Tasmania declares itself 100 per cent powered by renewable electricity
reneweconomy.com.au
reneweconomy.com.au
https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/major-publications/qed/202... (Section 1.5, figure 30)
So it's more correct to say that local generation is 100% renewable, not total energy consumption.
https://environmentvictoria.org.au/our-campaigns/safe-climat...
> But Victoria is catching up. In 2016, the Victorian state government announced new renewable energy targets. By 2020, 25 percent of Victoria’s electricity will come from clean renewable energy. By 2025, that will rise to 40 percent.
Their target is 50 percent by 2030, but I’m overly optimistic based on runaway rooftop solar deployments and the current utility scale projects in the pipeline. It is highly likely most of Australia is 100% renewables powered (electrical, doesn’t include transportation) by 2032, 2035 at the latest.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/australia-can-be-powered-100-by-...
There are other small countries such as Costa Rica or Norway which are also already on “100% renewables” thanks to hydro power.
Also, this is usually just for electricity. They are probably still burning lots of fossil fuels for heating and vehicle traffic.
Washington state could be hydro powered, but it's only 70%, with 20% non-renewable. Quebec is 97% hydro, but 3% nuclear due to a historical political horse-trade. Illinois, despite having the mighty Mississippi River, has 3 total dams and is less than 1% of its energy mix, with more than 50% being non-renewable.
So Costa Rica and Tasmania do enjoy some advantages, but so do lots of other places that haven't accomplished the same.
This? https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/ma...
Couldn't imagine wanting to import nuclear instead of moving trains full of oil to burn during winter had anything to do with the decision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...
Tasmania is also blessed in that Hydro is our "base load" which can be ramped up or down in seconds based on the fluctuating wind and solar generation.
I was driving past some of Tasmania's older dam's today on the way home from a hiking trip and I found myself trying to imagine what the river would have been like if the dam's had never been built. While I am thankful for Tassie's dam's and what they'll mean for our future, it's hard to not notice how much they change the environment.
> They are probably still burning lots of fossil fuels for heating and vehicle traffic.
Car's YES... although I'd say a LOT of people (perhaps most) heat with electricity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laTIbNVDQN8 is a good documentary about dam removals in the American west.
But more than the technical achievements, it's a political achievement too. Australia has been mired by coal mining influencing policy for decades, and in the past ten years states have been reacquainted with their fortitude and started making policy that helps the state and not the mining industry.
SA and Tasmania are full steam ahead on renewables and they are leading by example on just how capable new energy technologies can be when deployed with smart policy.
Yeah that's a renewable energy you know?
The common term for this is "net 100% renewables" as opposed to "gross 100% renewables", and is typically defined as exporting more renewable electricity than you import fossil-electricity while simultaneously not generating any fossil-electricity locally.
And in Australia, whenever a state talks about "100% renewables by 20XX" they're almost always talking about net 100% and not gross, so it's a reasonable-ish thing to leave off. Still annoying, mind you.
So the headline isn't incorrect, just annoyingly ambiguous.
Tasmania is an exceptionally small state. Population 500K. Based on the renewable power sources available, they must rely on a network for stability. Otherwise, they would have to massively over-develop their power infrastructure. This itself would be unsustainable.
The issue is not that Tasmania needs to over-build. It's that Victoria needs more renewables. If TAS was a net importer, that would be a different story.
So it is not in their control to be powered only by non-renewable energy. The rest of what you have written doesn’t change this simple fact.
Nuclear has similar issues where baseload generation is inefficient when trying to cover shifting power demand. Thus small cities next to nuclear will import power even if they are a net exporter. In the end larger electricity grids are simply more efficient.
So, simplified you can produce 120% export 15% and import 5%. That’s net export, and covering 100% of demand. That’s also how they can have a “200 per cent renewable target by 2040.”
Batteries for example aren’t actually renewable energy sources. So when a solar or wind powered off grid home uses batteries to store solar energy for later usage is that 100% renewable energy as long as the power is originally from sunlight?
