By Jo Nova
It’s grand final day in Australia, and awkwardly the State of Victoria risks a grid overload. A truckload of solar power will arrive at lunchtime that no one needs, and which has no place to go.
The largest single generator in Australia now is rooftop solar and it’s virtually uncontrollable. The geniuses running the national grid have subsidized solar panels and made electricity unaffordable at the same time, thus driving more householders into the arms of the solar industry.
So they’ve created an artificial market bubble — as all good communists do. We now have a 20 gigawatt capacity generator that mostly can’t be turned off, except by clouds or possibly Chinese cyberwarfare.
And where autumn and spring used to be the easy seasons, now Sunny spring days are diabolical too — hardly anyone needs their air conditioner or their heater at lunchtime, but solar watts are pouring in.
This was the situation yesterday in Victoria:
Again, the poor sods who built solar industrial parks (marked in red) have to curtail their production massively from 8am to 5pm. The red curve is supposed to look like the yellow curve. The missing red peak is wasted solar production.
As the yellow uncontrollable peak rises towards the black line (the total demand), the whole grid has a problem — more reliable cheap generators have to shut down to prevent the toxic excess electricity building up. Without the reliable generators, with their 500 ton turbines spinning at 3,000 revolutions per minute, (or 3,600 in the USA) the grid loses frequency stability, and spinning inertia, and the ability to cope when a cloud rolls over. The problem of excess solar at lunch time is also called The Duck Curve and has been known for years. It’s not like this snuck up and surprised anyone, yet here we are — courting disaster.
The ABC reported on this, but can’t bring itself to call this what is is — a “Solar Glut” dumped on the grid. Instead rooftop solar is a “juggernaut” and the grid faces a “low demand warning”, as if you personally are the problem, for not using enough electrons. Don’t blame the artificial pointless bubble of solar panels.
Rooftop solar ‘juggernaut’ risks grid overload as AEMO issues first-ever low-demand warning
by Daniel Mercer, ABC
Rooftop solar output has reached such enormous levels that authorities have begun issuing warnings about their ability to keep the electricity system from being overloaded at times.
In an extraordinary first this week, the body that runs Australia’s biggest energy market said the supply of solar power in Victoria threatened to overwhelm demand for electricity from the grid amid mild, sunny conditions.
It said Friday’s oversupply of solar was so acute that demand for power from the grid would fall below a threshold critical for keeping the electricity system on an even keel.
Even the AEMO (the Australian Energy Market Operator) calls it a minimum system load notice – not a solar surge, or a renewable overload.
And despite the toxic excess of solar panels, and that we’ve known this day would come, in true Soviet fashion, we’re still installing as many as we can (see below). The trainwreck continues.
The relentless rise of solar PV in Australia.
That would stop dead in its tracks if householders had to pay fair costs for the frequency stability, the back up power, and the storage.
The solution, according to government experts, is not to have a real market and accurate prices, it’s to give more powers to some bureaucrats so they can order battery owners to discharge before lunch and be ready to soak up the dangerous excess at midday. The battery owners don’t like that, but like an anaconda, the government gradually tightens its grip until the free market is dead. The other “solution” is to add controllers to home solar panels so the government can switch them off (which is starting to happen in South Australia and Western Australia). Solar panels owners don’t like that either, but they were sold rainbows and fairy cakes that no one could deliver.
The communist quislings complain that the market is failing us and needs more governance. But the truth is, the overlords destroyed the free market long ago. The people want reliable electricity, and if they were allowed to choose reliable power over renewable energy, the problem would solve itself.
Meanwhile, grid managers surely pray for cloudy days. Soon, some bright spark is going to suggest cloud seeding for grid stability.
Wonderful situation brought about by never, never thinking ahead.
Force electricity costs up, and then find that people are choosing a cheaper way. Next step is to get them to instal batteries Oops! have to dump the electricity to make room for even more “renewables”.
The only “good solution” is a blackout and Moonshine Bowen getting retirement. Preferably with quite a few public “servants”.
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I’m looking forward to major grid collapse.
It’s the only way politicians and the Sheeple will wake up to this anti-science and anti-engineering madness.
