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The future of energy generation and storage

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SirRumpole said:
Well, nothing is perfect.
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Yeah well if SA had its act together and had 100% power generation for need, the power that Vic sent them could have been used for NSW which would have knocked on to QLD not having to load shed because it was supplying NSW too.... oh hang on QLD didn't need to load shed because the people own our power production with 1000 megawatt spare capacity.
 

You have defined the essential problem, it's State vs State, green ideology vs privatisation ideology.

FFS, politicians should get the hell out of designing power grids and let engineers do it.

All generators should be Federally owned and run on the principle of equal distribution to all customers. That will reduce the political bs that people like Turnbs is going on with.
 
sptrawler said:
The CEO of Bluescope Steel, sums the situation up pretty well, in this article.

http://www.theage.com.au/business/e...-buyback-on-profit-surge-20170219-gugiq6.html
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sp, all so very true but the lefties (Greenies and red raggers) will come back and say what a lot of rubbish....That CEO from Blue Scope Steel doesn't know what he is talking about......Just stick up more wind mills, that will fix the problem and pigs might fly....Or just tell the CEO of BSS to put in his own diesel power plants and pollute the air with more green house gases......What a joke these clowns are.
 
Interesting article...

The federal government wants to use taxpayer funds to support new pumped hydro electricity generation across Australia.

Only three pumped hydro schemes exist in Australia at the moment.

The Clean Energy Finance Corporation has given $54 million to a Queensland project that will convert an old mine into a solar farm and pumped hydro generator, and it's expected more projects will follow.

But there are thousands more sites where pumped hydro could be viable, ANU renewable energy Professor Andrew Blakers tells AAP.

WHAT IS PUMPED HYDRO?

A pumped hydro scheme has two water reservoirs at different heights connected by a pipe. When power prices rise or there is low supply from other sources like solar and wind, water is released from the upper reservoir and runs through a turbine into the lower one, generating electricity as it goes. When power is cheaper, the water is pumped back up from the bottom to the top. This has the added advantage of using excess power generation, University of Melbourne's Dr Roger Dargaville says.

WHERE IS THIS USED NOW?

The three existing river-based schemes are at Wivenhoe Dam in Queensland, Shoalhaven in NSW and the Snowy River in NSW.

WHERE ELSE COULD IT OPERATE?

Any hilly farmland where you could build two 10-hectare reservoirs. Blakers says there are thousands of potential sites, including the western slopes of the Great Dividing Range and even "sunny, arid South Australia" including in the mountains from Adelaide up to Flinders Ranges National Park and along the eastern side of the Great Australian Bight.

Dargaville says schemes using sea water could also be an option in SA, meaning only an upper reservoir would need to be built with water pumped from the ocean.

HOW DOES IT COMPARE TO OTHER POWER GENERATION?

Pumped hydro offers all the benefits of other baseload power sources, such as coal and gas, but much quicker, more flexibly and without the emissions. For example, a coal-fired power station can take up to 24 hours to reach full capacity, where pumped hydro can do it in one minute.

Plus, the technology already exists and it's a fraction of the cost of battery storage. "If you want pumped hydro you just ring up a company and they'll build you one, nothing to invent," Blakers says.

WHAT ABOUT THE SCARCITY OF WATER?

Blakers describes the reservoirs as "over-sized farm dams" and says there's little chance of a pumped hydro scheme sitting empty once built, even if Australia goes back into drought. They use much less water than coal plants and recycle the same water over and over, with none lost in clouds of steam like thermal generators.

WHY AREN'T WE USING IT ALREADY?

Essentially, because we still rely heavily on coal-fired power the price of electricity is relatively stable - pumped hydro makes the most sense where there are large spikes and drops in price. Once there is more intermittent power like photo-voltaic solar and wind power in the grid, pumped hydro becomes more viable.

"It's off-the-shelf, waiting for when PV and wind reaches the point that it destabilises the grid then you just go and build it," Blakers says. He expects to see it soonest in SA, where he says the government needs to invest in another interconnector to import electricity from NSW, pumped hydro, or both.

