The Bridgestone World Solar Challenge will be held next October. Here is a taste of Australian slang for any Americans participating:
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Tag Archives: Australia
Greenhouse emissions in Australia
I thought I would take the opportunity today to talk about energy production and greenhouse gas emissions in Australia. The chart below shows the populations (blue bars) and population densities of the six Australian states plus the Northern Territory. Note that New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland have the highest populations (8.2, 6.7, and 5.2 million respectively), while the Northern Territory has the lowest. However, given its smaller area, Victoria has the highest population density (29.4 people per sq km), while Western Australia and the Northern Territory have the lowest population densities (1.1 and 0.2 people per sq km respectively).
The next chart shows the per capita electricity production of the six Australian states and the Northern Territory, by type. These figures are adjusted for net electricity transfer between states. For example, Tasmania imports some mainland coal-fired power.
Notice that the totals are high in the less densely populated regions (Western Australia and the Northern Territory). The total is also high in Tasmania, because of the widespread use of hydro-electrically produced electricity for heating there.
Total per capita electricity production is lowest in Victoria, in part because of the widespread use of natural gas for heating and cooking (total gas use in Australia generally is about 4 times its use in electricity production). Victorian electricity is the dirtiest, however, with heavy use of brown-coal-fired production. Brown coal is by far the dirtiest fuel; it produces about 47% more greenhouse gases per MWh than black coal, and triple the greenhouse gases per MWh of natural gas.
South Australia has achieved 50% renewable energy, but this is not without its problems:
- Wind and solar power are more expensive, so that South Australians pay about $360 per MWh for their electricity: 44% more than the two large states
- The sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow: this means that, in the absence of massive-scale energy storage, South Australia has to “borrow” coal-fired power from the East, although this is eventually repaid with interest
- Solar and wind power cause substantial grid stability and grid synchronisation issues, which become very apparent at the 50% renewable level – good solutions are needed for this; South Australia currently copes by turning solar power off
To avoid “borrowing” electricity, massive-scale energy storage is required. South Australia would need several days worth of demand, at 40 GWh per day. Their famous Tesla battery has been expanded to a capacity of just 0.2 GWh, which is about a thousandth of what is needed. Batteries appear inadequate for energy storage at the required scale, and hydrogen storage is probably what we want.
Tasmania operates at a 92% renewable electricity level, thanks to multiple hydroelectric dams, which do not suffer from the problems of wind and solar (and availability is only an issue during lengthy droughts). In addition, hydroelectric dams can also provide energy storage for solar and wind power, simply by pumping water uphill. It is unfortunate that environmental groups in Tasmania have campaigned heavily against hydroelectric power.
The last chart shows the per capita CO2-equivalent emissions for state electricity generation, plus other emissions (including agriculture, other energy use, industrial processes, waste, forestry, and land use change). Agricultural emissions are highlighted in green. A note of caution, however: the electricity generation data is for 2019, but the total greenhouse emissions are for 2018 (the latest I could find). These numbers cannot be compared to those of other countries, unless the numbers for other countries are equally recent and also include the full range of emissions, per UNFCCC standards (some comparable national averages are shown on the left).
Note that net greenhouse emissions for Tasmania are negative, largely due to tree-planting. Per capita emissions for the large, less densely populated areas are higher than those for New South Wales and Victoria; in part due to transportation requirements (shifting commuters and freight from road to rail would help here). Agricultural emissions per capita are particularly high in the Northern Territory, because the impact of cattle farming is being divided among a tiny population of just 0.2 million people. The overall Australian average of 21.2 tonnes per capita is quite significantly affected by the inevitably high emissions for the large, less densely populated areas. There is also the question of whether emissions due to mining and agriculture should be attributed to the producing country, or to the country of final consumption.
Economically and geographically, Australia is in many ways more like a Central Asian country than a European one, given its large size and its heavy reliance on mining and agriculture (Australia’s greenhouse emissions are comparable to those of Kazakhstan, which produces 21.7 tonnes per capita). However, progress could be made in Australia with more energy-efficient housing and transportation.
