Governor Brown has California on same “dark ages” renewable energy path as South Australia
Guest essay by Larry Hamlin
The entire state of South Australia suffered a complete power black out on Wednesday September 28 plugging it’s nearly 1.7 million residents, communities and businesses into darkness.
Loss of available power from transmissions lines feeding the region from other states coupled with South Australia’s ill-considered climate change energy policy of forced shutdown of the states operating coal plants to promote heavy use of renewable energy created this latest power debacle.
Last July the state barely averted energy black outs when reduced outside electrical energy supplies forced huge and costly purchases of needed power to restore electrical system reliability.(http://theconversation.com/south-australias-electricity-price-woes-are-more-due-to-gas-than-wind-62824)
The forced shutdown of operating coal plants and mandated increased use of renewables had significantly increased energy costs to consumers by eliminating production from low cost power plants while increasing use of more costly renewable energy which also requires the operation of higher cost natural gas power plants for reliability backup with these backup costs hidden from consumers. (http://www.smh.com.au/business/renewables-shift-brings-threat-to-power-supply-20160921-grl0bs.html)
The September 28 state wide black out is clearly creating challenges to the governments climate change policy initiative which is responsible for these power availability and high energy price debacles and which has jeopardized the power supply of the entire region. (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-25/sa’s-power-price-spike-sounds-national-electricity-alarm/7875970)
Unfortunately Governor Brown has California on the same path as the state of South Australia where the present and future reliability of the states power supply is dependent on huge imports of power from adjacent states which provide 1/3 of California’s electrical energy.
Unlike a decade ago where use of this imported power was driven by considerations of lowering energy costs today this imported energy is absolutely essential for sustaining the states electrical system reliability.
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I am not one to say “I told you so”.
HA!
I told you so!
Bwaaaaaaahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
RAOTFLMAO!!!!!!!
This energy generation chart for each Australian state says it all. This has been a train wreck waiting to happen and Victoria will be next:
https://themarcusreview.com/2016/09/29/two-of-these-states-are-not-like-the-others/
This level of black out was not caused by the storm. On a normal grid at least 10% of the lines could be out with no network failure. This failure was the result of near zero reserve capacity so each failure took out the next weakest point. This should be a dire warning but clearly to you it is not and you are prepared to accept lame excuses by green zealots who are unwilling to see failure when it is written large in front of their face.
UTTER NONSENSE!
This was a storm powerful enough to take down 22 or more electricity pylons…
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/sep/29/south-australia-weather-the-storm-that-shut-down-a-state-in-pictures
There is no state on earth which would not suffer a power blackout in those conditions.
you may note that New York state, which suffered power outages in hurricane Sandy, is turning to renewables in microgrids to forestall complete power outages if they have another storm…
Those power pylons don’t look like the were made from strong enough steel, certainly look light weight to me. Were they all properly maintained? And as it appears you have no mechanical understanding of steel structures, once one falls, for whatever reason, places extreme stress on the others however connected, which eventually fail under continuous load (Drag on cables caused by wind and their mass). Also, the process of galvanizing actually weakens steel.
Most pylons are suspension towers whose main role is to support the cables weight. They can be built quite lightly and will fall over if the cable tension is not the same from both directions. Interspersed with these and at turns are strain towers that can stand unsupported with only cable tension from one direction.
If the winds are strong enough to bring down a strain tower, it is inevitable that all the suspension towers up to the next strain tower will fall. It’s about economics – there’s nothing wrong or stupid with this and the practice is global in power transmission.
The real point is that the grid should not collapse statewide in this situations. Blackout islands are inevitable but not a state.
Let’s be clear here those transmission towers would be well engineered and follow traditional transmission tower design-
http://www.electrical4u.com/electrical-transmission-tower-types-and-design/
However the weather here is rated at a 1 in 50 yr event and was associated with mini cyclone/tornado conditions in that area and once you whip those wires around and bring down a tower or two there is a chain reaction so 22 towers in a specific area is painful but not the end of the world. OTOH the cost of gold plating a network to handle such infrequent freak weather events (why not 1 in a 100 yrs we might ask) can be cost prohibitive. In that sense we need to remember engineering goes hand in hand with economics.
