This is a mobile optimized page that loads fast, if you want to load the real page, click this text.

The future of energy generation and storage

Jump to new
sptrawler said:
Then they have to unravel all the silly spin, that is being pedalled at the moment, crazy as bat $hit, is what they are leaving options open and having an open mind is the key IMO.
Click to expand...

Absolutely, and not believing the industry merchants peddlling their own stuff unless it can be independently verified, and that means having a panel with no skin in the game and is not being paid by industry money( if that is possible).
 
SirRumpole said:
Absolutely, and not believing the industry merchants peddlling their own stuff unless it can be independently verified, and that means having a panel with no skin in the game and is not being paid by industry money( if that is possible).
Click to expand...
Yes it is just so crazy, the electrical system isn't a game, if it becomes a stuff up it will mean lives, no if or buts, it is just so important in a modern society we would struggle to function without it in an extended outage IMO.
How many infirmed old people in high rise buildings would manage without lifts and air conditioning, a lot of high rise buildings don't have diesel backup generators.
The list of problems would be endless, they just need to be open minded, honest and have no vested interests, that is probably a good reason why the Government should be heavily involved again in the planning stage, or we will end up with an electrical system like our apartment blocks e.g Opal Towers.
 
Even rusted on Ross, has had a light bulb moment and is getting nervous.
Good to see everyone is getting up to speed though.
They should have been reading this thread three years ago.

Albo’s economic report card: Must try harder to secure our future

The government is making an each-way bet when it comes to dealing with the energy transition – and that’s a big problem.
www.theage.com.au
From the article:
an Anthony Albanese’s government walk and chew gum at the same time? Should be able to, provided it stops trying to work both sides of the street.
A big achievement at last year’s federal election was to get rid of a government of closet climate-change deniers only pretending to want to do something, and replace it with a government that did accept the scientists’ advice and did want to act on it.
But although Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has been busy setting up the frameworks for reducing greenhouse gas emissions – fixing the “safeguard mechanism”, producing a hydrogen strategy and developing a critical minerals strategy, and, last month, announcing a scheme to underwrite the risk of investing in new renewable energy generation and storage – few new projects have begun or are in the offing.

That’s the trouble: actual progress is happening too slowly. Albanese’s game plan for this term seems to be softly, softly catchee monkey. Make sure you don’t offend any powerful interests, get comfortably re-elected and then think about getting tough.
There’s not enough sense of urgency. The longer it takes us to make the transition to renewable energy the more pain we’ll suffer in the process.

Loading
The Grattan Institute’s energy and climate change expert, Tony Wood, wants us to realise that this transition will be harder than anything we’ve had to achieve outside of wartime.

“We must manage the decline of the fossil fuel extractive sectors, transform every aspect of our energy and transport sectors, re-industrialise much of manufacturing, and find solutions to difficult problems in agriculture,” Wood says.
Note that the challenge comes in two parts. First, make the domestic shift from fossil fuels to renewables. Second – since the world will soon enough no longer want to buy our massive exports of coal and gas – find something else we can sell abroad.

Get it? If we don’t want to become a lot poorer, we’ve got to get weaving. Labor does get that to secure our future we must seize this limited-time opportunity to turn Australia into a renewable energy superpower.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers will tell you the government has already invested about $3 billion in the superpower project. But, again, we’re being too slow in getting on with it.
Nothing Australia can do by itself will halt climate change. That will take concerted, decisive action by all the big carbon-emitting nations. That will happen eventually, even if happens too late to prevent a lot more warming.
So, if we don’t mind being lasting losers from the eventual transition – the country that used to make a good living as an energy exporter – we can stay as laggards, waiting for America, China and Europe to do the heavy lifting.

If we want to stay winners, however, we have to get ahead of the others. We have to get to net-zero emissions before everyone else. We have to build a renewables industry so big it can meet our domestic needs, with at least as much energy to spare for export to countries less well-placed than us.
Loading
Most of our exported renewable energy would be “embodied” in green steel, green aluminium and other resources. This would be all to the good, allowing us to set up new manufacturing industries to further process our resources before selling them.
To achieve this unprecedented transformation will involve the government leading the way, funding research on how basic science can be commercialised, funding pilot projects, and reducing the risks for investors in renewables and storage.
This is challenging stuff for conventionally trained economists. They’re used to telling governments to let private firms pursue our “comparative advantage” by exploiting the nation’s “natural endowment”. They tell politicians never to try to “pick winners”.

