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The future of energy generation and storage

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There is good debt, and there is bad debt.

Beware the infrastructure debt trap

Geopolitical and economic rivalries can see projects of questionable value get
pushed through without proper assessment of financial and economic viability.
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It is claimed that Snowy 2.0 will last 100 years before requiring a major rebuild, and the debt will take 50 years to pay off. All is well, unless......
 
SirRumpole said:
No doubt that was said of the original Snowy scheme....
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In my 30+ years of history study, I do not recall reading anything like that.

The original Snowy scheme was a nation building project, designed with more than one aim in mind. Nation building. Including developing hydro-electric power, increase agricultural production in the Murray and Murrumbidgee valley, and increasing Australia's population talent pool. One hundred thousand people worked on the Scheme, many where migrant workers that stayed and brought their families

Snowy 2.0 is just a very expensive (gold plated) upgrade.

 
There will be a lot of gold plated financially irrational projects built in the next 30 years IMO, while we try to wean ourselves off fossil fuel, no matter what the cost.
The first projects are the easy ones that will give more bang for bucks, then will come the ones that make no financial sense, but still have to be built.
 

Yes indeed, like the gold plated poles and wires.

We have a gold-plated electricity grid consumers can't afford

Australia has a power system "ten times more reliable that it needs to be" and which is the envy of the world. So why are consumers so unhappy?
www.abc.net.au
 
JohnDe said:
Water management authorities may have made mistakes, poor decisions and compromises. However, even if everything was done perfectly there still would have been flooding.
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Flooding as such yes.

Flooding at Blowering Reservoir or a need to spill from it no.

In the context of power generation, if the discharge from Blowering is at zero and flooding still occurs downstream well then clearly that's an occurrence unrelated to the hydro scheme.

Blowering holds almost a full year's worth of inflows and it holds over a decade's worth of inflows entering naturally below Tumut 3. That it's full now is because it has been full almost constantly for two years, a consequence of policy.

If I were a farmer downstream suffice to say I'd be outright furious with the feds for having created this situation. First with an unnecessarily large flood and next will be an unnecessarily severe lack of water during the next drought. That's due to the nonsense which spews from Parliament House, not Snowy Hydro.

The big problem politically is that, broadly speaking, they tend to think in terms of annual or average, politicians really aren't good at the idea of establishing a broad principle with the detail filled in on the fly in real time going forward.
 
Quoting a few bits from AEMO's Integrated System Plan:

Australia is currently installing VRE faster than at any time in history. This record rate needs to be maintained every year for a decade to triple VRE capacity by 2030 – then almost double it again by 2040, and again by 2050
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Note for clarity the above does NOT include electricity used for hydrogen production which is additional.

In regard to firming VRE, AEMO sees a need for:

46 GW / 640 GWh (gigawatt hours) of dispatchable storage, in all its forms
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+
7 GW of existing hydro generation
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+
10 GW of gas-fired generation
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Back to my own comments:

In the context of hydro projects, they basically fit into three categories in terms of what they're an alternative to:

Those with no storage, that is they are true run of river schemes, are ultimately an alternative to wind and solar. They generate energy on an intermittent basis driven by weather.

A pumped storage scheme with a few hours' storage is ultimately an alternative to other pumped storage schemes or batteries. An on river dam with limited storage is much the same.

A pumped storage scheme or large on river dam, one that's able to discharge constantly for an extended period when required, is ultimately an alternative to gas, diesel or other fuel-based options.

Now for the pain.....

For those in the first category we have an abundance of options. There's plenty of sites for wind and solar and likewise simply diverting a river into a penstock then back out the tailrace doesn't usually upset too many people.

For those in the second category it's not so easy. Private enterprise is happy to pick the low hanging fruit and install batteries with 1 or even 4 hours' storage but that's about it. Talk about 8 hours and most have by that point left the room. Talk about 16 hours and none are interested. The economics just aren't all that great.

For those in the third category well that's where the real pain comes in and not just economically. There's a strong argument against fossil fuels on the grounds of the environment, resource limits, national security and so on. But it's also true that big dams have plenty of detractors, indeed there are quite a few who very strongly oppose that idea.

Personally well all things considered I'd generically choose hydro over gas. It doesn't run out, doesn't start wars at least in the Australian context, if well done doesn't need add significantly to emissions and so on. Plus it's effectively permanent once built.