It should also be emphasised that, given its small population, Australia’s greenhouse emissions make a neglible contribution to the global and regional climate. If increasing atmospheric CO2 has an effect in Australia’s region, that is due primarily to emissions by the large countries of the world, particularly China (which produces about a third of the world’s CO2). Australia should, no doubt, reduce its greenhouse emissions, but whether Australia does so or not will make no measurable difference to the global or regional climate.
Exciting Australian solar car update
Here is a list of 7 active Australian solar car teams. Although the World Solar Challenge has been cancelled, several Australian teams hope to run an Aussie Solar Challenge in October at Wakefield Park near Goulburn, NSW (
). That is very exciting news! The format of the event appears to be rather like the iESC.
7 
Adelaide University Solar Racing Team 
Challenger (new car: Lumen III) – They are hoping to attend the 2021 Aussie Solar Challenge (AuSC).
Previously, Adelaide came 21st at WSC 15; participated at WSC 17; and came 16th at WSC 19.
14 Flinders University 
Two-seat cruiser (Investigator Mk 3) – they were planning to improve aerodynamics, reduce weight, and make some other changes. They have taken an unusual approach to the motor. They will not be racing at AuSC.
Previously, Flinders participated in the WSC 17 Cruiser class and participated in the WSC 19 Cruiser class.
15 Western Sydney Solar Team 
Challenger (new car) – but they plan to attend AuSC with their ASC-winning 2017 catamaran Unlimited 2.
Previously, WSU came 11th at WSC 13; came 10th at WSC 15; came 6th at WSC 17; came 20th at WSC 19; and won ASC 18.
Left: Anthony Dekker / Right: Anthony Dekker (click images to zoom)
30 Team Arrow 
Cruiser – They are hoping to attend the 2021 Aussie Solar Challenge (AuSC).
Previously, Arrow came 7th at WSC 13; came 8th at WSC 15; came 3rd in the WSC 17 Cruiser class; participated in the WSC 19 Adventure class; came 5th at Abu Dhabi 15; and came 8th at iESC 18. Their team number (30) is the average age of people on the original team.
41 Australian National University
Three-wheel challenger (new car) – They are hoping to attend the 2021 Aussie Solar Challenge (AuSC).
Previously, ANU participated at WSC 17 and participated at WSC 19.
75 Sunswift (University of New South Wales)
Cruiser (new car) – They are hoping to attend the 2021 Aussie Solar Challenge (AuSC).
Previously, Sunswift came 3rd in the WSC 13 Cruiser class; came 4th in the WSC 15 Cruiser class; participated in the WSC 17 Cruiser class; and came 2nd in the WSC 19 Cruiser class.
960 Deakin University / ACCIONA (Ascend)
Two-seat cruiser (new team with car: Ascend) – they will not be racing at AuSC.
This page last updated 18:00 on 13 August 2021 AEST.
Australia Day Honours, 2021
It’s Australia Day again, which means the annual Australia Day honours. Some recipients of note this year in the field of the sciences include:
- Emeritus Professor Cheryl Elisabeth Praeger, now a Companion of the Order of Australia (top left in photo: credit John Henstridge). Professor Praeger has published extensively in group theory and other areas of mathematics, and was the Inaugural Director of the Centre for the Mathematics of Symmetry and Computation at the University of Western Australia.
- Professor Mark Randolph, now an Officer of the Order of Australia (top right in photo: credit UWA). Professor Randolph is a geotechnical engineer specialising in foundation systems for offshore structures such as oil rigs, and has published extensively in that field, as well as holding important academic and other posts. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society.
- The Honourable Patricia Lynne (Trish) White, now a Member of the Order of Australia (bottom left in photo: credit @trishwhiteeng). Trish White has been an engineer, academic, government scientist, politician, cabinet minister, board member, company director, and National President of Engineers Australia.
- Dr Carden Crea Wallace, now a Member of the Order of Australia (bottom right in photo: credit Carden Wallace). Dr Wallace is an expert on corals, and has published extensively in that field, including her book Staghorn Corals of the World. She is also Emeritus Principal Scientist at the Queensland Museum.
