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Ladies and Gentlemen, Australia is now romping in as Star-Crash-Test-Dummy in the renewables stake.
Proportionally, we have more uncontrolled solar roof top generators than any other nation. We’re in uncharted territory: about 20% of houses in Hawaii and California have Solar PV, but in Western Australia, it’s 25%. In Queensland it’s 30% and throughout Australia we are adding 100MW a month and it’s like a whole new coal fired station every year (except it doesn’t work most of the time).
Strap yourself in! This is more useless infrastructure than anywhere else on planet Earth. The only time solar PV panels provide something we might need is at afternoon tea time in summer when airconditioners are on. So for three quarters of the year they provide electricity when we don’t need it, and for three quarters of every day they don’t even work. The rest of the time they burn capital, increase the blackout and fire risk and sit there collecting dust and hail stones.
Electricity at the wrong time is not just wasted, it’s a burden
Too much electricity bumps up the grid frequency and voltage, potentially damaging equipment and risking blackouts. Obviously we have to “manage” this flood of […]
By Jo Nova
South Australia survived the big scary sunny day yesterday, but had to shut off solar power and throw all those sacred green electrons into a thousand open circuits.
Yet again, another spooky voltage spike appeared, suddenly leaping from 245 to 257 volts in less than three minutes and shaking down any impertinent solar panels. That was at 10am. From then on, despite the growing sunlight, the combined solar output of South Australia stayed flat at around 1.2GW. Compare this to last week — before the safety cord to Victoria broke — then, solar generation was peaking at 2.1 GW. So the great renewable wonderland is managing to keep the lights on, but nearly a billion watts of solar power is sitting uselessly on rooftops and in fields every sunny day at lunch time.
This is not the cheap and efficient golden path to the future, but the Bolshevik elephant that eats your retirement plans. Despite the oversupply of unreliable generation, yesterday the state was using fossil fuels to supply between 20% and 80% of their electricity.
Mark Jessop recorded the voltage and commented: “Lovely sunny day here in islanded SA, which of course means @SAPowerNetworks has bumped […]
by Jo Nova
With all the calm language of a paid ad agency, the ABC is breathless because an esoteric measure called “minimum operational demand” has hit a record or two. This glorious moment may have only lasted 30 minutes, and it isn’t actually a useful thing, but it’s a “record”.
In fact, “minimum operational demand” is a grid management headache, not a badge of honor. It’s the midday moment when solar panels all work — and it’s becoming such a problem that two states in Australia have said all new solar panels need “smart” controllers so that the guys in the central control rooms can turn the darn things off. That’s how good it is.
Renewable energy records tumble around the country as rooftop solar power soars
by ABC Energy Propaganda Reporter, Daniel Mercer
Soaring power production from households and businesses with rooftop solar panels has sent records tumbling across Australia as output from fossil fuels falls to all-time lows.
The record so-called minimum operational demand excludes the power generated by consumers with their own solar panels, which met 92 per cent of South Australia’s overall needs at one point on October 17.
[…]
As Paul McArdle of WattClarity says: “the NEM* is becoming increasingly dependent on the weather“
Saturday week ago in Queensland was cold enough to break records. Brisbane “only” made it up to 17.9C (64F). It hasn’t been that cold there in May for 40 years. At the same time a band of cloud covered the populated slice of the state.
The cloud cover meant all the large solar “farms” in Queensland — with a total rated capacity of 1.7GW — produced only 79MW as an aggregate average daily output.
Sunshine State forgets its own branding on Saturday 23rd May 2020
Averaged across the 24 hours in the day yesterday, average aggregate output across all of the Large Solar plant in QLD was a very meagre 79MW only:
1a) Dividing this by an aggregate 1,664MW installed capacity* across the Large Solar plant in QLD this represents a capacity factor the day of just 4.7%
Not surprisingly the same clouds that ruined the large solar farms also wrecked the rooftop solar.