Why keep postponing the inevitable?
Grid collapse will eventually occur anyway. It’s better sooner rather than later.
At the next election ditch the Lib/Lab/Green Uniparty and vote for conservative-oriented parties such as:
United Australia Party
Libertarian Party
One Nation
210
Good idea but who will the “experts” blame for such a failure? It will be the old coal plants or some such distraction otherwise they will have to admit they were wrong and that will never happen. The left and its acolytes always blame someone else.
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Blame? More sacrificial altars to the sun god, old Sol has a hearty appetite (cough!), okay, the sun’s representatives and spokespersons and lawyers and faithful servants have hearty appetites.
If you can’t stand the heat,
get off the rooftop –
especially at midday.
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I’ve been voting One Nation since 96 (when available). Forgive me but I’m losing hope anyone else will.
I like to complain Australians are brain dead, but I don’t think that’s correct, they just lack a sense of inquiry, apart for where the next freebie comes from.
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The three small conservative parties need to work together to form a credible opposition to Labor, not to mention the lefty heavy Liberals. I like each of them but ‘ get your act together’.
30
Reliable, dispatchable power, or, unreliable non-dispatchable power.
Pick one. You cannot have both.
The maximum penetration of unreliable power into a grid is the reserve generation in the dispatchable grid, or roughly the capacity factor of the non dispatchable power generator.
The physics cannot be cheated. The economics can only be cheated until the pollies run out of taxpayer money.
I’m stunned at the idiocy of the general population. Any thinking person can see that their costs are greater with W/S nonsense. Perhaps after the economy and grid and society crashes, a realization will occur.
10
And the Chicomms are laughing all the way to the bank and world domination due to a massively weakened West.
120
Why not turn on the water heaters during the day instead of using the off peak power at night?
Or… Why not run the desal plant for 4 hours a day, when the sun shines, (oh), that’s right, it was sold to the public as a ruinable powered site but can’t actually be run that way.
Or… Why not FORCE business to install large water storage tanks for the provision of heat or cooling which could be piped around and used during the peak times.
Or… FORCE all solar panel owners to USE grid supplied power during the peak to make sure that they PAY for the large/corporate solar farms which must be losing a fortune at present. We have to keep those union superannuation funds buoyant.
Or… Do what is happening at present. AEMO is hoping that it all just fixes itself. Wait till more ruinables come on line. How many more panels, without control, can the grid sustain, 5%, 10%, or shall we talk in terms of when? This spring, next spring, 5 years?
Bowen has a plan, but you may not like it.
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My system already diverts solar to the water heater rather than the grid but when the water is hot it can’t be made hotter. I’m not buying a battery either. Maybe I could pump water up a high hill and turn off my pressure pump. Back in the day when common sense prevailed we didn’t need to do any of these things and we bought our electricity for 10 cents a kWh.
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Or why not walk away from all UN treaties and stop funding anti-Australian organisations starting with the UN but including their ABC, the BoM and the CSIRO.
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Some good ideas Ian all centered around using excess power when available.
Hey, how about duplicating the snowy mountains scheme and pushing water uphill when the sun shines? I wonder why no sane person has ever thought of that.
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Usually an easy way to increase demand for something is to lower the price. .
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Dear Jo,
This is so beautifully written. In my opinion never has such a Portent of Doom on this subject been so neatly, graphically and concisely delivered.
The fall out of the increase in potential and out of control frequency variations in the grid will be a disaster that will be difficult to recover from. Burnt out motors, exploding capacitors, loss of transformers; a ‘Solar Glut’ does not just mean you may lose your frozen piece of wedding cake and have to replace your fridge. We are racing towards a known tragedy. A solar installer explained it to me over ten years ago. He was watching his competitors add solar installations in the street raising back to grid voltages to enable their customer to compete with neighbours in producing power for maximum rebates. ‘Greed may be Good’ in Wall Street, not so good when the primary function of a utility is to supply dependable power with defined limits for the quality of the supply.
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W & S are obviously an unreliable toxic mess and we should be stopping any further installations ASAP.
We need more reliable base-load energy only and as soon as possible and hopefully an education program to allow the average Aussie to understand, before it’s too late.