Congratulations to all four of these outstanding Australians, and to the many others on the list.
For another perspective:
- Top left: the Petersen graph is the smallest vertex-transitive graph which is not a Cayley graph. One of the many publications of Professor Cheryl Praeger AC constructs other such graphs.
- Top right: an oil rig (photo credit Ken Hodge). Professor Mark Randolph AO is an expert in their engineering, and a Fellow of The Royal Society.
- Bottom left: the headquarters of Engineers Australia (photo credit Bidgee). The Honourable Trish White AM is a past National President.
- Bottom right: a staghorn coral (photo credit Albert Kok). Dr Carden Wallace AM has written a definitive book on Staghorn Corals of the World.
History, geography, and the Western genre
Once Upon a Time in the West, Rio Grande, High Noon. We know the films – and the many books.
“The bray of a lazy burro broke the afternoon quiet, and it was comfortingly suggestive of the drowsy farmyard, and the open corrals, and the green alfalfa fields. Her clear sight intensified the purple sage-slope as it rolled before her. Low swells of prairie-like ground sloped up to the west. Dark, lonely cedar-trees, few and far between, stood out strikingly, and at long distances ruins of red rocks. Farther on, up the gradual slope, rose a broken wall, a huge monument, looming dark purple and stretching its solitary, mystic way, a wavering line that faded in the north. Here to the westward was the light and color and beauty. Northward the slope descended to a dim line of canyons from which rose an up-flinging of the earth, not mountainous, but a vast heave of purple uplands, with ribbed and fan-shaped walls, castle-crowned cliffs, and gray escarpments. Over it all crept the lengthening, waning afternoon shadows.” – Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912)
But why are the films and books all set in the United States? Didn’t the very similar continent of Australia have similar stories? Well, up to a point.
Click map to zoom
If we want to know why things are the way they are, the answers often lie in history and geography (Jared Diamond makes an especially strong case for geography in his Guns, Germs, and Steel). European settlement in the US began several centuries ago. The Appalachian Mountains (rising to 2,037 m or 6,684 ft) formed a barrier to westward expansion, but hardly in insurmountable one. The eastern US is also blessed with many navigable rivers, especially the Mississippi and tributaries such as the Ohio, Missouri, Platte, and Arkansas. The eastern US is also blessed with good rainfall.
Click map to zoom
Western expansion in the US constantly outran organised government. This created a degree of chaos that lasted for a surprisingly long time. The Oklahoma Panhandle, for example, was “No Man’s Land” from 1850 until 1890 – not part of any state or territory. The western part of the Minnesota Territory had the same status between 1858 and 1861. In addition, some of the organised territories in the contiguous US (Arizona and New Mexico) did not become states until 1912.
One tool for dealing with this situation was the resurrection of a thousand-year old English law enforcement strategy: posse comitatus or “power of the county.” Law enforcement was provided by a sheriff, who was authorised to call on armed citizens as needed. Part of the drama of Western stories lies in the sheriff deciding when this was actually needed.
Click map to zoom
In contrast to the US, Australia is significantly drier. The Great Dividing Range in the east is somewhat loftier than the Appalachians, with the highest point being Mount Kosciuszko (2,228 m or 7,310 ft). A significant part of the water falling on the west of the range winds up underground in the Great Artesian Basin, a vast bed of porous sandstone holding up to 64,900 cubic kilometres (15,600 cubic miles) of water, capped by an impermeable layer of rock. In places, the basin is 3 km (2 miles) deep. The basin was discovered in 1878, and only after that date did cattle stations or sheep stations in certain parts of the country become feasible, thanks to water from deep bores.
Click map to zoom
Politically, the Australian situation was quite different from the US as well. The entire continent east of 135°E was initially part of the British colony of New South Wales, and by 1829 all of the continent had been claimed. Colonial boundaries shifted several times before Federation in 1901 (and the Northern Territory was transferred to federal control in 1911), but the US situation of unorganised territory was nonexistent.
Law enforcement in Australia was initially military, and early police forces were composed of military personnel. In 1853, Victoria was the first colony to merge law enforcement into one colonial police force. However, law enforcement was never decentralised, as it was in the US.
