Solar panels eat the profits of the reliable generators for lunch
The system is reaching a crisis point and April is turning out to be the month of confessions
His speech was the sound of an industry being tortured. The transition is going backwards. Big projects are stalled. Costs are rising and reliable old assets are being closed too quickly. It’s like we are disassembling the plane as we fly it…
A couple of weeks ago in Australia the chief of Alinta Energy admitted in a big speech that the industry needs to be honest with the public about the costs of the transition. This marks a big shift from the “cheaper and cleaner” misinformation which the renewables industry was practically built on. Jeff Dimery had a stark warning — his company bought a large old coal plant in Victoria for a billion dollars in 2018, and it powers one fifth of Victoria. But to replace that today with renewables would cost $10 billion.
But he also laid bare the crushing effect subsidized rooftop solar PV panels are having on the transition. No news outlets seemed to appreciate the implications of this. Fully one in three Australian homes now has solar panels, but they are all dumping power on the grid at the same time pushing wholesale prices into negative territory that burns the other generators. The midday solar glut, as he calls it, means no one wanted to invest in large scale renewables. But as night follows day, surely that which ruins the market for large scale renewables would also ruin it for large scale fossil fuel plants too? The subsidized solar panels are vandalizing the whole market.
Skeptics who have been predicting this all along, note that the same people who cheered every time a coal plant was struck down are now wading through an impenetrable swamp of their own creation. The same subsidies that hurt coal and gas power, now wipe out the large (subsized) wind and solar plants too. It’s takes some chutzpah to complain about solar subsidies ruining the market for other generators which are also subsidized.
Someone let a plague of solar-locusts on our grid. They eat the profits out of all the reliable providers, which close down. We are actively sabotaging the entire grid — killing off the parts that made it work.
Australians to pay more for their energy as transition accelerates, Alinta Energy says
By Colin Packham, The Australian
Australians face higher bills as the country struggles to build adequate replacements for coal with soaring costs for new sources of green power and transmission, Alinta Energy chief executive Jeff Dimery has warned.
The stark comments, described by the energy boss as “truths and straight talking” comes amid growing concern about the toll of Australia’s energy transition.
Mr Dimery said Australian energy stakeholders must be honest with the public about the toll of the transition.
Mr Dimery complains he can’t build anything profitable at $58 a megawatt hour.
“When I sat down to write this speech, the future Victorian energy price for the 2026 calendar year was $58 a megawatt hour,” said Mr Dimery.
“At $58, I can’t build anything to meaningfully prepare for coal to come out of the system. I can’t build more solar, because we already have a glut of solar in the middle of the day, which is sending spot prices deeply negative. If I was just looking at the forward price, I would also be very wary about building new wind, because the margins would be slim to non-existent, and any curtailment – which is a growing problem – could be disastrous.”
If only the energy commentators of Australia could read the same AEMO reports that unpaid bloggers do? Then they’d know that this time last year old brown coal plants were still selling electricity for $15 a megawatt-hour. But Mr Dimery probably knows this, since he owns one of those coal plants, and he didn’t mention it either. (Perhaps he believes in the transition, or perhaps the Hong Kong owners of Alinta might not appreciate that?). He’s being more honest than the other energy chiefs, but Australians need the whole truth. Just what are we giving up by blowing up the old coal plants?
The renewables transition was like a gold rush, but quickly projects started to fail… as Big Government plans do:
11 minutes: I also want to explain what’s caused the drop in investment for large scale renewables. … In the last 5 years the top three gentailers [combined generator-retailers] in this country have collectively written off in excess of $10 billion of shareholder funds. There’s a race to Net Zero but it’s supposed to be for emissions not for profit.
In the early era of renewables Australia had the perfect investment climate for wind solar and pumped Hydro. It could have been seen as the gold rush for renewable generation and certainly we saw no shortage of companies trying to get a piece of the action, but very quickly projects started to fail, loss factors increased and investment cases started to crumble. With a lack of planning and proper infrastructure we quickly found the grid overwhelmed…
Costs are rising rapidly:
15 minutes: Let me tell you why higher cost and uncertainty about recovering those costs that’s why in 2017 Alinta energy developed and built the first big battery in Australia for around $1.5 million per megawatt. Right now we’re building another one that will cost roughly $1.7 million per megawatt . In 2020 it cost around $850,000 to insure a gas fired power plant. Today it’s around $1.75 million — that’s up 40%. I shocked people when I spoke at a conference two years ago and said that it would cost $8 billion to hypothetically replace our Brown Coal fired power station which was acquired for $1.1 billion. Replacing it with pumped hydro and offshore wind today would now cost in excess of $10 billion. That’s up two billion in a mere two years. Developers rightly are afraid to lock in high costs in case they can’t be recovered.
The Alinta chief admits his biggest problem is the glut of solar panels at midday
Everything he says about the problems with massive solar input at lunchtime is true for all the original baseload generators on the grid too. In full honesty he would admit coal plants were not retired because solar and wind were cheap, they were driven out of the market by the subsidy on an essentially irrelevant unreliable form of extra generation that always turned up when we didn’t need it:
The solution to the solar panel glut is battery storage
(What did I say? One reason for the EV mandate is so they can make you buy the backup battery to store the useless intermittent watts in?) Dimery doesn’t want to offend 3 million solar panel owners, but he is quietly saying “they must pay”:
I know how much households love their solar and how important solar is to the transition, but as with any of the intermittent technologies on its own it has pluses and minuses. … the daytime production from rooftop solar needs to be stored and shifted to when it’s required. We’ll need household batteries but they’ll fill up quickly. We’ll need big batteries, and they’ll also fill up quickly too. EV’s will take time to build up to critical mass and for vehicle-to-home and vehicle-to-grid models to alleviate some of the imbalances of homeowners dominating solar and battery installations. We’re exploring other options too like inviting retail customers to be co-investors in wind farms and giving them a portion of the output offset against their bill as well as providing better insights about their appliances via itemized bills that show what’s being spent on heating and cooling and refrigeration.
