Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Instead of coming clean on policy failures, South Australia, the world’s renewable energy crash test dummy, has announced a decision to ditch free markets and assume direct government control of the electricity grid, in an effort to stabilise their self inflicted renewable energy nightmare.
SA power: Energy Minister to be given more control in state’s $500m plan to secure future
By political reporters Nick Harmsen and Angelique Donnellan
The South Australian Government has announced it will spend more than $500 million to build a new gas-fired power plant and Australia’s largest battery as it moves to secure the state’s energy supplies.
The government will build, own and operate a new $360 million, 250-megawatt gas-fired power plant
Australia’s largest battery will be built before next summer, by the private sector, and be funded from a $150 million renewable technology fund
SA’s energy minister will have the power to order a generator to be switched on if more supply is needed (a power held by the AEMO)
Announcing the energy plan in the wake of blackouts and load-shedding, SA Premier Jay Weatherill said his government would take control by ensuring the energy minister was given powers to direct the market.
The plan would involve building, owning and operating a $360 million, 250-megawatt gas-fired plant to provide power grid stability and for emergency power needs.
The private sector would build Australia’s largest battery before next summer, with a 100MW output, Mr Weatherill told a news conference.
The venture would be funded from a new $150 million renewable technology fund, he said.
“We think that a secure energy system should have multiple sources. It is a question of speed as well,” he said.
“A battery could be delivered quickly, we are advised, but we want multiple sources of redundancy, if you like, in our electricity system so that we have got more service efficiency.
“The other thing with a battery, which is attractive, is that it can be done quite economically. The battery can become essentially a player in the market and, to some degree, pay for itself.”
Gas-fired plant for emergency use
Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis said the gas-fired power plant could be turned on “in an emergency” if an electricity shortfall was forecast.
…
By seizing direct control of the grid, South Australian authorities are also assuming total responsibility for its stability. There will be nowhere to hide, next time their unreliable electric supply nightmare collapses.
What is a battery with “100MW output”?
Good point, AP. All the batteries I’ve ever used are rated in Ampere/hours.
That’s because Amp/hours is a measure of how much power the battery can deliver over a time period, which is the correct way to frame energy delivery for a storage device. However, since the energy sources, like the gas plant, are framed in Watts (power) I think they had to frame the battery system in Watts as well. You can ‘convert’ amps to watts, but or vice versa, but it requires more information than the article provides.
Showing the battery as ‘100MW output’ adds to the misconception that it is a power source, not a storage system.
Tesla specs their systems this way …
Power
50kW (AC) per Powerpack
Energy Capacity
210 kWh (AC) per Powerpack
https://www.tesla.com/powerpack
In my experience, reporters are not good at details.
My best guess is that Ah is only given if the voltage is known. Otherwise the wh term is used.My
That is what is being “sold” to the public, and the public has no idea what it means.
Big green conned the world, big education has left the West credulous, gullible and unable to critically think. Big government, filled with credulous gullible people panders to the big green con. Batteries generate nothing. They store energy. They are rated in amp hours. They lose efficiency when they are charged. They lose energy when they store power. They lose energy when they discharge and their DC output is converted to usable current.
It’s a big number that sounds impressive.
its a battery with 100MW output Presumably before it emulates a small atomic bomb
i.e a car battery is typically around about 5kW before it explodes.
it takes a couple of bhp – 1.5kW – to start a car….
So the South Australian politicians are spending 500 million from the taxpayers to try to insure their re-election on 17 March 2018? Assuming a little more than half of the population are of voting age, that works out to the voters paying about 500 dollars for the privilege to vote these folks back into office.
Are SA Aussies going to accept this?
“cedarhill March 14, 2017 at 1:57 am”
South Australians aren’t the sharpest tools in the box in my experience. In fact one South Australian I knew once caused the biggest IT disaster in Australia on July 26th 2012, and I had to clean up his “mistake”.
Politicians in general are good at manipulating people. That’s the only skill they really need. Everything else is just fluff.
$150 million into Elron Musk’s pocket for batteries.
That guy has to be one of the world’s top CON-MEN !!
And the SA politician’s among the world’s most GULLIBLE.
Energy minister says…
“but we want multiple sources of redundancy”
Yep.. we notice that you are trying to make South Australia TOTALLY REDUNDANT !!!
I’d rather make the politicians redundant.
Most are.
I hate to disparage one of my favorite places/peoples (I visited Australia in the mid 70’s as part of a Marine Battalion operating with the Aussie Army and LOVED the place and the folks), but, are they out of their minds?
