The future of energy generation and storage

[moXJO]

Are renewables just a scam?
The amount of land they take up. The lifespan. The ability to recycle them. The power they generate and the sheer visual blight on the landscape they create. Backed up with the fact that power prices have never been dearer.

Is it based on sht implementation or just a sht product.

 

[farmerge]

Are renewables just a scam?
The amount of land they take up. The lifespan. The ability to recycle them. The power they generate and the sheer visual blight on the landscape they create. Backed up with the fact that power prices have never been dearer.

Is it based on sht implementation or just a sht product.

@moXJO just received notification from Western Power here in WA that the power we supply into the grid will have new pay rates.
3pm to pm 10c a kw the rest of the day 2c a kw.
Wow not much output in the 3-9pm timeslot

 

[IFocus]

Are renewables just a scam?
The amount of land they take up. The lifespan. The ability to recycle them. The power they generate and the sheer visual blight on the landscape they create. Backed up with the fact that power prices have never been dearer.

Is it based on sht implementation or just a sht product.

Get off the extreme RW BS sites, SP can tell you about coal fired PS maintenance costs and the man power to maintain and run

 

[farmerge]

@moXJO just received notification from Western Power here in WA that the power we supply into the grid will have new pay rates.
3pm to 9pm 10c a kw the rest of the day 2c a kw.
Wow not much output in the 3-9pm timeslot

 

[moXJO]

Get off the extreme RW BS sites, SP can tell you about coal fired PS maintenance costs and the man power to maintain and run

I'm not just stirring and have consistently queried renewables. If you take into account the land usage, grid build out, disposal and the rest. Add on to that, we are not seeing it translate into cheaper power. Renewables being the only discussion in the room seems to be stupid. It's at best an addition.

Take Victoria for example. I was talking to a guy down there with a 7.2kW system and it wasn't doing sht. Their renewable projects seem to be producing fk all. Im sure it stacks up for sunny places. But they are talking about doing away with gas as well. Gas heating is simply miles ahead of anything electric can do.

I'd suggest you have been listening to the bs from renewable investment firms. I'm asking at what point does power come down considering renewables. Not about lefties defending their religion.

 

[sptrawler]

Get off the extreme RW BS sites, SP can tell you about coal fired PS maintenance costs and the man power to maintain and run

There is no arguing with that, the only advantage coal ever had, was price and availability.

Even from an operational point of view, it was much easier firing gas in a boiler, than coal.

 

[sptrawler]

When the going gets tough, the tough flex their muscles, but what about the planet?

Renewable connections stalled, prices rising as the fallout from a bitter industrial power fight spreads

Entrenched opposition between electrical workers and NSW transmission owner Transgrid is taking a toll on a strained power market.

www.abc.net.au

 

[IFocus]

I'm not just stirring and have consistently queried renewables. If you take into account the land usage, grid build out, disposal and the rest. Add on to that, we are not seeing it translate into cheaper power. Renewables being the only discussion in the room seems to be stupid. It's at best an addition.

Take Victoria for example. I was talking to a guy down there with a 7.2kW system and it wasn't doing sht. Their renewable projects seem to be producing fk all. Im sure it stacks up for sunny places. But they are talking about doing away with gas as well. Gas heating is simply miles ahead of anything electric can do.

I'd suggest you have been listening to the bs from renewable investment firms. I'm asking at what point does power come down considering renewables. Not about lefties defending their religion.

Speaking from spending nearly years 50 of all things electrical / instrumentation that includes construction through to high end control systems, writing code, running major projects decades in supervision and actually physically fixing stuff blah blah blah... OK i'll now stopping pissing against the tree cause SP has done far more.

Renewables are right now far and away the best option for Australia if you are moving away from fossil fuels (which we should be anyway).

The big but is it's not a one size fits all across Australia (Smurf has covered this numerous times please pay attention) plus there are gaps (also spoken about).

Wise old jungle saying for every problem there is a solution, you wont like some solutions.

Land usage is not an issue, but of course some idiot will use arable land because they can next thing the RWNJ's start screams renewables suck because they are using good ground, the problem being not renewables but bad approvals / locations.

As for costs to fall the east coast market is set up to stitch you lot right up (I know traders in the power market) renewable will need to reach saturation (another 80%?) plus get rid of the market traders and all the other lot making money out of thin air not power supply.

