Plant Bowen by Sam Nash
By Jo Nova
The Greens will be apoplectic
Donald Trump pays no lip service to the tender heart of the Eco-Blob bureaucrat. Old coal plants are going to be kept running. Plants that have stopped will be reopened and modernized. New coal plants will be built. It’s all there. Some plants will be converted so they can switch between different fuels seamlessly.
It’s almost like the US is in a race to claw back industry and manufacturing, and wants to be world leaders in a breakthrough new technology that burns energy for breakfast.
This is what a true leader does — they make the right choice while all the minions are aghast, then years later everyone copies them.
Trump administration opens more land for coal mining, offers $625M to boost coal-fired power plants
By Matthew Daly, AP News
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration said Monday it will open 13 million acres of federal lands for coal mining and provide $625 million to recommission or modernize coal-fired power plants as President Donald Trump continues his efforts to reverse the years-long decline in the U.S. coal industry.
Actions by the Energy and Interior departments and the Environmental Protection Agency follow executive orders Trump issued in April to revive coal, a reliable but polluting energy source that’s long been shrinking amid environmental regulations and competition from cheaper natural gas.
Under Trump’s orders, the Energy Department has required fossil-fueled power plants in Michigan and Pennsylvania to keep operating past their retirement dates to meet rising U.S. power demand amid growth in data centers, artificial intelligence and electric cars. The latest announcement would allow those efforts to expand as a precaution against possible electricity shortfalls.
Trump also has directed federal agencies to identify coal resources on federal lands, lift barriers to coal mining and prioritize coal leasing on U.S. lands. A sweeping tax bill approved by Republicans and signed by Trump reduces royalty rates for coal mining from 12.5% to 7%,
Coal once provided more than half of U.S. electricity production, but its share dropped to about 15% in 2024, down from about 45% as recently as 2010. Natural gas provides about 43% of U.S. electricity, with the remainder from nuclear energy and renewables such as wind, solar and hydropower.
No one wants to lose the AI race, except maybe Australia
Imagine there was hot potential new technology, maybe as transformative as the printing press, and your nation said “No” because the PM wanted to earn Green Victory points at the U.N. assembly?
Australia could do this too and say hello to cheap electricity, jobs, smelters, patents and technological advances. Instead, the more renewables we add, the less industry we keep. Alcoa has just closed an alumina refinery in WA that has been open for 60 years. Alcoa is tactfully blaming several causes, but everyone knows that electricity prices are rising, and the country is in the grip of the meddling bureaucratic Blob.
The US Department of Energy plan
WASHINGTON—The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced a $625 million investment to expand and reinvigorate America’s coal industry, aiming to boost energy production and support coal communities nationwide. The funding announcements are issued in accordance with President Trump’s Executive Orders, “Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry,” and “Strengthening the Reliability and Security of the United States Electric Grid”
“Beautiful, clean coal will be essential to powering America’s reindustrialization and winning the AI race,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said. “These funds will help keep our nation’s coal plants operating and will be vital to keeping electricity prices low and the lights on without interruption. Coal built the greatest industrial engine the world has ever known, and with President Trump’s leadership, it will help do so again.”
DOE has committed to providing $625 million in funding for:
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- $350M for Coal Recommissioning, and Retrofit: for projects to demonstrate readiness to recommission or modernize coal power units and provide near-term electric power reliability and capacity.
- $175M for Rural Capacity and Energy Affordability Projects: for coal power projects that provide direct benefits of energy affordability, reliability, and resiliency in rural communities.
- $50M to support the Development and Implementation of Advanced Wastewater Management Systems: to demonstrate scalable, cost-effective wastewater management systems that enables coal plants to extend their service life, reduce operational costs, and enhance commercial byproduct recovery.
- $25M for Engineering and Implementation of Dual Firing Retrofits: to enable coal power plants to seamlessly switch between fuels, achieve full steam capacity, and economic flexibility to extend plant lifespans.
- $25M for Development and Testing of Natural Gas Cofiring Systems: to support investments that will maintain boiler efficiency and reliability when utilizing 100% natural gas.
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Good news for a change WRT coal expansion.
WRT Alcoa: the main reasons given for closing the Alumina Refinery are lower grades of bauxite; clapped out facilities; green / social activism.
