Last week I visited the New England Solar installation at Uralla, New South Wales. It’s been created by a company called ACEN Australia who were incredibly helpful in making it possible for me to film there.
It’s still being expanded but currently consists of just under 1 million solar panels on a sheep farm, and when I say a sheep farm, I don’t mean it was a sheep farm, it still is a sheep farm. In fact it’s 7 sheep farms, this thing is humungous.
We’ve made an episode about it which will shortly be on Everything Electric Tech in a few weeks.
It’s a properly enormous project, with massive batteries and enough electricity generated (I don’t like this metric but it’s often used) to power 250,000 Australian homes. It’s also the cheapest way anyone can generate electricity, many times cheaper than coal, gas or nuclear.
Is that having an effect on the Australian energy market? Does the Pope live in Rome? Yes, a massive, and increasingly devastating effect on the coal industry. Hold that thought for a moment.
So, when I’d finished, I got in the Polestar 2 electric car I used to get there, big thanks to Polestar Australia, there is no way I could have gor to the location any other way, it was a 600 plus kilometre drive to get there, and another 650 to get where I am today.
On the way south to Sydney, I passed through the Hunter Valley, famous for wine . . . . and of course wonderful freedom coal, the fuel that makes people wave flags and hate immigrants. In Australia this hatred is delightfully confusing simply because everyone except the indigenous Australians, is a bloody immigrant.
It’s it’s filthy, dated technology that requires mining, processing, massive transport costs and we can only use it once, it will be obsessively worshipped by the most ill informed, angry, flag waving losers on the planet.
If it’s part of the global energy transition then slightly better informed people who can cope with change tend to be more supportive of the rapidly emerging alternatives.
However, as the video above illustrates, the scale and impact of the old fashioned burning method of generating electricity is still spreading its toxic filth around the globe with nonchalant abandon.
I was driving along a small back country road, past distant farms and cattle standing in the shade when I heard the train approaching a crossing. I had time to stop, get my phone out and record the massive passing embarrassment as it snaked its way toward the distant city of Newcastle where it’s loaded onto massive filthy ships that take it to Malaysia, India and now increasingly less often to China, where it is burned, once.
And yes, I know that 99% of solar panels I saw are made in China and some of the electricity used to run the factory might come from burning Australian coal, but thankfully China is using more solar PV, wind and batteries than the rest of the world combined, so that argument no longer holds water. They are doing everrything they can to not rely on filthy Australian coal, and of course most of the coal burning power plants in Australia have already closed down.
82 wagons, each holding 120 tons of coal, so around 9,800 tons of coal, pulled by 3 huge fuel burning diesel locomotives. Thankfully it is a dying industry, it employs very few local people, it makes eye watering gazillions for about 5 people and is a historically shameful disgrace we needed to go through to get where we are, but we really do need to stop burning this filth.
There are alternative, particularly in the sun belt. Solar is now so cheap it’s replacing coal all over the world, We need to keep pushing for a far more rapid transition, like the Chinese are doing, and unlike the tragic once great country of the USA.
Clean coal. A truly pathetic attempt at rage baiting. It doesn’t make me rage, it makes me smile because I know the suckers who currently rake in a fortune from this disgusting industry are slowly but surely fading into history.
You won’t be missed.
