Highlighting the utter supidity of current energy policies

This article was copied from a social media post, and it serves to highlight the utter stupidity of the current energy polices of many nations

The Loy Yang A power station in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley generates 2210 megawatts of electricity. Around the clock. Every day. Rain hail or shine.

It supplies roughly 30 percent of Victoria’s entire electricity needs and powers over two million homes. It has been doing this since 1984.

The active coal pit that feeds it covers 650 hectares. The total site including everything around it is 6000 hectares. To put that in perspective for anyone in regional NSW that is roughly the size of a decent family farm.

In 2023 AGL spent 92 million dollars refurbishing one of its four generator units to keep it running reliably until its scheduled closure. The station is not worn out. It is not running out of coal.

It is being closed by a political decision not an engineering one. Now here is the part that should make every Australian stop and think.

The coal is not running out. The Loy Yang mine has reserves of 168 billion tonnes of brown coal. At current usage of 30 million tonnes per year that is enough coal to last roughly 500 years on that one site alone.

Geoscience Australia calculated total recoverable brown coal reserves across the entire Latrobe Valley at more than 76 billion tonnes. At current production levels those reserves are expected to last more than 1000 years.

And getting at it is not difficult. The layer of dirt covering the coal seam is only between five and 24 metres thick. The coal seam below it averages 180 metres thick. You remove topsoil and there it is.

The Victorian Government has already extended the mining licence to 2065. The mine was originally planned to operate until 2048. It is being deliberately closed 13 years early.

So what does it take to replace it.

To generate the same amount of electricity from solar panels during daylight hours you need somewhere between 14,000 and 16,000 hectares of panels. That is more than 20 times the land area of the entire Loy Yang site including the mine.

And after all that solar produces nothing at night. Nothing on heavily overcast days. And nothing at all after a hailstorm tears through the installation.

So you need wind turbines to cover the nights and the cloudy days.

Australian wind turbines have a real world capacity factor of around 30 to 35 percent. That means a turbine rated at six megawatts only generates an average of around two megawatts of actual power across a full year because the wind does not blow consistently.

To replace 2210 megawatts of around the clock coal power with wind you need installed wind capacity of roughly 6500 to 7000 megawatts. At six megawatts per turbine that is over 1100 wind turbines.

The Sapphire Wind Farm in NSW has 75 turbines and covers 8921 hectares. Scaling that up to 1100 turbines you are looking at roughly 130000 hectares of wind farm sprawling across regional Australia.

And even then it still cannot guarantee power on a calm cloudy night. For those periods you need batteries or pumped hydro storage which requires yet more land and yet more billions.

So to replace one coal power station and its mine covering 6000 hectares you need approximately 14,000 to 16,000 hectares of solar panels plus approximately 130,000 hectares of wind farm plus thousands of kilometres of new transmission lines to connect it all to where people actually live.

That is a total footprint of somewhere between 130,000 and 150,000 hectares against 6000 hectares for Loy Yang. More than 20 times the land area. Mostly on prime agricultural land across regional Australia.

And it still cannot guarantee a single watt on a calm cloudy night.

The transmission lines needed to carry all this electricity are already increasing sharply in cost before they are even built. The Central West Orana transmission zone near Dubbo started at 650 million dollars and is now confirmed at 5.5 billion. Eight times the original estimate.

The VNI West project connecting Victoria and NSW went from 3.9 billion to potentially 11 billion. Project EnergyConnect from South Australia to NSW went from 1.53 billion to over four billion.

Every dollar of every blowout goes onto your electricity bill for the next 30 to 50 years through network charges.

Australian taxpayers and electricity customers have already paid more than 29 billion dollars subsidising the ‘renewable’ energy industry over the past ten years. The 2024 federal budget committed another 22 billion on top of that.

That is over 50 billion dollars and counting.

For a fraction of that money Australia could have built several modern high efficiency gas or coal power stations that would generate reliable electricity around the clock on a fraction of the land.

Or we could have a serious conversation about nuclear power which France has used for decades to generate cheap reliable around the clock electricity on minimal land.

Instead we are deliberately closing a perfectly good power station that was just refurbished for 92 million dollars. Walking away from a coal reserve that would last 500 years.

Covering tens of thousands of hectares of prime agricultural land with solar panels made in China using coal fired electricity.

Building 1100 wind turbines across farming country that still cannot keep the lights on after dark, and spending hundreds of billions on transmission lines that blow out to eight times their original cost before the first pole is in the ground.

We are closing a 6000 hectare power station and mine that has powered Victoria for 40 years to build 150,000 hectares of solar and wind infrastructure that cannot match what it replaces.

And the people making these decisions do not farm a single acre of the land they are covering with panels and turbines.