The real question is, why did such an isolated infrastructure failure cause a series of rolling shutdowns to black out a whole State, when such systems are designed not to do that and the finger is being firmly pointed now at a lack of resilience in a total network that has seen an incredible rise in management complexity, due to the increasing rollout of unreliable wind power. In that regard the re-powering of the majority of the system (in my metro Adelaide suburb taking 7 hours) needed traditional power in the form of local gas fired backup and interconnector coal fired power to stabilise the frequency before any fluctuating wind power could be added into the mix. On top of the massive spike in SA wholesale power price to $9000/MWhr in July the finger is being firmly pointed at the real costs of unreliable wind now.
“Analitik September 29, 2016 at 5:15 am”
Correct. But when wind blows the lines are “pulling” the tower to one side shifting the load stress in a direction the tower was not designed to support, ie, not in compression. The cables and insulators act as “sails” shifting the load center and increasing load stress causing the tower to fail.
More utter nonsense, transmission failure at one end of the State does not have to drag everything down
If true, that’s pretty dumb. Hopefully they’ll have plenty of diesel or gas generators on standby in case unreliables are -well, unreliable. But at least they are being “green”, right?
Well said……………..
“There is no state on earth which would not suffer a power blackout in those conditions.”
Not entirely correct. Yes, there would be power blackouts, but limited; not covering the entire state. That is the whole point of a properly designed network. But the mad rush to replace reliable base load power generation with (extremely) intermittent ‘renewable’ sources has left the state with an unsupportable mess.
“Where the transmission lines, managed by ElectraNet, came down is south of Port Augusta. In May this year South Australia closed its last coal-power station at the port. If those coal-power stations were still operating, they still would have dropped offline and seen the cascading failure that tripped the generations. Having those thermal generators there wouldn’t have helped at all.”
http://theconversation.com/what-caused-south-australias-state-wide-blackout-66268
St Judes storm UK 2013… not as severe and main power lines not impacted:
“In addition to this, in severe weather conditions, trees can cause considerable disruption to electricity supplies, as was evidenced in the December 2013 storms, when more than 2 million customers lost their power supply at some point, and almost 16,000 homes were without electricity for more than 48 hours.”
If South Australia had more large scale dispatchable power sources it would be much easier for them to black-start the grid. Intermittents can not be used to black-start and windmills all run at slightly different frequencies further adding to the difficulties of black-starting a grid.
” and almost 16,000 homes were without electricity for more than 48 hours.”
That’s worth one small suburb.
Griff is OK because he has his own, or is planning to install his own, solar “renewable” power source, if he does not move of course. He will find out soon enough that living in the UK power will become a luxury. I bet he never experienced the power black-outs in the UK in the 70’s. I sure did, and it was nothing to do with “climate change”.
I remember the 1970s outages very well Patrick – great excuse not to do your homework!
Alas, I don’t think tomorrows youth will have that excuse.
“Griff September 30, 2016 at 7:43 am
I remember the 1970s outages very well Patrick – great excuse not to do your homework!
Alas, I don’t think tomorrows youth will have that excuse.”
Homework? What homework did I not do Griff? BTW, tomorrows “yoof” will be too busy gawping in to their latest iPhone to be bothered about “climate change”.
Keep your eye on these blokes and they’ll get to the bottom of it all-
http://www.wattclarity.com.au/
and there’s no doubt the political temperature over unreliables is hotting up with the SA experiment
Amusing to-ing + fro-ing here.
Yes – quite a lot of towers went down – but people *will* be asking questions as to why the entire grid went down.
If you’ve a shed in the woods that needs power there is a point where running a series of extension reels from the nearest house for permanent electricity supply does not make sense and you have to have a generator (be it solar panels / inverter or chug-chug) and that needs to be proofed against the environment. It may well be that the weather is the sole cause here – but system resilience is going to be called into question.
I hope that an honest and thorough engineering led evaluation of the failure is performed – the we’ll see – I do not though hold out much hope for that – Australia seems to have a penchant for letting activist (and idiot) pols gruesomely torture public policy for ideological ends and little concern for the real effects of their meddling.
well here’s your answer:
“23 towers in five locations, affecting three major power lines, were lying on the ground, ripped out by the storm. As Simon Emms from Electranet made clear on Thursday, when you take more than 700MW of generation out of the system in a matter of seconds, no grid that he knew of could have kept going..”