 

[sptrawler]

Are renewables just a scam?
The amount of land they take up. The lifespan. The ability to recycle them. The power they generate and the sheer visual blight on the landscape they create. Backed up with the fact that power prices have never been dearer.

Is it based on sht implementation or just a sht product.

Renewables are great, there is no doubt about it, but as with everything there are plusses and minuses.

The plus is, they actually absorb the suns rays and give off electricity, the minus is they don't give it off at a constant rate or constant time.
I keep saying that at the end of the day, humans are consumers, we never stop finding new ways to consume more, whether it be food, energy, water, just about anything.

So the problem we have at the moment, the renewables are really in their infancy, we have been making electricity for quite a while, commercial size solar is really quite recent history.

No doubt we will get better and better output from it, but at the moment we are pushing hard to replace established technology, with a new and immature technology.
Take for example a 2,880MW power station like Eraring, that has produced power for a long time, 24/7 365 days a year when you want it.

Now it has to be replaced by twice as much say solar, because solar only produces power during the day and the power output falls dramatically on a overcast day.
But just to compare a solar farm of similar output (600MW less) than Eraring, there is a 2,245 MW solar farm in India.

Bhadla Solar Park in northwest India - Google Search

Back of the napkin, to replace Eraring with a high degree of certainty, two Bhadla solar farms would be required (to supply the load and charge the storage), plus enough batteries to carry the load through the night and a Snowy 2.0 to carry the load through extended periods of solar drought.
It is a big call and will take some time to achieve, if indeed it can be achieved, because there are several Eraring size power stations that require replacing.

The Bhadla Solar Park is a solar power plant located in the Thar Desert of Rajasthan, India. It covers an area of 56 square kilometers and has a total installed capacity of 2,245 megawatts, making it the largest solar park in the world as of 2023.
There are 7.5million solar panels.

This is a satellite image from NASA, so we need a LOT of farms that size, plus more every time the load grows with the population and industry, plus batteries plus hydro storage.
So it is a massive undertaking and we aren't moving very fast ATM, due to roadblocks and red tape.

 

[sptrawler]

Speaking from spending nearly years 50 of all things electrical / instrumentation that includes construction through to high end control systems, writing code, running major projects decades in supervision and actually physically fixing stuff blah blah blah... OK i'll now stopping pissing against the tree cause SP has done far more.

Renewables are right now far and away the best option for Australia if you are moving away from fossil fuels (which we should be anyway).

The big but is it's not a one size fits all across Australia (Smurf has covered this numerous times please pay attention) plus there are gaps (also spoken about).

Wise old jungle saying for every problem there is a solution, you wont like some solutions.

Land usage is not an issue, but of course some idiot will use arable land because they can next thing the RWNJ's start screams renewables suck because they are using good ground, the problem being not renewables but bad approvals / locations.

As for costs to fall the east coast market is set up to stitch you lot right up (I know traders in the power market) renewable will need to reach saturation (another 80%?) plus get rid of the market traders and all the other lot making money out of thin air not power supply.

Pretty well spot on, we have to move away from fossil fuels, even if we don't want to it will happen due to depletion.

Even if nuclear is used it is still finite, the thing with humans as you say, they are great at engineering a solution and I'm sure that renewables and solar will be the end result. It is just a case of time frames IMO.

My guess is eventually we will have concentrated solar being focused to receivers from space, who knows where it will end but humans adapt.
Unfortunately politicians don't.

Just doing it in a sensible controlled manner, that doesn't cause a collapse of our society is the trick, whether the politicians can do that remains to be seen.

 

[moXJO]

Are we consuming more power than say back in the 90s per household?
Realistically we have all these supposed power saving devices now. Just an example of light globes with the old ones about 100W and the LEDs now about 4 to a room with 32W combined Max.
Kids are using ipads instead of TVs or computers. TV all flatscreen. Most people play on their phones.

I would expect some degree of price reduction to start filtering down.

As for costs to fall the east coast market is set up to stitch you lot right up (I know traders in the power market) renewable will need to reach saturation (another 80%?) plus get rid of the market traders and all the other lot making money out of thin air not power supply.

This is actually the info I was interested in and can investigate further to use. At the moment the whole lot just looks like a sht show.

 

[sptrawler]

Speaking from spending nearly years 50 of all things electrical / instrumentation that includes construction through to high end control systems, writing code, running major projects decades in supervision and actually physically fixing stuff blah blah blah... OK i'll now stopping pissing against the tree cause SP has done far more.

