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By Jo Nova
Finally, twenty years too late, Australian leaders are talking about the galactic cost of making a spare energy grid that might, maybe, hopefully one day reduce world temperatures by one thousandth of a degree. Sadly they are still not talking about why that’s a pointless quest, why CO2 feeds the poor, warmth is good, humans emissions are irrelevant, or how science has become a turgid swamp patrolled by dead sacred cows. But it’s a start!
We got the trifecta: Our car-crash energy bills, the revolution of common sense in the US, and the appearance of our own election on the horizon have set off the Air-raid sirens to wake a sleeping nation.
It’s only half a trillion dollars
The Minister for Energy says the cost of renewables by 2050 will be $122 billion (AUD). Not convinced, the Opposition commissioned a study that estimates it’s more like $650 billion. But what’s a half a trillion dollars when you have hope, faith, and a fantasy to make storms a bit nicer? It’s a horror show. The Labor Government wants every family of four to spend something like $100,000 on their wind and solar vision over the next 25 […]
Broken Hill Solar Plant | Photo by Jeremy Buckingham
By Jo Nova
The lights went out in Broken Hill. A storm blew seven transmission towers over disconnecting the area from the national grid on October 17th. About 19,000 people live there, and with a 200MW wind plant, a 53MW solar array and a big battery, plus diesel generators it was assumed they’d be OK for a while without the connection to the big baseload plants, but instead it’s been a debacle. They’ve had nearly a week of blackouts with intermittent bursts of power, barely long enough to charge the phone.
The fridges in the pharmacies failed, so all medications had to be destroyed and emergency replacements sent in. Schools have been closed. Freezers of meat are long gone… Emergency trucks are bringing in food finally and hopefully the schools will reopen today. But the full reconnection will not happen until November 6th.
Western NSW blackout ‘a green power warning’
By Joanna Panagopououlos and Alexi Demetriadi, The Australian
Mayor Tom Kennedy said state and federal governments “needed to learn” from the experience, and how wind and solar energy are “almost useless” in a crisis without […]
By Jo Nova Banker warfare to destroy businesses but make the weather nicer…
It’s another emergency on the Australian Soviet-style electricity grid. An entirely profitable and law abiding operation is potentially about to be shut down, putting 4% of the national electricity supply at risk, because the bankers want to save the world, and the government is helping them. Who runs the country, is it the PM or the banker cartel?
Delta Electricity needs a bank guarantee so it can keep trading in our national electricity market, but 15 banks have refused to supply that because of their own show-pony ESG requirements, designed to impress their ski buddies at Davos. Essentially, the bankers want to decarbonize our electricity grid, and make electricity more expensive for the poor, but can’t be bothered to run for election, so they are running the country the way they want anyhow — voters be damned.
It’s even more absurd that it looks, Delta isn’t asking for a loan — it’s profitable, it has the cash. But the bankers won’t even hold the cash and promise to pay it back when needed. Delta’s current bank guarantee runs out on Dec 31, and after that it […]
By Jo Nova
It wasn’t supposed to be this cold and windless in Australia
For some reason that no climate model can explain, Australia has run out of wind power three months in a row, which means we had to use more gas than expected. It’s also been colder than climate models predicted, despite global emissions being higher than ever in history. For some other reason that no rational adult can explain, the State of Victoria banned gas drilling for most of the last decade (to reduce the beachy-weather days in eighty years) and thus, as night follows day, the state is running out of gas. Ergo, predictably, it is also facing blackouts, cost blowouts and manufacturers dependent on gas are warning they may have to close down, or move to the US, where gas is still cheap.
If only the climate models could predict temperatures and wind even a month in advance?
The AEMO (our electricity grid manager) says Victoria will run out of gas before winter runs out of bite. Apparently Victorians are pulling twice as much gas out of their main storage as they can afford to at the moment. Not only does Victoria need the […]
By Jo Nova
The Renewable Crash Test Dummy hits a fork in the road
Finally the Australian opposition is bravely popping the sacred cow of the Energy Wars. The Dummy nation was aiming for the holy grail “low emission” grid that no other nation had tried. The driest continent on Earth, with small hydro, and no extension cords to any nuclear power, were going to build the perfect grid based on the wind and sun alone. It was always doomed to fail, it was just a question of how much money would be burned at the pyre before the Crash Test Dummy crashed.
