By Jo Nova
Shh. The Renewable Crash Test Dummy Nation is at work.
We’re still subsidizing new solar panels even as we figure out how to shut down the excess panels we already have.
The body responsible for keeping the lights on in Australia’s biggest electricity grids wants emergency powers to switch off or throttle rooftop solar in every state to help cope with the daily flood of output from millions of systems.
It turns out those negative prices for electricity at midday are there for a reason. A firehose of electricity at lunchtime isn’t always a good thing. Negative prices not a bargain, they’re the penalty a seller has to pay to get someone to take the toxic waste away, and the price signal was saying “Don’t Add More Solar”.
The amazing thing is that an institution with fifteen years of grid management didn’t see this coming fifteen years ago. Does night follow day? Is there any industry that runs better for only four hours a day than for 24?
The AEMO surely knew that without a Sea-of-Galilee type miracle in battery storage, the whole nation could not run on lunchtime generators. The AEMO also surely knew that our 50Hz stability comes from 500 ton turbines that spin 3,000 times a minute, and not from flat glass panels that make the wrong kind of electricity (the DC kind, not the AC). Yet here we are, 60 quarterly reports later, swamped with excess solar power to the point where we suddenly need to add remote switches to four million already-installed solar panels, so the guys in the the control rooms can stop them doing the one thing they are supposed to do at the time of day when they are best at doing it.
The disaster days are now Spring — when the sun is shining but people don’t need their air conditioners on, which begs the question of whether we just need to issue emergency announcements to turn on the dishwashers, pool pumps and ovens to save the grid. You know, “Pyrolytic Ovens save the day, people”.
In any case, wasn’t climate change going to turn spring into summer? Won’t this problem solve itself as spring disappears and long hot summers take over the calendar? No one seems to saying that now…
Solar is pushing out the “other” forms of generation that are keeping the grid stable
AEMO said the ever growing output from solar was posing an increasing threat to the safety and security of the grid because it was pushing out all other forms of generation that were needed to help keep the system stable.
But isn’t the whole point of solar exactly that? Aren’t we supposed to drive out the other sorts of generation because they cause storms and floods and they start wars, kill koalas, and makes babies premature. Are all these things OK now?
Did we say “desperate”?
The AEMO admits what many suspect they are already doing, rather brutally sending voltage spikes down the line to trip out the solar panels:
And it warned that unless it had the power to reduce — or curtail — the amount of rooftop solar times, more drastic and damaging measures would need to be taken.
These could include increasing the voltage levels in parts of the poles-and-wires network to “deliberately” trip or curtail small-scale solar in some areas.
They’re hinting these voltage spikes might damage some delicate equipment. Would you like a big blackout or a small capital loss?
An even more dramatic step would be to “shed” or dump parts of the poles-and-wires network feeding big amounts of excess solar into the grid.
“If sufficient backstop capability is not available … the NEM may be operating insecure for extended periods,” the agency wrote in the report.
The Bureaucrats that wrote this hope you don’t understand it:
“(It may) therefore be operating outside of the risk tolerances specified in the National Electricity Rules, where the loss of a single transmission or generation element may lead to reliance on emergency control schemes to prevent system collapse.
But there it is. They’re talking about “system collapse”.
As it is, new solar panels already have to have the remote control switch built in in WA, SA, Victoria and parts of Queensland. Yesterday was the day when the AEMO announced we needed to do this in every state, and “by next year”.
Just four weeks away…
I think we’ve got to the stage with the whole climate change energy transition process that people are starting to wake up. They’re realising, rather slowly I might add, that the promises and benefits of the energy transition are both lies and invisible. They’ve noticed lots of the countryside being uglified by wind turbines and solar industrial sites. Everyone’s energy bills just keep going up and they cant afford them. EV’s are cute and really sexy, but there’s seems to be a lot of fires associated with them. Bits of wind turbines have been reported in farmers paddocks situating wind turbines. The feed in tariffs for all those smug people who installed solar panels are reducing and may in fact disappear. But worst of all the power supply dependability appears worse. So, the people are curious now. What is all that climate change science anyway? Is it legit? It seems a whole lot more people are realising now that the science is not settled, not even close. That maybe all the bushfires and storms we experience, may in fact be just a normal part of the Australian climate anyway. In order to persuade the remaindery of the population who either dont have the time to learn about climatology or aren’t interested, we need that system breakdown. We need either Melbourne or Sydney to go dark and it needs to be sooner rather than later.
