Last November at lunchtime 64% of the entire generation of South Australia was coming from across thousands of small generators that the Grid Managers had no control of, and that clouds could wipe out. This is the junk conglomerate infrastructure that billions of dollars in forced subsidies have created.
The AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator) has no control over the vagaries of two-thirds of the electricity generation. Audrey Zibelmen has described it as “”It’s almost like driving without your headlights.” She wants new panels to get “smart inverters” which means they can be dumb servants — controlled by the AEMO, just in case there is an emergency — lest the state suffer another System Black. They also want old panels to get the new style inverters when the next replacement is due.
Who could have seen that coming (only anyone with an engineering degree).
Poor solar home owners are feeling pretty miffed. They didn’t realize their panels were never economic, a burden on the grid, and they’ve been riding on the backs of fellow Australians for years. And after reading this ABC story (below), they still won’t know. So it’s a complete surprise to them that the green electrons they produce are expensive and unwanted, and so useless — worse than useless — the Energy Market Operator wants to have the power to turn them off at their peak time of day.
Craig Kelly M.P. has a much better plan. He thinks if China can cancel our barley because of alleged subsidies that don’t exist, we ought to axe the subsidies that do exist for the Chinese solar panels and save that $1.7billion dollars a year which hapless Australian electricity consumers are forced to cover installation costs of.
Concerns over plan to switch off household solar panels when grid is unstable
Ange Donnellan ABC
Thanasis Avramis has been an advocate of solar panels since he had them installed in 2008. “In the last 12 years we’ve probably earned about $9,000 worth of feed-in tariff. That’s been a very substantial reduction in the cost of our electricity,” Mr Avramis told 7.30.
Thanasis is not happy and blames the regulator and the network. He says it would make “Australian families pay for the mistakes of others”. Which would be not much different to his solar panels where Australian families pay for him to get cheaper electricity.
Since 2010, the number of panels across the nation has grown from 100,000 to 2.2 million.
But the proliferation is at times leading to grid instability, prompting the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) to call for the switch-off measure.
AEMO CEO Audrey Zibelman said it would only be used in emergencies
When we have way too much solar there’s so little load we can’t even manage to keep the balance with the generators, and in that context there’s always a risk that the system could fail and will go black.”
ABC advertising writers (called journalists) manage to find a quasi industry spokesman to say exactly what the ABC staff want to hear — including his own big conspiracy theory:
Energy analyst Bruce Mountain said solar helped keep prices down.
When Australia had only 100,000 solar panels wholesale prices were $35 per megawatt hour. Now that we have two million, we pay $80. That’s not the kind of “down” most people are thinking of.
He is worried that once the ability to switch off solar systems is added, there could be pressure to externally control them more regularly.
“The threat lies not with the market operator, but the control mechanisms that they establish may well be taken advantage of by other forces who want to throttle back rooftop solar to look after their own commercial interests,” he told 7.30.
Bruce Mountain is director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre (VEPC). He is in a sense, a de facto employee of The Victorian Government, an entity that benefits from renewables propaganda.
All those new “smart inverters” — add them to the bill for solar power.
Handy questions journalists could’ve asked
- Is there any country around the world which has a high penetration of intermittent renewables and cheap electricity? Name them…
- If renewables are so cheap, why is China secretly building more coal power plants?
- Australian electricity wholesale costs were around $30 per MWh for years on the national grid, then we added 2 million solar panels. Shouldn’t the prices have gone down?