Australian Politics

Gas plant building boom to fuel renewable revolution, says energy grid chief

Craziness: Greenies don't like coal because it is a fossil fuel. But natural gas is a fossil fuel too! It's a theology that's beyond me. I don't agree that either are "fossil" fuels but that's what Greenies call hydrocarbons

The east coast of Australia will need 13 gigawatts of new gas fired electricity generation - the equivalent of building 26 new gas plants - within the next 25 years to back up the rollout of renewables.

The Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) finding that an extra 13 gigawatts would be needed was contained in its latest energy grid road map, released last week. It also warns that eastern Australia’s gas supply is running so low that emergency diesel fuel supplies would need to be built next to each new gas plant.

AEMO’s warning is a high stakes challenge to the Albanese government and Peter Dutton’s opposition given just one gas plant was completed in the past 10 years, with one more in development at Kurri Kurri in NSW.

With 10 months before the election, neither major party has detailed their plans to build crucial energy infrastructure or boost gas supplies.

AEMO said new gas powered capacity must be constructed between now and 2050 so the fuel source can continue to produce 5 per cent of the total energy mix in the grid. These plants will be needed in addition to a huge boost in batteries and pumped hydro.

The figure of 26 gas plants is extrapolated from AEMO’s report. Assuming that each plant can generate about 0.5 gigawatts, a total of 26 plants is needed to deliver 13 gigawatts of capacity – a tenfold increase on the current rate of construction given only gas plant to be built in the past decade.

The number of gas plants is a conservative figure, given the only plant built in the past 10 years, EnergyAustralia’s Tallawarra B gas plant, was 0.3 gigawatts.

AEMO’s Integrated System Plan found the “optimal development pathway” for the lowest-cost energy grid would be powered almost completely by renewables and backed with gas, batteries and pumped hydro.

The road map said gas would continue to play a small but crucial role. It will back up the vast bulk of renewable electricity under the Albanese government’s ambitious target to more than double the proportion of renewable electricity in the grid to 82 per cent by 2030.

Gas peaking plants can respond almost instantly when needed during periods of extreme demand or periods of low renewable generation, especially in winter when low wind and sunshine coincide with cold weather, and households switch their heaters on all at once.

However, AEMO is warning supplies of the fuel are running out – driven by dwindling reserves from Bass Strait fields, which have been the mainstay of the east coast gas market for decades.

AEMO said in March that the entire east coast gas market would be in annual deficit by 2028 unless new supplies are tapped, forecasting the supply gap to increase over time.

That is why AEMO said new gas plants should be built with onsite storage for extra diesel or hydrogen fuel to keep the turbines running if gas runs out – although it noted that hydrogen was likely to be too expensive in the coming decades.

“A typical gas generator may generate just 5 per cent of its annual potential, but will be critical when it runs. Most of that will be needed to support some winter days of low renewable energy output,” AEMO said.

A spokesperson for the Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen said the government was aiming to boost gas supply under its future gas strategy and that gas power would play a small but significant role in an energy grid dominated by renewables.

“AEMO estimates just 1.4 per cent of our 2050 demand will be met through flexible gas or hydrogen generation to support the transformation to reliable renewables that’s underway,” they said.

Former prime minister Scott Morrison’s “gas-fired recovery” policy vowed to open up new gas fields, including the Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory, but no new gas field was developed during that term of government.

Dutton must convince industry and voters he can reverse the record of the Morrison government, when four gigawatts of generation capacity left the grid and only one gigawatt was added.

Opposition energy spokesman Ted O’Brien has promised to release a gas policy before the election. He was contacted for comment.

Not everyone agrees that more gas is needed. Renewable and climate advocates argue that pumped hydro dams coupled with batteries can provide the storage needed to back up renewables, coupled with policies to reduce energy demand with increased energy efficiency.

“A national support program for home batteries will ease the power bill shocks in people’s homes, further stabilise the grid, and cut pollution,” the Smart Energy Council said last week.

‘No shortage’: Producers reject minister’s gas supply claim
Grattan Institute energy and climate policy expert Tony Wood said the government’s policy to encourage more renewables, known as the Capacity Investment Scheme, risked leaving the grid in a mess because gas was excluded.

