Gas prices set to soar!

[swoop42]

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/gas-bills-to-soar-over-next-few-years-20140903-10c0ng.html

Surely people see this as outrageous!

Why should our gas prices soar because international buyers now have access to this resource and are willing to pay more for it!

Surely to God natural resources taken out of the land or sea of Australia should be to the benefit of the Australian people first and foremost and supplied to us at regulated prices and not tied to what international markets are prepared to pay.

Honestly gas and electricity prices have sky rocketed over the last decade as it is (what's the justification?) yet we the consumers seem either unwilling or powerless to do anything about it.

This deserves to be a major political issue because I tell you it'll become a major social issue as low income people, pensioners and the like are already stretched to breaking point.

[swoop42]

A country like Canada, a country very similar in population and land mass to Australia pays only a fraction of what we have to.

The US is the same.

http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/average-electricity-prices-kwh

[5150]

Don't give a shit about gas prices. I care about the "happy birthday swoop42" thread I started yesterday.

Something is up? Either it wasn't your birthday and you had the mods remove it or there is a total douche deleting my threads.

[1061]

I think we need to blame Joan Kirner.

If her government wasn't so inept Kennett wouldn't have got in and sold everything off starting the landslide this has become.

[Tannin]

^ Are you joking or just clueless?

Much as I agree with your (implied) opinions of the hopeless Kirner and the greedy, shortsighted Kennet, neither one has had anything to do with the looming gas price shock.

The massive price rises we will soon see are purely a consequence of the daylight madness of building so many gigantic LNG export plants. This was allowed to proceed without thought or care as to the local consumer, to the needs of local industry for gas as a power source, as a raw material for manufacture of all sorts of things, most notably plastics, or the vital requirement for cheap, fast-reaction electricity generation systems to provide for peak demand and also cover for unplanned outages in baseload plants.

Given that the LNG plants are already nearing completion, it is probably impossible to stop the massive gas price rises. We can. however, do things to make the pain more bearable.

By far the major proportion of domestic gas is used for heating. We can cut that demand way back by better house design (current housing designs are in the main criminally bad from a thermal efficiency point of view); by better insulation - a huge energy and money saver even over the short to medium term; and by encouraging even faster takeup of zero-running-cost renewables like wind and solar.

Domestic-scale storage technology is getting much, much cheaper and is expected to be price-competitive for ordinary householders inside 5-10 years. If you are running rooftop solar all day charging batteries, your electric heating that night is effectively free. (Right now, the cost of solar system plus storage amortised over a decade or so is around double the cost of fossil fuel heating (gas or electric) - but that won't last. The price difference is eroding very rapidly now.)

An even better prospect, already in use around the world and set to explode into the mainstream, is pumped hydro. All you need is two small, cheap dams, one high up, the other low. (100 metres vertical seperation in the minimum but more is better.) You use surplus wind or solar power to fill up the top dam at times of low demand, then let it rip back through the pipe when demand is high. You use the same pipe, generator/motor and pump/turbine in both directions. Friction and other losses amount to about 10% in each direction, so overall it's 80% efficient - and once you have built the system, running costs are practically zero.

The storage system can be built anywhere - it doesn't matter if it's close to the power source (a wind farm for example), close to the point of usage (a town or factory), or anywhere in-between. Even if you locate it a long way away from the shortest line between the two points (tens or low hundreds of kilometres), the added transmission losses are small.

You don't need vast amounts of water because it's like a swimming pool - you fill it up once, then re-use the same water over and over with only minor top-ups. Or you can use seawater if that is more convenient.

You don't need to flood vast areas of precious natural bush or prime agricultural land to store three years worth of water - the two dams only have to be big enough to store enough water for a few days worth of generation.

Pumped hydro is impractical for domestic installations, but very, very practical on any larger scale from single mine or large factory right up to national grid level. And the technology is here now. already in use in other parts of the world.

Simply: if we do this right, the gas price rise shouldn't worry us for any longer than it takes to replace expensive, short-term gas heating with much cheaper, stored renewable energy. That's around 5-10 years with decent management, or several centuries if we let that moron Abbott run things.

[Tannin]

And another thing: because we are about to be switching from gas to electricity ('coz gas is going to be too dear) we really, really need to address the primary driver of electricity price increases, which is massive expenditure on new hardware for transmission of higher peak loads. The reason the power companies are installing all those new poles and wires and switching stations is to cope with the monster demand they get on about five days each year. Most of that demand is air conditioning units. If you don't use an air conditioner, you are being taxed $500 a year to subsidise people who do own one. That's just wrong any way you look at it.

The answer is time-of-use pricing. It's costs bugger all to provide power to you when the sun is shining (all that rooftop solar feeds the grid and the power companies pay bugger all for it), when the wind is strong*, or when demand is low. You should pay bugger all. It costs heaps to provide you with electricity when demand peaks. You should pay more at that time.

By switching to time-of-use pricing, consumers are able to reduce their costs (by, for example, running the washing machine in the daytime when demand is low and power is cheap) and businesses can reduce their costs too by, for example, scheduling heavy-power-use processes for off-peak times. (This is already being done for large businesses on individual contracts, and is spreading further every year.) Or, if you want to use lots of power at the worst possible time, if you want to add to the peak that costs us billions of dollars extra in power distribution, then you can pay for it. Fair is fair.

The payoff - apart from fairness to consumers (many of us are paying through the nose for power to subsidise greedy cnuts in mcmansions who set their aircon to 19 degrees when it's 38 outside) - is masively reduced distribution costs. It's the peak which costs the extra money, and by reducing usage on those half-dozen days a year, we can have much, much cheaper electricity.

* In Queensland this winter, the wholesale price of electricity was negative for a few hours! Yes, generating companies were paying distributors to take their electricity 'coz it takes too long to shut down and restart an old-fashioned coal plant and the power has to go somewhere. But those few hours of weirdness aside, the wholesale electricity price was very low for most of the season because of wind power, which costs essentially zero per kw/h once you have installed the machinery.

* None of this is to deny that the power companies are greedy cnuts who are out for what they can get. Just take that bit as a given and move on.

[watt price tully]

[Tannin]

But dream on brother. It won't happen. Greed and corruption in politics will see to that. Bet money on it.

[Culprit]

Hook up to Solar Hot Water and Solar Electricity. We will see self storage of solar power via batteries being affordable shortly, hence Abbott and his goons are trying to kill the Solar industry to help their Gas and Electricity and Mining mates.

It's affordable and worthwhile.

[watt price tully]

[Tannin]

So what's your point, WPT? That some countries spend vast amounts of money subsidising fossil fuel consumption, in defiance of every rule of sense or economics? Bollocks to that!

Here in Australia, we already have huge subsidies for fossil fuel - several billion per year - but only for foreign-owned mining corporations who pay little or no tax, not for citizens. Go figure.

[watt price tully]

[Culprit]

Gas Prices have gone the other way since September 4th.

[Member 7167]