TRANSCRIPT - ABC Rural ‘Bush Telegraph’ with Michael Mackenzie: ‘Regional town replacing smoke with mirrors’

MICHAEL MACKENZIE, BROADCASTER: The Gillard Government plans to close something like 2000 MW of high polluting electricity generation by 2020. This is part of this Carbon Tax Package. The coal powered Playford B power station in Port Augusta, in South Australia, is one plant which is being nominated to be shut down, and the owner of that plant, Alinta Energy, has confirmed that they’ve tendered for the Contract for Closure Program.  

But what will replace it once its closed? Well, a proposal to build a series of solar thermal plants is attracting a lot of local interest and support. The idea also has the support of the local Mayor, who we’ll hear from in just a moment.   

But first, Matthew Wright is the Executive Director of Beyond Zero Emissions who’s lobbying for the proposal. Matthew, welcome to Bush Telegraph.  

MATTHEW WRIGHT, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF BEYOND ZERO EMISSIONS: Thanks, Michael.    

MICHAEL MACKENZIE: Good to have you with us. How does it work, the solar thermal technology?    

MATTHEW WRIGHT: Look, it’s great, and it’s commercial and available. And the way it works is, instead of those rooftop solar panels that everyone’s familiar with that you have on your roofs that directly produce electricity - and send that to the grid in real time or power your toaster at home – these [solar thermal plants] consist of a large field of mirrors, a sea of mirrors that surrounds a central tower.   

Now, that central tower looks like a coal smoke stack on a coal-fired power station, but instead of smoke coming out the top, the top’s glowing hot - it looks beautiful, in fact, to look at – so, it’s glowing because all those mirrors in the sea of mirrors are shined up to the top of the tower and it’s collecting the heat that you get from tens of thousands of mirrors - and these mirrors aren’t like little mirrors, they’re the size of a house, they’re a 130 square meters each – and so, that heat is the heat of a coal furnace, it’s the heat of burning a massive amount of coal. Instead of just using that straight away, what you can do with heat cheaply is that you can store it. So, at the base of the tower is two tanks - they’re like giant thermos flasks and each contains industrial fertilizer, so a mixture of potassium nitrate and sodium nitrate…  

MICHAEL MACKENZIE: …that sounds scary Matthew, isn’t that explosive?!...

MATTHEW WRIGHT: …no, you’d, if you tried to…it would be just about impossible to get the right mixture to get that to explode ….

 MICHAEL MACKENZIE: …glad to hear….

 MATTHEW WRIGHT: …it’s also within a kilometer of mirrors, so you’d have to…and then at worst, you’d actually damage the plant because there’s no houses nearby, there’s just a sea of mirrors…so, you’d be very hard pressed to get anything to happen to that…

 MICHAEL MACKENZIE: …good to hear. So this particular mixture - you mentioned it was fertilizer - but it’s called molten salt, isn’t it?

 MATTHEW WRIGHT: Yeah, that’s right. But the particular salt, for farmers who are listening, it’s potassium nitrate 40% and 60% sodium nitrate - so they’re sort of chemicals that people are familiar with, they’re just mixed together in solutions. Their viscosity is like water and they’re pumped up from the coal tanks - and the coal tanks are 290 degrees cold, it sounds hot but its cold - and that goes to the top of the tower; it receives all that light from the mirrors and then goes down to the hot tank, where the salt keeps getting transferred from the cold to the hot tank during the day; the hot tank fills up with 565 degrees Celsius salt. And that is the same temperature a coal plants runs at.

 So then anytime - day or night - you need power, you then pump the salt back towards the coal tank. On the way, it passes through a heat exchanger and the heat exchanger has water running through it; and that water flashes to steam, and that drives a conventional turbine. So, that turbine’s the same turbine you get in a coal-fired plant, and fortunately for workers - the same kind of people who work in the Port Augusta coal-fired power station - they can then get jobs. They are very transferable jobs into the solar thermal plants.

 MICHAEL MACKENZIE: So let’s just make sure we counter any claims or concerns that may be out there. Because this molten salt retains heat for a period of time, you can provide - provided you have enough sun, which I think Port Augusta does - you can provide baseload power?

 MATTHEW WRIGHT: Yeah, you can provide 24hr solar power - solar power around the night, solar power 24/7. It’s baseload.

