Guest essay by Eric Worrall
WUWT recently reported how a disastrous attempt by South Australia to rely on renewables resulted in peak spot prices of $14,000 / MWh (up from $100 / MWh). Now we have an explanation why – the policies were not aligned.
The electricity price hike blame game: a sad product of a dismal climate change debate
The high prices in South Australia should serve as a warning to all. This is what happens when climate change policy is not aligned with energy sector policy.
Recent news reports highlighting that the price of generating electricity in South Australia has increased three to four times its historic levels have left politicians, commentators and renewables advocates in an agitated state. One side of the debate blames renewables, the other argues vociferously that it’s the fault of evil fossil-fuel generators and that renewables actually reduce the price of electricity.
This blame game is a sad product of the dismal debate Australia has had about climate change and the transition to a low-emissions electricity sector over the past decade. Transitions tend to be painful. The challenge for policy makers is not to avoid the transition because it’s painful – running away at the first sign of high prices does not make a brave politician. It is to make the transition as painless as possible.
But a debate about how best to make the transition is not the debate the country has been having. Instead we have oscillated from arguing that climate change does not need a substantial response, to introducing policies such as Direct Action that have no perceived impact on consumers and limited impact on the environment, to advocacy for an immediate transition to cheap, job-creating renewable electricity. The result is a policy mess, with no clear direction forward.
The high prices in South Australia should serve as a warning to all. This is what happens when climate change policy is not aligned with energy sector policy and when state policy is not aligned with federal policy. Setting a 50% renewable electricity target in South Australia appears foolish when it is not clear that the electricity system can handle that level of intermittent wind and solar power.
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Sadly the rest of the article doesn’t explain how the policies should be aligned, to make renewables viable, to allow the electricity grid to handle intermittency – though the author does demand an urgent review of policy with a view to achieving this goal.
The direction has been given – planning the implementation is someone elses job.
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It should be clear now why the prices spiked… You see, mistakes were made. Policies were not aligned. Consequences were unexpected. Nothing here to see, not really. No one to blame, certainly not the renewable plans themselves. No use looking backward and pointing fingers. We must all face the future together.
Move along. Move along.
No no! We must Learn by looking backwards while moving forwards arm-in-arm as one to another free to do as we wish you to do.
In other words, there’s a disturbance in the Farce.
The low density “green” energy converters are large scale environmental disruptors, which either destroy or displace a large number of flora and fauna from their natural habitat. The windmill and solar farms are “green” as in greenback and naive, but do not live up to the green profile of their drivers.
“The Policies were Not Aligned”
Yeah just like the planets haven’t aligned yet and the alien space rays are interfering with the windmills and the synchronicity.
When you think about it this really is the end of the road for them. While they could slough off their Climategate emails and hiding the decline and mangled data with all their pal review and psych Cook-ups and morph from global warming to climate change and extreme weather, there’s no hiding from the immediacy of economics and obvious shortcomings with their pet renewables now. South Australia is the perfect science lab experiment and the results are in. We’re a microcosm of the inevitable that awaits at any macro level because the plain truth is solar driven energy is density weak on average as well as extremely fickle and thank God it is and we’re 93mill miles from the source.
Why have they reached their Waterloo? Well if they can’t produce anywhere near current electricity demand reasonably economically, but more critically reliably with their pet renewables, then that rules out trying to add electric transport to their existing power generation quandary right here and now. Storage to even out unreliable generation is a pipe-dream. Certainly when you consider the pitiful history of mankind’s ability with simply storing calories and pumping water uphill. Electrochemical storage is even more pathetic in the big scheme of things and we’re still using the same lead acid batteries Henry was plonking in the Model T (and the same reciprocating piston engines) Yep, they’re now scientifically and economically bankrupt, whatever computer models they want to cling to with their doomsday philanderings.
Walter Russell Mead had them all pegged years ago as simply noisy alarm clocks and it’s now the time for them to switch off just like their flaky wind and solar power does-
http://www.the-american-interest.com/2010/07/12/the-big-green-lie-exposed/
Well said. Farmers have a simpler version of the same thought. Chickens coming home to roost leaving chickenshit.
Yeah just like the planets haven’t aligned yet and the alien space rays are interfering with the windmills and the synchronicity.
Get your Dual-Function Tin-Foil hat! Your DFTF hat fights global warming while ALSO preventing evil alien reality rays from penetrating your head! Buy now while supplies last!
The special interests were not aligned.
The socialists will stop at nothing to contrive new, plausible-sounding excuses for their failures when they can no longer convincingly lie and claim them as successes.
Give the politicians a crash course in the difference between kW and kWh.
kW is what you need here and now. kWh is what you have used or could use over a given time.
You have no use of 10kW supply the next hour, when you need it this hour.
BREAKING:
‘Gunga Din’ threatens to proceed with climate witch hunt.
Elizabeth Warren Warns: ‘You Picked A Fight with the Wrong State’
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/07/20/elizabeth-warren-warns-exxon-you-picked-fight-wrong-state
Jul 21, 2016 at 2:14 PM | john
I suggest oil companies boycott the state, no oil sold there.