But these are unprecedented times. Global warming has just torn up our comparative advantage in mining, rendering our natural endowment of huge remaining stocks of fossil fuels of little future value.
As Professor Ross Garnaut was the first to point out, however, in the new world where renewable energy is king, part of our natural endowment we formerly thought to be of little value is now our comparative advantage: relative to other countries, we have abundant supplies of sun and wind.
But waiting for private enterprise to turn our industrial structure on its head without government leadership is delusional. And, as we ought to have learnt by now, if you dissuade governments from picking winners, they end up backing losers: helping firms and workers who did well in the old world try to stop the clock.
That’s what’s wrong with the government’s softly, softly, all-things-to-all-persons approach to climate change. It’s working both sides of the street, taking an each-way bet: encouraging the move to renewables while retaining fossil fuel subsidies and allowing investment in new coal mines and gas projects.

It says a lot about the discombobulation of conventional economists that none of them beat the Australia Institute’s Dr Richard Denniss to pointing out the obvious: taking an each-way bet flies in the face of opportunity cost.
Allowing the established players to continue investing in fossil fuels deters them from investing in renewables. It also allows them to bid scarce skilled labour away from renewables and from rejigging the electricity grid. Sorry, the government must try harder.
 
sptrawler said:
climate-change deniers only pretending to want to do something, and replace it with a government that did accept the scientists’ advice and did want to act on it.
Click to expand...
Edit: this was a paper extract, not @sptrawler talking but the message is the same, say a lie long enough and it becomes a truth
About this paper:
Can you please give me one, that is enough, one proper scientist which can categorically states that climate change, if any, is caused (mainly caused if you want) by man made CO2 emissions.
I am not kidding.
A single respected knowledgeable independent scientist!
Obviously a PhD or chair in climate change "science" does not count in the same way as a Marlboro cigarette lab researcher should not be trusted in stating cigarettes being unlinked to lung cancer...
But any proper independent geophysicist, nobel prize or hard science theorist can count, as long as they know experimental science basis.

It is high time people wake up, especially when this is resulting in death of the west , and in the west by destroying our grid and economies when not directly switching off life support in hospitals.
We can try to
- get independence from oil suppliers..even if it is ironic from a country overwhelmed with fossil fuel resources,
-reduce polution in city centres and export it to the countryside or overseas..
all good..but not for fake lies
And lastly I provided in the last few months researchs stating clearly that in Australia,one of the best place on earth for solar, a solar farm plus battery is a net CO2 cost vs a fossil fuel power plant in its lifetime.
We are buying packed in China fossil fuel in the form of panels and batteries, or wind farms
Anyway, can we please have the decency of dealing with facts here.
So yes, some loonies have decided to destroy our coal power plants and use massive propaganda to justify it ,: we have now to deal with this fact.
How are we going to survive is what counts, not if we are saving the planet by commiting suicide and twisting sciences
 
That would depend on the detail.

Eg if runoff increases then, so long as the infrastructure is designed suitably and doesn't wash away, then that's a positive for hydro.

If runoff decreases then that's a negative for hydro certainly.

That said, the basic issue is acknowledged in the broad concept which, generically not specific to any particular scheme that could be built, is to (1) store as much water as practical at the top of the scheme and (2) base all the calculations on using no more than 85% of the average inflows.

So using a real one, a scheme that could be built, it stores 2.5 years' worth of river flow and releases taht water only for the purpose of deep firming as an alternative to gas. Noting that parts of the scheme, about 28% of its generating capacity, can also be used on a more routine basis for peak power due to some natural inflows downstream of the major storages plus a minor pumped storage component.

Now if we go back through the streamflow records well it would need a full 10 years of constant severe drought to empty the storage and bring about failure. That's not bulletproof but it's a fair bit of warning that it's going wrong and corrective action is needed.