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2016/uhlmanns-bizarre-prediction-of-national-blackout-if-we-pursue-wind-and-solar-39364
While we are discussing Oz, perhaps we should look at some other reliability risks of existing alt and existing energy like the effects of solar storms or EMP on photoelectric panels and grid, terrorism, and green (brown???) alternatives like microturbine power in sewage plants which are economical even in the US (see CPST) Money is going to be spent, we need to decide what is best and in what order to spend it … or not.
At peak demand the UK relies on imported French nuclear-generated electricity for between 5% and 10% of demand. Just imagine what happens when the cables fry, like what happened with the cable between Tasmania and NSW.
yup…. resilience isn’t a strong point for renewables and pruning the nasty carbon belching baseload to within 2.54mm of its existence is a rational and sensible thing to do.
Sh1t happens no doubt – but engineering is in large part about dealing with the possibility of bad things happening and applying a safety margin – something the “sustainability crew” usually have not got a clue about – being mostly public sector simple shoppers.
Why don’t you show the pictures of the 22 massive powers that were bent to the ground. No coal electricity getting past that.
25.4mm – not that greenies know the difference
Being spun as an example of what will happen to weather if we don’t adopt renewables to combat climate change. More garbage in the Australian media.
They are desparate, we are a bit short on cyclones lately and people didnt buy the barrier reef scam.
No matter what the energy source was, the outage would have happened. Quite a number of towers were blown over throwing the off switch to save the network.
This post makes some huge assumptions and the comments section just reaffirms each other with more and more outrageous comments. It was first and foremost a failure of the supply infrastructure, not the generation. For my full opinion feel free to view my post on this subject: https://obsqur.wordpress.com/
Errr, if all the windelecs (turbines) were off, because the wind was too strong, that is a failure of supply. If all the solar areays were operating at 20% because of thick cloud cover, that is a failure of supply. If so, then what you are demonstrating here is a (deliberate?) failure of cognitive ability.
Thanks
A dire warning to all counties. The UK is particularly vulnerable because of the supremely idiotic policies of Blair onwards. Ed Miliband with his act of parliament requiring an 80% reduction in the use of fossil fuels is well on the way to destroying the UK economy. The stupidity continues with indoctrinated civil servants being advised by people who do not know the first thing about climate history. If they were around today the people of the Medieval warm times as well as those of Little ice age times, to say nothing of those of the Viking colony in Greenland, would be laughing their heads off, or would they be crying? As usual it will be the poor who suffer most from these ridiculous policies. The continuing war against `carbon` as they ignorantly put it shows staggeringly defying ignorance. C02 is the stuff of life, food support and future of civilisation.
Tell me, with 32% renewable electricity and the worlds most reliable grid, why has the German economy not failed?
Coal. Germany built 10.5GWe of new coal power since 2010, so has dispatchable power to meet all demand. Renewables may as well just be there for show. Consequently, Germany has not reduced its GHG emissions (CO₂ eq) since 2009.
Deutschbank going down the gurgler? Europes most expensive energy? German economy failure is only a Volkswagen backfire away if not careful
Where do you live, mark4asp? I live in Germany and know of about 5 GWel installed since 2010, most of it having replaced old stuff.
In 2010, Germany produced 490 TWh out of follsile + nuke, and 100 TWh out of renewables.
In 2015: 420 resp. 190 TWh.
Indeed: Germany did not reduce its CO2 emission level. That’s due to the decision to shutdown the nuke context. And that’s in turn due to a lack of reliable nuclear waste storage entities.
Germany, that’s 80 millions of people living on 350,000 km². USA: 320 millions on 10 millions of km²… and lots of desert you can store anything in for centuries!
The Blackout of Spring ’16 will remain a shared experience for collectivists throughout the state. People will survive a day or two without electricity. They will long have the memory of how they did their part to support the collective and protect the environment.