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“The feed in tariffs for all those smug people who installed solar panels are reducing and may in fact disappear.”
I’m just waiting for the announcement that solar owners will be charged to supply the grid, kind of like a permanent negative pricing.
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We need Canberra to go dark FIRST.
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Hmm, controlled demolition, now where have I heard that before…
The high priests of Hokum,
in the state of Ignoramustan,
hath spoken.
Shall I bring gifts of candles and boxes of matches when I visit in a couple of weeks? And maybe a head-torch or two, with extra AA batteries, just in case…
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The lunacy of this situation is that the government, egged on by the climate alarmist community, have literally forced people to take up the massive volumes of subsidised rooftop solar to avoid paying the prohibitive costs of their government mandated “green energy” grid, causing the problem we now face. And people are still adding more and more governmnet subsidised solar, even as we speak, to avoid the ever spiraling energy prices. We all know the grid will collapse, we just don’t know the exact time and date, but it’s getting closer.
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In the ABC article I posted yesterday (embedded in a tweet) they made some stunning admissions. One subheading was “the physics problem”. These are the people who tell us they trust “The Science”. Shame they don’t know any.
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As I mentioned in an earlier comment, the power industry certainly saw it coming. But AEMO, etc are simpatico with the ideologues in the parliament houses and the lobby groups. They aren’t interested in listening to the cautions of those who actually know how the electricity network works.
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This latest power debacle is clearly just a microcosm of how our country has been and is managed.
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So, at midday, to save the grid from its managers, we the public need to go put a roast in the oven, put the washing on, iron all your clothes, vacuum the house and the car, vacuum the pool etc.
Do we have the technology, yes we do.
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AND while you are doing all your domestics you can spare a thought for your roof solar panels that the power company you are paying, at an ever increasing price, for the electricity to do your chores has turned off so that they don’t have to take it or pay you. The exact same electricity that you, as a community minded person, set up because they told you it would go some way to saving the world.
The same community mindedness that expected you to roll up your sleeve to protect your community even if it made YOU sick. But, as we all know, the negative claims were all just mis/dis information. Weren’t they?
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“The amazing thing is that an institution with fifteen years of grid management didn’t see this coming fifteen years ago.” – Jo Nova, 2024.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair, 1934.
90 years of progress!
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Just build an entirely new network based on DC. From scratch.
But why not pump the water uphill in Snowy II with all that extra free energy?
Nothing in this new Chinese view of the future for Australia seems to work, except that we are told to keep our coal in the ground for when they run out.
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A DC grid won’t solve the issues, and it would bankrupt the nation.
LVDC has high resistive losses and requires massive cabling. You’d have to restring the entire grid.
HVDC is about USD 1 M / kV and requires a minimum of 2 and max of 5 substations. Approaching 2.5 Billion USD.
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I doubt if we need worry in the UK about solar panels causing our national grid to collapse. We probably don’t get enough sun for that to be much of a risk. Wind farms are another matter and if the British government carries on its mad pursuit of Net Zero it is difficult to see how the national grid can continue to function as it ought to.
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Just after I posted the comment above about British wind farms I came across this article at the Daily Sceptic website.
Cost of Switching Off U.K. Wind Farms on Windy Days Hits “Absurd” £1 Billion
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/12/02/cost-of-switching-off-u-k-wind-farms-on-windy-days-hits-absurd-1-billion/
I wondeer if “free energy” from the wind will bankrupt the British economy? Ed Miliband will certainly go down in history.
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Full steam ahead with the big corporate multinationals installing solar factories on good agricultural land. Their feed in tariffs appear to be untouchable. The plebs with panels on their roofs are now cannon fodder when ideology meets engineering reality.
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No solar panels on my joint.