Bearing in mind a basic workaround exists in two forms:

1. Simply changing the priority order of using the hydro based on water availability. Prioritise those with more water, deprioritise those with less.

2. To the extent some gas (or diesel etc) generation is retained, if water levels become a concern that can simply be run as priority ahead of the hydro, thus reducing outflows and storage decline as a quick fix.

Ultimately it can't get to 100% reliability that's true. If runoff outright ceases well then hydro will fail that's a certainty. Mathematically however it can certainly be built to be extremely reliable as such, noting there that no power system is totally immune to failure.

As another example, there's one up in Qld in the area that's had flooding that could be built with the following basic specifications:

Installed generating capacity 1020 MW (3 x 340MW machines).

Normal day to day operation as a basic pumped storage scheme with a lower reservoir of size that hasn't been precisely determined but it'd be sufficient for normal peak load duty. This enables full power output from the machines, used as a pumped storage scheme.

Has 1.4 years' of full river flow stored at the top of the scheme which under typical circumstances is not being used, it's simply sitting there filling up.

Can be operated base load at full gate (100% generation capacity) for nominally 876 hours per annum (10% of the time) for the specific purpose of "bailing out" the rest of the system during periods of NEM-wide poor wind + solar yield. Doing so uses 85% of the river flow. During this mode of operation the lower storage simply spills once it's full and water goes down the river in the normal manner.

Noting that needing to run what is effectively an emergency backup at full capacity 10% of the time is itself a rather extreme occurrence, there's in-built contingency there in using that figure.

Downsides? Yep you guessed it, the land involved was all placed under conservation during the late 1980's specifically to prevent construction of this scheme or any variation of it.

There's more like that. Hydro schemes which are hybrid pumped and on-river major storage. So you've got a pumped storage scheme for day to day use, and up the top there's a great big volume of stored water as a contingency to "bail out" the overall system should the need arise. Normally that just sits there filling up but it enables sustained running of the power station, at constant full output, if required due to the rest of the system (wind, solar, storage) falling short. There's quite a few options for that sort of thing if we wanted to build them - mostly in places that would be contentious however.....

So in a technical sense a lot of options do exist. In practice though I'll be truly amazed if they're built in my lifetime or even a start made. As a society I think we'll do the right thing eventually, but not before trying everything else first.
 
On one hand I agree that the issue of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and temperature change should be subject to rigorous scrutiny.

On the other hand fossil fuels, especially oil and gas, have an abundance of problems even without considering CO2.

Scarcity, wealth transfer, wars, spills, etc. There's a lot of downsides to relying on fuel from the Middle East and/or Russia without needing to worry about CO2.

That doesn't apply to coal however, it doesn't have that problem.
 
SirRumpole said:
Is there any potential to install/upgrade hydro at existing on river storages or do their current uses conflict with hydro operation ?
Click to expand...
In short it depends but some of the things which could be built are indeed redevelopments, adaptations or extensions of existing infrastructure.

Eg changing the existing Kiewa scheme in Victoria from a seasonal (winter + snow melt) operation to one with major long term storage for deep firming simply requires upgrading one of the existing 4 power stations, building a new small 20MW pumped storage station (the pumping from which is critical to the rest of the plan so can't be omitted despite the small size of the generation) and building one new large dam at a location that's already been precisely identified, indeed the dam has been designed many years ago and a road already goes right to the site.

So that's simply a change of purpose of an existing scheme from peaking to deep firming with storage.
 
SirRumpole said:
Is everyone afraid of the environmentalists and NIMBY's ?
Click to expand...
This absolutely.

Hydro by its very nature involves large scale construction work being done in a location that's hard if not impossible to secure from trespassers. That plus the issue of hydro development is quite literally what gave birth to The Greens so in that political sense it's extremely difficult. Asking The Greens to back hydro is somewhat akin to asking the Liberals to sing the praises of unions, it'll be done grudgingly as a last resort if it happens at all.

Versus an LNG import terminal that can be placed at a shipping port and easily secured and which is small enough to go largely unnoticed.

Gas turbines likewise can be hidden in plain sight and seem to go unnoticed. I mean there's three gas-fired stations in metropolitan Melbourne but I doubt most people living there know where they all are.

