By Jo Nova
Following the footsteps of Cuba
It’s not even summer and the Australian grid is having heart palpitations.
The Blob are in concert — blackouts might be at hand, and they want us to blame the heat (it’s code for climate change). Let’s get a grip, we’re only talking about a Sydney forecast of 33°C (all of 91F).
The ABC calls this “sweltering” and files it under “extreme weather events”. Channel Nine call it a “major heatwave”, which it might be if it were London.
For most of the last week, the AEMO (Australia Energy Market Operator) has been flashing red lights and ringing the LOR3 bell. That means they’ve been forecasting a full Level 3 Lack of Reserve, which means they can see blackouts coming. A level 3 is the most serious warning alarm. Not only is there no reserve power available if something goes wrong, there’s not even enough power for normal operations.
A week ago the AEMO saw blackouts coming for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday — but by hook or by crook with finagling, they’ve got enough promised power now to turn off the sirens, though the lights are still flashing. Think of this an emergency room visit where the heart attack didn’t quite happen today, and probably won’t happen tomorrow, but the patient needs to pay attention.
Quite often in the last few years the AEMO would issue a level 1 warning and forecast a few hundred megawatts of shortage for a couple of hours. But by yesterday morning, in forecasts for Wednesday’s mildly warm day they were looking down the barrel of a 1,700 MW shortage. The full emergency period was not just an hour or two long but started at 11:30am and ran right through to 7:30pm at night.
And of course, it’s old coal’s fault:
Discussion at WattClarity suggest that Australia is running short of spare coal and gas plants to operate. It’s a combination of forced outages, unforced outages, and some maintenance taking longer than expected. Nearly one third of all thermal units bigger than 150MW in generation are out of action.
So geniuses, if a lack of coal causes blackouts, what’s going to happen when we shut down more coal?
Andrew Forrest’s Squadron Energy said the warning underscored the dangers of an energy system still largely reliant on coal.
“AEMO has confirmed that the combination of high temperatures across NSW and Queensland, along with coal plant outages will cause tight electricity supply forecasts in the coming days,” said Squadron boss Rob Wheals. “We know that Australia’s coal fleet is nearing the end of its economic and technical lifespan, with coal plant outages driving high price periods.”
— By Perry Williams, The Australian Heat spike puts NSW power grid on edge
There’s plenty more of that at Squadron Energy’s site, where they say ““Coal is killing affordability and reliability. Renewables are the answer.” The mystery is why even The Australian thought any of it was worth printing, except as a giggle.
Twenty years of Soviet style management is what is killing our grid
We got exactly what we paid for: Government subsidies to boost unreliable energy have, shock, created an unreliable grid. We used to have enough coal power so they could take a few units out for maintenance and it didn’t matter. But when we pay more for random generators, we drive reliable ones out of business. We then expect the owners to run vast finely tuned 500-ton machines faster and slower all the time to “fit in” with the wind and solar machines we don’t need. This reduces efficiency, which increases their costs, and no doubt the maintenance time. Then we kill off the long term prospects for the industry, call them stranded assets, and wonder why companies don’t value them, build new ones or fix up the old ones properly.
Crazy subsidies, make for crazy thinking, and then we get Squadron Energy telling us coal is killing affordability…
The Australian Grid is running close to the edge
The latest update suggests the level 3 alarm for Wednesday and Thursday has dropped to a level 2. The AEMO tell us the reserve requirement on Wednesday for our most populated state is 1,202 MW but, not so reassuringly, “the minimum capacity reserve is 0 MW”. That means, they think, that if everything works as expected, and the weather is not hotter than forecast, or more cloudy, or less windy, and nothing breaks, then the system will be just barely OK.
Usually the people in the control room like to have enough spare capacity on call, so if the biggest single generator trips out, the back up is there to keep the lights on. The minimum capacity reserve is not just a nice thing to have, its considered an essential part of normal operation. It’s the difference between the first world and the third world.
h/t David of Cooyal in Oz.