It seems somewhat silly to say such homes are battery powered. The same terminology is used when homes skip the batteries and send power to the electric grid only to use that amount of power later. Sure, they could spend more resources building batteries, but that’s wasteful.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s easy to disagree with the common definitions. However, as long as the definitions used are common and describe the situation you can’t say they are lying.
PS: Fossil fuels are also from sunlight just like wind, so saying their not renewable is really talking about the ability to use them vastly faster than their created. Which fits the batteries / grid as renewable energy storage definition just fine.
Yeah, so why choose deceptive ways to define things?
> Batteries for example aren’t actually renewable energy sources.
They aren’t a source at all. They are just a way to store energy.
> So when a solar or wind powered off grid home uses batteries to store solar energy for later usage is that 100% renewable energy as long as the power is originally from sunlight?
Sure, why not?
> Don’t get me wrong, it’s easy to disagree with the common definitions. However, as long as the definitions used are common and describe the situation you can’t say they are lying.
I don’t know about that. It seems quite hard to disagree with the common definition. It seems very apt. The definition you seem to defend on the other hand seems like meaningless political drivel.
As per the GP's comment, in 2020 that is not the case and have been a net importer.
If renewables+fossil fuels allow you to pollute less than either renewables alone or fossil fuels alone then that's what you should do.
Edit: per comments downthread, perhaps they're actually not quite there yet, but still I think the principle holds if internal generation is exclusively renewable and net imports are negative.
So it is actually over 100%? I don’t understand what you are even calculating when you say 100%, for me it makes no sense.
In a longer time frame they normally export more energy, but they are just announcing that all (used) local generation capacity is renewable, so even if we look at a longer time frame they still don't meet the definition.
Assuming they get normal rainfalls next year (and nothing else interrupts local generation) then they will likely hit the "net 100% renewables" target next year.
I believe the GP's complaint is that they're announcing something -- the ability in normal conditions to generate all their electricity through renewable means -- in a way that could easily be parsed incorrectly to mean they are doing so currently.
In actual fact even local generation is not 100% renewable, they have a small quantity of gas generation too. For example Tamar valley gas power station is running right now - and effectively being exported to Victoria.
"100% renewable" in the sense that generation of renewable electrical energy is more than 100% of electrical energy consumption. It seems like the most straightforward way to account for it.
Haven't seen anyone insisting they should build nuclear yet, that always shows up too.
2. Because nuclear is wildly misunderstood, has progressed dramatically in the last two decades, and has a bad stigma because of incidents in the past caused by poorly designed facilities and cut corners. The incidence rate of nuclear is ridiculously small, and most of the arguments against it have scientific and completely positive responses. It is a viable solution that parrots love to put down because "oh no chernobyl".
Due to improved security nuclear plants have gotten more expensive, and as a results almost no new ones are being built in the Western world to replace those that are shutting down. The industry is slowly whittling down.
Now you can start inventing excuses why this is happening (popular ones are the greens, and the governments, and scared people, and also people who don't want to pay for the transition off fossil fuels). But it IS happening.
There's a fair amount of hype surrounding nuclear tech, e.g. in the form of small plants, but so far that's all vapourware. They are not competing on commercial terms, or even close to.
It costs more than every other form of renewable energy even when variability is taken into account.
I've yet to hear a scientific response to this that doesn't involve some sort of FUD around variability.
As it is, calling this "100% powered by renewables" is like me saying I'm a vegetarian because I don't buy meat, omitting the fact that I regularly order and eat pizzas with meat in it.
Also, yes, nuclear should be the part of overall solution, but it's arguably too much capex for Tasmania.
The 6% non-renewable production seems to come from natural gas, and it imports a large amount of energy from Victoria.
It is good that they've achieved this, but their carbon intensity right now (for consumption) is 196g/KWh which is more than double the consumption for France
Source: https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/AUS-TAS
Screenshot for production: https://imgur.com/8sBZ0Tx
Screenshot for consumption: https://imgur.com/ryvAT2d
Its not a scalable solution! A lot of Australians already have solar panels on their roof which generate more electricity than they use in a 24hour period. But we cannot say we are 100% renewable because we also use power at night, where the electricity is still mostly from coal, especially when theres no wind.