One in three homes in Queensland have solar panels. With 1.8GW of theoretical capacity, rooftop solar is Queenslands largest generator (except it hardly ever […]
Welcome to the new complexified energy grid where a cloud can cause a system black event — knocking out power for as much as nine hours. This affected the hospital for 30 minutes and the prolonged problems caused many businesses and supermarkets to close. Alice Springs is an island microgrid servicing about 29,000 people in the centre of Australia. It was 38 degrees C yesterday when the power went out. Shame about those fridges and air conditioning units.
Alice Springs is a mini version of larger grids showing how fragile these new complicated systems of multiple generators based on weather events and batteries can be.
Looks modern, sometimes has electricity too. Alice Springs | Photo by Stefano, Wikimedia.
Yesterday: Thousands impacted by Alice Springs power blackout*
Steve Vivian, ABC News
Thousands of residents in Central Australia went without power yesterday afternoon, with some experiencing blackout conditions for up to nine hours.
Electricity was cut across the Alice Springs region around 2:30pm yesterday and was not restored in some areas until 10:47pm.
Today: Inquiry called, and explanations garbled — NT Chief Minister announces review
NT Chief Minister Michael Gunner told ABC Darwin […]
Solar installations are rapidly accelerating in Australia, surging in the last quarter by an extraordinary 482MW. This is partly due to rapidly rising electricity costs, but in the last quarter, especially amplified by an extra $2250 subsidy in Victoria which adds to current subsidies like the SRES (RET) which already cover around half the cost of installation.
This is obviously a market destroying practice but will be hailed as evidence that solar power is “surging” due to “falling prices” and “increasing demand”. More fake news.
In the land of the Renewable-Crash-Test-Dummy we’re hitting the death spiral. Every installation costs non-solar owners more (with the tally at $200pa and rising fast) and there are fewer non-solar owners left to pay. Obviously, the whole market has to be changed to ensure that solar owners pay a fair share of networking and backup costs.
If solar power was cheap, useful or competitive, it wouldn’t need the subsidies. Instead, the nation keeps adding more useless infrastructure and wondering why the price of electricity is rising.
Solar panel installations, Australia, Graph.
Data: Australian PV Institute
The tally of solar stupidity
Solar is inefficient, wilderness destroying, money-hungry, useless, grid wrecking equipment
Without subsidies the German […]
Panels are going in everywhere in Perth.
In Western Australia the uptake of solar panels has rocketed as electricity prices leaped — there’s a slow motion solar train-wreck underway. Solar PV panels are now on more than one in four houses and growing at a phenomenal rate.
The South West Grid is small, with around one million customers and a daily peak of around 2 – 3,000 MW. But the solar generation now totals as much as 1,000MW, and is growing at blistering 180MW a year. Already, there are times solar can be the largest “single” source on this grid, and the AEMO has no control over it, which is why emergency notices are being issued more and more. The AEMO suggests the answer is more batteries, but we are still subsiding the installation of these unnecessary panels making the problem worse, and electricity prices are forecast to rise another 7% this year. As readers TomOMason and TonyfromOz say, so much for cheap solar — watch out: “Batteries Not Included”. The hidden costs get you every time, and the cost of the impact on the rest of the grid is only becoming known as we do this live experiment.
[…]
A little too much solar success perhaps?
Solar panels in Queensland and NSW in Australia have been providing some householders with energy in a more concentrated form than they bargained for. At least 70 houses with rooftop solar panel arrays have had solar driven burnouts. The fire risk means that nearly 30,000 faulty solar power isolators have been recalled. The company that imported them went bust on Friday. (Ain’t that the way?)
Remember if your house burns down, it is the price we pay to save the planet. It will, unfortunately, blow your personal carbon footprint through the roof. (A point that will, no doubt, grieve you as you sift through the smouldering ruins.)
8.6 out of 10 based on 102 ratings […]
This is Fall of Rome type stuff — everything is coming undone
National rolling blackouts have been occurring for days in South Africa and are forecast to continue for another week at least. One engineer warns they are just a step away from a total blackout and says it will be very difficult to reawaken the entire system. Traffic lights are failing, trains are stopping, and mobiles phones, ATMs and fuel pumps may not work. With unemployment at a shocking 35% already, the million dollar losses from blackouts make for a dark feedback loop.
