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The future of energy generation and storage

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mullokintyre said:
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.
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What's missing here is leadership and credibility.

If it was a century ago and Sir John Monash said a transmission line needs to run across your farm then few if any would've argued. That's what happens when you've got a credible plan being run by a credible, respected individual. People go along with it unless they really do have a legitimate point to make about some minor detail and how it could be improved.

Related to this are those who whip up the farmers' fears and leave them genuinely believing their cows will glow in the dark if the line is built.

Plus its also a natural consequence of the "there is no such thing as society" nonsense that originated a few decades ago from a certain British politician.

Strong leadership is needed to resolve this sort of thing.

From a technical perspective though - get it built ASAP, there's no real "no" option here. One way or another it or a direct alternative is needed.
 
A century ago we did not have climate emergencies, or people with little or no engineering background making engineering decisions based on political imperatives.
Farmers have been pilloried for diesel emission increases ruining the climate, for cow sheep and pig farts for doing the same, for ruining the health of others because of pesticides and herbicides.
They live and work in areas that have a very poor level of basic health services, education, recreation and cultural services.
Not only do they have to put up with poorly maintained road networks, they have to contribute to city based subsidised public transport that they may be lucky to use once a year if at all.
And now to top it off, chunks of their land is going to be acquired to proved electrical services to a city 100kms away, with little or no benefit to them.
Why not build a number of smaller windfarms, solar farms etc no the outskirts of Melbourne to provide the electricity.
The transmission cables will not be needed then.
Why does the land have to be taken up at Ballarat, a 100kms from Melbourne?
Its called exporting your problems, in this case exporting them out of the cities.

Mick
 
Basic problem is no present city in Australia, and few globally, are built in a place that's has everything required nearby and Melbourne certainly doesn't.

It's not windy enough, it's not particularly sunny and it has no major pumped hydro sites.

If we were planning Australia from scratch to suit all this then it could be done differently perhaps, though there'd be a lot of parochial type resistance, but it's too late now. Moving the energy's the only realistic way forward.

As a concept it's the same basic situation as agriculture. Farms have to go where land is suitable, there's suitable weather and so on and then we transport the produce to cities. Exact same situation at the conceptual level - cities can grow food but in practice it's not really workable to be self-reliant. It's far more workable to grow food in the regions and transport it to the cities despite that requiring highways, rail lines and so on.
 
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Yes, but the problem is , it is all one sided.
Before Melbourne became the mega city it is, there were hundreds of hectares of market gardens around Werribee to the west, and in the sandy soils to the south east in the local area now known as Kingston.
There were similar levels of orchards to the east around Warrandyte then more market gardens further out around Cranbourne and the Orchards in the eastern areas from the hills down to Nunawading.
Virtually all of them have been swallowed up by the ever encroaching suburbia.
Good productive agricultural with access to water gone into unproductive housing estates.
Everything is geared towards the convenience of the urban dweller, usually at the expense of those in the regions.
Mick
 

Same around Sydney. In the northwest where I used to live there were many orchards around the Dural area which are now housing estates.

Lack of planning is allowing suburbia to sprawl at the cost of our capacity to feed ourselves.
 
SirRumpole said:
Same around Sydney. In the northwest where I used to live there were many orchards around the Dural area which are now housing estates.

Lack of planning is allowing suburbia to sprawl at the cost of our capacity to feed ourselves.
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The same everywhere, in W.A between Perth and Bunbury (about 160km South) when I came to Australia as a kid there was cows everywhere along the coastal strip, dairies, huge irrigation system to flood all the paddocks.
Now all the paddocks are comparatively empty, most of the dairies are closed, the milking cows are gone.
 
mullokintyre said:
Good productive agricultural with access to water gone into unproductive housing estates.
Everything is geared towards the convenience of the urban dweller, usually at the expense of those in the regions.
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"I hear you" absolutely on that one. No argument there whatsoever.

I'm just looking at how to make the energy work however.....

My own recent, to be resolved today hopefully, experience actually does sum up a lot of the issues pretty well. My own as in personally at home.

Monday morning the neighbour's tree limb fell off and wiped out the consumers' mains, that is the overhead cable running from the network pole on the street to my house. We're talking about a decent size limb here - haven't measured it but if I said 300mm diameter that would be close to it.

So a cable lying on the ground, the bracket ripped off the house, busted the fascia, timber and lining under the eaves too. Plus the sudden force of it all wrecked the downpipe.

Bearing in mind the electrical attachment is outside the main bedroom, and this happened just before sunrise, that's one hell of way to wake up......

Anyway I've had power from an off-grid solar system since then and no big deal. Lights are working, water's hot, the oven has been used and so on. All off the grid on solar.

But it's worked because the weather today is sunny and 25 degrees and yesterday was much the same. Solar panels at full output through the day and no need for heating or cooling makes it all very easy. Whilst the neighbours have kindly put an extension lead over the fence, I've had little need to use it - only put the computer stuff on it and that was more about power quality than quantity. The oven or other big loads being turned on does cause a pretty decent voltage sag so, given the option is there, I'll choose to not subject electronics to that.