Wood warned the opposition’s nuclear policy, a plan announced earlier this month to use public funds to build reactors on seven sites across the country, could leave the taxpayer on the hook for inefficient technology that private investors wouldn’t back.

“What we should be saying is we want to design a market with a reliable, low emissions mix and leave it to the market to solve the problem,” he said.

“But we seem to have got ourselves in a situation where the Labor government is arguing more for the private sector and the Coalition is arguing for the public sector investment. How weird is that?

“If the government’s going to decide what the mixture of technology is then we’re in a really bad place.”

The Albanese government approved last week Senex Energy’s long-delayed $1 billion Atlas project in Queensland’s Surat Basin gained federal environmental approval and is set to supply 60 petajoules a year from the end of 2025.

Renewables are driving coal plants out of business at a rapid rate with 90 per cent of the grid’s coal plants expected to be gone by 2035 and all of them shut by 2040. These plants currently supply 60 per cent of electricity.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/gas-plant-building-boom-to-fuel-renewable-revolution-says-energy-grid-chief-20240627-p5jpb0.html

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Dr Nick Coatsworth makes major admission about Covid-19 pandemic

A top doctor who led Australia's response to Covid has admitted governments and health officials lost the trust and goodwill of the public over their handling of the virus.

Dr Nick Coatsworth, who was the deputy chief medical officer during the pandemic, said draconian measures to contain the virus dragged on too long and caused people to tune out.

In an interview with Body and Soul, Dr Coatsworth said Australians were on board with what was being done to promote 'public health' for the first year of containment measures.

'They were open to what we were doing,' he said.

'I think, honestly, if we'd taken the foot off the restrictions a little bit earlier in 2021, then we would've had a lot more people stick with us.

'We had an opportunity to really change the way that people think about health, but I think we lost that in 2021 - the consequence being people just mentally blocked out 2020 and 2021 entirely.'

Dr Coatsworth has previously stated 'group think' and exhaustion led to poor Covid responses in a 10-page submission to the special commission of inquiry being held into the pandemic.

He also made the stunning admission that imposing vaccine mandates was wrong, following a Queensland Supreme Court finding in February that forcing police and paramedics to take the jab or lose their jobs was 'unlawful'.

Although Dr Coatsworth said Australia had assembled a top team of medical experts to advise on managing the pandemic they lacked an ethical framework meaning the focus became too narrow.

'This allowed the creation of a "disease control at all costs" policy path dependence, which, whilst suited to the first wave, was poorly suited to the vaccine era,' he said.

Dr Coatsworth argued the restriction and testing policies adopted to constrain the first deadliest strain of Covid in 2020 lingered well past their relative benefit.

He also thought the differing approaches among states and between them and the Federal government confused the public and eroded human rights.

'I strongly encourage the inquiry to recommend amendment of the Biosecurity Act to ensure that all disease control powers are vested in the federal government during a national biosecurity emergency,' Dr Coatsworth wrote.

This means the federal government would be in control of state border closures during a pandemic.

Outside of 'biosecurity emergencies' states would retain their disease control powers.

Dr Coatsworth has previously taken particular aim at the Victorian government, under then Labor premier Dan Andrews, over its harsh Covid reactions while hosing down criticisms of Liberal Prime Minister Scott Morrison during the pandemic.

'Scott Morrison didn't issue fines to children for crimes against disease control, and Scott Morrison didn't shut down two towers full of refugee and migrant Australians,' Dr Coatsworth said.

'There were very real democratic rights that were trammelled in the course of this pandemic.'

Dr Coatsworth was referring to the July 2020 lockdown on Melbourne public housing towers in Flemington and North Melbourne, which eventually led to the Victorian government offering a $5million settlement to those affected.

After the Covid inquiry was announced in September 2023, Dr Coatsworth took aim at Mr Andrews who 'thinks that the Covid inquiry should focus on vaccines, national medical stockpile and PPE'.

'It is a word that he would prefer never enter into the historical record on our (and his) pandemic response. But it will,' he said.

'None of those are related to the core question. Proportionality,' Dr Coatsworth added.

