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By Jo Nova
As Western grids are teetering, people are suddenly realizing demand for electricity is about to skyrocket
Unstoppable demands are about to meet immovable rocks. A year ago the grid managers thought they had their five year plans figured out, but now the same experts think we are going to need to add twice as much generation as they did then. The watt-hogs have arrived to chew on some gigawatt hours.
The usual slow grid planning processes are getting upended. Take the US State of Georgia for example. They have scored lots of new electric vehicle and battery factories, a few large “clean energy” manufacturing projects, and have attracted a bunch of energy-sucking data centers, but all of these things add massive loads to the grid.
In the last 22 years demand for electricity hasn’t growth much, so in 2022 Georgia Power were expecting to close their coal fired plants pretty soon, and not even put forward a new plan til 2025. Instead Georgia Power are knocking on the state regulators door to let it expand generation. They’re now expecting winter demand will grow 17 times faster than their previous plan, and summer use will explode to […]
By Jo Nova
This week the agitprop-media was full of contrived good news about electricity prices in Australia, associated suggestively, in the loosest, most meaningless way with the word “renewables”. Not one of them said that long term prices were still higher than when we started trying to force unreliable wind and solar power on the grid, and not one of them said prices would be one half of the price now if the country was lucky enough to run off brown coal.
These misleading stories were disguised adverts for renewable energy pretending to be “news”. They were on display at The Guardian, The ABC and The Sydney Morning Herald, and every other paper across Australia. Not one journalist apparently had the wit to ask the AEMO how this compared to long term prices. But all of them obediently repeated that prices this December were 48% cheaper than the December before that, as if Australians like to discuss that sort of thing across the BBQ. Were monthly average wholesale prices good for you Jim?
Australia’s wholesale power prices fall by almost half as carbon emissions drop
Wholesale power prices across Australia’s main electricity market almost halved at […]
By Jo Nova
Our cities are more fragile than we imagine
During the winter storm called “Elliott” last Christmas, gas pipes came close to freezing in New York. The gas shortages are not just deadly themselves in cold weather, but more of the electrical network is dependent on gas now rather than coal, and therein lies double jeopardy. As the gas crisis escalated, so did the electrical one: at its worst there were “90,500 megawatts of coincident unplanned generation unit outages, derates and failures… “. This was on top of 37,000 megawatts of generation that was already out of service, so 127 gigawatts in toto*. Some 18% of the normal resources of the Eastern Interconnection was missing.
At 4:25am on Christmas Eve in North Eastern USA the grid frequency fell to 59.936 Hz, just below the trigger point of 59.95 Hz.
If the gas had stopped flowing completely during the big freeze that lasted five days, water pipes would have frozen, and not only would the water stop flowing out of taps, and toilets stop flushing, but pipes would have burst — rendering thousands of apartment blocks and offices unusable, and possibly water damaged too.
Somehow, like a disaster […]
By Jo Nova
Does anyone care? 600 million Africans don’t have electricity
They burn wood for power. Forests are razed and no one even notices. As Geoff Hill says, they warm their homes and cook their food the only way they can — by chopping down forests and converting wood to charcoal, a fuel used by the Greeks and Romans. If they had coal fired power or gas plants they wouldn’t need to cut down 400 year old trees.
An area the size of Switzerland is being denuded every year, 70% of Africa’s forests are gone, but it’s as if the rest of the world barely registers it.
Solar panels don’t work under thick cloud, and can blow away in cyclones, hydro plants won’t work in droughts, but fossil fuel plants survive bad weather. Do the Greens really care about the environment, or the poor — does the ABC, CBC or the BBC?
His advice: don’t let them get away with propaganda that keeps people in poverty
When you see a newspaper article claiming that sandstorms and creeping desert are solely down to climate change, write a letter to the editor – even just a few lines […]
Image by Ritu Rawat
By Jo Nova
It’s just another wake up call in the Green fairy fantasy land
It’s a nice idea to think we can store electricity in liquid fuels and effectively run our planes on wind or solar power, but the numbers are not your friend. The chief of Europe’s second largest airline presumably thought it was time to remind our planetary saviors that aviation really needs Avgas. There is no realistic option to decarbonize flights.
German airline Lufthansa says it would consume half of Germany’s electricity if it were to switch to green fuels
By Prarthana Prakash, Fortune
…while Lufthansa has tried to do its bit to adopt sustainable practices, the company’s chief says that switching the airline to green fuels like e-kerosene could come at a big price—half of Germany’s electricity supply.
