The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand | Green states and brown

11 comments on Green states and brown

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Anawhata on May 16, 2008 - 11:55pm

Kiashu, you have come up with a really interesting local way to look at our domestic "green-ness".

I have a couple of comments on Greenpower.

First, it is a GREAT scheme which enourages people like me to buy renewable electricity when we cannot install solar PV for reasons like roof shading or lack of up-front capital. Greenpower doesn't apply in Tasmania because electricity in that state was almost 100% renewable hydro until recently, and it doesn't apply in NT for completely the opposite reason - the Territory has an isolated grid largely dependent on fuel oil for generation, so no renewable plants are in place yet. Greenpower is very new in WA, another isolated grid known as the SWIS, and recent launch explains the low % there.

The trap in interpreting Greenpower data is that it fails to distinguish between the many households buying only 10% or 25% Greenpower ("token" users perhaps) and the few buying 100% at significantly greater cost. I buy 100% Greenpower and it costs me about $300 a year above non-Greenpower charges - still a bargain considering Australia has staggering cheap electricity by world standards, which incidentally is one of the reasons Solar and Wind plants are so hard to justify here.

It would be interesting to dig deeper into the Greenpower data and compare delivered MWh as a percentage of state totals. I wonder if they would provide the data?

Cheers, Mark

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Big Gav on May 17, 2008 - 12:07am

I'd love to se these numbers too - the inability to distinguish between 10% Greenpower and 100% Greenpower leaves a lot of uncertainty as to how green we are.

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Kiashu on May 17, 2008 - 3:39am

Tasmania is listed by the quarterly GreenPower report as a participant.

Figures for renewable generation are easy enough to find. However, as the GP report says,

From 1 July 2006 onwards, GreenPower providers are required to source 100 per cent of accredited GreenPower sales from 'new' GreenPower generation. For long term GreenPower sales contracts signed prior to 1 July 2006, the 100 per cent ‘new’ GreenPower requirement must be implemented as contracts are renegotiated or by 31 December 2008,
whichever is earlier.

"New" means at least half the generation was built since I think 1997. I've not been able to find figures on renewable generation vs "new" renewables.

The report tells us that GreenPower sales to the 695,884 customers in fourth quarter 2007 were 154,800MWh. This is 154,800,000kWh, or 222kWh per household. The actual average may be a bit higher, bear in mind that about a third of the customers only signed up during 2007 so they won't have been with it for the whole year. Average household use in Australia is about 1,200kWh a quarter. So we find that about 20% of their power use was supplied by GreenPower.

Of course we might also find that the sort of people who sign up for GP also conserve energy, so that the actual use may be more than 20%.

The UIC, drawing on printed sources, says,

In 2006 Australia's power stations produced 255 billion kilowatt hours (TWh) of electricity (243 TWh public supply + 12 TWh for non-grid autoproducers), 65% more than the 1990 level and growing at 3.3% pa.

Of this gross amount, about 18 TWh is used by the power stations themselves, leaving 237 TWh actually sent out (net production). Then about 17 TWh is lost or used in transmission and 9-10 more in energy sector consumption, leaving 210 TWh for final consumption - or 187 TWh apart from aluminium exports.(Vencorp suggest that typically net TWh are about 10% less than gross TWh, with transmission and distribution losses often being 10%.)

So the 154.8GWh GreenPower sold each quarter is about 0.2% of all generation. By comparison, just one wind turbine project at Portland is expected to produce 500GWh annually, that is not much less than the 600GWh or so demanded by current GreenPower customers.

So renewable generation is small in Australia, but is far greater than that demanded by GreenPower customers; the extra 5.5c/kWh GreenPower customers pay goes to subsidise renewable energy for the rest of the country who don't pay for it.

However, my point in the article was not that GreenPower was having a great effect, but rather that the consciousness of environmental and consumption issues was growing. Nobody changes their actions before changing their minds, and the significant number of people volunteering to pay extra shows that people's minds are changing. It's a start.

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