'It is a word that he would prefer never enter into the historical record on our (and his) pandemic response. But it will.'

In his latest interview Dr Coatsworth admitted the public profile he gained from the pandemic has led to media opportunities such as being a fill-in host for Channel Nine's Today program and making a new show, Do You Want to Live Forever?.

'The opportunity arose out of the pandemic [because] people knew my face,' he said about the new documentary series focusing on how to extend lifespans.

'I love what I do in the hospital, but it’s often too late.

'Once someone’s got a chronic disease, you can’t really make a difference. You make the biggest difference if you can stop them getting the chronic disease in the first place.

'So, I figured television was the best way to get that message out and communicate how to live a healthier life.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13578061/Dr-Nick-Coatsworth-makes-major-admission-Covid-19-pandemic.html

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Jewish groups turn on Sydney University

A rare coalition of Australia’s peak Jewish groups says it has “lost confidence” in the University of Sydney to provide for the safety of Jewish people, and that the organisations “stand ready to provide support to Jewish students and staff … who now wish to leave the university”.

The move follows the university’s controversial agreement with the Muslim students society, which defied university orders to pack up its pro-Palestine encampment protest and has been implicated with extremist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir.

In a significant escalation of pressure on Australia’s oldest university, six Jewish organisations, including some of the most powerful in the country – the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the Australasian Union of Jewish Students, the Zionist Federation of Australia, the Australian Academic Alliance Against Anti-Semitism, and the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council – said they were “appalled and deeply concerned” by the university’s agreement.

“Many of the protesters were from outside the university, yet they were allowed to menace the university community and disturb campus life without challenge,” their joint statement reads.

“They have now been rewarded for doing so.”

The groups said they had rejected the University of Sydney’s offer to participate in a working group to review defence and security related investments and called on others not to partake in the “sham” and “fundamentally flawed process”.

The university has pledged to grant a seat on that working group to the Sydney University Muslim Students Association under last week’s agreement. It has also promised a suite of other measures in return for an end to the encampment protest after almost two months.

Those measures include a pledge to disclose defence and security related investments and research ties and to double its expenditure to support academics under its scholars-at-risk program with a particular focus on Palestinians.

The agreement came a week after the university ordered the campers off the lawns, threatening that failure to comply with directions to leave would constitute an offence. Everyone but the Sydney University Muslim Students Association left following that order. That group defied orders and camped out another week until the agreement was struck.

They said in a statement last week that this defiance “worked in our favour across many fronts, most particularly being the catalyst for negotiations with the uni”.

The Jewish groups said the agreement would “only act as an incentive for further and more extreme disruption at the university in the future”.

“Based on our interactions to date, we have lost confidence in the capacity of the university to provide for the physical, cultural and psychosocial safety of Jewish students and staff members.

“This is not just our view. We have been made aware that several academic staff, some of them leaders in their fields and employees of long standing, have already notified the university of their decision to leave the institution. We have also been informed that a number of Jewish students are now considering shifting to other universities.

“We have also rejected the university’s offer, extended to us after an agreement had been reached behind our backs, to participate in the proposed process to review the university’s investment and research activities. “The process is in our view a sham and we will have nothing to do with it. We encourage individuals and groups of standing likewise not to engage with or lend credibility to such a fundamentally flawed process.

“We continue to explore all options to ensure the safety and wellbeing of students and staff at the University of Sydney and stand ready to provide support and assistance to Jewish students and staff at the university, as well as those who now wish to leave the university.”

The University of Sydney has repeatedly said the working group will not review the university’s research activity.

When contacted for a response to the letter, a university spokeswoman said: “These are deeply challenging times and we recognise the significant distress relating to this conflict and also the way the university has managed the encampment.

“We deliberately took time to listen and understand our community’s concerns with the intention of coming to a peaceful resolution.

“We are pleased the encampment was resolved without violence. The ending of the encampment is the first step, and we know we need to work hard to rebuild our relationships with some members of our university community.”

One Jewish student at the University of Sydney, Zac, told The Australian that he was considering transferring following the last few months of tensions on campus. He did not want his face photographed or his surname published for fear of reprisal.

