electricity

Jo Nova: There Were Warnings That Renewables Made The SA Grid Unstable

/ newlifenarrabri / Leave a comment

Jo Nova digs deeper than the politicians and mainstream media want you to see about the effect of wind power on the statewide blackout in SA. On the other side we have simultaneous claims that the storm was made worse by climate change (remember weather is not climate except what climate “scientists” say so) and a journal article that says that the flooding in SA was all imaginary because climate change is driving all the clouds in the Southern Ocean south leading to drought. Meanwhile the Greens are saying that now is not the time to “politicise” the issue by blaming the windmills, thereby politicising the issue.

Jo Nova writes:

The South Australian black out — A grid on the edge. There were warnings that renewables made it vulnerable

Australians are going to be talking about this for weeks. Indeed, the SA Blackout is the stuff of legend.

The Greens are blaming coal (what else?) for causing bad storms and blackouts. Forget that Queensland gets hit with cyclones all the time and the whole state grid doesn’t break. Some greenies are also raging against “the politicization” of the storms. Yes, Indeedy. Go tell that toWill Steffen.

We are not being told the whole story. We do know that South Australia has the highest emphasis on renewables in the world. It also has a fragile electricity network, andwild price spikes to boot. (Coincidence?) The death of a few transmission towers should not knock out a whole state, nor should it take so long to recover from. The storm struck worst north of Adelaide near Port Augusta but the juicy interconnector from Victoria runs in from the south, and goes right up past Adelaide and most of the population. Why couldn’t the broken parts of the system be isolated?

Digging around I find ominous warnings that while the lightning and winds probably caused the blackout, the state of the South Australian grid appeared to be teetering on the brink, without enough reserve, or without well planned protection mechanisms to cope with an inherently unstable system.  The excess of wind power made the system more fragile, and also made it harder to restore. There appear to be three reasons (at least) that excessive wind power is less fun, more costly, and golly, but if windmills don’t stop storms, why buy those expensive electrons?

Read the full article here (trigger warning- contains real facts)

More Climate Change Craziness

/ newlifenarrabri / Leave a comment

The Climate Change panic just keeps on producing weird dysfunctions in energy systems around the world. A couple of years ago it was Britain converting power stations from burning  local coal to running on wood imported from the US- all in the name of carbon credits.

Now it seems plausible that Germany’s obsession with “green” power such as solar has raised their power costs to such a level that China will be able to export cheap coal power there at half the price.

Jo Nova writes:

Get a load of this.  China has been adding a new idle coal fired plant nearly every week. It is building368 coal fired plants and planning a further 803.The Greens think the Chinese have over capitalized, made a bubble, and have built a bunch of white elephants (maybe they have). But Germany has crippled its electrical generators in order to make the weather cooler, and pays exorbitant prices per kilowatt hour that are driving businesses overseas.Merkel is still trying to get solar powerto work in a land where the only thing that will make the current panels economic is if the Earth changes its orbital tilt.

Well say hello to the savvy Chinese investors who may be able to solve both problems. It seems hard to believe but all that surplus energy might just find its way to Germany. With new ultra hot coal power there is talk they can produce electricity so incredibly cheap they can send it on ultra high voltage lines all the way to Berlin. Barking? They’ll probably earn carbon credits for doing it too.

coal fired plants, China, India, 2015. Map.

The Times UK

Coal’s future burns bright— Graham Lloyd

Greenpeace likes to think that China’s future coal plant projections are the result of “dysfunctional planning systems and cheap credit’’.

But there is another possibility highlighted by Britain’sFinancial Times: that is, that China’s proposed investment in long-­distance, ultra-high voltage power transmission lines will pave the way for power exports from China to as far away as Germany.

Liu Zhenya, chairman of State Grid, told reporters that wind and thermal power produced in Xinjiang could reach Germany at half the present cost of electricity there.

… the World Coal Association maintains new high-­efficiency coal technology will deliver power at half the cost of gas and one-fifth the price of wind in Asian countries in the future.

China looks to export surplus energy to Germany— Financial Times

Talk of exporting power is a reversal for China, which as recently as 2004 suffered rolling blackouts across its manufacturing heartland. But huge investments in power in the decade since, and the construction of a number of dams, nuclear reactors and coal-fired plants due to begin operating in the next 10 years, mean the country faces a growing surplus.

