Two Government Wins

 Two By Two from RenewEconomy  today. RenewEconomy (all links will be in the blog article for the "PTEC3D On Air" podcast listeners) has a real focus on renewables and sustainable and I do recommend subscribing to their newsletter.

(No - I'm not affiliated/associated in any way with them, I'm giving an unsolicited testimonial.)

The first two articles of theirs are to do with the two sides of a coin: setting an emissions target, and then curbing the fossil fuel's dying snarling grabbing attempts to stay alive - by gouging their customers. 

Who'll Think Of The Poor Corporations ?

I'm glad to say that I predicted this a long time ago (I'll have a link if I can ever find any of those posts) that the fossil fuel industries would experience starvation just like any other animal, and snap and bite at everything they can reach - and in this case it's their customers - in an effort to prolong their life.

And it stands to reason, right? The Fossil Fue Cartel (FFC) as I call them, is a corporation. Check out definition 2. - a body formed and authorized by law to act as a single person ... in other words, the "corp" refers to "a single body" but for the purposes of the law they treat the corporation as a human individual not just a body. Pity. They should have treated it as a predatory wild animal...

No-one (I think?) has analysed corporations as having biological behaviours. (Actually, I'm wrong. There's at least this handy dandy guide for corporations analysed this way. So we do have a precedent.) But we all know that a wild animal is most dangerous when it's dying, and the FFC is no exception.

And it's important, as your government is setting decarbonisation targets, emissions targets, etc; To email your politicians and make then aware of what the predictable reactions from the FFC are going to be. 

Notice that as EVs are gaining in popularity, the FFC has already raised fuel prices far above what could reasonably be expected. It's not going to get better because they are losing their bottom line, and if they can't sell as much fuel in the future, they need to fill their bellies now. 

Also note that we're all moving towards reducing the use of "virgin" plastic, that is, plastic produced from fossil fuel feedstock. Also please note that plastic is a FOREVER kind of material, like glass and aluminium - and note that we have highly efficient ways to recycle those and so save using virgin materials as much. Of course plastic is eminently recyclable, and of course that is not what the FFC wants because this is the second-most-lucrative market for their product. 

So these sorts of shenanigans are to be expected, and we need to prime our politicians to look out for US and not the FFC...

Now To Energy And Ducks

Western Australia is a thinly-spread but sizeable population, and to their credit, their power transmission system has always struck me as being quite well-maintained. In most States, the energy companies charge "service" fees that they then don't use to service their power grid, and they have power outages regularly. In WA, there seemed to always be crews out working on the system grid, and so outages were fewer than here in Victoria. 

But also the State lagged behind in renewable/sustainable energy, and relied on a lot of gas turbine plants to tame the "Duck Curve" as it's called. Check out Wikipedia's Duck Curve article. As I haven't been in WA for over a decade, I can't comment to their uptake of wind and solar energy generation but I imagine it'd be quite substantial as we have sun and wind aplenty there. 

Their first grid battery is slowly going online and for all I know may already be in full production by now. It's also worth noting that each time we buy a battery system, it breaks previous records both locally and often internationally as well. 

Australians also (I think?) broke records for speed of mobile phone adoption and distribution, quickly realising the advantages of this means of communication over the wired phone system, and we're also behind a lot of the technology we've been buying back in the products we import. We're so good at innovating and so bad at capitalising on our innovations...

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