 So, that’s already demonstrated and operating in Spain. In fact, in Spain, their solar thermal program involves $20 billion worth of plants that they started commissioning in 2008 and they’ll complete that $20 billion worth of projects by 2013. So they’re going to have 60 of these solar plants, most of them in either peaking set up - where they run well into the late evening or early morning - or some of them set to run baseload – so they’ve got enough salt storage to run 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week.

 So, that is the perfect ‘drop-in’ replacement for these coal plants.

 MICHAEL MACKENZIE: Matthew, if Alinta - the owners of this current plan, the current Playford plan that you’re proposing should change over to solar thermal - if they go ahead with this, if they also get money from the federal government to compensate them for closure, is there any existing coal-fired power technology within that plan that can be adapted to solar thermal?

 MATTHEW WRIGHT: No, you’d be better off - apart from the workers knowledge and their skills that can transfer - you’d be better off building a plant from scratch because one of the reasons they want to close down is that a lot of the stuff is pretty past its use-by…so, coal plants don’t last forever - in fact, most of them had a design life of 30 years and then 50 years later they’re still operating…

 MICHAEL MACKENZIE: …yeah, ok, I’m with you…

 MATTHEW WRIGHT: ..so, you get the latest equipment, and the latest equipment is more efficient, so in the longer run you benefit…

 MICHAEL MACKENZIE: …but the transferred power that’s generated out of Playford…I mean, the network that takes that into the South Australian grid - that would remain, so you’d still have the connection to the grid, you’d just change the technology that delivers to the connection.

 MATTHEW WRIGHT: Yeah, absolutely, so that’s your advantage for Port Augusta’s people, is [sic] that they’ve got that connection. If you put that in the vicinity of the current network connection, well you’ve got everything designed around dispatching power from around there…so you combine this with South Australia’s very advanced wind program - where they’re one of the leaders, they have 20% of the state’s annual energy coming from wind - then this can actually fill in the gaps. So you can actually end up with a state that’s run on wind, solar thermal with storage, and the rooftop solar panels that have been rolled out recently on the back of the feed-in-tariff.

 MICHAEL MACKENZIE: Gee, it all sounds very new technology and very renewable indeed. Listening into this conversation is the long time mayor of Port Augusta, Joy Baluch. Hello Mayor.

JOY BALUCH: Good morning, Michael.

 MICHAEL MACKENZIE: Good to have you with us. I believe you’ve been in the job off and on for about 37 years so you’d know this community backwards. Are they up for this?

 JOY BALUCH: I have been mayor since ‘81. I had a couple holidays…

 MICHAEL MACKENZIE: …at the behest of the ALP, wasn’t it?

 JOY BALUCH: …yes, that’s right…

 MICHAEL MACKENZIE: …yeah ok, but your back now. And Mayor, does Port Augusta want this?

 JOY BALUCH: Port Augusta community has been suffering the effects of the emissions from the coal-fired power station for the last 40 years.

MICHAEL MACKENZIE: When you say suffering, what do you mean?

JOY BALUCH: Well, we’ve got double the State’s statistics on lung cancer, we’ve doubled that rate. We have other forms of cancer throughout the community and my community has been dying just to provide cheap power to the state. We provide 40% of the State’s power.

MICHAEL MACKENZIE: So, this is a chance for you to re-version [sic] yourselves and, in fact, improve the health outcomes for your community.

 JOY BALUCH: Indeed, indeed. We have been wanting this for a long period of time but the requests have fallen upon deaf ears.

 MICHAEL MACKENZIE: No of course, no one – no one, Mayor - wants to put their hand up and go, “yes there is a direct link between the cancer rates and Port Augusta”.

JOY BALUCH: Of course not, but, I mean, for how long? How long can they keep fooling the community? And of course they throw in the emotion of job losses. Well, as you have already heard with Matthew, there will be very few job losses with a solar thermal power station, whereas, if it was converted to gas, there would be massive job losses. And in any case, I’m not going to be swayed by that because the job losses could be taken up with the manufacturing of these solar panels, so a loss of a couple hundred jobs is nothing compared…what value do you put on a person’s life?

 MICHAEL MACKENZIE:  My guest is mayor of Port Augusta, Joy Baluch, and also Executive Director of lobby group Beyond Zero Emissions, Matthew Wright.

 Matthew, I understand that you’ve taken independent Tony Windsor and also economist - and clean energy protagonist, I guess you could say - Ross Garnaut to the site. Just how dirty is the Playford brown coal-fired power station?

