TRANSCRIPT- Mark Ogge radio interview with ABC Port Pririe

ANNETTE MARNER, PRESENTER: Well, will solar thermal power replace the coal-fired Playford B power station at Port Augusta? Now, Port Augusta has two coal-fired plants: Playford B, which became fully operational back in 1964; and the second is the Northern power station, which was commissioned in 1985. Now, these plants provide something like 40 percent of the State’s electricity supply. The older one is used during periods of higher demand - that’s the Playford one - for example, during a heatwave when we’re all running air conditioners. And as we know, the coal for the plants is mined at Leigh Creek and brought to Port Augusta by rail.

Now, Beyond Zero Emissions is an independent not-for-profit organization, they say they receive no government or industry funding. Now, they’ve released a report called Repowering Port Augusta, and very much, the focus is on a vision for Port Augusta being the hub of solar thermal power, ultimately, replacing both [coal-fired] power plants.

Mark Ogge is from Beyond Zero Emissions and joins us. Mark Ogge, welcome to ‘Late Afternoons’ today.

MARK OGGE, BEYOND ZERO EMISSIONS STRATEGIC DIRECTOR: Hi Anne. Good to be here.

ANNETTE MARNER: So, I mean, have you spoken to Alinta, the company that actually runs the power stations, or is this very much a vision of Beyond Zero Emissions?

MARK OGGE: No, a lot of people share this vision, and we’ve spoken to Alinta and Alinta are really positive about it. In fact, Jeff Dimery was on Stateline, ah, the 7.30…

ANNETTE MARNER: …with Simon Royal last week…

MARK OGGE: with Simon Royal, and he said that Alinta’s preferred option was renewable energy and felt that solar thermal power should be a part of it, which is completely in line with our view [at Beyond Zero Emissions]. And yeah, I think really that a lot of people are realizing what a fantastic option it would be for Port Augusta and for South Australia.

ANNETTE MARNER: So, for our listeners that may not be familiar with solar thermal, how does it work?

MARK OGGE: So, solar thermal power produces heat rather than electricity directly.

A wind turbine or a solar PV panel will directly produce electricity and electricity itself is very hard to store. Those technologies are really, really important and great renewable technologies but they produce electricity when the sun’s shining or the wind’s blowing.

Solar thermal power concentrates the sun’s energy with mirrors onto a receiver, which contains a liquid; that liquid is heated up and that heat can then be stored in big tanks of molten salt and dispatched to generate electricity anytime of the day or night when you don’t have sun. So it gives you the ability to have baseload solar power – so, solar power dispatched around the clock, ah, to provide electricity.

ANNETTE MARNER: So, “baseload electricity” is the buzz term, isn’t it? It can provide that…so, if the wind’s not blowing, the sun’s not shining, solar thermal can still release the heat that will, in turn, generate steam to turn the turbines.

MARK OGGE: Absolutely. Yep.

ANNETTE MARNER: Are there any by-products of this process potentially damaging to the environment or to people that work with solar thermal plants?

MARK OGGE: No, well, that’s the great the thing. Relative to coal or gas, ah, well….ok, the first thing is that there are no emissions associated with it.

Obviously, there’s lifecycle emissions when you make the glass and steel for the plant, as there is with anything you create, but the energy pay-back time is very short - in fact, a few months.

And when the plant’s are operating you have absolutely no emissions; that’s contrasted to coal and gas which pump out a huge amount of fine particulates into the atmosphere, which are very dangerous because they’re really tiny and they lodge in the lung and in the bloodstream and actually cause serious illness, and in some cases, death. That’s what the people at Port Augusta have been living with for the last 50-odd years with those coal plants. The other option is gas plants, and gas plants have less fine particulates but they still have about 30 percent of what coal does and they also have similar levels of volatile organic compounds, which are also cancer causing and affect the respiratory system and cause serious illness as well…so, solar thermal doesn’t have any of those downsides.

ANNETTE MARNER: Solar thermal, you say, is operating on a large scale in Spain and also in the United States. How expensive are the plants to establish, to build?

MARK OGGE: The great thing about renewable energy is the price is coming down – the more you build, the more the price comes down – whereas with gas and coal the price is going up.

The first build of a solar thermal power plant in Australia will be relatively more expensive than ones down the track, but as you build them, the price comes down fairly radically. So, in Spain at the moment they’re building 50 MW plants – there’s a bunch in operation, a bunch under construction at the moment, and there’ll actually be 50 of them completed by 2013, whereas in Australia, by 2013, we actually won’t have any and we actually have a far superior solar resource.

ANNETTE MARNER: Ok, so they are relatively expensive. So, I can’t pin you down? Are we talking a billion dollars or half a billion…what are we talking about, as a “ballpark”?

MARK OGGE: The relevant comparison…because, when you build a gas plant you have a…it’s fairly low up-front capital but you pay most of it with gas prices over years to come. And it’s difficult to quantify that because gas prices are volatile and trending upwards so it depends on the assumptions that you’re making about what the future gas price will be. And the gas price is expected to go up, ah, to jump up very significantly soon because of gas exports and domestic gas prices being linked to international gas prices. But at the moment, solar thermal plants – the first of the kind built – will have about three times the cost, per unit of electricity, will be about three times that of gas in the initial stages. As you build more the price will come down and continue to come down while the gas price goes up.

