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The future of energy generation and storage

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It hasn't been so wet in Hobart or Launceston, but over western parts of Tas rainfall over the past week has been roughly half of the amount of rain that Hobart or Melbourne gets in a year. So that's rather a lot of water and it's still coming down.

Excess water being released via the spillway at Cethana dam. Volume of water being discharged as shown in the photo is about 150,000 litres per second. That's in addition to water going through Cethana power station which is not in the photo but which has been operating constantly at its absolute maximum output for the past 2 weeks since the rain started - and the lake was practically empty at the start of the month so it has filled quickly.

http://www.hydro.com.au/system/files/imagecache/lightbox_image/images/IMG_4541.jpg

The 110 km/h winds (official BOM measurement there) aren't so good though. I haven't heard any reports of major damage but it sure is noisy trying to sleep with that going on outside. Thankfully it seems to have died down for now but the last two nights have been seriously windy.
 

At those sort of wind speeds the wind turbines, wouldn't be doing much?

Great news about the rain, if Bass link stays oos, your dams will be full in no time.
 
Wind is going pretty well, running at about 80% of capacity at the moment.

Hydro storage was up to 20.0% as of yesterday so that's a decent rise from the all time low of 12.8%.

Things aren't going so well elsewhere though. SA shut the coal plant, now they're relying almost totally on gas right now plus a bit from Victoria given the lack of wind there at the moment. And most of that gas-fired generation is either from the steam units at Torrens Island or from open cycle gas turbines so it's not overly efficient (particularly not 30 year old open cycle GT's).
 

It sounds as though S.A will become a total electricity importer, sooner or later.

If Tassie gets back to full storage capacity, I wonder if the export cut off point will be changed, to ensure adequate reserve capacity?
Maybe they will just spend the money and duplicate the Bass link.

Interesting times.IMO

Interesting about the wind turbines, over here in W.A at wind speeds of 120 km/hr they would lock up and stop generating.
 
Well it seems that the good people of Queensland have kindly sent some rain down the East Coast of Australia over the past few days. Flooded NSW in the process and we've got some ridiculously high rainfall in Tas too. It's wet, seriously wet.

Lake Gairdner - was 10m below full (near empty) in the early hours of Sunday. Rained so much that the water reached the top of the dam by early afternoon and was 3m over the top by evening.

Lake Cethana much the same. 4m below full (about 10% of capacity) in the early hours of Sunday. Reached full by the end of the day and the water was 5m over the top of the spillway earlier today. A 5m wall of water going down the spillway - that's major.

Lake Pieman - 2.5m below full late last night (bit over a third full). Reached full this morning and now about 1.3m over the top.

Lake Trevallyn - 7m below full (very low) this morning but full this afternoon and now about 1.7m over the top with the water rushing down the Gorge (Launceston).

All quite safe, the dams were built to withstand major floods and won't break but it's seriously wet to say the least. All good.

For anyone in Tas who wants a photo or two, Devils Gate dam would be the pick there. Water is 3m over the top and that creates a nice man-made waterfall as the water falls straight vertically from the top of the dam (spillway) down to the valley below.
 
Good to hear about the rain, not so good about the floods, but it sounds like you are coping.

How long would it take to empty the dams for power purposes from the state they are now , assuming no more rainfall ?
 
SirRumpole said:
How long would it take to empty the dams for power purposes from the state they are now , assuming no more rainfall ?
Click to expand...

Hypothetically if we had zero rainfall, zero wind, no import or export over Basslink, no generation from gas or diesel then the answer is 4 months.

Realistically though, in recent times we're now getting above average rainfall, wind is extremely unlikely to be zero, Basslink returned to service today and we could run gas and diesel if we had to so a more likely answer is "decades".

Basslink returned to service today at 11:51AM and is now operating normally. Power is flowing Tas to Vic at a moderate volume. Reason for that is that the hydro schemes with dams full or spilling (see below) are all being run flat out as well as whatever wind we get. That's more than consumption in Tas at the moment so the rest is going to Vic and means a bit less coal or gas is being burned somewhere in Vic / NSW / SA / Qld (all the same grid as is the ACT although there aren't any major power stations in the ACT but it's still part of the same grid).

Mackintosh, Bastyan, Reece, Fisher, Rowallan, Lemonthyme, Wilmot, Cethana, Devils Gate, Paloona, Lake Margaret, Trevallyn, Tungatinah*, Liapootah, Wayatinah, Catagunya, Repulse, Cluny and Meadowbank hydro stations are all running flat out (since the dams are full).