It’s a solar death spiral
He points out that solar PV owners themselves don’t care about the negative wholesale prices at lunchtime (but in a real market they would).
Rooftop solar is contributing to low energy prices at various times in daylight hours but it isn’t affected by price signals in the same way large scale generators are. It’s a problem we need to solve.
So we subsidize lunchtime solar we don’t need, which makes electricity more expensive for those without solar. Eventually everyone feels they have to buy solar panels, but at the same time the solar glut is driving out the generators we need the other 75% of the day. This is a spiral that only goes down. The end is coming. The subsidy game can’t go on forever.
We need to put real prices on solar panels now, and if that stops all new solar being installed (except in remote locations) so be it. Then we then need to rejig the billing system so those who installed the panels aren’t being subsidized by those who couldn’t afford them. It will take years to unravel this mess.
The land of truth is arriving at the magic renewable tree.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Jeff Dimery was alwys a renewables guy, Oh the irony, that he is now the one saying we need to keep coal running a bit longer:
Jeff was a founding member of Australia’s Clean Energy Council, and previously served on the boards of The Renewable Energy Generators of Australia, Australian Energy Council (including as both Chair and Deputy Chair), and the Australian Wind Energy Association.
Alinta Energy from Wikipedia
Alinta owns 3GW of power, gas, wind, coal, and “co-generation” in NZ, and has about 1.1 million retail customers.
Alinta Energy is an Australian electricity generating and gas retailing private company owned by Hong Kong-based Chow Tai Fook Enterprises (CTFE). The sale for $4 billion was approved by Treasurer Scott Morrison in 2017.[2] Alinta Energy has an owned and contracted generation portfolio of up to 1,957 MW, approximately 1.1 million combined electricity and gas retail customers and around 800 employees across Australia and New Zealand.[1]
Alinta Energy’s approximately 3,000MW electricity generation portfolio includes:[8]
-
-
- Port Hedland Power Station, Western Australia
- Newman Power Station, Western Australia
- Pinjarra Power Station, Western Australia
- Wagerup Power Station, Western Australia
- Goldfields Gas Pipeline, Western Australia
- Reeves Plain Power Station (Proposed), South Australia
- Braemar Power Station, Queensland
- Bairnsdale Power Station, Victoria
- Loy Yang B Power Station, Victoria
- Glenbrook Power Station, New Zealand
-
If Loy Yang B was truly dispatchable, Alinta could turn it on only when marginal prices were high enough to make a decent return. It sounds as if they can’t, in which case it’s a stranded asset. The days of brown coal electricity generation is gone. They are polluting and inefficient. Fast dispatchable gas generation will be the backup when all other sources can’t produce enough power. The electricity market is working as designed, price signals will determine investment in future generation.
292
Gosh Simon, are you finally acknowledging that your beloved “renewables” can’t deliver? I thought it was only a matter of building more windmills, panels and Big Batteries until Utopia was achieved.
And where is the gas going to come from? Pretend conservative Howard sold most of our gas to the Chicomms, exploration is banned in many places in Australia, as is fracking which is totally banned in Victoriastan.
Isn’t it bizarre that Australia is the world’s biggest gas exporter but has a gas shortage itself? Twiggy Forrest is actually building a gas import terminal in Port Kembla.
830
Simon, why should Loy B Yang be forced to be “a peaking power back up option” when it can be $15 MWh and on all day? Oh, wait, it’s so we can change the weather?
Far from the days of Brown coal being over, the days of renewable lies are coming to an end.
The electricity market is only “working as designed” to make the ruling class richer and the working class poorer. Are you a part of the ruling class getting richer on this Soviet-style mismanagement Simon? If you had a conflict of interest, would you tell us?
520
Not at all. Very little is emitted apart from the non-pollutant life-giving gases of CO2 and H20.
As for efficiency, I am not sure what metric you use but a power station is small, compact and invisible to most people and requires relatively little materials per unit of useful power produced as compared to wind and solar. They also last for at least 50 years, perhaps much longer. Wind and solar installations are essentially disposable with extremely short lives, perhaps 12-15 years, and mostly not recyclable unlike power station materials.
As for dispatchability, I am not sure what figures you use but power stations are available on demand if not subject to standard maintenance or extremely rare breakdowns.
Wind and solar are never available on demand and are totally weather dependent therefore not dispatchable at all unless coupled with a huge and expensive Big Battery which could deliver during a, say, ten day wind and solar drought in winter. Such a battery is economically impossible.
740
The point about “dispatchability” … which is more of a seat-of-the-pants estimate than a real scientific measurement … but the point is that with solar you can have heavy cloud move in and halve the power within perhaps 30 minutes, but if a coal fired plant needs to pick up that slack it simply cannot heat up the boiler within 30 minutes and it’s very bad for that equipment to attempt rapid thermal cycling.
Therefore you need at least some gas turbines and even diesel generators … because those can start and stop rapidly in order to compensate for intermittent wind and solar.
Coal mostly only works as baseload … that is the power you know you need all the time. Nuclear is much the same.
220
Actually, Tel, you have got this idea of coal not being able to take up the slack back-to-front. If you run the coal-fired plant all the time instead of the solar, then there is no slack that needs to be taken up. The solar power station can simply be left off-line, and the electricity grid runs smoothly. You still need gas turbines etc to start and stop rapidly in order to meet fluctuating demand, but they are not needed to compensate for intermittent wind and solar once you prevent wind and solar from coming anywhere the grid.
401
Loy Yang B is nearly 40 yrs old and, according to Aneroid Energy, delivering 110% capacity factor almost 24/7.