Dargaville says: "By adding large-scale storage into the grid, it will allow more of the world-class renewable wind and solar generation resources in South Australia to be deployed, further reducing Australia's carbon footprint, without the current negative impacts on energy security."

http://www.news.com.au/national/bre...e/news-story/bc1beca0ae140b91e077dc66fa743fee
 
That story on pumped hydro is very interesting. I wonder at what the costings look like. It seems easy to say just build a dam up a hill put in the pipes, the generator , the connecting power lines, the pump to take the water back up the hill, the renewable energy supply to run that pump...

It is an excellent idea. I think we should see some practical figures . It also seems to be a project that would work in tandem with wind and solar energy on the one site . .

Just a thought. I wonder if the open cut coal mines in the Latrobe Valley would be deep enough to be part of a pumped hydro scheme ? They already have the power lines in place.
 


The biggest problem with dams, is the greenies don't like them, there will be some flower that is only found in the dam catchment area.
Then there will be the rent a crowd, chaining themselves to trees, seen it all before. Won't happen.lol
 
With all the talk about pumped hydro lately I'm thinking that government might be starting to grasp that we've actually got a problem.

Batteries were always a diversion story. Makes people feel good but ensure that coal remains king. Solar thermal storage was a bit better but still has limitations. Pumped hydro, on the other hand, is 100% proven, reliable and actually works. It along with conventional hydro is the key to making the transition to a renewable power supply.

At the risk of boasting, Smurf has been saying for a very long time that we need to go down this track so I'm more than happy that government is finally waking up.

The other pieces of the puzzle are conventional hydro, a strong transmission grid and it would be very nice to have geothermal if we could get it working. That latter point needs the $ spent to prove it one way or the other - and suffice to say that private enterprise has shown pretty clearly that government needs to get involved with this one.

Location - There's no fundamental reason why pumped hydro needs to be at the same site as solar or wind. In all cases the intent is to take advantage of natural conditions and it's not a given that a place that is good for one will be good for the others too although in some cases it will be. The grid itself by its very nature removes any actual need to co-locate pumped hydro with anything else unless doing so just happens to make sense at a particular site.

The only bit that worries me is I've seen a few media comments about it having a 50 year lifespan. Suffice to say that if it's only going to last 50 years then whoever is planning on that is in the wrong job and/or is planning to engage some shoddy contractors to do the work. If they want a figure then 90 years would be a better one to quote although that's by no means the limit.

The 300 MW being talked about in SA would be a help but in itself is not enough once you realise that we need 1500 MW between Vic and SA even if everything works pefectly with 2700 MW being a much safer scenario which does allow for things to go wrong whilst keeping the lights on. Still, it's a start and we can always build more once people decide that having reliable power is a good idea.
 
sptrawler said:
The biggest problem with dams, is the greenies don't like them, there will be some flower that is only found in the dam catchment area.
Then there will be the rent a crowd, chaining themselves to trees, seen it all before. Won't happen.lol
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In theory pumped hydro can be done with minimal impact.

But so far as politics is concerned, well the Greens opposing dams is much like saying that Labor supports unions. It's not just some random issue but the very basis on which both parties were formed. It's not going to be easy, in a purely political sense, for the Greens (as in the party) to ever support dams just like it wouldn't be easy for Labor to turn against unions (or the Liberals to advocate unions).

It's something very fundamental there, not just some random issue of the day from asylum seekers to defence to trade. Opposing dams is at the very heart of the philosophy which directly lead to the Greens existing in the first place. Forests, the issue most associate with the Greens, came more than a decade after dams.

If we're talking about building small dams on agricultural or other land of minimal (or no) conservation value then there's no logical reason anyone would oppose that especially not if they actually want a transition away from fossil fuels.

Politics isn't logical however - I could also say there's no logical reason why the Liberals would oppose wind power. For that matter, if you wanted to find a group that you'd expect to be aligned with Labor then coal miners (actual miners, not necessarily mining companies) would be a very classic support base at least in theory being blue collar and historically at least highly unionised. So none of it makes any rational sense when it comes to politics.

There's really only 4 choices in all this however.

