South Australia heads back 100 years to diesel (with battery back up)

The new SA rescue plan is more diesel than battery

Diesel’s prototype engine circa 1892.

A big fuss was made today over the world record battery, but the diesel generators put on a hire-purchase plan three days ago are more than twice the power:

The world’s biggest lithium ion battery has been launched in South Australia, with Premier Jay Weatherill declaring it an example of SA “leading the world”.

The first diesel generator was patented in 1892. Go, Go, SA.

A battery bandaid arrived barely in the nick of time:

That reliability was tested before the battery’s official launch when it began dispatching around 59 megawatts into the state’s electricity network on Thursday afternoon as the state hit temperatures above 30C.

How fragile is this system?

The facility has the capacity to power 30,000 homes for up to an hour in the event of a severe blackout but is more likely to be called into action to even out electricity supplies at less critical times.

There are 673,540 households in South Australia and the Big Battery can supply 4% of them for an hour with electricity, or all of the state for a […]

December 2nd, 2017 | Tags: , , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Greens, the baseload deniers, want $2.2b for bandaid batteries to keep junk renewables alive

The Greens are now asking for another $2.2billion to pay for the battery bandaid to fix a problem they and the leeching renewables industry created.

Adam Bandt is out today with the big new plan, apparently confused about what “load” means:

We don’t have a baseload problem, we have a peak load problem,” Mr Bandt said.

No matter how you look at this, it’s not a “load” problem. It’s an issue of supply.

We can count on the Greens to pour confusion on any problem:

“We need flexible generation and energy storage to manage the transition, not more coal.”

Four mistakes in one sentence. We have flexible generation – more than enough to cope with the current load curve. What we need is affordable electricity, which we used to have, and which coal supplies. What we don’t need is energy storage to manage an irrelevant transition that we never had to have in the first place. Let me say it again, electricity generators are for generating electricity, not for magical attempts to control the climate.

What Adam Bandt was trying to say:

“We The freeloading renewables industry needs flexible generation and energy storage to […]

October 5th, 2017 | Tags: , , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Battery powered SA, could be 100% renewable for just $60 – $90 billion

South Australia (SA) is planning to build a new gas fossil fuel plant for $550 million because it has too much competitive and “cost efficient” free energy. There are fears this will not only push up electricity prices in the state but in Victoria, NSW and Tasmania too. (Bravo, SA). In order to build a new fossil fuel plant with Greens permission they spend $360m on the new gas plant, and then offered $150m more to appease the angry renewables spirits. It is said to be needed to encourage investment. Obviously no sane investor would spend money on renewables for purely economic reasons.

Meanwhile Elon Musk offered to fix the states problems in just 100 days or “it’s free” and with only $33million for a 100MWh battery farm. The offer has triggered a bun fight between Musk and local companies who say they can do even better.

But in the long run, SA wants to go “100% renewable”. Below Paul Miskelly and Tom Quirk calculate that for SA to truly do that, it would need about 270GWh of batteries to cover the peak use. This would require 7.5 million tonnes of lead acid batteries and cost 60 – 90 billion […]

March 14th, 2017 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming, Renewable | Print This Post Print This Post | |
 
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