Who is the Greenest of Them All?

15 August 2009

Nuclear power. Monty Burns may of given it a bad image, the Russians – even worse, yet when it comes to low carbon, low cost power which can sustain the quality of life Australians are used to, there appears to be few other options.

Renewables are generally split up into tidal, wind and solar. The federal government has committed to providing 20% of the nation’s power from renewables by 2020. Each power source has issues, yet government had generally agreed that windpower would be able to provide a large portion of our renewable power. This was due its alleged consistency ,running day and night and its flexibility to be placed in numerous regions across the country.

However no serious analysis on windpower has been conducted until now. Andrew Miskelly a regarded meteorologist and physicist Tom Quirk have debunked the economics surrounding windpower within Australia through some thorough analysis. Australia’s plans for wind power are based on the premise that if there is no wind blowing in say South Australia, NSW will make up the difference for it will be blowing there. Quirk and Miskelly blows this out of the water (you only need to look at yesterdays national forcast!) and show that all that windpower will do is generate more carbon emissions as they still require a coal fired power station to back them up when the wind is not blowing.

In a separate study by power industry authority and engineer Peter Lang it was found that wind power will cost consumers over $800 per MW against nuclear of $22 per MW.  Now there may be consumers out there willing to pay such a premium for green power, yet domestic households do not use the majority of our power. It is industry and business which does and there is no way they could afford such an enormous rise in costs. The economic impact of this would obviously be enormous.

The public may freak out about the prospect of nuclear power, yet the latest generation of nuclear power stations are essentially fool proof. Even one of the greenest politicians in the land former NSW premier Bob Carr supports them.

It is time for the cheap platitudes to end and nuclear power to be seriously considered to meet Australia’s growing power needs. All we are receiving at the moment is the type of analysis which is conducted by Monty Burns, or even worse Homer Simpson.