…
Here in crazy Australia, we have too many renewables, but both sides of politics still want more
Here in the Renewable Crash Test Dummy Land, both sides of politics think we should use our national grid for weather control which is good for President Xi, but bad for Australians. The Opposition is pointing out that the 82% renewable purity target is bonkers, and we should add nuclear plants, while the Labor party are hell-bent on running the world’s first experiment in wind and solar with not much hydro, no nuclear power and no extension cords to a international market that can rescue us. Literally no nation on Earth is this recklessly ambitious.
With an election coming, and domestic electricity prices approaching escape velocity, both sides are sparring with economic reports. The government claims it can do a national wind and solar miracle grid for just $122 billion. But Frontier Economics put the cost at $594 billion. The opposition, meanwhile, has finally revealed the first serious costing of their big new nuclear power plan is $331 billion (which is $260 billion cheaper), but it’s still $300 billion we don’t really have.
Awkwardly for Labor, both latter cost comparisons come from the same economists — Frontier Economics. And as Simon Benson points out in The Australian, the Energy Minister might like to discredit them, but his own department uses the same team for energy modelling, so he can’t.
Thus in news that will surprise no engineer, a fifty year old technology will be about half the cost of a wild national experiment with technology so new, half of it hasn’t even been developed yet. The real surprise is that the difference is not bigger, and perhaps the reason for that is that the Coalition plan still has a lot of renewables.
Can’t we just have cheap electricity, and skip the “weather control” fantasy?
Sadly for Australians, no economists, academics, or over-paid bureaucrats, are looking for the cheapest option, which would be coal and gas — or exactly what we had 30 years ago. The invisible problem here is that the Coalition’s plan is 38% nuclear and 53% crazy. (It’s 53% renewables, or 53% unreliable, however you want to label it).
Australia is currently 36% renewable, and it’s already too much
Australia is well beyond the sweet spot of renewable energy, the more we add now, the worse it gets. We already have so much roof-top solar power we are savagely curtailing most of our solar grid scale plants, even in early Spring.
One warm week and the grid is on the verge of blackouts. We’re paying industries to shut down so the grid can survive a normal summer day.
The small Alice Springs microgrid became too unstable with little more than 13% solar power. A cloud rolled over and the whole town blacked out. Since that scare in 2019, other perfectly good solar plants have sat idle for 4 years in the Northern Territory because the people running their grid are afraid their presence will crash the Darwin grid too.
And after the Sydney near miss, our own national grid manager has belatedly realized solar power threatens our largest cities and now wants emergency powers to switch off individual panels spread across 4 million homes. And the South Australians want to force two diesel plants to return to service.
Meanwhile the surge of negative prices at midday is frightening off investors. Jeff Dimery, the head of Alinta Energy, basically said electricity has to get a lot more expensive before an investor will even think of building something to replace coal in Australia.
“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.”“
When will one of our 27 government agencies find out what Australians really want to know — what grid would get us the cheapest reliable electricity?
Let’s have a plebiscite on whether we should be paying to “fix” the weather?