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Question of power a heated debate

June 19, 2004

Solar hot water panels on housing commission flats in Prahran.
Picture:Ken Irwin

Environmentalists and scientists are frustrated by Australia's dependence on fossil fuels, writes Geoff Strong.

It will be a proud moment next year when Professor Martin Green gets the new factory to manufacture an idea he has been nurturing for more than a decade. After $70 million worth of research, he and his team at the University of NSW have developed electricity-generating solar cells that can be made at half the cost of their competitors.

They have invented a way of coating glass sheets with a thin veneer of the silicone that allows such cells to produce electricity when exposed to sunlight.

With Australia's political parties once again deciding they need a green tinge and with public concern about rising energy costs and the issue of greenhouse gas-induced climate change, the project would appear to have all the ingredients for our leaders to be scrambling to snip the opening-day ribbon.

They won't get the chance. The factory will be in Germany.

Despite having considerably less sunshine than Australia, the German and other European governments give much higher financial incentives to people who generate renewable energy, such as with these photovoltaic solar cells. In our land of abundant sunshine, there is not enough interest in renewable energy technology, even when it is developed here.

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Prime Minister John Howard's continued support for a fossil-fuel future in his energy white paper on Tuesday has made Green even more comfortable that the Germany decision was the right one.

"Germany is the biggest potential market because it has a supportive government program. People can buy the cells, put them on their roof and sell the excess energy back to the grid at a government-determined price that allows them to make a profit," he says.

The greenhouse debate took a surprising turn this week when Lord Oxburgh, the head of Shell, the world's largest oil company, conceded that emissions of carbon dioxide threatened the future of the planet. Given the transport industry is one of the main sources of the gas, the statement was bigger even than a tobacco company admitting their product causes cancer.

The politics behind the Government's support make it (geosequestration) a golden handshake for the fossil fuel industry.

Oxburgh called for the urgent development of technologies to capture the gas and bury it underground, a process known as geosequestration and something being pushed by Howard as a means of keeping our export-earning coal industry alive.

But the technology is still a long way off and while most environmentalists, such as the Australian Conservation Foundation's Don Henry, support it in principle, they believe it will be much more expensive than proponents claim and worry there is not enough proof the gas could be contained once buried.

"It is a bit of a pipedream. I think the politics behind the Government's support make it a golden handshake for the fossil fuel industry," he says.

It might be no coincidence that Howard's acknowledgement of global warming's dangers and the Opposition's drafting of high-profile environmentalist Peter Garrett coincide with the release of Hollywood's climate-change blockbuster, The Day After Tomorrow.

Earlier this year, a secret report prepared for US defence chiefs warned of a scenario as dire as Hollywood's, fearing that in the next 20 years climate change could be so disruptive to the planet that it would dwarf the threat of terrorism as a source of political and military instability.

Taking the worst-case scenario, it predicted nuclear conflict over resources such as water, mega-droughts (particularly in Australia), famine and widespread rioting.

Although the Federal Government claims Australia is on target to meet its Kyoto commitments on greenhouse emissions, this still leaves us one of the worst polluters per head of population and one of the nations most reliant on fossil fuels.

To the disappointment of the renewable energy industry, the white paper did not increase the mandatory renewable energy targets, presently set at just 2 per cent of current energy output. Environmentalists and the renewables industry argued for an increase to at least 10 per cent.

While many European countries such as Britain, Germany and France have set the target of reducing emissions by 60 per cent in 2020, even under the Kyoto guidelines, Australia's emissions are set to increase.

While Green's commercial solar panels will be first exposed to the weak German sunlight, there is one German idea that is poised to get its first full-scale test in Australia. On degraded grazing land, 23 kilometres across the NSW border from Mildura, a Melbourne-based company plans to build the world's tallest structure, a solar power station that can generate enough electricity for 200,000 homes.

Unlike most solar generation, which converts sunlight directly into electricity, this idea relies on an enormous greenhouse, seven kilometres across, to generate heat on the ground, which is then sucked up through a one-kilometre-high chimney. The updraft created would power a bank of 32 turbines at the bottom of the chimney and these would generate 200 megawatts.

Roger Davey, chief executive of proponent Enviromission Ltd, says that late last year Chinese investors put $1.5 million into his company because of interest in similar projects to lower China's greenhouse emissions. He is dismayed the Government has not increased its mandatory renewable energy targets.

There is a range of potential options to wean Australia off fossil fuels. One that has received Government favour is a joint venture between an Australian National University team and a Queensland company to produce power from the heat found in hot rocks about four kilometres beneath the ground in the Cooper Basin region of South Australia.

There is also a whole division of the CSIRO devoted to new energy technologies. Its chief, Dr David Brockway, says that even if we continue to use coal for electricity there is a potential technology to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas in proportion to the power generated. He says the technology to convert coal directly into gas before burning could be as little as five years away. This will mean scrapping existing power stations, but will boost efficiency from 29 per cent to about 50 per cent.

"But the holy grail of technology is to work out an economic way of producing hydrogen gas from sunlight. You can generate electricity and power vehicles, there is virtually no greenhouse gas and the main by-product is water," he says.