electricity

Jo Nova on the Current Madness in Australia

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Holy Battery Powered Australia: Chris Bowen thinks we can store electricity “like water in a dam”

Someone needs to tell the Australian Energy Minister the bad news about batteries

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen says we just need more renewables and more storage:

Bowen says we can store water, we should be able to store power

“You can say the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. Well, the rain doesn’t always fall either but we managed to store the water,” Bowen said.

 

Is this Chris Bowen’s Zuma-numbers moment with electricity?

He doesn’t seem to realize that electrons won’t politely sit in a shoe box waiting for the day they run your toaster. When South Australia got the worlds biggest battery in 2017 everyone got excited but few realized it would only power the state for two whole minutes before it ran out. South Australia is just 6% of the total National Energy Market, but if we were trying to make it truly 100% renewable with a reasonable battery backup Paul Miskelly and Tom Quirk calculated we’d need 7.5 million tonnes of lead acid batteries and a spare $60 to $90 billion dollars.

In a recent “record winning moment” in solar and battery powered excitement one of the smallest and sunniest towns in Australia made headlines when it managed to run off 100% solar and battery power for a whole 80 minutes. Onslow is a metropolis of 847 people. As I said at the time, we’re only 520,000 minutes short of a year.

Last year one new Tesla Megabattery in Victoria caught fire soon after it started operating. Since it took 76 hours to stop the fire we can honestly say it burned for three times longer than it provided electricity.

That’s how ready we are to power a nation of 26 million people on solar and wind and big batteries

Storage can be more than batteries, but we’re already spending $10 billion plus on Snowy Hydro 2.0 — the giant renewables-storage scheme that will waste 20-30% of the renewable energy fed into it so we can make a non-despatchable generator into a partly-despatchable one.

Hydrogen is hardly the answer. As David Archibald says it’s is such a reactive gas that there is no source of it in nature. The only naturally occurring hydrogen is the flammable part of farts. Otherwise, the cheapest way of making hydrogen is a water shift reaction with natural gas. But about 60% of the energy contained by the natural gas is wasted in the process — if you just wanted a source of energy, obviously, you’d use the natural gas.

As a fuel, hydrogen has some big shortcomings. It’s has low energy density, so a big, high-pressure tank of the stuff doesn’t take you far. It has an explosive range in air of 18% to 60%. It causes embrittlement of steel. There is a plot at the moment to add hydrogen to the natural gas distribution system — which then might start leaking like a sieve. It has a colourless flame, so leaks that have caught fire can’t be seen. In the days before infrared cameras, workers at a rocket fuel factory in Texas used to detect hydrogen leaks by walking with a straw broom in front of them. When the broom caught fire they had found the leak.

— DAvid Archibald

There’s more information on why Hydrogen is not the answer either here, thanks To Rafe Champion.

Like a third world nation we’re rationing electricity in winter:

Watch the fiery moment Energy Minister loses it at a journalist for suggesting more coal was the answer to the energy crisis

Last night hospitals were ordered to reduce electricity use and millions of people urged not to use basic appliances.

The potential for mass blackouts has increased with about 1800MW of coal-fired power not operating in Queensland and 1200MW of capacity offline in the states of NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania.

The Tomago aluminium smelter in NSW, the country’s biggest electricity user, was also forced to cut production to reduce the chance of a blackout.

 

Read the article here

The Energy Crisis

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Australia is now reaping the fruit of the Green madness, and will continue to do so for at least the next decade, or longer if we pursue the Net Zero madness.

Last night, NSW was warned about a potential power shortage from 6 pm to 8 pm. Rolling blackouts were a possibility, we were told.

We dodged the proverbial bullet last night, but it could be on again tonight. If not tonight, then maybe next week. We are only two weeks into winter, and this is where we have got to. Then there is the next peak season, called summer.

The solution to this situation, we are told is more solar and wind power. Solar power will not make a scrap of difference in the evening peak in winter, because it is dark. Here in Narrabri for the last few days it has been very calm, so not much wind power either.

