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The future of energy generation and storage

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but isn't the key problem the absence of secure interconnection; either we use whatever is available locally: solar in middle of australia, wind in SA, etc and work the load as one big nationwide system or we have to work on a set of small autonomous subsystem each with their peak load, base load and intermittent capacity;
as i read it the real issue is that SA is too far ahead in the absence of safe and secure interconnection, the fact it is also on the periphery of the east coast states does not help.
In any case, did not work well.interconnection is key to reduce risk as Tasmania was already demonstrating a few months ago
 

As far as I know, and Smurph may be able to confirm this, the key to intermittent renewable energy is storage; ie you don't feed wind or solar PV direct to the grid you use it to charge batteries, pump water uphill or heat molten salts so that you can extract the energy in a constant way later on.

To me, the failure (if it is such) of renewables so far is that it's basically been handed over to private companies whose sole aim is to maximise their short term profits by investing in as little infrastructure as possible. They have therefore not bothered much with storage, they prefer to wow the consumer by showing them their power meters running backwards. Good while it lasts, but basically useless in the long term national interest.

Governments have to take power supplies back, come up with a nationwide plan for integrated renewables with storage and concentrate on supplying cheap and reliable energy to consumers and industry with profits running a distant second place.

The article quoted by Qldfrog did not even mention storage, perhaps unsurprisingly as it was written by a political reporter who probably has no clue about energy management. Maybe I don't either but I think it's time governments stopped playing politics with power and handed the system back to engineers who should know what they are talking about.
 

The big problem is, how many batteries do you think you would need to store 70% of S.A wind generation? Also who pays for them and where would you put them, then after 7 years you have to replace them and get rid of them?
Currently small pockets of residential populations are being tested with battery storage( I think Alkimos in W.A) is currently trailing it.
But to have enough battery storage to run a State grid is mind bending, same with pumped storage you have to be able to store it,also sodium(salt) storage only works in really fine weather. Unlike what S.A experienced.
 

The big issue from what I read, is the lack of generators on line that could frequency control, wind turbines can't.

Some generation has to be able to absorb load, to reduce the frequency and keep it with safe limits around 50hz.

If not system stability will be lost, as happened.
I guess there will be new operating instructions, as to how much renewable can be online, in those weather conditions.
 
SirRumpole said:
As far as I know, and Smurph may be able to confirm this, the key to intermittent renewable energy is storage
Click to expand...

Crux of it is this.

1. Electricity is not easily stored. Until very recently, every grid had no storage at all and even now it's incredibly minor where it does exist. You turn the kettle on, a power station somewhere is producing another 2kW to run your kettle. Etc.

2. Storage is anything but cheap. There are situations where it can make economic sense but it's not cheap as such, just the "least costly" option in some cases.

3. With conventional power generation (coal, oil, hydro, nuclear, biomass in the few places which use it) we can however store the fuel used to run the power station. Coal piled up, oil in a tank, water in a dam, etc. So at least the power station itself can, as long as nothing breaks down, run "as required".

Gas has always been viewed with caution since it's impractical to store significant gas at a power station and there's generally only a modest amount in the pipes (not zero but it's limited). So gas is more subject to sudden disruption than other fuels and for this reason utilities traditionally backed up gas-fired generation with the ability to use some other fuel (usually oil since that's technically the easiest). In more recent times the privately owned gas-fired plants often have no backup since it costs money to have that.

Whilst it's not impossible to have a shortage of coal, water etc at least you normally have plenty of warning. If the dam's half empty then that's not something which suddenly happens just like that. Same if the coal mine isn't operating well and the coal stockpile is shrinking, you've got plenty of warning and time to do something (get coal from somewhere else, run other power stations more to save what fuel is left at the one with trouble, etc).

4. With wind and solar PV generation there is zero storage of the primary energy source. A cloud comes over or the wind drops = power production immediately declines. You can't store sun or wind directly, at most you could store them in another form, and we can't change when the wind blows or the sun shines.