The immediate cause is strikes for wage claims and terrible maintenance leading to major power outages lasting as long as nine hours. But Green targets and activism only makes it worse because there’s no interest in maintaining plants properly which are planned for closure. South Africa runs mostly on old coal plants, and one of the largest plants is closing (supposedly) as soon as September. And the wind and solar power they have often isn’t helping with the peak loads either.
There is vandalism from every direction. At the bottom end, apparently up to half the people in Soweto are not even paying for electricity […]
Watch this space. The Western Australian election is four weeks off and the new young Liberal (“Conservative”) opposition leader has just made this a “climate change” election and launched himself to the left of the Labor Party by suggesting the state can close all government run coal plants by 2025.
Epic loss coming. The opposition leader may even lose his own seat (Dawesville, in Mandurah, held by only 0.8%). The National Party and minor conservative parties could do well from the aftermath.
Aiming for political correctness in a politically incorrect state?
WA political landscape turned on its head as Liberals outline renewable energy policy
[ABC News] One major party is making the case that renewables are the way of the future, the other is warning they will cripple jobs and send power prices skyrocketing. …it is politics as usual in Australia for the past decade. Except in this case, it is the WA Liberal Party calling for coal to be tossed aside and wind and solar to take its place, with Labor blasting the idea as “reckless”.
The Liberal Party were on a hiding to nothing before this announcement. The local Labor Premier hit 90% […]
Western Australia is a giant experiment: Even the Energy Experts are saying solar is jeopardizing the grid — it’s “dumb”
Watch this space — blackout coming, 3 years and counting…
The Western Australian grid is a separate island from the rest of the nation. It’s roughly a 2.5 GW system for 2.5 million people. WA is getting into trouble faster than nearly anywhere else. Solar PV is now up to …. something larger than 850MW (which is the size of the coal fired generator). The ABC doesn’t tell us what the real figure is (according to the AEMO it’s around 1300MW, and growing at 120MW a year). There are no interconnectors to rescue WA, just the taxpayer or hapless electricity consumer.
Unreliable solar is now the largest single generator in the Western Australian grid. It’s not only bad because there are no other states to dump the excess energy on, or to save the state, but despite the vast size nearly everyone lives within 100 kms (60 miles). So when the sun peaks for one it nearly peaks for all. When the clouds roll over, especially when those nice north-south aligned fronts roll in, it covers most of the […]
How to make electricity more expensive: build 1,000MW of random generation which needs expensive back up and an undersea cable too.
Tom Quirk and Paul Miskelly noticed that the team selling the new “largest wind farm in the Southern Hemisphere” on Robbins Island are claiming it will help stabilize the supply of intermittent power in Australia. Instead it’s likely to do the opposite. This is the same 1GW wind farm that even Bob Brown, former Greens leader, doesn’t want. An eagle-chopping eyesore.
UPC Renewables are claiming the correlation between the Tasmanian Robbins Island output is “very low” compared to the wind farms in Victoria. It would be nice if only it were true. Instead they apparently got their r mixed up with their r2 — and incorrectly claim the correlation is low when actually its dangerously high. I say “dangerous” because it’s a danger to the NEM — the national grid. The last thing we need is 1,000MW of useless extra energy that arrives when all the other useless energy arrives — exacerbating the ups and downs — driving the efficient baseload providers out of business even faster, and leaving the nation with an expensive headache and sitting on a […]
Venezuela has 31 million people and has had almost no electricity for six days. There are estimates on Twitter (#sinluz) suggesting that about half is back up as I write, but the stories of chaos, death and disaster are surely just starting to come out as communication lines open. The water coming out of taps is black, possibly contaminated with oil (are those shots fake?), the Pepsi plant was stripped bare, see the video. People are desperate: Shop owners are apparently shooting looters. At least one tweeter claims people are eating zoo animals. One baker took his own life after his shop was overrun and everything was stolen. It may not be over yet either — the grid recovered almost as far a few days ago, then collapsed again. Indeed, today explosions have been reported at an electrical substation at La Tiama, as well as other substations. What a debacle, a disaster. Babies in hospitals are being ventilated by hand. Many life support systems are off.
