Electricity: price and reliability of supply

Smurf1976 said:

I'm assuming typical "as done in practice" equipment.

So that's looking at sub-critical through to ultra supercritical coal versus internal combustion and open cycle gas turbines fired using diesel.

Obviously there's a difference between a 40 year old OCGT versus a brand new USC coal plant but comparing similar eras and approaches (cost versus technical aspects etc) there's not a lot of difference.

If you get 150 diesel generators (internal combustion) and put them into base load operation then the efficiency averages about 35% in practice on an HHV and sent out basis. Been there, tried that in Tas last Autumn.

That's pretty close to the real world efficiency of coal fired plant in service in Australia and indeed most countries except those where it's either all new (China most obviously) or they're broke and running antiques.

The only real outliers would be things like a liquid fuelled CCGT or a massive scale diesel IC engine, both of which can achieve efficiency over 50% quite easily. There aren't many actually doing that for power generation however so that's not the technical approach I've assumed to be used.

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So they don't use gas turbine diesels in the field? No CCGTs?

Tisme said:

So they don't use gas turbine diesels in the field? No CCGTs?

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Plenty of OCGT's firing with diesel, kero or other flammable liquids (a few have even done it with fuel oil although you need some pretty decent filters for the fuel to avoid problems hence most stick to refined fuels and avoid residuals).

For CCGT it can be done but there are issues with any non-gas fuel and its potential to soot up the HRSG (Heat Recovery Steam Generator) such that the majority of CCGT plants either fire gas only or use a bypass stack, which turns them into an OCGT with no heat recovery and a one third loss of efficiency, if they do need to fire liquid fuel in an emergency situation.

As with all this stuff there are exceptions, liquid fuelled CCGT has certainly been done, but it's not without risks and technical hassles hence only a few have gone down that track (and then only because firing with gas or building a coal / nuclear / hydro plant wasn't a feasible alternative).

Here in Tas we've got 4 OCGT's (with 7 actual gas turbines since 3 of them are twin turbine units) and all are set up to fire either gas or diesel as needed. But for the CCGT it's gas only, no backup via diesel fuel, for the reasons I've mentioned.

Elsewhere in Australia CCGT generally is gas only. OCGT may or may not be dual fuel depending on how worried about reliability the owners are. Some OCGT is liquid fuel only, some is gas only, some is set up for both.

So Fizzer has summoned the energy retailers to Canberra to sort out why we have the highest of bills in the world LOL

Of course Malcolm has a track record of sorting things out ...doesn't he, it's just that I can't think of anything that comes to mind at the moment.

<keating> "was a bit like a big red bunger on cracker night"



</keating>

Tisme said:

https://media.giphy.com/media/3ohzgSc09zmHqDX4k0/giphy.gif

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Tell it to the retards in the LNP.

SirRumpole said:

Tell it to the retards in the LNP.

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All the pollies in this country a f cukin retards only interested in lining their own sticking rich pockets.

I like the latest add for the NBN you have to change over lol fascists.

crackajack said:

I like the latest add for the NBN you have to change over lol fascists.

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Australia was once a great country about 50 years ago, now its just another money grabbing venture for the rich.

SirRumpole said:

Tell it to the retards in the LNP.

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I apologise to those with an intellectual disability. It's not their fault. The politicians are just greedy ideologically obsessed myopic idiots.

crackajack said:

Australia was once a great country about 50 years ago, now its just another money grabbing venture for the rich.

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"Young Country Nation Building" swapped for "Every man for himself"

Just another excuse for power companies to put up fixed charges as consumers get more efficient in reducing their usage charges ?

Solar panels innovation gives round-the-clock power without pricey battery storage

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-06/big-data-devices-get-more-free-energy-from-sun/8774584

Tisme said:

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Smurf politely points out that Qld had the second lowest price increase of the NEM states this year.

Tasmania had the lowest price rise of any NEM state, indeed prices for some customer classes have actually been reduced (and that's a real, actual price reduction in nominal terms).

In this whole saga SA and Vic are the leaders, NSW comes next, Qld is trailing behind and Tas went along with it just enough to avoid being smacked too hard by the feds and then went back the other way when nobody who matters was looking.

There was a bit of desperation from the other states via the feds a couple of years ago to the the whole privatisation thing pushed through here in Tas and also Qld. Anyone with a shred of industry knowledge knew we were heading for trouble and it's more than a tad embarrassing for the pro-privatisation crowd that the states who went down that track most aggressively and rapidly are the ones with the biggest problems now.