“We would need around half of Germany’s electricity to create enough of the fuels,” Lufthansa’s Carsten Spohr said at an aviation conference Monday, Bloomberg reported. He added that while green fuels made using renewable energy sources would help Lufthansa decarbonize its fuel consumption, the […]
By Jo Nova
Don’t mention brown coal?
Last quarter I reported that the Australian Energy Market Operators (AEMO) had strangely “forgotten” to list the brown coal prices in its quarterly report, despite it being the second largest energy source in our national electricity market.
Other quarters, often they would include a graph comparing the average winning bids of all the major fuel types — a graph that surely is essential in these inflationary times where our electricity prices are setting record highs, rising by 25% this month, and we have a national debate on our energy crisis.
In the next quarterly report the AEMO did list the average “winning bids” of brown coal but didn’t do the comparison graph, so I’ve done it for them. If only they had room in their 68 page report and $450 million dollar budget so Australians can see, at a glance, which fuel source provides the cheapest wholesale generation by far, every quarter, all the time?
Despite all the inflation, the war, and the pandemic, brown coal generators are still making electricity for 3c a KWh. Shouldn’t Australians know that?
Click to enlarge (Or download the larger JPG file)
Compare that to […]
By Jo Nova
The land that is the Renewable Crash Test Dummy is holding its breath
This time last year, the Australian energy market turned into a kind of Hunger Games spectacle with daily feeding-fest at dinner time where prices were so burning hot that unhedged smaller retailers begged their own customers to leave them and then the whole market was suspended. The bonfire was so big we’re still paying for it, and retail electricity prices are set to rise another 25% in a few weeks.
So it’s no surprise that as the cold weather arrives downunder, everyone involved in energy is “on edge”. Suddenly Australian corporate leaders are telling it like it is — the Alinta Gas chief says there is just no way we can build enough renewables in time — he can’t even “see a way” of building enough renewables to compensate for the coal units that are being closed.
The man who used to run the Snowy Hydro Scheme agrees (and then some) — saying we need to build a “Snowy” every year, and we are being lied to (his words) and it will take not 8 years, but 80 years to get there. The […]
By Jo Nova
With South Africa only weeks away from the start of winter, the head of the State owned Eskom warns there will be the worst blackouts on record, which is really something because some people are already going 10 – 12 hours a day without electricity at the moment.
The country is allegedly at Stage 6 blackouts with “Stage 8” appearing to be a near certainty (if not there already). But apparently they are making plans to invent a “Stage 16” just in case they need it.
“Luckily” South Africa may meet Climate Goals to cut emissions by 2030, though possibly destroy their civilization in the process.
SA may face power cuts of up to 32 hours, says Eskom
Johannesburg – South Africans should brace themselves for the possibility of being plunged into the worst darkness ever since the start of load shedding, as load shedding up to stage 16, meaning an unspecified 32 hours of power cuts, is anticipated to avert the total collapse of the grid owing to mounting demand.
A document titled “voluntary” NRS048-9 edition 3, which would in unforeseen emergency circumstances allow Eskom to implement drastic load shedding beyond stage […]
By Jo Nova
Welcome to Futility Island
Shut down Australia and save 0.01 degrees.
Australia’s role as the Global Renewables Crash Test Dummy continues.
Having installed more renewables per capita than anywhere on Earth, our PM declared that the decade of doing nothing was over. It was time to crash faster, or something.
So, the revamped Australian carbon tax called the Safeguard Mechanism does everything it isn’t supposed to. Gas and electricity prices will rise, climate targets will be harder to reach, the grid will get more unstable, and investors will run a mile now that new gas fields have to be “net zero” — meaning presumably they will have to buy carbon credits before they sell their first cubic meter of gas. The field of ineptitude even reaches overseas — with less gas for sale — our trading partners will just buy more coal.
Australia will spend even more billions to win a fashion contest at UN dinner parties and cool the world by 0.0 degrees C.
The Australian Electricity market melted down last winter, and stopped trading, because we didn’t have enough gas for the artificial “transition”. Even the hard-left AEMO — our climate activist electricity […]
By Jo Nova
We’ve never had another third quarter this expensive
Despite setting price records — averaging $200/MWh across the whole quarter for the whole five-state National Energy Market, there’s like a cone of silence around the price of brown coal. The ABC is happy to evangelize about 30 minute “renewable energy records”, but they don’t mention that the three-month total system costs went off like a bomb.
Somehow Australia has all that free cheap green power and yet the wholesale costs exploded. The system broke:
No other Q3 has ever been this expensive.
But one unmentionable fuel type was still cheap
The average wholesale price for all generators last quarter was 20 cents a kilowatt hour (or $200 per megawatt hour), but brown coal generators were still able to supply during that same incendiary quarter for just at 4c a KWh. That was the average “winning bid”. So last quarter brown coal was one fifth the price of black coal, and one sixth the price of gas or hydro, and no one is talking about it.
