The future of energy generation and storage

[SirRumpole]

It comes down to the risk of billions of dollars of stranded assets. Who wants to take that financial risk ? An insurance company? Private industries?

Yes, I agree. Fossil fuel projects will have to be mainly government financed, but a sensible government will take the advice of the people who actually have to build the network rather than the finance industry.

There are times when you have to do things for the national interest rather than commercial return.

 

[SirRumpole]

Not completely off topic. I think this is a thread for engineers so check out how a guy moves huge concrete blocks by hand.

No jacks. No modern technology.
Clever and interesting.

Clever guy, but how did he get the block on his device in the first place ?

Here's another one of the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Leedskalnin

 

[sptrawler]

Looks like the PC brigade has got into the insurance industry now.

Gas may be a fossil fuel but it's a lot cleaner than coal, and I'd rather trust Alan Finkel when he says gas should be an important part of our energy grid.

I suppose insurance companies can do what they like with their money , but I'd rather have scientists and engineers designing our essential services.

When the ranters and chanters start logics go out the window, "we want it and we want it now", then the media get on board then the loonies join in, then we have situation normal Australia.

 

[sptrawler]

We are not going to stop using fossil fuels in the next 5- 10 even 20 years. That's a given.
On the other hand the push to renewables is driven by economics and environment. They don't compete economically and represent a CC risk. In that context the financial risk of backing new fossil fuel projects is very significant.

It comes down to the risk of billions of dollars of stranded assets. Who wants to take that financial risk ? An insurance company? Private industries?

Hardly.

Someone is going to have to fund it, be that private or public.
One thing for sure no one will accept, having to sit in a cold dark house for an extended period, because the government flucked up.
Thats a given.

 

[Value Collector]

Looks like the PC brigade has got into the insurance industry now.

Gas may be a fossil fuel but it's a lot cleaner than coal, and I'd rather trust Alan Finkel when he says gas should be an important part of our energy grid.

I suppose insurance companies can do what they like with their money , but I'd rather have scientists and engineers designing our essential services.

I don’t think anyone will have trouble finding someone to sell them insurance contracts, there are plenty of big insurance companies that will love to take any business Suncorp doesn’t want.

 

[Value Collector]

We are not going to stop using fossil fuels in the next 5- 10 even 20 years. That's a given.
On the other hand the push to renewables is driven by economics and environment. They don't compete economically and represent a CC risk. In that context the financial risk of backing new fossil fuel projects is very significant.

It comes down to the risk of billions of dollars of stranded assets. Who wants to take that financial risk ? An insurance company? Private industries?

Hardly.

or even worse, the assets aren’t “stranded”, instead they still get used but the owners are subjected to punitive tax rates.

 

[Smurf1976]

On the other hand the push to renewables is driven by economics and environment. In that context the financial risk of backing new fossil fuel projects is very significant.

It comes down to the risk of billions of dollars of stranded assets. Who wants to take that financial risk ? An insurance company? Private industries?

Hardly.

In the context of an insurer deciding where to invest money then sure, no problem with them investing in whatever they've concluded makes for a good investment so long as it's legal etc.

In the context of providing an insurance service however, well the risk that the customer's assets become worthless isn't really the insurer's problem. They're insuring them not guaranteeing there's any profit to be made by owning them.

I'll simply say that as a concept I dislike the idea that a private company imposes "moral" conditions on its provision of services. So long as the customer isn't purchasing something for an illegal purpose then I'm not at all keen on the idea that someone's trying to force their view on society. That sort of thing's a very slippery slope most certainly and best left for democratically elected governments to decide what's OK and what's not. If the purpose is legal then a business shouldn't refuse service.

I'm saying that as a matter of principle not because I think Suncorp are going to put the gas industry out of business. Business forcing morality is a slippery slope as a concept.

Back to the practical side, well government still all but forces connection of gas to any new home built in Victoria and it's the same in some parts of other states so we're going to be using gas well beyond the life of current gas fields. New supply from some source is required and it won't be obsolete anytime soon.

I don't agree with that policy pushing gas by the way, but it is what it is. It's not totally impossible to avoid it but you'll need to be pretty keen and willing to spend time and money in order to do so. End result = consumption is locked in for many years to come in practice.