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It’s not worth reinvesting in manufacturing industry more often than not under Albanese Labor economic vandalism and fiscal foolishness
When the recession began 1990 and the worst recession for sixty years in Australia a budget breakfast meeting at a major accounting firm in Sydney CBD hosted a senior executive from a multinational mining company as guest speaker. He spoke about the then many adverse impacts on the economy and resulting loss of economic prosperity underway, and pointed out that the average Australian would not be aware of the dangers until about ten years time when foreign investment had stalled and including new investment into existing mining and other business ventures.
Of course loss of business activities is also loss of jobs directly employed and indirectly via suppliers, and tax revenue losses etc.
Look at Australia right now and count the already closed down and many threatening closure, and ask where the increased tax revenue is coming from that is propping up government budgets, albeit temporarily. Increasing taxes to replace lost tax revenue is a recipe for economic disaster
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The bauxite story is rubbish. If Australia really has the largest reserves in the world, you could bring a new mine on line and that problem should be sorted. Distance from the smelter could be an issue.
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Alcoa has just closed an ALUMINA refinery. Not an aluminium refinery. I wish the link could be corrected.
It might seem trivial to some but this is as different as a flour mill to a bakery.
And on a side note, anyone think that an aluminium smelter will still be producing in Oz within 5 years? I’m still thinking that Portland will announce their closure before the end of the year.
PS. Who gets to keep all the red mud?
[Thanks Eng_Ian. Corrected. Tho’ I can’t fix the ABC story. – Jo]
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An aluminium plant ie electrolysis pots, provides a variable big load to the NEM. No big load no NEM.
Meanwhile we are building HVAC sublines from the main spine connected to Snowy 2.0 and various unreliables. Hate to think just how complicated this is going to become.
If Yallourn shuts Victoria is screwed.
If Alcoa shuts the NEM is screwed.
All brought to you by colluding with Chinese communists by Australian socialists and government idealogists.
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Just to help things along the BoB highway to Hell:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-01/rio-tinto-announces-early-closure-of-gladstone-power-station/105838270
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Gladstone is a 1976 model,( Holden Kingwood era) coal fired power station of 1680 Mw.
Looks like the alumina refinery is going down with the power station.
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If the Gladstone coal fired power plant closes, then North Queensland struggles for power, and in such a huge decentralised State, with North Queensland supposed to be such a growth area, then that power situation becomes highly problematic.
Tony.
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Albo and his henchmen along with the globalists want us servicing overseas supplied products and services with nothing actually manufactured in Australia. He calls that LOCAL JOBS!
Just deceptive and stupid.
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But Albo thinks that lots more public servants will mean more efficiency, things done quickly and at lower cost.
Myself I think he is delusional.
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I just wish that the leaders of the Public Servants in the Finance area could do math and tell these politicians what the math means.
For example, if on average a public servant earns $125,000 and pays 30% tax, then that means that $90,000 has to come from the private sector tax payers. And if on average the private sector worker earns $90,000 and pays 22.5% tax, which is roughly $20,000, then it means there has to be 4 private sector workers for each public sector worker.
So less than 20% of the workforce must be public servants otherwise there is not enough tax collected to pay for the public servants.
Once over 20%, the country will eventually go totally broke.
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It’s an illusion that Public Servants pay tax, THEY DON’T.
Taking $120 out of the pot, and then puting $30 back in. IS NOT contributing to the pot.
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Public service employees including Members of Parliament are a cost to budget every financial year, total package value and other costs related to employing people.
Private sector provides the real tax revenue.
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I think a couple of years ago it was something like the top 40% pay over 85% of the personal income tax revenue. (top 5% paid nearly 40%)
The bottom 40% of taxpayers contribute about 3% of the personal income tax revenue.
Using averages doesn’t represent the ratio sufficiently because the average is inflated by a small group of bigger tax contributors.
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Consider the rising costs of the NDIS now industry, another financial burden funded from private sector taxes, on the other hand providing employment and the spending is economic stimulus, an illusionary balancing act
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Fossil fuels have been a boon to environmentalism.
The Industrial Revolution (powered by coal) saved the UK and the rest Europe’s forests by switching energy generation from wood to coal as well as making ships from steel rather than wood (which don’t mix well with thermal power). Ditto for oil in relation to saving the whales, which replaced whale oil with kerosene.
Make nature great again. Use more fossil fuels.
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The industrial revolution also helped save the forests by building steel ships and not cutting down the best trees for masts.
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… and by burning fossil fuels pumping CO2 into the atmosphere to help them grow nice and fat.
… and by getting the maximum amount of energy production with the smallest possible footprint rather than having to clear-cut entire old growth forests for fuel (or in the modern world, to make room for windmills / solar panels and a whole new set of transmission lines).
