|
|
Electricity prices declined for forty years. Obviously that had to stop.
Here’s is the last 65 years of Australian electricity prices — indexed and adjusted for inflation. During the coal boom, Australian electricity prices declined decade after decade. As renewables and national energy bureaucracies grew, so did the price of electricity. Must be a coincidence…
Today all the hard-won masterful efficiency gains of the fifties, sixties and seventies have effectively been reversed in full.
Indexed Real Consumer Electricity Prices, Australia, 1955-2017.
For most of the 20th Century the Australian grid was hotch potch of separate state grids and mini grids. (South Australia was only connected in 1990). In 1998 the NEM (National Energy Market) began, a feat that finally made bad management possible on a large scale. Though after decades of efficiency gains, Australians would have to wait years to see new higher “world leading” prices. For the first years of the NEM prices stayed around $30/MWh.
But sooner or later a national system is a sitting duck for one small mind to come along and truly muck things up.
Please spread this graph far and wide.
Thanks to a Dr Michael Crawford who did the original, […]
What energy transformation?
The EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2018 is out. The hard heads at the US Dept of Energy crunched the numbers, assumed technology will improve, and modeled the outcomes. According to their best estimates (and even their “worst” estimates) thirty years from now, the main energy source for the US is natural gas and fossil fuels. Renewables grows from 5% to 14%, but coal, nukes, hydro stays about the same. When the Australian Greens say “we don’t want to be left behind”, the answer is “Exactly! So explore for gas! Use Nukes!”
The World’s largest economy will still be nearly 80% fossil fueled in 2050.
On the road, most people are still using gasoline cars, and here’s the kicker — electricity prices are still at about 11 cents per kilowatt hour. Weep all ye Australians, Brits, Germans and other who would be grateful if electricity only rose 10% a year, not 10% over 30 years.
How much does an interconnector cost from Townsville to Texas? 😉
h/t Paul Homewood who has quoted Mark Perry from AEI:
Despite all of the hype, hope, cheerleading, fuel standards, portfolio standards, and taxpayer subsidies for renewable energies like wind and […]
More bad luck for the renewables industry. Despite providing free energy from the sun and wind, electricity prices keep rising relentlessly, shockingly fast. Even doubling in wholesale costs in South Australia and Victoria.
It was supposed to be cheap to collect low-level-energy across hundreds of thousands of square kilometers. Who knew that subsidized, unreliable energy would induce volatile pricing, allow the players to game the system, create obscene spikes, drive out the cheapest providers, require expensive battery storage, more frequency control, more maintenance, just as much back up supply, $400 million dollars worth of extra diesel generators (and the rest) and extra long transmission lines? Who knew? — Probably thousands of engineers.
Spot the pattern? Every other nation with lots of renewables has expensive electricity and our forward market says there’s more price rises coming.
Australian electricity prices rising six times faster than wages are growing
Sydney Morning Herald
Electricity prices have jumped by six times the rate of the average pay rise, new figures reveal, as family wallets are increasingly squeezed by essential services such as education, utilities and fuel.
The most significant price rises were electricity, up 12.4 per cent, fuel up 10.4 […]
How much do we hate Lignite Gas?
Victoria is suffering the largest rises in wholesale electricity prices in the country, as it sits on large gas fields that it won’t touch. Why — geniuses hope to reduce global droughts and floods and sea level in 2100.
Robert Gottleibsen savages the state governments that conducted the renewables experiment without mentioning the real costs or the cheap alternatives.
If Victoria allowed its gas to be developed the energy scene in Australia would be transformed, as would the outlook for the nation.
But that’s not much consolation for those in vast areas of rural NSW and Victoria plus suburban Melbourne and small areas of South Australia who suffered blackouts or reduced power on Sunday night. It’s true part of the outages were caused by fuses, but the outages were too widespread. It’s another smokescreen.