*Tungatinah is running 4 machines flat out, the 5th being out of service for a major upgrade.

For the other hydro stations: John Butters is out of service for maintenance. Gordon, Poatina and Lake Echo are being used minimally (if at all) in order to build up storage as those dams are still very low. Butlers Gorge, Tarraleah and Tribute have plenty of water but aren't spilling and so are waiting for other stations downstream to stop spilling water before running to any major extent.

Gas - The open cycle (peaking) gas turbines will be run if the price in Vic makes it profitable to do so. But with Basslink back, we don't need them as such to maintain supply in Tas.

The combined cycle unit is far less flexible in operation, slow to start and stop, and will likely remain offline until about October with a major maintenance outage done in the meantime.

Diesels - The diesel generators are being removed at George Town, Port Latta, Catagunya and Meadowbank but those at Que River as well as the diesel-fired gas turbines at Bell Bay are being retained for a while longer "just in case" they're needed. The turbines at Bell Bay could be operated for peak supply (export) to Vic if the price is high enough in Vic to make doing so profitable but those elsewhere aren't technically suited to that sort of operation.

As for overall water storage, well we're pretty much back where we started.

Basslink failed on 20 December 2015 with storages at 25%. They're about 26% now.

Lowest storage = 12.89% on 25 April 2016. That is now the all time record low, the previous having been 14.2% during the 1967-68 crisis.

On an individual catchment basis, storage level at 21 December 2015 / lowest level (and date) / level last week

Great Lake / Arthurs Lake: 22.4% / 14.6% (25 April) / 21.4%

Gordon: 16.5% / 5.85% (4 April) / 13.2%

Derwent: 47.3% / 15.1% (2 May) / 39.1%

King: 33.8% / 20.9% (14 March) / 80.8%

Pieman: 60.6% / 39.9% (2 May) / 100% (spilling)

Mersey-Forth: 73.1% / 34.1% (2 May) / 100% (major flooding)

Yolande (Lake Margaret): 50.0% / 20.2% (14 March) / 100% (spilling)

So basically back where it all started. Just with a lot of excitement, drought, diesel, gas, fires and then a flood to get there all in the space of 25 weeks.
 

Sounds like great allocation of resources, as one would expect, hope the rain continues to fill the great lakes.

What was the outcome with the Bass link failure, they should have been able to identify the cause of the rupture, water ingress, physical damage, mechanical failure?

Or will that be locked away in classified information.lol
 
SirRumpole said:
Will the consumer ever win with solar power ?


Solar power: Bill shock looms as lucrative tariffs roll back, advocates warn


http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-19/bill-shock-looms-as-lucrative-solar-tariffs-roll-back/7638952
Click to expand...

What, no more government hand outs?

Its definitely best not to include any tariffs on new solar installs. Our reasons for going solar will not be based on a return on the assets, only the ability to be self sufficient. There still can be enough power to feed into the grid, especially during peak demand when power companies may pay more for power.

I just want to make use of the sun's power...

Oh, by the way, there's a good show on ABC regarding solar, battery and control technology. I'll see if i can find the link. It was on Catalyst...on Iview.
 
CanOz said:
What, no more government hand outs?
Click to expand...
The at least half decent way to go would be for the energy company to buy back at the price they sell at that time, when I produce, the power is used by my neighbour, and both him and I are paying a fee for the priviledge to be connected, I also forget the fact that in qld, solar has avoided the building of a few new power plant already, nice asset expense saved ...
anyway: liberalism a la communism is the way these utiilities water/power/road and infrastructure work in Australia.
 

Check out that episode of catalyst
 
qldfrog said:
both him and I are paying a fee for the priviledge to be connected
Click to expand...

The problem in most areas is that the fixed supply fee covers only part of the fixed cost of being connected and keeping the grid in place, the rest being recovered by a margin on the volume sale of energy.

That model fails spectacularly if consumers generate their own power or by some other means use less than would normally be the case.

The underlying problem remains and is more acute now that solar has become mainstream. It won't go away that's for sure and the industry is seriously struggling to come up with workarounds that the community might find acceptable. Nobody is keen to re-visit what was tried in Tas 20 years ago that's for sure. My heck that caused a lot of outrage. Long term though I think there will be no choice and slowly but surely there's a move toward that in most states. Pricing the fixed charge to actually recover the fixed costs - do that and it then ceases to matter (within reason) what consumers do with consumption or their own generation.
 
City of Melb is developing a creative way of boosting renewable energy supply in Victoria.

