That Tassie oil strike will be a bitter pill for the tankers of poppyseed biodiesel as they drive past.

The export-only feed-in PV tariff is still paid for by battlers who don't have panels ie a tax on the poor and an investment copout by powercos.

I've tried making biogas and it's a lot of work for poor results. Not since my student days have I lived with pigs so I hope they don't want us to go back to that.

Great news that using brown coal for Vic desal won't cause GHGs. They have offsets.

I used an 80L reactor (ie .08 m^3) filled with lawn clippings, water and cow manure. The gas was bubbled to an upside down drum floating in water. That created mild pressure (less than 2 bar I suspect) to send the gas to burners when the valve was opened. I will say that the muck cleaned out of the digester was an excellent plant food. A good job for 'guest workers'.

I think those landfills, dairies and sewage farms who can exploit biomethane are already doing it. If food production becomes localised then waste recycling will be essential for nutrients (ie NPK) with methane as a secondary consideration. This is clearly not something that most people want to do. Unlike coalfired electricity it's up close and personal, not out of sight, out of mind. The suburban lifestyle is dedicated to being clean, dry and odour free.

No Bullroarer this weekend but I'll post a few articles here - first off from the SMH :

http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/another-big-dry-forecast-for-irri...

ANOTHER devastating year is on the cards for many irrigators in the Murray-Darling Basin.

Autumn has seen a return to near-record low inflows and history has proved that a dry autumn usually means the rest of the year will be dry.

Although a La Nina weather pattern brought sometimes flooding rains to parts of NSW and Queensland over summer, the head of the Bureau of Meteorology's National Climate Centre, Michael Coughlan, warned yesterday that eastern Australia was drifting back towards an El Nino, where dry conditions dominate.

It was unlikely farmers would see the extensive rains needed to cancel out the deficiencies of the past six drought years and refill the dams, he said, particularly in the southern half of the basin.

In the autumn of 1989 a La Nina delivered an average of 267 millimetres of rain across the basin, but so far this autumn there has been an average of about 30 millimetres. "There's something going on - the fact that we had a La Nina but we are just not getting the turnaround in rainfall that's associated with La Nina," Dr Coughlan said.

The driest autumn on record across the basin was 1902, with 28 millimetres.

Wendy Craik, the chief executive officer of the Murray Darling Basin Commission, said data suggested that climate change had beset the southern basin far sooner than forecast and greatly reduced inflows could be a permanent state of affairs due to consistent lower autumn rainfall.

In the Snowy Mountains, dams are around their lowest levels since construction and the State Government has given Snowy Hydro permission to expand its cloud-seeding program designed to increase snowfall and inflows to water storages.

Another one, this time from frogblog on "Michael Moore, Peak Oil And Food" :

http://blog.greens.org.nz/index.php/2008/05/08/michael-moore-peak-oil-an...

Here are two quick videos. First up every Neo-Con’s favourite documentary maker, Michael Moore, suggestis to Larry King that the real danger from peak oil is not its impact on energy but its impact on food production.

Then this one on both food miles and the oil that goes into into growing food. Both videos are American but sadly entirely relevant here too.

The Courier Mail reports that a 120 MW wind power facility will be constructed in Queensland (not the windiest of places) with more to come.

AS Kevin Rudd touched down in Bali to sign up to a global fight against climate change, he set a new clean energy industry up for take-off in Queensland. The same day, a senior executive of IFE Engineering, one of Germany's biggest renewable energy investors, flew into Brisbane where talks led to a plan to build a $250 million north Queensland wind energy plant that could power a city the size of Cairns. ...

"The Rudd Government's election and Kyoto Protocol signing gave us the confidence to move forward," says Edwin Cywinski, managing director of eco-Kinetics, a Gold Coast-based renewable energy firm part-owned by IFE.

German firm IFE has signed a letter of intent with Wind Power Queensland, the Brisbane-based company of meteorologist Lloyd Stumer, to build within about two years a 120 megawatt, 60-turbine wind farm at Archer Point, 15km south of Cooktown. Stumer says the 2300ha site is buffeted by southeast trade winds that make it the best – but not the only – wind power prospect in Queensland.

Cywinski says Germany's largest bank, Deutsche Bank, and Aktiva Group, a major European renewable energy sector investor, wish to join IFE and WPQ in the Archer Point wind farm. He says the group is already mulling stage-two expansion and additional Queensland wind farm sites.

"We hope to complete due diligence (on Archer Point) in the next two months, then get on with it. We see potential for a stage two, adding a further 60MW on the site, and are looking at further opportunities in Queensland and elsewhere," Cywinski says. ...

The German companies planning to help build Queensland's first large-scale wind farm are part of a domestic industry that is a world leader, with capacity of about 22,200MW or almost twice Queensland's entire power grid capacity of about 11,400MW.

Queensland has a meagre 12MW of installed wind energy capacity and is relying on its coal and gas resources for future needs. But gas and coal-fired power are both polluters. ...

Wind power has been criticised, largely by coal industry defenders, as too unreliable to form a viable and sizeable part of a power grid. But University of NSW environmental studies institute's Mark Diesendorf says total output isn't intermittent from a large-scale wind farm where wind turbines are spread over a large area.

He says the reliability of a large-scale wind farm can be upgraded to that of a coal-fired power station by adding "a few" gas-powered turbines into its system. But this is only needed when there is a big reliance on wind power or 10 per cent or more of total power supply.

"Detailed studies in Britain, with data from 60 sites spanning 30 years, show that if you have large-scale wind farms over a large area it is a reliable power source. The criticism that wind power can't be a reliable power source just isn't valid," Dr Diesendorf says.

Queensland's energy ministry describes renewable energy, or non-polluting energy forms that harness limitless power sources such as wind, solar and tidal power, as an emerging technology. Some are well established within Australia.

South Australian government spokesman Rik Morris says that state will see 20 per cent of its electricity generated from renewables – mainly wind farms – either this year or next year.

SA has 388MW of installed wind energy capacity and that will more than double by the end of 2009. An extra 2800MW of wind projects are being developed there. That equates to 32 per cent of Queensland's needs.