Netblocks tracks connectivity in Venezuala, which seems to be a reasonable proxy for power, and clearly electricity is being rebuilt partially, then collapsing again.
Update: 119 hours after the onset of nationwide […]
Australians are the Renewable crash Test Dummies
As I said for free and two months before the ANU, with a 50% annual growth in renewables, Australia is ramping up unreliable power faster than anywhere.
Now comes a paper: Australia: the renewable energy superstar showing that, per capita, Australia is installing unreliable generators in a blitzkrieg pace, more than twice as fast as Germany is, and 4-5 times faster per capita than the EU, USA, Japan and China. No other dummies are even in the race. The largest coal exporter in the world is working harder than anyone to destroy its largest export earner — which would be noble if only there was more to it than being a magical spell to ward off storms.
This is a legendary paper and very helpful. Save the link, copy the reference, send it to your MP, your friends, your newspaper! Why not head to the launch at ANU at 5:30pm, 14th Feb?
Never again can anyone get away with national flagellation for “not doing enough”. Henceforth Green and Labor M.P.’s will stop calling us a national joke, a pariah, and a disgrace. (Though, actually, all those things are true, for the opposite […]
Green genius: Pay $1400 a year to not stop any storms
Finally some veteran engineers checked the Labor Party 50% renewable plan and the AEMO “65% scenarios”. Unlike others, their study that did not involve magical assumptions that the cost of renewables would dramatically fall. Instead they used “actual costs” and found the price of electricity will rise “84%” and cheap coal power will be forced out of business (just like what we also found here). The engineers include Barry Murphy, former managing director and chairman of Caltex. Robert Barr, an electrical engineer and academic at University of Wollongong. If only Kevin Rudd had asked them in 2007.
Engineers warn of bill shock under green energy surge
Adam Creighton, Economics Editor, The Australian
Electricity bills will soar and gas and coal-fired power stations will close if the share of wind and solar generation increases dramatically, engineers have warned after analysing the nation’s energy supply.
It found bills were likely to soar 84 per cent, or about $1400 a year, for the typical household, if wind and solar power supplied 55 per cent of the national electricity market.
A quarter of Australian rooftops have solar, […]
Crash Test Dummy Update: Data analysis thanks to Tom Quirk
In the South Australian experiment total wind power capacity is now far above the average state demand most hours of the day. This effectively destroys any economic case for cheap baseload power (I hear that was the aim). This fleet of unreliable generators is being supported by forced subsidies through power bills from all around Australia. Sadly, despite this rain of money falling in SA, those funds end up with renewable investors, not South Australian consumers who pay some of the highest rates in the world.
These legislated subsidies have fed so much wind power that sometimes the state produces more power than it can use. That excess power will be exported, but may or may not be actually useful at whatever time it happens. Unless it happens at peak-time, it will be eating into the efficiency of baseload providers in other states. Like an infection, inefficiency and underutilization of infrastructure spreads…
This volatility appears to make freak wholesale price spikes more likely. Quirk calculates that one hot January day last year was so wildly expensive in South Australia it added $2/MWh to the entire years average wholesale cost. Can’t […]
The Renewables Lobby subsidy and handouts are still growing. In 2018, Australia must get 16% of all our electricity from “renewables”, up from 14.2% last year.
That’s 28,000 Gigawatt hours of magical green electrons from generators that give us nice weather as opposed to generators that cause droughts, floods, cyclones and spread crocodiles, dengue fever, cause wars and change butterflies.
Welcome to modern Australia where our grid is designed by witchcraft, run by superstition, and panders to every whim of the Giant Renewables Industry Lobby.
The noose tightens in Australia.
Renewables must supply 16% of our electricity in 2018, and even more in 2019.
Source: 2001-2030 Annual Targets and renewable power percentages, Clean Energy Regulator.
Prices are rising too: Could there be a connection here?
Even the ABC now says “Something has gone terribly wrong with our electricity prices”. Prices went off the ranch from 2007, rising much faster than the CPI. This is also the point Australia started ramping up the intermittent renewables. Before that the Snowy Hydro Scheme –the only reliable and cost effective form of renewable power — had been operating for decades. Correlation is […]
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