The future of energy generation and storage

Snowy Hydro 2.0 has not been a raging success so far, not in anybody's language.
That has not stopped the Snowy execs getting huge bonuses.
From The Evil Murdoch press

Nine executives on the Snowy Hydro 2.0 scheme were awarded $4.5m in short-term bonuses in the past financial year, despite the project facing major cost blowouts and a delay of up to six years until completion.
The giant pumped hydro’s top bosses raked in a total of nearly $11m in their pay packets, which were up by more than 20 per cent on the year before. The payments were buoyed by a 30 per cent increase in bonuses.

The significant boost in salaries comes as the project continues to be beset by myriad delays, which have included the collapse of one of its main contractors, Clough, and the abrupt exit of its chief executive, Paul Broad.

Significant derailments in the project and closure of coal-fired power stations have triggered the Australian Energy Market Operator to warn of a supply crisis in the next few years unless new supplies come online or Snowy 2.0 can claw back delays.

The project’s key building partner has also been facing accusations of payment delays to contractors, while workers have threatened to strike after maggot-infested food was served onsite.

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The KPI's for these blokes must have just consisted of just turning up for work, rather than working from home.
Mick

mullokintyre said:

Snowy Hydro 2.0 has not been a raging success so far, not in anybody's language.
That has not stopped the Snowy execs getting huge bonuses.
From The Evil Murdoch press

The KPI's for these blokes must have just consisted of just turning up for work, rather than working from home.
Mick

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Unfortunately it's a bit like the subs, they don't have an option, the real tragety is the ones who most want renewables are the major hinderence.
But that's normally the way, the ones most vocal, have the least idea of how to fix the problem. Lol

Not sure if this has already been posted , but i could not find any reference, so here goes.
From WattClarity

Today, on the 16th of March 2023, the AEMO published its 2023 Gas Statement of Opportunities (GSOO). The executive summary of the publication begins with the line “Despite increased production commitments from the gas industry since the 2022 GSOO, gas supply in southern Australia is declining faster than projected demand“.

The report highlights the ‘risk of peak day shortfalls’ in the southern states from winter 2023 which are being forecast when modeled under very high demand conditions. It goes on to state that annual physical gas supply is forecast to be adequate until 2027 but investment “is needed in the near term to ensure operational solutions from 2027, despite falling gas consumption”.

Almost one year ago, the AEMO’s 2022 GSOO flagged longer-term challenges with the country’s eastern and south-eastern gas market with the AEMO’s Merryn York then-stating that the market operator was uncertain about the future demand supply of natural gas as the market looks to decarbonise.

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Basically they are saying that despite falling gas consumption, much lower gas supplies means there will be a shortage until far more gas usage us removed from the market.
In Victoria at least, it is almost impossible to get approval to get gas connected to new housing developments.
Siz years ago, when we built our house, gas heating and gas stove top cooking were the the cheapest most effective way of doing both.
How quickly things change.
Mick

mullokintyre said:

Not sure if this has already been posted , but i could not find any reference, so here goes.
From WattClarity

Basically they are saying that despite falling gas consumption, much lower gas supplies means there will be a shortage until far more gas usage us removed from the market.
In Victoria at least, it is almost impossible to get approval to get gas connected to new housing developments.
Siz years ago, when we built our house, gas heating and gas stove top cooking were the the cheapest most effective way of doing both.
How quickly things change.
Mick

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I remember when oil heaters were cheap and worked well, but that soon changed too.

It seems that households are relatively simple to convert from gas to electricity, I don't think you can say the same for a lot of industries.

We

SirRumpole said:

I remember when oil heaters were cheap and worked well, but that soon changed too.

It seems that households are relatively simple to convert from gas to electricity, I don't think you can say the same for a lot of industries.