That makes the gas option attractive politically. It's dead easy to do it - with the exception of AGL's ill-fated attempt to build an LNG terminal near Melbourne, nobody really fights against the rest.
 
Just adding that the debate about hydro versus gas is a debate about how to provide deep firming of wind and solar.

That is, both are in the context that wind and solar do most of the work with the question being how to deal with periods of sustained poor yields. Either storing lots of water on top of a mountain or burning something being the two realistic options at the present time.

Nobody's seriously suggesting we'd use hydro or gas for the majority of generation though to be clear. That idea would be hugely problematic - not enough sites for hydro and where to get the gas from on that scale?

The other option is burn something other than natural gas. Eg diesel, jet fuel, propane, butane, etc in the gas turbines.
 
And I fully agree on that,
Especially for the EU..
Not valid here as we have plenty of gas..well do we even own any left?
And as you noted coal
so the very good reason we switched to a Chinese only dependency for our solar farms...
Very wise strategically ..
 
Too late as we are selling existing resources and preventing exploration of new field, but I think Australia could be powered on gas only?
Not that I suggest or favour it.
But I somewhat doubt we have enough storage facility with hydro battery..for a better term (pump and release) for the whole of Australia..let's say 3 full day consumption , not caused by the concept but due to our geography and required transmission lines.
If we lose 10% in transmission to go to the battery, then an extra 20% in losses to pump then convert back when drawing power back, then extra 10% on transmitting the power back to the city that is not far from a 3rd or more of generated solar farm/wind farm output going in heat ..you know warming the planet...before it can be used.
I do not know the details but suspects losses will be much much higher actually
Mr @Smurf1976 will have the data to firm up these figures but yes, pumping this energy to a suitable dam setup and getting be back is not free as our elevated available sites are far from the key consumption areas.
A great site in FNQ is of limited interest for 95% of the Australian population unless we move Canberra there?
So another pain in the hydro vs gas
 
Ultimately it's workable with proper engineering bearing in mind it's really no different to the logistics of using coal. We already can and do transmit over relatively large distances indeed in the case of the Qld scheme, transmission already just happens to run very close to the required location (and that's not a coincidence, it's from the days of forward planning).



Bearing in mind that whilst Cairns is a long way from Sydney, the real transmission distance is much shorter in practice. Physically, that ~1GW isn't going to make it anywhere south of Gladstone. Same goes for most of this, the effective transmission distance in practice is a lot shorter than the total network length due to that local consumption.

For those in WA, an equivalent would be placing generation in Kalgoorlie. Now that's a long way from Perth, and could be argued as too many losses and so on, but in practice most of the physical flow won't make it out of the Goldfields region anyway. The effective distance becomes much shorter than the actual route itself.

Using that principle we already transmit between SA and Tasmania via Victoria after all, and the circuit length between Gordon power station and Port Augusta is about 1800km, but it works because the energy isn't really moving that far due to loads and generation along the way. In truth none of it's getting past Melbourne in either direction and once you realise that, well the distance is a lot shorter.....

On the engineering side for Qld, the former Queensland Electricity Commission had it all worked out ~35 years ago to put ~1800 MW of hydro up there. They didn't need to physically transmit it all the way to Brisbane, just needed to reverse the flow in the lines such that Brisbane peak demand would in practice be met simply by keeping more of the coal-fired generation down south, using the hydro to run the north. Same concept. Noting that 1800MW wasn't the limit, just what was seen as required at the time.

Simplest "layman's terms" way I've explained it is to say imagine it as a pipeline carrying water where we've got lots of consumers taking water out, but we've also got lots of water sources being put into it. The pipe might be thousands of km long and in theory water could travel from one end to the other but in practice no water actually travels the full length of it, and most isn't going far at all. Most of it's just going a short distance from somewhere in the middle to somewhere not far away, and even if we make up any shortfall by adding water right at both ends, all that's really doing is suppling users at the ends and leaving the other incoming water to supply those in the middle. No individual drop of water is travelling even half the pipe length in practice.

What all that comes down to though, and the thing we're really lacking at present in Australia, is taking a proper engineering approach to it. Engineering yes, not politics. Data collection and number crunching, not words and arguing.
 