MATTHEW WRIGHT: Look, it’s very dirty. In carbon terms, the Playford plant is pretty much the worst in the country. It’s something like 1.7 tones of C02 per MW hour - that compares to renewable resources, that obviously are zero, and say, a Queensland coal plant which only puts out 700 kg of C02 per MW hour. So it’s [the Playford power station] more then a ton more of CO2 per Megawatt hour.

In addition, coal plants are the source of mercury, cadmium, thorium, radon…all these things go up the smokestack and into the lungs of the poor people of Port Augusta. And, in fact, we’ve got the same circumstance in Victoria where I’m from, where the La Trobe Valley is just a horrible vector of lung disease and …

MICHAEL MACKENZIE: …I believe your brother is a cardiothoracic surgeon…sees a lot of people from the La Trobe valley, is that right?

MATTHEW WRIGHT: Yeah, absolutely. If you want someone on the record who’s going to draw the link for lung disease to coal-fired power, my brother would certainly be happy to do that. He leads the team at St Vincent’s hospital in Melbourne - the cardiothoracic surgery and surgical oncology team - and they’re always seeing either people for smoking-related lung disease and the other people they see are people from the La Trobe valley.

MICHAEL MACKENZIE: Ok, well look, Joy Baluch and you have made a very strong case for the health outcomes from this, but something that Joy mentioned I’d like to take to you now Matthew Wright: what about the proposal to, perhaps, close down the coal output but instead convert the plant - the Playford plant - to gas? Why isn’t that a viable concept?

MATTHEW WRIGHT: Well, it’s a terrible option for a number of reasons. 

One is that petroleum sources and the gas are running out, so the industry’s moving to dirty and dangerous options such as shale gas and coal seam gas.

And we’ve seen just how divisive in the communities of New South Wales and Queensland coal seam gas is. It’s a disaster and I haven’t got enough time to go into the details of why. In addition, gas actually tracks the price of oil globally. Now, we’ve all experienced what happens at the petrol pump when we turn up the next week to fill our tanks and the price has gone from $1 a litre to a $1.50 a litre, or it’s gone from a $1.5 to $1.80, and you don’t want to feel that.

Australian families can’t feel that when they reach for the light switch. I mean we need to know what we’re going to be paying in the long term. We need to be fully hedged. And with the solar thermal plant, we lock in the cost of electricity not just for 10 years, for 20 years, for 30 years - for 60 years and beyond, because renewable energy sources always become cheaper, but fossil fuels, as everyone’s aware, have always been going up in price. So you don’t want to be installing something that’s going to last 60 years that has a fuel source that always goes up in price - and that’s what a gas will deliver - versus something that will always come down in price – and that’s what renewables will deliver our people.

MICHAEL MACKENZIE: Well in talking about solar thermal, Matthew, you mentioned the living example in Spain and I think you said that it was a $20 billion plan. How much will it cost to do the kind of conversion your talking about, and that Joy Baluch is talking about, in Port Augusta?

MATTHEW WRIGHT: In Spain it’s a $20 billion roll out, so there’s 60 power plants across the country for $20 billion.

MICHAEL MACKENZIE : Gotcha, alright.

MATTHEW WRIGHT: So it’s pretty significant. For what we‘d need to do in Port Augusta, you’d need $3 billion from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation - if we’re talking about using the mechanism that are on the table – and that’s if the Clean Energy Finance Corporation is properly structured, of course, to allow this to occur. But if they get it right, $3 billion from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation would give us roughly six towers - six individual solar thermal with storage power towers - and two of those would replace the output of Playford, and then, over time, we could also replace Northern and you’d get another four power towers in there. So six towers altogether would replace all the production of Playford and Northern. You’d have that planned, so you’d build the first two towers - and they’ll be installed within the next 2-3 years - and then with another four to replace Northern.

MICHAEL MACKENZIE: And Joy Baluch…

JOY BALUCH: …Michael, can I please get back to the emissions out of A and B station back in the 70’s?

MICHAEL MACKENZIE: Certainly. We’ve only got about 30 seconds Joy, but go for it.

JOY BALUCH: Well there were 600 tons - 600 tons of fly ash emitted over the city, per annum, of fly ash. That’s how much was emitted out of a station before I pushed - and it took seven years - to get precipitators on a station.

MICHAEL MACKENZIE: So, obviously there’s a long legacy of that kind of health outcome from that kind of emissions back even 40 years ago that you need to deal with now in your community. I hope, Joy Baluch, that you’re still mayor if this comes to pass. I take it you will be, too.

JOY BALUCH: God put me on this path and I won’t get off this path until something is done about the Northern Power station and conversion to alternative clean energy.