Goto: https://anero.id/energy/fossil-energy
Loy Yang B1 is the light green line virtually off the scale.
530
Coal fired is despatchable by design it’s just the destabilised grid supply variability means playing the stack with your spin reserve economics is just not that easy anymore.
220
Since when is CO2 which is essential for plant life a “pollutant”? If CO2 in the atmosphere falls below 200 ppm -life on planet Earth will not exist.
Germany still gets 87.5 billion Kwh of electricity from lignite (browen coal) or 17.0 percent of total production after spending over half a trillion Euros of the “green energy” transition.
So much for brown coal power stations being “stranded assets”.
In the winter of 2017 Germany experienced 5 continuous weeks of very low winds when solar output was negliable. During this period wind and solar were “stranded assets” and it was coal, nuclear and natural gas to the rescue (before Russia cut of natural gas and before nuclear power stations were shut down)
Germany now has to rely on coal during periods of “Dunkelflaute”.
Here is what “stranded assets” really look like:
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/china-and-germany-firing-up-coal-power-while-wind-takes-a-back-seat/#
450
Been drinking the Kool-Aid again
Communism 101 is a “Command Economy” where the government determines what is produced and determines investment priorites as opposed to a “Demand Economy” where consumers vote with their wallets as what will be produced and only efficient producers survive.
Australia now has a totalitarian Communist Goverment (which should be obvious to any thinking person) and energy policies are based on ideology and not sound science and engineering.
There are ZERO benefits from these “energy policies” which are destroying what was once a reliable and affordable electricity grid.
Like in most Communist countries only the wealth elites experience the “good life”.
Billions of taxpayers dollars are being completely wasted and the environment is being vandalised.
450
‘Australia now has a totalitarian Communist Government …’
At this rate you will fail political economy.
129
Prove that I am wrong.
130
We have a democracy and Labor is centre left.
212
Our “democracy” is flawed when it’s compulsory to give a vote, even a lowly-ranked vote, to a candidate whom you suspect is traitorous or otherwise unacceptable.
(Once again I’m drawing your attention to, and complaining about, the compulsory preferential voting in the Commonwealth House of Representatives.)
Cheers,
Dave B
40
If you don’t like any of the candidates then write that across the ballot paper and it will make it invalid. Think of it as a silent protest, tell your friends to join in.
31
El+ Gordo,
Incorrect.
The Federal Labor Government is controlled by the Marxists of the extreme left within the ALP, the unions and the left-aligned activists groups.
Albanese is a closet Marxist and has been since his university days. He was closely associated with the Communist party and has never broken those links.
Labor’s policies favour the command economy approach and we can see the evidence of the fairly rapid shift towards that end of the spectrum.
It will end in tears and take years to fix, if not decades.
140
I studied Marx and the command economy at university, but as the years roll by its plain to see communism is a bad system.
Democratic socialist governments can be found all around the world, a bulwark to communism.
12
but as the years roll by its plain to see communism is a bad system.
What took you so long?
40
In the fullness of time a few years is not long.
The centre left is not communist.
13
Where has Chris Bowen made mention of this? Natural gas (another fossil fuel) has been demonised by the Climate Cult along with coal.
Fracking has be banned in the People’s Republic of Victoriastan along with gas appliances for new homes.
The Communist Victorian goverment cannot now support “Fast dispatchable gas generation” to replace reliable low cost brown coal power stations.
In any event natural gas supplies are already tight on the East Coast of Australia, with LNG soon to be imported from Qatar.
The future lies with killing whales as sacrifices to the Climate Gods by building super expensive and corrosion prone offshore wind turnbines along the Victorian coast.
The sacrifies of birds and bats to onshore wind farm projects has been found to be insuffient to appease the Climate Gods.
310
Yes Simon, I guess that somehow makes sense in your world.
Lets see, take the biggest solar plant in Australia and the take Loy Yang. At 4am operate both at maximum output. Which is dispatchable and which one isnt?
The simple word dispatchable doesnt actually mean much with context of level, timing, response time, duration etc. but at its core you need to have power available to control. Nearly everything else is moot.
280
For many centuries, mills made flour when the wind was blowing and they stopped work when the wind stopped. Power was NOT available to control but instead you needed to make sure that you were ready to work whenever the power was available.
An inconvenient system … but better than nothing and it worked. We are probably going to end up heading back in that direction, to some extent at least.
131
‘Fast dispatchable gas generation will be the backup…’
That is the plan, but the Morrison government had to fork over Snowy Hydro money to build Kurri Kurri, work is ongoing. The government had put out tenders but the market wasn’t interested, in simple economic terms it was a no brainer.
Chow Tai Fook Enterprises, based in Hong Kong, acquired Loy Yang B power station a few years back. This doesn’t raise any red flags, but keep it in mind.
72
Where is this plan? How many wind farms are owned by the Chinese which used Chinese wind turbines?
50
When the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow, gas has been earmarked to pick up the slack.
The CCP doesn’t own any of our renewables system, but they have supplied most of the infrastructure.
04
Let’s look at a few of your claims:
“If Loy Yang B was truly dispatchable, Alinta could turn it on only when marginal prices were high enough to make a decent return. It sounds as if they can’t, in which case it’s a stranded asset”.
By your definition, Solar panels are a “stranded asset” for 12 hrs or more each day. Wind turbines are “stranded assets” when the wind doesn’t blow.
Other “stranded assets” include aluminum smelters, steel mills, silicon chip fab facilities, refineries, etc, whenever the power isn’t available. People are “stranded assets” when employment fails for want of reliable energy.
It takes a Hydro plant some 10 mins to deliver power from a demand call. 18 to 40 mins for a CCGT depending on warm or cold start conditions. It can take 4 to 12 hrs for a coal plant to start depending on warm or dead cold start conditions. Diesel gensets take 15 to 20 mins to start up and deliver power. Things like thermal stress become important to know about.