That answer kind of the fact that transmission is not required all that far..well, maybe in pocket states like SA,Victoria but in Qld, there is hardly anything in term of consumption north of rockampton, yet this is where most of the hydro can be set
Technically, how much of the Australian power is lost in transmission losses?
Aka total generated minus total consumed
That is a minimum of what we can reasonably expect in difference between generated green anergy and available usable energy
Then what is the efficiency of a water based battery: pumping water up with excess power during the day then to a turbine at night
There are serious losses:
Electricity to pumped water (pump efficiency), flow resistance ..I know, I do pump water to an overhead tank at the farm, then flow resistance again then turbine efficiency
Would 20% losses each way be unrealistic..
So in short how much of 1megawatt hour generated on a sunny day in a solar farm beingd the range can we hope to get back and use in a Sydney suburbs?
Do you have a technically accurate/tested answer on that Mr @Smurf1976 ?
Not sure if this is something you have access to

I do believe this is an essential question which needs to be answered.
It is very hard to find answers on the net, yet I would assume the computation was made?
So my suspicion that the answer must be ugly...
Worse, the usual answer is that the power stored would be wasted/ is free so who cares...
Well if we need to solar produce not twice but 3 times the actual consumption, there is a $ cost...

While looking at that, I researched the snowy 2 scheme efficiency...hum
No answer but I found that

Snowy Hydro pumps up its numbers, but do they hold water?

Snowy Hydro is using unpublished negative price data to boost prospects of Snowy 2.0’s commercial success. But the claims raise more questions than answers.
reneweconomy.com.au
From a green side...
And the cost of snowy 2 has now doubled again from that paper time...

We as Australian power users and taxpayers are being played..but stating this is putting me in the white supremacist camp I am sure and a denier and why not a Nazi, one of these Gaza bombing Nazis the leftards hate so much
 
qldfrog said:
Technically, how much of the Australian power is lost in transmission losses?
Click to expand...
Don't think I've ever seen a single figure for the nation or even the NEM looking only at transmission (without distribution) - most focus being on marginal losses under any given circumstance or the losses at any individual connection point (generation or load) not the total lost in the whole system.

Someone would definitely know it though, just not me. I'll have to find that one out.....

For the marginal losses, from any specific point, here's some random Queensland Marginal Loss Factors for 2023-24 calculated from AEMO data:

SF = Solar Farm, WF = Wind Farm. Rest is conventional coal, gas, hydro, diesel.

Note this is a lost of a lot of generators in Qld but is not comprehensive. There are also others.

Wind and solar:

Baking Board SF = 4.02%
Bluegrass SF = 4.54%
Childers SF = 2.96%
Clare SF = 10.19%
Clermont SF = 8.5%
Collinsville SF = 8.68%
Columboola SF = 2.54%
Coopers Gap WF = 3.42%
Darling Downs SF = 2.38%
Daydream SF = 9.02%
Dalacca WF = 2.24%
Edenvale SF =2.8%
Emerald SF = 8.89%
Gangarri SF = 1.63%
Hamilton SF = 9.4%
Haughton SF = 8.49%
Hayman SF = 9.02%
Hughenden SF = 7.78%
Kaban WF = 4.25%
Kidston SF = 7.78%
Lilyvale SF = 9.36%
Longreach SF = 8.5%
Maryborough SF = 0.86%
Middlemount SF = 8.89%
Mount Emerald WF = 5.28%
Oakey SF = 1.31%
Ross River SF = 7.78%
Rugby Run SF = 8.15%
Sun Metals SF = 0.21%
Susan River SF = 2.96%
Wandoan South SF = 1.68%
Warwick SF = 0.86%
Whitsunday SF = 9.9%
Woolooga SF = 2.64%
Yarranlea SF = 0.86%

Coal, gas, diesel, hydro:

Barcaldine = 6.2%
Barron Gorge hydro = 4.1%
Braemar = 3.83%
Callide B = 8.51%
Darling Downs = 3.83%
Gladstone units 1,2, 5 & 6 = 6.71%
Gladstone units 3 & 4 = 6.77%
Kareeya + Koombooloomba hydro = 4.41%
Kogan Creek = 3.27%
Millmerran = 2.37%
Mt Stuart = 8.36%
Oakey = 3.72%
Roma = 3.57%
Stanwell = 8.19%
Swanbank E = 0.13%
Tarong North = 2.88%
Tarong = 2.93%

Kennedy Energy Park Battery = 3.33% each way

So for Queensland anything between almost zero and about 10% is a credible number, they're in that range.