For the last 20 years, successive Governments have been telling us that we have to move away from “fossil fuels” for our power generation. The result is that generator companies have taken the hint and not invested in maintaining or upgrading their facilities. So, over the next few years, coal-powered electricity will virtually disappear from Australia. Ironic, when we have so much “clean” coal in this country that we are sending overseas.

At the same time, the same Governments have been telling us that gas is a good “transition” power source. It is true that gas generators are more responsive to demand and gas produces more energy per tonne of CO2 emitted. But, these Governments have also prevented the gas companies from extracting coal seam gas from most of the country.

So at the time when we most need natural gas as a backup for our electricity grid, there is a huge shortage because of Government policies. The world price of natural gas is high because of the Russia- Ukraine war, and we have lakes of it underground just waiting to be tapped.

Now we have this crazy situation where the electricity regulator has imposed a price cap on wholesale electricity of $300/MW hr (The price used to be about $30, that is how bad things have got). At this price natural gas power generators cannot make a profit, so they don’t want to operate. We have a couple of coal-fired generators under maintenance that was delayed, because there is no point in spending too much on them when they will close in a couple of years anyway.

This is where following the policies demanded by green activists gets you to. The next few years are going to be worse as we close down coal. When electric cars become a significant part of the vehicle fleet, the demand for electricity will be double what it is now.

It is actually worse than that, when you consider how people live. You get home from work, what do you do? Plug your car in, turn the heater or air conditioner on (full blast at first because you’ve been out all day), put the kettle on, then turn on the stove to cook dinner.

That time from 6 pm to 8 pm, when the sun has gone down and the wind is usually calm will for ever be a tight wire act for our power system.

Welcome to our brave new future of Net Zero.

The Green Industrial Revolution Is A Lie

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As we gear up for a Federal election in May, you can be sure that Labor and the Greens will peddle the fantasy about “Green Jobs”. It is a lie, like the one about renewable energy being cheaper than coal, not to mention the whole climate change scam.

Ben Pile writes on spiked:

The green industrial revolution is a lie

The UK’s green sector has not grown in nearly a decade.

The green industrial revolution is a lie

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TopicsPOLITICSSCIENCE & TECHUK

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) published data earlier this month which showed that the UK’s ‘low-carbon and renewable-energy economy’ (LCREE) had not grown significantly between 2014 and 2020. This performance is a far cry from the promises of plentiful ‘green jobs’ and a ‘green industrial revolution’ that have echoed around Westminster for the past decade and more. It turns out that the much heralded green growth was nothing more than mould.

This news should surprise no one. As I have argued elsewhere on spiked, the green industrial revolution is a lie. Since the 2008 Climate Change Act, successive governments have embraced the fantasy of leading the world in the ‘transition’ to a low-carbon economy. And it’s all been to no avail. The rest of the world continues to increase its consumption of fossil fuels despite endless COP meetings, and Britain’s green industrial revolution stubbornly fails to materialise.

Back in 2009, the then Labour government, led by Gordon Brown, claimed the green economy was already thriving. He promised to add 400,000 new ‘green jobs’, taking the total number of people working in the green sector to 1.3million. These claims were based on proprietary data produced by an economic research company, which refused to share its data, as did the government even after freedom-of-information requests.

Even without access to the data, I was already able to point out in 2009 that growth in the ‘green economy’ is an illusion – or better still, an accountancy trick. The government was effectively compelling sectors of the economy, through a variety of green regulations, to ‘decarbonise’ their operations. It was then adding said sectors to the green economy and so the green economy appeared to be growing. This was happening even when the sectors in question had been harmed and diminished by the new regulations.

It took me until 2013 to obtain the data on which successive governments were basing their figures, policies and predictions. By then, it was being claimed that the ‘green economy’ was worth £122 billion. But it had only reached this size because the figure included sectors of the economy that simply do not qualify as ‘green’ in any meaningful sense. It even included the production, transportation and sale of liquefied natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas – otherwise known as fossil fuels – merely because such businesses were now subject to environmental regulation. My analysis at the time suggested that through such tricks, the government’s financial wizards had inflated the value of the ‘green economy’ by something in the region of 700 per cent.