 

[basilio]

Clever guy, but how did he get the block on his device in the first place ?

Here's another one of the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Leedskalnin

From memory he developed an ingenious way of lifting the whole block up using leverage chocks and see saw effect. In the end the concrete block is a metre off the ground resting on supports.
I was amazed at his efforts at moving whole buildings hundreds of metres with just simple muscle !!

 

[Smurf1976]

From memory he developed an ingenious way of lifting the whole block up using leverage chocks and see saw effect. In the end the concrete block is a metre off the ground resting on supports.

If you can find a way to effectively gear the task right down well then ultimately it's just a matter of applying energy to raise it up. Gear it down enough and the relatively limited physical abilities of a human are good enough.

 

[sptrawler]

If you can find a way to effectively gear the task right down well then ultimately it's just a matter of applying energy to raise it up. Gear it down enough and the relatively limited physical abilities of a human are good enough.

Applied mechanics 101.

 

[sptrawler]

Well as they say "it ain't over untill the fat lady sings", the offshore gas processing isn't going as well as planned. We may well end up with the gas processed onshore yet.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08...remains-in-shutdown/12565490?section=business

 

[sptrawler]

Looks like the PC brigade has got into the insurance industry now.

Gas may be a fossil fuel but it's a lot cleaner than coal, and I'd rather trust Alan Finkel when he says gas should be an important part of our energy grid.

I suppose insurance companies can do what they like with their money , but I'd rather have scientists and engineers designing our essential services.

It looks as though the loonies and the media have moved on from coal at last.
https://www.theage.com.au/environme...ed-new-research-suggests-20200824-p55ovg.html
From the article:
The good news about natural gas is that when it is burnt it creates between 40 and 50 per cent less carbon dioxide than coal would to create the same amount of energy.
But the good news ends there, and there is a lot more to the story.

Before it is burnt natural gas is mostly made up of methane, and methane is estimated to be about 28 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over a 100-year period.

https://www.theage.com.au/environme...-gas-say-leading-experts-20200824-p55oty.html
From the article:
A group of leading Australian scientists has taken the unusual step of writing to the Chief Scientist, Dr Alan Finkel, saying his support for gas as an energy source "is not consistent with a safe climate".
In the speech Dr Finkel outlined how Australia needed to electrify its energy system to meet Paris climate goals.

He said that as renewable energy generation, storage and transmission technologies are scaled up to decarbonise the economy, gas would play a "critical role", and that the transition could take decades.

"He seems to be speaking in ignorance of or [to be] ignoring the overwhelming amount of evidence gathered by his own scientific community about the impact of the gas industry on the climate," said Professor Steffen.

Professor Steffen said that Australia's Paris climate targets were weak, set politically and had no scientific basis; that even if they were to be met Australia would still not be doing its fair share to mitigate global warming under the agreement, and that the use of gas as a transition energy source was quickly making the situation worse.
.

 

[SirRumpole]

Professor Steffen said that Australia's Paris climate targets were weak, set politically and had no scientific basis; that even if they were to be met Australia would still not be doing its fair share to mitigate global warming under the agreement, and that the use of gas as a transition energy source was quickly making the situation worse.
.

I see these gas stations as an emergency reserve to be used when conditions don't allow the production of renewable energy, ie long periods of overcast weather in Qld say. So they will probably be idle for most of the time if things go well with the renewable output and therefore won't produce much GG. But of course the ultra left latch on to anything "fossil" and demonise it, thinking we can do it all with renewables.

Renewables are great, but we need a backup.

 

[Smurf1976]

Renewables are great, but we need a backup

Gas is one way to do it although I'm sure that Snowy Hydro and Hydro Tas would both be very quick to point out that large scale hydro is another way of doing it.

Large scale as in capable of running not continuously, that isn't required, but for an extended period not just a few hours.

Meanwhile in SA:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08...olar-panels/12602684?WT.ac=localnews_adelaide

It's a crude solution but one that's unavoidable given that better solutions haven't been implemented and there's simply no time left to do anything.

In layman's terms the idea is jack the network voltage up and that trips off the inverters. Do it gradually and they don't all trip at once. So just trip enough to keep supply and demand in balance.

