Winds of change

apple’s decision to pull out of their agreement to buy power from a proposed wind farm in the upper burdekin region marks a turning point in the energy debate. BY NIck Cater.

The decision by Apple to pull out of a carbon offset arrangement with Andrew Forrest’s Squadron energy marks a major turning point in the energy debate and makes the argument for lifting the moratorium on nuclear even stronger.

Squadron’s proposed wind turbine development in the Upper Burdekin forests in far north Queensland will come at a huge cost to the natural environment, as I have highlighted previously. It will destroy some 74 ha of koala habitat and have serious consequences for their population.

That a wind turbine development should even be considered on a site as rich in biodiversity as this highlights one of the obvious limitations of wind and solar. It requires so much land that even in a country as vast as Australia we are fast running out of suitable locations.

The Victorian government estimates that meeting its projected electricity requirements for 2050 using wind, solar and battery technology alone would take up 70 per cent of Victoria’s farming land. It would involve the clearance of 662 ha of Sharman’s rock-wallaby habitat, 709 ha of greater glider habitat, and 754 ha of habitat that provides sanctuary for the red goshawk, the most endangered bird of prey in Australia.

And then there is the koala. The construction of the wind turbine plant would destroy 769 hectares of koala habitat, three times the size of the Brisbane CBD.

No wonder Apple decided to pull out.

It was only a matter of time before the headlong rush for wind and solar was forced to confront the iron law of energy density. There is no getting around the physics: dilute sources of energy like wind and solar require huge amounts of land.

Even in a country as vast as Australia, the land bank starts to run out. Which is why the Victorian government is pushing ahead with offshore wind turbines despite the technical challenges and the estimated $29 billion cost. It is why the Queensland government is spending $5 billion on a new transmission line to open up remote areas of the state as renewable energy zones.

The second unavoidable snag with low-density renewable energy sources is that they require considerably more raw materials at the outset than denser sources of energy. That challenge was acknowledged by Siemens Energy CEO Christian Bruch on CNBC in December.

“Never forget, renewables like wind roughly, roughly, need 10 times the material compared to () ... what conventional technologies need,” he said. “So if you have problems on the supply chain, it hits … wind extremely hard, and this is what we see.”

“And this, unfortunately, obviously, leads to the situation where () … it impacts the overall group results substantially.”

The cost of renewable projects is escalating as Australian projects compete with the rest of the world for materials. Those attempting to build a 400 MW wind development will struggle to get change out of $1 billion. The business case for Upper Burdekin has been further weakened by a reduction in scale from 139 turbines to 80 forced upon it by adverse environmental reports. When we add the opprobrium fostered by Apple’s withdrawal and the loss of a major customer, the project looks to be in severe trouble.

Which leads to the question: what’s plan B? And how does the business case compare? The development of Small Modular Reactor technology is at an advanced stage. Construction will begin soon on the first commercial SMR in Canada at Darlington in Ontario.

The Darlington SMR will generate 300MW of dispatchable energy which translates into an annual output of around 2700 GWh. The Upper Burdekin project on the other hand will have a nameplate capacity of 400MW of intermittent energy, the equivalent of barely 1000 GWh a year.

Wind has a footprint 40 times larger than SMRs. Turbines have to be replaced after 20 years while an SMR goes for twice as long.

It is vital that the moratorium on nuclear power generation be overturned before it’s too late. The misallocation of capital into environmentally destructive wind and solar products needs to be stopped.

Much of the proposed investment in new transmission lines would be avoided by placing SMRs within the perimeter of existing coal-fired power plants. By swapping out coal for SMRs, the net effect on the environment will be positive.

With the mounting problems in the renewable sector, the argument for nuclear could be won sooner than we imagined.