So wind and solar are "use it or lose it" at any given time and for that reason are not a "firm" source of generation since there's no certainty the wind will blow when you need it. It will blow sometime though, and if we store the energy (eg pumped storage, batteries) then it could certainly work to replace coal etc for power generation. That said, there isn't a single wind farm supplying the main grid which has any storage at all and there's stuff all when it comes to solar.

All that said, in the context of the SA blackout the ultimate problem is that transmission lines physically came crashing down to the ground due to structural failure of the towers. That would have blacked out at least part of the state no matter how the power was being generated.

That said, steam turbines (all coal plants use steam turbines as do some gas and oil-fired plants) or hydro (not that SA has any significant hydro) would have been far more likely to keep going through all those shocks to the system as the lines came down, lightning hit and so on than a wind turbine. Firstly because they're synchronous machines able to control frequency (unlike wind turbines) and secondly because of the sheer physical mass of the rotating machinery and its constant energy input (steam or water) means it does take a fair bit to make it fail.

It's certainly possible to run a grid 100% from wind and solar, Hydro Tas does it routinely on King Island and is building another system like that for Flinders Island, but the actual wind farms and solar we have on the main grids in Australia are not set up to work this way (and it would cost big $ to do so). Rather, they rely on conventional (coal, gas, hydro) generation to maintain grid frequency. Lose that coal, hydro etc and the wind farms will all shut down in an instant.

So you could have a location (major sub-station) with 500 MW of wind generation and 100 MW of load connected to it and with transmission to the rest of the grid. If that transmission fails then the result will be a complete shutdown of that generation and load, causing a blackout in that area plus the loss of the other 400 MW that was going into the rest of the grid. That's because wind turbines can't maintain frequency and thus can't operate without the rest of the grid.
 
I think it was Musk that made a statement about storage that pretty much summed it up, i just can't recall what it was but yeah, storage changes everything...
 
Thank you Smurph.

Indeed storage is not cheap which is why it needs to be a national priority rather than left to the private sector.

Barnaby Joyce is handing out millions to build dams for water storage, I wonder if he ever thought of the dual use of interlinked dams for renewable energy storage.

On a smaller scale, CSIRO has developed a new battery said to be cheaper and have a longer life than current batteries. While you couldn't run a grid off them they could be useful for household storage of intermittent renewable energy.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-...trabattery-for-off-grid-renewable-use/7881656
 

I don't think it's a viable solution just yet and a waste of money. If you were going to put money into something then you would put it into nuke. Pi$$ing around with renewables may feel good, but I question it's ability to produce and durability.
 
Electricity is a bit like sound. You can store the means of producing it but you can't store the actual electricity or sound itself.

Every now and then the media uses the term "reserves" in the context of electricity. What that means is that there's unused capacity to generate, not every power station is running flat out to meet the present load on the system, but there's never any reserve of actual electricity as such. The moment generation stops, the lights go out immediately.

If we're going to use resources that are intermittently available to produce a large proportion (or all) of our electricity then ultimately we need a means of storing either the electricity itself or something else which can easily be converted back into electricity since the underlying resource isn't always available. That's where the batteries, pumped hydro, molten salt, compressed air etc come in.

The only real storage we've got at present in Australia is 3 pumped storage schemes at Wivenhoe (Qld), Tumut 3 (Snowy scheme) and Shoalhaven (NSW). All three were built as add on's to water supply / irrigation schemes and intended primarily as a relatively cheap means of adding peak generating capacity to the grid (since the energy to pump the water back up hill has historically been from coal). They could certainly be used to store energy from other sources but even collectively they're nowhere near big enough to run the entire grid, the three between them being about the same size as one major coal-fired plant.

Update on the situation in SA:

All load is restored so far as practical. That is, nobody is in the dark on account of a shortage of power as such but some areas still have blackouts due to lines down etc.

Of the present load, Torrens Island power station is of itself supplying 66% of SA's entire power consumption right now.

20% is being supplied from Victoria.

12% from Pelican Point power station.

3% is from SA wind generation.

2% from Quarantine power station (right next door to Torrens Island).

Figures don't add to 100% due to rounding.