But here’s the real issue: The grid requires generation to load balancing equality in 1 to 30 seconds. If that cannot be done, the grid crashes and generation startup times don’t matter because the time for stable grid black start is days to months.
Keep focusing on irrelevant things, whilst ignoring relevant things. Convince yourself that some tiny knowledge of a complex system is sufficient to inform policy decisions, and blame others if the lights go out. Yeah, that’s the way of a modern industrial society.
How odd that the grid functioned efficiently and reliably for 50 to 100 years right up until “smart” people decided to replace what works with what sounds good. Have a nice day.
520
‘ … price signals will determine investment in future generation.’
Only if unsubsidised.
82
When is this happening? When Hell freezes over?
80
Cannot pick the timing, but I suspect it will happen when everyone agree that CO2 doesn’t cause global warming.
11
The use of a small number of big generators generators using steam as a working fluid is always going to have high latency, no matter what the heat source.
The design philosophy of large thermal systems is to run at rated capacity all the time to meet the known base demand.
Other technologies (eg CCGT, hydro) are more suited for known daily peaks, and still other technologies (eg diesel, OCGT or hydro) are suited for fast response.
If coal (or nuclear fission) is the heat source for the steam, the flexibility can be improved by using a larger number of smaller generators. That would carry a cost penalty.
In summary, it’s not the coal which has high latency, it’s the large steam turbines and generators.
50
Perhaps you have not heard of “spinning reserve”. Before all of this nonsense the state control system managers in QLD, for example, required that there was a spinning reserve of 28%. These generating units were on line and generating at a lower than maximum capacity and, therefore, had room to increase their output quickly. The ramp rates for these large units depends largely on the design of the coal feed system. At Gladstone, for example, the coal feed system has high speed atrita pulverizing mills and so the ramp rate, i.e. load increase rate is very fast. All of this was factored into the overall design of the generating and transmission system in the past.
The state grid management in QLD, before the take over of the Commonwealth government and their useless bureaucrats, produced electricity at a reliability factor, measured as availability factor, and cost which was among the best in the world. It has all been downhill since and will continue to decline until we are in serious trouble.
The lead times to repair all of this would be measured in more than a decade.
30
I knew that powdered coal could add heat very quickly, but I thought the limiting factors were the thermal capacity of the boilers and the inertia of the turbines & rotors.
The spinning reserve figure is much higher than I expected. Was that a pragmatic figure based on the plants available, or based on, for example, to cover the loss of a large generator?
00
Once a unit is at load the temperatures within the boiler and turbine system remains mostly constant. The steam temperature going to the turbine for a sub critical station like Gladstone, for example, is kept at about 541C. The changes in load are all associated with changes in coal feed to the boiler with increased feed water flow to the boiler to increase pressure and subsequent steam flows to the turbine to keep the turbine spinning at 3000rpm as increased demand on the grid flows back and starts to slow the generator. Anybody who has run their own generator will understand this when they increase the load by turning on new appliances for example. At Gladstone the feed flows for steam for each of the six units at maximum load of 275 MW is about 200kg/sec.
The only time heat stress is an issue is with a cold start up or when the unit has been off line and cooled to a certain degree.
10
Did you actually read the above Article. or did you just wake from dreaming of a new “Utopia”/Dreamtime and hit the key board whilst engaging your ‘half a brain’?
Go back to sleep you Clown.
61
Simon
If solar and wind were truly “dispatchable”, we wouldn’t need backup, but because they are weather dependent, and thus completely unreliable, we need a full system backup that duplicates the so-called “renewable” system.
Billions spent on wasted capital investment, perpetual ongoing subsidies, and we still need a real generation system as a backup. Do you really defend this rubbish, or are you just a petty contrarian?
90
“Transitioning” to “renewables” is impossible unless the expectations for cost, availability and quantity of deliverable power are dramatically altered.
Renewables WILL be able to provide enough power to provide some night time lighting, a small internet connected appliance to receive government propaganda and to spy on you (Orwell’s Telescreen) and perhaps a small cooking appliance to once per day warm your daily ration of insects and gruel “food”.
Forget about heating and cooling.
Unreliables can offer a subsistence level of living in a very primitive society only.
Don’t forget the King and Flinders Islands renewables experiments in Bass Strait, Australia. These are two places in the world where renewables might possibly work due to being in the Roaring Forties for wind and with adequate sun for solar. And both those communities rely on diesel generators or they’d have almost no electricity.
460
Recall some years ago that NSW unions were campaigning against privatisation, saying that you will pay more. Exactly. Latest newspoll suggests that people are willing to wear higher prices for reasons that elude them.
80
When governments try to run a market with false signals:
Yesterday in Victoria at midday the spot wholesale electricity price per OpenNEM was negative $30/MWh but home solar owners were being paid $40/MWh.
At 6pm the spot wholesale price jumped to $120/MWh. Average wholesale price for the month $80/MWh, but last 9 months average $45/MWh.
And at the evening peak the retail price is about $350/MWh. Off peak retail prices are around $250/MWh.
The crash is coming when the next coal station shuts down and there isn’t enough gas to cover the peak.
Yesterday in Victoria coal and gas generation was curtailed to 2,500 MW through the day, but then ran at 3,700 MW through the night.
270
How can it be? Simon says it not dispatchable.
90
The old adage “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” couldn’t be more true! It’s time “to put real prices on solar panels now, and if that stops all new solar being installed (except in remote locations)so be it. Then we need to rejig the billing system so those who installed the panels aren’t being subsidized by those who couldn’t afford them”.
I attempted to explain this dilemma to a friend/neighbour and recent PV installer. He was gloating about a reduction in his power bills. When the subsidies stop, as they surely will, he’ll still be paying off his thirty thousand $$$ costs and incurring the higher cost of power he helped establish!
