Energy from renewables is great. If only it was around *where* and *when* we needed it.
Most of the climate doomsday cultists have no earthly idea how an electrical grid actually works
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Preface:
We at RAA think the “consensus” around global warming is both hysterical and unscientific.
In 1969 we rode our bicycles to grade school wearing signs that said “We Support Earth Day”.
We like the idea of energy sources that do not produce emissions.
But we are really weary of nation-scale science experiments funded by endless quantities of taxpayer subsidies that essentially reproduce what we already have, except for the CO2 part (see above).
And oh, except at much higher cost:
Where matters. A lot.
We will try to keep this simple enough that even Energy Minister Chris Bowen could follow along.
We used to benefit from the lowest electricity prices in the world (industrial prices).
We have 24 coal power stations. For comparison, China has 1,118.
Our coal-fired power stations produce an average of 2100 megawatts each.
The average renewables project produces around 60 megawatts.
And THAT means you need lots and lots more of the things shown below, to get the renewable energy to where it is actually needed:
The Government revealed in Senate Estimates that their “Powering Australia” plan would require at least *10,000 kilometers* of new transmission lines.
And to build new transmission lines, they’ll need to rip huge scars across the landscape:
Because if you don’t, you will get some very nasty headlines like these:
The habitat destruction on the scale required for new transmission lines is very difficult to justify.
Then you have the endless negotiations with the landowners. Costs blow out to at least $2M per kilometer, often much more.
They can’t even get local communities to agree to 190 kilometers of lines, let alone 10,000.
No wonder we have built so few kilometres of high-voltage transmission lines in the last 20 years.
And with transmission costs making up around 40% of a homeowner’s electric bill, that’s probably not a bad thing.
When matters a lot too. Maybe even more than where.
You could pave Australia with solar panels from coast to coast.
You could even blanket Australia’s best farmland with them, as Labor are doing.
But try as you might, those panels will only ever produce power mostly in the middle of the day.
And here is a chart of when energy is actually needed:
We’ll make this so easy that even Team Chaos (Chris, Tanya, Anthony, Jim, and Penny), upon whom the prosperity of our nation rests, can grasp it.
Here are the two charts overlaid on top of each other.
And coal and gas plants are designed for continuous operation.
They are not designed to ramp down when solar or wind is available and then quickly ramp up to meet peaks in demand.
As the Australian Energy Market Operator states:
Traditional sources of energy like coal are only economic when they are running all the time.
If you have to turn them off at mid-day because the power is supplied by solar, they become economically unfeasible.
So they have to raise their prices. You can see the morning and evening price spikes in the chart below.
This, in turn, leads to headlines like these:
Rystad analysed 39 different global markets for energy price volatility (shown here as “spreads”).
This energy price volatility has gotten so bad, Australian manufacturers are even telling their workers to down tools during price spikes.
CEO Vik Bansal said Boral’s electricity price rose by 54 per cent in the 12 months to the second half of last year, and have not retreated, counter to expectations.
He said Boral had about 5500 blue collar workers who were being told to stand aside and do nothing for 30 minutes at a time when power prices made it too expensive to operate.
“At a certain price during the day, when the price goes up [to] a certain level, our manufacturing stops because we’ve worked out economically it’s actually better to have thousands of people waiting idle for the prices to come down then actually do the work,” he said.
“That’s a real issue we are facing every single day on 300 manufacturing sites across the country. So we are extremely nervous what that means.”
So. Our energy bills have skyrocketed since the introduction of intermittent renewable energy.
In the face of all this, it’s not clear what we should make of individuals publicly making statements like these:
Isn’t that what’s known as “disinformation”?
It’s bad. And it’s getting worse.
The Rystad report above says that “extreme price fluctuations are down to high solar power penetration”.
When producers are told by the grid operator there is oversupply in the middle of the day (screwing up the economics for the whole system), or “congestion” (not enough transmission lines, see above), they receive a “curtailment” payment.
In other words, they are paid by the grid for NOT delivering their energy.
These payments total in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This is done because the grid must stay balanced at all times.
As more and more solar is put online around the world these curtailments are rising fast.
This leads to a discussion of something that has been called The Duck Curve.
Quick summary
More renewables mean more power is being supplied to the grid when it’s not really needed.
We pay for that energy whether we use it or not.
Our energy grid has gone from stable, predictable and cheap to wildly volatile and expensive.
The volatility and uncertainty has even raised the prices of the energy sources (gas, coal) we used to get very cheaply.
As the belly of the duck goes lower and lower the economics of baseload (fossil fuel) power will continue deteriorating to the point of instability and failure.
So we are starting to see headlines like this one.
To fix this we would need a frank and urgent discussion by experienced parties who are not financially or ideologically married to the problem.
Instead, we got true believer Jim Chalmers, who last week told us
Everything’s going great with his renewables jihad.
He urgently needs to throw $225 billion more dollars of your money at it and she’ll be right.
Dr. Chalmers’ prescription: We just need moar wind, moar solar, and moar transmission lines.
Somebody please buy this person a new hymnal. The one he is singing from is out of date.
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*Extra credit question:
Over the entire working lifetime of a wind turbine, does it produce more energy than it took to manufacture and install the turbine in the first place? Yes/No
Update
Today (14 November) we got the following headline from the U.S. energy regulator:
The upshot is this (the exact same situation as Australia):
Subsidies available to renewable generators are so lucrative that, when participating in procurement auctions, “they are able to offer at a price of zero instead of their actual cost.” The market signal is that these new resources can be built for free, and thus the cost of power is also free.
“This, of course, is untrue,” he said, “and the inevitable consequence is market-wide price suppression.”
Danly said that price suppression deprives other market participants of revenue, leading to the premature retirement of the dispatchable generators which have to offer into the market at their true costs in order to remain economically viable.
“FERC has seemingly done everything in its power to ensure that our markets will fail,” he said.
Our suggestion:
Post-Post-Script
This past April the Labor Government closed the Lydell power station.
To replace the power supplied just by Lydell would require:
93 *million* solar panels
Deployed on *17,000* hectares of land.
Post-Post-Post-Script
I guess we’re just going to keep updating this article until somebody in power notices.
Today (5 December) we got the following headline from the Wall St. Journal.
Q: Do the powers that be WANT a zombie apocalypse? (Don’t answer that).
“U.S. energy systems are becoming less resilient as coal and nuclear power plants shut down owing to competition from heavily subsidized green energy”.
I wonder if this explains the supply chain problems in the construction industry and the collapse of the rental markets...mmm