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OT: Moorabal/Lal Lal wind farm 3-Sep-2009 At 9:04:50 AM evanbb

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On 3/09/2009 Wendy wrote:
>On the topic of "subsidy", I reckon quite a lot of "subsidy" in varying
>forms have gone into coal. Funding into research, development, plants,
>mining, grid, roads ...
There's actually very little research in coal burning technology. It's old technology, and very primitive. You just dig up rocks and burn them, to make water hot. They're not even oxy-firing or anything sophisticated like that. The heat cycle they use is pretty fancy, but it's still 1850 technology.

Hard to find out details of the past, but in the last budget there was a stack of cash for coal. Most notably was the $2.4B (compared to 1.6 for solar) for the Clean Coal Flagships program, plus another $500m for the Lowe Emissions Coal Initiative
http://www.ret.gov.au/resources/resources_programs/cei/ccsfp/Pages/default.aspx
http://www.ret.gov.au/resources/resources_programs/nleci/Pages/NationalLowEmissionsCoalInitiative.aspx
The previous year they also set up the Global Carbon Capture and Storage institute, but I can't find how much cash they put into that. At the same time $100m went into a similar solar research institute.

But in my opinion, the big breaks for coal are in infrastructure spending. Infrastructure Australia have released a list of priority projects, of which many $s are spent on improving freight and port facilities.
http://www.infrastructureaustralia.gov.au/files/National_Infrastructure_Priorities.pdf
Most of these are coal transport facilities, but it's hard to put a finger on which.

I actually think the coal subsidy is overstated by a lot of people. It looks cheaper because the environmental cost is not included, and because it's an incredibly energy dense fuel. One could also argue that the environmental and planning rules have been 'bent' in the past, to allow access to this burning dirt. But there's scant evidence.

So for mind, the best argument against coal is that they are wrecking stuff beyond their scope of providing power. Same as hippies (myself included) are prepared to pay more for organic veges, or better Free Trade coffee and chocolate, people should have to pay more for coal power, to take into account it's damage to the environment.