The future of energy generation and storage

sptrawler said:

As long as your son is happy, that's really all that matters, he has his own life choices to make, no matter how much you try to steer them.

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You are probably, and history tells us that all empires did from deception, corruption and mental weakness.
My knowledge of the coming Chinese empire, or worse Turkish caliphate does not fill me with joy, a democratic with Judeo-Christian values capitalistic regime remains my preference.
Maybe the earlier the collapse the better, I should subscribe to AGL green power...

qldfrog said:

You are probably, and history tells us that all empires did from deception, corruption and mental weakness.
My knowledge of the coming Chinese empire, or worse Turkish caliphate does not fill me with joy, a democratic with Judeo-Christian values capitalistic regime remains my preference.
Maybe the earlier the collapse the better, I should subscribe to AGL green power...

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But we digress, let's go back to the pure technical subject of Australian future, or absence of, power...

And SA is the flagship in how to wreck a grid with green power
Let's try to compute the cost to have batteries equivalent to these 2 plants.rol..... .

qldfrog said:

And SA is the flagship in how to wreck a grid with green power

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Fundamentally it's not the means of generation that's leading to those being closed.

It's the bizarre idea of trying to run a natural monopoly as an unnatural forced competitive market that's the direct cause since it leads to a situation where nobody wants to invest in or even just retain the unprofitable parts despite them being technically required.

Get an engineer in and they'll point out that some things have very high rates of utilisation and other spend more than 95% of the time idle but we need them all and, to make it even more complex, which bits are heavily utilised and which aren't isn't a constant, it's something that'll move over time.

Now get an accountant or financially focused manager and they'll flatly refuse to accept the idea of having something that costs money each and every day but which goes months at a time with zero revenue let alone profit.

Therein lies the flaw in the market design and that's the direct reason myself and many others saw this coming long before the installation of wind and solar got underway to any meaningful extent. The problem's far more fundamental than the technology of generation.

This is intended as comedy and was recorded 7 years ago now but it's actually pretty good as a factual commentary on the situation. Their focus may have been entertainment but clearly they did their research on the subject:


Sums the whole thing up brilliantly even down to the incident at the end - and in my view we're going to need that to happen on an epic scale before governments finally concede that the focus needs to be on engineering and real economics not ideology and made up numbers.

Adding to the previous post, this basic approach applies across much of the Australian economy. We've gone from a focus on discovering, creating, doing etc, which is all "hands on" at the technical end, to an approach of administering a contract or some rules and regulations.

Energy as viewed by government stopped being about planning, engineering, strategic use of natural resources, cost minimisation etc and instead became about having a choice of company to buy electricity from, and making sure great tomes of rules and regulations were complied with.

The outcome of that change is there for all to see. Same applies to many other fields eg education and housing for example and there too the results are in.

It won't change, beyond some tinkering around the edges, until a crisis forces it.

Smurf1976 said:

Adding to the previous post, this basic approach applies across much of the Australian economy. We've gone from a focus on discovering, creating, doing etc, which is all "hands on" at the technical end, to an approach of administering a contract or some rules and regulations.

Energy as viewed by government stopped being about planning, engineering, strategic use of natural resources, cost minimisation etc and instead became about having a choice of company to buy electricity from, and making sure great tomes of rules and regulations were complied with.

The outcome of that change is there for all to see. Same applies to many other fields eg education and housing for example and there too the results are in.

It won't change, beyond some tinkering around the edges, until a crisis forces it.

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We fully agree, but you seem to believe if I read you right that there is an ideological reason: basically and roughly, a free capitalist view leading to the debacle whereas I see that as an incompetence lead by the removal of sciences and tech, or even business and workplace aware citizen from our leadership.
Our governments from both sides, and all over the West, are populated by lawyers and bankers, on the left, workplace lawyers,coms reps, and on the right civil and business layers.
Accountants.
It is a societal shift, where the margin of society living of the fats of the economy suddenly believes it is the wealth making component, the fleas of the dog.
Where it is important to see it that way is that even a catastrophic failure will not be enough to change a thing but token kneejerk and on surface only changes in what is a corrupt society
Look at Covid response by a governing body: the equivalent of jumbo jets crashing every week are dead and some still dying but no-one at the top want to sort the issue, suppression, denial
So in case of power crisis, panic will come , and absolute crazy solutions will come, we will loan generators on ships off the coast, Elon will receive billions to fly containers of batteries..ohh sorry we did that...
As you know, the grid as a whole needs decade planning, especially in Australia.
China could do it in 3 or 4 years, here we are talking 10y minimum.
BTW, we all remember how a couple of years ago,China was having some power grid tension, all sorted now as far as I know
Very happy to be off grid I can tell you.
And the greens will be happy, look we are closing these dirty fossil fuel dinosaurs, so expensive to run, and increasing our percentage of overall green energy.soon to 100%. Even if it is up only 10h a day
Thanks for your knowledgeable input.