Some great comments from people who would
seem to have some electrical engineering knowledge who have my respect
Unlike the Nick’s and Griff’s etc who seem to have got their grasp of electricity production
from some Green guide book
It did not take long for the usual Green zealots like Bandt etc to tell us that clearly the storm was due to climate change so the answer was to go for more renewables
-completely ignoring the difference between synchronous and asynchronous power which suggests the idiotic target of 100 % renewables (at least not the sort Australlia can produce) is never going to be possible
yeah truly crap weather
BUT
the lines down were in melrose
if PAgutta was still up n running theyd have been able to cut that feed out n resume
or if Torrens island and pelican point were on full capacity not low as backup,
and of course all the damned birdshredders were on downtime due to winds as well..
hmm
im curious theyve NOT at all mentioned the state theyre in damages wise..there would have to be some damaged as they were in the zones hit fully all along the coast n pt Wakefield and inland behind the Clare valley as well as sth coastals.
the hail damage to the solars will be interesting to see IF they manage to report;-) ha ha not holding breath on that.
what MORE concerning is the sucking of Vic power
as the followup storm hitting SA this evening has a seriously foul curl in it and its coming right into Victoria and forming an eye
now , as much as I dont want storm damage n power out here
should Vic cop it badly as it appears also
then when OUR power goes to hell
the SA drain on ours also ceases..again.and they go dark again, bigger time!
and where once SA woulda backed us up?
well thats not going to happen is it?
see here why I am concerned
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-222.05,-36.11,2999/loc=143.093,-37.198
I will be honest and say most of my comments are directed to Nick Stokes version of events.
Sure there were grid inter-connector power lines down but the issue goes beyond this as wind turbines would be shut down too in very high winds. Lack of strategic State power plants added the finishing touches to ensure a virtual blackout trifecta. It should be noted that in effect these are fundamentally dependent events so it is absurd to say that it is an extreme trifecta; it only depends on the wind energy. Once one goes down then the mainly renewable route capability in a State has gone too with no local power offset.
If the Govt subsidises only renewable competitors and forces customers to take all the output that these competitors can produce then I doubt whether I will be competitive no matter the circumstances. When the the Grid system was conceptualized there was little thought to the issues of renewables as a substantial power source.
True, it does not help my case if I have to import coal. I don’t claim expertise but there is ample natural gas in SA at Moomba so a source of hydrocarbons is not a limiting factor. As Santos pipes this gas to Whyalla it is clear evidence of viability.
Further is it not a conundrum and basically hypocritical that the SA Premier is trying to promote a nuclear source of energy and not gas (/coal) for the SA state? For example the MacArthur wind power facility only has a capacity utilization of 28% (it is not in SA but close enough for relevance). I suggest he does recognize the renewable problems but the usual political correctness prevents him stating it clearly.
If wind was ever a most efficient source of energy (I am talking financial efficiency which includes capital input) one would think the Dutch would have been using it rather than replacing windmills with fossil fuels in the past. I guess sailing ships could also still be viable. Instead we subsidize some and make the whole system less efficient.
I will leave it there as I get a bit irritated with so called scientists like Steffan (in Oz) clamouring that this situation is due to the CO2 climate change; will eliminating CO2 fix this issue? Why ask? I simply wonder why Oz funds these ostriches posing as scientists.
Apologies, I meant the MacArthur capacity utilization at 28% as an illustration of the poor capital efficiency comment later on.Need better eyesight for copy/paste!
http://theconversation.com/what-caused-south-australias-state-wide-blackout-66268
“So, what did cause South Australia’s blackout?
Was it because of wind or wind turbines?
It has everything to do with wind – because that’s what blew over the transmission lines. But it has nothing to do with South Australia’s wind turbines.
Where the transmission lines, managed by ElectraNet, came down is south of Port Augusta. In May this year South Australia closed its last coal-power station at the port. If those coal-power stations were still operating, they still would have dropped offline and seen the cascading failure that tripped the generations. Having those thermal generators there wouldn’t have helped at all.
A lot of generation capacity was lost because of the transmission failure. Because of that there was a voltage drop, which triggered safety protection measures that tripped the Haywood inter-connector that connects South Australia with Victoria. This could have happened in any state or with any generation technology.”
Whatever the ultimate definitive truth, the watermelon’s problem is having relied on emotion and hype to flog their wares instead of cautious judicious science, they’ve made a rod for their own backs-
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/opinion/david-penberthy-premier-jay-weatherill-must-guarantee-viability-of-sas-power-supply-or-face-backlash/news-story/8f29d04621e0efe181301152a83ac271
and there’s nothing more emotional than freezing in the dark they’re quickly discovering.
Thank you for that link, it was an enjoyable read. 🙂
>>But it has nothing to do with South Australia’s wind turbines.
But most of the windelecs (turbines) were shut down due excessive wind, were they not? That is a failure of the windelec supply, at the critical moment the state needed it most. Do you have the figures if how much wind energy was going into the grid, just before the blackout?
