tscmacdonald.bsky.social
Energy & decarbonisation by way of physical chemistry and spin stuff. Sometimes folk music and dance.
249 posts
310 followers
405 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
comment in response to
post
Hi - do you have any suggested reading on this? 'Socially-positive State energy intervention understood as a low/zero discount rate' has been a thought rolling around my head for a while.
(found this by looking you up after enjoying your pieces on TGN Haldane)
comment in response to
post
Any idea if Australia or the US have hydrophone arrays/IUSS in the Tasman or SW Pacific more broadly? Seems a surprising detail to be totally blank on.
comment in response to
post
Is that mostly capex inflation for the GT plant, or more about growth in ancillary costs for regulatory/planning, civils, grid connection, etc?
comment in response to
post
This is some really cool work Jack - great to see these simple mechanicsl systems still producing interesting research
comment in response to
post
This is all very easy with an economy wide price on carbon, and very difficult without one.
comment in response to
post
Price is a signal to demand. At present, the signal says to buy conventional steel rather than green steel. It would be good if that was different - and it could be different in future - but right now it's not.
Investing in new green steel plant is of low value if nobody will buy the product.
comment in response to
post
No. But until buyers are willing to factor in those costs and pay more for a green product, that number isn't actually relevant to steel producers.
comment in response to
post
If we're heading for a world withess free trade and more protectionism, I think there might be good scope here to trade e.g. preferential market access to JP carmakers for green steel buy commitments. Harder for China given far far stronger market power + lower-cost local steelmaking.
comment in response to
post
The demand side is much more important and challenging here, I think. The supply question is basically solved in a technical sense - it's just not going to compete with conventional steel without a price on carbon.
But demand side policy is tricky for us as a major exporter and minor consumer.
comment in response to
post
But what's the point of subsidising an export industry with no buyers (yet) and no clear sense of when there will be buyers? Isn't that just throwing money away?
comment in response to
post
Not just the subs, but also the wisdom of the partnership...
comment in response to
post
Cheers. I want to see this stuff work - I think we all do - but without a mandated carbon price, it's just really hard to see voluntary green premiums for commodity steel getting anywhere near where they'd need to be for this to stack up.
comment in response to
post
Everything you've said is true from a physical perspective, but the economics of green steel remain very challenging at achievable H2 costs of ~AUD$6-9/kg and without an economy-wide price on carbon. Safeguard does nothing here, and the FMIA PTC isn't enough - is there anything Australia *can* do?
comment in response to
post
Wild. It makes sense, but I had no idea that constraint violations could set the marginal spot price like this.
I wonder if the potential for conflicting constraints on the parallel V-SA lines could lead to constraint violations and high prices under more "normal" dispatch conditions?
comment in response to
post
First up, the aluminium package is a big deal and matters a lot for industry decarbonisation while protecting 13,000 jobs.
Australia is the 7th largest aluminium producer in the world. We have four smelters, one hydro powered and the other three dependent on coal based electricity.
comment in response to
post
We're entering a world of real moral hazard here as the market abandons core energy investment to the State, but still anticipates reaping the benefits of a highly volatile market designed to allow high energy prices to lure investment. Something's got to give (there are many options).
comment in response to
post
I think this is basically the story of Western universities and academic research.
comment in response to
post
The culture warring doesn't help anyone trying to work through a complex evaluation balancing all sorts of different costs vs benefits (both today, and looking forward to plausible future economies). It's hard enough comparing new-build *costs*; adding legacy *prices* only muddies the waters.
comment in response to
post
*reading Hugh White from line to line, reflecting on Tiananmen and Tibet and nodding thoughtfully*
comment in response to
post
One of my favourite auspol microconstituencies have got to be the crusty greens that hate nuclear power in all its forms but want a domestic nuclear weapons program to free us from the shackles of US imperialism
comment in response to
post
Remarkable how much of energy price discourse boils down to crowing over short-run costs from legacy plant that were paid off decades ago. Yes it's cheap; no that's not a particularly helpful observation.
comment in response to
post
Fair! I like the target fixing aspect - it almost gets meditative on big maps with ASW aircraft. But not necessarily the most relevant thing to spend limited time on.
comment in response to
post
Dangerous Waters is dated but a bit less arcadey: broadband tracking and narrowband signature identification, prop turn-counting to get speed, TMA to fix position. Each station can be done manually or handed over to an autocrew, so players can either DIY or sit back to watch the steps happening.
comment in response to
post
Great, you'll be fine - enjoy the read!
comment in response to
post
The challenge is that homochirality needs a way to separate chiralities (chemically). That's doing work against entropy - it takes energy to do work in a way that discriminates by chirality. Autocatalysis helps set up a chiral enriched starting point, but homochirality takes a bit more effort :)
comment in response to
post
The core issue here is microscopic reversibility: if an (auto)catalyst helps make one chirality form faster from an achiral starting system, it will also accelerate the reverse reaction. Autocatalysis can get you a transient spike in one chirality, but it can't sustain homochirality alone.
comment in response to
post
Not sure what your chemistry background is, but this is a great and relatively readable paper on these systems and how they do/don't work: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
(on scihub if you don't have access)
comment in response to
post
Interestingly, chiral autoamplification is entirely a kinetic phenomenon - not thermodynamic. Left to run for long enough, the unflavoured chirality would "catch up" and you'd get a 50:50 mixture.
Homochirality needs not only amplification, but also a way to start and stop the reaction system!
comment in response to
post
Moves from local diversity toward homogenised mass culture are hardly new: c18th printing (e.g. broadside ballads), c19th urbanisation, c20th recording and broadcast…
Is c21st streaming actually different? Will national culture prove more resilient than regional culture did?
comment in response to
post
I'm around a lot of folk music, which has always had a beautifully hazy performer/audience not-quite-divide. It's a niche that still has a lot of local cultural transmission between musicians and generations.
Much is not recorded; much of that which was recorded is not on steaming services.
comment in response to
post
I think that makes sense from a government level - if opposing yank tanks is seen as an unwinnable battle, who's going to spend political capital opposing something that's actually useful to many people? But it's weird that we don't even seem to have activist protest against the emissions impact.
comment in response to
post
The series jumps around: we're looking at a single peak demand interval per region per year, and the rPV contribution can be volatile depending on time of day and season. But I think you can see broad trends of e.g. stalling peak demand reduction value in Vic vs continuing value in Qld
comment in response to
post
Following up with a quick effort to plot peak demand reduction benefits vs rooftop PV capacity in NEM states. It's a little hacky:
- PD reduction here is just annual max(operational demand) vs annual max(op. demand + rPV output)
- rPV capacity is just max output seen
Each point is one calendar year.
comment in response to
post
I think those questions can be separated. The impact on network capex may be favourable to unfavourable; the impact on generation capex may be favourable to insignificant (if there's so much PV that new rooftop generation only increases curtailment).
The net value will vary by location.
comment in response to
post
Also note that PV can increase network capex where "peak demand" becomes an export (rather than import) figure, which I believe is already the case for a few distribution zones here in Australia. It's fair to question who should pay for that, but there are real costs here: it's not only benefits.
comment in response to
post
I *think* the AER would track and regulate budgeted vs actual vs recovered network costs, but not at all across the details
comment in response to
post
My preferred solution would probably be something like an almost-entirely-fixed network cost component (demand tariffs would be better but people don't like them) with a discount applied for the peak-reducing value of local PV, + a separate FIT for the energy value. But I'm not sure it'd be popular.