Now if it was mid-winter with overcast skies and I've got heating running and so on then it would be extremely different. The problem would be juggling the use of appliances in order to not overload that extension lead which would be required extensively. Because far less solar output when it's mid-winter and overcast, it drops off dramatically, meanwhile consumption rises due to space heating, more hours of lighting, more likely to be indoors when at home, and incoming water is colder so more need to heat it.

Now realise the same applies at the city wide level. Adelaide or Melbourne, or SA and Vic generally, have some real difficulties in making this work during winter. Especially Melbourne. To overcome that, realistically, without burning fossil fuels the options are pretty limited and can be expressed in one word - hydro. That being hydro as in, primarily, Snowy Hydro and Hydro Tasmania and the only way to make that work, apart from SH and HT themselves building new storage schemes and so on, is to build massive transmission projects. Overhead 500kV or a least 330kV lines in the case of linking to NSW, undersea cables in the case of linking to Tasmania.

The opportunities for hydro storage in Vic and SA aren't zero, there's a couple of projects that ought be built in my view, but they're limited in scale and not sufficient in themselves.

As I'm somewhat fond of saying - "All power pollutes" because indeed it does. It all impacts something somehow, the only questions being what and where but there's no such thing as pollution free energy.

Society overall is in for a shock with a lot of this. It's doable but there's no free ride, it's not without downsides and some painful debates are coming that's a given.
 

It's strange and disturbing that little is being said about hydro, apart from Snowy 2 and most about that seems to be negative.

It's a sign that the politicians just don't like the idea of a. spending the money and b. arguing with the environmental lobby continually.

They still aren't switched on (pun intended) to the realities of intermittent generation and are being hijacked or blackmailed by either the fossil fuel lobby or the Greens.

It doesn't look good for the future I'm afraid.
 
SirRumpole said:
It's a sign that the politicians just don't like the idea of a. spending the money and b. arguing with the environmental lobby continually.
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The problem is short term thinking. The desire for "quick wins" combined with a lack of technical competence on the part of politicians sees the country sent down dead ends.

As an example from 2007: https://www.smh.com.au/national/wel...labor-tells-green-voters-20070821-gdqwrm.html

By 2010 electric hot water systems would no longer be installed in new homes, and by 2012 they would be replaced by solar, gas or heat-pump systems in existing dwellings, Labor's environment spokesman, Peter Garrett, said yesterday.
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So a policy that pushed consumers to, in practice, almost entirely gas systems. A bit of a market for solar and heat pumps but visit any new subdivision and see what's being installed - it's overwhelmingly gas which, if course, is exactly the expected outcome.

15 years later we're running out of gas and the "green" lobby hates the stuff. Meanwhile we've got renewable electricity routinely going to waste during off peak periods.

Off peak? Now where have I heard those words before? Oh yes, that's right, "off peak hot water" which was the thing they wanted to get rid of.

Can't make this stuff up unfortunately. It's a classic case of someone non-technical and more worried about politics looking for "quick wins" and going down a dead end road in order to achieve them. Versus looking at the long term goal and realising that short term pain is required in order to get there - either stick with electric storage and just shift the means of generation as is now underway or, if we're going to shift the water heating technology, go straight to heat pumps thus retaining the ability to use an increasingly renewable electricity supply, at off-peak times, and avoiding the use of gas. Doubling down on gas, when we already knew future supply was a problem, never made sense.

Now today the very same "green lobby" has seen the light and wants electric hot water, electric cooking, electric heating and even electric cars. Excellent - just what the engineers said we needed to do back in 1977. Finally we have some common ground.

All this is much like investing or fitness. If we want good outcomes then we need to focus on the long term not the short. Look to the horizon and walk toward it, don't look 5 metres in front and end up going around in circles. Short term that means pain but long term it's a winner because tomorrow does come.
 
Meanwhile in Queensland:

Callide C co-owner Intergen goes into voluntary administration

Intergen, which owns 50 per cent of the coal-fired power station, went into administration on Thursday after shareholders couldn’t agree on future funding.
www.afr.com

Callide C co-owner Intergen goes into voluntary administration​

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Callide C being the power station where a catastrophic failure occurred with one unit on 25 May 2021, the present return to service estimated date being 31 October 2023.

The other unit has been out since 31 October 2022 due to cooling tower falling down. Return to service date is presently 30 September 2023 at partial capacity, full capacity toward the end of the year.

 
It sounds very balanced and accurate, someone has spent some time, putting that together. Not a lot of emotion involved, pretty well written and alludes to the issues that are mounting.
 
Sean K said:
This could also go into the Climate Hysteria thread, but this three part discussion of our energy transition is bloody good reading.
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I could nit pick but basically agreed yes.