Read the full article here

The Reality Of Green EVs

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From wattsupwiththat.com

I especially like the part about Scotland cutting down 1.4 million trees to make way for wind farms. Way to go, Scotland!

For 40% Of The EU And US To Drive EVs, 56,000-70,000 Km² Of Land Must Be Cleared For Wind Turbines

By Kenneth Richard on 15. July 2021

A new study warns that “a massive expansion of impervious surfaces” is an inevitable consequence of having electric vehicles reach a 40% share of citizens’ driving needs.  A land area the size of Croatia (in the European Union) or West Virginia (in the United States) must be completely covered with wind turbines to meet EV-charging energy demands for 4 of every 10 vehicles.

The already-weak power capacity of wind turbines, 0.5 We m² on average, will only continue to diminish as more wind farms are added to the landscape (Miller and Keith, 2018).

Consequently, the land area that must be devoted to the erection of wind turbines to meet the ever-growing energy needs of Earth’s citizens is harrowing.

Consider the US. Electricity generation only accounts for 17% of the US’s primary energy consumption. For wind energy to supply all the electricity needs for US citizens, a land area the size of California – 12 percent of the contiguous US – must be cleared to make way for wind farms (Miller and Keith, 2018). Again, that’s to meet just 1/6th of Americans’ energy needs.

Image Source: Miller and Keith, 2018

In Scotland, 14 million CO2-absorbing trees were recently chopped down to make way for wind farms. This way the Scottish government can ironically claim they’re doing their part to reduce CO2 emissions.

And now a new study documents how much more land must be converted to impervious surface so that new wind farms can supply the electricity to charge an exponentially-growing number of EVs in the coming decades.

“In order to run 40% of their vehicles with electricity, the EU should devote over 5000 km² of land (twice the size of Luxembourg) to photovoltaic panels or almost 56,000 km² (about the size of Croatia) to wind turbines, whereas the US should devote over 6000 km² (roughly the size of Delaware) to solar or almost 70,000 km² (more than the area of West Virginia) to wind.”

Image Source: Orsi, 2021

Put another way, an average EU or US city will need to expand its urbanized area by 0.2 to 4 km² due to dramatically rising number of EVs using low-density wind and solar energy to supply electricity.

And this is green?

Germany Weighs Electricity Rationing Scheme To Stabilise Its Now Shaky Green Power Grid

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Germany is a warning of where Australia will be in 10 years or less, unless we regain some sanity in electricity production.

From wattsupwiththat.com.

Germany Weighs Electricity Rationing Scheme To Stabilise Its Now Shaky Green Power Grid

 

Putting matches in charge of fighting gasoline fires?

Even more interference appears to be the German government’s approach to solving the power grid mess that its earlier meddling created in the first place.

Germany struggles to keep the lights on, looks for a law to prevent its power grid from crashing. 

Before the days of climate alarmism and hysteria, the job of deciding how to best produce electricity was left to power generation engineers and experts – people who actually understood it. The result: Germany had one of the most stable and reliable power grids worldwide.

Green energies destabilized the German power grid

Then in the 1990s, environmental activists, politicians, climate alarmists and pseudo-experts decided they could do a better job at generating power in Germany and eventually passed the outlandish EEG green energy feed-in act and rules. They insisted that wildly fluctuating, intermittent power supplies could be managed easily, and done so at a low cost.

Blackouts threaten

Fast forward to today: The result of all the government meddling is becoming glaringly clear: the country now finds itself on the verge of blackouts due to grid instability, has the highest electricity prices in the world, relies more on imports and is not even close to meeting its emissions targets.

Germany’s rickety and moody power grid now threatens the entire European power grid stability, as we recently witnessed.

