Clean Energy

Sydney has just hosted a conference of ministers and industrial concerns from 6 major industrial countries. Called "Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate", it appears to have been a WOBTAM - "Waste of Bloody Time And Money". As Wendy Frew wrote in today's " Sydney Morning Herald" "NO TARGETS, no timetables, no carrots, no stick. There was little on offer yesterday to tackle one of the biggest challenges facing the world: climate change."

The ALP seems a bit fractured on the issue; most are decrying the "outcomes" and the communique as nowhere near far enough, and in fact the totally wrong approach. Who knows quite why, but maybe Martin Ferguson ("It's time to abandon the political correctness espoused by the Green movement") is looking for a nice UN or other diplomatic posting.

Not often that you get to hear him agreeing wholeheartedly with the PM.

Then again, not so often that you find a junior minister lobbying and getting something from the PM; in this case the Industry minister Ian Macfarlane managing to get oen quarter of the Australian funding to be earmarked for alternative energy sources.

So - where to from here?

My prediction, nowhere very fast.

Politicians saying that leadership is needed from Industry.
Industry saying that leadership needed from the executive and legislative branches of governments.
A Senate enquiry into nuclear power generation in Australia will probably not be meaningful; if it were, it would not get through all the negative submissions before the expiry of the current Senate. Then again, this government has recently shown that the senate is not a house for debate, but a house for rubberstamping.

We will probably start exporting uranium to China before the end of the decade (personally, I don't have a problem with that; they are the biggest users of fossil fuel in the world, and their energy appetite is not getting any smaller).

India? Probably bigger problems politically sending bomb fuel there. Pakistan (our great allies in the War Against Terror (TM) may have issues with that...

And as for "HDR (Hot Dry Rock) technology?" Well, I haven't seen any serious proposals for trying this out "in concept" for a while. Why not?

The source of the energy is (in the most part) a long way from the need; stringing transmission wires is pretty expensive, but at least there is really no worry in regards to transmission loss (the amount of electricity that "evaporates" along the way) as the production costs after the inital capital installation is negligible.

HOWEVER; there is an estimated 15,000 petajoules of accessible energy that could be converted into 5.5 years of Australia's total electricity consumption sitting in the Hunter Valley - just south of Muswellbrook. Surely that would be a perfect site for a "proof of concept" study.

Watch this space.