Getting a better Energy deal - WHAT A JOKE!

[FenceFurniture]

Here's one for the woodies:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-...nergy/11120590

[fletty]

200 tonnes of sawdust PER DAY and “good clean smoke”? ........ NOoooo!

Surely he he meant to say “processing 200 tonne of timber per day” and “good clean STEAM”?
I hope he still has a job by the end of today!

[FenceFurniture]

I hope he still has a job by the end of today!

I have no doubt that he will. ABC News thinks it's ok to run two news articles PER DAY on Game of Bloody Thrones. News has gone to the dogs under Craig McMurtrie.

[Bushmiller]

"There may be a bit of smoke. But it's good clean smoke."

Surely that is an oxymoron.

If it is a 15MW boiler that might require 60T of sawdust to fire up to that level. Only 3 1/2 hours of operation per day at max capacity. They are processing pine. 300,000 tons of sawn timber per year. I am not sure of the conversion rate from log to timber product. 75% conversion, which even for softwood would be exceptional, would yield 200T per day for 365days of the year.

My guesstimate figures may be a little out. (based on 2T of coal/MW in a high tech boiler. Figures rounded for simplicity)

So it may be possible: Not however the clean smoke.

Regards
Paul

[rustynail]

This is nothing new for the timber industry. Mills have been burning waste for years to produce heat or steam. Its the smoke produced that becomes the problem. Better to put waste to a recycle use than send it up a chimney.

[BobL]

Clean smoke is "relative"

Deep in the forested northern Italian Alps where there are a number of saw mills one of my cousins is an engineer in charge of a small timber waste power plant (2 x 12 MW) where they burn wood waste including a lot of roadside trimmings and supply electrical power and hot water (for domestic use and central heating in winter) for a local ski resort and nearby small town. Before they did this they imported oil to power the generators and had no centrally distributed hot water system and the roadside trimmings and wood waste was just burned. At the height of the ski season, on still days the smoke from he oil fired generators hung around in the valleys and ski runs were tainted with a brown rind which was not too attractive and they were losing trade to other fields. When the snow melted the oil contaminated ground and ground water and streams etc.

The process started with a hard-nosed financial analysis that demonstrated that it could be done on a cheaper sustainable basis provided they did not collect teh waste from more that 35km away. Then there was a wide consultation and education of the community. Every homeowner of the two was required to contribute 2000 euros which basically paid for a heat exchanger for their house. The easiest persons to convince were the 90 year old grandmas who were keen to leave a clean legacy to their descendants. As a result the snowfields are back to where they were 40 years ago and the water pollution has been reduced. There are now a number of similar small local power stations in the alps and the latest estimate is they have reduced oil importation by more than 100,000 tons a year.

In another town not that far away two other cousins own a mega CNC carpentry business (their machine can handle 13m! x 600 mm x 600 mm inputs). Their main sellers are complete roofing timbers and mountain trail refuges but they can also make whole houses. The CNC generates a lot of waste and they burn this and the replaced roof timbers to provide the town with hot water - they make almost as money out of the hot water business as they do from the carpentry.

I posted about all this back in 2010 but unfortunately all those photos.

[Bushmiller]

In burning fossil fuels there are two potentially polluting aspects. The first is visible pollutants which are the non combustible components of the fuel (ash etc.) or, in the case of poorer burning processes, the unburnt particles of the fuel that did not ignite because of poor combustion.

The second aspect, which is the main focus and contentious issue of the day, is the production of carbon dioxide. All fossil fuels do this and in similar combustion situations they can be compared. Power stations are such a similar combustion scenario. The rating is designated carbon intensity. The worst is brown coal, then black coal, then black coal in the most modern power plants (tending to be the so-called supercritical boilers), then gas fired stations (Gas turbine peaking plants) and finally gas plants with a heat recovery steam generator tacked onto the exhaust gases. Intensity varies from 1.6 at the worst of the brown coal stations (the now defunct Hazelwood plant) through to .9 for the supercritical, .8 for the straight through gas turbines and .6 for the Gas Turbines with a HRSG (Heat Recovery Steam Generator) tacked on the exhaust gases.' The is is for the CO2 emissions and does not reflect the economy of these plants. On an economic basis it is a totally different picture.

The domestic fire place and the open BBQ are at the worst end of the spectrum. I don't know where oil features in all this as nobody in industry use that fuel in this country. Wood, particularly soft wood, I think is worse than brown coal, but I don't know the value. I did find these tables below that are not carbon emissions but gives the relativities of various fuels and is German in origin.

Specific CO2 emissions of various fuels.png

Lignite is brown coal. Traditionally brown coal has to be dried before it can be successfully burnt and I would expect that sawdust from green milling has to be treated the same way. As high temperature kiln drying for radiata pine takes around eight hours I expect that it is not a big issue to treat the sawdust in a similar fashion prior to burning. However I have no direct knowledge of this.

Also it is interesting to note that diesel fuel is a poor performer compared to petrol and is one of the explanations as to why the Europeans, having initially embraced diesel powered vehicles with a vengeance, are moving back to petrol. Of course that is with domestic vehicles. I don't know how that will pan out with trucks where the characteristic of a diesel are more suited to heavy duty haulage. Australia is clearly behind this trend as it was to adopt diesel powered cars until very recently. You can also see from those charts why electric vehicles may be so much more efficient.

Lots of openings for discussion there I know.