260
That used to be common wisdom, but now most people expect “free stuff”, not having any clue how wealth gets created and then taxed by the Government to transfer the property of a productive person’s labours to someone else.
Similarly, most people have no clue where food in the supermarket comes from.
Milton Friedman wrote a book by that name in 1975, as a way to explain the concept of opportunity cost.
He wrote:
160
🙃 Insulted,I’m telling
ya. Insulted.🤣
10
If you’re relying on so called renewable energy that only has capacity factors of 15% and 30% then you must know that you are WASTING TIME and billions of $ straight down the drain.
Sooner or later we must wake up ,yet we have clueless loonies that want to blow up RELIABLE BASE-LOAD power plants and try and replace them with TOXIC UNRELIABLE W & S and WRECK the environments ONSHORE and OFFSHORE as well.
And all for UNRELIABLE TOXIC energy that has to be replaced every 15 to 20 years. We need new RELIABLE BASE-LOAD energy ASAP, yet we have stupid pollies, MSM, so called Scientists etc who still don’t understand very simple sums and they still insist on a repeat of the last 34 years.
250
This cost is just for the unreliable cost component of so called “renewables” that have to be replaced every 15 years or so and does not include the cost of battery back-up to make the unreliables – reliable. That is the wind turbines and solar panels and the related installation costs.
Add at least another $100 Billion for the reliablity component if you can get the Chinese made batteries.
170
I dunno where he gets his 58 bucks a MWH.
In Qld, I paid $942 (ex GST) for 3118 KwH.
942 / 3118 = $0.302 per Kw.
That’s $302 per MwH!
Who gets the other $244?
100
Prices are lower in Victoria because of wonderful brown coal which is not traded internationally like black coal in Queensland.
170
Poles and wires, retailers, subsidies and assorted hangers on.
100
His. $58 /MWh is the average WHOLESALE price the generators earn selling to the market operators.
Your $302 MWh is the RETAIL cost after the addition of transmission, distribution , service, and retail MARGINS …have been added.
So , all the noise about coal/gas/solar/wind ..etc , costs are trivial compared to the retail cost that us consumers actually pay. !
150
How too much solar power at the wrong time is destroying a once affordable and reliable power grid
https://www.esc.vic.gov.au/media-centre/how-can-feed-tariff-go-down-while-retail-prices-are-increasing#:
110
It seems to me that if a truly free market was allowed to exist (stop subsidies to wind and solar) we would soon return to a sane and reliable grid. The subsidies to rooftop solar should be removed immediately and as the installed systems retire over the next decade the grid would return to the way it was with the incentive to investors to build 24/7 power plants.
160
The days when electricity was controlled by country councils are unfortunately passed. Poor infrastructure in those days meant blackouts – not outages, but we enjoyed cheap reliable power, but tell that to younger generations who that eggs are manufactured on a assembly line you will get a shrug of indifference.
70
Dans return of the State Electricty Commission is going gang busters, oh wait, sorry that should just read “bust”. It seems to have faded from view like the latest comet.
Approaching the horizon with great fanfare only after close scrutiny to be a complete fizzier.
160
Despite its imminent failure, they are apparently still hiring people, with special preference being given to Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and LGBTIQ people. (Not kidding.)
Silly me, I thought it was meant to be an energy company, not a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion showcase.
https://www.secvictoria.com.au/careers
190
Yep – our once reliable energy grid will be competely screwed. How many of this lot have degrees in electrical engineering?
120
Another show pony for the election at the time….like the decentralised Commonwealth Games.
00
We cannot return to a ‘sane and reliable grid’ (ie, coal/gas/nuclear(?)) while the premise for the transition is to reduce CO2 emissions.
Our ‘betters’ are fixated with CO2 being a weather control, not cheap, reliable, continuous power
130
The great “Green New Deal” in the USA is not going according to plan – the same is happening in Australia as more people wake up to the “renewables” scam. Only the wealthy elites can be disinterested in their ever increasing power bills when they were promised “Schleeper Electrishitty” and a $275 electricity bill reduction by the current Communist Goverment.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/04/24/tracking-the-demise-of-the-u-s-green-energy-transition/
120
Some don’t have power bills. They used other people’s money to help pay for their solar panels and battery.
Residential batteries are still behind grid scale installations in capacity but the market is new and growing strongly. Give it a couple of years and the residential market will be bigger than grid scale.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/04/09/big-batteries-overshadow-residential-rollout-in-australia/
The combined capacity of household batteries in not trivial at grid level.
A lot of Australians drive utes. It increases their independence. Buying a battery for the house increases your independence. Payback on batteries are now down to 7 years in some locations in Australia. That is with incentives (theft from others) but who pays more tax than they need to.
132
I wondwr what the residential fire stats have done over the last few years?
20
Only fools rush in.
In 2007, Spain implemented several regulatory measures with the purpose of stimulating investment in the burgeoning renewable energy sector.
Initially, the system was a huge success, attracting interest from domestic investors and international companies.
However, after the boom, came the bust.
After the 2008 financial crisis, Spain was no longer able to guarantee the initial incentives and between 2012-2014, the government retrospectively removed them, prompting legal claims by the investors.
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/12/27/spain-faces-8-billion-in-renewable-legal-claims-over-past-solar-boom
120
Well, being a smug I haven’t paid a power bill for 3 years except for one torrid period when we ran air-conditioning units for a month. Here in NQ we receive a QLD government assistance rebate along with our rooftop solar input which keeps our bills at a minimum. My wife and I are in a good position, but many that I hear of pay way too much; high prices, poor housing design and profligate use are main contributing factors for high bills. Alas, most people think that renewable energy is cheap and it saves the planet – a pity that you can’t protect against ignorance.
75
Oh well , your rebates and FITs have got to be paid for somehow. The ignorant peons will just have to wear it.