The cheapest prices were from brown coal. (Far right)
Imagine if Australia had a free market in electricity? […]
By Jo Nova
Imagine an energy system so broken that the government forced The People to buy generators that only work (randomly) 30% of the time and told them they would still have to pay the generators even when their product was useless.
Britain wasting ‘millions a day’ in energy as wind farms told to turn off while bills soar
The UK has been squandering an estimated £1billion a year in energy as the National Grid’s infrastructure cannot handle the volumes of clean power currently being produced.
By ANTONY ASHKENAZ, Express
Imagine that the government told The People that this would make their electricity cheaper (and people believed them!).
In the UK people are forced to pay unreliable generators for electricity that comes when no one wants it. No doubt this was built into the contract from the start to stop investors from fleeing for the hills.
Imagine an investment so bad that the seller has to pre-arrange payments for all the times their product is useless or it wouldn’t be worth building in the first place. There’s a message in that. (Don’t build it.)
To put arsenic-icing on this cake, the wind farms that […]
By Jo Nova Ironies don’t get better than this: Thanks to the renewable energy transition, Europe can’t afford to make renewable energy.
When will the message get through that renewable energy is not sustainable?
European photovoltaic plants and battery cell factors are temporarily closing or quitting altogether because of obscenely high electricity prices. When the plants were built they expected to pay €50/MWh, but now they are €300 – 400/MWh. And the situation may last another couple of years, so it’s hard to see how these manufacturers can avoid leaving permanently.
So much for all the solar jobs. Europeans are being reduced to being installers while the production of panels shifts to coal fired China because electricity is so much cheaper. Most of the wind turbine industry has already moved to China.
European solar PV manufacturing at risk from soaring power prices – Rystad By Jules Scully, PV Tech
Around 35GW of PV manufacturing projects in Europe are at risk of being mothballed as elevated power prices damage the continent’s efforts to build a solar supply chain, research from Rystad Energy suggests.
The consultancy noted that the energy-intensive nature of both solar PV and battery cell […]
By Jo Nova
Just to recap: Energy prices are so wildly high in Europe — thanks to a quest to alter the planetary climate — that 70% of fertilizer plants have already shut down, half the aluminum and zinc smelters have closed, and glass-makers and tilers who survived both world wars may go out of business. German homes are reduced to being wood fired (if they can find the firewood). Meanwhile someone very naughty set off explosions on the Nordstream gas pipes from Russia, and since a third of all UK gas comes from an underwater pipe to Norway now suddenly people are very nervous about that. Before most of this unfolded, UK consumer confidence was at minus 44 — the lowest ebb ever recorded since 1974 when people started recording these things. Now it’s even lower (minus 49). As many as one in four people in the UK were saying they won’t heat their homes in winter. It’s the most dramatic fall in European energy since the late Middle Ages. Luckily, at least the UK and Germany both have some old coal plants they haven’t blown up.
To make things more exciting, last week, after the underwater bombs went […]
Looks like a system wide failure
For years the average wholesale price was somewhere between $30 and $60 per megawatt hour for electricity on the Australian national grid. But for the entire 2,184 hours of quarter two this year, we were paying an average price of $264 per megawatt hour. It wasn’t just due to a couple of freakish spikes, instead it was a relentless burning average, like a lava flow arrived at your wallet.
At an average operational demand of 22GW, that’s a hefty $12.7 billion dollar price tag for 91 days of electricity. Last year the same period it cost $4b. Years ago, before we added all the unreliable generators, it would have cost $2 billion.
It would have been cheaper just to build a whole new power plant last year.
The graph below covers the century so far. It is that bad.
It wasn’t that there was a particular time of the day when prices were higher, instead every hour was a bloodbath. It was a phase change. There was no happy hour at this hotel.
And it didn’t matter whether a state was renewable-heaven or a den of black-coal. Prices were shocking in every […]
Just an update on South Africa: Blackouts continue, and the people are not happy:
These are being describes as the worst blackouts since the ANC came into power in 1994.
Residents block roads in Tembisa in South Africa against rising prices, high living costs and water and electricity cuts.#SouthAfrica #Tembisa #Protest #BreakingNews pic.twitter.com/GknLuNtGR8
— We Are Protestors (@WeAreProtestors) July 20, 2022
Some are so desperate for electricity they are rewiring substations and ending up in hospital:
Mini substation blows up in face of man trying to illegally reconnect it
Reeshni Chaslyn Chetty, The South African
A Johannesburg man who tried to illegally reconnect electricity faced injuries after he allegedly opened an electricity substation and it blew up in his face.