I note in Somerville’s graphic (below) that 1/3 of SAs wind arrays dropped offline during the storm, just before the blackout. Causing significant variability in supply, which was probably difficult to control on the grid. Unfortunately the graphic only gives capacity factor, and not GW. It would be interesting to see what the fluctuation in supply really was.
While sympathy is in order for the inhabitants of South Australia suffering from a loss of electrical supply, the reality is that they vote in people who pursue these policies. Frankly it is the electorates who are to blame, although I appreciate there are those here who think such a conclusion is asinine.
This outage is good news. Maybe people learn?
It will take much more than this before people are ready to toss the bastards out.
And, by then, it will be far too late to repair the damage in any reasonable amount of time.
Uuuuhmmm, PBS NewsHour last night stated that the blackout was caused by an intense storm in the region.
For the last time!
Reliance on wind power had *everything* to do with the statewide SA shutdown.
(Can’t believe how this meme of denial & dissembling has spread so pervasively.)
Wind turbine production automatically shuts down in gale force winds.
That is what led to massive capacity drop & runaway grid instability. Not the regional loss of transmission towers in the north. SA wind generation is well distributed…
Once capacity failed catastrophically, the national grid automatically tripped to isolate SA, so as to protect eastern states from their asynchronous contagion.
Here is the event, in all its techno-coloured ingloriousness…
That plot doesn’t seem complete. It is missing Snowtown, for example, which is a big one and seemed to play an important part in the recovery. And it seems that while some dropped out, a lot didn’t. As noted above, SA is a big place, and the storm was intense in places, but a lot of turbines on the periphery would have been highly productive.
Actually Snowtown was the one of the first to go offline. This link shows how it all went down:
See the 4:59 minute mark of the video.
Here is the subtotal plot for SA wind production on 28th. All appear to have been braked offline at once.
(I don’t know what happened to Snowton-1 on that other plot but its irrelevant to what happened…)
Whether it was used to restart the grid or not (it was,) its still irrelevant to the statewide shutdown.
SA wind capacity is listed @ur momisugly 1580MW. Flailing along @ur momisugly 70% (approx 1100MW) before the shit hit the fan.
Reg Nelson, you are so right! Vic gov is committed to self-same SA suicide policies. Nice preview, this.
No plans for gas turbine to replace Hazelwood… they conducted recent ‘community consultation’ exclusively in Nth. Victoria, asking for opinion on how to repatriate the L.V workforce and expressly forbidding any discussion of any alternate (fossil fuel) solution. Cheifly, by deceptively conflating efficient, modern gas-turbine generation with inchoate clean-coal tech.
“All appear to have been braked offline at once.”
That looks a lot like a plot of the grid going down at 16.18 (link). They have to go offline if there is no line. And there seemed to be little loss of power before that event.
Philip, when you haven’t got a grid, you can’t send the power anywhere – wind, coal, gas or wombat powered treadmill. That’s what that shows.
To make matters worse, as the storm approached and the wind velocity increased, the majority of power generation shifted to wind, leaving only a small percentage of thermal (fossil fuel) power generation online when the blackout occurred.
As others have pointed out, the wind power can’t be brought back online until the grid, powered by stable thermal energy, is up and running. So reliance on wind power can significantly increase the duration of the blackout, which IMHO is far more important than the actually cause — a five minute blackout is a nuisance, a twenty four hour (or more) blackout is a major public health and safety concern. The higher the reliance on unreliable renewable energy, the more serious, risky and dangerous this issue becomes.
The Hazelwood coal power plant, which currently supplies the state of Victoria with 25% of its electricity, is likely to close in April 2017. How will this impact the price and availability of electricity in South Australia? And what if Victoria follows South Australia down the green garden path and can no longer export electricity to South Australia, what happens then? Where will they find the power to keep their useless desalination plant running?
Besides being incredibly wasteful and detrimental to local economies, these green policies actually harm the environment, not help it. Exporting local coal to burn it in unregulated (or less regulated) countries, like China and India, actually causes more pollution and harm to the planet than good.