They have formed a consortium which will be a guaranteed buyer of renewable energy for 10 years. Apparently many other cities are looking closely at the model. Quite transportable

Climate change: Melbourne renewable energy project provides global blueprint

The project, which would create a guaranteed market for renewable energy, aims to reduce city’s annual emissions by 138,000 tonnes a year
Click to expand...
https://www.theguardian.com/sustain...able-energy-project-provides-global-blueprint
 
SirRumpole said:
What was that ?
Click to expand...

Separation of component costs for retail consumers (residential and business).

So it was a charge to cover the fixed costs of providing the network plus another charge for energy consumed, the key point being that the fixed charge was set at the actual cost of providing the service rather than those costs being recovered via a "loading" on energy rates as is conventional practice just about everywhere.

Consumers hated it with a passion, one survey put opposition at literally over 99%, and suffice to say that every other electricity supplier in Australia (and they were all watching closely) is glad they're not the ones who tried it. No chance we'll be doing it again in Tassie anytime soon either - and 20 years later is "far too soon" in that context.

The basic idea was to remove the link between volume consumption and recovery of fixed costs which do not alter based on volume. With that done, there was then no reason for the electricity industry to care about volume sales and no problem if literally anyone wanted to generate power and use the network. Hydro (which at that time still owned the network as well as being the monopoly generator) was looking ahead and seeing that others would be generating power, wanting to send it over the network, and that the conventional pricing model wouldn't work.

Also considered was that in future consumers would likely have vastly different consumption profiles due to things like electric vehicle charging, use of solar and other non-electrical energy, and energy efficiency. Some will adopt those things and others won't, so the old situation where most homes used roughly the same amount of electricity would no longer apply.

There was also a political angle, the thinking being that promoting energy use was out of step with community concerns about the environment. The CO2 issue was very much alive back then, and at that point Hydro was contemplating what to do next but there was one certainty - with the remaining hydro resource mostly "locked up" and the rest uneconomic, anything new was going to involve burning fossil fuels with the only question being which fuel (coal, oil, gas) and where (burn it in Tas or burn it in Vic and send power across Bass Strait). So there was a definite thinking that a "zero consumption growth" approach might be the way forward and that removing the financial need to keep consumption up was a key to doing so.

With that pricing model spectacularly killed off and a reversion to historic practice the industry was left with only one real choice, that being to go back to selling as much power as possible. Suffice to say that every possible means of pushing up consumption was promptly applied and it was highly successful with strong load growth.

With the mass adoption of solar, every electricity distributor in Australia faces the same dilemma. They're financially dead if consumers draw less power from the grid unless they can work out some way to either recover the fixed costs and/or charge consumers for their self-generated power. Nobody has really worked that out yet, although at least in Tas we do have a positive aspect in that consumption peaks when the sun is down and the scale of that consumption precludes the economic use of batteries, such that to some extent consumers are largely forced to remain on-grid. In other states with warmer climates it's a far bigger problem for the industry - how do you recover fixed costs if the only way to do it is via energy sales but consumers are generating their own energy?

For reference, the actual network charge (20 years ago now) was 96 cents per day fixed with unit consumption rates in the 4.4 to 6.6 cents / kWh range depending on tariff (off-peak versus continuous rate).

If it were done today then the fixed charge would be about $200 per quarter. Politically that's considered outright impossible.
 
The only viable economic model I can see for funding the network under the current pricing model is for individual generators to be paid a wholesale price for all the electricity they generate and not just for what is fed into the grid.

This though offers no incentive for batteries however a higher wholesale rate could be offered for those instillations that include batteries to reflect the reduced need for additional grid generation capacity. That though may not be much of an incentive depending on the proportion of grid costs related to expansion and maintenance of transmission assets and the actual impact private battery storage would have on the need for expanding generation capacity.

A net feed in wholesale rate from private generation such as rooftop solar can only work economically if network and generation costs are reflected accurately in the retail pricing model.
 
drsmith said:
The only viable economic model I can see for funding the network under the current pricing model is for individual generators to be paid a wholesale price for all the electricity they generate and not just for what is fed into the grid.
Click to expand...

The problem is a political one.

Looking at the past couple of years and ignoring crisis events (notably Tasmania this past Summer and Autumn) bulk electricity as a commodity is worth 3 - 6 cents / kWh depending on location (state). Suffice to say that whilst large scale electricity generation businesses need to survive on those prices, owners of small scale solar systems tend to not be overly happy about it.

A point that consumers generally struggle to grasp is that electricity as such isn't worth much and hasn't been for half a century now. You might be paying 25 cents / kWh retail but those generating the power are only getting around 20% of your money, the rest being networks, retail and GST.
 
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