The need for “smoothing out” demand peaks

So what solution does Berlin propose today? You guessed it: more meddling and interference, more outlandish bureaucrat solutions. Included among them are shutting down the remaining baseload coal-fired and nuclear power plants, and relying even more on the power sources that got the country into its current mess in the first place.

And new are restrictions as to when power can be consumed by consumers and industry! Energy rationing and targeted blackouts.

Hat-tip. Tichys Einblick

Cutting off e-vehicle battery chargers and industry

To deal with the power grid problems, Germany’s Economics Minister Peter Altmaier presented a draft law that would allow electric utilities “to temporarily cut off charging power for e-cars when there is once again too little electricity available”, an idea known as “peak smoothing”.

“Shutdowns due to power shortages have been practiced for some time. Aluminum smelters, for example, have to put up with having their power cut off for limited periods of time,” reports Tichys Einblick. “These, like refrigerated storage facilities, consume great amounts. It’s a dangerous game because after three hours the molten metal has solidified and the factory is ruined.”

Situation now “too critical”

The situation in the German power grid has deteriorated so much that Tichys Einblick also comments: “The situation in the power grids has become too critical. The only thing that helps are abstruse ideas like: ‘You are not allowed to refuel your car from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day!’”

A law that would allow for “peak smoothing” has been demanded by power utilities for some time now as they struggle to keep the increasingly wind and solar powered grid from careening out of control and into blackness. In other words: targeted blackouts.

And as Tichy Einblick mentions, the increasing number of cars on the market will only serve to cause more extreme power demand peaks. Currently Germany is set to make a major push into electric mobility this year.

No electricity for up to 2 hours a day

In the proposed draft law, which has since been recalled because it was deemed so embarrassing, it was written that “controllable consumption facilities” would be able to receive no electricity for up to two hours per day if there was a threat of overloading the grid.

“This includes charging stations for e-cars as well as heat pumps, which can already be temporarily disconnected from the power supply,” reports Tichy.

More burden on power grid

Currently there are only 33,000 electric car charging points in Germany, a country with over 50 million cars, and the government plans a vast expansion in the future, yet isn’t sure what that infrastructure should look like. It’s a policy of going  full speed in total blackness and hoping there won’t be a brick wall in the way.

Government admits it’s not going to function

Tichy comments further: “The German government has recognized that in the future electricity system, it will no longer be possible to satisfy every demand at all times. Therefore, the control of the consumer side should be put on legal feet.” […] “Controllable consumers such as heat pumps, electric heaters and wall-boxes, i.e. charging stations for e-mobiles, would then be switched off variably at times.”

This is the sorry state of Germany’s once highly regarded power grid.

The Joys of Electricity

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They say it pays to shop around. They don’t tell you it will drive you insane.

For some reason, the standard electricity contract in Australia is the most expensive option. If you don’t negotiate a contract you can end up paying lots more than you need to. But the electricity companies don’t make it easy to compare prices, offering percentage discounts off their “standard” rates, which vary a little. Even someone like me who can cope with numbers finds it mind-bogglingly complex.

Last year, for the church, I took up an offer from Company A which offered a 12 month contract with a 24% discount. When the contract expires next month, they would only offer a 12% discount.

So I consulted the meerkat people who aggregate offers from different companies and they came up with an offer from Company B which offered a 24% discount and 11c solar feed in. I signed up for that contract, thinking I was done and dusted for two years.

This morning, just after I got home from my bike ride, a representative from Company A rang me and asked why we were transferring to Company B. I explained how I was able to do better with Company A. His counter offer was a 32% discount, but just 8c for solar. He would backdate the offer to January 17th. So I thought, “This is even better.” so I accepted his new offer. He even helped me by transferring me direct to Company B’s cancellation number.

Now Company B decided to match the offer but with 11c feed-in, if I complete the transfer to them.

I hope that’s the end of the ping-pong! I really don’t like this business of working your way down to a lower price, especially when that price was always available but they just don’t want to tell you about it up front.

