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As Australia push-pumps “renewables” into remote locations some of their incomes are suddenly being cut because the losses (as they transmit across long lines) are higher than they expected. On March 8th the AEMO rerated many generators and this year it’s being called a bloodbath for wind and solar. Some of them, like AGL’s Silverton wind farm face losses of 20%.
It all revolves around something called Marginal Loss Factors, a value that is set by the AEMO each year for each generator. The rating is reduced by transmission losses over distance and also by “congestion” from other renewables which are popping up in the same remote locations far from the cities and industries that need the electricity they make. This sudden loss of expected income threatens new wind and solar projects (as it should — hello market signal!) Sometimes the loss factors are hard to predict years in advance which makes it difficult to also predict whether a project will return a profit (even despite the guaranteed subsidies).
Another renewable inefficiency strikes — “marginal loss factors”
Generators are paid according to the electricity that arrives rather than what they produce at the plant. (Seems fair). This is called the […]
South Australians have so much wind power, too much, that in Quarter 3 last year the AEMO had to intervene to cut off excess wind and solar generation. Ever since the Great Blackout of 2016 new rules mean that there must be enough back up power running to cope with the fickle vagaries of intermittent energy. (Obviously, this wasting of sacred green electrons wouldn’t need to happen if people weren’t so persnickety about blackouts!)
This graph is from the Quarter 3 AEMO report for 2018. It is technically about both wind and solar, but it appears to be mostly wind. Solar is not a star player in Q3 because it’s winter.
Would we put up with any other industrial output that had such a dismal performance. Imagine this was your car….
AEMO Quarter 3 report page 7
Synchronous generation is the kind that comes from machines that spin at 50 Hz (like coal, gas, hydro, nukes). These keep the system stable. Happy happy hertz.
But ten percent of all the wind and solar power had to be thrown away in SA because there wasn’t enough reliable back up power to guarantee the stability of the system.
During […]
One big government agency quietly admits renewables make electricity more expensive, and another big gov media agency hides it.
The new AMEC report tells us renewables will make electricity prices go down a tiny 2% in the short run but make electricity more expensive in the long run due to forcing out cheap baseload players. What matters most to Australians — that we can expect our electricity costs to be 2% less than “obscene” for the next couple of years, or that the artificial transition we are forcing on the grid will indirectly make electricity more expensive?
Which message does the ABC headline? Say hello to Trivia!
Renewables set to drive down power prices, new AEMC analysis shows The ABC is essentially a taxpayer funded advertising machine for the renewables industry.
A flood of new renewable energy projects is likely to drive down household electricity bills, according to new analysis by government policy adviser the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC).
On a national basis, household bills are set to fall by 2.1 per cent — but price falls in the eastern states and South Australia are offset by increases in Western Australia, the Northern Territory and […]
Got Solar PV? Don’t let the kids play on the roof
Would you like a 240Volt shock with that?
In Australia, shonky fly-by-night installers are botching the wiring and not screwing the panels on properly. As many as a quarter of solar panels pose a high or severe “electrical safety” risk. Since there are two million households with solar panels, that’s half a million homes sitting under a live problem.
By mismanagement and delusional climate-changing schemes the government has entirely and artificially created the solar bubble. Hopefully people won’t die like they did in the Pink Batts Bubble. Back then, to stop droughts and storms and save the nation from the Global Financial Crisis, the government decided to rush out home insulation. The artificial bubble brought in poorly trained workers and four people died. Kevin Rudd (former PM) now says he wouldn’t have done it if he’d known the risks. But heck, way back in 2010 no one could have realized that artificial government industry bubbles wouldn’t mix well with 240 Volts. Sure.
Australia’s big advance seems to be to stop unnecessary deaths under roofs, and start doing them on top.
Warning of deaths over solar panel installations Simon […]
It’s Santa’s happy hour in electricity land
Finally, No really, renewables are so cheap we can switch to them and change the global climate for free.
This is a new study by the kind of “independent” group that is totally dependent on Big Gov handouts. It compares Australian prices to other obscenely expensive countries and finds that “renewables push down prices”. Compared to what? Not compared to nations with cheap electricity. And not compared to most of the last thirty years in Australia before we added all the unreliable gear.
The tricky graphs clearly baffled Peter Hannam. If only he were a journalist, he could have asked some hard hitting questions and shown this study to be the concocted vaporous PR exercise that it was.
‘No trilemma’: Study finds increased renewables push down power prices
Peter Hannam, Sydney Morning Herald
Renewable energy drives down wholesale power prices well in excess of subsidy costs and a further expansion of wind and solar would likely push them lower still, a study of Australian and European markets shows.