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The Europeans are in strife, the green renewable juggernaut is being streamlined to override conservation law. This is a dilemma for the green movement, save the planet or old growth forests.
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It’s happening here as well.
“Renewable” projects are getting approval that would not be granted to any other project, they are getting them faster, and they are getting government guarantees of revenue whether or not they actually produce.
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H – The heavy drain was on oak trees –
“The Royal Navy’s war on trees”
“At the zenith of Horatio Nelson’s navy in the late-1700s into the 1800s, it took about 4,000 oak trees, or up to 40 hectares of forest, to build a single 100-gun ship of the line. That’s equivalent to 3,750 city blocks of optimum-density oak forest for a vessel that, on average, sailed for 12 years.”
https://legionmagazine.com/the-royal-navys-war-on-trees/
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The Trump phenom is really something and I’m grateful.
But on one hand it represents a failure of modern enlightened human society.
Where would we be if this one of a kind had not emerged?
Plus just a very few others, like Elon Musk.
(The massive effort to destroy those two alone is frightening and revealing of the character of their opponents.)
I at least, lived most of my life believing that ‘democratic’ governance was on its’ way to move us past tribal like cultural behaviors.
That we would utilize science and logic for the unending rise out of the brutal past.
It appears humans still need alpha male leadership and no more BS Dad energy to correct things.
Turns out committees and faculties of pointy heads just make a mess.
And the Pointy Head tribe now want us unalived because we recognize and are no longer silently tolerant of their failure.
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Hence the Left’s war against so-called “toxic masculinity” which is essentially about alpha male leadership or masculinity in general.
The Left would have us run by soy boys (like Trudeau, Macron, Albanese) etc., or beings of indeterminate gender, and not men like TRUMP.
It reminds me of a Trudeau/TRUMP meme.
https://x.com/Yank2784/status/1493699382612529163
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Hillary blames white Christian men.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/531ggMbZD3I
If only Charles the Hammer had had a smaller hammer.
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Trump is an intelligents test for democracy. The manipulators know this, and that’s why they are going all out to portray him and his voters as dumb.
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1. We got there by the width of an ear.
2. Alpha male, or just Alpha? – Margaret Thatcher.
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“Green energy” is, at best only suitable for subsistence living as it is extremely expensive and unreliable. It is not suitable for industrial Civilisation or a decent standard of living. It might be suitable for a few LED lights in each household, once per day cooking, a refrigerator and an internet connected appliance to receive government propaganda and for the government to monitor you.
Thus, in the future there will be just two manufacturing superpowers, the United States and China, both running their societies on inexpensive and reliable coal, gas, nuclear and real hydro power.
And since China is not a fundamentally free country its longevity is unclear, the United States might become the only superpower and only manufacturing superpower. If they have labour shortages they can import workers on temporary work visas.
Australia’s future will be as a quarry to supply China and the US. Farming will be questionable because it requires a lot of energy, fertiliser and freedom from over-regulation. It might be adequate to feed the local population but will no longer export food.
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Sky News is interviewing Michael McCormack this morning and the loony Labor party are about to waste 1.3 TRILLION dollars on toxic, unreliable W & S and ongoing waste again every 15 to 20 years.
I think Trump knows what is best for his country while our clueless donkeys want to cover a million football fields with toxic W & S rubbish.
And definitely no change in our weather or climate by 2050 or 2100.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx85ThzJ0mA
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How much better having that money spent on infrastructure instead of the USAID boondoggle.
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There certainly is money in AI. Nvidia is now the world’s largest company by market cap; valued at $4.3tr. An industry that will pass Australia by due to the nations energy poverty.
Australia is doing the exact opposite of USA. The following was in an email on the Star of the South offshore wind:
The Australian Government has set a 2035 emissions reduction target at 62–70% below 2005 levels. Hitting this target will require a massive scale-up of renewables: 4x wind capacity, 3x utility solar, 2x rooftop and distributed solar, and 6x utility-scale storage.
None of this is economic expenditure. It is all waste. Surely people writing this stuff can see the stupidity; the enormous cost to make electricity enormopusly expensive. The rooftops will happen because it is easy and will remain economic until Australia follows USA and reinvigorates its coal fired power generators.
Grid solar is obviously a stranded asset in South Australia and wind is fast approaching. Only a fool would be investing in these sources of electricity.
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I’m not sure that they can.