And stop voting for Labor, Greens and Teals loonies and insist we again have grid stability and reliable affordable energy.
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If only these was an affordable , non flammable Australian made battery everyone could afford, we could wave goodbye to the grid.
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Just noticed an ad for Pickles auctions who are auctioning off solar panel manufacturing equipment and it looks like it’s everything needed .
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I don’t think there is any battery technology that is cheap enough to be able to economically store sufficient power nor enough rooftop space for enough solar panels to generate enough power to supply a typical household in winter in Australia for extended periods of no sun in winter.
Unless of course we revert to a Neolithic standard of living which is the ultimate plan of the Left for non-Elites.
Of course, solar energy from the past has already been stored for us in the form of coal. That’s ready and available to go right now! If only we were allowed to use it…
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That is where you will end up if you do not take control of your own energy needs. Howard started the rot with the “Renewable Energy Act” in 2000. I have been predicting the grid demise for more than a decade and every year the picture gets clearer.
Australia is probably the only country on Earth that can run a modern household on solar/battery for an acceptable cost. And a house using solar/battery will always be lower cost energy than a grid using solar/battery plus transmission.
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What about high-rise apartments etc?
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Like everything in shared living, it can only be done through the body corporate. Install a battery and as many solar panels as can be fitted in favoiurable locations. Only use grid power when it costs nothing through the middle of the day.
Rppftop solar is displacing other WDGs. So there will always be negative prices until the mandated theft is stopped. Wholesale price has been negative from 7am today.
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Make it a rule that non-dispatchable power, of any kind, is not allowed to feed into the grid.
That weasel Howard, fake conservative, first allowed that. (No offence intended to the weasel community.)
If someone owns rooftop solar, it must be used for personal consumption only and must not be allowed to contaminate the grid. A household should have two separate completely independent circuits, one for appliances fed by their own solar/battery system, and another for grid-fed appliances. Or if they have a big enough system, they can disconnect from the grid altogether.
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Too much practicality there David. Too much……common sense, which ain’t that common.
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Perhaps we should consider a duplicate grid system- one system using only dispatchable power and the other a mixed system. No cross-subsidies permitted.
How long would the unreliable system remain in service?
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The economics of the Snowy 2 project is based entirely on soaking up intermittent generation. So there will never be a rule to prevent non-dispatchable power from being connected while this project continues.
There is a massive amount of transmission infrastructure being planned or in construction:
https://www.webuildvalue.com/en/infrastructure/australias-energy-system-trasmission-lines.html
The EnergyCopnnect project is a 900km transmission line with a cost of $2.4bn. So the 10,000km will cost around $30bn. That is all justified on intermittent sources of generation.
Everyone with rooftop solar will be considering a battery. Gradually these households will move off-grid. That means all these new costs for the transmission, storage and stability control will fall onto a diminishing consumer base.
No one pushing NetZero understands how grids evolved from local generators to townships to regional coal mines. I have a friend who delivered coal in a truck to the Richmond power station in the 1970s. Yallourne started production in 1924. So 100 years ago this year.
The reason for the existing grid was to get power from the energy source (coalfields) into population centres. Transmitting electricity is far less messy than transporting coal. Any each stage of development,ent, there were massive benefits of scale.
We are now using a ubiquitous source of energy in a system that evolved to benefit from scale and the source of concentrated energy in coal fields or hydro in mountains.. It is a dumb idea and any sensible person can see that. Solar or wind do not benefit from scale. These sources of energy are not compatible with a grid.
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I hope that we can go dully off grid soon, as the mess they have made of it so far can only get worse.
EVERY single time gummint tries to run something they balls it up.
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Depends. The government actually ran a gird that provided the cheapest electricity in the world for many years. Until, the government went mad.
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The state grids ran pretty well, even after they were “privatised”.
But it *has* been downhill ever since NEM, AEMO, etc.