“I’ve been harassed,” he said. “They had a protest. I was filming the protest just in case anything happened. I got told I wasn’t welcome here and that I had to leave – I said, I’m a student at the university and they didn’t care. And I got pictured and posted on Instagram and they called me a ‘Zio’.”

Zac said the university’s deal with protesters announced last Friday confirmed to him that the university “didn’t care about me personally”.

“I guess the squeaky wheel gets the grease. If they complain loudly enough, it doesn’t necessarily mean their opinion’s right or anything they do is right. They’re just the loudest.

“I’ve looked into it a lot, into transferring to UNSW, or UTS, or Macquarie. When you don’t feel comfortable walking around campus, and your classes are on campus, and there are people who you thought were friends who now you don’t talk to or they don’t talk to you, it sort of makes it hard to want to keep coming to uni.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/jewish-groups-turn-on-sydney-university/news-story/822c4873d9a9c9521dbed7be10025335

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My street library was just a family project. What happened next, well, you wouldn’t read about it

As I have spent most of my life reading, I really like this story -- JR

Amy Adeney

I’ll be honest – my motives for installing a street library outside my house were not particularly community-minded. At the time I was really into “projects”. We’d just finished transforming our swimming pool into a trout pond (yes, really), and I was looking for something new to keep my kids busy during the summer holidays. As a picture book reviewer, my bookshelves were overflowing, so a street library felt like a two-birds-one-stone solution.

I’d heard about street libraries and noticed the occasional book box on side streets – but I didn’t know much about the movement, or how they worked. I purchased a large ready-made raw timber unit from the Street Library Australia website and got to work on the fun bit – bringing it to life. We chose a deep purple paint colour called Dumbledore and adorned the doorframe with mirrors and jewels.

The website advises that it’s a good idea to give your street library a name, and Dumbledore felt perfect – a font of wisdom and knowledge, like the books that it would hold. When the paint and glue were dry, Dumbledore was glorious to behold, and once it was installed on a post behind our front fence with a bunch of books inside, I dropped a note in every letterbox on the street informing residents of the new street library. At that point I was ready to sign off – mission accomplished.

What came next was entirely unexpected. Notes and cards began to appear in our letterbox, thanking me for “adding a touch of beauty to our neighbourhood,” for initiating such a “fabulous venture,” and promising to add and swap books. The cards were mainly from strangers. We had lived in the house for six years but had never spoken to many of our neighbours.

Suddenly, we found ourselves striking up conversations with people as they browsed the library, chatting about books and offering recommendations. On days when the box was full, small piles of books would be left on our doorstep, to be squished into the shelves when there was space available.

The library took on a life of its own, and the turnover of books has never slowed. During lockdown, an elderly lady I spoke with on the street told me all her friends from the aged care home around the corner would walk to my house to find things to read. Far from just being a place to rehome kids books, Dumbledore is also stacked with adult options, from thrillers to cookbooks.

While my initial motive may not have been altruistic, as a lifelong reader, primary teacher and children’s author, I’m now so glad that we joined the growing network of street librarians. Like all libraries, our lovingly decorated installations are a wonderful way to increase literacy and provide easy access to books for members of the community who may not have other avenues. I also love the way that street libraries introduce readers to new authors and genres that they may be reluctant to try while browsing in a bookshop – I have certainly found some unexpected gems on Dumbledore’s shelves. Most importantly, this experience has shown me that, far from being a solo pursuit, reading can be a fantastic way to foster connection with others.

These days, the trout are long gone, but the street library is in full swing. A couple of weeks ago, as I headed out for a walk, a new neighbour was peering through Dumbledore’s perspex window. Her daughter-in-law was in labour, and she was killing time as she waited for a phone call announcing the birth of her twin grandchildren. We exchanged details so that I could share some recommendations of my favourite books for newborns, and a few days later she texted me a beautiful photo of the babies. I can’t wait for the time those babies are old enough to toddle up to Dumbledore and choose their own books. And I’m forever grateful for the random impulse that inspired me to introduce this little box of bookish magic to my street.

https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/my-street-library-was-just-a-family-project-what-happened-next-well-you-wouldn-t-read-about-it-20240517-p5jej8.html