In the old days, where the electricity market was a Government-controlled monopoly, you just got a price and that was it. Competition has to be better for everyone, but sometimes it is hard work to save a few bucks!

China Leaps Forward With Fusion Power

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From the ABC, an exciting step forward in cheap, sustainable power generation

China’s ‘artificial sun’ reaches 100 million degrees Celsius marking milestone for nuclear fusion

By Jack Kilbride and Bang Xiao

Chinese nuclear scientists have reached an important milestone in the global quest to harness energy from nuclear fusion, a process that occurs naturally in the sun.

Key points:

  • The ‘artificial sun’ is designed to replicate the fusion process that occurs in the sun
  • Dr Matthew Hole said the achievement is significant for fusion science around the world
  • Fusion is seen as a solution for energy issues as it is clean, sustainable and powerful

The team of scientists from China’s Institute of Plasma Physics announced this week that plasma in their Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) — dubbed the ‘artificial sun’ — reached a whopping 100 million degrees Celsius, temperature required to maintain a fusion reaction that produces more power than it takes to run.

To put that in perspective, the temperature at the core of the sun is said to be around 15 million degrees Celsius, making the plasma in China’s ‘artificial sun’ more than six times hotter than the original.

The news comes after China shocked the science community last month with plans to launch an ‘artificial moon’ bright enough to replace city streetlights by 2020.

A moon, which replaces the globe in a light globe, hangs over Chengdu's cityscape.

PHOTO: Chinese scientists plan to send three artificial moons into space in the next four years. (ABC News: Graphic by Jarrod Fankhauser)

Speaking to the ABC, associate professor Matthew Hole from the Australian National University said the achievement was an important step for nuclear fusion science.

“It’s certainly a significant step for China’s nuclear fusion program and an important development for the whole world,” Dr Hole told the ABC, adding that developing fusion reactors could be the solution to global energy problems.

“The benefit is simple in that it is very large-scale base load [continuous] energy production, with zero greenhouse gas emissions and no long-life radioactive waste.

“It provides a silver bullet energy solution … providing that one can harness it.”

Fusion vs fission

How close are we to having nuclear plants that fit the clean, green bill? We explain the how different nuclear technologies work and where the research is up to.

He added that nuclear fusion reactors also avoid risks associated with the currently employed nuclear fission reactors, which can be adapted into dangerous weapons and are prone to possible catastrophic meltdowns.

The news went viral on Chinese social media, with most users excited by the achievement.

“There is nothing China can’t make,” one user on Weibo said.

Another proclaimed that “if this technology is put in use, the world will no longer feel anxious about the energy crisis.”

So how did China manage to pull it off?

China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), dubbed the 'artificial sun'.

PHOTO: China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), dubbed the ‘artificial sun’. (Supplied: Institute of Plasma Physics Chinese Academy of Sciences)

While current nuclear power plants rely on nuclear fission — a chain reaction where uranium atoms are split to release energy — nuclear fusion effectively does the opposite by forcing atoms to merge.

One way of achieving this on Earth is by using what’s known as a tokamak, a device designed to replicate the nuclear fusion process that occurs naturally in the sun and stars to generate energy.

The EAST that pulled off the 100 million Celsius feat stands at 11-metres tall, has a diameter of eight metres, and weighs around 360 thousand kilograms.

The metal insides of the EAST

PHOTO: High-powered magnets line the ‘doughnut shaped’ inside of EAST. (Supplied: Institute of Plasma Physics Chinese Academy of Sciences)

It uses a doughnut-shaped ring to house heavy and super-heavy isotopes — atomic variations — of hydrogen known as deuterium and tritium.

The isotopes are heated by powerful electric currents within the tokamak, tearing electrons away from their atoms and forming a charged plasma of hydrogen ions.

Powerful magnets lining the inner walls of EAST then contain the plasma to a tiny area to maximise the chance that the ions will fuse together.

When the ions fuse they give off a large amount of energy, which can then be harnessed to run a power plant and produce electricity.

