Australians Doing Well Required To Buy Luxury Cars At Gunpoint

On the Australian Luxury Car Tax, Maserati General Manager Glen Sealey said, ‘It’s a discrimination against people who are doing well.’ And Porsche dealer Sean Lygo said, ‘…totally unfair to charge people 33 per cent for buying a car because they’ve done well’.

So apparently it's not discrimintation against people who spend more than the Luxury Car Tax threshold of $63,184 on a car, it's discrimination againt people have done well.  I wonder how that works?  Are Australians who do well required to buy a luxury car by law?  Do they have one issued to them based on their tax returns?  If I don't have a luxury car and I'm doing well will the police arrest me?

These are not very bright statements.  They are also suspiciously similar as if they both subscribe to the same newsletter.   And the guy from Porche doesn't even seem to know how the tax works.  It is not a 33% tax, it is 33% above the Luxury Car Tax threshhold, which means it will vary but I guess it would average around 8%.  Hardly an imposition given we tax junk food, something almost everyone buys at least sometimes at a 10% flat rate.  In fact, let's see if I can come up with a brilliant statement of my own, "The junk food tax is discrimination against people who waste money on junk."  Or maybe, "It is totally unfair to charge people 40% but really 10% for buying a mars bar simply because they couldn't be arsed to eat a piece of fruit."


Anyway, after reading their statements, I'm convinced we should get rid of the Luxury Car Tax and replace it with a much higher Wanker Tax.

Arise Carbonetta, Queen of the Prime Minister's Heart!

Free Riders On The Storm

John Quiggin recently wrote about how a certain country that shall remain nameless, but which begins and ends with an A and isn't Andora or in South America, and how it is attempting to free ride on the CO2 emission reductions of other countries by getting rid of its carbon price.  This inspired me to write the following song.  However, I can't talk all the credit for it as I did get some help from Jim Morrison:


Free riders on the storm
Free riders on the storm
Around government they swarm
Against them I now warn
They’re out seeking rent
And won’t stop until we’re spent
Free riders on the storm

There’s a killer in the air
In his birth we all share
Fly on a holiday
For a nice steak pay
Emit it from your ride
And sweet Bangladeshis will die
Killer in the air

Girl ya gotta be informed
Girl ya gotta be informed
Take your keyboard in your hand
Make them understand
The world on you depends
For many lives will end
Gotta be informed

Free riders on the storm
Free riders on the storm
Around government they swarm
Against them now I warn
They’re out seeking rent
And won’t stop until we’re spent
Free riders on the storm

It's time for us to all pull together

Looks like The Master has been working out.

Disney is remaking 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in Australia and for some reason we are paying them $20,000,000 to make it here instead of the other way around. We may as well send China some free coal while we're at it.

Probably No Significant Amount of Concentrating Solar Thermal Capacity Will Be Built In Australia

Concentrating solar thermal power, that is using mirrors to concentrate sunlight to produce steam to run a generator, used to be a big contender in the renewable energy stakes.  It seemed like it should be a low cost way to generate electricity.  After all, the basics are pretty simple - mirrors, pipes, steam, generators.  We could have started building concentrted solar thermal back in the 19th century if we'd wanted to.  But it has been sidelined over the past few years by the huge drop in the price of solar PV which you can see in the form of solar panels installed on roofs all over the place in Australia.  But solar concentrating thermal can be built with thermal storage that can provide electricity after the sun goes down or when it's overcast.  So will Australia build a significant amount of concentrating solar thermal plants?

Probably not.

It's possible that concentrating solar thermal may become an important source of electricity in the future, but it faces some challenges. Its first problem is it’s not currently suitable for point of use applications. That is, you can't easily stick it on your roof and so needs to supply power directly to the grid.  This means that like any other source of electricity that is delivered directly to the grid, it is less competitive than point of use solar PV. As point of use PV is the cheapest source of electricity for most Australians, people are installing a lot of it which is pushing down the wholesale price of electricity during the day and making concentrating solar thermal less economical.

Concentrating solar thermal can be built with energy storage to provide electricity during the evening, but faces the problem that Australia’s high retail prices mean Australians may soon find it profitable to install home and business energy storage which has the potential to greatly reduce the demand for electricity in the evening.   And for on grid storage, concentrating solar thermal faces competition from point of use PV. This is because Australia may end up with enough point of use solar to often push the price of electricity down towards zero during the day. This means that energy storage could be charged at little or no cost during these times. This means that thermal storage could be built without any attached concentrating solar capacity. Using electrical resistance heating to raise the temperature of concrete or other material to later produce steam to generate electricity is not efficient, but if the cost of daytime electricity is low enough it could be cheaper than building concentrating solar thermal.

So I basically I can't see Australia building much in the way of concentrating solar thermal plants, not with the decreasing cost and increasing adoption of solar PV.