REFERENCES
AEMO notice 120894 contained the LOR3 1,731MW notice at 4:37am Monday. Later notice number 120946 updated the situation in NSW and number 120949 has cancelled the LOR3 in NSW for Thursday too. The AEMO have put out something like 1,000 notices in the last three weeks. It didn’t use to be this way.
Production lines run best when they have attained an equilibrium.
I can only imagine the damage and resulting costs from brown outs and blackouts on industries where there is insufficient back up power to keep the normal operating conditions, not to mention industries like Tomago where many operations can only be run with grid scale power.
Given a choice between switching of voter’s air conditioners or an entire plant what choice do you believe our career politicians will make? Especially when they know the result of industry shutdown will be diminished by main stream media and search engines will make sure sites like Jo’s will be missing from searches or just plain buried.
130
It’s a real shame that a forced ‘shut down’ Aluminium Plant doesn’t have a lot of votes. But the Owners, Management and Workers do have a vote.
40
Thankyou for highlighting the ridiculousness of this.
The MSM no longer report news – their product, their only output, is anxiety.
That’s what they peddle: anxiety.
When you make people anxious, they click (MSM earns income), that watch (ditto).
If everyone understands that their product is anxiety, it’s easier to ignore them. No click, no watch, no income.
180
Aren’t potential blackouts news?
06
Yes they are, good news, the sooner we have a couple of good ones, maybe we’ll look at what’s actually going on.
40
Perhaps there are enough stupid people out there who believe all this rubbish of coal and gas causing every problem known to mankind.
Having spent over 30 years prospecting in the Outback I mostly retreated back to the east coast when the temperature reached 42+ deg and this was generally the first or second week of November. Now 42 and 33 deg are extremes?
It’s called “covering your arse” in the face of blackouts!
100
NSW residents must all arise this morning & switch on every single electrical appliance they possess.
It won’t send your power bill over the top as the whole grid will go down. Teach the CC morons a huge lesson. The people are still in control. Crash the grid & maybe the message will get thru. Stop the insanity before we all are bankrupted. Stop the energy subsidies before the financial system goes “ belly up “! The general election may not come soon enough!
140
My solution is when the Coal generators come on line again is to keep them going. See what happens AEMO.
10
People have been telling this government that renewables won’t work to cover the energy grid until they are blue in the face.
Blackout Bowen stands there and says, “Nuh, we’re going wind and solar. Nyah, Daddy WEF said so!”
Airbus Albo stands there and says, “when’s the next overseas conference?”
There is no climate emergency, Summer is hot in Australia and the BOM are manipulated figures to make it appear more dire than it is.
60
A coal plant does have an unfortunate tendency to fail after it has been blown up.
130
What hope have we got when even the Australian parrots the same BS and fra-d and seems to believe that perhaps the answer is more unreliable, toxic W & S?
Why can’t the average person use their brains and very simple logic and reason?
We need more reliable 24/7 base-load energy and we need it ASAP.
70
Perhaps the nightly news can start a blackout weather segment where any regions facing LOR1, LOR2, or LOR3 are highlighted. People don’t know how many of these near misses are happening. Or is it pointless to warn people of potential blackouts that (so far) usually don’t happen?
40
How about named blackouts. We have named storms, why not named blackouts. Alphabetic, as usual: Blackout Albo, blackout Bowen, Blackout Chalmers, …
10
If renewables are so affordable and reliable (which they are not and possibly never will be) then the coal-fired industry would be dead already.
When virtually all our power was coming from fossil fuels we had absolutely no problems with “affordability and reliability.”
130
Coal and oil are products of millions of years of pressure put on vegetation. They are natural substances and should be recognised as such.
If they are used to produce other natural products such as plastics why does anyone worry?
40
Coal, Oil and Gas are really types of Solar Energy. The Sun shining on Planet Earth was the original source.
Now hop to it and get those Solar Plants humming.
10
Carbon dioxide makes the world work as a living entity.
Non-scientists tend to lie through their teeth to get what they want. What they want is a redistribution of the World’s wealth as evidenced by all the COPS that have ever been.
90
If grid collapse is imminent, a wise person would store potable water, canned foods, propane and other fuels, necessary medicines, cash money, and ammunition.