Noting two major complicating factors:

First is in the case of situations where generation leads to negative losses in practice due to location and impact on flows elsewhere in the network to supply that load in the absence of local generation or due to reactive power issues. Those tend to be minor but some examples do exist. Eg Sunshine Coast SF generation effectively has negative losses albeit minor.

Second is that losses are not constant or linear. Plant that runs at full capacity will tend to have a higher % loss in practice than plant which operates at partial output if all other things are equal.

My point there being not about the detail of any particular connection point, just that overall losses are generally under 10% and most are considerably less.

Load also plays a big role especially with interstate transmission. The lower the load, the longer the effective distance in practice, it leads to some counterintuitive outcomes that lower load actually results in higher current flow on sections of the network due to that. Eg if there's maximum flow under a low load scenario then lines past the first load connection point will carry more current than they'd carry under a high load scenario.

All of which is a long way of saying there's no single answer.

Now I'll throw in the curve balls....

Powerlink (Qld transmission) are planning on installing 500kV lines for bulk transmission in Qld, that being a pretty big step up from the 275kV used at present and the benefit is lower losses.

Not necessarily at 500kV, more likely another 275kV, but a particular near term focus is transmission to the far north due to the renewable energy resources there. Not the hydro but the wind / solar but I'll add that if the point of the hydro is to firm the wind and solar when there's a lack of wind or sun, well if such a scheme were built then it could use the same lines.

As for the efficiency of pumped hydro, that depends and is also not constant. Turbine efficiency varies with load and when generating is typically optimal somewhere circa 70 - 85% of peak capacity with some loss either side of that, and that loss itself is not linear. Then there's variation in head loss (friction loss) in the water conveyance.

Then there's any complicating factors eg net water flow in the scheme. Typically that'll be downwards, a net gain, but Shoalhaven (NSW) has the somewhat unusual feature of net outflow at the top of the scheme. That is, it pumps more water than it discharges, a concept most easily explained by saying the river's at the bottom of the scheme not the top, and the top serves as the source for one final stage of pumping then gravity flow into Sydney's water supply. That gives it somewhat shocking efficiency at storing electricity if only gross input and output is considered but it looks a lot better if that physical water discharge into Sydney's water supply is netted out.

Realistically though, a well built modern pumped hydro scheme with both reservoirs not far apart and without any complicating factors will hit 80% energy storage efficiency in real world use, and will exceed that if intentionally operated so as to optimise efficiency.

SH2 doesn't meet that criteria however, due to the long horizontal distance between the upper and lower reservoirs which lowers efficiency due to increased head loss. I'm not aware if anything's changed recently, but earlier calculations were 76% efficient if operated optimally, 67% worst case, with the difference being in the operating scenario. Some others, whose objectivity is questionable given stated opposition to the scheme and use of emotive language, claim as low as 60%.

That said, efficiency isn't necessarily a show stopper.

No ordinary consumer could care less about the technical efficiency of upstream supply. What they care about is that it works and it's affordable. Efficiency matters to the end user only to the extent it helps achieve that end goal, or is avoiding some other problem they're concerned about (eg environment).

On economic measures though well there's no denying gas turbines have a lot going for them. That's if, of course, you've got gas to run them with and therein lies a problem - the notion that Australia has an abundance of gas is true only if we're talking about the past or we're talking about tearing up contracts. Because in our infinite wisdom of ignoring those pesky technical people, we've managed to sell pretty much all the economic reserves overseas.

That leaves the uneconomic gas reserves, imported fuel, finding more gas reserves, ripping up the export contracts or non-gas options.

Personally I won't argue that hydro necessarily ought be the solution. I will however argue that it's technically viable, it's physically possible to build it, and that being so it ought be properly evaluated from a strictly objective perspective. Measure things and crunch the numbers on costs, ecological impacts and so on. Same goes for gas, liquid fuels and so on, crunch the numbers rather than making assumptions or political claims.