But as more companies try to reach 100% through offsetting the more saturated the grid becomes with renewables, which will make fossil plants uneconomical and force changes around storage. Early adopters pay more for less efficient renewables, late adopters pay more for storage. It's not that terrible. Assuming the books aren't cooked of course.
This whole thing would be a non issue if people actually took their damn medicine.
Paying for renewable energy creates a market for renewable energy. It is that simple.
I think it is easier for smaller countries with the right conditions, to achieve it (Iceland and Norway are on a similar rate as well):
https://i.redd.it/iwqx9a21ql951.png
The exception is in years with excessive draughts, where they have had to import it. But in years of good rainfalls, they do export it as well.
They are most likely still burnung fossil fuels for heating and vehicle traffic.
Where can I read more about how you guys managed to switch everyone to heat pumps? Or is hydro power cheap enough that you can just create heat rather than pump it around? Because that would make it a simple "replace 1 device" transition from heating water with gas to heating water with electricity. And for burning garbage, do you filter the CO2 at the exhaust or how is that green? (I don't know much about garbage burning or what kind of pollution does/doesn't come from it.)
The main driver to get people onto heat pumps has mainly been just lowering electricity bill. You get up to 5x more heat per kWh, so it has a significant impact. We've also just banned oil burners[2], though not too many had those.
Water heating is primarily done using electricity, using a water heater like this[3].
In some places, especially in cities, there might be district heating where the heat and/or hot water comes from a central. In my previous place that was due to a waste plant burning trash. They filter a lot of stuff but not CO2, however the other one in the city will be getting CO2 filtering now[4] after a financial go-ahead this year from the government.
[1]: https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/Market-data1/#/nordic/table (e.g. Oslo)
[2]: https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/forbud-mot-oljefyr--ti...
[3]: https://www.osohotwater.com/en/domestic/saga
[4]: https://www.fortum.com/media/2018/11/full-scale-carbon-captu...
There's another similar project in which solar captured in the Northern Territory will be exported to Singapore via a 4500km undersea cable:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-30/nt-sun-cables-austral...
That is the current plan, as well as the state planning (and signed into law!) to double their renewables capacity by 2040.
(Marinus Link mentioned below is a 1500MW upgrade to the existing 500MW underwater interconnect allowing the bidirectional flow of power between Tasmania and the mainland).
> Barnett added that the Tasmanian government would continue to support an expansion of the state’s renewable energy capabilities, as the state looks to grow its role as a supplier of zero emissions energy to both mainland Australia and of green hydrogen into international export markets.
> “But there is more to do, which is why we have set a target to double our renewable generation to a global-leading target of 200 per cent of our current needs by 2040 – which we recently passed into law following the passing of legislation through both Houses of Parliament,” Barnett added. “We are also continuing to progress the Marinus Link and Battery of the Nation projects that represent an intergenerational opportunity to make Tasmania a global leader and the renewable energy powerhouse of Australia.”
I do not know how far is this from Zero CO2 considering cattle production and CH4 emission, cement production, ship and airplane traffic ...
Average daily winter temps in Hobart (capital of Tasmania) is 8.5C (47.5F). It snows enough for ski resorts in Tasmania [1]
So yes.
(Natural Gas in Australia isn't that cheap anyway, we export nearly all of ours)
We have gas heating, floor heating , wall heaters and such..
However the weather doesn't get cold enough to kill you here even down south. The houses generally aren't designed for cold weather and we as a nation tend to just put on more clothes and endure somewhat colder houses. I've had people from overseas complain about how cold they get because we don't do much about it.
In say, Germany/China in winter I remember being stunned by how hot people kept their houses and public spaces. We don't heat our spaces in the same way generally.
On the other hand, it gets real hot and we are somewhat optimised towards that way of living.