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Nope. The lowest costs were achieved after the State monopolies were eliminated and the grid was operated as a free market.
https://electricitywizard.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/consumer-retail-price-changes.png
The monopoly was eliminated in the early 1990s and NEMMCO formed in 1996. The lowest prices were achieved in the late 1990s before Howard introduced the “renewable energy theft”. RET scheme in 2000. The first wind farm connected ion 1998. So that is when the grid was destined to collapse. The only way to get more of them was to mandate theft from consumers, which was what was done.
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A lot of people will be getting cardio in Melbourne when the grid goes down.
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‘Toxic Solar Electricity Production’ is a very good description of the problem. People and, eventually, politicians will only wake up to it when there are some overwhelming failures on the grid and prices become unsustainable for industry and ordinary people. As we saw with the ‘Covid’ Affaire, it takes a lot of pain to remove the blinkers from the propagandised eyes.
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That’s why the idiots want to produce hydrogen using the “excess” intermittent electricity.
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Love how they use new terms “ minimum system load notice” – overload. Controlled outages is the other one- which are just blackouts.
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As we can’t absorb any more solar panels, what happens to the $1,000,000,000 of our hard-earned taxes that the Government allocated to solar panel manufacturing in Australia?
More sacrifice to one of the green gods Helios?
https://arena.gov.au/news/1-billion-boost-for-australian-solar-pv-manufacturing/
And obviously it’s not thought through. How could Australian manufacturing of any kind compete with the Chicomms?
It’s a total waste of money which could have been used for something useful like paying down the $1,970,000,000,000 federal+state+local government debt.
http://australiandebtclock.com.au/
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In fact it was the Howard government that enshrined the theft from poor consumers to help fund rooftop solar for the not so poor. Notably the theft from poor consumers to pay for rooftop solar is now much less than the theft that gets paid to the grid scale solar and wind owners.
The Australian grid has been in terminal decline since the first WDGs were allowed to connect on highly favourable terms – without guarantees on dispatch. The final phase of decline is now apparent with rooftop exporters being charged for the privilege to export lunchtime power. That encourages them to install batteries. So far there are 220,000 household/business batteries and it is the fastest growing segment of the electricity market. Many households will realise they do not need the grid. That will leave the ever increasing cost of the grid to be carried by the poor consumers who do not own a roof.
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I own a roof, but not the towering trees that shade the roof after 12pm. I asked Crown Lands to cut a few of them down. Absolutely not of course is the reply.
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You may be interested in this article:
https://renew.org.au/sanctuary-magazine/in-focus/right-to-light-solar-access-and-the-law/
My neighbour has listed tress and has limits on what he can do with them. Anything done has to be carried out by an authorised aborist. I paid for a large branch to be removed by his arborist because it was a structural hazard for my house and also blocking sunlight. My neighbour agreed to me keeping the wood, which took the following winter to burn. The tree is a very large swamp gum. The arborist said the removing the branch improved the balance on the tree and the wind torquing would be reduced significantly.
It is interesting that in the recent gales last month, my neighbour lost one of the massive ghost gums in his yard. THe base was not much under 1m thick. Small branches impacted on his garage but no structural damage..
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Yes, even I bought solar panels a year ago, calculating they’d pay for themselves over 4 years, even if power prices didn’t continue to escalate. And I haven’t so far had to pay a single cent on each monthly power bill, so I’m on track.
But isn’t the “duck curve” just the daily demand curve?
Isn’t it just the case that the duck is developing an extremely fat back?
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I second Broadie’s comment, ‘this is so beautifully written’ and its a scoop.
The managers may be given some respite now that La Nina is coming, with an increase in cloudy days.
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No sympathy from me.
They have been given a free pass on so many things.
We paid for the wires and poles.
They only work during the day.
Some days they hardly work at all.
They have smoko breaks whenever the sun isn’t shining.
They can’t give us a warning when they’re going to have a smoko break.
And they expect to be paid for this?
If a business owner had a worker like this he would be kicked to the footpath.
The grid is a mess. I agree with early commenters that a grid collapse of some form appears to be the only thing that will make the idiots in charge wake up.
Curtail the unreliable madness. We need reliable power 24/7. Renewables don’t cut it.
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I’m just looking forward to the day when we will have spent a bazillion trillion dollars on our unreliable and overcomplicated network, and the fat heads who will have enabled this fiasco shrug and concede that “Well f**K, we should have gone Nuclear after all.”
