Energy. It’s what you dig out of the ground.  

Larvatus prodeo has a look at the sorry state of energy policy in Australia and points to some new research into the cost of externalities for various energy sources - Energy. It’s what you dig out of the ground..

Is there anything more alarmingly delightful than the creaking gears of history as the dialectic of Enlightenment lurches forth?? For all the gnashing of teeth and angry bashing of keyboards about K-Rudd’s 100% pathetic climate target, the real politics - the subpolitics of experts, bureaucrats and negotiators - continues under the public radar. Few (ie. everyone in the MSM except Bernard Keane) seem to have noticed that the government Marn is going to release a new Energy White Paper at the end of the year. To that end, they’ve published a “strategic directions paper” that doesn’t even bother with any pretense of deliberative input into what is essentially a private taxation regime for the Greenhouse mafia. The whole process is so completely stacked against any outcome commensurate with the challenge of climate change and economic common sense as to be essentially laughable. ...

The ‘coal is cheap’ meme was dealt yet another blow last week with the release of a new ATSE report entitled The Hidden Costs of Electricity: Externalities of Power Generation in Australia.

Leaving aside for the moment the difficulties in accounting for the not hidden costs of electricity generation, it does seem rather strange that the National Electricity Market has been running for over a decade, is Australia’s largest Environmental Externalities market and yet nobody has thought to publish data on the toll its participants exact to public health through particulate emissions and people through global warming. The findings of the report would make Marn blush, cause they ain’t friendly. All this crap about ‘not picking’ winners relies on a concerted effort to ensure these kinds of calculations are kept as rough and marginal as possible. The challenge for the troglodytes in the energy industries is to provide plausible counter-calculations if they’re going to have any chance of keeping a presentable public face.

1) For reference, they note that the present wholesale price of electricity in Australia averages around $40/MWh.

2) They estimate that between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion will be required over time in the Australian context for RD&D to fully demonstrate a single commercial application of CCS. I’d love to know how they arrived at that figure, but still.

Ouch.

That could buy an awful lot of solar thermal/wind integration/wave power research.

But there’s a much deeper issue here still, and it relates to the promises of big, complex technologies keeping within certain cost bounds. As Stephanie Cooke notes in this excellent piece, legacy issues with nuclear energy are a huge drag on the dreams of a clean energy revolution:

PRESIDENT OBAMA has made clean and efficient energy a top priority, and Congress has obliged with more than $32 billion in stimulus money mostly for conservation and alternative energy technologies like wind, solar and biofuel. Sadly, the Energy Department is too weighed down by nuclear energy programs to devote itself to bringing about the revolution Mr. Obama envisions.

Today, the department’s main task is managing the thousands of facilities involved in producing nuclear weapons during the cold war, and the associated cleanup of dozens of contaminated sites. Approximately two-thirds of its annual budget, which is roughly $27 billion, is spent on these activities, while only 15 percent is allocated for all energy programs, including managing the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and researching and developing new technologies.

2/3rds of its annual budget spent cleaning up nukes? Let’s hope Marn isn’t setting us up with a similar problem.