Gas top cooking fears and the climate skeptics playbook

I am starting to feel the ‘cooking with gas is bad for health’ meme that has taken hold in the last year or two is a very good example of the good guys behaving like the bad guys. Some feel the definitely sufficient arguments that electricity is cheaper than gas and that gas use needs to stop for climate change are insufficient, and thus need to appeal to more immediate fears (Won’t you think of the children!) and dress fear mongering up as science.

How are they doing bad guy things? By taking disparate evidence and spinning it in a way that suits their argument, ignoring where there are flaws or weak evidence. Go into any one of the recent pieces on the dangers of gas top cooking and actually follow the chain down to the primary references cited in them and you find that they are all very simple experiments conducted by individual scientists and all of them decades ago (1980’s 1990’s). There has been no systematic measurement of the effects of gas combustion in cooking on health whatsoever. Any evidence is meta studies which I somehow suspect haven’t set out to prove the opposite.

I am certainly not going to rule out that there is possibly meaningful impacts on health from gas cooktop cooking, but there isn’t any compelling evidence that there is. I would be flabbergasted to discover that the rate of complex organic molecule production and particulates from gas combustion was even an order magnitude in range of what comes off your actual food when you cook on a cooktop irrespective of whether its gas or electric. Something I can see myself on my household air quality monitor every time I cook a stir fry on my induction cooktop even with the exactor fan on maximum.

(Disclaimer. I have an all-electric household by design and have no skin in the gas game. As above I firmly believe it use should stop as a soon as is reasonably practical. Just not because its allegedly giving people asthma).

Maps!

Vegetation survey of Western Australia Albany & Mount Barker 1979

A bad case of gas

I know the Tories rush to gas is galling, but there is a sort of logic to it if you drill down:

(Note upfront: Do not read as endorsement of gas!)

If you first discount the central idea that decarbonisation is necessary to control global temperature rise (I.E long term downside risk for gas) BUT accept what has been happening in coal for some time, and is just kicking off in oil (I.e the death of the industry as a super profitable one) is a real thing. What do you do if you can’t accept putting your money into things that filthy greenies and pinko’s like?

Gas makes sense for a few reasons:

• It is the only fossil fuel using infrastructure that could potentially be of use in in a declining / post fossil fuel world at all parts of the chain except production (I.E. Storage, distribution and combustion).
• It has large fixed and, at least to some degree, path dependent customers. A large industrial plant using electricity doesn’t care where the electrons come from. You could change them to 100% renewable tomorrow and it’s no skin off their nose, so long as they come. If you have your own gas turbines there are real and large costs involved in changing.
• It’s easier to sell as it has a lower emissions intensity. We’ve all seen the stories saying ‘gas is just as bad a coal’ It could be true, but those stories certainly don’t present any evidence of it. It doesn’t matter what you believe, its what the people making the funding decisions believe, and they will accept what’s in the regulations. For the record the most recent Australian Greenhouse Account Factors are Gas: 51.413 kg CO2 per GJ. Coal: 90.23 kg per GJ. And when it comes to actual carbon released to units of energy utilised the difference would be even greater due to a more efficient utilisation process (I.E energy delivered to energy inherent in the fuel combusted).
• They have money in it already (The obvious one).

Who is really taking the hatchet to renewable targets?

I think the end game behind this renewed push against renewables (if you will pardon the pun) is not actually about energy security or even building droves of new coal fired plants, next generation or otherwise, or just about ideology, but about money.

For owners of only semi dispatchable large fossil fuel and by extension their fuel suppliers generators; coal fired plants and combined cycle gas plants (unlike their more emissions intensive cousins the open cycle plants they cannot ramp up and down a very short notice.) renewable power is a problem because it eats into their profit margin. It also impacts coal producers by reducing demand and suppressing the price and the requirement for new production

Whenever the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, even at the relatively low penetration rates for renewable generation around Australia, all these plants but those supplying the very bottom of what is termed ‘baseload’ have to stand idle. This causes a number of knock on effects:

• Additional costs imposed by being forced to switch off and on and or ramp output up and down (extra wear and tear etc.);
• Loss of income during idle periods while fixed costs remain;
• A requirement to bid higher to make up for lost income during periods when they are able run.

Now attacking renewable targets (apart from being a brave policy since they are popular. This doesn’t mean they can’t be successful in targeting them since they had temporary success in target climate action. Majority support as recently 2009 was flipped around in the following years with the carbon tax scare and has only recently flipped back round again) is not going to change this aspect of the energy market since the capacity is there and it is not going to vanish now matter how purple Barnaby gets. Even if all state targets and the federal targets eventually got knocked on the head by 2019 the total renewable capacity of the NEM and SWIS would still be higher than it is now, and the problem of profitability for many of the fossil fuel generators would remain.

What it would do is potentially buy time for existing infrastructure to fully recover their initial investment plus margin. If we are 30/40% renewable by 2030 some important people are going to lose money and this, combined with the raging fire of far right anti-anything-sustainable-feeling-empowered-by-Trump-victory rage of course, is what is behind the push. Actually building new coal fired next generation plants is merely the fever dream of reactionaries, thermal coal mine owners and gentailer executives who want their company to fail.

The reasonable question in response to my angle is: Why is this suddenly an issue now when some of these targets are over a year or much older? I think the answer lies again in renewables popularity. They simply haven’t had the hook until the South Australia storms and then heatwave has presented them with blackouts to spin as being as a result of renewable energy dependence.

My view is that the bed is made on the death of coal and the tories should just live with it and stick to trying to wedge the opposition with enabling racism etc. rather than flogging a dead horse, but hey, what do I know?

Ian Pilmer can’t add up, luckily he is a Geologist.

 

Energy Produced by 1 KW Solar Array against car manufacture.

Basis:

Perth average daily generation for 1 kW array = 4.4 kWh per day (source)

Most panels are guaranteed for 20 / 25 years. We will use a conservative estimate of 15 years.

Panel efficiency Loss of 0.5% per year (source) with 3% in the first year (source)

Average energy to build a car 260 gallons of petrol (source) equivalent to 33.41 * 260 = 8686.6 kWh (conversion)

 

First the total energy output by the panels:

Over 15 years = 22720.66 kWh

Therefor a 1 kWh array produced enough energy to make 3 normal cars in it’s lifetime. Put another way reading off the graph it produces enough energy after just over 5 years to produce 1 car. Therefore, for what the prof says to true then the unsubsidised cost of producing a 1 kilowatt array would have to be three times more expensive in energy terms than three new cars. Put down your pencils everyone. We don’t need to work out if somehow it takes more energy to put together a few kilos of silicon, some copper wire and small electric inverter than to make three cars, cause it don’t.