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We should stick to that coal right beneath our feet after all. The rest of the world with its massive population can go nuclear. I’m not scared of nuclear but if I’m living in the woods full of trees, I’m burning a fire to keep warm, not a high-tech expensive contraption.
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I went up to the Stete forest to collect wood a couple of weeks back. Huge number of trees down in the Neerim area. Piles of wood for the side of roads for locals to collect for a couple of years.
If it is not collected and put to good use now, it will fuel the next wild fire.
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This was all explained to me probably 15 years ago, when I was stating “Australia should roll out solar on every roof top’. Someone replied to such a post – it was probably twitter or Facebook in very early days – explaining the flaws in my plan: potential overload of an uncontrolled supply and the poor subsidizing the wealthy to reduce their electricity bills.
Made perfect sense to me and I changed my tune. Not hard. And I’m only average intelligence, so I’m not sure why it takes others so long to work it out. I would suggest they are only average intelligence too but are not exposed to the explanation. People are stuck on the “the sun is there we may as well use it” explanation, like a needle on a scratched record
Already I am reading knee jerk responses to this news of solar overload, people suggesting roll out of batteries (subsidized by magic government money of course) on every house which takes up the overload, and simply supplies your house with “free” electricity at night. Simple!
I notice that John Codagan (?) is shilling house batteries these days. Got to make a buck off those Youtube videos. But he is all in on the co2 scare is our John, and likes calling you a “mouth-breather’ if you challenge him.
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I initially loved watching Codagans videos.
I gave up because he has a terrible habit of taking 10 minutes or more to say what could be said in 1 minute.
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I have always thought generating electricity closer to home is a good option. Year ago I installed a 4.4 KW solar system which powers my cottage during the day and exports enough to the grid to cover line charge costs i.e. no power bill effectively. I few months ago I was offered a $3000 battery system which ended up costing $3800 for a bollard and travel. Now my battery charges within a few hours and has kept me 95% self sufficient whilst exporting energy to the grid. My behavior has improved in terms of not wasting electricity at night. Vacuuming and washing are done on sunny/windy days. Cooking is bought forward from the evening so my battery is preserved. I estimate the battery system will pay for itself in 4-5 years. My feed in tariff is 20c Kwh with AGl, and my grid source costs 35c Kwh. I notice the solar battery charges immediately there is excess solar available. A better program might offer an incentive to charge closer to midday, given the system has access to meteorological data. The company installing the battery system wanted me to shell out for a $5K system. The larger system would allow more use of electricity e.g. air conditioning but my 1872 cottage has been habitable for 152 years without it!
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My logic and experience are similar.
My other considerations were that the grid was only going to become less reliable and power was only going to get more expensive.
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Yes. If you are using a source of energy that is much the same everywhere then there is little value in having a grid that was designed to deliver electricity from coalfields to your urban house.
The other thing off course is to just leave the grid. While you have an account, they will find ways to separate you from your money.
If you live in a temperate zone then winter will be the toughest time for the power supply. So its makes sense to have panels set up to make the most of winter.
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All good stuff but really only implementable by a very small subset of the consumer base.
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Labor has the answer! More people! We used to laugh at the cat chasing its tail but not so funny now that the tail is chasing the cat to bight its bum off. Bowen won’t have a bar of it he’ll just keep on importing RTS and windmills from China.
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… communist quisling governance is a proven failure and we need a market that won’t fail.
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In a country that loves its “BIG” attraction by major highways as per:
https://bigthingsofaustralia.com/the-big-prawn/
surely the answer is simple.
In each State a giant resistor needs to be installed in a strategic location to maximise the dissipation of useless and possibly damaging power generation.
The tourism potential would be enormous, especially if they glowed in the dark. It would be Bowen’s greatest legacy.
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A giant flywheel might be more useful … but the resistor will be cheaper.
We could pump water uphill and watch it flow down again … how about installing another 100 fountains in Lake Burley Griffin and then switch on as many as necessary?
Consider the idea of an aluminium smelter designed to only run a few hours per day.
Bitcoin mining?!?
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