Since the Finkel review was announced it has been open season for notion building in the energy space. While Malcolm has been pumping Snowy 2.zero, Craig has been promising death by renewables, quite literally…
- Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor Emeritus, The University of Melbourne
In the third in my series on the crisis besetting the National Electricity Market (NEM) in eastern Australia (see Part 1 & Part 2), I look at some evidence for how the market itself has played a role…
“Flabbergas” in Beijing The Sichuan basin is one of China’s premier shale gas plays, and when it comes to developing Chinese resources, state-owned enterprises like Sinopec have the inside running. I met…
In the second in my series on the crisis besetting the National Electricity Market (NEM) in eastern Australia, I look at the tightening balance of supply and demand. Australia’s NEM is witnessing an unprecedented…
What energy crisis? Who could forget the energy “crises” that affected electricity supply across south-eastern Australia last year. Firstly the Tasmanian crisis, following the Basslink outage in December…
The European Commission’s latest Quarterly report on electricity markets makes sobering reading down under. Over the last year wholesale electricity prices have been falling just about everywhere across…
Central Italy has been hit by a magnitude 6.2 earthquake, only seven years after a similar devastating quake in the region.
Mark July 7th as a red letter day in Australia’s tortuous path to decarbonisation - a day of special significance and opportunity. The causes and consequences of the wild gyrations on the South Australian…
In an entertaining and somewhat chaotic episode of ABC’s Q&A (Monday 15th August) pitting science superstar Brian Cox against climate contrarian and global conspiracy theorist and now senator Malcolm…
The strangeness of last Sunday … Has there ever been better times for our electricity utilities? Sunday is typically pretty subdued in terms of electricity demand. Consequently Sunday wholesale electricity…
In case you had forgotten, electricity prices were a really big deal in the last federal election campaign in 2013, albeit often disguised under the rubric of axe the tax. Then Coalition spokesmen quite…
With little by way of fanfare, Basslink resumed operation this week after almost 6 months. Basslink is Tasmania’s proverbial umbilical cord - a 500 megawatt submarine HVDC cable that connects to the mainland…
The Bropkas meet the grid In what must surely be a first for the Conversation, I am writing this post from the village of Sakteng in remote eastern Bhutan. That I can do so is a remarkable testimony to…
At 9.40 am local time on Monday May 9th the turbines at Alinta’s 520 megawatt Northern Power Station at Port Augusta disconnected from the grid for the last time. And with it ended more than 50 years of…
For the Turnbull of old, could a picture be worth a thousand words? “Climate change is the ultimate long-term problem. We have to make decisions today, bear costs today so that adverse consequences are…
It’s more than a little disconcerting to wake every hour or so, gasping for air, suffocating. It happened to me during a field season in southern Tibet camped at about 5400 metres above sea level. With…
On all sides of an argument, advocates push ridiculous extremes. Take the conservative push against windmills, which hopefully reached some kind of zenith last year when Alan Jones, appearing on on ABC’s…
When two major earthquakes occur within days of each other thousands of kilometres apart, it can look like they’re connected. But are they? Here’s what the science says.
The landscapes of the Xinjiang province of western China are very special. It is here the ancient trade routes of the Silk Roads skirt the great mountains and deserts of central Asia, weaving a magic thread…
It took several trips before I began to understand the scale of the horror. It was 2009 and I was working in the Ainaro district in Timor Leste, not far from Ramelau - Timor’s highest peak. A rural centre…
Politics is full of irony and it seems our climate is happy to lend a helping hand. Witness the Great Barrier Reef’s encore to Greg Hunt’s recent award as the world’s best environment minister. Not that…
On the back of four years of dry and the shadow of El Niño looming large, recent rains across parts of inland Queensland must come as great relief. While plenty of follow up will be needed to restore surface…
Did you notice how windy it was here in Melbourne on the first weekend of October, when the city stopped for the annual festival of the boot - a.k.a. the AFL Grand Final. Whether or not it influenced the…
The earthquake that struck Nepal on Saturday was caused by the same forces that built the Himalayas, and science is helping predict where the next quake might strike.
Several factors combined to deliver seemingly astonishing reductions in Australian electricity sector emissions over the carbon tax years. With those gains now being reversed, as shown in the figure below…
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