The distance from the edge of China to Berlin is apparently only 600km further than across China to Shanghai. And China hasnuclear power, many hydroelectric dams, and also other markets along the way — like Pakistan and India. They have 32 nuclear power plants in operation, 22 under construction, more about to start, and even more in the planning stage.

China is happy to pay lip-service to the Paris Climate Deal — it doesn’t have to do anything different for 15 years when population growth meant it was going to slow emissions then anyway. Meanwhile the Paris deal hobbles competition, and tosses money at China to shift from older, higher emissions power to newer cleaner styles.

 

So You Want To Be Coal Free by 2100?

/ newlifenarrabri / Leave a comment

Earlier this week, the G7 countries proudly announced a target to be free of fossil fuels by the end of the century. What a joke, setting a target for something when the date is long after they are all no longer on the planet.

But if such a thing is possible and even desirable, why are the same countries actually increasing their usage of coal?

The brave new religion of global warming where lip service is far more important that actual deeds. The exact opposite of true faith.

From Jo Nova:

Forget momentum for renewables. Five of the G7 nations increased their coal use

Spot the contradictions. Oxfam want us to believe we can be “coal free” in France, the UK and Italy by 2023. Then they tell us that most of these richest of rich nations are already trying and failing to do that. They are using more coal.

Then there is a nifty graph below, which seems to suggest that in these same nations solar is cheaper than coal. If solar is so cheap then, we don’t need any schemes, markets or subsidies. Right?

Welcome to reality — even the richest greenest nations need more coal:

Five of the world’s seven richest countries have increased their coal use in the last five years despite demanding that poor countries slash their carbon emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change, new research shows.

Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan and France together burned 16% more coal in 2013 than 2009 and are planning to further increase construction of coal-fired power stations. Only the US and Canada of the G7 countries meeting on Monday in Berlin have reduced coal consumption since the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009.

The US has reduced its coal consumption by 8% largely because of fracking for shale gas. Overall, the G7 countries reduced coal consumption by less than 1% between 2009-2013, the Oxfam research shows.

A tad ambitious?

The UK could feasibly stop burning coal for its energy supply by 2023, according to Oxfam’s report.

….  and in the US and Canada by 2030

There is a reason Africa is poor and Africans want to come to the West.

The briefing paper comes as nearly 200 countries meet in Bonn ahead of crunch climate talks in Paris later this year, and shows that G7 coal plants emit twice as much CO2 as the entire African continent annually, and 10 times as much as the 48 least developed countries put together.

Read the full article here. If you have trouble understanding the map, consider this. Some parts of Australia that are too remote to be connected to the mainly coal-fired national electricity grid have discovered that solar power is cheaper than using diesel generators to power the town. Therefore the whole of Australia is coloured as solar is cheaper than “conventional.”

Technology to Kill Coal?

/ newlifenarrabri / Leave a comment

An interesting article from the ABC points out that improving and cheaper technology will make coal powered generation obsolete “within years.” The interesting observation is that “solar plus storage” will be competitive with grid-supplied electricity in many parts of the U.S. within 4 years.

I wonder how that will impact the local coal mines.

Technology, not regulation, will kill coal fired power

By business reporter Stephen Letts

Updated1 hour 20 minutes ago

Liddell power stationPHOTO: Dark clouds are hanging over the future financial viability of coal-fired power. (Mick Tsikas: Reuters)
MAP: United States

The Obama administration’s plan to reduce power plant emissions may be a bold effort to put climate change back on the political agenda, but it doesn’t exactly have the big generators in the US quivering with fear.

Not yet anyway.

In a detailed analysis, Bank of America-Merrill Lynch’s energy team argue the EPA draft rule, which mandates a 30 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030, is “a relatively soft requirement.”

On BoA-Merrill Lynch figures, the rule changes to the Clean Air Act effectively amount to a 1 per cent per year reduction in carbon from 2013 levels.

The baseline year for the 30 per cent reduction is 2005, which is pretty well the peak of carbon emissions in the US – only in 2007 were emissions higher.

Since then, the closure of numerous coal fired power stations, the gradual switch to gas fired generation and lower demand have seen emissions in the US fall by about 16 per cent, making any reduction trajectory less onerous.

The BoA-Merrill Lynch team says the EPA’s move had already been anticipated by the market and is not a “material surprise” to valuations. If anything the rule changes are “a light touch”.

However, another report put out by a different investment bank two weeks before the EPA came out with its new carbon rules may give the coal burners a far greater concern for their future.

Full article here