If similar conditions are repeated on weekdays and/or extend over several days the blackouts will be devastating as a result of the political vandalism. Government spin doctors and others are desperately trying to conceal the truth about the damage governments headed by Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian (plus her predecessors […]
The Mystery: The most resource rich nation on Earth has the highest electricity prices?!
Ask anyone and get confused: It’s poles and wires, gaming of the system by capitalist pigs, excessive taxes, privatization, and record gas prices. The CleanEnergy Council tells us that Australia has one of the longest electricity networks in the world — we need lots of poles! And so we do. But once upon a time Australia had the cheapest electricity in the world and we still had lots of poles. Not only were miles of poles and wires, there were also capitalist pigs, excessive taxes, and privatized generators. There were wild gas price spikes too, (during which we probably just burned more coal).
Evidently, something else has changed. Something seismic that wiped out all the bids below $50/MWh.
Perhaps it has something to do with the 2,106 turbines in 79 wind farms that on random windy days might make 4,325MW that didn’t exist in Australia in 1999 when electricity was cheap and our total national wind power was 2.3 megawatts?
Another clue might be the 1.8 million new solar PV installations, which theoretically generate 7 gigawatts of electricity at noon on cloudless days if all […]
Hope foreign readers are enjoying the spectacle of a first world nation destroying its competitive advantage with renewables. Hope that helps you avoid the same fate.
Praise the lord, states without coal don’t have to load-shed-industry (because they don’t have much left):
The South Australian Treasurer is bragging that SA didn’t have to shed any industry load on Friday, but the coal state of Victoria did. Pull the other one:
“In terms of supply we should be okay,” he [the SA Treasurer] said.
“Victoria I understand is about to load shed industry. So they’re not coping with the power supply.
“They are a coal-dependent state and they are having to take industry offline to support their households. In South Australia we’re not having to do that today.” — h/t A H
The Treasurer didn’t mention that SA shed the load already over the last two years by driving heavy manufacturers out of business, and out of the state. Let’s name some:
Gone from the SA power load: Mitsubishi, GMH, Plastics Granulating Services (Recyclers), Caroma (76 jobs) after 79 years in business, Penrice, Arnotts biscuits (120 jobs), Aldinga Turkeys (79), ACI Glass (60 […]
While geniuses are bragging that the Australian grid survived two normal hot summer days without falling over, they don’t mention the flaming spectacle of the cost.
Tom Quirk and Paul Miskelly, after a couple of suggestions from me, have calculated the full staggering electricity bill at $119m for SA and $267m for Victoria, making it nearly a $400 million dollar bonfire — for two days that were neither the hottest ever, or records for peak electricity use. See their work and details below.
To put this in perspective, a whole new gas plant could have been built for around $230 million. Instead of vaporising this money, Australians could have constructed one whole new gas generation plant, paid it off, and had money left over to give away free electricity.
Every household of four in Victoria just lost something like $170 of productivity for two days of electricity, and in South Australia, $280. Respectively, $45 per Victorian and $70 per South Australian. While businesses also share this burden, ultimately companies are made of people, and this is productivity lost to both states. The losers are shareholders, customers, and employees. Some will be interstate, but the pain flows back. The price is […]
UPDATE: MELBOURNE hospitals are enacting emergency procedures to prepare for the potential loss of power. Hospitals are switching off non-essential electrical equipment, including some lights, to minimize energy use. This is a “Code Yellow” alert asking hospitals to check their back up generators are ready. The Victorian Minister insists this is not about the “threat” of blackouts, but because hospitals need to be “good corporate citizens”. Pull the other one. At the very least, this is about reducing electricity bills. h/t Chris in Hervey Bay.
See further UPDATES on “The art of blaming coal” at the bottom.
How much fun can you have? The AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator) projects that as temperatures hit 42C in Victoria, prices are forecast to rise over 100 fold. The AEMO is furiously busy issuing market notices.
