Liberals don't want sustainable energy

The Europeans have long been leaders in attempts to reduce their climate change impact. While the Federal US government is doing little, much is being done in the USA at the state level. China is by far the leading nation in the world at present in construction of new wind farms as a way of reducing its reliance on fossil fuels and limiting greenhouse gas production.

The nations with a high per-capita rate of greenhouse gas production are the ones that have to accept most of the blame for climate change, while those that suffer the most from climate change will be the poorer nations like those of SE Asia and the pacific. (Several decades ago we could have claimed that we didn't know we were causing climate damage as an excuse for inaction; we no longer can.) Does Australia risk becoming an international pariah if the Liberals get into government and stop all action to improve Australia's position on climate change? Most Australians want action on climate change; are they willing to support a political party that wants to do nothing? Those who do will be as culpable as the Liberals themselves.

The Liberals in three Australian states have now come out in support of mandating no wind turbine being built within 2km of a home without the home owner's approval. Many people in Australia and around the world are living very happily much closer to wind turbines than that. There should be, and are, laws about maximum sound levels from turbines at homes, but a mandatory 2km limit is foolish, not supported by the evidence and will greatly limit renewable energy development in Australia.

• Famously (or infamously) Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott has said that "Climate change is crap" and the Federal Opposition is implacably opposed to PM Gillard's carbon tax while not having an alternative policy to lower greenhouse gas production that any economist seems willing to support.
• In August 2011 the Baillieu Victorian Liberal government placed in force new laws that will make further wind power development in that state very difficult;
• Around the same time NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell said on radio that "if I had my way, we wouldn't [approve any applications for wind farms in NSW]";
• Also in August the WA Liberal Party voted 'by an overwhelming majority' for a Royal Commission into climate change science – indicating that they were not convinced that it is real.
• In September 2011 rumours were circulating that Isobel Redmond, Leader of the (Liberal) Opposition in South Australia, was considering introducing laws like those in Victoria when and if she gains power. At the same time SA Shadow Minister for Energy Mitch Williams was using the inability of solar and wind power to provide peak load power as a way of devaluing sustainable energy, both in response to my written inquiry and on ABC radio. This seems to be a political ploy to make voters think that sustainable energy has serious short-comings, while the fact is that the power supply system can easily cope;
• To cap it all off, in December 2011 the SA Liberals announced their wind farm policy in a flyer.

In any case, even if a Liberal Federal Government was to retain the 20% by 2020 target, where could the wind farms be built if Liberal governments in the states stand against renewable energy?

In an article by Anthony Steward on ABC On-line news, 2012/02/17, energy analyst Kobad Bhavnagri pointed out that the Victorian rules would push energy prices up. The logic is simple; we must move to renewable energy, wind power is the most practicable of the available options and if the best places to build wind farms are ruled out then they must be built elsewhere at higher prices or you have to go to other, more expensive, forms of renewable energy. Of course it is the consumers who ultimately pay the bill. The ABC requested a comment from Planning Minister Matthew Guy, but received no response.

The ABC World Today's Anthony Stewart reported on 2012/02/17:

"Six months after the Victorian Government brought in strict rules on wind farms, there are warnings the laws are forcing the industry out of the state. Since the guidelines were introduced no new wind farm energy projects have been proposed and the future of several existing projects is in doubt. There are fears Victoria will miss out on billions of dollars in investment and potentially force up the price of electricity."

Victorian rules mystify Danes

"The head of the world's largest wind energy company has questioned the Baillieu government's rationale for giving households veto rights over turbines within two kilometres of their homes. Ditlev Engel, chief executive of Danish company Vestas, said he had "no idea" where the policy had come from. Mr Engel, who is visiting Victoria with Crown Prince Frederik and Tasmanian-born Crown Princess Mary, said no one had explained the motivation for Victoria's most restrictive regulations on turbines. In Denmark, when you have a wind turbine, in order to get approval, you need to be four times the height of the tip (away from a house). The tip height is 150-200 metres, so the distance from the turbine to where people live has got to be 600-800 metres. And that's fine."

"FEARS that wind turbines make people sick are ''not scientifically valid'', and the arguments mounted by anti-wind farm campaigners are unconvincing, according to confidential briefings given to the state government by NSW Health.

Documents obtained under freedom-of-information laws show that health officials repeatedly warned ministers last year that there was no evidence for ''wind turbine syndrome'', a collection of ailments including sleeplessness, headaches and high blood pressure that some people believe are caused by the noise of spinning blades.

But the department's advice contrasts with the view of the Planning Minister, Brad Hazzard, who was responsible for draft guidelines, released in December, that significantly tighten the approvals process."

NSW Planning Minister Brad Hazzard decided that he could ignore this information when he said "the jury is still out on the health impacts from wind farms".

Giving every home owner the right to veto any wind turbine within two kilometres of his or her home will make construction of wind farms in many areas in SA impractical.

Liberals have second thoughts? The first flyer that I received on paper from Liberal Member for Stuart, Dan van holst Pellekaan's office (and downloaded from the Net) talked of a five kilometre ban from houses. On 2012/01/06 I received a second flyer from Hendik Gout at the office of David Ridgway, MLC, (Liberal) Leader of the Opposition in the SA Legislative Council. Mr Gout said that the original "was prepared specifically to a meeting held at Allendale" (where there is opposition to a proposed wind farm). The second flyer is similar to the original, except it says that the Liberals will ban a turbine from being built within 2km, rather than 5km, from a house, without the agreement of the owner, and 5km from a town. The lies and half-truths in the second flyer remain the same as in the first.