No production from Angaston, Lonsdale, Port Lincoln, Snuggery (all oil-fired) or Dry Creek, Mintaro, Osborne, Ladbroke Grove, Hallett (all gas-fired) although some generation has occurred at Port Lincoln, Snuggery and Labroke Grove at various times since yesterday's blackout.

The electricity market in SA remains suspended from a financial perspective.
 

Sir Rumpole, you have an obvious concern for the environment and efficient uptake of alternative energy and I assume you live in a rural area.
Maybe there is a opening for developing an electric tractor, that could be charged by solar and wind, thereby reducing the pollution these agricultural monsters pump out.
When you consider how many farms out there are using these diesel powered monsters, the carbon saving would be immense, also the solar array would be easily placed as the paddocks are cleared.

Actually it makes more sense to make farms off grid, as it reduces the pole and wires required, these are a major cost.
Then as these small systems are made more reliable, step up the installations to small towns and slowly decrease the spread of the grid.
 

I'm not advocating any percentage of renewables I'm just saying that most renewables are pretty useless without some form of storage. Their intermitedness plays havoc with the grid and they will always need some form of baseload generation, but the uptake of rooftop solar PV and development of advanced batteries shows that they do have a place. The problem I have is that politicians are the ones who seemingly decide what proportion of renewables we have , I just wonder how much they have consulted with engineers as to whether their plans are feasible.

There are new nuclear reactor designs coming on all the time. We seem to be in an excellent position to go down that route. Lots of uranium and thorium and lots of space to store waste. We should have been in the business years ago instead of putting it in the too hard basket.

Electric tractors sound a good idea, but the basic problem is in transport fuel ie trucks and ships. More freight rail and going back to wind cargo ships as some have proposed would go a long way to conserving fuel.
 
Looking at the power of renewables in South Australia = bending power pylons, flooding rivers, etc I wonder how long before the penny drops with the Liberal Party that harnessing that energy in part might be a good idea.
 
Tisme said:
Looking at the power of renewables in South Australia = bending power pylons, flooding rivers, etc I wonder how long before the penny drops with the Liberal Party that harnessing that energy in part might be a good idea.
Click to expand...

I cannot help but think the South Australian Labor Government have gone too far with renewable energy and the whole balance is now out of whack.....I am sure they will be doing lots of heavy thinking down the track and look at clean reliable base load nuclear power.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/bus...s/news-story/fcac47d28f0ee0382bf96bb50927c825


South Australia’s state-wide power outage has wreaked havoc on some of the nation’s biggest industrial and mining ventures, cutting more than $50 million of revenue at major sites and causing serious damage to the Port Pirie lead smelter and the struggling Whyalla steelworks.

Costs could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars according to the Australian Industry Group, which says the outage has substantially damaged South Australia’s reputation as a place to do business.

Domestic airlines suffered in the power outage, with eight flights cancelled at Adelaide Airport on Wednesday night and another six yesterday morning. There were no cancellations for international flights.

Virgin Australia was hit hardest, with 12 of the 14 cancellations.

The lead smelter, which is the world’s biggest, Arrium’s Whyalla steelworks and its nearby iron ore mines, BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam copper and uranium mine and OZ Minerals’ Prominent Hill copper mine were all still shut last night, more than 24 hours after going off line.

The outage will cost the businesses an estimated $15m combined in daily revenue, before costs of repairs and start-ups.

PM’s ‘wake-up call’ needs actionOMore: PM’s ‘wake-up call’ needs action
Blackout a wake-up call: PMOMore: Blackout a wake-up call: PM

Once grid power returns, production will take two weeks to *return at Port Pirie, and work is unlikely to be able to start quickly at Whyalla.

Substantial damage has already been reported at the Port Pirie smelter’s blast furnace, which will be offline for up to two weeks because the outage caused slag inside the furnace to freeze, costing up to $7m of lost pre-tax earnings on top of repair costs.

At Whyalla last night, it appeared that emergency power had averted what would have been a disastrous cooling of the steel blast furnace.

But Arrium, being run by administrators KordaMentha, was still racing to find more power to prevent molten steel solidifying in four 180-tonne ladles, an un*controlled cooling of the kiln at the sites pellet plant — which would take three weeks to repair — and freezing of iron ore slurry in pipelines to the pellet plant.