With few exceptions, just about everyone under 50 or 60 has been thoroughly dumbed-down, ever since the Left took over the “education” system mid 60’s to 70’s. And to make matters worse, decision makers in that age range get mostly-woke AI (which has been programmed to believe in anthropogenic global warming) to do their “thinking” and write their reports for them.
The people who were raised in the pre-woke education system and haven’t been dumbed-down are either retired or approaching that age.
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So trump wants to spend 625 million on genuine, reliable BASELOAD energy and stupid Albo and B O Bowen want to waste 1300000 million on dilute, unreliable, toxic W & S rubbish?
So who thinks Aussies are funding the more sensible investment? Anyone?
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BTW Aussies could easily build 130 large reliable, BASELOAD, Nuclear power stns for 1.3 trillion $.
See the ABC and CSIRO costing before the last election.
Again Nuclear power stns built this decade would have capacity factors of 93% and easily last until 2100.
OTOH toxic, unreliable W & S have capacity factors of just 24% and 15% and would be replaced every 15 to 20 years or until we wake up to this super expensive W & S lunacy.
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Forget nuclear, focus on new Hele coal fired power stations or a revamp of older ones.
Qld’s largest coal-fired power station set to close within years.
‘Rio Tinto has flagged Queensland’s largest coal-fired power plant could close within years, putting hundreds of local jobs at risk.’ (Oz)
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Have you seen the various Sky News television images of the existing wind towers and solar paddocks, access roads and transmission line corridors plus the proposed additional builds and the enormous areas of land required, ignoring the firming equipment and including even gas turbine generators?
It’s much more than farmland, native forests are being destroyed, emphasis Great Dividing Range and elsewhere.
The cost estimate recently $1.3 trillion but not including transmission lines costs, or the inevitable fall back position power stations of whatever technology.
Then consider replacement of wind towers, solar panels and batteries every up to 20-25 years and already the first builds have reached replacement dates, at least one being Codrington VIC will be removed but not replaced because it would not be cost effective.
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In complete contrast to Trump, our genius PM is flying around the world telling everyone how Green he is and how he is going to save the world by shutting down Australian coal/gas/petrol, now even the North West cape existing gas supply with new environmental restrictions. But internationally no one is listening, even to his advice on Gaza.
Yesterday in the Australian Greg Sheridan called it Albanese’s Magical Mystery Tour. And suggested he was on Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
At the UN speeches fewer people listened to Albanese and Mr Wong than to Netanyahu and the latter was a universal boycott. At least Elbow did not have to worry about the loss of power to the microphone.
Somehow I don’t think Sheridan is impressed with the idea that Australia is going to be completely shut down and send all our cash and iron ore and coal to China while
Australian taxpayers get Nett Nothing.
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You cant compare our PM from the Westminster style of government to the US president. Almost totally different political system and governing. Our PM’s get sucked into the Canberra bubble and then are beholden to both the public service, their personal advisors and the party line. There’s no opportunity to think or research anything yourself. It’s why even the LNP PM’s struggle to a certain extent. John Howard was probably lucky in that social media/ 24 hour news cycle hadn’t yet begun. Tony Abbott tried his best, but struggled. Morrison was a complete waste of time. The Labor PM’s ideology obviously fits in with the Canberra public service thinking. You can tell from some of Albanese’s comments that he has no original thinking. If it is, it’s from his student marxist days. Then you throw in the endless photo ops, selfies and promotion of woke subjects and there’s no time for the serious stuff. Even if we had a change of government to the LNP, nothing will change much at all. We need a maverick like Trump, who has an independence from the bureaucracy and party politics. We dont have anyone that I can see even halfway equivalent to DJT- do you?
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Albanese doesn’t think.
He knows.
That’s the advantage in being a perpetual undergraduate Trot.
He don’t have to think, because his putrid ideology does that for him.
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That sums up Albo in a nutshell. He is more concerned with posturing on the world stage than sensibly dealing with issues in his own backyard. Instead of devoting time and resources to our defence, he implores the UN to give Australia a seat on the security council. Rather than take steps toward giving the country energy security for manufacturing, he stands at the podium and bleats to the world how Australia is leading the way in tackling climate change by setting ridiculous targets. He is a dunce.
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Or a useful idiot using our money to buy the temporary seat at the UN Security Council on behalf of his best friends in China. Nothing else makes sense. Tiny Australia, like most Africa states he is bribing, does not need to have a seat on the UN Security Council. A total waste of our money. But may be useful if you plan an invasion or two.
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What happened to Austrailia? Is it bought by China?