The vast size and relatively small population of Australia meant that there was plenty for law enforcement to do, of course. Stage coaches and gold miners were robbed, and what Americans call “rustling” also took place. In 1870, a daring theft of around 800 head of cattle took place at Bowen Downs Station in Queensland. Harry Redford and four accomplices overlanded the stock to outback South Australia, where the brands would not be recognised (a distance of about 1,300 km or 800 miles). Employees of Bowen Downs successfully tracked the herd, but Redford was acquitted by a working-class jury who didn’t much mind rich graziers being robbed.
The Western genre tells stories of human drama and resourcefulness on the frontier, and in that it resembles the science fiction genre. But to a large extent the Western genre is also a celebration of the land. To quote one of my favourite contemporary short stories (a Christmas story, actually), from novelist Elisabeth Grace Foley:
“A million diamonds glinted in the smooth, untouched white curve of snow in the basin, struck out by the sun that pierced the bright silver-white sky. The bitter wind whisked across it, kicking up little powdery swirls. Cal Rayburn turned up the collar of his sourdough coat with one hand, hunching his shoulders a little so the collar half covered his ears. He squinted at the blinding-bright landscape, and one side of his cold-numbed lips twisted back a little in a half-smile.” – Elisabeth Grace Foley, “The Bird of Dawning”
Australians may have lost contact with the land to a greater extent than Americans have, so that the genre of Australian colonial stories has largely faded away. Australia was formed as a collection of colonies with coastal capitals (and with the national capital only 100 km or 60 miles inland). That, together with the dryness of the interior, facilitated a drift to the cities, so that 70% of the population now lives in the 8 capitals.
In contrast, the US has many landlocked states which seem to retain a greater connection to the land. The state flag of Kansas, to pick just one state, seems to tell an entire story, including Indians hunting bison on the Great Plains, a steamboat on one of the navigable rivers, a settler ploughing his field, and a wagon train heading west. There is scope for all kinds of literature and cinema right there (as Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louis L’Amour, Howard Hawks, John Sturges, Clint Eastwood, and many others have shown). Let us hope that people will keep telling those stories.
National Science Week 2020
National Science Week in Australia is here again, until 23 August.
Watch the clouds, go on a nature walk, visit a museum (if you can), read a science book, or check out the activities on the website.
The Sydney Observatory
An unusual free science museum in Sydney, Australia is the Sydney Observatory. This opened in 1858 as a working observatory. The time ball, which dropped each day to mark the exact time, is still operating at 1:00 PM each afternoon. The observatory now operates as a small museum, having been refurbished during 1997–2008. The telescopes can also be used on paid night tours.
The observatory is a stiff climb up Observatory Hill. The exhibits are limited in number, but include some excellent orreries. Unless you have some astronomical expertise, the paid guided tours will be helpful. My brief visit was an enjoyable one.
An orrery at Sydney Observatory (photo by Anthony Dekker)
Exploring the moral landscape with recursive partitioning
I’ve mentioned the World Values Survey before. Lately, I’ve been taking another look at this fascinating dataset, specifically at the questions on morality. The chart below provides an analysis of responses to the question “Is abortion justifiable?” These responses ranged from 1 (“never justifiable”) to 10 (“always justifiable”). I looked at the most recent data for Australia and the United States, plus one European country (the Netherlands) and one African country (Zambia), using recursive partitioning with the rpart package of R, together with my own tree-drawing code.
Attitude data such as this is often explained using political orientation, but political orientation is itself really more of an effect than a cause. Instead, I used age, sex, marital status, education level, language spoken at home, number of children, and religion as explanatory variables, with some grouping of my own. Demographic weightings were those provided in the dataset.
