Mind you, Brumby is getting a seemingly well-deserved shellacking at the Business Spectator.

http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/The-path-of-least-res...

The Brumby Government trumpeted this week that it had signed a contract to “facilitate” the development of a $750 million, 400MW brown coal power station to be built jointly by Chinese state owned power group Harbin and HRL, a private company believed to be backed by Kerry Stokes. The plant will be funded by a $50 million grant from Victoria and a $100 million grant from Canberra, pledged by John Howard. Harbin, which is based in a brown coal sector in China, will contribute $500 million.

The proposal trumpets the use of a process called integrated and gasification combined cycle (IDGCC), which essentially cooks the coal before it is burned, removes as much water as it can and thereby reduces brown coal emissions by around 30 per cent.

To hear the Victorian government talk about the technology, you’d think they had found the secret of turning water into wine. But in fact, it’s just turning brown into black. Because that is what the technology achieves: it reduces the emissions of brown coal to the same level as black coal, or as one climate campaigner described it – from “really appalling to merely appalling.”

Brumby’s description of the technology as “clean coal” is disingenuous at best. If the technology was applied to existing brown coal power plants, the investment would be sensible. But this is for a new power station that will spew an extra 2.5 million tonnes of Co2 into the atmosphere each year. And this when other technologies such as gas fired power stations, not to mention renewables and energy efficiency opportunities, are readily available.

The timing of the announcement is also curious. On Monday, the brown coal power generators were warning that an emissions trading system could spell the death of them. On Tuesday, they announce a new brown coal power station.

Why, ask some in the oil and gas and renewable industries, did the Brumby government make such a commitment just three days before the release of the Garnaut report, and two weeks before a government paper on emissions trading? One of the Brumby arguments is that Victoria has no alternative for its energy needs. That’s highly debatable, but whatever happened to the concept of a national grid, where alternatives can be readily sourced elsewhere?

Last month, Brumby was happy to have his photo taken at the solar thermal plant being developed by Australia’s leading solar scientist David Mills. Perhaps he didn’t get the irony. The solar thermal plant, predicted to provide base load power around about the same time as Brumby’s cherished new brown coal plant swings into production, is located in California, where Mills moved in 2006 because he could receive no support from Australian governments.

There are innovative solutions aplenty. Most of it centres around the creation of smaller, more discreet power stations – be they fired by gas, geothermal, wind or biofuel sources – rather than the monolithic installations favoured in the coal era. There are good reasons for this, not all of them environmental.