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l guess we could swap the gas ducted system for an electric heat pump, but it means throwing a few grand away and spending a few more grand for another system, then replace the gas cooktop with an electric one, and replace the three gas instant hot water heaters for electric /solar.
Thats quite a few grands worth of expense for what?
Mick

mullokintyre said:

We

l guess we could swap the gas ducted system for an electric heat pump, but it means throwing a few grand away and spending a few more grand for another system, then replace the gas cooktop with an electric one, and replace the three gas instant hot water heaters for electric /solar.
Thats quite a few grands worth of expense for what?
Mick

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For what ? Gas is getting harder to find and will only go up in price. I guess it depends on a number of factors including cost of conversion and if you intend to move soon

SirRumpole said:

For what ? Gas is getting harder to find and will only go up in price. I guess it depends on a number of factors including cost of conversion and if you intend to move soon

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Would take a lot of gas usage to make up for the conversion costs.
Gas and electricity both going up in price.
Plus I like insurance , when the electricity is not there, I can cook and heat water.
And as for shifting house, that will probably only happen if there is a divorce and my wife kicks me out.
Mick

mullokintyre said:

Would take a lot of gas usage to make up for the conversion costs.
Gas and electricity both going up in price.
Plus I like insurance , when the electricity is not there, I can cook and heat water.
And as for shifting house, that will probably only happen if there is a divorce and my wife kicks me out.
Mick

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The really funny thing is, unless the electric cooktop is being supplied by renewables energy, how much extra pollution is being emitted by changing the gas cooktop to an electric one.
The pan on the gas cooktop is converting all the energy in the gas into heat at the pan, it is hard to beat that.

If the same gas is instead being put through a gas turbine generator, 50% of the energy in the gas is lost in waste heat, then there is all the transmission losses, before the electricity reaches the cooktop.

So really until all the electricity is supplied by renewables, all they are doing is causing more emissions, by making people change over to electrical appliances, but it makes it sound like they are improving things.

mullokintyre said:

Not sure if this has already been posted , but i could not find any reference, so here goes.

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Going into detail, more detail than is in the report:

Longford Gas Plant (Vic) has a nameplate capacity of 1115 TJ/day and in practice has run to 1168 TJ / day in practice historically.

Longford winter 2022 production peaked at 1040 TJ / day

Capacity outlook for this coming winter is in the 800 - 845 TJ / day range for any given date between 1 May and 30 September.

Lang Lang Gas Plant nameplate is 67 TJ / day with production last winter around 25 TJ / day. This winter should be around 15 TJ / day.

Otway Gas Plant nameplate is 205 TJ / day. Last winter ran at about 130 TJ / day. Present capacity is 108 TJ / day but will be brought back up to the full 205 TJ / day once the wells are drilled and a new field brought online.

Athena Gas Plant nameplate is 70 TJ / day. Presently running at about half that, 34 - 35 TJ / day, same as last year.

Orbost Gas Plant nameplate is 68 TJ / day. Due to recurrent technical problems onshore was limited to 45 TJ / day last year but now running at 62 TJ / day so long as nothing goes wrong.

The above all being in Victoria. In total it comes to 1275 TJ / day being available in winter 2022 and about 1040 TJ / day for winter 2023. With a bit of variation either way on any given day.

Others:

Moomba Gas Plant (SA) original nameplate capacity was 630 TJ / day with 310 TJ / day of processing capacity presently in operation. Actual flow limited to 230 TJ / day in winter 2022 but has recently been achieving a bit more than that, 255 - 270 TJ / day.

Camden (NSW) ran at 9 TJ / day for winter 2022 and presently in the 5 - 6 TJ / day range with complete closure (permanently) later this year.

Maximum supply to SA from Qld depends on NT gas production being sufficient to supply Mt Isa from the NT rather than from Qld and that's somewhat hit and miss in practice. So it's not a constant but broadly it's 370 TJ / day +/- 15% bearing in mind the pipeline capacity expansion this year with the installation of an additional compressor.

So overall, gas production capacity within the combined NSW / ACT / Vic / Tas / SA area (noting there's no actual production in Tas or ACT) is coming down significantly yes.

There's also the question of storage:

Iona (Vic) with pipeline connection to Adelaide and Melbourne is presently at 99.3% of capacity and filling right now.

Dandenong (Melbourne) presently at 48% and standing still due to work being done. There's also a lot of contractual issues there - long story short AEMO itself is paying to fill the storage and will own that gas. Getting that done required various legislation and so on and has only very recently taken effect.

Newcastle gas storage is somewhat of a disaster. It's presently at 23.4% and slowly falling due to natural boil off of the LNG in the tank. It was run completely empty last year, some attempts to fill it made over summer, but that ran into technical hiccups....

Gas pipeline map as below. Key points to understand being:

Pipeline capacity between Queensland and the south-eastern states is limited.

