Exports: Global Grid
Once again, dream a little. Australia is smart. Australia catches on to the global tide of post-industrial economic reconstruction centered around clean energy. Thanks to Outback power from solar, geothermal, nuclear and wind, waves and other technologies, Australia is an "energy superpower." It's creating more power than it needs and in many transmutable forms: electricity, hydrogen, heat. Being in this situation, Adam Smith's theory of comparative advantage argues Australia would be smart to export this surplus. If it does, there'll be plenty of takers. Energy runs the global economy. That's not about to change.
Just as fiber optic cables connected the world with ubiquitous communications and dropped the cost of a phone call from expensive to negligible, the same thing can and will happen with power. Remember domestic electricity "price separation?" Energy price separation also happens globally because domestic markets are largely disconnected. Low cost power can't flow to high-priced markets. For the true flowering of the clean energy age to occur, the world needs an interconnected energy market to levelise prices. This is already happening. Supertankers and gas pipelines are examples of it. What's needed is something more ambitious: a global electricity/energy grid.
This idea has been pushed for years by an outfit called the GENI Initiative -- the Global Energy Network Institute. Consider the impacts at the Australian level of connecting its clean energy supplies to the world, just as Tasmania is linked to Victoria through the Basslink cable and the eastern Australian electricity market could be unified through building power lines from Olympic Dam to Brisbane.
The first port of call for such an energy export pipe would be to Australia's north, to Indonesia, just as the Overland Telegraph connected Australia to the world in the 19th Century. Indonesia needs the power. Indonesia is now considering building nuclear plants along geologici fault lines directly north of Australia. It wants Australian expertise to build them. Is this smart? Rather than sell low-profit uranium and one-off nuclear expertise to a country with sloppy safeguards and a militant Muslim fringe, wouldn't it make more sense to export a lucrative perpetual annuity of higher priced electricity? This would make Indonesians safer and Australians richer. It would also enable Indonesia to concentrate on geothermal. This is an area where Indonesia has a distinctive comparative advantage, instead of nuclear, where Indoneisa has comparative disadvantages too numerous to mention.
Just as global telegraph cables gave rise to global telephony which in turn gave rise to global waves in interchanged data, and just as dirt tracks gave rise to country roads which in turn became freeways, so global energy cables can similarly revolutionise production and consumption of global electricity.
How to start? Through building a Basslink-style underwater electricity cable to Indonesia and onward to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and ultimately China. Over time, other markets can be connected. This will drive economies of scale. The replacement cycles of fiber optic cables and energy cables will eventually coalesce, allowing both sets of infrastructure to be replaced on the same cycle, saving money.
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| Australia could provide Outback generated power through high capacity DC power lines laid along fiber optic subsea pathways, pictured above |
Consider the hypothetical energy reserves that could be unleashed. A concentrating solar power farm in central Australia 800 kilometers on a side would be enough to satisfy the entire world's primary energy demand. Yes, primary energy demand. That's everything from electricity to all transport fuels and on down to firewood -- for the whole world.
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The amount of sunshine falling on Central Australia could power the entire world's |
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| Source: German Aerospace Laboratory | ||||||
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Would it be expensive. Sure it would. But so is uncontrolled climate change in the future, and so is dirty electricity right now. As we saw earlier in this report. ANTO has estimate the health and greenhouse costs of coal fired power in Australia to be 4c per kilowatt hour. And the World Bank estimated that, in 1995 (13 years ago) regional air pollution was costing China US$48 billion year. Imagine what the cost is now.
Now, compare Australia's direct normal radiation resource to China's; or, for that matter, anywhere in Asia.
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Australia has a vastly more powerful direct normal radiation solar resource than |
| Source: NASA, Google Eart |
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