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I hope the PM will repay all of the expenses incurred in his party political attendance at the UK Labour Party Conference where he addressed delegates.
Apparently the public service employees travelling with him decided they could not attend the conference according to public service rules!!!
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Again, wind average capacity factor of 24% means wind is generating for just 24% of every year or about 2.9 months and solar on average only generates for about 1.8 months a year.
Does anyone really think we should be wasting TRILLIONs of $ on this toxic, unreliable rubbish?
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They might have a private opinion but grabbing subsidies and wholesale price advantage system profit they seem to like, but I understand the game is to sell before the replacement 20-25 years is drawing near.
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What happened to Austrailia? Is it bought by China?
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Meanwhile, according to News.com, Rio is going to close its Gladstone coal fired power station 6 years earlier than planned. Spokesman for Queenslands Liberal party says their government is still aiming for net zero by 2050.
https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/sustainability/rio-tintos-gladstone-power-station-set-to-close-six-years-early/news-
story/ba4dda5710164016f57b579d812f2600
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Perhaps Trump’s Energy adviser has told Trump the basic facts about how safe the world is today? Here Lomborg’s team uses the latest data and proves the huge reduction of 99 +% in deaths since the 1920s.
“But because the world’s population also quadrupled at the same time, the climate-related *death risk* has dropped even faster. The death risk is the probability of you dying in any one year. In the 1920s, it was 243 of a million people. Each year, out of a million people, 243 would die from climate-related disasters. In the 2010s, the risk was just 2.5 — a drop of 99%. 240.5 people would not die each year because of lower climate death risk. In 2020, the preliminary number is 1 — 99.6% lower”.
“This is clearly the opposite of what you normally hear, but that is because we’re often just being told of one disaster after another – telling us how *many* events are happening. The number of reported events is increasing, but that is mainly due to better reporting, lower thresholds and better accessibility (the CNN effect). For instance, for Denmark, the database only shows events starting from 1976”.
Bjørn Lomborg – Ever-lower death risk from climate-related… | Facebook
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Lomborg is perfectly sensible. Even if it were true, there are much more pressing problems in the world which can be addressed with much less cash.
The absurdity of making CO2 the biggest problem in Australian history is obvious. No one even tries to explain how Australia benefits even slightly from all this expense.
And still they push the barrow that spending a trillion dollars will make electricity cheaper. So we get the money back then?
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Sorry here’s the link to Lomborg’s article and the references he uses.
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php/?story_fbid=10159904546833968&id=146605843967
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Meanwhile in Queensland, Australia the news today is …
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The only winner in the AI race will be AI itself.
(c) 2025 JC2. 😉
…playing with digital fire…
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Meanwhile last night a few decent Greens are trying to stop the unreliable, toxic W & S RUINABLES and Sky News and Senator Matt Canavan try to explain the scale of these horrendous environmental disasters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpN3DCViE5
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Sorry that video has vanished but here’s a shorter version.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBgu8jjeu1g
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AI is just the latest fad term in IT. The reality is that most AI today is nothing more than pattern matching algorithms searching vast stores of data, or Large Language Modules that have been specifically designed to reproduce text.
The infrastructure that it runs on are called supercomputers or High Performance Computing. These are huge data centres, specially designed to achieve high rates of floating point operations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer#:~:text=A%20supercomputer%20is%20a%20type,%2C%20and%20of%20nuclear%20weapons).
These supercomputers are massively parallel designs, using millions of CPU or GPU cores. Apart from AI applications, supercomputers are incredibly useful for accelerating research. They can run complex computer models faster, crunch vast amounts of data faster, and produce results from experiments much faster.
That is why computer modelling is considered the third pillar of scientific research (alongside theory and experimentation). So supercomputers are incredibly useful to universities and industry, and are known to significantly accelerate innovation. So what is the problem Australia faces?
Supercomputers use vast amounts of energy, generate massive amounts of heat and require a massive amount of cooling. As the above article points out, “Tianhe-1A consumes 4.04 megawatts (MW) of electricity” and is not even listed in the top 10 supercomputers today! So when people are planning the construction of a new supercomputer, they generally build it near a power plant that has plenty of excess generation capacity. Usually, construction will also include a brand new substation and backup power supply just to manage the loads that the supercomputer will generate.
Perhaps worse, a typical supercomputer only has a useful life of 3-5 years, and then it must be totally replaced. That means that designers need to allow enough land and building capacity to at least double the original footprint, and enough power and cooling capacity to deal with up to 10 generations of computer upgrades.
