You are spot on, it isn't going to be an easy road and I can't see how it will be achieved without the Govt getting involved.
an interesting TED talk dealing with solar wind and coming from a deep woke green person...
Anyone open minded enough to mention nuclear, IMO needs to be given credit, way too many are stuck in blind ideology.
I'm yet to see anything convincing that nuclear's the best option in the Australian context, cost being the key problem, but an open mind should always be kept certainly.
At the global level I agree there are difficulties.
I'm yet to see anything convincing that nuclear's the best option in the Australian context, cost being the key problem, but an open mind should always be kept certainly.
).
Sure and i have solar on my roof and plan to go battery..at the house level, no issue when living on a standalone house let alone farm.At the global level I agree there are difficulties.
In the Australian context I suggest driving from Sydney to Adelaide via Broken Hill. Take note of all that you see.
Now take a look at a map of Australia and note where you drove.
We're not even slightly short on land in Australia for the development of wind and solar. Not even slightly.
As a physically large country with stuff all population and among the best wind and solar resources on the planet, this is something we ought be able to do pretty easily if we put our brains to use, stop coming up with silly excuses, and get on with it.
Actually mr Rumpole, in the last 5y, fusion has made giant steps both at gov research level US China but even private companies.Yes, the cost benefit ratio of nuclear for this country is very poor, but all technology advances so one day nuclear may be a viable alternative.
(In 30 years when we have fusion
www.perthnow.com.au
AGL is also losing money with gas.
Not forced to but AGL more than any other has been recently pushed a bit that way theu the new directors or at least.they may even be given an excuse that way.Putting some figures around this to illustrate the point and using SA as the example:
Peak demand in round figures = 3400 MW
Average demand = 1500 MW
Now if the aim is reliable supply then you won't find an engineer who comes up with anything less than about 4100 MW as being the required capacity. That allows 3400 MW to be run plus the other 700 MW to cover breakdowns etc. Even that's pushing it - most would feel more comfortable with somewhere around 4300 MW installed.
How a single utility would do that is straightforward. Build modern, efficient plant up to the point that meets routine requirements. Keep serviceable but technologically obsolete "old clunkers" on standby for use when demand spikes or breakdowns occur.
Hence if we look at it historically well that is indeed what was done. Modern plant built to suit routine requirements, old clunkers in reserve to fill the gaps when needed. And they did get used, plenty of examples where that occurred.
With a competitive market however all that changes. Nobody's going to keep plant sitting around unprofitably just to ensure society continues to function. They're not going to pay staff, keep it maintained and so on when they could instead knock it down and sell the land. That's not the role of any company operating in the market so they don't do it.
So these days we're basically running without a backup. There's no emergency brakes, there's no insurance, if it goes wrong then out go the lights. That's nothing to do with wind and solar versus coal and gas or nuclear. It's simply a consequence of nobody being obligated to foot the bill for a technically robust system.
Nobody's forced AGL to shut Torrens Island B, indeed the SA government has paid them to delay it. Just as nobody forced Energy Australia to shut Wallerawang C. Nobody forced Alinta to shut Northern. And so on. The companies made the decision of their own accord simply because they can still generate most of the energy whilst having less capacity at remaining facilities. Trouble is, from a technical perspective that's guaranteed to put the lights out at some point.
AGL is also losing money with gas.
Therein lies the real problem and it's not about technology but rather, it's about the industry structure.
Nobody's getting too excited about nuclear because quite simply nobody with the money to do so actually wants to build one, at least not that they've made public, and the reasons for that are much the same reasons why nobody apart from government has much interest in pumped hydro and it's the same reasons why AGL is closing Torrens Island.
In any power system, if it's to be technically robust, there will be components which are individually unprofitable on a standalone basis. Bearing in mind that which parts those are, which bits are unprofitable, will itself change over time.
Go back 40 years and Torrens Island was generating 70% of all electricity in SA with an operating capacity of 1280 MW from 8 generating units. 4 x 120MW and 4 x 200MW. The overall success of SA was extremely heavily dependent on this power station which is itself somewhat of a landmark, the two stacks being visible across much of Adelaide.
Past 12 months it contributed 7.1% to SA's electricity supply with an operating capacity of 600MW, that being 3 x 200MW which on average was just under 20% utilised.
This gets to the heart of the problem.
From a technical perspective, to maintain a reliable power system, there's an extremely strong argument to retain Torrens Island in service at least partially and that's not due to averages but due to the extremes. 5.2% of total output occurred over just 6 days during the past year and 28% occurred over two months. On those days it was indeed critical. Another way to put it is that average utilisation and revenue has dropped dramatically but the peak requirement still substantially remains. A classic example of an asset that's moved into the unprofitable stage of its life - now nobody wants to foot the bills.
