I'll tell you about coal fired plant efficiencies:
Gina Rinehart reckons that renewable energy could use one third of Australia's prime agricultural land to replace energy production from coal fired power stations. (DEC 2023).
Rinehart bases this on a report from the IPA and claims that one-third of Australia’s agricultural land would “have to be sacrificed” to renewable energy developments to meet Australia’s energy needs with a 50:50 mix of wind and solar by 2050.
The energy demands as calculated by the IPA are not based on actual demands, but on potential demands which overestimates the actual projected figures by the Australian Energy Market Operator by 30 times! and from here, the fun starts. the IPA reckons that demand will grow to 15,459 terawatt hours by 2050 whereas Aemo reckon that it will grow to 420TWh and the Net Zero Australia report reckons it will grow to 450TWh
Using this fabricated assumption, the IPA and Rinehart reckon that renewable energy will have to “proportionally replace all the energy attributable to Australia’s hydrocarbon fuel production as of today, including for export purposes”. (IPA research released 11 December 2023. Kevin You). The thing that the IPA don't disclose in their report is that with fossil fuels, most of the energy is lost in heat! 60% is lost as heat in coal-fired power stations.
What this means is that the simple x amount of renewables required is equal to the x amount of coal required is a gross distortion of the truth.
Not only is the IPA projected 15,459 terawatt hours by 2050 thirty times more than what the reality is likely to be, they do not take into account that 60% of the energy of burning coal is lost as heat during energy production. This convenient non disclosure and grossly inflated projected energy demand by 2050 means that the IPA's assertion that between 57 million hectares and 180 million hectares of land will be needed by 2050 for renewables, something diligently regurgitated by Rinehart and making headlines in the IPA media (just about all media), is absurd. The NSW 2022 report by the agricultural commissioner found that between 80,000 and more likely 55,000 and hectares in total will be require in NSW.
According to the Clean Energy Council, replacing all Australia’s coal-fired power stations with solar farms would take less than 0.016% of the country’s land area, equivalent to 0.027% of agricultural land; a far cry from the 33% that the IPA and Rinehart reckon it will require.
By the way, if we did a crude calculation based on the the NSW agricultural commissioner's highest estimate of land required in the 2022 report of land required to meet the energy renewable target by 2050 in NSW, and multiplied it by six for SA, NSW, Vic, Qld, WA and NT (sorry Tassie), then the figure is 480,000 hectares - a far cry from the 57 million to 180 million hectares that the IPA and Rinehart reckon.