1. We're building more coal-fired generation.
2. We're going to at least partly shut down the almost new Qld LNG plants and use gas instead with a market intervention to differentiate Australian prices from the international market.
3. We're going to literally sit in the dark or at least with seriously expensive power.
4. We're building pumped hydro.

Hydro looks the winner to me. It's the only one that has any chance of getting political backing from both major parties. Labor won't back coal. Liberal won't back intervention in the market especially when it leaves investors out of pocket. Neither is likely to see blackouts as a good idea. Which leaves hydro.

Who'd have thought. 2017 and we're faced with an energy crisis the solution to which is the same technology we turned our back on a generation ago (pun intended). And we're likely to build it in, of all places, South Australia. Well I'll be, um, dammed I suppose.

FWIW - Pumped hydro in SA isn't a new idea. ETSA thought of that one circa 1980 but never went ahead with it since building Northern power station and the Mintaro gas turbines were a better option at that time (cheap gas and nobody worried about CO2) but it was certainly considered.
 
I thought that the Green opposition to dams was mainly to building dams on rivers and therefore interfering with the natural flow and causing problems downstream as well as flooding natural wildlife habitats.

Closed dams would hopefully be a different issue for them, as well as the fact that water can be pumped out of the oceans to a higher level which doesn't appear to be environmentally negative.

The benefits of pumped hydro should appeal to most Greens , but Lee Rhiannon will probably be out waving her red flag simply because money has to be spent and that is horrid capitalism at work.
 

It's not as simple as building a cofferdam. The water stored has to be kept clean and suitable for dumping into a river system that in itself may require seasonal low flow for the ecosystem it supports, etc. Farmers would probably end up tapping into it in exchange for money and eventually howls of protest that it was allow to drain down and crops lost.

I would suspect there would be mass deforestation in any possible catchment area, there would be filtration systems, spillways, big out of sight infrastructure, administration, pipelines. We would have to pay for junkets to Sweden to find out how electricity works and put out tenders to Norway, France, Japan and Sweden because we are incapable of anything because our Naplan scores say so.
 
Tisme said:
We would have to pay for junkets to Sweden to find out how electricity works and put out tenders to Norway, France, Japan and Sweden because we are incapable of anything because our Naplan scores say so.
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We'll be ok, we've got Smurph !

I'm sure there are a few around like him too.
 
Pumped hydro plan for SA power security

When the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow, seawater could keep South Australia powering on.

One of the nation's biggest electricity industry players is looking at building a pumped-hydro generator in South Australia's Spencer Gulf, near industry hotspots Whyalla, Port Augusta and Port Pirie.

The federal government has offered Energy Australia $450,000 in taxpayer funds to help with a feasibility study and hinted there could be more financing available if the project is viable.

More here > http://www.news.com.au/national/bre...l/news-story/e6b6f2674f5d224e82f29dc794e21d9d
 
SirRumpole said:
I thought that the Green opposition to dams was mainly to building dams on rivers and therefore interfering with the natural flow and causing problems downstream as well as flooding natural wildlife habitats.
Click to expand...

The Green movement in Australia all started in Tasmania and hydro dams were the trigger.

The first opposition goes all the way back to 1938 when Lake St Clair was dammed. No real opposition to the dam itself but bushwalkers used to get upset about the fluctuating water levels making it hard to walk along the shoreline.

That all went away once WW2 started, there were bigger problems to worry about, and didn't come back afterward since (1) the Hydro was viewed in almost god-like terms by practically everyone in the state on account of its massive scale creation of employment to which practically nobody was going to object with the Great Depression and WW2 still fresh in everyone's minds and (2) there was a desperate need for power to run industry which was widely known and (3) construction of the Clark Dam (aka Butlers Gorge dam) downstream in 1949 greatly reduced the need to draw down Lake St Clair other than in times of drought - and if there's a drought then nobody's really going to complain too much about a lake being a bit low.

Then it all came back in a big way with the flooding of Lake Pedder in 1972 as part of the Gordon Power Development (Stage 1). That was the trigger event for the formation of the United Tasmania Group, regarded today as the world's first "Green" political party and the predecessors of what became "the Independents" followed by "the Green Independents" and now simply "the Greens".