Because they didn’t do their homework, and the fan-media didn’t ask them to, the Labor Party set themselves up to fail. They left their left flank wide open, and the Opposition is finally launching the missiles that have been there all along in the mist. The ultimate low-emissions generator was always and obviously the unspeakable nuclear power. It’s a fifty year old technology. If anyone actually cared about carbon dioxide, they would have done this instead of the Kyoto scheme in 1997. But it was all a theater of grift and graft for unreliable, fairy energy, […]
They’re not much use without a lot of cabling. | Image by Norbert Pietsch from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Thanks to Oldbrew at Tallblokes Talkshop
Who knew high voltage cables running for kilometers in a deep electrolytic moving body of water would be expensive?
The 245kV Wolfe Island Cable | Photo by Z22
Despite offshore windfarms dealing in a kind of mechanical hell of high speed salt water spray, big waves and volatile wind conditions, surprisingly 85% of the insurance claims are because the underwater cables are failing.* If the subsea cables can’t be insured, it’s another unexpected cost threatening the economics of offshore wind.
The underwater cables needed for offshore wind are apparently so costly to repair, and the losses from lack of generation so steep, they are in danger of becoming uninsurable.
Subsea cable failures pose global threat to offshore wind
Energy News Live
The race to harness offshore wind energy has hit a significant roadblock, with the reliability of subsea cables emerging as a critical concern.
Global Underwater Hub (GUH) has raised alarm bells about the escalating issue of subsea cable failures.
October 6th, 2023 | Tags: Basslink, Subsea Cables, Wind Power | Category: Global Warming, Grids, Renewable, Wind Power |  Print This Post | |
By Jo Nova
We’re on the precipice of a radical experiment with a national electricity grid
The AEMO (manager of the Australian grid) has finally released the major report on problems coming in the next ten years on our national grid, and it’s worse than they thought even six months ago. They euphemistically refer to the coming “reliability gaps”. They could have said “blackouts” instead, but a gap in reliability sounds so much nicer.
Bizarrely, the lead graph of the 175 page AEMO report goes right off the scale, mysteriously peaking in the unknown and invisible real estate off the top of the chart. And they’re not projecting troubles fifty years from now. Those cropped peaks of invisible pain hit from 2027.
And even the pain we can see is apparently quite bad. Two states are already likely to breach “the interim reliability measure” in this coming summer. Ominously, just one day after releasing the report, the AEMO is calling for tenders for “reliability reserves” in South Australia and Victoria. Apparently, they want offers of industries ready to shut down who aren’t already on the list, and they want spare generation too — get this — even asking […]
By Jo Nova
A “win” for predatory capitalism and government mis-interference
Liddell power station (foreground). Bayswater power station (rear).Photo NSW DPI
Yesterday, for the last time the final turbine was switched off at Liddell Coal plant after 52 years of operation. The NSW government gave it away for free in 2014 — bundled like a McHappy Meal in with the sale of Bayswater Coal, valued at $0. Governments saw old coal as worthless, at least until 2017 when everyone saw the bloodbath when the Hazelwood coal plant suddenly closed and electricity prices suddenly rose 85%. Then they started to panic a little — even Malcolm Turnbull (our Renewables lovin’ PM) started openly pressuring AGL to sell Liddell so it could keep running until his pet project the Snowy Hydro 2.0 could start. Chinese owned Alinta turned up with $250 million dollars and was willing to put in a billion to repair the station and extend its life up to 2030. Despite that bonanza, AGL refused to take the money. It was determined to run it into the ground and shut it down instead. Now it’s determined to blow it up as well. The Demolition crew is already appointed […]
By Jo Nova
Wade Allison has done a short but devastating analysis for the GWPF. The take home message is that the energy contained in the wind is diabolically more erratic than most people realize. It’s just basic physics and almost no one in politics seems able to comprehend just how impossible these numbers are. If only they would “follow the science” eh?
Thanks to Paul Homewood at Notalotofpeopleknowthat.
The exponential death of affordable electricity
It’s just physics. The power of the blowing wind increases by the speed of those particles cubed which produces a twin engineering nightmare. If the wind doubles in speed, the energy goes up by a factor of 8 (or 2 × 2 × 2, and we need to spell it out), and if it slows by half, the energy drops eight-fold. It’s bad both ways. At high speeds, the mechanical engineers have to turn off the turbines to protect them, and at low speeds the electrical engineers have to ramp up power stations that may not exist, or pray to Gaia for batteries that will never exist.
