This news today “Govt scraps plans to shut down dirty power stations”.
How do the Greens wake up in the morning – look at themselves in the mirror – and stay in coalition with Labor ? With the national Green vote ebbing away from double figures – they need to do something before the future double dissolution near wipes them out.
The usual dishonest reporting by the media. That picture is from before electrostatic precipitators were installed. Here is a more recent picture which shows the chimneys with one of the precipitators turned off temporarily. There is no visible smoke from the chimneys where the precipitators are operating.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hazelwood_Power_Station_ESP.jpg
Thanks Philip – I see now where electrostatic precipitators were installed in the 1990’s – so the photo could be over a decade old.
Even before the Hazelwood precipitators were upgraded, that kind of show from the stacks could not have occurred without natures help to convert water vapour to cloud. An opportunistic snap I suspect.
As Hazelwood does not have cooling towers there is not normally the convenient plume for alarmist photos we often see.
Gotta love it. Only last week the government were sucking up to the Greens with the plan to link the carbon price to Europe’s, which the Greens accepted as a step towards global emissions trading. (dixit Christine Milne of the Greens here.)
This week the knock-on effect: the “carbon” price in 2015 will be so low that the highest-emission plant in Australia won’t have to close after all. It’s too valuable, at the projected low rate of the tax, to be worth buying out.
In the linked story, the reasonably sensible resources minister, Ferguson, says pegging our price to Europe’s was “only a minor factor” in making it not worth the government’s while to buy out the brown coal stations. For “only a minor factor”, read “the straw that broke the camel’s back”.
Nevertheless a good decision. No waste shutting down a perfectly good power plant. No loss of jobs. No power price increases from attempting to replace the plant with unreliable, unpredictable, uneconomic renewables. And the Greens get shown who’s boss for once – a first step towards Labor regaining some self-respect?
More juicy details on other aspects of this farce here.
Yes Bob, if you look carefully you will see the “smoke” or most of it starts above the chimneys. I suspect there is a fair bit of water vapour as well as CO2 from burning brown coal and the photo was taken on a very humid day.
Over 20 years ago, the Wallerawang power station near Lithgow (not the newer Mt Piper station) felt compelled to erect a road sign stating that the “smoke” from the towers was in fact water vapour
Made no difference to opportunistic greenie misrepresentation, though. One only has to wait for the sun to strike the water vapour at the correct angle (generally early morning or late afternoon) and hey presto ! … instant polluting carbon that just begs for a tax
Bob in C & Mike B, you are right the brown coal at Hazelwood contains about 60% inherent moisture. The firing system has to separate some of the fuel with recycled hot combustion gas (like a pilot flame) to maintain stable combustion. This is a major reason that the boilers can not readily be turned down (or up) to accommodate fluctuating load. Basically brown coal power stations need to be run close to maximum all the time or taken out of service. Black coal power stations have more flexibility but need sometime to accomodate change in load. Hydro & gas turbines (open cycle) are used short term fluctuations and peak loads.