Great to have a ‘battery system’ that can deliver 100MW, but how long would it be able to do so and what is the expected life of the batteries it is made of (I’m assuming it will be multiple batteries in a system rather than one huge honking battery even though they refer to it as a ‘battery’)? Will SA taxpayers have to fork over $150 million every 7-10 years?
Why does the energy Minister refer to the ‘battery system’ as an ‘energy source’ as if it’s producing the energy it delivers? Why are they spending $300 million on a system that will only be used ‘in an emergency’?
Australia is a very different place now than then. Liberal rot set in late 70’s early 80’s…
Sorry to hear that. I remember Sydney. It was great. Post Viet Nam in the US, the military was still being ‘shunned’ by the civilian population, not so in Australia. We made out troops wear uniforms, thinking it would help us keep them in line more easily. 1st night of liberty there was much bitching about having to wear uniforms because it was not wise to do so in the US at the time. That was before we found out that the Aussies still remembered US Marines from WWII fondly. Walk into a bar in Sydney in marine uniform and we were almost universally greeted with, “A Yank Marine! – have a drink, mate” and our money was no good the rest of the night. One restaurant owner, a handsome older lady who apparently dated Marines in WWII, even went so far as to set me and my 4 buddies up with dates w her waitresses and free meals at other restaurants in Sydney. Fond memories for me
If you walked in to a bar in uniform these days, you would probably be spat at and/or sworn at. Now, if you dressed in drag and did same, you’d be sweet as for the night *WINK*!
The cell is the unit of the electrochemical package. A battery is a “battery” of cells in the military sense of the term. What Tesla proposes is a collection of their 25KW batteries. You can correctly call that collection a battery. Yes, I am a nerd.
The problems in SA are down to severe weather and bad management – not renewables.
The gas plant is redundant…
Grid battery storage is much quicker at responding on frequency response/black start. That will solve the problems (along with setting the wind farms not to trip: standard practice in Germnay since 2008)
You’ll be the last one voting for them, mate. And you will be happy it is by pencil and paper.
The new name for South Australia: “East Germany”
So you need a $300 million ‘redundant’ gas plant to account for ‘severe weather’ and ‘bad management’? Maybe you could improve the management instead?
Building a power system that can’t survive bad weather is bad management.
“Griff March 14, 2017 at 2:27 am
The problems in SA are down to severe weather and bad management – not renewables.
The gas plant is redundant…
Grid battery storage is much quicker at responding on frequency response/black start. That will solve the problems…”
Problems CREATED by renewables.
What I find fascinating is Griff’s belief that they are going to install enough batteries so that no matter how long the wind doesn’t blow, they won’t need that back up gas power plant.
Yep Griff, wind mills are always a sign of bad management.
🙂
Funny I never heard of SA having trouble with electricity in recent times since the switch to electricity .
You mention the storms but not what effect high wind had on the windfarms or the cloud cover blocking out the solar panels .
Actually I like the typo .
Hey Griff, how come they never had problems with bad weather prior to the renewables being installed.
1) How much does this grid storage add to the already ridiculously high cost of renewable power?
2) How much grid storage. The way you talk one gets the impression that you have no idea how many batteries are going to be needed. You just invoke the magic words, grid storage, and all problems are solved.
3) If you don’t set the wind mills to trip when the wind is too strong, you end up with broken windmills. That’s why they set them to trip in the first place.
“Setting the wind farms not to trip”? That would be for over current situations, Griff. The alternative would be watching them catch fire and turn to gobs of metal!Congratulations! your record is intact! 0 for whatever? A few hundred?
The windmills in question tripped because the wind got too strong. They wouldn’t melt down, instead the blades would rip off with big heavy pieces travelling several miles.
“The problems in SA are down to severe weather and bad management – not renewables.”
BOLLOCKS!
That has been thoroughly debunked over and over and over again.
Why do you keep posting downright lies, even when they have been demonstrated to be so?
Ah, I forgot. You’re paid to, aren’t you?
Have you apologised for lying about Dr. Crockford yet?
He’s still claiming that Germany get’s 20% of it’s electrical supply from renewables.
WOW Griff so South Australia just suddenly started having severe weather events just this last two years. Severe weather events never ever happened for the previous 50 years.
Then you want to claim the Gas plant is redundant shows you are a complete fool, the power station is the actual solution but whether they can get it built in time is going to interesting.
Think before you post about places you don’t live and don’t have a clue about because your nonsense becomes tiresome.
Where do you actually live Griff because you don’t have the slightest clue about Australia?
When the battery plant catches on fire, make sure you are not too close.
And have your generator ready because the first of these large plants are likely to teach us some lessons about battery fire risks until the technology is perfected when the 50th plant is built.
Should provide for some interesting video however so if someone wants to try it without using my money, go for it.