It's a problem best explained by saying that forecast load in SA tomorrow afternoon, a Saturday with a forecast maximum temperature of 25 in Adelaide, is 400 MW (purely coincidental that it's a round number, the forecast is produced down to the 1 MW accuracy level and wouldn't normally be a nice round number like that).

To put that into perspective, that's well under half the minimum load Tasmania experiences in any 24 hour period despite SA having 3.4 times the population. It compares with maximum load in SA of about 3400 MW, average load of about 1500 MW and minimum load overnight tonight forecast at 959 MW.

Better solutions in my view are encouraging load shifting at the end user level. Water heating's the obvious one but has turned out to be somewhat difficult from a bureaucratic perspective. It'll happen, just not as quickly as would be ideal from a technical or environmental perspective (a statement that of itself seems rather odd, that the engineering and environmental aspects both are optimised with the same approach).

So whilst there's some progress on all this stuff, I do caution that there's a lot still to be done.

 

[sptrawler]

Gas is one way to do it although I'm sure that Snowy Hydro and Hydro Tas would both be very quick to point out that large scale hydro is another way of doing it.

Large scale as in capable of running not continuously, that isn't required, but for an extended period not just a few hours.

Meanwhile in SA:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08...olar-panels/12602684?WT.ac=localnews_adelaide

It's a crude solution but one that's unavoidable given that better solutions haven't been implemented and there's simply no time left to do anything.

In layman's terms the idea is jack the network voltage up and that trips off the inverters. Do it gradually and they don't all trip at once. So just trip enough to keep supply and demand in balance.

It's a problem best explained by saying that forecast load in SA tomorrow afternoon, a Saturday with a forecast maximum temperature of 25 in Adelaide, is 400 MW (purely coincidental that it's a round number, the forecast is produced down to the 1 MW accuracy level and wouldn't normally be a nice round number like that).

To put that into perspective, that's well under half the minimum load Tasmania experiences in any 24 hour period despite SA having 3.4 times the population. It compares with maximum load in SA of about 3400 MW, average load of about 1500 MW and minimum load overnight tonight forecast at 959 MW.

Better solutions in my view are encouraging load shifting at the end user level. Water heating's the obvious one but has turned out to be somewhat difficult from a bureaucratic perspective. It'll happen, just not as quickly as would be ideal from a technical or environmental perspective (a statement that of itself seems rather odd, that the engineering and environmental aspects both are optimised with the same approach).

So whilst there's some progress on all this stuff, I do caution that there's a lot still to be done.

From the outside looking in, IMO S.A got way ahead of the curve and are desperately treading water, while their problems are absorbed.

 

[Smurf1976]

From the outside looking in, IMO S.A got way ahead of the curve and are desperately treading water, while their problems are absorbed.

Classic case of a bunch of mostly well intentioned ideas but no actual plan on how it was going to work.

When that was the odd random household installing a 1kW solar system it simply didn't matter, it was unnoticeable "noise" in the overall context, but it sure does now when it's considered that at midday Friday:

Small solar = 857 MW
Large solar farms = 282 MW
Load = 1575 MW

So that's 72% supplied by solar and that's a very long way from the insignificant "noise" it was a decade ago.

To be politically neutral and straight to the point, I think rather a lot simply didn't foresee it getting to anything like this level for a very long time if ever. They were thinking that we might get to 10 MW of solar in a decade or by the time they were dead it might be 100 MW, the idea that it would exceed 1000 MW, in SA alone, just didn't occur as being even remotely possible.

That's how I see it really. Despite the political noise neither side of politics thought we were really, actually going to make a serious move to renewables beyond tokenism indeed some states still don't officially accept it as being plausible.

End result is a lot of wind and solar have been built but the necessary policies and infrastructure to go with it are running well behind and that's the issue. It gives rise to a "feast or famine" situation - solar going to waste then literally just a few hours later gas turbines or diesels are roaring away.

1:55pm Friday = spot price in SA was at $5.90 per MWh. Solar and wind combined were supplying 79.8% of load.

6:00pm Same day = spot price hit $288.04 per MWh. Solar and wind combined were supplying 4.9% of load.

For the companies who build storage facilities to take advantage of that price volatility, charge when it's cheap and discharge where it's expensive, well that's where the business opportunity in all this lies.