I'm not ideologically opposed to private ownership though as I've said many times. Get AGL, Engie, Origin, Alinta and others all in the same room and get them to work co-operatively and the problems are fixable. It's the nonsense of all working against each other, maximising profit through maximising revenue rather than minimising cost, which is messing it all up in every way - economic, engineering and environment are all suffering. It's all based on an economic theory which works fine where you have a storable and/or differentiated product but which fails when applied to different parts of an integrated system which necessarily work together.

We've got a couple of private wind farm developments going ahead down here in Tas and they're being developed on that sort of model. https://www.hydro.com.au/about-us/news/2017-06/progress-granville-harbour-wind-farm-proposal

Australia has its own unique set of challenges in order to really reach a world class energy management scenario....but given the opportunity, at present with renewable energy resources....why can't we be the leader?

CanOz said:

Australia has its own unique set of challenges in order to really reach a world class energy management scenario....but given the opportunity, at present with renewable energy resources....why can't we be the leader?

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Because politicians leave it to business to invest in a small market in a very large country. Big risks for business which they don't want to take unless they get government guarantees, and some politicians are so ideologically obsessed with market philosophy that they don't see that sometimes socialist ideas like a State owned energy system is the best solution for our circumstances.

CanOz said:

Australia has its own unique set of challenges in order to really reach a world class energy management scenario....but given the opportunity, at present with renewable energy resources....why can't we be the leader?

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We were leaders historically.

Plenty of world firsts achieved in Tas and in the Snowy scheme which have stood the test of time.

NT was an early adopter of combined cycle plant long before it became fashionable. They had it up and running in Darwin back in 1986.

WA gained international attention for the speed at which they moved away from heavy reliance on oil to minimal reliance following the 1970's oil shocks. They'd actually done it whilst others were still pondering how to go about it. And nobody could dispute the incredible flexibility they achieved at Kwinana, the second largest power station ever built in WA and at one point the largest, with the ability to run 3 fuels all at once if the need arose.

Queensland and NSW had the most fuel efficient fleet of coal-fired generation in the world.

Victoria was pretty much the global expert at using truly crap coal indeed someone in the US did actually build a Loy Yang clone since nobody else had a better design.

SA weren't so known for engineering but achieved something close to a miracle at keeping costs down despite having every possible natural factor against them. Crap coal in the middle of nowhere, extreme temperature variations, no hydro resources and a state that's sparsely populated apart from Adelaide itself but they still did it cheaper than most and blackouts weren't common back then either.

So we were leaders on the technical side and also the third cheapest in the OECD too. If we'd continued with that "find a way or make one" approach then we'd have done just fine with the transition to alternative sources of energy indeed most state authorities were already giving that some very serious thought back in the 1980's.

The SECV put a grid-connect solar system on a private house over 30 years ago for evaluation.

Vic, Tas, SA, WA were all looking for sites for wind farms back then to and had wind resource monitoring programs in place.

There's a lot of talk about pumped hydro today but few realise that even SA had some decent plans for how to do it 35 years ago as did other states.

The only reason it was all thrown away was ideology.....

Today what used to exist in terms of organisations, planning and internal engineering capability is completely gone in SA, Vic and NSW. It's a shadow of what it once was in Qld and WA whilst it's largely intact in the NT and Tas.

No surprises to find out that SA, Vic and NSW are seeing huge price rises, there are lesser rises in Qld and WA, and no problem in NT or Tas. That's not a coincidence.

This is where we're headed folks. The world must be laughing at us. Aussie businesses are already feeling the pinch, and that means jobs.
Original graph in: joannenova.com.au

This is the problem when a Country is driven by complacent people, with too much time and money available to them, they find a way to stuff it up.
It won't be long before everyone goes, "where the hell did our standard of living go".

Logique said:

This is where we're headed folks. The world must be laughing at us. Aussie businesses are already feeling the pinch, and that means jobs.
Original graph in: joannenova.com.au
View attachment 85859

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Some allowance should be made for population density and economy of scale, but there is no doubt that we have gone backwards in recent years due to bad political decisions.

USA is the second cheapest on that list, yet it is mostly privately owned infrastructure, so that goes against the argument all our troubles are simply because of private investment

Value Collector said:

USA is the second cheapest on that list, yet it is mostly privately owned infrastructure, so that goes against the argument all our troubles are simply because of private investment

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Same land area, 10x the customers, not a valid comparison.