The ABC tells us it is 42C, that Portland Alumina has reduced production, but for an ‘undisclosed price’ (why can’t taxpayers know what they are paying this group, not to produce aluminium today?) Meanwhile the AEMO has put the RERT plan into action: “Under the RERT scheme, AEMO has contracted 884 megawatts of “demand side response” across Victoria, NSW and South Australia.” Translated, […]
Watching the AEMO dashboard as a hot summer day hits
Is this the summer crunch-time that the the National Grid managers have been fearing?
Today things are not running smoothly in the green states of Victoria and SA where prices this minute have hit $14,000 per MW hour, or $14 per KWh. These are wholesale prices. Right now heads of major industries are watching the dashboard, turning off everything they can turn off, or switching on the diesel generators, or counting hundreds of thousands or even millions being added to their bills if production cannot stop.
Demand Management schemes (a form of load shedding) will be running to reduce demand — air conditioners will be remotely switched down.
How much of the productive brain power of Vic and SA is distracted from more useful tasks today?
The AEMO has put out an Actual Lack of Reserve Notice (LOR1) saying that Victoria is 300 MW short: “The contingency capacity reserve required is 1100 MW. The minimum reserve available is 815 MW”. Another notice of a “non-credible contingency event” (a code for “something broke”) reports that a busbar, transformer, and line have tripped or opened in Victoria, unplanned.
Victoria
…
[…]
Green Utopia
We’re trying to control the weather by limiting a universal molecule intrinsic to life on Earth. What could possibly go wrong? Loopholes, for starters. Only this isn’t a loophole — it’s an obvious outcome of “carbon neutrality”. The only thing that could have stopped wood from replacing coal is if the tidal-windy-solar idea had been competitive, reliable and batteries were really cheap. Or, if we all went nuclear.
So carbon neutral means conserving black coal deposits underground and mowing down thousands of square kilometers of forests. Don’t think Greenpeace saw that coming. Carbon Loophole: Why is wood burning counted as green energy?
Fred Pearce, Yale, e360
The forests of North Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi — as well as those in Europe — are being destroyed to sustain a European fantasy about renewable energy…
Wood burning is booming from Britain to Romania. Much of the timber is sourced locally…
But Drax’s giant wood-burning boilers are fueled almost entirely by 6.5 million tons of wood pellets shipped annually across the Atlantic.
Drax Power, UK emits 23 million tons of “good” neutral carbon which used to be trees:
About 23 million tons […]
Outback couple build solar farm to prove fringe-of-grid power generation needs
Building a $14 million solar farm is an expensive way to send a message about electricity prices, but Doug and Lyn Scouller said they were left with few options.
In Normanton, 500 kilometres north of Mount Isa in north-west Queensland, the Scoullers built a solar farm big enough to power an area almost twice the size of Tasmania, in a move to prove to stakeholders the benefit of positioning power generation sites at the end of the grid.
In old fashioned terms, the “farm” produces five-megawatts. But yesterday, Tasmania didn’t use 5MW it used 1,072 MegaWatts. So this solar farm would have supplied 0.2% of the houses and businesses on an area “twice the size of Tasmania”. The only Tasmania-sized-areas that would be functioning on 5MW are in the empty desert or the Great Southern Ocean.
And we wonder why some Australians think solar power is a no brainer. If this little farm can supply 120,000 km2, we just need another 60 like it, and we could do the whole continent!
ABC journalists are not good with numbers. If only they had a billion dollars […]
Here’s another “breakthrough” fusion claim. Thing is, one day, one of these will work.
Something like this: Boron Hydrogen, Fusion, click to read about aneutronic fusion.
In the meantime, knowing that the future is nuclear, and the only question is when, we should burn all the coal we have while it is still worth something.
UPDATE: Everyone knows that fusion is the perennial baby of Hype-n-Hope. It’s easy to criticize, but why miss the chance to crush a few mantras instead? The renewables industry talks about how inevitable renewables are, so lets talk about the inevitable Fusion-Future that makes the “renewables” surge a temporary blip that will be superseded. The Fusion-Future adds urgency to coal use now — a real use-by date (albeit with blurry print).