As a resident of Victoria, I have already enacted my contingency plan: I have installed a wood fired heater for heat and cooking, a five year supply of firewood, a diesel generator, and a 250 gallon fuel tank.
While this won’t save me in the long run, it will help me over the hump when the riots and civil war breaks out. I also have ensured that my friends Smith and Wesson have taken up residence, along with a large supply of their favourite lead based aperatives.
We are in for interesting times.
Serial, only if the footy is not on TV and the beer is warm…which could happen if this madness continues.
tty March 14, 2017 at 10:19 am
” “The linked article says that 20MWh system can supply the energy needs of 15,000 homes for 4 hours, or 2,500 homes for 24 hours.”
That comes to 330 W/home. I hope nobody is going to do nasty things like cooking or running washing machines.”
>>>
If you have high energy prices like here in Germany, the only thing you can do ist to use electricity more efficient.
Or washing machine runs with 40 °C, our dishwasher with 50°C, and are fed from solar thermal heater, etc. Ironing we mostly have skipped (being lazy people). Everybody has a computer, but changed to efficient power use. So our average load of our house of seven person, 3000 sqft, is less than 500 Watt.
Heating is done with a high efficiency gasifying wastewood burner, costing us 300 € per year – and some work.
This keeps our bill below 100€ per month.
Tesla pledges to fix Australian state’s power woes
Lyndon Rive, co-founder of Solar City and head of Tesla’s energy division, believes that his company could fix an Australian state’s energy woes in just 100 days. Rive was talking to Australia’s Financial Review, claiming that Tesla could build between 100-300MWh of battery storage in that short a time. It’s a bet that his cousin (and boss) Elon Musk was eager to take up, later tweeting that Tesla would do the work for free if it missed that deadline.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/03/10/tesla-pledges-to-fix-australian-states-power-woes/
Well, Tesla would do the work using US Taxpayer largesse at any rate
Intriguing that the article you linked says that the California system has 80MWh capacity but the link to the article says it is 20MWh, not 80.
The linked article says that 20MWh system can supply the energy needs of 15,000 homes for 4 hours, or 2,500 homes for 24 hours. That would mean a similar system at 300MWh would supply the energy for 225,000 homes for 4 hours. What’s the population of the SA area and what are the power requirements for the businesses & industry there?
green numbers.. you can never pin them down. one minute they are powering the state, the next they are only powering the local industrial park.
i think average power usage per household a day is 20KWh, well it is around my area, which would make 20MWh = 1000 homes for a day out of the what 900,000 houses. hmm dont see any problem there. so all we need is about $10B worth of batteries every 5 or so years to power the state for a single day, without recharge of course. haha, there have been days without wind or enough solar to help things along, so i would say at least a few days storage would be required. lets make that 30B oh and you still need the gas backup.
what a joke.. i would like to thank the people of SA for taking on that crash test dummy role, heroic jesture it is, knowing full well that that brick wall is fast coming their way. renewables (r.i.p. to the word renewable) all remind me of that mr risky insurance ad. they are ready, intrepid and utterly progressive and soon to come to greif, yet only mr risky and his entourage seem to not see what is going to happen in the near future. fun to watch, but not so fun if you are stung by the incompetence much like the point of the ad.
“The linked article says that 20MWh system can supply the energy needs of 15,000 homes for 4 hours, or 2,500 homes for 24 hours.”
That comes to 330 W/home. I hope nobody is going to do nasty things like cooking or running washing machines.
That’s what, a 45 inch TV and a couple of lights?
The only answer to too much bureaucracy is more bureaucracy.
Being in the UK, I am glad this one is the other side of the globe. We have already been the demonstrator for wood pellet idiocy.
The same guys who have squandered vast sums of South Australian tax payer money are now going to be in charge of the fix. What could go wrong with that?
and the solution of bureaucrats is always ‘spend more money’, isn’t it?
Somehow, the money being spent is never their own.
LOL @ur momisugly how many watt-hours per resident of the DPR SA those batteries will store next time the grid goes dark. Especially since there will be no 50Hz power to synchronise to.
And then there is the other monster elephant in the room, that the EROI of the gas plant plus wind generators plus battery storage must approach a record tiny number. Did the ABC reporters get that? Or they are ignoring that as well? The biggest problem is that the majority of voters are fed a mono green diet, and are rubbing their hands together at this world first. They just don’t know a first of a major energy crash. Coal=cheaper =less CO2 (even if that doesn’t matter anyway).
Fantastically stupid. I feel proud to be a part of it all.
There is no EROI. Just a constant loss.