Then came Stage 2 of the Gordon scheme, more commonly but incorrectly known as the Franklin Dam, and something not far short of an actual war erupted over that one (indeed at the height of the conflict the Feds did actually send the RAAF in for surveillance purposes and that is the only instance in Australia's history of the Australian Defence Force being used against an Australian target, albeit with no actual military conflict taking place in practice).

Stage 2 of the Gordon Scheme was ultimately scrapped following a High Court challenge and that in practice marked the end of large scale dam construction in Australia. Tasmania built two much smaller hydro schemes as a stop-gap measure to keep the lights on and delay a spike in unemployment whilst every other state simply lost interest (and Tas sure wasn't interested in doing anything further beyond those two schemes - zero chance).

The Gordon Stage 2 conflict ran from late 1979 when the scheme was announced until it was scrapped in 1983. In that time a referendum was held, it politically wrecked 2 state Labor premiers and resulted in the Liberals gaining majority government for the first time in Tasmania's history. Notable point there politically is that several unions were publicly backing the Liberal party which supported the dam and urging their members to vote accordingly. Other unions had a lot of internal strife over the issue and for that matter it's no secret that it wrecked quite a few personal relationships as well.

For the record, anyone who went to Hydro Tasmania's centenary touring exhibition in 2014 would have seen the "No Dams" case presented along with the rest of the organisation's history. A point that surprised many visitors certainly was to find a "No Dams" film running on continuous loop. It gets a mention in "Power of Nature" too, a printed book handed out during power station tours etc. And if you go down to Lake Pedder then you'll find that some signs have been erected acknowledging the conflict and presenting the case against dams - and yes it was Hydro that put them up of its own accord.

There's no hiding from the past and no point dwelling on it now. Moving forward is the way and in that context I'll mention something from both sides. Hydro has zero interest in building big dams today, indeed it no longer has the workforce or construction machinery etc to do so and it would be a massive task to put all that back together. From the other side, well the Greens here in Tas did get enough courage to adopt the slogan "Clean Green Hydro" for a while and use it publicly. As with all conflicts, what was black versus white has become shades of grey over the years. Hydro has people employed looking after threatened species and so on. Plenty of environmentalists have, privately at least, acknowledged the other side of the argument as the world grapples with the problem of fossil fuels.

There is no such thing as totally non-polluting power. It all pollutes something somehow. All we get to choose is how and where but it all pollutes something.

My hope is that all sides can acknowledge the need for large scale energy storage if we're to become reliant on intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar. Acknowledge that there's a very real need for pumped hydro and that the question is where to build it not if to build it. Take that mindset and then have a sensible conversation to identify suitable sites which tick all the boxes - practical, economical and not of high conservation value. Do that, accept that we're going to put some land under water but that we'll go about it sensibly, and it should be possible to get broad agreement.

For the record, the undeveloped potential of large scale hydro in Australia is equivalent to 1.7 times the size of the Snowy scheme with 71% of that undeveloped but identified resource being in Tasmania. So it's significant certainly but we're not going to run the whole country with hydro that's for sure.

A key future role for large scale hydro could be very intermittent operation for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine to any great extent. So you build conventional (on rivers) large scale hydro (including adaptation of existing schemes) and have it sitting there doing nothing most of the time. Then you run it hard to cover the longer term (days, weeks) periods where solar / wind + pumped hydro will struggle to meet total demand. There's certainly a need for that if we're going to go completely (100%) off fossil fuels but we're nowhere near needing to have that debate yet.

Also worth noting is that there's a massive hydro resource in PNG not being used for anything. We could power two thirds of Qld (in terms of base load supply) with it fairly cheaply and reliably. Whilst it's in another country I certainly think it's worth a very serious look given the scale of the resource, low cost and that it's on the doorstep of our second largest energy consuming state. Origin Energy had some interest in it a few years ago but seemed to lose their nerve unfortunately.

Someone asked about pumps - in short the pump and turbine are on the same shaft. Snowy has a diagram somewhere showing how it all works (Tumut 3 has pumps on 3 of the 6 machines, the others being generation only).
 
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