90
Most people I know who installed solar were hooked on the illusion of saving the planet. A few did detailed economic analysis are are benefitting significantly now.
60
Rick, are they only benefitting due an artificially inflated electricity price? I.e. would they still benefit at free market electricity pricing?
40
It is not an artificially inflated price. It is mandated theft. The retailers are the bagman that pass on what they collect from consumers to pay for their LGCs from the grid scale WDGs.
In fact the more rooftop output that retailers get, the less they need to pay for LGCs. So rooftops are un upfront contribution of consumers money in the form of STCs. The deeming period for STCs is declining so the number of STCs for any particular sized rooftop is declining.
The margin between wholesale and retail is increasing. Most of that margin is locked in through all of the additional transmission and distribution costs.
If the theft ended tomorrow, it would save consumers around $8bn dollars. Say $800 per household per year.
The RET is supposed to end in 2030. So the mandated theft has a deadline. That is the key factor preventing more investment in grid WDGs.
Unless the government extend the RET period, there is little chance in getting much of the proposed investment in generation up and running.
If the RET ends in 2030, rooftops would get very little for export because it would immediately knock 5c/kWh off the value. Some only get 4c/kWh now.
By the time all this gets flushed through, rooftop and battery would be paid for. If Dutton gets in, it will be 2050 before there is a nuclear power station unless it is on a barge.
50
I will qualify that the solar panels were installed from the time of the previous owners. At least they’re not unsightly given that they are part of a corrugated iron roof.
10
In Q1 2024, LGCs cost consumers around $2.014M dollars. That is theft from consumers to the big grid players.
In terms of theft, the grid scale WDGs are getting more than rooftops.
Every household battery reduces grid demand. So all the cost recovery of all the additional hardware is spread across fewer consumers.
I have constantly pointed out that the demise of the grid started with the first connection of an intermittent generator. It is now evident to those in the industry that the grid is in demise.
Fundamentally there is no benefit of scale with WDGs. Any household can install solar panels fixed to maximise their input to their worst sunlight days and a battery for far less cost than any grid scale generator using the same technology but having to transmit that power over large distances to a battery then on to a load. Land access costs is a huge and growing portion of the cost for WDGs
Fortunately, the governments have reduced their share of ownership in the grid assets. So it is private equity that is being burnt. I cannot see them backtracking on incentives for households. Many in government would be applauding that large scale generators are losing money. They might stop applauding when the power no longer comes out of the wall socket.
The promoters of grid scale WDGs are starting to learn about what the mining industry has been dealing with for decades – frogs, flowers, lizards, lung fish, sacred sites and so on. It is all hard work.
I personally know eight households that use the grid connection as their insurance policy. Otherwise they could be independent of the grid. Only two actually considered the cost/benefit in any detail. One bought a house with batteries and panels already installed. Others did it to reduce their carbon footprint without realising they have actually increased it. They were sold on the illusion. But they have little or no ongoing costs. One makes money from his grid connection (he did the sums). Two of those households now have BEVs that they charge when the sun is shining. They are expensive shopping trolleys and local runabouts but that are never inconvenienced by having to go to a fuel station.
Australia just needs to keep sending iron ore, coal, bauxite, base metal concentrates, etc to China and China sending back solar panels and batteries and the more wealthy households can get off the grid and leave the poor households getting government support to pay for electricity. It would help if Australia just gave up on all manufacturing. Leave China with their high carbon footprint while growing military might.
110
That should read $2,014M or $2.014bn. So the LGCs are now costing electricity consumers around $8bn per year.
20
Hang on!! Please define what appear to be little used acronyms. What is a “WDG” “LGC” etc.? I just got up to speed with ABC, NSW, VIC, EV, LBGT!!!, KWH, MWH, $, and so on. WTF?
50
LGC = Large-scale generation certificates . These are the forced subsidies the expensive solar and wind players need to be given to be competitive with cheap reliable coal.
WDG = Wholesale distributed generation (meaning solar panels on rooftops)
60
Hi Jo
Some time back on one of your posts you had a graph of electricity prices over time which also showed the growth in renewables and how the two were linked. I’ve looked for it but couldn’t find it. Could you kindly let me know where it might be found? Thankyou.
Neil
00
WDG – weather dependent generators. They are not “renewavble” because they are not sustainable. They are a one shot wonder until China realises they are paying more for coal and subsidising the rest of the world.
50
Love your work Jo.
This is one of your best.
If the MSM had done investigative journalism years ago on this madness and called the governments on their obvious lies maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Cheap, cheap, cheap the pollies and the MSM all said.
Yeah right… BTW I’m selling the Sydney Harbour Bridge…any offers?
110
You are expecting a lot from journalism.
The Climate Change™ madness can be traced back to academics and the UN seeking to lock in program funding. The problem of academics requiring to justify their program expenditure to government hacks has eliminated personal integrity. It was identified as a potential problem not long after the Second World War.
There are very few people having Peter Ridd’s integrity – prepared to trade employment for the truth. I started my crusade after reading a small booklet published by a senior scientist sacked from CSIRO for questioning Climate Change™. He went from a reasonably well paid senior scientist role in the CSIRO to teaching at a tech college two States away from his home State where he was previously employed by the CSIRO.
The phrase “due to climate change” gets 1bn hits on a Google search. It is the gift that keeps giving. It is almost a universal requirement of everything that comes out of government and academia to pay homage to the climate gods and demonise CO2.
Older people are questioning “the science” because it is visibly wrong over their lifetime. There is pressure to lower the voting age so the propaganda in the schools can work before curiosity sets in that questions the teachings.
210
Ed Krug is another scientist who got kicked out for having integrity … he got the scientifically correct answer on acid rain but not the politically convenient answer.
Read the book “Environment Betrayed”.