PS: Yes, The Greens are going to hate it. A private energy generator, outside government control, not needing hand-outs, and one that solves “climate change” but without subsidies and strings. These companies might say what they think! They’re a power threat to global parasites. Remember: a dependent company is an obedient company — one that cheers for big-government.
Australia spends $5 billion a year installing inefficient, non-competitive renewables. […]
The shape of normal AC Electricity: 50Hz (230V) and 60Hz (110V)
Nobody says much about FCAS in public — but it’s become a hot topic among Australia’s energy-nerds and electricity traders. It never used to be a big deal, because we got it at very low cost from huge turbines — from coal, hydro, and gas. Suddenly, it is costing a lot more. As I discovered below, in one month FCAS charges in South Australia rose from $25,000 to $26 million. Wow, just wow.
What is FCAS?
FCAS means”Frequency Control Ancillary Service”. With an AC (or alternating current) system, frequency is everything — the rapid push-pull rhythm that is the power. FCAS is a way of keeping the beat close to the heavenly 50Hz hum (or 60Hz in America and Korea). Network managers cry when things stray outside 49.85Hz or 50.15Hz. So controlling the frequency is a very necessary “other service” supplied by traditional generators, but not so much from intermittent renewables. Large spinning turbines “do” FCAS without a lot of effort. And the cost used to be a tiny fraction of the total electricity bill, but it is rapidly rising in Australia, thanks to the effect of the […]
Higher electricity costs mean more people turn off their heaters
There’s a big freeze coming to Britain with minus 12C temperatures possible in the next three weeks.
Last year in winter in England there was a remarkable 40% rise in winter deaths
David Archibald emails that last year was a mild winter for Brits, but the death toll rose from the normal 25,000 excess to 34,000 people. Remembering that it’s moderate cold that kills far more people than extreme temperatures. The UK government advises rooms be heated to at least 18C. (I’ve been in a Canberra house where the temperature fell to 11C indoors, and that was in May.) Despite all the newspaper headlines about outside temperatures, the big killer is indoors.
The big killer is indoor temperature and moderately cold, not extremes.
Campaigners demand urgent cuts to power bill after number of winter deaths among the elderly rise by 40%
Pensioner groups are demanding urgent measures to cut the cost of heat and light after official figures revealed a surge in deaths last winter. There were some 34,300 so-called ‘excess’ deaths during the cold months, according to new figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS). […]
Three ways to destroy a perfectly good electricity grid
Council for the National Interest (CNI)
Royal Perth Yacht Club 2:30 til 4:30
Australia II Drive, Crawley Bay, Nedlands.
Free Entry
UPDATE: A great success and a lot of fun. These events are always so well run. If you live in WA check out CNI. A smart, polite and friendly crowd.
9 out of 10 based on 110 ratings
Some people in Sydney will be paid to not use electricity in peak periods
Instead of a big blackout the plan now is to have lots of little “by choice” blackouts at the appliance level. It’s smarter than crashing the grid, but ponder what we’ve swapped –once electricity was cheap and “all the time” and now after this discount it will still be more expensive but also “not there when you need it”. Let’s all cheer for progress.
Cashing in for slightly less obscene electricity bills? How low is that bar on our expectations.
Sydney households to cash in for turning off appliances
Houses and business in some high-growth Sydney suburbs will be offered payments to dial down or switch off appliances during peak demand periods under a scheme being trialled by the state’s biggest distribution network.
Ausgrid is planning the demand management trial for up to 10 suburbs across the city — including Alexandria, Redfern, Auburn, Kingsford and Waterloo — over summer in a bid to reduce the peak load on its network.
It is expected to cost around $1.5 million in payments to households and business and to involve up to 1300 […]
We are trying to collect dilute energy across a million square kilometers with heavy machinery in extreme conditions. What could possibly go wrong?