The Chinese research team said they were able to achieve the record temperature through the use of various new techniques in heating and controlling the plasma, but could only maintain the state for around 10 seconds.

The latest breakthrough provided experimental evidence that reaching the 100 million degrees Celsius mark is possible, according to China’s Institute of Plasma Physics.

Nuclear fusion a global mission, but not in Australia

Aerial shot shows the construction of the ITER

PHOTO: ITER is set to be completed around 2025. (Supplied: ITER Organization/EJF Riche)

Dr Hole said that while the energy possibilities of nuclear fusion as a clean energy source has attracted large investment from countries all over the world — including China — Australia has lagged behind.

“As a nation, Australia is about to lose its capability in fusion,” Dr Hole said, adding that many of his colleagues have changed field or are looking for work overseas due to a lack of investment in fusion science.

“Australia used to have good investment in this space, but it has really been neglected in recent years.”

He said that the achievement by EAST will be important to the development of the next major experiment in global nuclear fusion science: the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER).

Currently being built in southern France with collaboration from 35 nations including China, ITER is set to be the first fusion device to consistently produce net energy, producing 500 Megawatts of clean and sustainable power.

As EAST has a similar design to ITER but on a far smaller scale, it is likely to be an important testing device during the development of ITER, according to China’s Institute of Plasma Physics.

ITER is expected to be ready to create its first plasma and begin operations in 2025.

An aerial view shows the ITER site spanning across the French countryside

PHOTO: ITER will be the first in the world to produce more energy than it takes to run. (Supplied: ITER Organization/EJF Riche)

Jo Nova: “Free Energy” Costs Too Much

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Jo Nova writes:

The Mystery: The most resource rich nation on Earth has the highest electricity prices?!

Ask anyone and get confused: It’s poles and wires, gaming of the system by capitalist pigs, excessive taxes, privatization, and record gas prices. The CleanEnergy Council  tells us that Australia has one of the longest electricity networks in the world — we need lots of poles! And so we do. But once upon a time Australia had the cheapest electricity in the world and we still had lots of poles. Not only were miles of poles and wires, there were also capitalist pigs, excessive taxes, and privatized generators. There were wild gas price spikes too, (during which we probably just burned more coal).

Evidently, something else has changed. Something seismic that wiped out all the bids below $50/MWh. 

Perhaps it has something to do with the 2,106 turbines in 79 wind farms that on random windy days might make 4,325MW that didn’t exist in Australia in 1999 when electricity was cheap and our total national wind power was 2.3 megawatts?

Another clue might be the 1.8 million new solar PV installations, which theoretically generate 7 gigawatts of electricity at noon on cloudless days if all the panels have been cleaned. Back in 2007, we had 14MW.

But of course, cause and effect are devilishly difficult. The one thing we know for sure is that even though sunlight and moving air is free, there is no country on Earth with lots of solar and wind power and cheap electricity.

Any day now, renewables are going to make electricity cheap, but when that happens, it’ll be a world first.

See the graph: the more renewables we have the more we pay…

Cost of electricity, countries, graph, renewables capacity.

….

Source: Paul Homewood at NotalotofpeopleKnowthat inspired graphs by Johnathon Drake, and Willis Eschenbach, and Dave Rutledge, similar to this one. This particular graph came via Judith Sloan in The Australian, though I can’t seem to find the exact link.

 We’re high achievers price-wise

Australia is far above the trend-line.  Our electricity is even more expensive than it should be for the amount of renewables we have. At a guess this might be because other nations have more “hydro” in their renewable mix and less wind and solar.  Or they have access to nuclear power (like all the EU countries). It may be made worse by the way our energy markets are managed, the profusion of bureaucracies, the subsidies and rebates, the renewable energy target, or the overlapping state and federal green aims. It also may be that in our smaller market we have a few big players gaming a volatile, complicated market. Stability may cost more here, due to the fragility of our network.

Don’t blame wind and solar… oh, wait

To isolate the effect, this graph from Euan Mearns takes out the “hydropower” and biomass aspect and just looks at wind and solar. Spot the trend:

(Note that “Aust” means Austria, not Australia)

Europe, renewables, countries, cost of electricity, graph.