With regard that comment, without pissing on a tree, I do have a letter of commendation from the GM of SECWA for saving a grid blackout, unlike yourself who has stated they caused one.

 

[sptrawler]

Are we consuming more power than say back in the 90s per household?
Realistically we have all these supposed power saving devices now. Just an example of light globes with the old ones about 100W and the LEDs now about 4 to a room with 32W combined Max.
Kids are using ipads instead of TVs or computers. TV all flatscreen. Most people play on their phones.

I would expect some degree of price reduction to start filtering down.

This is actually the info I was interested in and can investigate further to use. At the moment the whole lot just looks like a sht show.

@Smurf1976 can answer that with absolute accuracy.

 

[Smurf1976]

Why am I not surprised?

From what I hear, the issues on that project are much the same as all construction projects in Australia at present, including those having nothing to do with energy.

A combination of higher material costs, higher overheads and lower productivity is blowing up the finances.

 

[Smurf1976]

3pm to pm 10c a kw the rest of the day 2c a kw.
Wow not much output in the 3-9pm timeslot

Emphasis mine and that's the problem. That's when it's needed.

Hence I'll advocate to anyone willing to listen that solar panels on roofs should preferably face west.

 

[Smurf1976]

Are renewables just a scam?
The amount of land they take up. The lifespan. The ability to recycle them. The power they generate and the sheer visual blight on the landscape they create. Backed up with the fact that power prices have never been dearer.

Is it based on sht implementation or just a sht product.

Fundamentally renewable energy resources are relatively diffuse when compared to fossil or nuclear sources. That's the inherent nature of them and that being so, the physical footprint of any scheme to use them will, per unit of output, be larger than one based on fossil or nuclear sources.

That however isn't necessarily a problem since land as a whole isn't scarce. Scarce in Western Europe, in parts of China and in the north-eastern United States perhaps yes, but not scarce in most places.

The real problem that's making it unnecessarily expensive is that society, via politics and to lesser extent commercial arrangements, is trying to fight physics and that has no chance of ending well. There's a lot of things that can be done to do it economically but as a society we're choosing to not do them, instead doing it the hard and expensive way instead.

If it's to work then it's not a lot different to making coal work. We need to work with physics not against it. Indeed that was very much the key to making brown coal work in Victoria - it's a shockingly crap resource but there was a determination to make it work and so it did. Same applies to renewables, they can work if as a society we wan them to work.

First step is the wind and solar farms need to go in the right places, and it's not just about total production over time. It's about inverse correlations across the fleet so as to get consistent production overall. So it's about putting solar and wind farms in places with exposure to different weather and in particular where inverse correlations exist (and they certainly do exist in practice). Likewise it's about inversely correlated technologies of which solar and river hydro are the most obvious since the weather conditions that favour one are detrimental to the other, leading to greater consistency of overall production.

The next step is to align consumption with production. That doesn't mean eating dinner at 1pm and things like that but some loads can certainly be shifted. Eg storage water heating is dead simple technology, well proven more than a century ago, and was actually in widespread use until in 2010 our political masters decided they preferred gas. That one in particular needs to be reversed with all haste, and also encouragement of sensible time shifting of other loads where practical. Eg battery charging, swimming pool filters and heaters, etc don't need to happen at a specific time as long as they do reliably get done.

Then there's a need for storage to go with it. Noting the two points above both reduce the requirement for storage, and they do substantially, but it still exists so we still do need storage and that means both batteries and pumped hydro, not one or the other but both. And in doing that the "kill two birds with the one stone" approach should always apply - sensible location of the batteries can avoid network upgrades that would otherwise be required, thus saving money.

Always remembering that it's a system and that brings me to another point - one of the biggest mistakes we're making is economic ideology insisting on pretending there's multiple systems when in truth there's only one. That alone is adding serious inefficiencies and costs when compared to having everyone working on one plan and, if there's a desire to have multiple owners, well just reach agreement on who does which part of that plan. It needs to operate as a single system however.

And finally, overheads. Technical efficiency alone won't provide a low cost supply if it comes with overheads and at present those are a killer. Hedging adds about 50% to the price of wholesale bulk electricity on a base load basis in SA and it's similar for other states. That's financial middlemen clipping the ticket, and it's a situation that only exists at all due to a market that's intentionally designed to produce volatility. A single monopoly utility wouldn't spend even one cent on that - hence as I've previously mentioned 46% of the total bill is for things that aren't the physical generation, transmission or distribution of electricity to consumers.

