Replace Hazelwood – Petition Now Online!
Posted on 30 May 2012 (Permalink) by Berish
Environment Victoria along with YCAN and a number of other environmental groups has been running a campaign to Replace Hazelwood, Australia’s dirtiest power station, with clean energy. Hazelwood is responsible for almost 15 percent of Victoria’s and 3 percent of Australia’s greenhouse pollution all on its own. Finally the chance to replace it is within reach…
The Federal Government is currently in negotiations with the owners of Hazelwood and other polluting power stations to close down three of these big polluters. The negotiation deadline is 30 June – just over five weeks away. But recent media reports suggest that the government might walk away from the negotiation table – leaving Hazelwood and other power stations polluting for decades to come.
Unless the government receives pressure from people across the country this crucial moment to Replace Hazelwood, cut pollution, and bring online clean renewable energy could be lost.
That’s why Environment Victoria in partnership with Change.org have built a massive petition to tell our government to close the deal on Hazelwood.
Please sign the petition on the Change.org website, and be a part of replacing Hazelwood once and for all.
Many thanks from the YCAN team!
Change to clean energy now!
Hazelwood units 1 & 2 has just been modified and are cleaner than some of the other units in the local area and could be made much more efficient if required! You guys need to get your facts straight! Think the best resolution is to keep the plant but make it more efficien. At the end of the day it produces 25% of Victoria’s BASE LOAD capacity and you ain’t gonna replace that in a hurry. Turn Hazelwood off now and you can kiss goodbye to electricity for a few years, can you afford to do that?
Hi Jon,
I’m not sure what you base your views on? You say YCAN should get their facts straight but where are the facts in your comment?
First of all – how much cleaner could Hazelwood get? How does that compare with what the climate science says we need to reduce our emissions to? Figures please!
It seems to me that any emissions from Hazelwood is still a hell of a lot more emissions than the zero emissions from renewable energy. And since we are already at around 396 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and we need to get BELOW 350ppm – then emissions have to go to zero and carbon taken out of the atmosphere.
How will Hazelwood being slightly less filthy achieve that? It can’t.
Hazelwood has to be urgently replaced with renewable energy.
Not one single person is saying it needs to be shut down straight away before a renewable replacement is built – you are using a straw man argument there.
but it is certainly possible to build enough wind and baseload solar thermal to replace it within a few years. In fact, over the last few years the equivalent of Hazelwood has been taken off Australia’s electricity demand just by people using less electricity!
Replacing Hazelwood is possible and also extremely necessary.
The photo shown is doctored – Hazelwood actually doesn’t emit much in the way of visible pollution from its stacks; the exceptions are when the units are returned to service or the electrostatic precipitators are clanged together to prevent particulate pollution from entering the atmosphere. If you want to see a poorly performing plant, visit Rockhampton and see Stanwell – 24/7 there’s a brown haze over everything (and the government owns that plant, not the private sector)
That said, there was meant to be money raised from the carbon tax for a fund to progressively shut down the most carbon intensive industry (Hazelwood is a prime example) – but that’s now been scuttled and money sent to consolidated revenue. Very sad.