If renewables actually reduced average prices, this would be a first. Around the world, the more intermittent generators you have, the […]
The Crash Test Dummy accelerates. Australia is steaming ahead in the forced transition to unreliable energy
A lot of the reason for the growth in renewables is the Renewable Energy Target (the RET). Renewables must supply 16% of our electricity in 2018, and even more in 2019.
Strap yourself in. Buried in the AEMO summer readiness plan was the news that our intermittent renewables capacity is forecast to increase by fully 50% this year. All the renewables we had accrued in the two decade “transition” til December last year, we’ve added half again. We are already pushing the bounds of stability and setting price records, but you ain’t seen nothing yet. We are escalating the rate of change.
In toto, we have 56GW of generation of all sorts in the national grid on the east coast. The wind and solar component increased from 4GW at the end of 2017 to over 6GW by the end of 2018. But it doesn’t take much intermittent power to change the way the whole grid works.
Things are so fragile that a few weeks ago, when 240MW of reliable supply was suddenly not available for this summer, the AEMO had to issue a […]
Some days I wonder if I should spread stories that make us sound like a recidivist third-world backwater struggling to maintain our voltage. But the ABC is already smashing away.
Just when you think there couldn’t possibly be another drawback to solar panels, lo! Solar Panels are pushing up the voltage at midday often as high as 253 Volts when it supposed to be more like 230 to 240V. This means appliances are using more electricity, that makes bills even higher. It may also be breaking appliances (making other bills go higher too). We’re not really sure about that, but when that study is done, it’ll already be 1.8 million panels too late.
Non-solar users are paying for this surge (and the appliances) — for every 1% increase in voltage, the costs go up 0.7%. Then, to ice that gravy-cake, the inverters on solar panels are also shutting off at 253V, meaning that poor home owners who paid thousands are not generating power for the grid. All up, solar is bad for you, bad for them, bad for our light-globes.
The warning comes from groups running the electricity networks in Australia.
Spot the key word missing from the ABC headline […]
Another Hazelwood-size batch of renewables coming on line in Australia by 2020.
That’s 1600MW of random subsidized energy dropping into a market that is artificially priced to value weather-changing potential over reliability. Now, even the bosses of two gentailers which both benefit from renewables subsidies are warning things are chaotic, going to get turbulent and more expensive. Why do they admit this? Probably because they want the government to add another layer of policy interference to reward “firm capacity” which they both also own.
Instead, lets get the government and the RET octopus off our grid. Surely we can set up a market that allows players who want electricity at 9am tomorrow to pay more for generators which can actually guarantee to be there. All the market players who don’t care when or if electricity arrives can buy the unreliable energy. Which businesses, industries or homes can use electricity that arrives at midday and random other times, remembering that wind power drops to 5% of capacity for days sometimes:
Renewables threaten volatile power supply, says AGL, Origin bosses
Perry Williams, Matt Chambers, The Australian
Power giants AGL Energy and Origin Energy have raised concerns over a surge […]
It’s not often we see a report that turns things on their head quite like this.
Wind turbines may cause more local warming than global cooling in the next century.
Photo: Jo Nova
If the US were to install a lot of turbines, Wind power could warm the United States by 0.24 degrees Celsius instead of cooling it, because wind turbines “redistribute heat” in the atmosphere. They mix the surface layers. (0.24C would be equivalent to two decades of recent warming.) The largest effect is at night where wind plants can warm the local area by 1.5C.
At least 10 previous studies have now observed local warming caused by US wind farms. Keith and Miller compared their simulated warming to observations and found rough consistency between the data and model.
Nick Carne — Cosmos magazine
The new studies by Keith and Miller were published in Environmental Research Letters and Joule.
Major downer. The power density of wind energy is up to *100 times* less than predicted.
The new research suggests we can’t put too many turbines to close together or the whole group become far less efficient. That means we need 5 – […]
Green genius: Pay $1400 a year to not stop any storms
Finally some veteran engineers checked the Labor Party 50% renewable plan and the AEMO “65% scenarios”. Unlike others, their study that did not involve magical assumptions that the cost of renewables would dramatically fall. Instead they used “actual costs” and found the price of electricity will rise “84%” and cheap coal power will be forced out of business (just like what we also found here). The engineers include Barry Murphy, former managing director and chairman of Caltex. Robert Barr, an electrical engineer and academic at University of Wollongong. If only Kevin Rudd had asked them in 2007.
Engineers warn of bill shock under green energy surge
Adam Creighton, Economics Editor, The Australian
Electricity bills will soar and gas and coal-fired power stations will close if the share of wind and solar generation increases dramatically, engineers have warned after analysing the nation’s energy supply.
It found bills were likely to soar 84 per cent, or about $1400 a year, for the typical household, if wind and solar power supplied 55 per cent of the national electricity market.