On a linked but different subject, how is the separation between states..as I think the splits are along state lines.
How independent can the whole eastern coast states run?
The reason I ask is as we get more variable generation, it obviously means that we need to increase transfer..from sunny or windy states to cloudy states, etc as a matter of continual quasi minute basis.
So once a state grid collapses first, how segregared is the grid to avoid cascading effect, do we have to be lucky and if inter state connections fail, pray that the sun is shining on the coast?
As I understand it, our generators are mostly aligned along the coast so not much diversification of weather patterns within one state

Smurf1976 said:

Adding to the previous post, this basic approach applies across much of the Australian economy. We've gone from a focus on discovering, creating, doing etc, which is all "hands on" at the technical end, to an approach of administering a contract or some rules and regulations.

Energy as viewed by government stopped being about planning, engineering, strategic use of natural resources, cost minimisation etc and instead became about having a choice of company to buy electricity from, and making sure great tomes of rules and regulations were complied with.

The outcome of that change is there for all to see. Same applies to many other fields eg education and housing for example and there too the results are in.

It won't change, beyond some tinkering around the edges, until a crisis forces it.

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What I find intriguing is the Government is willing to spend a trillion dollars on weapons, to protect us from a perceived threat from China and in the next breath spend another trillion dollars on making our whole electrical system 100% dependent on parts form them.

Which if they refuse to supply as in hostile relationship, it would completely cripple us anyway, meanwhile what are we doing a little bit of social engineering here and there and some bracket creep inflation, I mean taxation.

Go figure.

This has to end badly, the further it moves on the sillier it gets.

sptrawler said:

What I find intriguing is the Government is willing to spend a trillion dollars on weapons, to protect us from a perceived threat from China and in the next breath spend another trillion dollars on making our whole electrical system 100% dependent on parts form them.

Which if they refuse to supply as in hostile relationship, it would completely cripple us anyway, meanwhile what are we doing a little bit of social engineering here and there and some bracket creep inflation, I mean taxation.

Go figure.

This has to end badly, the further it moves on the sillier it gets.

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Look where the money is made, who benefit, what is the end model?
Power, food, water, population ..the key targets and you have your answer, if you do not believe we are living in a fundamentally corrupt society, you might be missing the point.
Corruption is not always receiving a suitcase of $ ..that's the low grade local council style, but our leaders deal with next assignment, Club memberships, contact, insider trading etc
There is no money for them in having a boring robust old style national grid.
But when crisis strikes, power & money wise ..it is bonanza.
On design, on purpose....

qldfrog said:

We fully agree, but you seem to believe if I read you right that there is an ideological reason: basically and roughly, a free capitalist view leading to the debacle whereas I see that as an incompetence lead by the removal of sciences and tech, or even business and workplace aware citizen from our leadership.

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If I take a lot of steps back and get down to very fundamental things then my observation is that at the core it comes down to accounting, finance and ideology having become dominant in a field which is naturally based around physics.

If you've got a single utility with a focus on making it work then it becomes the case that the engineering requirements need to be satisfied first, everything else being done as well as practical but ultimately a secondary consideration. Do it as cheaply as possible yes, but only to the extent it still meets the technical requirements in full.

Versus the situation we have now with (listed in random order) AGL, Origin, Engie, Snowy Hydro, Energy Australia, Iberdrola, Nexif, Neoen, Vena Energy all own significant dispatchable generation, that is fuel combustion or battery storage, and that's just in SA.

On a minor scale ElectraNet, the privately owned transmission network owner, has a 30MW battery and SA Water, which is a state government owned water utility whose primary business is water and sewage, also owns a number of small (a few MW each) batteries centrally dispatched. There's also a single small hydro station owned by Lofty Ranges Power.