The AU govt has “managed” itself into an untenable position. Politics and Propaganda will mean very little when the power goes out for a week or two, or a few months.
This is going to be painfully educational. All the excuses/blame/finger pointing will be meaningless.
Have a plan to survive, because the only person you can rely upon is yourself. Govt will not help you. They got you into this mess.
It is surreal to watch this slow motion train wreck happen in real time. Decades and Trillions wasted on what provably does not work in reality, is coming to fruition.
Plan accordingly. Stay out of the cities. Know your neighbours . It’s gonna get Real.
80
I posted on the daily unthreaded the ground level solar for the last 3 days:
4.9kWh
2.1kWh
1.2kWh.
Clear sky this time of year 8.4kWh per day.
Today has started out similar to yesterday – humid with drizzle.
The reason why I looked this up is that my off-grid battery went low last night. First time that has happened in spring or summer months.
So clearly the rooftops across Victoria will not be doing much. And wind is not doing much.
There is a fundamental truth in maths that any big number by zero is still zero. So you can have a trillion wind turbines but their output can still be zero.
My current prediction for Snowy 2 is up and running by 2049. Florence has now done 1600m of the required 17,000m but there is a good chance another machine will be coming to help with its workload.
I learnt yesterday that the geotechnical assessment of the ground conditions for the project were well below par for a tunnelling project off this scale.
61
Snowy 2.0 is a White Elephant’
It’s the same thing as ‘Robbing Peter to pay Paul’.
They will pump the water uphill using electricity when it is cheaper. They will let the water flow downhill when the electricity price is higher. Probably the same amount of electricity being used and then generated.
Maybe we need a Perpetual Motion Machine. Now, where do we get a load of those?
20
This whole scam has been based on the premise of excess power at night which will disappear with the shutdown of the coalies.
10
“Florence has now done 1600m of the required 17,000m but there is a good chance another machine will be coming to help with its workload.”
Double the machines, double the chance something will go wrong.
10
Who would have guessed, with the grid on the brink of collapse due to RE policies that we already knew would fail, the fake media are now trying to convince us that a normal warm summer day is “extreme heat”, caused by climate change. If the grid does collapse we already know they will blame climate change and the failure of the coal plants, and of course they will tell us that the solution is more RE. What’s playing out is a bit like giving a sick patient more and more cyanide to cure them from cyanide poisoning.
50
We definitely need more Green FFs to save more land for wilderness areas and we desperately need to stop the toxic , unreliable W & S disasters as fast as we can.
And we need to understand that FFs have allowed us to save an area the size of Nth America because we’ve been able to grow more food on less land over the last one hundred years.
Less farming land and more food is the best outcome and the data is readily available online.
See the first section of Dr Goklany’s study.
https://co2coalition.org/publications/fossil-fuels-are-the-greenest-energy-sources/
20
The VIC govt pays companies that use a lot of electricity to cease production when it gets a bit warm! And this is after Ford, Holden, Toyota and Alcoa, to name a few are no longer manufacturing here.
Companies will just pack up when the energy costs tip them over the edge (like Quenos recently – a big gas user). We can all just work in tourism or solar panel cleaning I guess…
We are living in a banana republic with imbeciles at the helm. What’s that saying about weak men create hard times…..
40
Ah yes. Demand management – I call it a controlled blackout.
Rather than cutting power to thousands of households pay industry that use huge amounts of electricity to have a day off.
This does mothing to address the underlying issue of lack of generation and the mums and dads in suburbia are totally oblivious because…”we never lost power”.
20
The media indeed have a lot to answer for when in comes to reporting of science and natural phenomena. We learned that during COVID. They couldn’t wait to totally exaggerate all aspects of the fake COVID pandemic. There seems to be some philosophy within media management that the more fear you can stoke, the better ratings, likes, reposts , newspaper sales that eventuate. The same seems to apply now to reporting of the weather. They are almost these days the “enemy of the people”, as one wise person once said. Conspiracy theorists would say its because these instructions come from some nefarious controllers of the world and Big Media are part of that club. They might be right. As for the unreliability of coal – I check the Australian Energy Market : Aneroid website https://anero.id/energy from time to time for the Victorian main coal generators. So Yallorn W and Loy Yan B are both running at above 100 %. They’ve now been doing this for years. How is that unreliable or inefficient?
