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The Government's 'alternative energy' policies will be a disaster for the economy
Gerard Jackson
The Liberal Party's proposed $3.2 billion solar fraud is just another demonstration of its leaders cowardice and wanton disregard for future living standards. Regardless of what Greg Hunt asserts there is no "real choice" between the Labour Government's destructive energy policy and the Liberal Party's green pandering. They are both based on outrageous distortions and outright lies.
Few people realise that it is physically impossible for solar energy to meet the needs of a modern economy, or any economy above a medieval level of existence. This is because solar — including wind power — face insurmountable natural limitations. Even if this were not the case they would still be facing massive diseconomies of scale.
A short time ago the New York Times published an orgiastic article on the marvels of the Florida Power & Light company's 75MW solar complex occupying 500 acres. Literally standing next to this twenty-first scientific miracle on 15 acres is the same company's natural gas plant that generates a massive 3.8 gigawatts whenever needed.
Now let us put these figures into perspective. The solar plant requires 33.3 times the area of the gas plant to produce a miserable 0.0197 of its output. (Remember: a gigawatt is 1000,000,000 watts, so 3.8 gigawatts equal 3,800.0000,000 watts.) Therefore, to produce 3.8 gigawatts would have to cover 25,333.3 acres or 39.6 square miles as against 15 square acres. To top it off, this super leap into the future can only produce electricity one-third of the time. Clearly, the insurmountable natural obstacle is energy density.
Solar energy is so dilute that it requires masses of land, labour and capital to produce a tiny fraction of the electricity that coal-fuelled or nuclear plants could produce with the same resources. Obviously it is the diluteness of the energy source that makes solar uneconomic. (The same people who scream against 'urban sprawl' swallowing up land see nothing wrong with blighting the landscape solar plants and wind farms.)
As disastrous as those figures are, it gets worse. It is easy to assume that to determine how much a solar plant capable of generating 3.8 gigawatts would cost we merely need to multiply 50.7 by $476 million (3,800 divided by 75 equals 50.7). This would be a grave mistake because it implicitly assumes constant returns to scale. For this to be the case there would have to exist an unlimited amount of idle land, labour and capital that can be freely drawn on.
As this is not — and never can be — the case then these projects would face increasing costs of production as they tried to expand output. In plain English, electricity prices would continue to rise and the standard of living fall. (Then again, President Obama did say that under his so-called energy program "electricity prices would skyrocket". Our politicians are not so honest.)
Fortunately, the vast quantities of materials solar plants would consume has been accurately calculated. Kathryn A. Lawrence, a scientist with the National Solar Energy Research Institute in Golden, Colorado, calculated that a solar plant with a 1000 MW output capacity would consume 35,000 tons of aluminium; 2 million tons of concrete (which is 500 times the amount of concrete a 1000 MW nuclear power plant would use!), 7,500 tons of copper, 600,000 tons of steel, 75,000 tons of glass, 1,500 tons of chromium and titanium a very expensive 5 tons of silver, and so on. Clearly, the resources that would be used up in building solar energy plants are immense. Yet these are conservative figures!
The Governor of Oregon's Energy Task Force (1975)* estimated that the actual amount of resources would be three times the amount calculated by Lawrence. This means energy costs amount to 75 million BTU per ton of aluminium, 56 million BTU per ton of steel, 18 MBTU/ton of glass, and 12 MBTU/ton of concrete. All of this for a solar plant which produces 1,000 MW of electricity. A conventional plant would only use about 1000th of this for the same output. So for the same power output, a solar plant needs about 1,056 times more structural metal (by weight) than a nuclear plant or a fossil burning plant.
The energy needed just to produce the aluminium, concrete and glass comes to about 30 trillion BTUs for a solar thermal 1,000 MW plant (a lot more if the 1,000 MW is decentralized). That energy produces wastes in addition to the wastes produced by the production of the materials. Obviously a part of the energy needed to produce a solar plant will be electrical. As that will be coal (no nuclear in Australia) it will involve the production of thousands of tonnes of solid waste plus tens of thousands of tonnes of gaseous wastes. All of which will be deposited in the environment. Obviously, the opportunity costs of these plants would be colossal and totally unjustified.
These figures put to rest the idea that solar is a benign and efficient alternative to coal-fired power plants. Solar would be a blot on the landscape, an environmental menace and a criminal waste of land, labour and capital and a savage attack on the standard of living.
*That this report was produced 35 years ago is irrelevant. What is relevant is that it is based on the fact that solar energy is dilute and that this is why it can never compete with centralised power stations, irrespective of how technically efficient solar collectors become. So why are Australia's think tanks and so-called conservative columnists silent on these facts?
Gerard Jackson is Brookesnews' economics editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 26 July 2010