I say "generically" because there are certainly some hydro options that personally I wouldn't support. That being those which send species extinct and so on. That's too high a price to pay simply to generate electricity. There are of course plenty of hydro options that aren't in that category and which haven't already been developed.

That said, well I've no expectation whatsoever that we'll actually, really move away from fossil fuels completely. There'll be a lot of huffing and puffing politically but ultimately society really isn't keen enough on the idea yet to actually do it. We'll use less fossils yes but, broadly, gas is still a path of lesser political resistance than hydro and so it will continue to be used.

To the extent any hydro gets built though, well it means less gas but there's very little chance we'll build enough of it to get to zero by that means. That leaves ongoing use of gas unless / until some other technology comes along.

To those who oppose hydro projects I've always asked the same question - "what specific alternative do you propose?" Actual, specific alternatives.
 


Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Australia the country of drought, flood and democracy.

March 2021 -

 
JohnDe said:
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Australia the country of drought, flood and democracy.

March 2021 -
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The problem now is, the ones in charge haven't got anyone to blame, so it is going to get messy politically IMO.
Floods, covid, fatigue and the main cause has been removed, so the next scapegoat has to be found, the media will be looking.Lol
 
One of the issues often glossed over is what may have happened without all of the various infrastructure built on the rivers over the pas 200 hundred years.
Anyone bothered to look at historical photographs of the Murray river in summer prior to the building of Dartmouth, Hume, Mulwala, Tocumwall or the myriad of locks etc would see a mere trickle of water during some drought years, and significant floods during wet years. Today it is regulated all year round.
And lets not forget how many levee banks have been built up over the same period to try to direct water away from towns.
Similarly those on the Murrumbidgee flats before Burrinjuck or Tantangara were built, would have had big surges of water and regular flooding multiple times during a wet year.
The landscape has been altered in so many ways that water flows are now unrecognizable, but instead of blaming changes in flood patterns any of these structural changes, its a little more fashionable to blame climate change.
Mick
 
So what? If you had enough 4-hour battery storage facilities, they don't all have to feed into the grid at once, do they?
 
Flood patterns due to structural changes such as the building of dams and levees is a factor, true, but so is the building of residential areas on flood plains. I'm glad you mentioned the Murrumbidgee. What happened at Gundagai in 1852 is common knowledge, with colonists ignoring the previous warnings of the local indigenous population regarding the site for the town. Is it any different to what happened in Brisbane in 2011? Trying to funnel floodwaters, whether naturally occurring or not, down a hard narrow path and not expecting consequences for adjacent properties is just plain dumb.

Having a go at people mentioning climate change is not doing you any favours. You're more worried about mitigating a flood after it rains; some are more worried about calming the climate to reduce the amount of extreme rainfall events. It's a bigger picture than the one you're focusing on.
 
There is a reason why some of these areas are calle flood plains, they flood.
I am not looking for favours, I am looking for facts.
It seems that everything and anything is blamed on climate change, without ever mentioning the mechanisms by which the blame is attributed.
A book called The Early Days of Windsor, by James Steele was published long ago in 1916. It tells us that early flooding for the first European settlers in Australia was frequent, and was so bad on the Hawksbury in 1798 the Governor even limited the sale of rum (it must have been serious). The first Government House in Windsor was said to be “swept away” in 1799. This was followed by another flood in 1801 and a much worse one in 1806 when seven people died. The plucky residents only had to wait three years to be besieged again in 1809. By then people were getting so fed up of being flooded they moved Windsor and other settlements to higher ground in 1810, which was a jolly good thing because it flooded again in 1811.

In 1817 things were so bad, it was reported that the Hawkesbury and Nepean rivers had inundated the buildings on the banks “three times within nine months”.

After that, everything dried out for a few decades. Droughts became the norm instead. That was until the late 1850s when flooding came back into fashion, climatically speaking. Symbolising this shift, a neat little church at Clydesdale was built in 1842 and lasted til the great flood of 1867 when things got so bad there was “driftwood on the roof”. The book drily notes: “This church is now closed.” By 1872, flooding was again so common the people of Windsor even formed “a water brigade” so they were ready to rescue people and knew how the manage the flood boats. It sounds a bit like an early inland version of the Royal Life Saving Society that wouldn’t even start work on Australian beaches for another twenty years.