30
Tasmania would be rolling in Hydro-Volts had it not been for Bob Hawke scrounging for votes. During the 1983 federal election campaign, Hawke publicly committed to stopping the dam if elected and Green votes ensured that outcome! Today Greens and Labor still play in the same cess pit
20
Being in Nepal, I am now used to the wonderful Net Zero lifestyle of random or scheduled power outages, electricity only used for minor loads like lighting (in fact, only lighting up here in the hills, when it is available at all), no room heating (at 626am my guest house room is 2.3C), no hot water on tap or hot showers, wood or dung for cooking fuel etc..
(Posted from Chandanbari, Nepal 28.11049°N, 85.34007°E, elevation 3270m.)
41
You’ll be all trained up for the outages when you lob back home.
50
While this may not seem on topic, it actually is, and it needs an explanation, and relates closely to what was mentioned about the coal fired power generation fleet maintenance, ironically, where the blame is sheeted home to, and as Joanne mentions ….. don’t these people listen to themselves.
Joanne mentions this:
Back in 2017, I started the first of what is now five ongoing series on power generation. At one of the ‘believer’ sites, someone picked me up on the absolute minimum power consumption for the whole (AEMO) grid, and I used that figure of 18,000MW, around 4AM every morning of the year, when nearly everyone is tucked up tight in bed. I was told (in no uncertain manner) that the 18,000MW I ‘quoted’ was patently false, and (the usual response from them) please supply a reference for that.
That was the prompt to start that Series about ….. Base Load, and here note that this is not used as an adjective, as all believers do, but as an actual ‘Entity’, something that is an actual physical total.
So, each week I would check and detail the data and make a Post about it. I would check each State on a daily basis at that minimum power time, and average that across the week, and then add the totals for each State to give an Australia wide total for that Minimum power generation.
(blah blah blah) but you get the idea.
Here’s the link to the Post for week 52, so one full year of daily data, and hey the average for the whole year was, umm, 18,020MW, which umm, sort of supported what I had said all along. Again when I mentioned this, and then showed the data Posts, one response was this ….. “Yeah, that’s what’s being generated, but it’s not what is being actually consumed.”
I mean, how can you argue with people like that? Generated power EQUALS consumed power. There’s no ….. just sitting there waiting. But hey, people have no concept about the first thing about power generation.
Okay, and here’s the point leading directly back to what Joanne said about maintenance.
Right from when I first started doing all this, I had been checking data from sources I could use, and that wonderful Aneroid site fast became my ‘goto’ site for data, as it was directly using that SCADA five minute real time data of actual grid power generation.
In those early days back in 2008, I could see we had that now ancient thinking ….. ‘rolling reserve’, where older coal fired plants waited for scheduled maintenance. They would ‘scroll up’ and at the required time, come on line as the operational plant ‘wound down’ for the maintenance. That’s all they did, come on line for maintenance periods, and also if there were even some major problems where large levels of power were required, and no one had even the faintest clue it was all happening, or even knew what was going on, as it was all just so seamless.
So, back to my Base Load Series.
What I found was that the two major power consumption Seasons were Winter and Summer, where it was ‘all hands on deck’ for those coal fired plants, the major sources of power generation ….. both then and STILL NOW in fact.
During those benign Months where power consumption, across the board was (considerably) lower, them that was the time when that scheduled maintenance was carried out. You could watch as it happened at that Aneroid site, Units at those plants in States going off line in almost sequence, starting in the first Month of that benign Season (Spring and Autumn) and lasting right up to the start of the Summer and Winter Seasons. And, at times during those Summer and Winter Seasons, it was not uncommon to see every Unit at every Plant delivering its full power, and times in the benign Seasons when up to ten Units or even more were offline for maintenance.
So ….. here we are now with one week to go until the start of Summer, and maintenance rolls on.
The only difference now is those existing Units at the still operational Plants are now getting so long in the tooth, that maintenance has either been wound back, or takes longer, or they’re finding more little problems due to age.
