Professor Ty Christopher, an electrical engineer with four decades of experience in the power industry, is the director of the Energy Futures Network within the faculty of engineering at the University of Wollongong. I spoke to him on Thursday.: Thank you for your time, professor. Let’s start, if we may, with your credentials to make comment on the new proposed wind farms off the Illawarra coast and the energy matters of the day.
Ty Christopher: “When people politicise the debate is that the first casualty is truth, and the second one is common sense”.: Terrific. And just to put it on the record, you’re not on the secret take from energy companies or receiving orders to put out pro-renewable propaganda from a small man by the name of Dr Evil, operating out of a secret bunker under Lake Geneva?] Quite the opposite, Peter.
Onshore wind has a capacity factor at best of around 30 per cent. But with offshore wind, its capacity factor is around 50 to 55 per cent, as it is so much more windy offshore. So that’s why, over the years, globally, the wind farms are gravitating to the oceans. And in Australia, it makes even more sense because as a population, we mostly cling to the coast, and so you can put them offshore near where the energy is needed, with much shorter and less expensive transmission lines.
Peter Dutton announces the nuclear plan on Wednesday with Liberal MPs Angus Taylor and Sussan Ley.: You have a certain fatigue in your voice as if you’re a little tired of explaining plain facts for the umpteenth time.: Anyone telling you for political reasons that we can do this as a nation in less than 20 years or that that delay won’t cause terrible problems is divorced from reality in what they’re saying, Peter.
: Critics say, if these wind farms are so great, why not put them off Bondi Beach? Sydney’s where our heaviest population is, so does that make a certain amount of sense? And last time I was at Bondi, the wind blew my toupee off!: Bondi Beach doesn’t have a steelworks. BlueScope steelworks at Wollongong consumes a massive amount of energy every day, about 2400 gigawatt-hours – the equivalent of solar export from 240,000 homes.