“The major businesses across the state — BHP, ourselves, Port Pirie, Santos — we’ve all been concerned about redundancy risk and now it’s happened,” administrator Mark Mentha told The Australian. “The challenge will be, at a state or national level, how do you shore up the South Australian grid.”

Mr Mentha said the outage “couldn’t have come at a worse time” for Arrium, which was trying to bed down productivity gains to keep the steelworks profitable, so it could be divested through a trade sale or listing, along with the rest of the company’s mining and steel assets.

He would not quantify potential costs of the outage.

“I think we’ve avoided the worst (a blast furnace freeze), but there are residual issues that could still be costly,” Mr Mentha said.

“It’s a crisis that is becoming a bigger one as time passes — the lack of power is exacerbating lots of issues across our plant and mines and the weather is not abating ... we don’t think the outlook for power is great, so we’re trying to find alternative power through generators and the like.”

Whyalla’s back-up gas generator, which had been running in anticipation of a blackout, was itself tripped up when the outage came.

Belgium’s Nyrstar, which acquired Port Pirie from zinc miner Zinifex in 2007, said a back-up generator had sustained the blast furnace for several hours but the prolonged outage had proved too much.

“We are obviously very disappointed that the power supply in South Australia has failed and the impact that this has caused to the Port Pirie plant,” Nyrstar’s Zurich-based chief executive Bill Scotting said yesterday.

Ai Group chief Innes Willox said total costs would probably run into the hundreds of millions of dollars once start-up, clean-up and repair costs were included.

“This puts a dagger in the heart of the reputation of the state as a reliable place to do business,” Mr Willox told Sky News last night.

“The bill for this will be extremely high. The question will be what recourse there is, if they (businesses) choose to go down that path.”

The outage hit on Wednesday afternoon after a severe storm damaged power lines north of Adelaide. The Australian Energy Market Operator said yesterday it was unclear why this had resulted in a “cascading failure of the remainder of the South Australia network” and that this would be subject to further investigation. Last night AEMO suspended the spot market for power pricing, after prices peaked to more than $13,000 per megawatt hour on Wednesday.

Power was restored to Port Pirie and Whyalla residents yesterday.

The state’s two big copper mines suspended production because of the power outages.

It is understood BHP has also been searching for spare generators to try to get as much power as it can at Olympic Dam, near the town of Roxby Downs, until grid power is returned.

“Back-up generators are currently providing power to critical infrastructure, which will allow a restart of operations when power is restored,” a spokesman said.

Adelaide-based OZ said it had no definitive timeline that suggested when power would be restored to its site near the Woomera rocket range.

Insurance companies are closely monitoring the impact of the storm, but with phone lines out across the state, claims have not been flooding in.

What is worrying the insurers, however, is the harsh start to the storm season.

The Insurance Council of Australia last week declared a catastrophe following major flooding in Forbes in central NSW, while western Victoria suffered floods earlier this month. IAG exceeded its natural perils allowance last year, while Suncorp recently bulked up its catastrophe and weather reinsurance program.

A QBE Insurance Australia spokeswoman said the company believed the claims volume would not be as severe as first anticipated.

“At this stage we think the main losses will be for business interruption due to storm damage to the power network and food spoilage, particularly in those areas where power is yet to be restored,” she said.

Santos, which runs the Moomba gas plant in the Cooper Basin that straddles the Queensland and South Australian borders, was unaffected by the outage because it does not use grid power.

The privately owned Coopers Brewery was unaffected by the power disruption as it has its own generator and cogeneration plant.
 
Noco, you and the Prime Minister (who's become an embarrassment) don't get it. Well I think you do but continue your oil/coal lobby campaign to confuse the ordinary populace.

100% perfect neuclear generators would not have made any difference. What happened in South Australia was a failure of the infrastructure. The poles blew down and buckled under the exceptional wind gusts and foundations giving way due to extra damp ground from huge rainfall.

Extreme weather events caused by polar warmth displacement. Co2 driven climate change.
 