Tasmania is for practical purposes part of Victoria so far as gas is concerned whilst the ACT is part of NSW. North-Western Victoria is fed from Adelaide.

Key pipelines being:

Queensland - Moomba (SA)

Moomba Gas Plant to both Adelaide and Sydney

Port Campbell (Otway Gas Plant, Athena Gas Plant, Iona Storage) to both Adelaide and Melbourne

Longford Gas Plant to Melbourne and via Eastern Gas Pipeline to NSW / ACT. Orbost Gas Plant connects to the Eastern Gas Pipeline whilst Lang Lang Gas Plant connects to the Longford - Melbourne pipeline.

Tasmania fed from Longford in practice.

So far as peak day gas demand is concerned, it does depend very heavily on weather and peaks don't necessarily coincide between the states.

For a representative high but not extreme day though, the sort of thing that will happen and doesn't require a snow storm to hit Melbourne etc:

Victoria = 1146 TJ
NSW = 536 TJ
SA = 334 TJ
Tas = 20 TJ

Those are all actual figures taken from a previous cold but unremarkable day.

Versus an unremarkable mid-summer day:

Victoria = 279 TJ
NSW = 230 TJ
SA = 105 TJ
Tas = 20 TJ

Victoria the largest driver of consumption by far is space heating hence the extreme variation winter versus summer.

SA the largest driver is power generation and after that space heating.

Tasmania mostly industrial use so pretty constant. Unless Tamar Valley power station is put into production in which case that can, at the limit, use about 80 TJ / day. At present though 54% of its capacity is mothballed and 5% permanently out of service so it won't be using much gas without a conscious decision to put it into production.

mullokintyre said:

Siz years ago, when we built our house, gas heating and gas stove top cooking were the the cheapest most effective way of doing both.

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Biggest gripe I've got with it all is the various state governments which outright forced consumers to use gas.

ACT and Victoria took it to the extreme. Taxpayer funds to extend the gas network, which is of course privately owned and run for profit, and mandatory to connect any new home or major renovation to it at your expense. Some councils in NSW did the same, no gas means no occupancy certificate, and likewise a pretty firm push in SA and WA albeit not actually compulsory.

Heck in SA we've got one subdivision where the gas company has, I'm not sure of the correct legal term but there's a word for it, but it's an actual enforceable requirement that the owner must use gas. There's no choice about it - gas is mandatory. It gets even better too - monopoly gas supplier and they're supplying piped LPG fed from six large tanks at the end of a street.

https://www.google.com/maps/@-35.08...0!5s20190901T000000!7i16384!8i8192?authuser=0

Now some, notably the ACT, want to force consumers to stop using the very same thing government forced them to use in the first place. Clueless politicians yes.

sptrawler said:

The really funny thing is, unless the electric cooktop is being supplied by renewables energy, how much extra pollution is being emitted by changing the gas cooktop to an electric one.

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It'll depend when it's used.

Right now, at this moment, the marginal source of generation in Vic and SA is wind.

NSW and Qld it's coal. Tas it's hydro.

That will change with time but right now that's the marginal source of generation, the resource used more of it you turn something on, so in Vic or SA it's a "use it or lose it" situation with wind and even in Qld and NSW well at least there's not a near term coal shortage like there is with gas.

That said, well most people aren't cooking before 6am.

My view - if you're buying new then go electric. It'll be mostly renewable over most of its lifetime. But if you've already got a working gas appliance then no panic to replace it for the reasons you mention - it's more about preparing for the future than any immediate gain.

Smurf1976 said:

It'll depend when it's used.

Right now, at this moment, the marginal source of generation in Vic and SA is wind.

NSW and Qld it's coal. Tas it's hydro.

That will change with time but right now that's the marginal source of generation, the resource used more of it you turn something on, so in Vic or SA it's a "use it or lose it" situation with wind and even in Qld and NSW well at least there's not a near term coal shortage like there is with gas.

That said, well most people aren't cooking before 6am.

My view - if you're buying new then go electric. It'll be mostly renewable over most of its lifetime. But if you've already got a working gas appliance then no panic to replace it for the reasons you mention - it's more about preparing for the future than any immediate gain.

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Yes, I was talking more from an efficiency/ emissions perspective, not from a fiscal one.
I have removed the LNG cooktop and LNG HWS and installed electric, the main reason being the service cost for the gas far outweighed any gain by replacing the gas HWS with another one when it failed.
It just made more financial sense to go all electric and remove the gas.