Likewise for anyone who can work out a way of charging EV's when it's cheap and so on, there's a coming opportunity there assuming EV's do become common.

 

[orr]

Cheers Smurf; is there a public available link to the SA spot price history?
You are being a little cheeky as to who's got the capacity and who's already creaming it on these differentials.
the quote was something like..'Have the worlds biggest battery have the worlds biggest Banana'
what a goose...

 

[Smurf1976]

Cheers Smurf; is there a public available link to the SA spot price history?

Ultimately all the data's available (to anyone, no $ or password needed) in raw .csv form from AEMO.

That's rather user unfriendly however unless someone really does want the fine detail so the easier ones are:

https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-syste...ricity-market-nem/data-nem/data-dashboard-nem

"Price and Demand" shows the current past day and day ahead forecast. Blue line is load and the purple line is price. Solid line is the past day, dotted is forecast ahead. Just pick the state at the top left of the page.

"Dispatch Overview" shows the overall situation for each state. Price in $ and demand (purple bar) and generation (blueish green bar) in MW.

There's also an assortment of third party services around. Some paid ones for professional use, some in-house ones developed and only available within particular companies (generally with a focus on their own generating plants), and various free ones available to anyone. Of the latter, this one's about the most useful:

https://opennem.org.au/energy/nem

It's intuitive and self-explanatory really. As with the rest it's simply accessing AEMO's freely available data and putting a far more user friendly interface on it.

Actual prices today in SA were negative, that is below zero, constantly between 7:30am and 5:00pm local time. Significant volumes of large scale solar were curtailed during the day, indeed it was literally shut down completely for a period, and likewise wind was curtailed most of the day.

Following chart shows wind and large solar generation only as well as the price:

That hollowing out during the middle of the day is wind and large solar being curtailed due to nowhere for it to go. Easily explained by posting the same chart again this time showing all solar generation, small as well as large, and also gas, battery, import from / export to Victoria:

That's the same chart, just with all the data on the second one versus wind and large solar only on the first one.

Yellow = Solar. Green = Wind. Orange = Gas. Purple = Import from Victoria. Below the zero line = export to Victoria. Blue = battery charge / discharge.

In case you're wondering why some gas-fired plant was still on, the simple answer is what's generically referred to as "system strength". In short, it's technically problematic to control a power system without running some level of synchronous plant (in layman's terms - big rotating machines running synchronised to the grid so that's steam turbines, gas turbines, diesel engines, hydro).

That's a technical limit with present technology not an ideological, political or economic one. Wind and solar can displace a large portion of the output from conventional plant at any given time but not the whole lot, some level of synchronous plant is still required to maintain system stability and control.

In short, great big lumps of rotating metal (steam turbines, hydro etc) have mechanical inertia which thus far at least electronics (wind, solar) don't adequately mimic. Someday perhaps, not yet however and that in practice sets a minimum level of gas-fired generation in SA (gas given there's no hydro or coal of any significance in SA so those aren't a consideration and whilst some plant exists diesel's far more expensive to operate than gas).

There's some proper calculations behind all that by the way. Traditionally it wasn't a problem, since all generation came from rotating synchronous machines of some sort, but with the growth of wind and solar it has become an issue. As such AEMO has done some pretty serious number crunching in the areas where it's of concern so as to determine exactly what the limits are.

As for the price, well charging the big battery at $-50 / MWh as occurred today is a "can't lose" strategy really. Get paid to fill it up, then get paid again to discharge it. The ultimate "buy low, sell high" strategy when the buy price is negative.

Whilst it's still only of fairly small scale relative to total consumption, this chart over the past 3 days shows it pretty clearly. Dark blue above the line is discharging, light blue below the line is charging (slightly complicated by the existence of more than one large battery in SA, each owned by different companies using different trading strategies etc).

 

[Smurf1976]

Chart referred to in above post:

 

[sptrawler]

A very interesting article on small modular nuclear reactors. Of interest was the last paragraph.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/arti...ny-adds-molten-salt-storage-to-its-smr-system

In a bombshell 2018 report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, nuclear played a role in all scenarios that kept global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

May not apply to Australia, but the rest of the world?