Huh, those ancient coal fired dinosaurs (and how wind power daydreams that they could last perhaps half as long as them) deliver power on a scale that wind cannot even get within cooee of.
2023 whole of year
Coal Nameplate – 20,000MW. Power delivered – 118,000GWH
Wind Nameplate – 13,460MW. Power delivered – 27,600GWH
So coal fired power delivers more than FOUR TIMES the power of those Industrial wind plants.
Why am I reminded of that old adage ….. Flogging a dead horse!
Tony.
50
The Aneroid site is great but there is a problem with its reporting accuracy, I just checked a few minutes ago and Aneroid said Callide was generating 242Mw, but another site that shows the units online and their output showed 3 units online and producing 602.68 Mw.
00
The only reason the grid has survived so far without large scale domestic or business outages is that AEMO has had the ability to order the few remaining large scale industrial consumers such as the now-subsidised aluminium smelters to switch off (I.e. load shed). How much longer will they tolerate that? They will pack up and leave soon. Then the only loads to shed will be domestic and business. This is in fact a good thing because it might make people wake up and see the madness. Then again, the Left will probably spin in, as they are doing, as not enough windmill or solar plantations. Thus we need someone in a position of power and authority to be brave enough to risk all and tell the truth about this madness.
(Posted from Chandanbari, Nepal 28.11049°N, 85.34007°E, elevation 3270m.)
30
Most of Nova’s article here and some of the comments are close enough to the mark. Certainly, no group are planning to spend $70-90 million on repairing and upgrading old coal-fired generators when legislation forcing them to close down within a few years is already enacted. This is obviously not accidental.
What seems to be missed here though is an obvious pattern of behaviour by Westerman, CEO of AEMO. This pattern has been evident for quite a few years now, with Westerman giving it a big boost, which pleases Bowen greatly.
What pattern ? Commonly known as “Crying Wolf”. As you watch, the routine unfolds: “Blackout warning !! Bad weather, caused by climate change, and no power Reserves !! Blackout warning !!” Then within 24-48 hours: “Oh, we’ve managed to scramble through !! But we need more W + S as soon as … !!” Time after time, as the song goes …
The purpose of this cynically deceitful propaganda routine is to generate an underlying sense of panic in a semi-informed population that will give “social licence” to the crash, bang, splatter of smashing more W + S across the landscape, private property and public parks, including many thousands of km of high-tension lines.
In my view, Westerman is a thug.
70
I must be getting old. It’s only 33 degrees on our porch at the moment, but it damn feels like 40. Or are the climate nutters getting into my head??
I think it must be the latter. I chased an old cow out of the sun this morning and into the shade of a tree with the rest of the herd. Now I see they are all out grazing, and it is hotter. Must be me. They’ve done my head in.
30
Labor refuses to ‘come clean’ on emissions targets prior to election. More like can’t say as that will jeopardise votes and in all probability the election.
30
I have a theory that all the reports from the BOM and news outlets are from people under 30 who think/feel that 33c is absolutely sweltering because they were raised with airconditioned everything.
20
I suspect that very few people understand the studies highlighted by Dr Goklany and the incredible bonus that Green FF energy has given to Humans and our planet.
Here’s a quote from Dr Goklany at the link and his data since 1900 and 2000 also proves his point and that increase of Global land Area ( GLA) of 20.4% for plants and animals is a modern Fossil fueled miracle…..
“Habitat Saved by Fossil Fuel Usage from Conversion to Human Use”
“Use of fossil fuel technologies has enabled human beings to spare 20.4% of GLA for the rest of nature. This exceeds both the habitat lost currently to cropland (12.2% of GLA) and the global cumulative area currently reserved or identified as conservation areas (estimated at 14.6% of GLA) (Goklany 2021). Clearly, conversion of this magnitude of habitat to agriculture would devastate global biodiversity”.
“The increased agricultural productivity allowed cropland in many areas to revert to forest or other non-agricultural use. For example, between 1990 and 2020 forestland in the USA and Western Europe increased 2.4% and 10.1% despite population increases of 30% and 11%, respectively (FAOSTAT 2022)”.
00