Will Tasmania outlaw new combustion vehicle sales like many other jurisdictions have set deadlines to? Seems like it’s reasonable to do so based on their electrical generation mix and EV charging infrastructure deployment timelines/cadence (with orchestration to prioritize charging those vehicles when excess renewables can’t be shipped over the underwater interconnector).
https://aeva.asn.au/articles/tasmanian-fast-charging-network...
https://www.plugshare.com/ (search for “Tasmania”)
I'm not sure if they have legal authority to do that. In Australia, vehicle emission standards and design rules are set by the federal government, not the states. If a state tried to set more stringent standards, there is a risk the federal government might argue in court that is invalid as contrary to federal legislation, and there is a decent chance the federal government would succeed.
(Although both Australia and the US are federations, and the Australian constitution is heavily influenced by the US constitution, the balance of power between the state and federal governments is different in each country, so just because a US state can "go-it-alone" on some issue doesn't mean an Australian state necessarily can.)
There are a bunch of other ways in which Australian states are weaker than American ones:
* In the US, marriage and divorce are primarily state responsibilities; in Australia, they are primarily federal ones, with states only having some residual responsibilities related to marriage registration (and the federal government could legally take those residual responsibilities over if it wanted to). This meant that while things like marriage equality or divorce law reform could happen on a state-by-state basis in the US, in Australia they could only happen at the federal level
* US states have power to levy state income tax; Australian states are de facto banned from doing so. (Federal law says that if a state imposes income tax, it makes itself ineligible for federal funding grants, which makes state-level income taxation infeasible).
* More generally, Australian states are far more dependent on federal funding than US states are
* The Australian federal government has massive direct economic expenditure in several areas – health, education, disability, broadband – which in the US are primarily state or private funding responsibilities
* The external affairs power gives the federal level the power to override any state law if required by an international treaty. Although the Treaty Clause of the US Constitution may be similar, that requires a 2/3rd supermajority vote in the Senate which is a difficult bar to overcome, whereas the Australian external affairs power only requires a normal 50%+1 majority in each house of the Australian Parliament. As an example, Australia has a national ban on the death penalty enacted on the basis of the UN treaty "the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights"
* US constitutional amendments require approval of state legislatures; in Australia, the federal government directly seeks approval of constitutional amendments by the voters in national referendums, leaving the state governments/Parliament with no direct role in amending the national constitution
How do they determine renewable generating capacity? I'm asking because it will vary years to years. Is it the theoretical max, or is it the value based on some averages of the expected output?
To learn more, this post talks about it in greater detail: https://blog.greensolver.net/en/p50-p90-simplified-two-figur...
This is pure fiction.
[1] https://www.hydro.com.au/news/media-releases/2017/09/15/inst...
And you’re wrong actually - in a gas turbine, diesel is cleaner than coal.
Your own link includes a link to https://www.hydro.com.au/clean-energy/secure-energy which had the current mix. There is 0% diesel, but a small amount (8%) gas.
It's only "100%" if you're being deliberately misleading and trying to gloss over the mass pollution of diesel.
Hydro is not 100% reliable 100% of the time, so to say it is an absolute fabrication.
You will note the OP claims Tasmania is 100% renewable powered without such qualification, a total lie.
Gas is better, but diesel is better than coal. The problem with diesel is usually that it's hard to get large enough output for a regional source. But Tasmania is small enough this wasn't too bad.
https://www.winnipeg.ca/finance/findata/matmgt/documents/201...
> You will note the OP claims Tasmania is 100% renewable powered without such qualification, a total lie.
It's - of course - not a lie at all. They claim they have just reached it now (in 2020). Your criticism is about something that happened in 2016.
The gas generators in Tasmania that will still exist until after 2040 don't exist then. Got it!
https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news/2150819-gas-to-play-role-...
> The state is on track to achieve 100pc of its electricity from renewable sources by 2022
(Noting that - as the link in this HN story points out - they got there early)
> It sees gas providing back-up power to solar and wind projects, as well as being used for household heating and industrial purposes
Oil (Diesel) generation is about 20% better in terms of CO2 output vs coal.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/reneweconomy.com.au/graph-of-th...
And how can it "negate years of hydro" anyway?
Say there are 5 years of zero emissions and then 3 months of diesel emissions. That creates some CO2 but it doesn't somehow erase the emission savings previously.
That makes zero sense at all.