But there’s a long list of people punished for asking questions … how about lukewarmers Judith Curry and Bjorn Lomborg? The way the true believers turned on those two viciously, must surely be intimidation designed to discourage anyone else coming forward. That itself is sufficient to identify this as a cult, not real science.
170
China Is Leading The Global Nuclear-Power Build-Out
China is currently constructing a total of 26 nuclear power units with a combined capacity of 30.3 gigawatts (GW), the highest in the world, according to a report by the China Nuclear Energy Association (CNEA)
Last year, China approved the development of five new nuclear power projects and began construction of five units, the report found.
Air pollution from coal-fired power plants is a major impetus for China to expand its nuclear generation fleet, according to the World Nuclear Association.
China is not giving up coal, but it is betting on nuclear, too, to meet its rising power demand with cleaner energy sources.
Many countries in the West, with the notable exception of Germany, have also recognized that nuclear power generation would help them achieve net-zero emission goals.
At the COP28 climate summit in Dubai at the end of last year, the United States and 21 other countries pledged to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050, saying incorporating more nuclear power in their energy mix is critical for achieving their net zero goals in the coming decades.
The United States, alongside Britain, France, Canada, Sweden, South Korea, Ghana, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), among others, signed the declaration at the COP28 climate summit.
China is not a signatory to that declaration, but it aims to develop more nuclear energy capacities to reduce emissions as its demand for electricity rises.
As of September 2023, China had 55 nuclear power units in operation with a combined installed capacity of 57 GW, and 24 units under construction with a total installed capacity of 27.8 GW, Xinhua quoted CNEA official Wang Binghua as saying. By 2060, that capacity is expected to jump to 400 GW, the official said.
China is also expected to approve six to eight nuclear power units each year “within the foreseeable future.”
110
Is that really true though?
Once you spend the money buying rooftop solar, after that there’s never a reason not to use it because you already have the sun and the power gets generated all by itself.
Thus, the only price signal is whether people buy solar panels in the first place. Given how high power bills have become and the fact that families can shift some of their load to the middle of the day … and the solar subsidies on top of that … there’s pressure to at least buy sufficient for reducing your own power bill, on average.
70
That’s exactly his point Tel. Imagine if solar rooftop PV was actually connected to the wholesale market they are interfering with? When the price went negative, the homeowner who didn’t disconnect the panels would have to pay for the right to dump unwanted electricity on the grid.
Boy would that change things…
Suddenly homeowners would be setting up remote disconnection or rushing home to turn off the panels at lunchtime. Either that or their bills would be rising to help pay for their panels being a burden on the grid.
160
They would disconnect then, but of course prices don’t ever really go negative that merely appears that way because of the LRET certificate system. Generally speaking, households can’t get access to certificate trading putting them at a disadvantage in the “marketplace”.
That wouldn’t change things much, what happens now is the voltage rises in a given area on a sunny day and if the power isn’t getting used then the inverters start to back off and any excess power get thrown away.
OK, so you could remove LRET and immediately the negative price would go away … but the power situation is much the same anyway. You can somehow apply a penalty for not disconnecting during times of oversupply, but for what purpose? The only effect would be to cause power to be thrown away in a slightly different way. Perhaps you can slightly inflate the wholesale price now and then by keeping solar cells off the grid.
Thing is … once those cells are installed they produce power.
00
Given my expectations of inflationary pressures of grid supplied electricity prices, the PV panels on my shed roof would have still been installed even without the “RET subsidies”.
If power exports to the grid became priced negatively on a regular basis, I would think that the inverter manufacturers would be asked to supply a software update that would simply refuse to allow that export. The cost benefit since the establishment of export pricing at (sort of) power generation wholesale rates became (and will remain) the avoidance of the grid source pricing.
00
Negative wholesale prices where some producers are will to pay someone to take their electricity production can only last so long.
When the grid is completely glutted with too much solar power at noon there will be no one able to take the additional electricty production at any negative price.
70
No, negative prices are the crazy problem the Communist Planned Market system perpetuates. Either Home solar is part of the market or it isn’t. Either the system values stability, FCAS, reliability and cheap electricity at all hours or the system favours green weather changing electrons and pays for fairy dust…
We pay for crazy so we get more crazy.
190
The ‘renewables guy’ tells it like it is. Now we’re faced with a solar energy noonday glut and how we’ll probably be nudged into helping the incurably renewables far-Left, socialist Albanese government use yet more of our taxpayer funding to subsidise household battery storage to rub out the embarrassing unwanted energy. Given that the beleagured householder, small business operator and energy dependent industries are now inured to burgeoning energy bills, does anybody now envisage that even with a sensible mix of coal, nuclear and renewables brought in by the Coalition, that energy prices will ever come down to a sensible level. I think not. After all, whilst we are inured to burgeoning energy costs, the greedy government facilitated energy companies are also inured to making unconcionable profits.
50
Yes and No. Dimery only tells it like it is in the sense that he assumes we need to get rid of coal or the storms will be worse. And he only tells us half the truth, not the cheaper half.
130
3 Physicists Use Experimental Evidence To Show CO2’s Capacity To Absorb Radiation Has Saturated
Adding CO2 to the atmosphere can have no significant climatic effect when rising above the threshold of about 300 ppm. Due to saturation, higher and higher concentrations do not lead to any further absorption of radiation.
If one were to paint a white surface black so as to allow it to absorb as much heat as possible, it is well known the first layer of paint has the most dominant impact on heat absorption. A second coat covers up any remaining grayish color and perhaps a few spots missed on the first layer. By the third layer, there is effectively no more heat absorption that can be attained with the additional coat, as the surface is saturated in black. It cannot become blacker.
Three Polish physicists have focused their attention on this saturation principle as it applies to CO2 in three recently published papers (Kubicki et al., 2024, 2022, and 2020). Their latest (Kubicki et al., 2024), published in Applications in Engineering Science, summarizes the experimental evidence from their 2020 and 2022 publications substantiating the conclusion that “as a result of saturation processes, emitted CO2 does not directly cause an increase in global temperature.”