To Improve the Health of Australian Children Make Shoes Optional

One of the reasons Australia produces so many great athletes is that many of them grew up barefoot.  Freeman, Phelps, and many others.  Not only does growing up barefoot give athletes an edge, it also reduces injury rates.  So, rather than spending money on olympic medal bonuses, why not take the money saving course of allowing children to go barefoot at school?  I'm sure it would have a positive effect on children's activity levels and so improve health and reduce obesity.

Solar, Wind and Efficiency Killing Coal Power in Australia

And they've shut down another 360 megawatts of coal power in Australia.  This time very dirty brown coal capacity at Yallourn power station in Victoria's Latrobe Valley.  So much for paying coal plants to shut down, they're doing it on their own.

Solar and Efficiency Gradually Eliminating Coal Power in Australia

I just read that because of reduced demand due to rooftop solar and improved efficiency, Queensland’s Tarong power station is mothballing half of its 1,400 megawatt capacity. So coal power capacity that has been shut down and not replaced in the last two or three years in Australia include half of Tarong (700 megawatts), Playford B (250 megawatts), Swanbank B (125 megawatts), and Munmorrah (600 megawatts), for a total of 1,675 megawatts. And if you want to throw in half of Northern power station’s capacity as it now only operates 6 months a year, that brings it to 1,935 megawatts, or almost two gigawatts of coal power.  That's fairly impressive.

Decent weather and increased grid electricity prices have also contributed to this, but rooftop solar obviously bears a lot of responsibility, as by the end of the year we will be approaching two gigawatts of installed solar capacity.  This means that on a sunny day, Australia's PV could generate as many megawatts as as the shutdown coal plants.  

Update:  Well, not quite as much as the shutdown coal power stations as our solar tends to be a bit higgledy piggledy and generally not optimally aligned, but it it can still generate a heck of a lot of electricity. 

Empower Women by Taking Away Their Choice to Wear What They Want!

I see some idiot is attempting to ban the burka in Australia. I wonder how that would work? If one of the three women who actually wears a burka in Australia steps outside will the police declare a burka alert and swoop down and send them off to fashion camp for reeducation? Or will they just strip a few inches off the hemline to make it a sub-burka? When they took our guns away we were compensated, so maybe we should have a bikinis for burkas program? Or perhaps we should go for a technological fix instead and start issuing people with infra-red goggles that can see through clothes?

Germany's Solar Panels Could Power the Whole of Australia

On Friday Germany's solar panels had a peak output of over 22 gigawatts.  Yesterday at noon the whole of Australia used 22 gigawatts of electric power.  Germany's solar capacity could power our entire continent.  Or at least it could on sunny weekends.

Nuclear Power in Australia - An Economic Impossibility

There are some people, Barry Grook for example, who, even after that slight problem they had in Japan that showed that non-Soviet countries weren't quite as good at nuclear safety as we hoped, still say that Australia should build nuclear reactors. I was going to write that Barry still THINKS Australia should build nuclear reactors, but to tell the truth, I have no idea what Barry's thinking.

This is not going to happen. Nuclear reactors are not going to be built in Australia. Uh-uh. No way. And the reason is quite simple. Money. Nuclear power plants are an economic impossibility in Australia. Commercial nuclear power has always been a no go here. We were going to build a nuclear power plant in the early seventies, but that was before we found out how much it would cost and then it was like, "Hell no!" And the economics of it have only gotten worse since then.

There are actually several reasons why nuclear power isn't economic here, but I'll just give one simple clear reason. Last year Germany installed point of use solar power for an average cost of $2.60 Australian a watt. There is no reason why Australia can't install solar for that price. After all, both Australia and Germany are high wage countries. But the really big difference is that Australia is more or less twice as sunny as Germany. This means that at $2.60 a watt, solar power will become the cheapest source of electricity for many consumers. In fact, most consumers. Already Australia's solar capacity is expanding rapidly and as there is plenty of room for the cost of solar to drop even futher, installation costs will continue to decline.

Just how much solar capacity we will have with an installed cost of $2.60 a watt, or the $1 a watt I am sure we will get to before too long, I don't know. But on sunny days of low demand solar power will push the price of electricity down towards zero. Also, as a price taker with zero fuel costs, solar power, like wind, reduces the wholesale price of electricity. Both of these effects are disastrous for the economics of nuclear plants which need both high wholesale prices and to operate at close to full capacity to hope to make money. Nuclear power could not compete when Australia was mostly coal and gas powered and it certainly will not be able to compete now that the price of solar has dropped so low. And if nuclear has to also pay the market price for insurance, well, what can I say? Pushing nuclear power in Australia is flogging dead parrot. It's a deceased source of energy. It's shuffled of its Tesla coil. It's run down the leaded curtain and joined the bleeding choir of invisible gamma rays! It is an ex power source!