Coal, coal, go away
The decision to grant resource consent for a coal-fired power station at Marsden B near Whangarei shouldn’t make you think it’s a fait accompli. There are 160 conditions on which the resource consent rest, which could well sink the project. Straight off the bat, I can’t see how Mighty River could limit the mercury that the converted power station will emit to one-twelfth of the level they’d asked for. A few further questions:
- Given everyone’s so worried about Kyoto costing $500 million unless we improve our emission levels, why on earth would we embark on a project which will make bloody sure that we’re going to emit even more?
- In an age when ‘energy efficiency’ is increasingly becoming a catch-cry as humanity comes to grips with our finite resources, why would we embrace a power station that will be so damn inefficient? For every hundred units of energy produced by burning the coal at Marsden, only 34 will be converted into electricity. The rest will be wasted - going up into the atmosphere with all the gross, black smoke.
- If almost every environmental consideration under the sun can be taken into account for the resource consent process, why can’t climate change effects?
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September 27th, 2005 at 10:27 am
Let’s move Marsden B to Makara. If the hobby farmers there are so concerned about a clean, renewable source of energy (wind farms) spoiling their view of untouched nature (such as gorse and macrocarpa), let’s see how they deal with a good-old-fashioned lump of industrial-revolution era technology in their back yards.
September 27th, 2005 at 10:42 am
Frog asks: “If almost every environmental consideration under the sun can be taken into account for the resource consent process, why can’t climate change effects?”
Graeme responds:
Because one more doesn’t actually make a difference.
September 27th, 2005 at 10:47 am
Now, where is that press release from the business friendly Green party… oh yes, here it is…
GREEN PARTY WELCOMES MARSDEN B RESOURCE CONSENT
The Marsden B power station has been granted a resource consent to start operations burning coal.
The Green Party are pleased that the resource consent conditions will make this the least environmentally unfriendly coal fired power station in the Southern Hemisphere. It will be many years before New Zealand is able to decommission its last thermally powered non-renewable power station, and this development will help power New Zealand’s prosperity through the next few decades, as well as being a small step towards a cleaner New Zealand.
Mighty River’s committment to limiting the envioronmental impact of its development is to be applauded, and we hope will encourage others to consider the environmental impacts of their businesses in a positive light, and work with the environment, rather than against it.
September 27th, 2005 at 11:54 am
Tomsk: no, to Auckland. They want the power; let them deal with the smuts.
Public opposition does though provide an excellent opportunity for the greens to gain representation on the district and regional councils, and build their profile for the 2008 election.
September 27th, 2005 at 1:34 pm
dbuckley
Now you’ve pulled your head out of your nether regions, how about writing it as it really is. Wake up and smell the carbon.
September 27th, 2005 at 7:12 pm
Can someone please explain to me why none of the older hydro electric stations are not being or cannot be updated? The environmental damage to the river has already been done. The dams are still in place. Surely using them is preferable to massive new schemes like the Waiaki idea of last year? Joy.
September 27th, 2005 at 7:23 pm
Frog asks: “If almost every environmental consideration under the sun can be taken into account for the resource consent process, why can’t climate change effects?�
Most other environmental considerations have a proper scientific basis to them, rather than theories that are not proven beyond reasonable doubt. As a lay person, I am far from convinced that the causes of climate change are as the greens would argue them. After all, when you have greens jumping on the bandwagon that the hurricane season being experienced in the US is being exacerbated by global warming, using quotes out of context and ignoring the fluctuations that occur naturally, it throws doubt on many of their arguments.
September 27th, 2005 at 7:24 pm
Good challenge. How it really is. Or how it really is going to be.
Dateline 27 September 2011
GREEN PARTY DISMAYED AT NEW ENERGY PROPOSALS
The energy minister today confirmed a number of fast track projects aimed at easing New Zealand’s growing energy crises. Briefly, the announcements are:
a) “Three new coal fired power plants will be built. These plants will be on-line within a four year timescale. The locations of the plants, which will be built using the most expedient technology, will be announced next week. However at least one of the plants will be built in the South Island adjacent to coal deposits, which leads me to the next proposal”
b)” A 400KV ’supergrid’ will be extended to form a backbone through the North and South Islands. This will be ready for the new stations as they come online”
c) “A coal to oil conversion plant will be built to deduce NZ’s dependence on expensive foreign oil, primarily to reduce diesel prices which last week hit $4.75 per litre. This plant will be build adjacent to an existing coal field.”
“In order that these urgent projects are brough to a speedy conclusion, the normal RMA process will be waived, and I will introduce legislation within the next week to ensure the trouble free passage of these projects through the consent process.”
The Green Party are dismayed at these proposals, in particular that normal environmental standards are being sidelined as these projects are railroaded to completion yada yada yada…
Yep, I can smell the carbon. Yes Sir, things are going to get a lot blacker around here. Me, I’m a bit of a pragmatist. I cant have what I want, so I’ll settle for the least bad of what is on the table.
And thats the real question here, and the one that will in my opinion dominate the period to the next election for Green politics. How scary are the Green party going to be? Where will the Greens land in the spectrum between good and evil. Is it better to be right and being able to say “I told you so”, or to try and achieve something.
Which was the point behind my dripping-with-sarcasm “press release”.