“From the conducted considerations, it follows that both in Eq. (4) and Eq. (6), the value of absorption is limited. In the first case, it cannot exceed 1, and in the second case, it cannot exceed the value of ψ less than unity. Therefore, for a sufficiently large mass m, saturation must occur, and further increase in mass will result in a negligible increase in absorption.”
This research adds another layer to more than 50 years of research on the CO2 saturation principle.
“Schack (1972)…demonstrated that for a concentration of 0.03% of carbon dioxide in the air, the absorption process in the troposphere is saturated.”
The authors are concerned about the recent push to rely on modeling and assumptions about CO2’s capacity to drive changes in global temperature rather than observational evidence. They point out the current CO2-is-the-climate-control-knob zeitgeist is no more than a hypothesis.
https://notrickszone.com/2024/04/23/3-physicists-use-experimental-evidence-to-show-co2s-capacity-to-absorb-radiation-has-saturated/
Say after me:
” Limited intermittent energy is the goal. Without that, they can’t control the masses.”
40
I started to watch the video but could not get past the elders past and present.
70
If I have to hear that elders bushwaa again I am going to brick the screen; but you omitted – the family in Hong Kong own what we built – just lovely! We have been screwed from all quarters, so thanks to Jo we get a reality check.
50
I live in the UK. Every Autumn the hedges of the back roads are awash with blackberries. Anybody who wants them can pick them and take them home. So why aren’t the back roads swarming with people picking free food? Because people can work out that a couple of pounds of blackberries is a pretty poor return on an hour’s labour when they could spend a couple of £s at the supermarket and have a choice of a vast array of fruit, including blackberries if that’s their passion.
The question is: how much free energy can we afford to collect?
40
given the price of fuel, unless you could walk or cycle to that hedge, you premise regarding buying the fruit will hold.
OTOH if within walking distance, it seems a useful way to collect vitamin D and put some of the local bird life on a more restricted diet.
00
Even walking to the hedge is more expensive. I live in a village, a suitable hedge with blackberries is about a mile away so if I walk there, spend (say) 20 minutes picking backberries and walk home that’s an hour of my time. I consider my time to be worth somewhat more than minimum wage but if we use that as a guide then collecting that free food has “cost” me £11.44.
00
The energy market mechanism is beset with rules that favour parasitic subsidies, imposed to appease self-serving ideologies.
The biggest problem for electricity end users appears to be the effect of the hierarchic glut of parasitic generation.
30
We spend so much time pretending that we are unbiased adherents of science and math, when it is painfully (very painfully lately) obvious we are ruled by quasi religious virtue signaling …
and math and science are just the latest tool used to justify the contortions necessary to produce compliance and maintain the hierarchy of the herd.
It was an Anthropogenic Pandemic of the Unvaccinated non-Followers.
30
Jo, a question about a tangential topic.
I’ve noticed in recent weeks at the top of stories you’ve had quite detailed artistic banner graphics bearing your copyright notice. They have been pretty good. One of them [https://joannenova.com.au/wp-content/Net-zero-3m.jpg] has a glitch in it (the incomplete ‘r’ in zero) which makes me suspect you’ve used some generative AI software to make these topical images from prompts. Did I guess correctly, and if so which “AI” program did you use?
00
The missing argument amongst all of these is that humans are going to have to work WITH NATURE NOT INSPITE OF IT. Some replies have hinted at or skirted this idea. Only the very greedy wish to take more from Nature than they need in one lifetime. Our industrial system is driven by the greedy to extract wealth from this planet by destroying it and reducing the quality of the life of the vast majority of people on this planet who do not have this toxic drive for material wealth.
10
According to Wikipedia, Loy Yang A (2200 Mw) is scheduled to close in 2035 and Loy Yang B (1050 Mw) in 2047.
Current Schedule of Australia Coal Plant Closures as of June 2023
Looking at this schedule, another 7374 megawatts of Australian coal-fired generation will be closed by the end of 2029. The closure of Eraring in 2025 will be a bellweather trend setter if it actually happens.
Also according to Wikipedia, Victoria’s green politicians want to move up Loy Yang B’s closure from 2047 to 2035, at which point 95% of Victoria’s power supply will be wind & solar.
As seen from my perch here in the Middle of Nowhere, USA, it appears Australia’s green politicians haven’t got a clue how they are going to get this done.
20
[…] From JoNova […]
00
[…] The only government stupider than Germany is the one that has already seen how badly this worked out and announces they’re going to do the same thing. Australia is not only ten years too late, but China has flooded the market to the point where people are using solar panels as garden fences, and we have our own glut of solar power at midday. […]
00
[…] L’unico governo più stupido della Germania è quello che ha già visto quanto questo abbia funzionato male e annuncia che faranno la stessa cosa. L’Australia non è solo dieci anni troppo tardi, ma la Cina ha inondato il mercato fino al punto in cui le persone utilizzano pannelli solari come recinzioni da giardino, e abbiamo il nostro eccesso di energia solare a mezzogiorno. […]
00
[…] Jedynym rządem głupszym od Niemiec jest ten, który już widział, jak źle to zadziałało i ogłasza, że zamierza zrobić to samo. Australia nie tylko spóźniła się o dziesięć lat, ale Chiny zalały rynek do tego stopnia, że ludzie używają paneli słonecznych jako płotów ogrodowych, a my mamy nadwyżkę energii słonecznej w południe. https://joannenova.com.au/2024/04/global-glut-in-solar-panels-so-bad-people-are-using-them-for-garden-fences/ https://joannenova.com.au/2024/04/alinta-chief-admits-the-transition-has-soaring-costs-and-has-stall… […]
00