Go back a step further and that's a mix of ASX listed and non-listed Australian investor owned companies, the French government and other shareholders of a French company, the Australian Government, a Hong Kong listed company, the government of Qatar, BlackRock, Norges Bank, a Thailand listed company, a French privately owned company, a private equity firm based in New York, the government of China, the state government of South Australia, the state government of Tasmania.

Noting that's just the thermal generation and batteries, it doesn't include the numerous owners of wind and solar.

Now that's quite a number of companies and it's a pretty diverse mix of owners but with the possible exception of the SA state government, whose involvement is minor in scale, the others have no fundamental reason to care if the lights stay on in SA or not. They're only generating in SA in order to make money either directly from the generation of electricity, or indirectly via some other means eg retailing, engineering support or whatever but if it's not profitable then they won't continue.

That inevitably leads to a situation where financial matters become the overriding concern with anything else being done only if it fits within that financial constraint. That leads directly down the path of compromised engineering, since nobody's willing to pay for the unprofitable bits.

Versus a single utility with a requirement, either self-imposed or imposed by regulation, to maintain reliability other than under genuine "act of God" type circumstances which can and will take a very different approach. Determine what's required in terms of capacity to meet that overall reliability requirement, then work out the cheapest mix of technologies to provide it but key point is it's a given the total will be supplied somehow, the only question is about the means.

Such a utility doesn't need to be government owned although it could be. But I've no doubt that AGL (for example) could do it if given a mandate to do so and not having to compete with others "cherry picking" the profitable bits and leaving them holding the bag for the unprofitable bits. That's the problem with the current market - even if someone wanted to get everything done, they can't do it in practice since someone else can and will come along and pick the low hanging fruit and leave the difficult stuff to someone else.

Smurf1976 said:

Lofty Ranges Power

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Which to explain the more detailed breakdown of ownership is a 50/50 joint venture of SA Water and Hydro Tasmania, the ultimate owners of which are the state governments of SA and Tas.

Yes it's metropolitan area drinking water going through it, it's just an energy recovery scheme at the end of the pipeline basically.

Callide Power Trading taken to court over generator explosion.

it will be interesting to see if they come back and if they do, for how long

SirRumpole said:

taken to court

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Yeah, there's a legal story here hence the cautious wording of my previous post.

It's going to take quite some explaining as to how it went so badly wrong. This wasn't a "normal" breakdown by any means.

Wind power comes to WA goldfields.

SirRumpole said:

Wind power comes to WA goldfields.

Goldfields miners sniff an opportunity in the wind

The state's resource-rich Goldfields region has been swept up in the global push to renewable energy, with billions in mining investment driving the development of six wind farms.

www.abc.net.au

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I do not have much hair to pull so I will be ok.....it is good that the WA people starts paying for this , for too long only the east coast had to pay for the resulting costs and drama which will happen once it goes above anecdotal quantities..

qldfrog said:

I do not have much hair to pull so I will be ok.....it is good that the WA people starts paying for this , for too long only the east coast had to pay for the resulting costs and drama which will happen once it goes above anecdotal quantities..

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I am too negative: plenty of jobs created to transport, install and build platform then repair, fight fires, dismantle and bury these into aborinal lands while lawyers and courts busy fighting native title and save our toad challenges
And that does not include the following supply and setup of diesel generators, and battery containers.
Probably better use than the 400m for 3 army drones to be built in yesterday news

A reasonable analysis of the electricity market (in my opinion anyway, others may differ).

Substantial load shedding and an emergency situation underway in Victoria at present.

Loy Yang A, the state's largest power station of any type, has completely ceased operation at approximately 14:10 Victorian local time with all four generating units tripping and now at zero. Immediately prior to that, all was normal indeed they were running at full capacity.

Cause unknown at this stage, anything there would be speculation.

Smurf1976 said:

Substantial load shedding and an emergency situation underway in Victoria at present.

Loy Yang A, the state's largest power station of any type, has completely ceased operation at approximately 14:10 Victorian local time with all four generating units tripping and now at zero. Immediately prior to that, all was normal indeed they were running at full capacity.

Cause unknown at this stage, anything there would be speculation.

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Reports indicated a major transmission line was brought down by a storm.