Gas export tax would help to fix Australia's energy crisis, says Dr Ken Henry​

The major goal of ITER, which is a multi-billion dollar collaboration between dozens of nations, is to show nuclear fusion can generate power at an industrial scale.

"Fusion energy is seen sometimes as the holy grail of energy," says Tom Wauters, a calm, slender and genial Belgian who works as a plasma physicist at ITER.

"The advantages of this technique — even though it's very complicated to achieve — is that you can have almost limitless energy."

The energy market operator’s urgent warning of a gas shortage has heated up a political brawl between the Greens and the federal government as time runs down for Energy Minister Chris Bowen to reform the safeguard mechanism to deliver on Australia’s legally binding climate target.
The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) released last week a forecast that the east coast would run short of gas by 2027 unless new supply projects opened up, or exports from Queensland’s LNG export terminals are turned back for the local market.

AEMO said Victoria, the state with the highest household gas demand and rapidly dwindling supply from its Bass Strait fields, could suffer a gas shortage as soon as this winter in the event of extreme weather conditions.

The gas shortage warning adds a new dimension to the standoff between the Greens and federal government over its safeguard mechanism reform ahead of parliament returning this fortnight, with the minor party’s leader, Adam Bandt, demanding a guarantee that all new fossil fuel projects will be vetoed in return for support for the signature climate policy.

The safeguard mechanism was created by the former Turnbull government in 2016 but it never set binding pollution targets. Bowen has already used regulations to tighten pollution caps so that Australia’s 215 biggest emitters must reduce their carbon footprint by about 5 per cent a year until 2030.

The beefed-up safeguard mechanism is forecast to deliver about 30 per cent of the cuts needed to achieve the government’s target to cut emissions by 43 per cent by the end of the decade. But to achieve that it needs to begin by July 1 and Bowen needs parliament to approve one more element of the scheme to make it work – and has only three parliament sitting weeks left.

sptrawler said:

Inside the facility designed to generate limitless clean energy — if it can solve the fuel problem

Among idyllic French villages and rolling fields, midnight convoys ferry enormous mysterious objects to construct the world's biggest fusion reactor. What's going on there?

www.abc.net.au

The major goal of ITER, which is a multi-billion dollar collaboration between dozens of nations, is to show nuclear fusion can generate power at an industrial scale.

"Fusion energy is seen sometimes as the holy grail of energy," says Tom Wauters, a calm, slender and genial Belgian who works as a plasma physicist at ITER.

"The advantages of this technique — even though it's very complicated to achieve — is that you can have almost limitless energy."

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Lots of risks but gee got to give credit for them all having a go.

IFocus said:

Lots of risks but gee got to give credit for them all having a go.

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If it comes off, it will be such a world changer.
Not just the energy generation side of things, but it will start to make nuclear weaponry harder to proliferate.
mick

I have said a number of times that for people who live outside the capital cities, the effects of the push for renewable energy has a much bigger footprint and larger side effects.
At the risk of upsetting Beli a second time, the obvious one was Canberra where they make much of only using renewables, but all the renewables infrastructure is outside its boundaries.
Another case is highlighted in Melbourne.
From ABC News

A protest against a major energy transmission proposed for Central Victoria turned ugly this afternoon when nearly 100 farmers rallied with tractors against the controversial Western Renewables Link (WRL)

Farmers were waiting outside a meeting scheduled at the Dean Recreation Reserve, north of Ballarat, between proprietor of the project AusNet Services, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) and local stakeholder groups.

The WRL would see 500-kilovolt high-voltage transmission lines installed through a secton of the farming community that could be as high as 85 metres if they were to be installed above the ground.

The lines would transport renewable energy from Bulgana, north of Ararat, to Melbourne, but farmers are strongly opposed to the plan.

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So the green citizens of Melbourne will be able to feel good by using more renewables during the day, but at no cost to them.
Their land will not be used up for solar panels, nor will it be blighted by the many towers that will support the 500kv power lines.
Can't imagine claiming part of the MCG to locate solar panels, or part of the MCG car park to put up some towers.
Mick

Yep, self righteous nimbies, sitting back on their balconies in the air-conditioned mega mansions, telling everyone how to save the planet. Lol