Using an analogy, suppose that we had no consistent road rules but that each car came with a book describing some rules the manufacturer wanted you to follow when driving, those rules being different for each make of car. Some say a green light means go, some say red means go. Some say a stop sign means you should stop, others say a stop sign means traffic on the cross street is going to stop for you. Some say 2P means a maximum 2 hours parking, others say that's a minimum stay. Some say a 40 sign means 40 meters per second is the minimum required speed, others say no it means 40 miles per hour, other say no it's actually in kilometres per hour and it's a maximum not a minimum. Etc. Meanwhile all the service stations refuse to tell you what the pump dispenses, leaving you to guess whether you just filled the tank with 98 RON petrol or whether you just filled it with AdBlue.

Now if we did that then we'd have constant chaos on the roads and, not unreasonably, there'd be a lot of people saying that cars don't seem too workable as a means of transport and that we ought go back to horses and carts, leaving engine driven transport to the railways alone.

That cars and other road vehicles work in practice is because it's treated as a single system. Doesn't matter what sort of vehicle or who made it, there's one set of rules as to how it's to be driven with those rules being designed so as to produce a workable system so long as everyone follows them. There's a requirement to hold a license to drive on a public road, obtaining which requires a competency test, and we have an assortment of other rules about paying attention, not being drunk and so on. Meanwhile the roads all interconnect with each other, they're named for identification with additional signage to remind drivers where those roads lead, the fuel pumps are labelled as to what they dispense, everything's clearly defined and we have active enforcement of compliance with all these requirements. End result is millions of privately owned vehicles, all driven by individual humans, actually does work well enough that the imperfections are tolerable.

Renewable energy is much the same. It can work so long as it's treated as a single system with everyone on the same page and that there aren't "missing links" which break it. It's workable if as a society we want it to work, indeed it does involve a lot of similar concepts. Put a chart of road traffic volume on one screen, and put a chart of electricity demand on another screen, and they look remarkably similar.

That centralised generation was simpler is so for the same reasons that railways are simpler. Only a few key bits of infrastructure and all under the control of one entity that can make sure its employees follow stated rules "or else" is inherently easier than a complex network with a huge number of participants. As cars have proven though, the latter can work so long as it's designed to work and there's a high level of compliance.

And yes, road transport has storage (car parks) it has demand management (drivers who don't need to travel during the peak tend to avoid doing so), it has transmission (highways), it has distribution (local roads), it's operated as a co-ordinated system (traffic signals) and so on. Quite a lot of similarities there but it's been made to work despite the underlying difficulties.

There's also the point that in the long term there's no choice. Regardless of where anyone stands on the climate issue, bottom line is non-renewable energy resources are just that, they're non-renewable and with continued use would eventually run out. Argue all you like about how long that would take, but ultimately they're finite and in the case of oil and gas current knowledge says they're reasonably limited. Exactly how long they'll last is arguable, but they're reasonably limited resources and, key point, they've a myriad of important uses other than generating electricity.

Ultimately it's doable. It's a lot easier than making agriculture work and it's no harder than making road transport work but, as with both of those, it needs politics out of the way and competent people left to get on with it, the role of politics being as an overseer asking pertinent questions to ensure it's on track but not as chief doer.

Historically, that's how the existing grid came into being. In the Australian context Tasmania jumped in first, figuring cheap electricity would be economically advantageous to the state but being consciously aware that hydro resources remote from the population needed a centralised approach to make them workable. Victoria came next for the same basic reasons, brown coal also needed a large scale co-ordinated approach to make it workable in an economical manner. Both succeeded and in due course the other states went down the same track.

So it's all doable and as a few have noted in the media, it basically is a case of doing what worked historically. Doing whatever's necessary to make the available resources workable.

As for the visual impacts, well those exist but nothing will trump agriculture for that one and roads have had a pretty major impact too. I mean seriously, there's an awful lot of Australia where farms and roads are basically using 100% of the available land but I don't see too many protesting about that and calling for a shift to synthetic food and a ban on cars.

 

[Smurf1976]

As for costs to fall the east coast market is set up to stitch you lot right up (I know traders in the power market) renewable will need to reach saturation (another 80%?) plus get rid of the market traders and all the other lot making money out of thin air not power supply.

This absolutely.

