The letters in the last issue expressed justifiable concern about the Borumba pumped storage “battery” and the impact on residents of high voltage power lines.
It would seem obvious that Powerlink should minimise the effect by using public land where possible and then ensuring that anyone affected is fully compensated.
A public benefit should never be at a cost to private individuals.
The idea is to take lots of power from wind and solar projects throughout Queensland and store the energy in the system.
The solar farm at Woolooga will only be a small part of this.
Solar and wind are the cheapest form of power by a large margin but then there is a cost of storage.
I have not seen any reasonable costing of the Borumba project.
It would be difficult to cost it as they need studies to determine many of the parameters of the project.
But before proceeding too far someone has to work out the cost of storing a Megawatt of electricity in the system.
Currently it looks like Snowy 2 will be a very expensive way of storing electricity.
Soon we need reasonable approximations of cost so there is a proper chance of assessment.
Powerlink have spent a lot of money “consulting ” about routes for the cables and much of this has been about routes that they themselves claim are “high impact” and therefore unsuitable.
It does not inspire confidence.
There has been some talk about “clean coal”.
“Clean coal” is a bit like “nice cancer”.
Australian coal has a lot of carbon in it and less of the other elements that produce things like sulphur dioxide and other pollutants.
So when this coal is burnt we get carbon dioxide and energy.
When low energy coal is burnt we get carbon dioxide, heat and a lot of other things.
But the other things are generally removed after the burning.
If we are concerned about the emission of carbon dioxide and the warming effect of this in the atmosphere, there is little difference in producing power from high carbon coal or lower carbon coal. We use less high carbon coal but, as there is more carbon in it, more carbon dioxide is produced.
So using high carbon coal will save expense in installing scrubbers in the smokestack but it will not be any cleaner from a global warming perspective.
– Reg Lawler
Dagun