In a reply further down I have explained it with the example of the German Irsching gas power plant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irsching_Power_Station
After California went through its series of blackouts some years ago, the political purges went essentially nowhere. The shiny object of Enron was paraded about as the evil actor causing all those shortages and price spikes. No one really got to the point of how the system got so screwed up that one minor player was able to do such damage, and the idealistic politicians/incompetent green ideologues (choose one) stayed in office in most lower political offices.
Haha. The idea that burocrats can run the energy supply better than the engineers. Priceless.
The educational system down under must have gone completely down the drain. They have clearly never heard of the soviet union.
This time it’s going to work because this time we are the ones in charge.
SA is one step from a erecting a giant wind powered spotlight aiming at a solar powered fan, for dreamers this is the goal.
I like this bit: “we want multiple sources of redundancy, if you like,”
Well, yes, a lot of people will eventually be fired for incompetency on a grand scale for this, so just keep going and you will achieve your aim.
There is a strong resistance to sack Gov’t employees in Australia, especially if they are “permanent”. They are usually promoted for their incompetence because it is cheaper than sacking and paying them out, until they qualify for their guilt edged pensions, for life!
Why, the Victorian desalination plant could be run on Musk’s batteries. A win-win situation, is it?
Errr, you cannot ‘run’ a desalination plant on batteries. You sort of need a power station to do that. You know – big lumps of coal burning….
Unless the desalination plant is like a child’s Christmas toy, and you throw it away when the battery is flat. That would suit green economics very nicely.
R
Just thinking.
Have the greenies considered this?
Port Augusta Power Station, fired by coal from Leigh Creek, produced a Class C fly ash. Class C was the most useful fly ash due to it’s cement replacement capacity. Fly ash is incorporated in blended cements, pre-mixed concrete and concrete products. Do our little green mates realise that by de-commissioning the coal-fired plant, the SA Commissars have removed a low energy cement alternative from the market which may now require additional cement in concrete etc. in locations where transport costs prohibit the use of fly ash from other sources (other coal-fired power stations, or blast furnace slag) ?
Just thinking.
Well said!
Notwithstanding the fact that SA are insane in the first place for insisting on uber expensive and completely unnecessary renewables driven electricity and given the fact that they are fully committed to this insanity the currently proposed safeguards don’t seem all that unreasonable. I know of no fundamental economic law which states that the free market will always provide services such as sanitation, transport and power distribution at optimal performance so government intervention to ensure basic utilities is not something which should necessarily be regarded as unusual, ill-advised or catastrophic.
Secondly what is being proposed does not seem to be in principle unreasonable. It is effectively what many people do on boats. I run mostly off solar and the excess keeps a battery bank topped up. When the sun goes down the inverter then pulls charge from the batteries. The difference is my battery bank is generally large enough to satisfy demand until the sun rises again. If I had large power needs and/or a small battery then I would arrange for an alarm as soon as the solar was no longer keeping up with demand and the limited battery capacity would give me time to fire up a generator without incurring power interruptions.
This seems to be functionally identical with what the SA government are proposing and so long as they have done the sums right – as all of us renewables users have to do – then all should be well. Insofar as the situation of scaling from a boat to a state is a sensible proposition in the first place – which it obviously is not.
While it is true that the free market isn’t perfect. (Nothing in this world will ever be) It’s also true that government is ALWAYS further from perfect than the free market.
The idea that you can improve something by handing it over to the government has been disproven so many times that I’m surprised that anyone still believes in it.
The issue is not, will it work. The issue is, at what cost.
You left out the part that your boat has no where near the power draw of a typical house. How often do you replace your batteries?
How much power intensive industry do you operate on your boat? Regardless, much like South Australia, boats are a hole in the ocean you pour money into!
To a leftist, the solution to a problem caused by government interference is always more government interference.
“There will be nowhere to hide, next time their unreliable electric supply nightmare collapses.”
You are way too optimistic.
Instead of a $360 million, 250-megawatt gas-fired power plant, why not spend the entire $500 million on an approximately 350-megawatt gas-fired power plant?
Just askin’.
The goal is not to save money. The goal is to keep Gaia appeased.
This is the liberal way. Mess with part of a system. Muck it up. Mess with more of it. Muck it up even more.
Two choices from that point:
1. Stop mucking it up and return to what was working before.
2. Claim the result is someone else’s fault and cut them out completely by taking total control.
Reasonable people choose option one.
Progressives/liberals always choose option two. Always. (Until they’re defeated at the ballot box or on the battlefield–they never yield control over others in any other way.)
A grid-significant size battery? This would be a CHEMICAL battery? Get ready for a whole new type of mega-explosive poison-inferno-producing human-made disaster.