Things that aren't the physical generation, transmission or distribution of electricity are taking almost half of what the average residential consumer is paying in SA and it's not much better elsewhere.

A cynic would think the debate about renewables versus fossils versus nuclear was intended to distract public attention from this fact.

 

[SirRumpole]

Fundamentally renewable energy resources are relatively diffuse when compared to fossil or nuclear sources. That's the inherent nature of them and that being so, the physical footprint of any scheme to use them will, per unit of output, be larger than one based on fossil or nuclear sources.

That however isn't necessarily a problem since land as a whole isn't scarce. Scarce in Western Europe, in parts of China and in the north-eastern United States perhaps yes, but not scarce in most places.

The real problem that's making it unnecessarily expensive is that society, via politics and to lesser extent commercial arrangements, is trying to fight physics and that has no chance of ending well. There's a lot of things that can be done to do it economically but as a society we're choosing to not do them, instead doing it the hard and expensive way instead.

If it's to work then it's not a lot different to making coal work. We need to work with physics not against it. Indeed that was very much the key to making brown coal work in Victoria - it's a shockingly crap resource but there was a determination to make it work and so it did. Same applies to renewables, they can work if as a society we wan them to work.

First step is the wind and solar farms need to go in the right places, and it's not just about total production over time. It's about inverse correlations across the fleet so as to get consistent production overall. So it's about putting solar and wind farms in places with exposure to different weather and in particular where inverse correlations exist (and they certainly do exist in practice). Likewise it's about inversely correlated technologies of which solar and river hydro are the most obvious since the weather conditions that favour one are detrimental to the other, leading to greater consistency of overall production.

The next step is to align consumption with production. That doesn't mean eating dinner at 1pm and things like that but some loads can certainly be shifted. Eg storage water heating is dead simple technology, well proven more than a century ago, and was actually in widespread use until in 2010 our political masters decided they preferred gas. That one in particular needs to be reversed with all haste, and also encouragement of sensible time shifting of other loads where practical. Eg battery charging, swimming pool filters and heaters, etc don't need to happen at a specific time as long as they do reliably get done.

Then there's a need for storage to go with it. Noting the two points above both reduce the requirement for storage, and they do substantially, but it still exists so we still do need storage and that means both batteries and pumped hydro, not one or the other but both. And in doing that the "kill two birds with the one stone" approach should always apply - sensible location of the batteries can avoid network upgrades that would otherwise be required, thus saving money.

Always remembering that it's a system and that brings me to another point - one of the biggest mistakes we're making is economic ideology insisting on pretending there's multiple systems when in truth there's only one. That alone is adding serious inefficiencies and costs when compared to having everyone working on one plan and, if there's a desire to have multiple owners, well just reach agreement on who does which part of that plan. It needs to operate as a single system however.

And finally, overheads. Technical efficiency alone won't provide a low cost supply if it comes with overheads and at present those are a killer. Hedging adds about 50% to the price of wholesale bulk electricity on a base load basis in SA and it's similar for other states. That's financial middlemen clipping the ticket, and it's a situation that only exists at all due to a market that's intentionally designed to produce volatility. A single monopoly utility wouldn't spend even one cent on that - hence as I've previously mentioned 46% of the total bill is for things that aren't the physical generation, transmission or distribution of electricity to consumers.

Using an analogy, suppose that we had no consistent road rules but that each car came with a book describing some rules the manufacturer wanted you to follow when driving, those rules being different for each make of car. Some say a green light means go, some say red means go. Some say a stop sign means you should stop, others say a stop sign means traffic on the cross street is going to stop for you. Some say 2P means a maximum 2 hours parking, others say that's a minimum stay. Some say a 40 sign means 40 meters per second is the minimum required speed, others say no it means 40 miles per hour, other say no it's actually in kilometres per hour and it's a maximum not a minimum. Etc. Meanwhile all the service stations refuse to tell you what the pump dispenses, leaving you to guess whether you just filled the tank with 98 RON petrol or whether you just filled it with AdBlue.

Now if we did that then we'd have constant chaos on the roads and, not unreasonably, there'd be a lot of people saying that cars don't seem too workable as a means of transport and that we ought go back to horses and carts, leaving engine driven transport to the railways alone.