Regards
Paul

[clear out]

We visited a mill just out of Tamworth in 74 which had an old boiler from Morts Dock in use.
They had numerous small steam engines mounted under floor and the waste was moved on belting.
They were bought out by a big operate for their timber stands and the mill disappeared.
Briggsvale had a C38 bricked in and the steam winding engines off the original HMAS Sydney to peel the Coachwood for ply for the Mosquitoes built during WW2. Briggs ply no longer exists.
The mill the hippies bought in Nimbin had steam wastewood drying kilns, I used to ride dirt bikes with the previous owners son.

So nothing new here , just another sound bite like big laminated timber beam buildings being something those amazing architects are now designing, how was the opera house built?
All but one of Symonds buildings are now demolished after 60 or 70 years, google Symonds it’ll blow your mind.
H.

[Lappa]

Mercedes Benz announced in May this year that they will cease production of all petrol and Diesel engines ( traditional combustion engines) by 2039 and produce a fleet of carbon neutral passenger vehicles. They will be electric or eFuel hybrids.

[FenceFurniture]

The original thrust of this thread was to describe the ridiculous series of events that one has to go through to get a better deal. The scenario was that in late 2017 I changed over from AGL to Origin Energy for electricity and gas. AGL then had their "Retention Team" contact me and offered me a much better deal, which I accepted. They then proceeded to make a complete pig's breakfast of the whole thing, so I called Origin (after going many levels up the management tree at AGL) and simply said that maybe I should just speak to the Retention Team at Origin, which I did.

I got a pretty good deal, with around 30% discount on usage. I had to ring a special phone number every year to revitalise these discounts (know idea why I really had to call).

Everyone is aware of the current turmoil in the prices for energy, and so Origin once more contacted me to say that I had to renew. Rang the number, left a msg, rang again some days later, left another msg, no response. So I rang Origin on their regular number and spoke to someone who said things have changed now, and the only way I can speak to Retention is if I leave Origin, which will trigger them to call me with a better offer.

So the upshot of that is that this morning I had to waste 30 minutes of my time, and Jane's time, from Energy Australia, transferring my accounts over to them. In a few days time when Origin are notified of this it will trigger their retention team to contact me, offering me some kind of discount to stay (probably about 15% I imagine).

My view of this is that it is disgraceful for one company (Origin) to quite deliberately waste the time and resources of another company (Energy Australia, or whichever supplier I have to select for the hoodwink). Now Origin would say "But they all do the same thing". This of course does not make it okay at all, when all they have to do to maintain the status quo is transfer me to their retention team to discuss what the new discounts will be. It also wasted Mohammed's time (Origin) this morning for about 20 minutes. All that has to happen to obviate this monumental waste of time for many people is to flag my file with "he knows how the game works" and then make an electronic offer of the new percentage discount with "you don't have to do anything to accept".

Any wonder why they have to keep putting up their prices.
The things you have to do to keep the bastards honest.



If anyone else is considering changing suppliers, and know they'll also have to go through this fiasco, I'd suggest that you pick one of the bigger players for the hoodwink. The smaller players have to operate on skinnier margins, and wasting their time would be more damaging to them. Apart from that, "But they all do the same thing" means I have no compunction about wasting a large corporation's time when they indulge in such behaviour.

[Mr Brush]

Standard operating procedure for energy companies. Some years ago I was with AGL for electricity (we have bottled gas for cooking), but had a bit of a shop around for better deals based on our usage pattern. Red Energy came up trumps with substantially better rates, but since we had been with AGL for 10 years I called them up as a courtesy and asked whether they would match a written quote from another outfit. "Oh no, we NEVER do that, we don't offer discounts against competing offers" they said fairly rudely, so I arranged the changeover to Red Energy and sat back to await the savings. About 8 weeks after the changeover.......yes, you guessed it......AGL ring up to say they were sorry to have lost our business, and what did they have to do to get us back? I explained to the nice lady on the phone that if their business model relied on pissing customers off and letting them go elsewhere, then running around trying to get them back, maybe they might want to take a look at that?

[FenceFurniture]

In a few days time when Origin are notified of this it will trigger their retention team to contact me, offering me some kind of discount to stay (probably about 15% I imagine).

Well that didn't take long. A missed call at lunchtime today, and then another at about 3pm. All sorted, Energy Aust told to bugger off but thanks for the dance. Gas prices only marginally higher than previously, but elec prices still through the roof (+50%), but better than the original offer (+60%), and everyone else.

[crowie]

G’day Brett.
On a similar annoying issue is the payment the electrical companies give you for your “feed in solar generated electricity”.
They then sell the electricity you’ve made to at a staggering 600% profit.
I thought that the consumer helping electricity companies and the country by adding solar panels was to benefit everyone not the electricity companies bottom line.
Silly me , cheers Peter

[Bushmiller]

G’day Brett.
On a similar annoying issue is the payment the electrical companies give you for your “feed in solar generated electricity”.
They then sell the electricity you’ve made to at a staggering 600% profit.
I thought that the consumer helping electricity companies and the country by adding solar panels was to benefit everyone not the electricity companies bottom line.
Silly me , cheers Peter

Peter

There is a big anomally at the moment in that the price offered for feeding into the grid form your solar panels should match the average wholesale price at least. At the moment that price would be around 28c/KWhr. However I expect many of the retail companies would say that they only buy small amounts at that price from the spot market and they have more on contract at much more advantageous prices. It remains to be seen what happens when those contracts run out.

Regards
Paul

[woodPixel]

Funny this thread should pop up.

I renewed my Gas/Elec just before the "Crisis" in mid-July (1st to be exact).

These are the screen grabs from when I renewed and last nights prices....

Screenshot_2022-08-16-01-21-53-750_com.originmobileapp.jpg Screenshot_2022-08-16-01-25-18-645_com.brave.browser.jpg

BAZINGA !!!!!