IaaC blog

Here are the maps that I was responsible for producing, including a comparison of world energy usage, Australian Energy and Adelaide. A full size version can be found here:

instructions for the maps

overall
- total diagram of size of energy consumption per country based on american energy institute figures

these were translated into a comparable rate to give each country its own ’scale’ of energy consumption comparable to the production centres

conclusions
- australia has highest energy consumption - perhaps because of the distances involved in the distribution of energy
- india has quite low, yet delhi is 2 x as high as the national average (suggesting that the urbanisation of a country (india)
is increasing the rate of energy consumption.

- total energy production distribution per country as a venn diagram scaled to the proportion of the country’s usage

conclusions
- australia has no nuclear because of political bias
- australia has reliance on the fossil fuels becuase of its rich reserves in gas and coal.
- the australian fossil fuel market is protected by government concessions that make them more appealing than renewable

- Australia has the second cheapest electricity of any major developed nation (second only to South
Africa), it is considered sea based wind farms are just not yet currently viable in Australia.

australia

- connected by a networked grid
- losses of up to 7.5% due to energy transmission

south australia
energy productions in shades of blue (scaled in W/s output)
energy consumption in yellow (scaled per person)
shows distribution

- high transmission distances are increasing prices
- south australia has lots of good wind production centres, but they are up to 650km away
- solar is not cost effective due to infrastructure costs (small gov rebate)
- biogas used from existing dumps and sewage good potential

- hot rock thermal production will have national usage
- domestic wind cannot be connected back into the grid (disadvantage over solar)

hydrogen fuel cells have advantage of no infrastructure and distribution costs

preliminary innovation ideas-

-1. main innovation is to bring things closer to the grid. . .

http://www.beyondlogic.org/southaustraliapower/#Interconnects

i. Distributed Generation using Miniturbines or Fuel Cells

One of the fastest growing sectors in the energy industry at the
moment is Distributed Generation (DG) also known as Decentralised
Energy (DE). Currently about 7% of world wide generation is DG with
some countries such as Germany having as much as a 13% DG market share.

ii. wind generation back into the grid at a domestic level

iii solar hydrogen

It has been suggested if 1.6 million individual households equipped their roofs with 10m x
10m of solar hydrogen panels they would meet all of Australia’s energy
needs.

iv. tidal energy harvesting

2. By political / policy change
i increase subsidies for renewable sources - reduce proportionally those
on fossil fuels

ii increase the cost of electricity!

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.