The spokesperson revealed that there is a ‘serious problem’ of vandalism of infrastructure in the City. This includes incidents where residents attempt to illegally operate the electricity network – they are often aided by unqualified electricians and try to reconnect or make illegal connections.
We hope he is OK.
These are eight hour regular rolling blackouts. People have Apps on the phone to tell them when their next blackout starts. People […]
Last month UK Ministers were warned that six million households could enjoy blackouts for dinner this winter. To try to stave off disaster, the UK Business Secretary has already written to the owners of the last three remaining coal fired power plants to ask them to stay running through winter. This is despite them being set to close in September.
Given the dire shortage of cheap energy, another plan is to pay British households up to £6 for each kilowatt-hour they don’t use at peak time. While a normal kilowatt-hour would cost 28p, the blistering premium price shows how desperate the National Grid planners must be. The last thing they want is everyone to come home, turn on the oven and washing machine and plug in their scooters and EV’s at 6pm.
So now possibly in a grand experiment, as well as trying to control the weather with windmills, millions of families may try to reschedule body clocks somehow, eating later, doing laundry later, watching the melatonin-destroying blue-screens-of-insomnia after 10pm and running the drier while they sleep. Maybe it won’t be so bad, or maybe people will be more sleep deprived and less productive, fatter, or crash their cars on […]
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.
Chris Bowen isn’t having any of Uhlmann’s ‘wind doesn’t always blow’ rhetoric.
“the rain doesn’t always fall either, but we manage to store the water – we can store the renewable energy if we have the investment”#auspol pic.twitter.com/LjJkEr3zJy
— Squizz (@SquizzSTK) June 16, 2022
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 […]
The Renewable Crash Test Dummies: Test in progress
A LaTrobe Valley Coal Plant
Day #3: Huge Yallourn coal plant in Victoria loses 2 of 4 turbines. The AEMO suspends the whole market. Blackout warnings continue. Australians are being asked to conserve electricity. It’s just another day in the forced transition we don’t have to have.
How much lower can we go? Half of the generators from the ultra cheap brown coal Yallourn plant went phht yesterday. This was “unplanned”. It normally makes 20% of Victoria’s electricity. It’s owned by EnergyAustralia (China Light and Power) which is keen to close it early in 2028 and has a special secret deal with the Victorian government to do so. Perhaps China Light and Power is scrimping on those maintenance costs?
Warnings about potential blackouts exist for all five states on the National grid during the next 48 hours. The Minister for Energy, and the head of the AEMO, and several state Ministers have asked Australians to turn off all the non-essential electrical items. The NSW Minister asked people not to use their dishwasher tonight. Go first world modern nation! Meanwhile Matt Canavan wonders why people can’t use their dishwashers but the […]
And the bonfire continues
As cold fronts sweep across the south east of Australia electricity prices are setting records nobody wants to set. The wholesale prices for electricity –across a whole month — soared past $300 a megawatt hour in three states of Australia. In NSW the cumulative cost of wholesale electricity for May alone worked out at $2.4 billion dollars. It’s enough to build a power plant. Back in 2015, before Hazelwood old brown coal plant closed and Australia installed more renewable energy per capita than anywhere else on the planet, the average price in NSW was $35/MWh. Back then it cost $260 million for the whole month. (And Hazelwood wasn’t even in NSW. ) The point is not about one coal plant, but about how recently the system still worked and how fast it fell apart. Hazelwood coal plant in 2017 was 53 years old and still selling electricity at $30 per megawatt hour when it was shut down. Since then the whole grid has so much more capacity yet so much less ability. There’s no resilience left. A few speed bumps wiped out the whole road train.
Wholesale electricity prices are higher across the […]
It’s a grid on the edge
Like a meteor-shower, the dinner time performance today may or may not be a spectator event. The fun may start at 4:30pm in Qld, NSW, Vic, SA and Tasmania — a full quinfecta at $15,000 per MW/h. The first wave of winter cold is about to wash over the grid, and those solar panels will fail just as people plug in their heaters, ovens, dryers and kettles and there is a four hour spike at $15,000MWh forecast. The graph below is the forecast for NSW, but it is essentially the same tsunami shape and dimension in every single state of the National Energy Market. Right now I presume there are engineers in the control rooms sweating over alternatives and they may well pull it off. These wildly high spikes have a way of resolving at the last minute. But think for a moment what kind of stakes we’re playing with. Hypothetically, if there was a 12,000MW demand for 4 hours in NSW at $15,000, that’s $720 million dollars worth of electricity. A few days like that would pay for a new coal plant, but no one seems to be listening to that price signal…
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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