For the United States (US), the overall average response was 4.8 (as at 2011, having risen from 4.0 in 1995). However, among more religious people, who attended religious services at least weekly, the average response was lower. This group was mostly, but not entirely, Christian, and the area of the box on the chart gives an approximate indication of the group’s size (according to Pew Forum, this group has been slowly shrinking in size, down to 36% in 2014). The average response was 3.0 for those in the group who also engaged in daily prayer, and 4.3 for those who did not. Among those who attended religious services less than weekly, the responses varied by education level. The average response was 4.8 for those with education up to high school; 6.9 for those with at least some tertiary education who were Buddhist (B), Hindu (H), Jewish (J), Muslim (M), or “None” (N); and 5.4 for those with at least some tertiary education who were Catholic (C), Orthodox (Or), Protestant (P), or Other (Ot).
For Australia (AU), the overall average response was 5.8 (as at 2012, having risen from 4.3 in 1981), with a pattern broadly similar to the US. Here the “more religious” category included those attending religious services at least monthly (but it was still smaller a smaller group than in the US). The average response was 2.7 for those in the group who also engaged in daily prayer, and 4.6 for those who did not. The group most supportive of abortion were those attending religious services less than monthly, with at least some tertiary education, and speaking English or a European language at home. Those speaking Non-European languages at home clustered with the religious group (and those with at least some tertiary education speaking Non-European languages at home are a growing segment of the population, increasing from 6.2% of adults in the 2011 Census to 8.3% of adults in the 2016 Census).
For the Netherlands (NL), the overall average response was 6.5 (as at 2012). Those most opposed to abortion either attended religious services at least weekly (3.2), or were Hindu or Muslim (3.3). Then came those who either attended religious services monthly (5.2), or who attended religious services less often, but were still Catholic (C), Orthodox (Or), Protestant (P), or Other (Ot), and had not completed high school (5.3). The group most supportive of abortion were those attending religious services less than monthly, with at least some tertiary education, and who were Buddhist, Jewish, or “None” (7.9).
For Zambia (ZM), opposition to abortion was strong, with an overall average response of 3.2 (as at 2007). It was highest for those whose marital status was “separated” (4.5), and lowest for those aged 28 and up whose marital status was anything else (2.8).
Of the explanatory variables I used, all except sex, age, and number of children were important in at least one country. However, sex was important for “Is prostitution justifiable?” or “Is violence against other people justifiable?” Age was important for “Is homosexuality justifiable?” or “Is sex before marriage justifiable?” Number of children was important for “Is divorce justifiable?” or “Is suicide justifiable?” For example, here is an analysis of attitudes to divorce:
Powers of 10: the Australian version
In the footsteps of the classic short film, we explore the powers of 10 (click to zoom).
We begin with a classic NASA photograph of the Earth seen from Saturn, with a field of view (in the distance) about 100,000,000 km across. We zoom in by a factor of 10 to see the Earth and the Moon beside it. After three more such jumps (to 10,000 km), the Earth fills the frame. Three further jumps (to 10 km) zooms in on Melbourne, Australia. Two more jumps show us the city centre (1 km) and St Paul’s Cathedral (100 m). Another two jumps (to 1 m) give us a small boy on the grass beside the Cathedral. Two more give us the iris and pupil of his eye (1 cm) and a small patch of his retina (1 mm). Finally (at 100 µm or 0.1 mm), we see red blood cells inside a blood vessel in his retina. Fifteen jumps in all, zooming in by 1015.
New solar car teams #4: ATN
ATN Solar Car Team (click: ) is a new Australian Cruiser-class solar car team. They are attempting something I have never seen done before – design and construction of a solar car by a team distributed across a continent. According to the initial press release:
- Curtin University (Perth) will handle the driver controls, lighting, instrumentation & telemetry
- University of Technology Sydney will handle the suspension & mechanical systems
- Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane) will handle the solar collector, battery & motors (note: QUT left the ATN group of universities in September 2018, so this may change)
- University of South Australia (Adelaide) will handle project management & also work on the solar collector
- RMIT University (Melbourne) will handle body design & component integration
I will be very interested to see if they can make this work and which virtual team tools and techniques they will use to do so. So far, ATN Solar Car Team has produced a number of quite different design concepts. The video below shows one of the more interesting ones, and has produced many admiring comments:
Note: Independently of this effort, the experienced Team Arrow will continue as a Cruiser-class team based in Brisbane (also associated with QUT).
Scientific Gems 