Last night around 9pm, the top part of the 30-metre turbine fell off in 40 knot winds — which is not unusual in Mawson (in September wind gusts of 185km/hr were recorded). Fortunately no one was killed because people were inside. Though it looks pretty close to that red building (was anyone there?) No one knows why it happened. The other turbine at the station has been turned off as a precaution (though I wouldn’t be walking underneath it). Maybe someone can tie ropes with a helicopter?
ABC News: Mawson Antarctic research station relying solely on diesel after wind turbine crashes to ground
Wind Turbine, Antarctic research station, Mawson, break, collapse.
Right now things have warmed up a lot at Mawson, and temperatures even climb above 0C by 3pm some days. Though on November 1 the maximum temp was -8.8C. Naturally diesel saves the day. Of course Mawson is fully backed with diesel power.
These are 300kW turbines installed in 2003, so only 14 years old. Maybe it was just bad luck.
The maintenance costs […]
Flinders Island is in the Bass Strait North of Tasmania.
If there is a heaven for renewables, this island should be it. But instead, even on Flinders Island, renewables aren’t cheaper than diesel generators. This is a dismal reality, yet the ABC promotes it as a fantasy poster-isle, interviewing only vested or “no idea” people, asking no critical questions, doing no counter research and telling us renewables will be “more reliable” and implying they are cheaper too. The ABC is a three-million-dollar-a-day advertising outlet for other government agencies. Instead of serving Australians it appears to be there to help shake down the taxpayer.
ABC renewables hype strikes again: Rhiannon Shine reports Flinders Island as a showcase of the brave new renewables world. Let’s translate that spin and see just how pathetic it is. If anywhere was going to be totally renewable, Flinders Island would be it — a first world island, tiny population, massive subsidies, no access to cheap coal or gas power, government support at every level and placed in a handy wind stream known as “the Roaring Forties”. Yeah! This is one of the last places in the first world (short of Antarctic stations) where renewables […]
The Australian national grid stretches from the tropics to the cold temperate zone from 16S to 43S. You might think that along those 40,000 kilometers of transmission lines there is always somewhere somewhere sunny at midday, but some days you’d be wrong.
James Luffman at WattClarity, noticed this extensive cloud arrangement affecting solar on Friday May 19th. On that day, a one thousand MW generator wasn’t there when it was expected to be.
Cloud patterns on Friday 19th May 2017 – leading to a day of low Solar PV output, NEM-wide
By James Luffman | Published Fri, 25 August 201
Cloud cover over Australia, map, preventing solar PV generation.
How often does this happen? Hard to say, since data on rooftop PV has only just started to be released. It may not be as often as wind turbines, which simultaneously flounder across the whole Australian grid every 10 days or so.
This kind of comma-shaped band of cloud is relatively common over eastern Australia, when you have moisture from the Coral Sea area feeding into a trough with a low-pressure system near SA or VIC.
In this particular case of 19th […]
When too much solar is more than enough
The WA government-run electricity provider (Horizon Energy) has called a halt to new solar installations in Broome, a town in Northwest WA that is not connected to the national grid, or even the main WA grid. (It’s 2,000km north of Perth). About 10% of the town’s power comes from solar* but apparently the little grid can’t handle the fluctuations, so the early birds got the subsidies, and the rest got grumpy.
June 3rd, ABC:
Broome residents tire of cap on solar power installations Horizon Power only allows 10 per cent of the town’s power to come from solar due to issues with grid fluctuations This leaves some residents unable to install a solar system that connects to the grid Horizon is trialling battery storage technology in other WA towns and hopes to expand this to Broome
Residents in the Kimberley town of Broome have said they are fed up with being prevented from accessing solar power despite living in one of Western Australia’s sunniest towns.
State-owned energy utility Horizon Power allows just 10 per cent of the town’s power to be generated from solar to protect the grid […]
|
JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
|
Recent Comments