A new coal plant for Victoria?

Like most ordinary citizens, energy news bewilders me. It’s arcane, complicated and irregularly analyzed by reporters. Despite my intrinsic interest in energy from a climate change perspective, energy news mostly slips past me in a blur of half-comprehension.

My lack of a basic grasp of energy in my home state of Victoria, Australia was highlighted by April 14 news in The Age. As readers of this blog will know, I’m naively (but correctly) portraying coal as a modern moral issue: it’s the dirtiest technology in terms of carbon emissions, so it has to end as soon as possible, with any cost impacts being gladly borne by society. I’ve been reporting on an emerging de facto US moratorium on new coal plants and somehow I assumed Victoria was also experiencing such an informal moratorium. Not so, it seems.

Adam Morton in The Age reported that on April 22 Melbourne-based HRL (which owns a medium-sized 170 MWe coal plant in Morwell) will sign a contract with a Chinese company ‘to build a demonstration plant that would use new technology to run on low-grade coal’. According to the article, HRL tried unsuccessfully to get a ‘clean coal’ plant up previously, again with a Chinese partner; this was replaced late last year by a ‘dual gas’ (but still clearly coal) 550 MWe plant to be running by 2013. The article mentions possible national and state funding totalling $150m.

Don’t rely on this post for authoritative information on the HRL development; I need to do some research. It’s not clear to me, for example, whether this proposed new ‘demonstration’ plant is the 550 MWe plant previously proposed – 550 MWe is obviously not ‘demonstration’ size! My point is this: even with carbon pricing looming for Australia, even with public acceptance of the link between brown coal and the most harmful levels of carbon emissions, new coal plants continue to arise as possibilities.

Moratorium on new coal? Not here yet.