So, “first of kind” builds are more expensive, as with any technology…

ANNETTE MARNER:…so the electricity will be more expensive too, that it generates…so we have an expensive plant…I’m reading between the lines of what you’re saying…

MARK OGGE:…sure…

ANNETTE MARNER:…so, we have a plant that’s going to cost a fair amount of money and then we have electricity that’s generated that’s going to be, what, three times the cost of electricity generated by gas? Is that what you’re saying?

MARK OGGE: In the short-term, for the first couple of plants, they will be more expensive. But you have to balance that. You’ve got to understand that the gas price is about to jump dramatically and that will continue to go up, it will continue to be volatile, and ultimately, if you want to keep electricity prices down you need to build solar thermal and renewable energy so you don’t get locked into ever-increasing electricity and gas prices.

ANNETTE MARNER: What has happened to electricity prices in Spain, a country which, according to you, has embraced solar thermal technology?

MARK OGGE: I’m not totally across the electricity prices in Spain at the moment, but they haven’t been…see, one of the big reasons that the Spanish are building all the solar thermal plants is that they want to be independent of gas, because the gas prices are so volatile and trending upwards and the supply was not reliable. And so, it’s to keep electricity prices down and to get energy security – to ensure their energy security – that they’re building all the solar thermal plants and a huge amount of wind power in the first place.

ANNETTE MARNER: Mark Ogge is my guest, from Beyond Zero Emissions.

Now, about a year ago you put out – Beyond Zero Emissions put out – a report, really a vision for Australia, talking about how renewables can actually generate a fair amount of electricity. In fact, the plan proposes that 40 percent of Australia’s total estimated electricity demand be supplied by wind power. That’s 40 percent of the entire nation’s…er, electricity would be generated by wind power.

Now, South Australia, because of coastline, because of the kind of wind resource that’s here, could well be targeted for that kind of development. How do you fell about the ongoing debate at the moment where, in several country communities, we actually have voices saying, “look, we don’t them here, they’re not actually wind farms, they’re industrial landscapes that you’re imposing upon us?” I recognise that, on the other hand, there are certainly voices that say, “come, we want the jobs and we’re happy that farmers get say, 8, 9, or 10thousand dollars per turbine, come”…it’s a very divisive situation at the moment about wind power.

What are your thoughts, that you’re proposing 40 percent of Australia’s total electricity be generated that way?

MARK OGGE: Well, thinking back to the Spanish situation…

Spain, for instance, it has 40 million people and it has 20 times the wind that South Australia has at the moment and there is [sic] no public engagement issues in Spain. They just go through the normal process of community engagement and working through proper planning laws, and it generates an enormous amount of jobs and prosperity and it also…what it actually does is prevent the industrialization of the landscape.

If you have a choice between coal and gas, or wind and solar and technologies like that…if you decide to go for gas and coal, what you have is massive amounts of areas becoming – as is happening in Queensland and New South Wales – covered with coal seam gas infrastructure. If gas is the solution in South Australia that gas will come from Queensland coal seam gas – the area in Queensland that is under coal seam gas exploration licences is about 5 times the size of Tasmania. When you look on the ground there’s going to be tens of thousands of wells on people’s properties’ they [the landowners] get far less than for wind turbines; there’s a massive amount of infrastructure – compression plants, flare pits, water treatment plants, reverse osmosis…

ANNETTE MARNER:…but isn’t that the kind of argument that says, “look, you know, South Australian people who aren’t happy about wind farms should just be quiet because it could be a lot worse, it could be what’s happening just beyond the border in Queensland”? …is that a bit…that argument…

MARK OGGE: …I think…look, some people don’t like the look of wind turbines but the situation in Queensland…

ANNETTE MARNER:…well, a kilometre, a kilometre from their country dwelling is what some of our listeners are saying they’re not happy about. Having to live a kilometre away from one. And that’s what the State Government in South Australia plans to do with their new plans.

MARK OGGE: I can’t speak for specific cases of how close a wind turbine is to somebody’s house but I know that, in Queensland, coal seam gas wells…there’s going to be tens of thousands of them, probably 40 000 wells approved already with 3 large projects. They actually impact the water table and cause a massive amount of problems and the real regulatory difference between wind turbines and coal seam gas is that nobody will put a wind turbine on your property unless you give them permission but coal seam gas companies can actually come onto your land and access it and drill whether you want it or not…

ANNETTE MARNER:…because the landowners don’t actually own what’s beneath the surface…

MARK OGGE:…what’s beneath the surface, that’s right.

And I should also say that, I mean, I travel around Australia talking about renewable energy all the time and I just get a massive amount of support from communities who have wind, I mean, they love it. It generates income, they feel really good about the fact that it’s generating emissions-free electricity, that it’s displacing coal and gas…so, a lot of people embrace it.

There are some people who don’t like the look of wind turbines, but I think you really do have to balance that with the enormous support that it gets from the community as well.

ANNETTE MARNER: Mark…

MARK OGGE: …and, no sorry, go on…

ANNETTE MARNER: I was just going to say that we must move on.

 But I wanted to thank you very much, Mark Ogge, for joining us and taking us through Beyond Zero Emissions’ vision for a very different landscape in South Australia and beyond.

For that, thank you for your time.

MARK OGGE: No worries, thanks very much.