Guest essay by Eric Worrall
While Federal politicians bicker, South Australia, the world’s renewable crash test dummy, has wasted no time demolishing their last viable coal power station, to lock in their pursuit of an energy free future.
Senate inquiry sparks ideological fight over Australia’s energy supply and climate change
By political reporter Angelique Donnellan
A Senate inquiry report into Australia’s electricity supplies has descended into a slanging match between members, prompting questions about its value for taxpayers.
The Select Committee into the Resilience of Australia’s Electricity Infrastructure in a Warming World heard from 60 witnesses in Adelaide, Canberra and Melbourne, including major energy generators, retailers and industry regulators.
But in the committee’s draft report released today, Federal Greens senator and chairwoman Sarah Hanson-Young took aim at the Coalition and its policies.
“The introduction of a market-based carbon trading scheme would effectively end the decades-long subsidy that coal has received in the electricity generation market,” she said.
…
South Australia’s last coal-fired generator at Port Augusta shut down last year and is being demolished.
“Coalition senators reject the proposition contained within the chair’s report that the Coalition Government is responsible for the ill-informed and misguided decisions of the South Australian Labor Government in destroying the supply of cheap energy for households and businesses in that state,” they said.
…
Alinta Energy offered to give the Port Augusta coal station to the South Australian government for free. The offer was rejected.
Port Augusta power station giveaway ‘a bad deal’, South Australian Treasurer says
By Tom Fedorowytsch
Updated 30 Mar 2017, 3:12pm
It has been revealed that Alinta Energy offered to give away the Port Augusta coal-fired power station for free.
The company approached the South Australian Government to take ownership of the plant under a “walk-in, walk-out” basis during negotiations in 2015, where it had also sought $25 million in subsidies to keep it running until 2018.
Alinta’s offer is referred to in a letter from chief executive officer Jeff Dimery in 2015, obtained by the ABC.
…
SA Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis said despite the apparent free deal, the Government would have taken on huge costs.
“Alinta would have walked away without having to pay any of the money for the clean-up of the mess that they had incurred and legacy liability they had taken on which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said.
“So it’s not free, it’s actually hundreds of millions of dollars.”
He said the price of taking on the plant’s liabilities would not have cancelled out the impacts of job losses or the cutback of thermal, baseload power.
…
Read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-30/port-augusta-power-station-giveaway-a-bad-deal/8398898
My heart goes out to the power engineers, including those who run the power companies.
For decades they thought their job, their responsibility, was to deliver stable, reliable power to the people.
Now their job has been made impossible by idiot politicians whose future energy plans are based on harnessing sunbeams and unicorn farts. The reward for years of service in often hazardous conditions is utter disdain and contempt from green fanatics who despise them as planet wreckers, green fools who never pause to think about what makes all the modern conveniences they take for granted possible.
It would not have caused any harm to leave the coal plant intact for a few years, to delay the demolition and cleanup, just in case.
Go with grace guys – what will happen next is not your fault.
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/31/world/asia/great-barrier-reef-dump-approved/index.html
And climate change is delicate about which reefs to endanger – others are left to vessels
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/03/22/caledonian-sky-destroyed-more-than-18000-m2-of-pristine-raja-ampat-reefs-survey-concludes.html
Johann you might want to do some studying on the life cycle of coral and it’s algae before you go pontificating about coral bleaching. You are just showing how little you know.
https://www.healthcentral.com/article/inability-to-recognize-sarcasm-could-signal-frontotemporal-dementia
Matt, maybe you will discuss this with Reichelt.
Sarc tags make blog life so much easier. Try using them in the future. Then we can laugh with you rather than swearing at you.
Hi Johann, repeating climate extremist propaganda dressed up as science doesn’t actually help the conversation.
[snip . . . off topic. . . mod]
I just love how “Gang-green” can contradict themselves without missing a beat.
Faster withdrawal from fossil fuels is clearly better for the global climate, and the volume of wind and solar set to hit the market means there’s little risk of outright shortages over the next five years or so.
One challenge remains. If coal-power retirements accelerate, solar and wind will be unable to fill the gap quickly enough, especially given the way their variability can undermine the stability of the grid.
Priceless irony notwithstanding, Australia’s energy plight is indeed “good news” for both U.S. coal and natural gas producers…
?w=720
Provided we don’t do anything stupid, like demolishing coal-fired power plants, we can competitively export natural gas and coal without causing our electricity rates to “skyrocket “
So now it will import its electricity from Victorie and NSW coal plants. Posing hypocracy
No it will supply it from solar, solar CSP and grid scale batteries as well as from wind…
As always, Griff remains delusional.