Allison has a graph showing the total output of all the wind turbines in the UK and Europe […]
A sign in Rockhampton. Where do they mention the fine though? | Photo by RegionalQueenslander
By Jo Nova
Block a sacred weather-changing EV from a charging point and you may have to sell your car
Feel the fear. The whole EV fantasy is coming undone as people miss planes, get stuck in cars, or ruin holidays because their battery is flat. There aren’t enough chargers, and charging is slow. In abject desperation, some Australian states are slapping monster fines on to make inadequate infrastructure stretch further, or because they realize how vulnerable they are to a protest campaign. Either that or they are actually trying to finance the transition to NetZero through parking fines. Call it a secret subsidy…
Victorians may be hit with a $370 fine if they drive a normal car and accidentally park it in an EV charging spot, thus depriving a sacred EV user of the chance to top up. You might think that’s wildly out of proportion — it’s only $100 less than if you recklessly run a red light. But it’s nothing compared to what NSW, Queensland and the ACT are doing. Drivers in these states who make the same mistake could […]
By Jo Nova
Last winter’s debacle in Australia could be repeated this year, but at even higher prices.
Despite adding more cheap renewables per person than nearly anywhere on Earth, for some inexplicable reason our retail electricity prices rose 18% last year and are set to rise another 20 to 30% this winter.
Last year was a bloodbath on the wholesale electricity market. Those costs have fed through to retail.
AER Australian wholesale electricity prices.
The Energy Minister Chris Bowen blames the Russians, and says we need more renewables.
Shock power bill jump to hammer households
Perry Williams, The Australian
Power bills for households will soar by hundreds of dollars a year from July 1, adding to soaring cost of living pressures as the regulator blamed supply challenges and volatility for the steep cost hit.
Customers in Victoria face a 30 per cent jump on ‘safety net’ prices while households in NSW, South Australia and southeast Queensland will see bills soar by up to 24 per cent.
The Victorian ruling by the Essential Services Commission estimates power costs will jump by $426 for residential customers to $1829 […]
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
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 […]
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 […]
So it’s a new record. In the 20 years since the National Energy Market formed it has never operated on such a vapor thin margin. Only a few days ago Paul McArdle at WattClarity thought a mere 15% instantaneous reserve plant margin was a headline event, but tonight the grid survived (so far) on a tiny 3% Instantaneous Reserve Plant Margin NEM-wide. Things were so tight the NSW Minister for Energy sought emergency powers to force coal companies to provide fuel to coal generators for the next 30 days on his say so. Presumably next on his list would be emergency powers from God to make the wind blow.
Two years ago Australian taxpayers spend $13 billion a year in climate action (Moran). As researchers at ANU noted, Australia was leading the way — installing more megawatts per person than any other nation on Earth. (Blakers) Despite being the fastest growing and sparsest population, on the most remote nation which was practically a quarry and farm built on coal and uranium deposits, Australian political leaders rushed to compete for green booby prizes in Beautiful Weather Contests.
And the toll from the bonfire in prices is just starting with Iron […]
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 […]
All the rules are breaking.
The price market broke on Sunday night and now the interconnectors rules are broken too. The whole Eastern five state “National” grid is flying seat of the pants — the reserves are so incredibly thin that there are LOR3 forecasts — meaning Lack Of Reserve Level 3 rolled out for all five states. It doesn’t mean blackouts will happen, but it means all the protective layers of this onion are gone. The system is running bare.
UPDATE: There were some blackouts in Sydney’s northern suburbs last night. “Millions of homes” were apparently told to conserve their power in Brisbane and Sydney. Welcome to RenewableWorld!
ht/ WattsUp, Eric Worrall, and RicDre
The price market broke on Sunday night when for the first time the AEMO imposed somewhat anachronistic price setting clauses it had never used. By fixing the wholesale price in Queensland, market bidding suddenly phase-changed into a twilight world where prices were set too low (at an obscenely high $300/MWh, but not high enough now), and generators didn’t want to bid. So offers to supply “Yo-Yo’d” and the AEMO had to run emergency orders of a different kind to […]
The Queensland grid is in crisis — the forecast price for nearly the entire next 24 hours is $15,000 per megawatt hour.
I have never seen a graph like this one. It’s a “white knuckle ride” as Paul McArdle describes it. The IRPM (or Instantaneous Reserve Plant Margin) is just 8%. “This shows total Available Generation of 31,679MW ready to supply aggregate ‘Market Demand’ of of 29,201MW at this point … so a surplus of only 2,478MW NEM-wide.” But only last week there was a record day where the grid demand was 32,000MW — the highest winter demand day for years.
AEMO
Reserves are incredibly thin, not just in Queensland, but also in NSW.
AEMO
Market Notices from the AEMO are flowing like confetti. There is an Actual Lack of Reserve Level 2 (LOR2) in Queensland as of 6pm to 8pm. There is an LOR2 running for NSW as well, and an LOR1 for Victoria. If things shift up to LOR3 that means blackouts are likely, and LOR3s are forecast — in QLD tonight and in NSW tomorrow night. The margins are thinner than they look. Because extra generation on one part of the grid may […]
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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