All of this took place before Dams, roads, hosing and levees we see today were engineered.
History is a great teacher , if one can bother to listen to it.
Mick
 
mullokintyre said:
The landscape has been altered in so many ways that water flows are now unrecognizable
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If you look at the Murray River catchment well most of it has been substantially altered in terms of land use and what hasn't been altered is either dammed not far downstream or is a tributary flowing into an altered section of the River.

There are proper ways to model flooding and forecast the extremes but the harsh reality is the results are really quite blunt - more than a few towns just shouldn't be where they are as it's a given they'll be flooded at some point.

Same goes for many Australian towns and cities. It seems we had an obsession with building them on flood plains despite having vast areas with no such risk.

For the record, my own house shouldn't flood in an extreme worst case event but about 150m away there's several places that'll go under for sure, possibly to the point of total destruction in practice. Now the thing is, those places at risk are in most cases somewhat newer than mine. I don't intend that comment as a boast, just as evidence that we're still doing silly things that will end in tears and that's not because of climate change or even climate itself, it's because humans do silly things - there's a reason that land wasn't developed in the 1960's when the rest was. Then someone came up with "infill housing" and off we go, the seeds of disaster have been sown.
 
A few very pertinent stories in the ABC around moving decisively to a renewable energy future. Many of the issues have already been raised and examined on ASF. Major points -

1) National and economic security. No one can control the sun or the wind and stand on your throat

2) Need to ensure stability of supply. Ton of work required for distribution and storage as well as generation. How do we "guarantee" the lights won't go out ? What price do we pay for this guarantee ?

3) Current risks of global energy crunch. Russia is intent on squeezing the West as hard as possible energy wise.

'Greatest peace plan of all': US, Australia say renewable energy cannot be 'weaponised'

Australia and the US call for the acceleration of the renewable energy transition as a form of insurance, arguing that no country has ever been "held hostage" over access to the wind or sun.
www.abc.net.au

Australia's energy revolution gathers pace with renewables to generate 'half' its electricity within three years

A report calls for changes to guide Australia's energy transition after finding the country is on track to generate half its electricity from renewable sources within three years and almost 70 per cent by 2030.
www.abc.net.au

Vital cover or junk policy? Why plans to 'insure' Australia's energy system are so divisive

Amid an ever-deepening crisis in Australia's electricity grid, something has got to give. But not everyone likes a proposed fix to safeguard the system, writes Daniel Mercer.
www.abc.net.au
 
I'll argue for both.

There are dams that have actually been built which on any sensible assessment should not have been built. They came at a huge ecological cost for limited benefits.

There are other dams that have not been built where the case to build them is extremely strong. The pose no known threat to any species, are not subject to siltation or organic matter entering, and from an electrical perspective offer a direct, large scale alternative to the use of fossil fuels to firm VRE.

Regarding flooding well it's similar.

There's land which should never have been built on but, once built on, a dam and other hard engineering approaches can mitigate the flood risk in that area. Problem is humans being what they are, they tend to then go and keep building things and a point comes where no practical dam or other infrastructure is a solution.

That said, it works to a point and can certainly be modelled:
 
Makes a lot of sense

BCA’s Jennifer Westacott: move to clean energy ‘biggest skills transfer in history’

In the final panel of Sydney’s international Energy Forum, Jennifer Westacott AO of the Business Council of Australia says building a workforce for development and deployment of clean technology is going to be the “biggest skill transfer in the history of the world”.

This transition is about new jobs, more jobs, adaptation of existing jobs. We have to be unambiguously optimistic. The emphasis is ... not job destruction.
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Westacott urges a “mindset change”.
We get bogged down by qualifications ... [but] what is a job? What is a skill? People have attributes, skills, capabilities that can be re-equipped ... We need to think about energy workers, not fossil fuel workers.
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An estimated 30 million jobs are expected to be created in the energy transition, Westacott explains. “These jobs will be right across the supply chain,” and the focus is on “reprioritisation” and “overlapping skills”.

On Australia’s tertiary education system addressing skills shortages and reprioritisation, Westacott says:
We need to blow this system up. We’ve got to think about life long skills ... We’ve got to blend in vocation skills ... We need to change accreditation ... We have to start now. It takes five years to get an engineer trained. We don’t have five years. We need to remove friction. Because this is the biggest skill transfer in the history of the world.
 
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