Short Circuits #3

Recycled wind turbines, coal as satire, and three men standing in a field for reasons unclear.

Wind beneath your feet

Want to feel like you’re walking on a cloud? The trendy Spanish fashion label El Ganso (‘The Goose’) has you covered with these sneakers made from recycled wind turbine blades!

Made in partnership with the Spanish infrastructure and renewable giant Acciona, the sole of these sneakers “incorporate recycled material from wind turbine blades, coming from the Aibar wind farm, in Navarra, after having been spinning since 1998 and generating 12,500 MWh of clean energy.”

These sneakers are not exactly cheap at €99 (AUD 160), and they’re currently sold out unless you’re a size 43, but they’re certified cool. Just imagine getting into an argument with a retired geologist about recycling wind turbines, and then kicking them showing them your shoes.

Australia Coal Energy Council

We were asked if we’re behind the Australian Coal Energy Council LinkedIn page. It’s not us, but it is a brilliantly satirical page. Kudos to whoever set this up. Bravo.

Speaking of coal policy…

Waste and graft

The federal opposition finally released their long hyped nuclear policy and it was… nothing? It was literally a Post-it note with the locations of current and former coal-fired stations. Some hapless Liberal staffer did about 10 minutes worth of research on Wikipedia in order to find a handful of locations which would sound vaguely credible.

We wrote about this last week, and I really don’t want to spend much more time talking about this, since it’s an absolute dead cat strategy, so instead I’d direct you to Tim Dunlop over at The Future of Everything who wrote a great article which perfectly captures my feelings and frustrations at the media and political narrative around this ‘policy’.

I was, however, hapless stupid enough to watch the announcement live on television, so now you must endure two snarky observations of mine:

When questioned about waste Dutton said that a “470 MW reactor produces waste equivalent to the size of a can of coke each year”. That 470 MW number seems to come from the Rolls Royce SMR design (Dutton also used the Rolls Royce renderings in PR releases elsewhere). The Rolls Royce brochure advises that a 470 MWe SMR would generate roughly 285 cubic metres of waste over a 60 year lifetime. That’s 4.75 cubic metres annually or 12,666 coke cans each year. Bad at maths and no fucking idea what they’re talking about ✅

But the show stealing moment for me was when Nationals’ leader David Littleproud unironically invoked the great and untarnished of reputation and definitely not corrupt or perjurous Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen in the context of building a nuke at the site of Tarong Power Station — “this will be one of the biggest investments of any federal government in a regional Australian town, ever. Make no mistake. The last time, in Kingaroy at Tarong, was when Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen built Tarong in 1980.”

Ignoring the fact that half a dozen other power stations in regional Australia have been built since Tarong, or that Tarong wasn’t built by the federal government (Joh never quite did quite become PM); Tarong is infamous in Queensland history because in the late 70s QLD premier Bjelke-Petersen controversially overrode the recommendations of the SECQ for the economically preferential site of Millmerran in order to pork barrel Tarong Power Station into his own electorate (Millmerran was eventually built in 2001). Quality stuff and definitely the kind of political decisions relating to energy you would want to highlight in a national press conference about future energy policy 🫡

Anyway, the whole thing was extremely stupid, but it did yield some excellent content…

Just a boy, standing in front of a power station, asking if you could love nuclear

Nuclear for Australia, the Liberal party pre-selection vehicle pro-nuclear lobby group founded by a Brisbane high school student had the ‘chance to visit the Callide Power Station’.

‘Visiting Callide’ normally would imply that you were invited on site for a tour of the facility by the owners — enjoy some terrible instant coffee¹ and go for a little wander around the plant with the station manager; high profile dignitaries might even be joined by the CEO of CS Energy or the Queensland energy minister.

Instead we got this excellent piece of content of three dinguses standing in a field outside the fenceline of the power plant.

For this unfilmed Utopia storyline alone, the Dutton announcement was worth it. Looking forward to more despatches from the Loy Yang lookout and the Nanango Peanut Wagon.

1. Every power station in this country has a break room with jars of sugar, Milo and the absolute worst grade of motel instant coffee. If you mix all three you get by the ‘power station mocha’; a few cups worth will power you through the long nightshift.