Currently farmers in the NSW Murray Valley are on 0 per cent allocation, yet Darmouth Dam is at 90 per cent and Hume at 46 per cent. Things are very desperate but if the government acts now we can not only ensure that our own region makes it through the drought, we can be a part of the solution to providing feed in northern NSW and Queensland.
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Next Monday we will be holding a Crisis Rally at 10am at the Deniliquin RSL. We need to increase the pressure on those preventing water from been made available and support our local MPs who are fighting to secure water for the region.
We must get the message across, please join us next Monday.
Shelley Scoullar, Speak Up Campaign
The answer is obvious
Your correspondent David Williams (Border Mail letters to the editor, August 21) put all the arguments of climate change deniers without even mentioning the climate. The first clue was the use of the word “baseload”, which is supposed to suggest that anything other than coal is inadequate.
People who advocate for coal usually add a comment like “the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow” to imply that renewable energy cannot be stored for later use.
He then moves on to dismiss hydropower as an energy option on the basis that it would need to be increased significantly to meet our current demands. He may well be right about that. Turnbull’s Snowy 2.0 will probably not survive its feasibility study.
The fatal flaw though is when after attempting to eliminate every other option, he suggests High Energy Low Emissions coal-fired power station as the only workable option. Except it’s not.
HELE has never worked anywhere near as well as their marketers suggest. There are three HELE coal power stations in Australia and they are, at best, about 10 per cent cleaner than an ordinary non-HELE. You end up paying about 20-30 per cent more for the HELE technology and still get 90 per cent of the emissions.
At the moment coal is among the cheapest forms of energy, but that’s only because the clunky old power stations have been written off and there are no longer any more investment costs. Building new coal power stations would be the most expensive energy option on the table.
While we’re at it we should also rule out a slightly different version of HELE, this being carbon capture and storage. There are no CCS power stations in Australia and only three in the world, including the most world’s most expensive power station, the $7.2 billion Kemper County Energy Facility in Mississippi. This is a completely failed experiment that fortunately nobody in Australia still seriously suggests.
Obviously renewables are the only option.
Graham Parton, Beechworth
Bills while dills dither
This week I had to pay a $540 power bill, and a $600 gas bill. Meanwhile our political leaders in Canberra are too engaged in a power struggle and point-scoring to get anything done about these kinds of real and crippling issues facing everyday Australians.
I am lucky. I can’t afford to save money but I can afford to pay those bills. I really feel for those who can’t pay those bills and who are very low down on the list of priorities of the nation’s decision makers.
