More than half of the homes in Australia now have air conditioners, compared to a third a few years ago; The increased consumption threatens to bring about the collapse of the electricity system in the country
Melbourne
Rodney Eales, who has been a plumber for 40 years, has his hands full these days, with the wave of air conditioning regulations sweeping through Australia, which has seen electricity consumption rise unprecedentedly in the industrial world. "15 years ago, less than 20% of the work we did was installing air conditioners. Last year, the installations were about 65% of the work," said Eales, who lives in South Australia, an area known more for its harsh winter than its hot summer.
Last summer, electricity consumption reached a peak, compared to the previous seven years. The proportion of single-family homes in Australia with air conditioning installed rose from a third of homes in 1999 to 50% in 2002. In light of the ongoing economic growth and the difficult summer seasons, it is expected that this trend will continue, and will stretch the Australian electricity supply system to the limit of its capacity. And since, on top of that, more long-term projects are planned, the industry is calling for the introduction of "demand management", which will prevent an overload on the system, which also has difficulty meeting the demand for electricity.
The Australian Electricity Company (NEM) has warned of blackouts in the states of South Australia and Victoria, which could occur if temperatures rise and one of the central generators collapses. The demand for electricity in the company's supply area - in the densely populated states of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia - reached a record of 29,775 megawatts last year.
Summer in Australia is very hot; In December-February, temperatures can sometimes reach 40 degrees Celsius. By 2030, temperatures in the country are expected to rise by an average of 2 degrees Celsius, and the number of days a year when the temperature will rise to more than 35 degrees Celsius will increase to 15-10 days a year, as part of the global warming of the earth - according to data published by the Industrial and Scientific Research Organization of UK. This trend causes an increase in electricity consumption. Electricity in Australia is produced mainly from coal, and only about a fifth of it is produced from natural gas or in hydroelectric form (production of energy from water).
The government expects that by 2020 electricity consumption in Australia will increase by 2.6% per year on average - almost twice the rate of growth expected in industrialized Western countries until 2030, according to a forecast by the International Energy Agency.
In the Australian electricity market, in the last two years there was also extensive business activity of various mergers, in Australia and New Zealand, mainly by American companies that sold assets worth more than 11.7 billion dollars. Asian companies, hoping for a stable growth of the Australian electricity market, turned out to be serious competitors in the tenders. The company "Singapore Power" purchased last year the assets of the American company "TXU" in Australia in the amount of 3.8 billion dollars - which made it one of the largest electricity suppliers in the country.
However, the exchange in the shareholders of the companies will not help. In order to meet the market demand for electricity by 2020, 37 billion dollars will be required, and some experts believe that the issue of demand for electricity should be examined more deeply. "Every year people install more and more air conditioners, which are getting bigger and bigger," said Roman Domanski, director of the "Energy Users Association of Australia". "Building a system that will deal with this costs a lot of money, so we claim that we need to deal better with the issue of demand in order to manage the matter."
Paul Breslin of the consulting company ACIL Tasman explained that "demand management" means charging consumers a higher price for using electricity during periods of load and supplying meters for the different hours of the day, which will show the fluctuations in electricity prices during peak and off-peak hours. "Electricity consumed in the middle of a hot day probably costs five to ten times more than electricity consumed at night, but consumers are not aware of this," said Breslin.
However, rising electricity prices may not cool Australians' love for air conditioners. Rodney Eales believes that the increase in the quality of life and the improvement of air conditioning technology are responsible for becoming after the air conditioners. "People want air conditioning, just like they want bigger and more comfortable cars, home theater systems and everything else."
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