THE PSYCHOLOGIST : The wave of investment into renewables could bring forward the closure of coal plant by up to a decade

The wave of investment into renewables could bring forward the closure of coal plant by up to a decade

Mark Collette above

This guy is a loon. He proposes to replace dispatchable coal power by new dispatchable gas-fired generation. What a waste of capital investment! It won't please the Greenies as gas is a "fossil fuel" and it will create a huge cost burden on already high gas prices. New demand must push gas prices higher. Maybe they are banking on Russian gas becoming available again. We can hope.

Power giant EnergyAustralia has revealed plans to spend $10bn over the next decade building new electricity generation as part of a broader industry push on green spending, a move that may hasten the departure of NSW’s last coal plant by up to a decade.

Ahead of a planned intervention into Australia’s domestic energy market, the nation’s third-largest electricity retailer and generator set out the new investment target to be split across renewables, storage and solar and battery systems in households.

The wave of investment required to hit Labor’s aim of tripling renewables capacity to 82 per cent by 2030 could also bring forward the closure of EnergyAustralia’s Mt Piper coal plant by up to a decade.

The Mt Piper facility was expected to be the final NSW coal plant to shut in 2040, but that timeline may jump forward by as much as 10 years depending on how quickly replacement generation is installed in its place.

“I‘m worried more about closures happening faster than new entry at the moment,” EnergyAustralia managing director Mark Collette told The Australian. “There’s a lot of modelling out there that shows a lot of closures coming. Historically, Australia’s had maybe three big coal closures in the past 10 years, with Australia facing something like 15 in the next 15 years.”

Asked if an expected wave of green investment would accelerate the exit of Mt Piper, Mr Collette said: “All of the coal-fired power stations in the country, I’d expect all of them to be gone as soon as there’s replacement technology available.

“So for Australia, the challenge is long duration storage. At the moment, coal and gas form that insurance for the system, so we can get through all weather conditions. The date at which coal closes is purely about how quickly we can have replacement from those sorts of services.”

The September quarter produced “a massive acceleration” in the timetable for closure of coal-fired generation on the east coast, according to consultancy EnergyQuest.

EnergyAustralia’s $10bn spending plan over the next decade mirrors a plan by Canada’s Brookfield to invest an extra $20bn in Origin Energy through to 2030 to build new renewable and back-up energy capacity should it prevail with a live takeover bid under way.

The nation’s other big player, AGL Energy, has also said it would need to find up to $20bn to accelerate its exit from coal generation, after announcing plans to bring forward the closure date of its Loy Lang A power station in Victoria.

EnergyAustralia has been in talks with investors to help fund its multibillion-dollar pipeline of projects, with the company’s parent, Hong Kong-listed CLP, previously pointing to a deal with pension giant CDPQ for its Indian business as a potential model it would consider for Australia.

“Our primary areas to invest in are behind the meter to bring the best of small-scale energy technology with grid technologies for customers. And then in flexible capacity, which is the reliable capacity that underpins a very high concentration of renewables and brings it to life,” Mr Collette said.

The company plans to install a giant battery at Wooreen in Victoria’s Gippsland region, a gas-fired power station near Goulburn in NSW, Lake Lyell pumped hydro in NSW along with the Tallawarra B gas plant.

“We can quite clearly see that for our market share it’s quite easy to get to investments of $10bn over the next 10 years. The energy transition is quite expensive and like all players, we’re working on the best ways to fund that transition,” Mr Collette said.

The energy industry is bracing for an expected intervention, with the Albanese government prepared to intervene in South Australia and Victoria on a gas price cap at $11-$13 a gigajoule amid a stoush with states on imposing coal price caps to lower bills.

EnergyQuest said targeting temporary financial support for consumers who are most vulnerable to energy price shocks would be a far better solution.

“Moves to cap gas prices would not only increase east coast gas demand and reduce supply, but it would also amount to a whopping and inefficient fossil fuel subsidy of over $20 a gigajoule,” EnergyQuest chief executive Graeme Bethune said.

“The Treasurer is getting $50bn of windfall gains to his budget through the increases in company tax and Petroleum Resource Rent Tax from the spike in fossil fuel prices. The states already have a mish-mash of energy grants for energy cost relief that could be much better targeted through the Commonwealth welfare payment system.”

Large manufacturers are being offered gas contracts for 2023 at rates up to five times the level being offered last year, with the government warning factories will shut down unless it makes an urgent market intervention to cut prices.

Oil and gas industry sources, who are concerned about Jim Chalmers expanding the petroleum resource rent tax to subsidise retailers and households, have said the government would face constitutional issues if it imposes price caps on east coast gas producers and not WA producers.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/renewable-energy-economy/power-giant-energyaustralias-10bn-renewables-bet-may-hasten-coal-exit/news-story/20910ea6e8bbab9652c01e9b27f5287f

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

The wave of investment into renewables could bring forward the closure of coal plant by up to a decade

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