SA already has a somewhat inadequate generating fleet, hence the various incidents which have occurred, and the new 800 MW interconnection with NSW goes a long way to fixing that. Trouble is, AGL is "fixing" the outcome of that new 800MW interconnection by closing 800MW of generation in SA. Or in other words, completely offsetting it.
Now from AGL's commercial perspective that's a completely rational decision. Their responsibility is to shareholders, not the public of SA, and they're acting on that basis.
It does get to the crux of the problem though and there's plenty of examples now.
A monopoly utility, regardless of who owns it be that listed, private or government, can and generally will do what's necessary to maintain technical integrity. They'll have adequate plant and just spread the cost across the customer base. Plenty of examples of that in the past, old plant retained "on standby" and it ended up running 2 or 3% of the time.
In a competitive market however that doesn't work. No company wants to own the unprofitable bits and once they become unprofitable, that tends to be game over. Hence we see closures immediately followed by demolition - and AGL has already announced that demolition will indeed quickly follow closure at Torrens Island.
End result is the present market structure will always produce a barely adequate system that's prone to failure. It doesn't matter what technology is used, it leads to the same outcome due to the industry's present structure. When it's all owned by different entities, and nobody's obligated to ensure adequate supply, the result is nobody wants to own the technically needed but financially unprofitable bits. That applies regardless of whether it's coal, gas, nuclear, oil, wind, solar, hydro or whatever.
If we want a reliable system based on renewables then it can be done. There are plenty of people capable of designing and building it. We've got plenty of land and, in the eastern states, plenty of good sites for hydro storage.
Same with fossil fuels. It can be designed and built sure.
Same with nuclear.
As a case specific to AGL, well they could replace this weir with a large (~50m high) dam:
By doing that they'd have 2.5 years' worth of water stored, rather than the 0.3 years' the store at present, and that then enables the existing McKay, Bogong, Clover and West Kiewa power stations to be repurposed for the specific role of firming wind and solar during periods of low yield. It also permits the addition of a fifth power station to the scheme.
That they haven't done it is because:
1. Financially not attractive. Their job is to make money, it's not their job to ensure the lights stay on.
2. Building dams is outside AGL's core expertise and business.
3. Fair chance they'd end up with protestors marching down the street against it and trashing the company's reputation among an uninformed public.
And so we end up with a minimally adequate system, prone to failure. We've ended up in that situation not because of renewables, it's been done with coal and gas, and we'd end up in the same with nuclear as well for the same reasons. All technologies fail when only a bare bones approach is taken to their implementation.
So long as the "fix" for someone adding more capacity, enough to make supply robust, is to then close an equal amount of capacity then we're stuck with the problem. And to be fair to the companies, so long as they're all competing for short term dispatch, literally every 5 minutes, then they're going to take that cost minimisation approach.
It's not a coincidence that the UK, upon which our market design is heavily based, is also in a mess. Not a coincidence at all - do the same thing, get the same results.
You nailed it smurf, that is exactly how a well managed system works, in a nutshell.Putting some figures around this to illustrate the point and using SA as the example:
Peak demand in round figures = 3400 MW
Average demand = 1500 MW
Now if the aim is reliable supply then you won't find an engineer who comes up with anything less than about 4100 MW as being the required capacity. That allows 3400 MW to be run plus the other 700 MW to cover breakdowns etc. Even that's pushing it - most would feel more comfortable with somewhere around 4300 MW installed.
How a single utility would do that is straightforward. Build modern, efficient plant up to the point that meets routine requirements. Keep serviceable but technologically obsolete "old clunkers" on standby for use when demand spikes or breakdowns occur.
Hence if we look at it historically well that is indeed what was done. Modern plant built to suit routine requirements, old clunkers in reserve to fill the gaps when needed. And they did get used, plenty of examples where that occurred.
With a competitive market however all that changes. Nobody's going to keep plant sitting around unprofitably just to ensure society continues to function. They're not going to pay staff, keep it maintained and so on when they could instead knock it down and sell the land. That's not the role of any company operating in the market so they don't do it.
So these days we're basically running without a backup. There's no emergency brakes, there's no insurance, if it goes wrong then out go the lights. That's nothing to do with wind and solar versus coal and gas or nuclear. It's simply a consequence of nobody being obligated to foot the bill for a technically robust system.
Nobody's forced AGL to shut Torrens Island B, indeed the SA government has paid them to delay it. Just as nobody forced Energy Australia to shut Wallerawang C. Nobody forced Alinta to shut Northern. And so on. The companies made the decision of their own accord simply because they can still generate most of the energy whilst having less capacity at remaining facilities. Trouble is, from a technical perspective that's guaranteed to put the lights out at some point.
That one was itself absolutely a consequence of the market.
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