That’s why countries that invest in research and innovation have developed national policies for investment and development of supercomputers. Sadly, Australia has never had such a national policy. Worse, as the above Wikipedia article shows, Australia has only 4 such supercomputers. Which means that not all of our top universities have access to a supercomputer!
Don’t even ask about privately owned supercomputers running AI systems! They don’t exist!
What does all that mean?
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Energy independence is the cornerstone of political annd economic independence. We need to get that right first and then all the other stuff follows easily.
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Huh! I didn’t want to butt in here. I’m past it now, but hey, imagine if we had have started to build those new technology coal fired power plants back when I first started to mention them.
I started it all back in 2008, and that was when the Chinese had already started constructing them, around one to two new ones every week, and they still are doing that. The growth of these new tech coal fired plants has been exponential ….. well, in China anyway, and now they are retrofitting older plants to this new technology, well, doing that for many years now also, and they lead the World in that, and in fact, they are driving the World in this new technology for coal fired power, and if you even think they are going to stop any time soon, then you’re sadly mistaken.
I bought it to the attention of Joanne, and she kindly gave me a guest Post on the subject, and that was back in March of 2013, and here’s the link.
Upgrade coal power and cut 15% of emissions. Where is the Green applause?
And now, they are even one level of tech higher than that even, so that means our 40 to 50 years old dinosaurs are four tech levels lower than that ….. oh, and still generating at or almost at their full whack. (when it’s needed the most every evening for the Peak Power time at 6PM)
That old and long forgotten Post is 12 years old now, and it had 290 comments.
Tony, no point flogging a dead horse, or even saying that most stupid of statements ….. I told you so, because, well, no one actually wants to know any more.
And to think, these plants could have been up and running long loooooong before any Nuclear power plant.
Back in 2008, there were actually plants like these with all the pre construction work done, just waiting for the go ahead, and then politicians got scared they’d lose votes!
Ah. Life Is A Minestrone, eh!
Tony.
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Tony’s post about High Efficiency Thermal Coal power stations mad me think again about why power stations all seem to have cooling towers. The reason for is to recondense the steam back to water and pump it back into the boiler.
But from an efficiency standpoint all of that heat that is extracted to recondense the water is wasted.
Is there some way to recycle the steam without wasting all that heat?
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Two thirds of that steam is recycled back through two of the three sections of the turbines via the furnace/boiler, so in fact, it’s not actually wasted at all.
Here’s a schematic diagram, and while this indicates this is for UltraSuperCritical for Lignite (brown coal, hey, who would have thought eh!) the same applies for black coal fired plants as well.
Electrical Engineers do in fact have the answers, and if they haven’t, they very soon will have them.
Tony.
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Having the low pressure end as cold as possible maximises the cycle efficiency.
Rankine cycle efficiency is:
Efficiency = 1 – Tcold/Thot
where both temperatures are given in Kelvin.
If you assume a supercritical boiler with high temp of 900K and cold end of 320K then the fundamental efficiency limit is 65%. Once you start adding in the losses that cannot be avoided like feed water pump, cooling water pump, turbine friction pipe friction boiler losses and so on the overall efficiency comes in under 40%.
Point is you want to cool the outlet stream/condensate as much as possible to maximise the cycle efficiency. The top end is limited by the available materials that can withstand the pressure and temperature. There are some advanced designs that get mechanical efficiency above 50% but I doubt they would be justified in Australia.
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I presume that T-hot and T-cold in this context refer to the inlet and outlet temperatures of the power turbine.
T cold in your example is still 320C which is still way above the condensation temperature of steam. Cooling the steam further to 100C is the job of the cooling towers.
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Coal is king. Coal will save the world… again.
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FWIW
“Net Zero Hobbits Encounter Realities Outside Middle-earth”
“We were promised a “green” utopia free of fossil fuels, powered by sunshine and breezes. However, the net zero hobbits living in this imaginary shire were blissfully ignorant of hard realities dictated by physics, engineering and economics.
Once trumpeted by corporate giants and governments alike, the vision of a world without greenhouse gas emissions is crumbling, its pseudoscience and false assurances incapable of sustaining the weight of one reality after another. Major airlines, energy companies and financial institutions are abandoning net zero commitments that always were destined to clash with the demands of business imperatives and people’s needs.”
More at
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/09/30/net-zero-hobbits-encounter-realities-outside-middle-earth/
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And
“Place Your Bet on the Future of Energy: U.S. Or China”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/09/30/place-your-bet-on-the-future-of-energy-u-s-or-china/
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