The fallacy of wind turbines is revealed with simple arithmetic.
5 mW wind turbine, avg output 1/3 nameplate, 20 yr life, electricity @ur momisugly wholesale 3 cents per kwh produces $8.8E6.
Installed cost @ur momisugly $1.7E6/mW = $8.5E6. Add the cost of standby CCGT for low wind periods. Add the cost of land lease, maintenance, administration.
Solar voltaic and solar thermal are even worse.
The dollar relation is a proxy for energy relation. Bottom line, the energy consumed to design, manufacture, install, maintain and administer renewables appears to exceed the energy they produce in their lifetime. Without the energy provided by other sources these renewables could not exist.
produces $8.8E6, cost $8.5E6.
===============
20 years of operation and you still haven’t broken even. no business in its right mind would invest.
but of course, this is the hidden factor – wholesale 3 cents per kwh – the wholesale price of electricity. fossil fuels deliver this for 3 cents per kwh, and consumers pay 10 cents per kwh. This provides the profit to invest, along with delivery and maintenance costs.
So by shutting down fossil fuel power plants, the price will rise until either people cannot afford electricity, or it will become profitable to install green energy, or people will start buying cheap coal which is no longer being used by power plants, and setting up power plants in their own back yards, selling surplus power to their neighbors at a fraction of the price of green power.
This is what happens when government policy is not alligned with reality.
Technically it is just not possible for 50% renewables in Australia, simply because of the intermittent wind speeds. On July 7 and also on Tuesday production from the wind turbines was less than 5% requiring substantial thermal back-up to keep the lights on. So one closes down the coal stations and then you have to rely on gas turbines or diesel generators when the sun is not shining nor the wind blowing.
And yet the governments of S. Aust., Victoria and Queensland are talking about 50% renewable electricity as well as the Federal Labor Party.
With every new wind farm or solar farm opening there is a speil about the number of houses it will provide electricity for and how many thousands of tonnes of CO2 saved, but rarely the amount of electricity that will be actually produced. And if there is the projection is never reached.
Saying that deveopment of renewable energy resources ‘creates jobs’ is Owellian prose at its finest. We could just as well dictate that everyone sleep on straw mats and invest in R&D for efficient weaving technology for straw mat manufactue. That too would create jobs.
No. Engineers and techology managers have worked dilligently for 300 years since Neomen to make energy supply extremely efficient requiring very few jobs to produce very much benefit. Jobs from renewables is doing less with more!
Fewer jobs in the energy sector leaves more human resources for important stuff – like education, health care, ederly care, the arts, the sciences (just not CAGW), entertainment, etc.
You didn’t have to convince the ancestors about fossil fuels and electricity-
http://peakoil.com/generalideas/how-much-energy-is-there-in-a-barrel-of-oil
But it gets a whole lot harder to get their switch flicking offspring to appreciate the fundamentals of EROEI-
http://euanmearns.com/eroei-for-beginners/
“At the present time, our energy web comprises a myriad of different resources. The legacy supergiants – Ghawar, Black Thunder and Urengoy et al – are still there in the mix supplemented by a vast range of lower ERoEI (more expensive) resources. The greatest risk to human society today is the notion that we can somehow replace high ERoEI fossil fuels with new renewable energies like solar PV and biofuels. These exist within the energy web because they are subsidised by the co-existing high ERoEI fossil fuels. The subsidy occurs at multiple levels from fossil fuels used to create the renewable devices and biofuels to fossil fuels providing the load balancing services. Fossil fuels provide the monetary wealth to pay the subsidies. Society is at great risk from Greens promoting the new renewable agenda to politicians and school children whilst ignoring the thermodynamic impossibility of current solar PV technology and biofuels ever being able to power human society unaided. The mass closure of coal fired power stations may prove to be fatal for many should blackouts occur.”
If you’ve got any doubts whatsoever about that Green morons, just ask yourself where the South Australian Treasurer went a running when it looked like the punters were going to flick their switches and nothing was going to happen. Duh!
great quote from your reference material, and the value of fossil fuels:
A fit human adult can sustain about one-tenth of a horsepower, so a human would have to labor more than 10 years to equal a barrel of oil.
[A fit human adult can sustain about one-tenth of a horsepower, so a slave/farmer/craftsman/teamster/drover
humanhad to labor more than 10 years to equal a barrel of oil. .mod]Quickly scanned the comments to see if this had been covered – I didn’t spot any:
“…what happens when climate change policy is not aligned with energy sector policy.”
It really needs to be pointed out that climate change policy doesn’t ‘align’ with energy sector reality. When ‘policy’ comes up against that which exists – ie real science and physical laws, the policy had better match exactly.
this is what is ignored by politicians and zealots everywhere in their haste to implement “green” energy. supply and demand rule the market, not politics. When politics tries to rule the market, the market collapses and dies.
imagine that whenever a king or president gave an order, the people receiving the order killed themselves. No matter what the order. the kings says pay taxes, all the tax payers kill themselves. what value would the kings orders have? how would the king enforce anything?
this is how the markets react when politics tries to rule supply and demand. the market commits suicide.