Figure 1 The Y-axis shows residential electricity prices for the second half of 2014 from Eurostat. The X-axis installed wind + solar capacity for 2014 as reported in the 2015 BP statistical review normalised to W per capita using population data for 2014 as reported by the UN.

As Euarn Mearns says, there’s more than one variable at work here, but the inescapable conclusion is the countries with the highest levels of renewables pay the highest prices.    h/t Don B.

Is that another 10 cent price rise coming?

According to wikipedia our wind power capacity is set rise 250% or something crazy (I’m skeptical):

From wiki wind power in Australia–  As of May 2017 a further 12328 MW of capacity was proposed or committed.[2] “AEMO Planning and Forecasting – General Information Page”. Retrieved 7 June 2017.

For a population of 24 million that means we would add another 500 watts/capita. Eyeballing the trendline in the graph,  prices would rise by another 10c/KWhr. (Don’t try to unpack the x and y units exactly and calculate it. That’s another story.)

Say it again: there is no country on Earth with lots of solar and wind power and cheap electricity.

REFERENCES

Moran, Alan (2017) The Finkel Report’s Recommendations on the Future Security of the National Electricity Market:
Impacts on the Australian Economy and Australian Consumers, Regulation Economics.

Jo Nova: SA Blackout: Three towers, six windfarms and 12 seconds to disaster

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wind-fail.jpg

(Generic photo, not necessarily indicative of anything in SA)

I heard SA Premier, Jay Weatherall (there’s an ironic name for you). the man must be the biggest dill in politics in Australia. When the AM presenter asked him about the AEMO report indicating that the sudden shut-down of the wind farms was a big factor in the state-wide blackout he flat out denied it. Then he blustered for a few minutes and said that there was a glitch that shut down these wind generators on that day. And the cause of the shut down? At this point I couldn’t take any more and went for a shower.

Jo Nova details the steps that led to the catastrophic shut down of a state.

SA Blackout: Three towers, six windfarms and 12 seconds to disaster

Finally, the gritty info we’ve been waiting for: The Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) preliminary report. The message here is of how a combination of both transmission towers failing and probably the auto-shut-off of wind farms combined in 12 seconds to crash the South Australian system. It’s looking awfully bad for the wind industry. The AEMO pins the crash on the sudden reduction from the wind generators, but stops short of declaring why they dropped power so suddenly. Was it the auto-shut-offs, lightning strikes, a software glitch,  turbine failure, or was it a key transmission line that broke?  Reneweconomy is about the last-man-standing trying to defend the wind industry in Australia. Giles Parkinson argues it was the third transmission line that took out some wind generation.

Even if the third transmission tower took out two “farms”, the fragility of wind-dominated grids is on display. And above and beyond this, South Australian electricity is a management debacle. The only question is, which mistake was the worst: Is this is epic indulgence of running the wind farms flat out in a storm only to trigger a blackout with their auto shut offs? There’s a compelling case, but there are tenths or less of a second between events in these graphs, and no confirmation.

If it was transmission towers that ultimately broke the system, things don’t look better for wind power which needs so many long transmission lines to capture energy from sites spread far and wide, rather than connecting a few centralized spots like coal stations — and that’s expensive (thanks to Tom Quirk for pointing out that).

We’re still left wondering why were these towers so weak, was it freak tornados — where is that documentation?  Then there is the unknowable — could it have been prevented if the Port Augusta  coal station was still running, or if the wind farms had turned off earlier in an orderly fashion, or if the transmission towers had been solid?

The bottom line is that wind energy comes at a very high cost and makes the system either very expensive or horribly fragile or both. Given that wind farms aren’t providing cheap electricity — when the infrastructure and the costs of having back up “spinning reserve”  and baseload is taken into account — what’s the point of adding all this risk to the system? To change the weather?

How many engineers saw this epic fail coming?

Read the full article here