And same goes for climate change, fracking and all the rest. Proper science not politics is what's needed.
 
Thanks Mr @Smurf1976 , you are a wealth of knowledge and provide to us data which is hard or quasi impossible for us commoners to access even when we try.
I know I might look like an old rant against anything green or trendy but I am not.
Own house is on 100% solar and lithium battery just because it makes $ sense where we are to fit the job.
I have no EV because it does not make $ sense for us .clear and simple.
I think grid pumped hydro is to be considered whereas grid lithium battery make no sense : $ cost is a nice summary of common sense and efficiency .
A little bit of solar is definitively usefully..probably roof top but I acknowledge that if solar plus lithium battery requires more fossil fuel in its operational life than a coal plant, we are better off with a coal plant or gas plant for base load
As you, and many other here repeated, we need figures based, science and engineering decision making.
I am personally no fan of current nuclear industry due to the waste management or absence of, but thorium reactor could be used.
Hey Australia, if you want to be a leader, that could be one area as we are telling everyone we do not touch uranium and do not want the bomb...
But looking at the latest fudged Csiro energy report, or the whole mess of BOM focussing on retrospectively changing data to fit a belief, we are not out of the wood even if politicians were starting to listen to local sciences or engineers.
 
Very hot and humid day today on the sunshine coast.and power cuts seems to be rolling since 5pm ish or so
1h here then one h therr.
I suspect today the Qld grid is failing once solar stopped.
Mr @Smurf1976 might know more but it feels and smells like rolling outage..
 
If that is really happening due to a stressed grid, that would be amazingly bad, I doubt it would be the case.
But if it is at this stage of the transition, that would be really scary imo.
As I said, I would doubt t is an underlying problem, probably more associated with local weather issues.
 
qldfrog said:
Mr @Smurf1976 might know more but it feels and smells like rolling outage..
Click to expand...
No shortage at the generation bulk supply level so any problems are with distribution networks. I don't have all the details but there's presently at least 145 separate network outages in Qld each of which is resulting in loss of supply to consumers, in most cases a substantial number of properties per fault.

Qld peak demand from all sources was 11,114 MW at 16:00, supply mix at that time being:

Coal = 5098 MW
Solar = 4760 MW
Gas = 667 MW
From NSW = 281 MW
Hydro = 248 MW
Wind = 62 MW
Battery = -1 MW (charging)

Qld peak demand on scheduled generation (everything except wind and solar) occurred at 19:30 with total demand of 9709 MW. Supply mix at this time:

Coal = 6119 MW
Gas = 2290 MW
From NSW = 624 MW
Hydro = 499 MW
Diesel = 98 MW
Wind = 76 MW
Battery = 2 MW
Solar = 2 MW

Notes:

On both occasions NSW was itself a net importer. That is flow from Vic > NSW exceeded flow from NSW > Qld. Net exports were occurring from SA & Vic, whilst net imports were occurring to Qld, NSW and Tas.

Solar figures include estimated production from rooftop solar.

AEMO has applied a number of constraints due to concerns about lightning impact on transmission in Qld. Those constraints aim to minimise the impact if the lines in question do in fact trip - in short it's dispatching generation more from some sources and less from others due to the unusually high risk of transmission failure.

All figures exclude the NWPS (North West Power System) which is a standalone power system separate from the rest of the grid. Most notably this supplies Mt Isa but also the surrounding area. Not to be confused with the North West Interconnected System (NWIS) which is in WA. Long term there's a plan to link the NWPS to the rest of Qld but at present it's electrically separate.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Gen Alpha
Replies
13
Views
868
moXJO
M
Electricity investments
Replies
8
Views
641
Smurf1976
The Effect of Deepseek on Australian Stocks
Replies
7
Views
738
Smurf1976
SS1 - Sun Silver
2
Replies
27
Views
5K
Sean K
How to totally xuck the worlds largest economy with a chainsaw
Replies
14
Views
551
basilio
Menu
Log in
Register
Cookies are required to use this site. You must accept them to continue using the site. Learn more...