricity market reform (flat pricing is a joke) and demand reduction strategies? Because they aren’t really serious about action, owned by the lobbies is why.

I am going to it there before I get angry about all the double speak and inaction.

Message to those in power – GET THE MRET STRAIGHT AND DO IT NOW. We have been losing world-leading renewable technology offshore for a decade now – when will it stop???

heinous said :

Nice to see RiotACT has an unbiased greenhouse alarmist at the helm.

Yep, just another cave person.

The airport system reduces energy consumption by 55% and is the same as systems being installed on mass in cities like London as major greenhouse gas reduction projects.

Methane is 20 times worse a greenhouse gas than CO2. The methane run units at the tip are actually doing something beneficial.

Wake up people, this is the climate change solution in action.

Well, the airport could build all kinds of things, who do they ask permission from again?

heinous said :

caf, you are entirely correct, my mistake I apologises to you JB.

The man likes full pints, not empty words. 😛

caf, you are entirely correct, my mistake I apologises to you JB.

heinous: That spiel you quoted was itself from the quoted comment by “Digga” (all the indented text is a quote).

tortfeaser said :

The public agreed this was where we wanted to go as we decided we all needed air conditioning.

You’re being to generous – the public never agreed! There was never a vote on this. Rather, individuals have decided to stay cool by using a/c. This is an attractive lifestyle choice that has been made possible by a/c manufacturers and gas companies. While these companies do their best to improve the efficiency of their products (particularly by ensuring installation by trained fridgies), the way things are at the mo'(especially through poorly designed buildings), a/c is going to continue sucking up plenty of power.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that

I agree. It gets bloody hot in summer but we just need to be smarter about how we deal with it.

Surely three extra power stations is overkill. Wouldn’t one larger station do the trick?

JB, it’s not that you brought the news to us, personally I think it’s a good thing your doing and keep up the good work, rather, it’s the accompanying spiel like What do we tell our kids in 17 years when we blow 2025’s reduced emissions targets

some will be worried about the greenhouse, other about the introduction of heavy industry.

it was news to me, so probably will be to some others too.

The CO2 isn’t a problem for local pollution.

Nice to see RiotACT has an unbiased greenhouse alarmist at the helm.

Jessica’s looking lovely, isn’t she!

The public agreed this was where we wanted to go as we decided we all needed air conditioning. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

An ETS means we won’t have increased emissions from these new generators, we’ll just pay a whole lot more for the emissions we make. Makes a mockery of the feed in tariff, MRET and other local- and state- government emissions reduction efforts.

I understand gas fired generation was less emissions intensive than coal anyway.

I’m pretty sure this makes no difference to the emissions targets – our emissions from electricity use should be counted by the electricity used here, regardless of where the generators actually sit. Otherwise we’d be freeriding at the expense of NSW.

In fact inasmuch as co/tri generation reduces electricity consumption we should be slightly better off.