Victoria

Australians know their country is rightly counted in the first rank of technological capability.  We are world leaders in a large number of industries and our ideas have shaped the world.  We have overcome great difficulties to become one of the principal suppliers of food to the entire world but now we must face and overcome the huge challenge of climate change which threatens to throw us, our unique environment and agricultural production capabilities into an endless series of droughts.  To overcome this life threatening/altering challenge, we must act now to provide sufficient hydroelectric recharge pumping facilities to underpin the green energy production future.  One of the main components we lack in our ability to meet the challenges ahead is an Australian pipe manufacturer with the installed capability to produce ultra large diameter pipes.  There are a number of ultra large diameter pipe manufacturers around the world, and we must either invite them in to set up shop or develop technology of our own.  With ultra large diameter pipelines we can efficiently move water over thousands of kilometres.

The government of Victoria has legislation outlawing the construction of new dams which needs to be repealed as a matter of urgency to meet the needs of the environment.  The response of cleared farmland to storm events is drastically different to that which occurs in natively vegetated catchments, such that the rivers we have today bear scant resemblance to the rivers of 200 years ago.  Our rivers now flood faster and more often than they once did so that now the river beds are reduced to sterile rock and sands.  The silts and clay fines in which bred, hid and prospered the micro animals of the riparian food chain have been scoured clean from the river beds.  Some claim that damming these rivers is a sin against nature, but is it not a greater shame to overlook the state of the catchment feeding the river its flows.

What is Victoria to do if it is to rebuild its forests and save the Murray Darling Basin if it cannot review its no new dams setting.  There is no doubt that there are a few rivers in its southern range which provide habitat for migratory fish and eel species but only a very few.  The recent floods which tore through Lakes Entrance should bring into focus the terrific waste of allowing floodwaters to flow uselessly into the sea.  With the amount of water that passed out the rivers' mouths, Victoria could have provided the water needs of the MDB for years.

How can Victoria offset its emission debts if it has no water to sequester carbon dioxide in its trees and its soils.  Its agricultural productivity is plummeting and, so much so, there is much talk of abandoning the MDB for the greener pastures of the Northern Territory and northern W.A.  The State is financially capable of constructing a number of new dams in the southern range and connecting them by pipelines to the dams supplying the MDB.  Below you can view an image of the Victorian Gravity Loop.  The Gravity Loop is a low cost means to link over 80% of the State's dams in a hydraulic circuit, so that water can be shared around the State.  It is possible to move water around the hump separating the southern regions of the State from the MDB.  With an ensemble of hydroelectric recharge pumping facilities this can be achieved without recourse to excessive energy usage.  The orange line represents the lowest possible route having a maximum elevation of sub 100m, and so can operate by gravity alone whilst, the blue line represents a higher elevation route at a maximum of 220m, and the yellow line at a maximum of 330m, represents the pipeline the Victorian government currently has under construction.

We believe that the Victorian government has done the right thing in constructing the pipeline to interconnect Lake Eildon with the Melbourne water supply, but we think it should be viewed as a first step along the path which must be trod to truly regain control of the water supply of Victoria.  We have a lot of empathy for those who oppose the current pipeline project, but ask them to consider it in the light of the larger pipeline proposal presented herein.  With this more complete suite of pipelines, the damage they fear will not occur.  The idea is to move water around the State to drought proof all including the greater environment.

Lakes Entrance

Lakes Entrance has only just begun to recover from the devastating floods which recently swamped its businesses and community.  These floods should spark a re-evaluation of the no-dams-policy amongst policy makers and the environmental movement.  Take a good look at these Google Earth images and you can see the catchments of these rivers have been cleared of their native vegetation.  There can't be any question that the rivers and the life within them are being tortured by what we have done.  If we want to save our environment and bring water to our parched inland, we simply must build new dams.  +6m pipes made of specialized nylon and reinforced with appropriate materials can be manufactured that can carry the pressures required to move extremely large volumes of water around the spine of the hump separating southern and northern Victoria.  The south eastern highlands of Victoria can experience significant storm events and we should build some very big dams thereabouts to take advantage of these events when they occur.  The southern range should be contributing 1000's of GL's of water to the MDB and all that need occur for that to happen is that there be a number of new dams built within and at the floor of the southern range and then the linking of these constructs to an ultra large diameter pipeline network and a series of hydroelectric recharge pumping facilities to provide whatever else needed in motive force to move the water around the spine.

With the Gravity Loop virtually all of the Victoria’s water reserves can be connected so that flood events can be stored and shared around the State.  Victoria has a huge carbon and greenhouse gas footprint which can only be reduced by the +70% required within the next two decades, by the bringing into the grid of green energy.  It has no hydroelectric recharge pumping capacity to speak of, and so its fossil burning power generators are hugely inefficient, and the green energy production the voters crave to have, and use, are not able to store their productions to raise themselves into true Base Load Certainty.

Recharge Hydro

Hydro electric recharge pumping is a form of a super massive battery which relies of the weight of water in gravity.  A hydroelectric recharge pumping facility includes a upper reservoir and a lower reservoir linked together by a pipeline including a turbine which can also if spun in the opposite direction act as a pump.  The idea being to pump water uphill from the lower reservoir to the higher reservoir using cheap off-peak energy and where it is then stored for release on demand down the pipeline to drive the turbine and thus produce electricity.  The effort is not 100% efficient of course as there are losses associated with friction forces and other factors but these losses are not so large as to be a game breaker as they can be contained to under 20% with relative ease.  This means that a battery of +80% efficiency is created and the fact is there is no other battery known to man of the scale achievable with hydroelectric recharge pumping.  These are batteries we can build which will last hundreds of years and which can be called into play in times of disaster and dire need.