Before 2003, when SA's first wind farm at Starfish Hill was built, SA had no wind power, but by 2011 SA was generating more than 20% of its electricity from clean, renewable, wind. This is a wonderful achievement, making SA a world leader in the fight against climate change, and all South Australian's should be proud of it.

Wind and hydro power are by a large margin the most viable forms of renewable energy available at present (the cost of solar is coming down, but an average utility scale wind turbine generates about 2000 times as much electricity as an average roof-top solar installation). Of course SA has negligible opportunity to develop hydro power, we have far too little rainfall for that. If the Liberals make wind power impractical they will greatly limit renewable power development in SA.

South Australia's best wind resources are mostly either on the coast or on ridge-tops within a hundred kilometres of the coast and it is not financially viable to build a wind farm a long distance from a power transmission line (which cost around a million dollars per kilometre to build).

The first anti-renewable energy flyer can be downloaded here.

Also Ms Redmond was reported by Adelaide Now to have said on 2012/01/21, "[Wind power is] probably the least efficient and most unreliable of all the green energy sources".

What could she mean by 'least efficient'?

But how does it apply to the wind? How would you meaningfully measure the efficiency of a wind turbine? If less than all the wind power available to the turbine is converted to electricity, does it matter? What harm is done?

Some wind farm opponents confuse efficiency with capacity factor. The capacity factor of Australian wind turbines averages out at 34%, which means that for every 10 mega-Watts of installed capacity we get an average of 3.4 MW of electricity. The capacity factor of solar photo-voltaics in SA is around 18%.

What could she mean by 'most unreliable'?

By making such obviously ill-informed statements Ms Redmond is probably doing more harm to the Liberals and herself than she is to the renewable energy industry.

On 2012/01/24 I offered to sit down and talk to Ms Redmond about the facts of wind power; as of late February I had not received any reply to my email.

David Ridgway, SA Shadow Minister for Urban Development and Planning joins in

Like so many anti-wind power people, Mr Ridgway made the point that wind turbines do not operate all the time and therefore conventional power stations must be available to fill in. In this he conveniently forgot that all major power generators are off line some of the time, either for maintenance or from breakdown. Fossil fuel generators are typically available only 85% of the time. Other generators must be available to fill these gaps too.

Both coal-fired and nuclear power stations are inflexible in generation, they do not easily respond to varying demand on the grid. Gas and oil-fired generators are flexible, but expensive to operate.

My photo used by the Liberals Construction of prototype turbine at Snowtown

The fact that the people who put the SA Liberal Party flyers together made so many errors, got most of their photos from the stridently anti-renewable energy Waubra Foundation and one of mine (without asking permission), and first said that they were going to enforce a 5km exclusion zone around houses and later changed that to 2km, suggests something thrown together with very little research, objectivity, competence, diligence or care; not to mention low ethical standards.

Contrary to the tenor of the Liberal flyer, wind power development has been a great success in SA, it generates more than 20% of SA's power and has substantially reduced power imports from the eastern states and, very importantly, lowered greenhouse gas emissions from power generation.

The flyers give the impression that wind power is unpopular in rural districts. As shown by the Pacific Hydro survey released in early 2012, the great majority of country people are actually strongly in favour of wind power.

Australians want action on climate change and it is only a small minority of country people who oppose them, mainly on the NIMBY (not in my back yard) principal. The following was extracted from a Summary of Opinion Surveys on Wind Power conducted by the European Wind Energy Association:

"The Australian Wind Energy Association commissioned a telephone survey in August 2003 covering 1,027 people. 94% of respondents thought that a target to increase the contribution of clean energy from renewable resources was a good (32%) or very good idea (62%). Less than 3% considered the current target to be too high or much too high. 88% said they wanted the government to increase support to the renewable energy sector, compared to 26% wanting an increase in support for the fossil fuel sector. 95% supported (27%) or strongly supported (68%) building wind farms to meet Australia's rapidly increasing demand for electricity. 91% agreed it was more important to build wind farms for electricity than avoid building them in rural Australia. For 71% of respondents, reducing greenhouse pollution outweighed protecting industries that rely on reserves of fossil fuel."

Pacific Hydro and CSIRO reports released in 2012

The CSIRO report "Acceptance of Rural Windfarms in Australia: a snapshot"; found that there is strong community support for wind farms (contrarty to the impression given by the popular media) and discussed ways of increasing this further.

There are already many constraints on where wind turbines can be built:

• They must be in a place that has a good wind resource; this often means that they need to be on ridge lines or near the coast;
• They must be reasonably close to a high voltage power transmission line with sufficient reserve capacity to take the power from the wind farm;
• They should be reasonably close to a number of other turbines to minimise the length of roads and power cables etc;
• Their location must not be where there is high conservation-value native vegetation;
• National and conservation parks cannot be used;
• Areas that have more than a few scattered houses are not practicable.

Most current wind farms have their turbines no closer than one kilometre from homes; that means an exclusion zone of about three square kilometres for each house.

Independent Australia's Sandi Keane on the motivation behind Plimer and Howard's anti-renewables stance; 'Plimer and Howard ape creationists'.

Article by Simon Copland on the ABC's The Drum exposing the Coallitions 'war against renewable energy' and discussing its anti-business aspects.

Is Nuclear Power Globally Scalable?, (by Derek Abbott, School of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, University of Adelaide) provides a convincing argument that nuclear power cannot replace fossil fuels as mankind's main source of energy.