One big problem that hasn't been mentioned is that merit order dispatch has itself been hijacked and no longer in practice means what any engineer reading that would be assuming.

In short - it's now based on numbers that are quite literally made up for purely financial objectives, having no basis in engineering or even real economics.

That more than renewables is behind much of the troubles. It leads to high cost, inefficient plant being run whilst low cost, more efficient plant is underutilised.

As I often say - it's the equivalent of paying a highly paid professional overtime, with penalty rates, to dig trenches meanwhile the labourers are told to down tools. Makes no sense whatsoever to anyone other than the politicians and ideologues who came up with it.
 
Unintended consequences, that is the problem with following an ideological driven mob and exactly what is going to be the problem with the Government setting a target in concrete.
We the taxpayer are going to be screwed, yet again as per the NBN, pre NBN we had internet basic for $30, now we have higher taxes and have to pay $60 for basic NBN.?
The pitchfork mob still think they are on a winner, well long may it last.?
 
Origins new owners, getting moving, or maybe not, maybe shutting down Eraring, or maybe not, maybe selling it to the new NSW Government, or maybe not. A lot of maybe's at the moment.

Brookfield open to talks with NSW on Eraring sale

The Canadian bidder for Origin Energy would be happy to speak with the NSW government about a potential buyback of the giant Eraring coal power plant.
www.afr.com
Stewart Upson, chief executive of the Asia-Pacific business of Brookfield, said any talks would have to involve the early closure of the huge generator as the end game, and not just defer a shutdown.
That includes the planned closure of Eraring, envisaged for August 2025 at the earliest. However, in the lead-up to last Saturday’s NSW election, then-opposition leader Chris Minns left the door open to a potential buyback of the 2880-megawatt generator if Labor won.

“We’d obviously be happy to have any conversation with the government and listen to what they have to say,” Mr Upson told The Australian Financial Review, when asked if Brookfield would be open to that option.
“In relation to that specific transaction, I’m not taking anything off the table. And obviously, we need to get briefed about the energy situation in NSW. We have ambitious plans in relation to the energy security corporation, but I need to get a briefing,” he said.
The NSW government had the opportunity to buy Eraring from Origin in mid-2021 but ultimately decided against picking up the asset over concerns that underwriting a plan to keep the coal-fired power station open longer could “crowd out” other investments in energy.

Mr Upson stood by Origin’s proposed earliest date for closing the plant in principle, and said he expected the shutdown would come as early as then under Brookfield’s ownership, as long as the reliability of power supply would not be harmed.
“The August 2025 date is simply the earliest possible date Eraring could be closed, but the actual closure of Eraring – including under Origin’s current intentions – is going to be driven by both having appropriate replacement in place and getting comfortable and working with the government to make sure that the shuttering of Eraring can be done in a responsible way that doesn’t have any sort of impact on [the] reliability of energy supply,” Mr Upson said.


“Our position on Eraring is that we will close it down as soon as we possibly can under those constraints, and it will close down as fast as or faster than it would have, with our ownership.”
 
sptrawler said:
Origins new owners, getting moving, or maybe not, maybe shutting down Eraring, or maybe not, maybe selling it to the new NSW Government, or maybe not. A lot of maybe's at the moment.
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On the supply side there's simply no adequate alternative actually being built to be available by 2025.

Simple as that really. That doesn't mean it's technically impossible and it's not a comment on economics, engineering etc - just an observation that it hasn't actually been done and there's not enough time to do it now.

One of the biggest problems we've got is people who say "that' two and a half years away, plenty of time to build something" - that's a rather epic display of ignorance and sadly it comes from some in high places. Far from being plenty of time, 2.5 years is too short to even contemplate it being doable unless we're talking about a rushed solution incurring permanently high costs for the next few decades.
 
Posting this here to avoid taking the EV thread drastically off topic:


In short the idea that hydrogen production can be used as a variable load to enable productive overbuilding of wind and solar is by no means certain. Indeed Origin (and others who've looked at it) see hydrogen as a load that itself needs firm or at least semi-firmed supply.

Also highly price sensitive on the electricity supply side, it's very similar to aluminium smelting in that regard. So some ruthless efficiency and cost cutting is going to be needed if it's to be a goer.
 
Came across this new Solar PV/heating unit that works at 80% efficiency. Essentially it is solar panels with a unit that extracts the excess heat generated in the PV panels and sends it down as heat for hot water. Incidentally reducing the excess heat on the PV panels improves their efficiency and lets them generate even more power.

Hybrid solar module sets 80 per cent efficiency record - One Step Off The Grid

SunMaxx PVT sees "no obstacles" to market ramp up of its combination of PV and thermal technology solar modules after setting a new efficiency record.
onestepoffthegrid.com.au

Sunmaxx PVT | PVT Modules

Sunmaxx PVT modules use the highest quality and most efficient solar cells as well as systems from the automotive industry.
sunmaxx-pvt.com
 
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