Electricity Generation in Australia and elsewhere.

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Question of the week: which country has the biggest banana plantation in Europe?

Answer: Iceland.

Surprising isn’t it. It’s done with renewable energy: geothermal heat. They use it to heat huge greenhouses to grow tomatoes, cucumbers and yes, bananas. Iceland hardly imports any of these goods.

Hot water is also used to generate 25% of Iceland’s electricity. The other 75% come from hydro. A long time ago, Iceland depended on imported coal for power. Not anymore. It got very expensive sometime in the 70’s so they just ditched it. Nowadays all the electricity produced in Iceland comes from renewables.

Meanwhile, what is Australia doing in this area? OK, we don’t have much hot water coming out of the ground, but we have a lot more sunshine than Iceland. In 2019 the total power used in Australia was around 265 TWh (terawatt hour: 1 terawatt = 1 1 billion kilowatt). Today I wondered how the production of my humble 5kW rooftop solar setup compares to that. It produces about 20 kWh a day, or 20 x 365 = 7,300 kWh per year. There are 8.8 million households in Australia. So if every house had the same setup our total production would be something like 60.6 TWh, almost 23% of the total power used (industry and all).

If you look at the graph, South Australia is already doing better than that: about 50% renewable, and their power price is the lowest. What is stopping the other states from doing just that? Mystery…

 

References:

Iceland bananas: https://icelandmag.is/article/does-iceland-really-have-europes-largest-banana-plantation

Energy generation in Australia: https://www.energy.gov.au/data/electricity-generation

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