That cars and other road vehicles work in practice is because it's treated as a single system. Doesn't matter what sort of vehicle or who made it, there's one set of rules as to how it's to be driven with those rules being designed so as to produce a workable system so long as everyone follows them. There's a requirement to hold a license to drive on a public road, obtaining which requires a competency test, and we have an assortment of other rules about paying attention, not being drunk and so on. Meanwhile the roads all interconnect with each other, they're named for identification with additional signage to remind drivers where those roads lead, the fuel pumps are labelled as to what they dispense, everything's clearly defined and we have active enforcement of compliance with all these requirements. End result is millions of privately owned vehicles, all driven by individual humans, actually does work well enough that the imperfections are tolerable.

Renewable energy is much the same. It can work so long as it's treated as a single system with everyone on the same page and that there aren't "missing links" which break it. It's workable if as a society we want it to work, indeed it does involve a lot of similar concepts. Put a chart of road traffic volume on one screen, and put a chart of electricity demand on another screen, and they look remarkably similar.

That centralised generation was simpler is so for the same reasons that railways are simpler. Only a few key bits of infrastructure and all under the control of one entity that can make sure its employees follow stated rules "or else" is inherently easier than a complex network with a huge number of participants. As cars have proven though, the latter can work so long as it's designed to work and there's a high level of compliance.

And yes, road transport has storage (car parks) it has demand management (drivers who don't need to travel during the peak tend to avoid doing so), it has transmission (highways), it has distribution (local roads), it's operated as a co-ordinated system (traffic signals) and so on. Quite a lot of similarities there but it's been made to work despite the underlying difficulties.

There's also the point that in the long term there's no choice. Regardless of where anyone stands on the climate issue, bottom line is non-renewable energy resources are just that, they're non-renewable and with continued use would eventually run out. Argue all you like about how long that would take, but ultimately they're finite and in the case of oil and gas current knowledge says they're reasonably limited. Exactly how long they'll last is arguable, but they're reasonably limited resources and, key point, they've a myriad of important uses other than generating electricity.

Ultimately it's doable. It's a lot easier than making agriculture work and it's no harder than making road transport work but, as with both of those, it needs politics out of the way and competent people left to get on with it, the role of politics being as an overseer asking pertinent questions to ensure it's on track but not as chief doer.

Historically, that's how the existing grid came into being. In the Australian context Tasmania jumped in first, figuring cheap electricity would be economically advantageous to the state but being consciously aware that hydro resources remote from the population needed a centralised approach to make them workable. Victoria came next for the same basic reasons, brown coal also needed a large scale co-ordinated approach to make it workable in an economical manner. Both succeeded and in due course the other states went down the same track.

So it's all doable and as a few have noted in the media, it basically is a case of doing what worked historically. Doing whatever's necessary to make the available resources workable.

As for the visual impacts, well those exist but nothing will trump agriculture for that one and roads have had a pretty major impact too. I mean seriously, there's an awful lot of Australia where farms and roads are basically using 100% of the available land but I don't see too many protesting about that and calling for a shift to synthetic food and a ban on cars.

Yes, I think we need a National Energy Grid Design Authority with politicians reduced to just finding the money to implement the Authority's recommendations, they seem good at spending money so let them do what they know best.

 

[SirRumpole]

A cynic would think the debate about renewables versus fossils versus nuclear was intended to distract public attention from this fact.

This has not been mentioned in the media to my knowledge, it's only from your postings that I realise that these inefficiencies exist.

Maybe you should drop a few notes to the ABC or Guardian.

 

[Smurf1976]

Are we consuming more power than say back in the 90s per household?

First thing to realise is households are only a minority of total consumption.

By state, households as a % of total electricity use 2021-22:

NSW = 31%
SA = 31%
Vic = 30%
Qld = 24%
Tas = 18%
NT = 16%
WA = 14%
Australia = 26%

So the media and political focus on households is itself largely missing the point since that's not where most of it's used.

Looking at total consumption, all users, here's some data quickly dumped into a chart. Pardon the dated software but it's sufficient:

So there's strong growth in Qld and WA, whilst there's a slow grind upwards over time in SA, Tas and NT. For NSW and Vic there's been a definite decline although that's reversing now in NSW.

Noting to considerable extent demand is linked to supply. There's certainly industrial load that would take substantially more supply in Tasmania for example if it were available, that's been the case for a long time. Same to some extent in other states too, lack of supply either now or in the foreseeable future results in an unwillingness to sign up new or even recontracted industrial load. Result = production goes interstate at best, offshore more typically.