To the extent that there's any issue with too much wind power in SA it comes down to what happens when you let the free market do as it pleases. Engineering considerations go out the window and profit becomes the motive.

That factor, profit, is the underlying reason why so many of Australia's wind farms have ended up in one state. Historically higher electricity prices, due to heavy reliance on gas, combined with good wind resources makes it the most profitable spot to put them.

AEMO has sensibly suspended the market in SA until further notice and now the engineers are firmly in charge and running the power system on a purely technical basis without regard to markets or matters of finance. Market? Well there simply isn't one.

So all available thermal generating plant is online and operating at least at minimum load with the Vic - SA AC interconnector being used as the backup if something in SA fails. The Vic - SA DC interconnect, along with SA thermal generation, is being used to keep flows on the AC line at the desired level (well below its maximum capacity).

What's being done right now is nothing radical, the entire concept of electricity as a tradeable commodity being a relatively recent one, just running the grid on the basis if security first given the risk that further transmission failures may occur given the ongoing weather and the possibility of damage to towers or lines that hasn't yet resulted in something falling over but will if there's another big gust.

In due course the market will be put back in place but for the moment it's basically being run as a single utility along purely technical lines. There's still a notional price but it's irrelevant for practical purposes.
 
SirRumpole said:
What about Tarraleah ?
Click to expand...

Tarraleah is a conventional hydro station in Tasmania comprising 6 x 15 MW units which entered service in 1938 (3 machines), 1943 (1), 1945 (1) and 1951 (1).

The scheme involves long (about 20km) canals from the water source (Clark Dam / Butlers Gorge power station) to Tarraleah. No.1 canal was built first with No.2 canal added in the 1950's.

The canals impose a constraint on water flow equivalent to continuous operation of Tarraleah at 60% capacity from No.1 canal and 20% from No.2 canal. So 80% from both.

As a workaround to this flow constraint, and noting that Hydro had very limited resources building this during the Great Depression and WW2, the "Pump Pond" was built at the Tarraleah end of the canals just before the water enters the pipelines (of which there are 2) and then the penstocks (6) into the power station.

The basic concept of operation is to pump water out from No.1 canal into the pump pond, store it, then release at a later time to enable intermittent 100% capacity operation of the power station.

When No.2 canal was later built, that discharges into the Pump Pond and has made the pumping from No.1 largely redundant although the pumps are still in place and able to operate.

This is not a pumped storage scheme in the normal sense since there is no ability to pump water back up after it has gone through the power station. So Tarraleah cannot store energy produced somewhere else, the Pump Pond being simply a means of storing water near the power station as a workaround to the limited canal capacity so as to enable peak load operation of Tarraleah on an intermittent basis.

It's an unusual approach due to the circumstances of the time. Very little money, most of the workforce ended up joining the army, couldn't get (or afford) construction machinery, couldn't get fuel even if machinery had been available, couldn't even get enough concrete (hence why it took 11 years to sort-of finish the dam, with the top not put on until a second effort some years later). Getting steel and everything else was a problem too. Then there was the transport problem - they really did drive a steam engine along the roads (not rail) from Hobart (about 120km) to move the machinery to the site. Trip took 3 days one way, the engine fueled by wood taken from the bush beside the road. And just in case all that's not enough,two of the machines were damaged before they reached Tas due to the war (they came from the UK, ship was bombed) and there's still a brass plaque on them today recognising the difficult circumstances under which it was all built.

So Tarraleah isn't a true pumped storage scheme, none of the Tas hydro schemes are pumped storage in the normal sense, but incorporates the Pump Pond as a workaround to the limited capacity of the canals.

In practical operation today, Tarraleah almost always runs base load (24/7) at 75 - 80% of capacity using flow from both canals so the Pump Pond is rarely used for its original purpose although it's there if full output is needed.