September 27th, 2005 at 8:15 pm
I meant to post this addendum with the previous note, but tea got in the way
As a further question, what if the Greens were to post that press release?
1) The plant actually gets built as specified, its the least bad plant, it could have been worse, or
2) the plant doesnt get built, so it didnt matter anyway, or
3) The environmental safeguards get swept away to enable the plant to be built. Suddenly you have an own goal on the part of the builder, and an easy platform to attack them on the grounds that they were, basically, lying.
No downside then.
September 27th, 2005 at 9:01 pm
I’m a bit confused, dbuckley.
Your idea seems to be that the Greens should bow to the inevitable while putting the best spin on it.
But the Greens’ ultimate aim is not to be popular, but to influence public policy. The Greens are not under the illusion that they are going to be able to dictate public policy (not any time soon, and not ever, in my opinion). Their aim is to use whatever weight electors give them to influence things in the right direction.
This brings us to the sort of position we have : Another motorway is a motorway too many; no new coal-fired power stations.
In fact, no doubt some more bits of motorway will be built; and coal-fired stations perhaps too; but whatever weight we will have brought to bear may have shifted some resources away from these projects and towards more sustainable, less environmentally destructive, albeit less ecoonomically expedient, projects.
I can see no upside for the Greens in pretending to like it when such projects come about, however “inevitable” they may seem to the fatalists of the Invisible Hand.
———————-
Anyway : if coal is really so inevitable, we should be building co-generation industrial plants. Use the heat, and double the energy efficiency for the same CO2.
September 27th, 2005 at 10:56 pm
Yeah, Alistair, I’m a bit confused too
I dont know what the right answer is, but I am aware that the Greens have a bad image problem, which I think is because the Greens are seen as anti-everything. I know they are not, but from Joe Public’s perspective its close enough.
If coal stations are gonna be built, then is it better to (a) just oppose them on principle, or (b) try to ensure that the least bad stations are built? Is it better to build hydro or coal??
Perhaps I should stick to things I know a bit about!
I used to be a really big fan of co-generation, but now I’m less convinced. Christchurch is the home of Wispergen, makers of domestic scale stirling engine cogen plants. When the smallest cogen plant was the Fiat Totem it was just too big for a domestic, unless you were a swimming pool owner. The Totem consmed gas, and turned out heat, with electricity (15KW!) as the waste product.
The wispergen is the same. Main poduct is heat, electricity a “free” by-product.
The totem was great, as back in the day gas boilers with which it competed were fairly inefficient. But modern condensing gas boiler is over 90% efficient, and thus there is little gap for sensible deployment of domestic scale cogen. Thus a product I had high hopes for appears to have been rendered unnecessary by improvements in a much older technology.
However, if your comparison is a 30% or 45% efficient plant, then cogen makes sense. I’ve mentioned previously plants that burn waste and produce heat and power, but again there is this Green thing about “burning”. There is a certain amount of nimbyism in relation to plants that burn stuf…
September 28th, 2005 at 11:58 am
The key to Marsden and Coal, which Greens are going to need to build policy around, is that Peak Oil is going to be more of a problem than Global-Warming in the short-term and power supplied from totally renewable sources are going to take some time to get built.
Therefore, rather than freezing in the dark as the Maui gas field disappears and the resources of the world are consumed by people who have a lot more guns and money than we do, we are very likely to need to burn some coal that we have locally available. Not forever, but for a while and if we do it in the cleanest manner possible and do cogeneration and push overall efficiency higher in the process (innovative ways to use the otherwise wasted heat are highly desireable), we are doing no worse really, than if the gas were not running out in the near future.
The need for:
1. Insulation and sealing of individual houses.
2. Double Glazing (local sources and lower prices)
3. Higher Electricity Prices (Market Capitalism works too)
4. Larger use of Renewable sources of Electricity
will not be met before the “freezing in the dark” situation becomes real to some of us. So we really do need to consider the use of some of the Coal.
If the generator also burned pelletized wood it would be a bit more environmentally friendly, but I have no idea if we could grow wood fast enough to feed the beast. I’d have to do some sums before thinking about THAT as a good idea. The hardware to do it is very similar however.
dbuckley - A modern condensing gas boiler is a heat generator… only. I think it a bit wrong to compare it with an electrical generator. The goal of a heat generator is to extract every bit of heat from the combustion and this leads to a relatively cool exhaust. Lower temperatures throughout. The efficiency of the electrical generator is related to Carnot efficiency and benefits from the highest temperature delta attainable… and it dumps heat. You expect to burn more fuel overall to produce electricity + useful heat in cogeneration, but you are getting the kilowatts and kilojoules both, and the logical overall efficiency has to be compared to what you’d get burning gas to produce each separately.
That wasn’t completely clear.
If I burn “q” kg of gas to produce “n” kw of electricity and then burn
“p” kg of gas to produce “m” kilojoules of heat my efficiency is on the sum of p and q vs the resulting m+n desired.
If I produce m+n in a cogenerator I will use more than p kg of gas but less than p+q, and the limiting factor for the power is not the 10% remaining efficiency of the gas boiler that is used to produce heat…
Does that help at all?
That said, the limiting usage of cogeneration has to do with the uses the heat can be put to, and there may well be more heat than we have uses. Time shifting the heat production vs the Electricity production becomes a complex issue in the use of cogen plants.
respectfully
BJ