Because 3 months of diesel averaged over 5 years (hydro fails only once every 5-10 years, not yearly) already makes that less than 100%.
Additionally, they STILL use gas today -- right now. 100% is fiction. It's not even true today.
How are you not getting this? 100% is a lie. The state government even admits as much.
"The Tasmanian state government still sees a role for gas in its plans for a big expansion in renewable energy output by 2040, after introducing legislation in the state parliament yesterday."
https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news/2150819-gas-to-play-role-...
Tasmania has gas generators. These gas generators run TODAY. That means that there are times when they are not 100% "renewable", making the headline claim false.
So average it over the year it happened, not 5 years? This seems a pretty reasonable thing to do. (But if you do average over 5 years it would also be reasonable to include the energy exports, in which case it is well over 100%)
I'm interested why this is a problem. Can't we make the blades out of various exotic metals like wings of the last aircraft generation are? Before the carbon 787 etc? Then we could just recycle them? Or is there a lightning strike issue or something I don't understand?
Wind turbine blades aren’t toxic. They can be land filled (like almost all waste that isn’t incinerated or plasma gasified), or, if you want to recycle them, they can be used as feedstock for cement kilns or crushed into insulation pellets (which requires a supply chain configured to do so).
https://blog.ucsusa.org/james-gignac/wind-turbine-blades-rec...
https://blog.ucsusa.org/james-gignac/solar-panel-recycling
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-solar-recycling-idUSKBN1J...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/08/26/recycling-pv-panels-w...
This is true of batteries too - basically, the stuff dead batteries are made of are far purer than ore, and pretty close to what functioning batteries need due to obvious reasons.
Do you have any information on that, I'd never heard of that being the case?
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/10/759376113/unfurling-the-waste...
Another comment on this thread says it's all fine and I'm wrong, which is good news.
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbines...
And increasing the length of the blades also provides more than linear improvements - doubling the length of the blades gives something like 4 times the power output.
So you could imagine how hard it is for wood to get traction - suppose that wood means the turbine accesses 10% slower wind speeds and also has 10% smaller blades. If I didn't fumble the maths (0.9^4 * 0.9^8), that would mean only a FIFTH of the energy!
I'm keeping my eye on wooden wind-turbine stuff like Modvion (side note: Modvion are combining wood turbines with a modular, which is really smart as wood is less dense and therefore causes more trucking problems and costs, and making the design modular means they can potentially reduce trucking costs to cheaper than conventional designs instead of more expensive, while simultaneously benefiting from the sunk costs of wood being limited to the size of a tree unless you combine materials together), but they're building a preliminary tower that won't come online until ~2022, so it's not tech that's viable today.
Also, as your article says: Financially speaking, nobody cares unless there's a solid tax on non-recyclable materials or carbon emissions. Wooden turbines are more useful in the real world than they are in the artificial market we live in, which refuses to acknowledge the large cost of our carbon emissions.
>doubling wind speeds gives ~8 times the power
This describes a cubic relationship; 2 cubed is 8.
>doubling the length of the blades gives something like 4 times the power output
This describes a quadratic relationship; 2 squared is 4.
0.9^3 * 0.9^2 = 59% of the energy, much better than the 20% you claim.
But the degrees to different ways of producing energy cause waste are really vastly different. Compared to spewing out greenhouse gasses and particulates into the atmosphere when burning fossil fuels, waste from wind, solar, and yes even spent nuclear fuel, are really trifling issues. We should do it well, and work on improving recycling etc., but current ways of handling them are vastly better than using fossil fuels.
For example. A common complaint is that solar panels are full of leaded solder. What the articles omit is that leaded solder has been banned for more than a decade and the panels they are complaining about are two or three decades old. The articles also generally focus on the most toxic waste even if the most commonly used solar panel types don't contain any of that toxic waste. Thin film cadmium solar panels are "toxic" and everyone agrees but it's a tiny portion of the market. Most solar panels are based on silicon wafers and with some luck you can resurface the top layer of the wafer and use it to make new solar panels. If the frame is made out of aluminum and glass you can recycle that too.