I have a question though regarding the voltage spikes.
Could these voltage spikes be high enough to damage my fridge, freezer, computer etc.?
If true, who will pay for repairs/replacement of my equipment?
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Bad choice of emotive terms there.
It wouldn’t be a “spike” at all but rather a voltage increase to a steady state.
A “spike” *should* be handled well by most modern electronics in any case, but if you wanted a reason to buy a UPS…
Or buy a power logger/harmonic analyser, so you have proof of voltage-anomaly caused damage.
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Educating the dumb folk:
https://va.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_snn67hpxvp1uo7oqq.mp4
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Why are the ONLY alternatives to oil, gas, coal, peat, wood are Chinese made Windmills and Solar Panels? And the Chinese are now past 40% of all fossil fuel use.
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Good one, he really paid out on ‘unreliables’.
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cross posted at ClimateGates
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I recommend that anyone with solar panels buy a LiFePO battery big enough to run their fridge 24/7 with a dedicated fridge circuit. You don’t need to spend a fortune on a micro grid (~1kW) but it might be worth looking at a 3kW system as the future is bleak until we build some small gas-fired units outside cities and a pipeline from the north. Pretty soon we’re going to see another coal unit break-down and then the grid will be permanently unstable to the point of scheduled regional power outages. That’s sort-of okay in winter but in summer your food will warm up. They will also be routinely charging you for your solar contribution to the grid as well as the AEMO routinely reaching into your Smart Meter and blocking your roof-top electron generator in much the same way that they tweak big coal units from the central control desk of the East Coast grid.
Adapt or suffer.
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“The AEMO surely knew that without a Sea-of-Galilee type miracle in battery storage, the whole nation could not run on lunchtime generators.”
Sea-of-Galilee type miracles seem to be a common feature of these “Green Energy” schemes. In New York state in the US, they have a name for this miracle, DEFR (Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resources). They have no idea how to create one, but they know they really need them to make their scheme work.
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No mention of daylight savings in this discussion. When daylight savings kicks in, sunset happens an hour later, so maximum heat and maximum sunshine should also happen an hour later. Therefore if all maximum rooftop solar electricity, occurs at midday, when daylight savings kicks in, maximum sunlight occurs at 1pm and maximum electricity generated should also to 1pm. Perhaps daylight savings should be extended to two hours.
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https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/solar-power-can-t-provide-stability-to-australia-s-energy-system/ar-AA1v9hJl?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=257d09af770
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What you are seeing is the result of Politicians mandating a solution without listening to the Electrical Power Engineers.
The “Original Grid and Generation” was designed to provide electricity from generating plant to consumer in a single direction, with no generators of the secondary distribution bus, always flowing toward a lower voltage.
Your “New Grid and Generation” has “distributed generators”, ie. Wind and Solar, backfeeding the distribution bus and causing voltages downstream to be higher than upstream. This presents a huge stability and control problem.
An “old grid” can tolerate some 15% of distributed load side generation ( W/S), and maybe up to about 30% of grid capacity as an upper limit. But go beyond that, and lots of strange things happen.
Add to this, that there are a variety of inverter based distributed generators (W/S) out there. Some have fixed reactive power capability, some have variable capability, some can be remotely controlled, and some not. All of them want to deliver power into the grid. Fine if all the power is consumed on the secondary distribution system because it is local. But once they start back feeding into the primary distribution or secondary transmission portions of the grid, it creates havoc at the thermal generating plants. You’ve got 10,000 ants trying to randomly overpower the elephants.
I can provide some links to various articles on the control system issues and opinions on answers, and would be pleased to do so, but all of them have their own slant on the technology. Suffice to say they all believe it can be solved, with “enough” programming, controllers, internet connectivity, money, testing, etc. But what that means is that any glitch in the internet means the entire grid crashes because the control systems are so delicately balanced they can’t survive any interruption.
Your ‘old grid’ did very well, for over a century, without all of this gilding. You can have reliability, stability, cost effectiveness, OR, you can have unreliability, instability and increasing costs by trying to overcomplicate what works with what is theoretically possible but as yet unproven.
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