Energy Archives – Page 3 of 6 – Stephen Andrew Kickstart Queensland

HYDRO SCHEMES MAY BE RENEWABLE, BUT THEY DEFINITELY AREN’T GREEN

This plan for building the world’s biggest pumped hydro site in the Pioneer Valley will be a disaster for the region in more ways than one.

Five years ago, Malcolm Turnbull announced the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project by saying:

“The plan will increase the generation of the Snowy Hydro scheme by 50 per cent, adding 2000 megawatts of renewable energy to the National Electricity Market (NEM).”

Australians were told the Snowy Hydro scheme would be completed at a cost of $2 billion without any taxpayer subsidy. It would bring electricity prices down and generate renewable energy with virtually nil environmental impact.

None of these claims turned out to be true.

Not only are Australian taxpayers now up for billions of dollars in subsidies but electricity costs have increased in NSW and Kosciuszko’s ecosystem trashed.

Earlier this year, a Victoria Energy Policy Centre Report said ‘Snowy Hydro’ now wants to increase transmission tariffs by more than 50 per cent.

Far from bringing electricity prices down, electricity prices in NSW have risen significantly because of Snowy 2.0.

And far from adding 2000 megawatts of renewable energy to the National Electricity Market, Snowy 2.0 will end up being a net load on the NEM.

For every 100 units of electricity purchased to pump water uphill, only 75 units are returned as the water flows back down through the turbine generators.

Even the Sydney Morning Herald described it as a ‘white elephant’ and the most inefficient battery on the NEM, losing 25 per cent of energy cycled.

The Premier’s ‘revolutionary’ scheme here in Queensland will be no different.

The whole thing seems to have been cobbled together without any consultations held with Traditional Land Owners OR the residents and farmers whose properties and community are set to be wiped out by the Government’s costly and catastrophic virtue signalling.

The concept of hydropower may seem like a green solution, but it’s actually a dirty one.

Hydropower dams emit a huge amount of methane, endanger fish species, submerge prime agricultural land and uproot communities.

Some existing dams in the lowland Amazon have been shown to be 10 times more carbon intensive than coal fired power plants.

Over time, they can lead to drastically reduced fish populations. They also change water quality, insect populations, riverside plants, disrupt food production and the entire region’s ecosystem.

These facts alone should eliminate hydro-electricity as either a green OR low carbon energy option.

SNOWY HYDRO 3.0 – MORE ‘GREEN’ INSANITY FROM QUEENSLAND LABOR!

Premier Palaszczuk has unveiled a new $62 billion 10 year energy plan, which will make Queensland home to the world’s biggest pumped hydro scheme and end the state’s reliance on coal-power.

Queensland’s eight coal-fired power stations are to be shut down and transformed into “clean energy hubs” by 2035 – a decade earlier than expected.

New legislation is also to be enacted committing Queenslanders to an 80 percent renewable energy target by 2035.

What neither the Premier or any of her Ministers mentioned, however, is that the proposed area of the project will mean the loss of parts of the Mackay-Eungella Road and the town of Netherdale.

In other words, an entire regional town comprising 121 people, including 35 families, will have to be submerged to make way for the project.

Aside from the devastating human impact this will cause, the project also risks causing irreversible and long-term ecological damage to the region’s ecosystem.

In 2017, scientists at the University of Hong Kong and James Cook University published a study on the environment effects of hydro energy in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

The authors found hydropower the most environmentally damaging of all the renewable energies they looked at, causing harm to wildlife and habitats, especially fish.

William Laurance of James Cook University commented that: “Hydro projects are such a disaster for tropical rainforests that I don’t consider them ‘green’ energy at all”.

The problem is hydro involves diverting rivers through a set of turbines before feeding it back downriver.

This poses a grave risk of the dam producing toxic methyl-mercury across the water system.

Hydro dams form head ponds and can flood the soil and form low-oxygen, toxic environments.

When exposed to these blooms, humans and animals may develop serious health issues including liver damage, rashes and gastrointestinal illness.

The Eungella Honeyeater is just one of many species at risk. It is one of the last new species of birds discovered in Australia.

The birds eat underwater insects that can accumulate methyl-mercury and then biomagnify it all the way up the food chain.

In terms of the economy, the $62 billion project will sink Queensland even further into debt.

The Government claims the “modelling” supports the extra debt but as usual failed to provide any details of that modelling or the data it was based on.

The project hasn’t even had any engineering or environmental work done yet.

As industry experts have pointed out, the project will be technically difficult.

And with no engineering assessment, the estimated cost is little more than guesswork.

You only have to look at the Snowy Hydro 2.0 project to know where this game is headed!

Pools of methane