Panic stations

phill Parsons

GOVERNMENT doesn’t like to be seen going there but down at the energy arm, the Hydro, the panic room, whether it’s the board room or the CEO’s office must be a place where the current storage levels cause some panic.

The gas fired power station has been sold to Alinta and is now under refurbishment so there’s no income or power from that source, instead we must buy dirty brown coal fired power from Victoria, through the Bass Strait cable, to meet our supply deficit.

And how do we pay for that and still sell power to industry at the wholesale rates contracted by Hydro?

Fortunately that cable allows us to sell hydro and perhaps even wind power to Victoria at the highest prices into the National Electricity Market.

However, storages are being run down to balance the equation of buying cheap and selling dear and the relatively still days are not helping the wind farms compensate.

Storage a month ago was over 18% and with the limited rainfall over the catchments the system had run down to 16.9% on the 9th of June with all stations recording falling levels, perhaps unprecedented.

Certainly there has been some rain following the 9th and catchments soils are saturated so with the rain of the week following the low level some inflow should occur.

But as autumn rainfall fails the Murray Darling Basin due to a new pattern prevailing over our climate the shift in timing and the reduction in volume also leave the Hydro system reaching further and further toward the bottom as the level fro which refill begins becomes lower and lower with each year.

There is a prediction that for a few years a slowing of the rate that the climate goes unstable will prevail and that may be seen as a false dawn causing inaction.

However, many leading businesses across the world are reducing greenhouse gas emissions and turning to low carbon sources of energy.

Its time the Hydro was reborn as a supplier of domestic renewable energy sources such as photovoltaics or solar water heaters for the hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses that have relatively low daytime demands but would overall assist in plugging the hole in the dams caused by the climate’s chaotic behavior and assist Tasmanians to transit through the costs of carbon emissions trading coming to all dirty brown coal, petrol and diesel users and so into the pocket of every voter to a low carbon economy.

The inaction by the government on the Climate Crisis can be measured by the paltry $5.7M allocated out of the $4B budget. I make it 0.14% of the total.

Were the Hydro given the right advice about future rainfall patterns, their study of rainfall out to 2040 is not proving itself on the ground.

It’s costing $100M to Hydro’s annual income and the best reaction appears to be to fund a ads promoting curtains in the hope that reductions in electricity demand will have an impact on dam storage levels or indeed rainfall.

Time to go back to the drawing board and do much better in investing in a secure energy future for the people of Tasmania without costing them a livable planet as the loss of carbon from continued woodchipping of the forests for giveaway prices is doing.

Yes folks, we have a government business enterprise, Forests Tasmania, mismanaging a 695,000 ha native forest Carbon store committed to the production of at least 82M tons of Carbon in one harvest cycle through their clearfall and burn process, and they are so good at this they can financially contribute nothing to any plan the government may have to assist Tasmanians to transit to a low carbon economy.

At the lowest end of the predicted market price range for emissions trading, which commences in 2010, that amount of Carbon is worth about $1.5B and would at a safe 5% investment return $78M per annum, the minimum amount FT should be contributing.

It ain’t clever and FT should know it.

Therefore the government, their owner, should know it.

Carbon emissions trading will be the biggest embarrassment to all incompetents managing forest Carbon sinks since the woodchipping began in the 1970’s and how much it was costing Tasmanians became public knowledge.

If the Tamar Valley pulpmill goes ahead, government will rue the day it gave away the Carbon value in the Wood Supply Agreement because with a cap and trade system of emissions trading the price of Carbon will rise. Duetsche Bank predicts A$100 per ton of C by 2020.

That’s A$390M per annum value for that C without cutting down a tree.

$15M compensation is nothing compared to the losses from a failure to get a return for the value of the Carbon stored in Tasmania’s State owned forests..

The day approaches [30th of June] for an official tearing up of the Pulp Mill Wood Supply Agreement and a renegotiation of all contracts to supply wood to include the Carbon value embodied in the biomass as a floor price to return an income to those Tasmanians who don’t have a stake in the outdated practice of woodchip exporting

so they may be assisted by government to transit to a low Carbon economy.

The costs of managing the forests and the losses of other values may be given away as government support for an industry as is the current practice but there is no justification for giving away the Carbon value.

Another of phill Parsons’ occasional rants on management of the climate crisis and government inaction.