Hydro Tas has looked at what options exist to increase flow in the canals, particularly the larger No.1 canal, in recent times. There's an ongoing problem with bio fouling of the canal which requires periodic removal (scrub it clean - a substantial task that takes about a week) and the thoughts are to apply a coating that would provide a low friction surface thus increasing water flow and removing the need for cleaning. That approach has been used successfully elsewhere (Liaweenie canal which dates from 1922) and is working well thus far. It's big $ for what amounts to some fancy paint to do it at Tarraleah though so it's a case of seeing how long the Liaweenie one lasts before doing more of that sort of thing.

Photo of canal being cleaned: https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/...bTNE3oLSZXoCTQEt0LS42C93ZYGyq8B17xGoUi5T34hpQ

Thankfully we've got machines these days. Those who dug it by hand (using pick and shovel) must have been pretty fit that's for sure. At least they would have been by the time it was done.
 
The South Australian government was warned back in 2005 of the poor state of those transmission towers with corrosion having taken place over a 50 year period and no action was taken......They were warned that the towers could collapse in high winds.


http://www.theaustralian.com.au/new...o/news-story/abc21f33acf2b752e6ec3e6fcb6e1999

ElectraNet ‘was warned’ of tower risk long ago



An overturned transmission tower knocked over during the recent storm surge in South Australia.

The operator of South Australia’s high-voltage electricity transmission infrastructure was warned of the risk of tower collapse a decade ago because of poor maintenance, sparking calls for more investment in Australia’s power network in the wake of South Australia’s statewide blackout.

The transmission company Electra*Net in South Australia owns and operates some of the oldest electricity transmission network assets in the nation, with half of the state’s electricity towers due to exceed their use-by dates by 2023.

On Wednesday, supercell storms with cyclonic winds ripped 22 transmission towers in South Australia’s mid-north out of the ground, bringing down three major transmission lines, which is believed to have caused the frequency of the grid to drop to a point where an automatic shutdown of the entire system was triggered. Temporary, replacement transmission towers are expected to arrive in the next few days from interstate.

ElectraNet was first warned in 2005 of the risk that 43 of its *towers could collapse in windy conditions because of corrosion and degradation of foundations.

Nearly a decade later, Electra*Net sought approval from the Australian Energy Regulator to recoup the cost of repairing the towers in its asset refurbishment plan for 2013 to 2018. The company noted that in some cases, foundation reinforcement bars and stubs were missing.

ElectraNet executive manager Rainer Korte yesterday said sev*ere weather that had battered South Australia since Wednesday afternoon meant “forces were put on sections of the lines that they were unable to withstand”.

Tackling coal, wind and ireOMore: Tackling coal, wind and ire

Mr Korte insisted none of the towers brought down on Wednesday had been identified as needing repair and could not say how old those towers were.

ElectraNet had wanted to spend $750.1 million over five years from 2013 to build new facilities or replace ageing transmission infrastructure but the regulator said $691m was sufficient. Company documents show more than 70 per cent of Electra*Net’s capital investment program is focused on replacing and refurbishing the state’s ageing infrastructure.

More than 80 per cent of transmission line failures in Australia are due to high-intensity winds. Energy experts yesterday warned that the ageing infrastructure would be unlikely to meet today’s minimum standards for overhead lines to withstand strong winds.

Energy Networks Association chief executive John Bradley said Australia’s energy infrastructure would be a major driver of network costs for at least the next decade.

With much of Australia’s electricity network built in the 1970s with a working life of up to 40 years, there was a significant need to invest in new infrastructure, he said: “The South Australian event just underscores the need for timely investment in secure and *reliable network infrastructure.”

ElectraNet said its towers were “fit for purpose” as they had worked satisfactorily for the past 50 years.

Queensland University engineer Matthew Mason said damage to towers from winds “generally happens on older line systems”.

“In the last few decades, regulations have been introduced regarding wind speeds they need to be designed for,” Dr Mason said.

“The older stock is not designed to that same standard and generally performs more poorly.”

The South Australian government confirmed that during the storm, a lightning strike hit AGL’s Torrens Island Power Station, the state’s primary gas-fuelled baseload generator. While this could have triggered the shutdown of the state’s main conventional power generator, AGL spokesman Craig Middleton said the plant’s systems did not indicate the lightning strike caused the plant to trip.
 
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