Jo Nova, Oz, post on South Australia black out- a grid on the edge…
One comment ;
‘The government is responsible for energy security, not the power companies or
the electricity market or Victoria or someone else. This demolition job done on South
Australia’s previously reliable and adequate power supplies should see the resignation
of the Premier who has presided over this devastating nonsense at huge expense. Is
this why South Australia gets twice the GST of WA? A desalination plant no one ever
needed? Total blackouts? No gain whatsoever for the people of South Australia in this
Green energy and windmill nonsense. How are the people of South Australia better off
in any way? It is an utter disgrace. Hot summers and stormy days come and go but
destroying a state’s infrastructure for a political agenda is an utter disgrace and a
betrayal of the very purpose of a government. Wetherill should accept his responsibility
for this utter mess and resign.’
Jo Nova:
‘Freaky weather month: While there are storms on the East Coast, In the next 24 hours
Perth may register its coldest September on record (or things might be a tiny bit warmer
than in September 1906. Did coal burning cause that cold spell?) Thanks to Chris
Gillham for tracking this exciting race so closely. More on that tomorrow.’
There was a lot of wind power being used at the time of the failure – yes – but you have to realize that the lines that were wiped out by the tornadoes were the same lines carrying that wind energy to the main consumption hub in Adelaide 200km away. In the past those same lines also carried the power from Port Augusta’s coal power stations to Adelaide. The weather event that wiped out all four main north south transmission lines would have dropped massive quantities of generation offline instantly regardless of whether it was coal or wind in this scenario – causing the under frequency trip of the entire system.
Wind was not the cause – but it suffered the same as coal would have because it used the same lines to transport energy to market that were knocked out……
Pursuing a green energy policy is not the cause of the system failure. If anything it is because 4 transmission lines in different geographic locations all got taken out by the same super storm at the same time. That system design has been in place since the 1960s and has served us through the coal generation era well. If people want even more redundancy then they had better be prepared to pay for it at a transmission network level. Thats the political point to be argued – not whether the power was coming from green or brown energy sources!
SA’s generation network is well distributed east of Spencer Gulf and as you point out, Port Augusta has ceased generation. Remaining gas-turbine generation is centred around Adelaide. The output graph I posted above shows wind output constrained to between 60-70% of capacity throughout the day, a heroic effort given the wild gyrations in turbine generation.
The only turbine that appears to have gone off line prior to 4pm. On the 28th., was Cathedral Rocks at Whyalla. That is to say, generation capacity was maintained up until the time the grid tripped out. I repost the spaghetti graph of SA wind power in the hope that it conveys the full chaotic state of SA wind generation during that storm, in all its techno-coloured ingloriousness.
“Griff September 30, 2016 at 2:34 am”
Synchronous gives us that. Wind does not!
A good grammar flame war could fix ALL the power problems of in South Australia if ONLY we could harness the incalculable Hiroshimas worth of megajoules to a steam generator.
Who needs a grid after you drive out all the auto plants and other non-resource industry anyway.
Resources are stuffed too Rg!
“Nyrstar, which processes lead and other metals at Port Pirie, fired up a back-up diesel generator but couldn’t prevent the blast furnace seizing up and expects metals processing profits to suffer a hit of about €3 million-€5 million.”
http://www.afr.com/news/bhp-billiton-shuts-olympic-dam-as-sa-bunkers-down-20160929-grriyg#ixzz4LfhnNpiY
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Right, so if the only power line that went down was the one that gives them power, they would have been screwed because their backup generator wasn’t adequate. Who is at fault for that?
Yep-
“Bailies Holst chief economist said SA needed to rethink its entire approach to electricity management.”
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/business/the-states-two-blast-furnaces-are-in-serious-trouble-following-the-storm-with-the-port-pirie-smelter-out-of-action-for-up-to-two-weeks/news-story/c7b496663e93c6bf55cdbf8e0c9f7ca2
Nick Stokes’ interpretation of SA wind production on 28th. ; “And there seemed to be little loss of power before that event.” So why did the network go down Nick? If there was no significant loss of power prior to the mass shutdown? Can’t possibly have been the transmission line loss in that case!
P.S I noticed your selective posting (above^^^) of 15 year old wholesale state pool pricing. From the first few years of the NEM, before SA even had *one single megawatt* of wind power installed.
Indeed at that time, pre 2003, there was only *one* single wind turbine in the whol state, in Cooper Pedy!
You’re one disingenuous *bastard Nicholas Stokes.
(Ed note; term of endearment in Australia.)