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On The Overland to Adelaide
I’ve been to Adelaide before, but only ever by air, so it never seems quite as far as it really is. Looking at a map, it doesn’t seem so colossal.
But now that Ellie and I have stuck our car on The Overland and are travelling 85km/h for ten and a half hours (or so the announcer said) and we’ve been going two hours so far. We’ve hardly made a dent in our trip. At about the four hour mark, not quite half-way to Adelaide, we will have travelled as far as our walk will take us. Presuming the announcer was right about our speed, after 3 hours, 51 minutes and 32 seconds on the train, we will have travelled the same distance as we will walk from Port Augusta to Adelaide. Watching the fields flash by at the moment, I’m getting a terrifying and inspiring idea of just how far 328 km is, and just how amazing it is that we’re doing it.
I’m also getting a sense that Australia is a bloody big country. It’s a long way from Melbourne to Adelaide. But that’s one of Australia’s relatively short inter-city hops.
Thinking about those distances and how they relate to energy supply, it’s not difficult to be overwhelmed by the space between everything. It’s harder to make a sustainable national power grid (which Australia still doesn’t have) because of the massive distances cables need to traverse. The longer the cable, the more energy is lost in the process of transmission, too. This means more power must be generated at the station (whether renewable or traditional) in order to get a certain amount of energy into the homes of people across the country. While we run on fossil fuels, this means that for every kilowatt which reaches someone’s home, more greenhouse gasses must be emitted than would in a smaller nation. The distance between cities is definitely not the reason Australia has the highest carbon footprint (per person) of any developed nation, but it sure doesn’t help.
The problem of transmission loss is why, for instance, simply closing Victoria’s Hazelwood power station will not reduce our national emissions all that much. Even though Hazelwood a relic of the cold war era, is Australia’s dirtiest power station. It runs on one of the most polluting sources of energy, lignite or brown coal, which is abundant in the area where the station stands. If Hazelwood simply closes, then Victoria will need to receive part of their power from NSW and Queensland. NSW and Queensland stations primarily rely on black coal. This energy source is cleaner than brown coal, but that’s because brown coal is especially inefficient, not because black coal is a clean alternative.
You would think closing the dirtiest power station and relying on less dirty source in NSW and Queensland would reduce our emissions, but those transmission losses mean that you must burn more coal at the black coal fired power station to get the right amount of power into Victoria. This means more emissions for every KW received by Victorians. The amount of energy lost in transmission over long distances makes black coal dirtier than it already was, perhaps as dirty as brown coal.
What we need is to close and replace the dinosaurs. Not in a piecemeal fashion, but in a systematic one.
Huonville in Tasmania is worth mentioning here. Way down South in that state, Huonville is a town which was built around forestry. Much of that, tragically, was done in old-growth regions. Tasmania’s forests are among the most carbon rich in the world, making them a great sink for CO2 emissions. Once they are cut and processed though, the carbon in the wood products will eventually make its way into the atmosphere as the products age and decay. Kept in the forest, that carbon is tied up in the endless cycle of birth and death in the forest.
For this reason, and many others, logging in old-growth forests is simply not safe. Over the years, scientists, activists and politicians of various colours have brought that point home. The practices of the logging companies in Tasmania and the rest of the world have become more and more regulated over this time, and rightly so. But for the residents of Huonville, this means that one of the main sources of income in the town is being taken away, without anything to replace it. The real estate market down there is a sad thing to see as families steadily move away to find work elsewhere. Huonville is far from being a ghost-town just yet, but things aren’t great down there.
This is not what we want to have happen anywhere. While we want the coal-fired power stations to close, we do not want to create ghost-towns. We do not intend to destroy people’s lives in the process of saving others. And so, as I said, we must close and then replace the coal-fired power stations. Replace them with truly green solutions that will last a lifetime. Preferably multiple lifetimes.
The perfect replacement on our sunny and windy continent is solar thermal, backed by wind and a tiny bit of biomass. These can often be placed in the same regions as where those stations with a sauropod-sized carbon footprint once stood. We can keep the towns intact.
I think this, above all else, was why so many Port Augustans support the Repower Port Augusta campaign. This is why when the Alliance polled 4000 residents—that’s a third of the population of the town—less than 50 chose gas over solar thermal. Renewables bring jobs and wealth to a region. They bring growth.
This is why Ellie and I are so impressed with the Repower Port Augusta campaign, and why we choose to walk in support of it.
Read the Repower Port Augusta plan here.
Written by AYCC volunteer Tim Baxter
The AYCC is building a generation-wide movement to solve the climate crisis
www.aycc.org.au
2012-09-13 02:41:30
Source: http://aycc.org.au/2012/09/13/on-the-overland-to-adelaide/
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