A quarter of Australian rooftops have solar, […]
The world still runs on coal and oil
After 20 years of subsidies, intermittent renewables account for just 3.6% of total energy generation. That’s the tiny purple sliver in the graph. Global power means not just electricity, but also fuel used in transport. And this is where wind and solar power are respectively old and slow, or modern but useless.
Someday solar powered planes might make their first round world trip in 48 hours but at the moment they need 16 months. There’s a a bit of hitch in the global energy transition.
Hello fossil wonder fuels:
Global Primary Energy, Graph, 1965-2018
Intermittent renewables are pretty useless everywhere:
Global Primary Energy, Graph, 1965-2018
Solar energy might have “made waves” and increased by an astounding 100GW last year, but it’s still irrelevant:
Oil remains the world’s dominant fuel, making up just over a third of all energy consumed. In 2017 oil’s market share declined slightly, following two years of growth. Coal’s market share fell to 27.6%, the lowest level since 2004. Natural gas accounted for a record 23.4% of global primary energy consumption, while renewable power hit a new high of 3.6%.
— Spencer […]
The advantage of communist autocrats is that they can create government havoc so much more efficiently.
The Chinese solar boom was so big it became the world’s largest solar market. It was so big it pushed up global “clean energy” investment to a record high. China became the veritable show pony of the solar spruikers: “leading the world in clean energy investment”. Mashable tells us it was so big “the solar boom could be seen from space“.
But the star advertisement for renewable glory was all based on subsidies:
The Chinese solar boom was “pretty significant”
A couple of months ago the Chinese government admitted they were cutting the subsidies to make electricity cheaper again for consumers. That hit the stock market. Now projects are being cancelled and orders are drying up for the hapless manufacturers.
The free market might be telling us something China’s solar industry is at a crossroads
“Without subsidies there’s no return on investment for over a decade, so investors and property owners aren’t interested in distributed solar. With subsidies it only takes seven years to recoup the investment,” he adds.
China’s solar manufacturers are unhappy with recent government policy changes […]
All those billions we spent and yet at 6pm, many days coal, gas and hydro provide 98% of the power Australia needs. Wind and solar are our spare bikes, the third ski, the Banana-Slicers of the National Grid (read those reviews). Just what would we do if wind and solar were all we had? — Jo
At peak time intermittent renewables often make less than 2% of total Australian electricity
Guest Post by Anton Lang (TonyFromOz)
h/t to Rafe Campion at Catalaxy
When power is required the most, wind and solar are missing almost entirely. This isn’t cherry picking of one time — peak time is the most important time on the grid, when the most power is required. The almost non-existent contribution from renewables is so common it has occurred now for seven days out of the last 14 days.
I’ve been doing a series on the Australian generation and demand curves on a daily basis for seven weeks, the totals are settling down, so that now the percentage changes are only in tenths of a percent, and consider that when it comes to total power and coal fired power, a tenth of one percent is 600MegaWattHours, so at […]
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 […]
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 […]
Strangely, the more free, clean, green energy we get the more household incomes fail to keep up with inflation. Who would have thought that using inefficient energy in an artificial government-picks-the-winner market could possibly reduce our living standards?
Of course, this is not all due to electricity efficiency and pricing. Bill Shock only affects things that need to heat, cool or move.
Bill Shock as Standard of Living Slumps
David Uren, The Australian
Australians have endured their longest period of falling living standards in more than a quarter of a century as growth in costs outstripped earnings for the fifth consecutive quarter, leaving households worse off than they were six years ago.
After allowing for inflation, taxes and interest costs, average household incomes dropped 1.6 per cent in the year to September, capping a sustained fall in living standards that has not been seen since the 1990-91 recession.
Economists say more than half the cost increases for households are being driven by electricity, rent, health, new housing and tobacco, while modest wage rises are being partially absorbed by workers being pushed into higher tax brackets.
Energy prices feed […]
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 […]
Apologies to foreign readers as we rake over the Stupidest Energy Policy on Earth. This really takes the cake.
Back in 2010 Rudd signed off on an extension of subsidies to renewables generators that would apply from 2020-2030, long after he would be gone. Effectively this decision will take up t0 $300 per Australian over that decade — in the order of $1000 per family — and gift to the renewables industry. Naturally, in the public arena, an issue this big was decided with major, some, no discussion at all.
The ABC investigated the intricacies of who knew what and when in the knifing of a first term PM, but billions of dollars — who knew?
Dennis Shanahan raised it today in The Australian
Rudd renewables extension upped power bills $7.5bn
Electricity customers face an extra burden of between $3.8 billion and $7.5bn in “windfall” subsidies for renewable power generators in the next decade because of the stroke of a pen in the last months of Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership.
Against advice from consultants, energy companies and the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Rudd government in 2010 extended the phasing out of the renewable subsidies for existing operators from […]
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