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Energy Security

So, NSW are going to allow Origin to shut down the 2880-megawatt Eraring power plant in Aug 25 and Kean's plan is to replace it with a 700MW battery that may last 2 hours. Is it April 1st already?

What tech is going to come on in the next three years that will fill the gap of reliable base load 24/7?

The AEMO thinks NSW is going to be able to absorb this, but they provide no detail on how.

Perhaps if the battery tech gets more sophisticated and can hold more power for longer in the next couple of years it might be covered. But at the moment, if the wind isn't blowing at night, they should be aiming for up to 10 x 700MW batteries, at least.

Surely, the Feds have to step in here and provide a proper transition plan for the eastern seaboard grid. A couple more gas fired plants as an interim while the other tech catches up might fill the gap and still reduce emissions.

If Australia wasn't racing towards net zero so quickly (and arguably so unnecessarily) then a better transition plan could be put in place so we could maintain our energy security.
 
I wonder what the emmisions will be from everyone's back up generators?
 
Very true @Sean K we have been discussing it a fair bit in the "future of power generation and storage" thread.
Like smurf says, it will take a crisis before the politics get taken out of it and the technical people are given control again, since privatisation too much State/Federal politics and not enough technical have been involved.
 
One must remember Russia saw all this leftists liberalism and the atrocities that it only causes. Putin speaks openly about this.

the west is caught up in liberal leftisms & it’s toxic politics.
 
One must remember Russia saw all this leftists liberalism and the atrocities that it only causes. Putin speaks openly about this.

the west is caught up in liberal leftisms & it’s toxic politics.

Yes, and China is doing it to the West as well through delaying their de-carbonisation so they can 'catch up' to the 'developed' world - even though they're arguably the biggest economy in the world right now. All we're doing is allowing them to get so powerful both economically and militarily that it's dramatically weakening our own strategic security position.
 
This, so this ^^

I have been arguing this for the last 20 or 30 years.

In fact way back in the 80s my old man argued that we should all be learning Mandarin, due to our own stupidity.
 
This, so this ^^

I have been arguing this for the last 20 or 30 years.

In fact way back in the 80s my old man argued that we should all be learning Mandarin, due to our own stupidity.

There was a time when we deliberately opened up to China with the theory being that once they got a taste for liberal democracies and capitalism they would naturally steer to the right and open up themselves. That did seem to be on track for a while, but then in the blink of an eye, they are more centralised and autocratic than ever.
 
And followed ideologically by our own governments... The CCP winning on several levels.

With so many, even a fair few ASFers cheering it on.
 
Nah dude.
Climate change is racist and only happens in white western countries



 
So, NSW are going to allow Origin to shut down the 2880-megawatt Eraring power plant in Aug 25 and Kean's plan is to replace it with a 700MW battery that may last 2 hours. Is it April 1st already?

Isn't the issue the station is losing money?

Given government's want a market place for power, the federal government appears to have little or no future planning it would seem security has gone out the window.
 
Isn't the issue the station is losing money?

Given government's want a market place for power, the federal government appears to have little or no future planning it would seem security has gone out the window.

Yes, and energy is a national security issue. The national government wants to build a gas plant to provide some sort of stop gap. But even that is being fought over by the green-left. For our national energy security in the short to mid term - 2025-2040, we probably need to build about six of them along the east coast to provide the 24/7 power to homes and industry while zero carbon solutions are realised, whether that's batteries, hydrogen, nuclear, or something that's yet to be discovered or engineered.
 

Hydro has been around for decades , the engineering is well known, all that is needed is the political will to stand up to the Greenies and provide the finance because it's likely that the private sector won't be interested given the long lead in time.
 

We have failed dramatically in harnessing the potential of the northern rivers during the wet season. A long term strategic blunder.
 
Hydro has been around for decades , the engineering is well known, all that is needed is the political will to stand up to the Greenies and provide the finance
Hydro is a thing which is very much site specific both with the details of how to build it and the impact of doing so.

On one hand my personal view is very firmly that sending a species extinct or permanently destroying something unique in order to generate electricity is a terribly bad idea. There are some places which for that reason really shouldn't be considered for hydro development.

But if we're talking about generic land that's of no unusual value or a situation where the impact is reasonably undoable well then it's a very different story. Renewable, dispatchable energy arguably has much greater value than that bit of land - and the amount society has devoted to agriculture, roads, towns and cities and so on vastly exceeds anything needed for hydro.

So it depends on the location. What's there and what would be the impact on it of development.

Holding a blanket "dam the lot" or "no dams" position as many do is most unhelpful in my view, neither really makes sense. It depends on the detail of any particular project.
 

Indeed so, I wasn't suggesting put it in anywhere.

Other benefits that don't seem to get discussed are water supply for agriculture, towns, fish farming and recreation, although I realise that those benefits are sometimes competing.
 


I thought the issue was lack of planning along with the Federal Governments policy technology will be the answer (what ever that means)

Batteries (electrical) are not for storage purposes perse (Smurf correct me if wrong) but for fault conditions / maintain stability of networks etc which leaves gas as the only stop gap measure but then there's the supply and prohibitive cost issues particularly on the East Coast.

Whole thing just looks a mess.
 

Absolutely, and there would have to be a cost benefit to any hydro development. What is CO2 emission free energy and limitless water down to the Murray Darling basin worth.
 
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