” No it will supply it from solar, solar CSP and grid scale batteries as well as from wind…
With an additional how many hundreds of millions was it Turnbull promised? Another cost of renewables unanticipated.
Finally! Now I have seen a real tangible “Tipping-point” for the Climate. At least for the in-door climate when the black-outs will shut the ACs down.
NASA to hold major press conference on ‘ocean worlds’ in our solar system
An amazing video: Firm evidence that climate extremists are at the end of the day destructive parasites feeding off the productivity of the world. The policies that climate extremists impose wreck the environment by industrialist the open spaces. Their policies wreck the economy by chasing away real jobs. Their policies hurt consumers and businesses by destabilizing the power grid and driving up prices. And their policies do nothing at all to change the climate. Blowing up a perfectly useful power plant seems to be a fitting tribute to the climate extremists.
Hopefully with the introduction of smart meters electricity distributors will be able to shut off power to green voting electorates first thus eliminating the need for general load shedding.
Sarah Sea Patrol thinks coal is subsidised?? Wow. So Hazelwood produced power at 4c/kWh for 5 decades in an undistorted market and was profitable enough to be sold for $$$ – then when the grid price increased 5 fold and they received subsidies they went broke?
That’s what happens when you drink the bong water.
Who cares? Really. This tiny demography uses 12TWh pa, a tiny area of an almost uninhabited continent that survives by being an easy access continental size mine far. far away. Who cares how mad /ignorant/corrupt and self harming they are? Why does any one care about the energy science denial by the green energy zealots of Southern Australia? They are irrelevant, even as crash test dummies, because what they do is simply irrelevant to industrialised economies. Not even relevant dummies, we have Germany and Denmark. Denmark was an obvious warning to S.Australia, OK their is more Solar PV, but the renewable prolem of intensity and unreliability and depndenec on capable supply via overland grid was the same. As was the easy greed of undeserved subsidies for what can never work in fact, because of its enrgy source limitations. Simple fraud on the science facts. We have better dummies. Am Bestern, Deutschland.
Germany is much bigger crash test dummy, and uses c.600TWh pa. They have relied on renewables and no nuclear (not really, they still get 14% of their electrical enrgy from nuclear, and replaced 10% or so of nuclear with – COAL! Most of the time, when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine (Winter). So much for climate change, really all they did was try to replace capable zero carbon nuclear with weak intermitent renewables, energy science denial which isn’t working well.
Now have the most expensive electricity around and NO net CO2 reduction per their government figures, if that really matters (saying it is is real science denial, no one can ever prove it, and there are better candidates for the flip flop from long term glaciation with short warm snaps we are curently in during the most circular part of of our orbit around the Sun, etc. But that’s not my subject.)
If they are treated as an independent energy Island,… as I read they are on a isolated position on their empty continent, South Australians own subsidy greed and technical ignorance can only deliver energy faminethat will starve them of adequate enrgy when needed if persisted in, as with other such superstitious civilisations that could not change from their flawed beliefs, Southern Europe’s Catholic science deniers, the Moche Indians who believed mud Pyramids = rain, etc., etc.
This has much in common with Scottish subsidy farmers the National Oz government will subsidise for votes, and they will need a large interconnect and capable reliable capacity from gas, nuclear or coal elsewhere to get away with that, because it can’t work on its own w/o capable support from 24/7 despatchable base load generation elsewhere, as with Denmark now. Simple. Soy th Australians don’t need to destroy their energy economy to prove a point made in larger economies elsewhere. If Solar PV is good value. Don’t subsidise it. Cut the fast, massive and easy regressive susbidies and see how Solar PV works in a rational enrgy market.
nb: Nothing wrong with non real time solar thermal, water heating, which offsets the use of expensively generated pure electrical energy for heating, which is daft (Using the primary energy directly is vastly more efficient and economic). Same for using coal fired electricity to heat water, Just have a coal boiler, 2.5 times as efficient. Gas less so, 60% effient CCGT vs 90% + in condensing boilers for clean natural gas.
Not only is all this delusional and greed fuelled, but it’s reallystupid in a developed educated society. Anyone with basic AS Level physics can quickly understand why renewables can’t deliver as advertised, subsidies don’t make the energy source more intense or controllable. Not enough energy when needed.
They can deny energy generation reality through interconnects for a bit, but not forever. Then they get real or revert to 3rd World economy status..
I’d cut the interconnects to make the point, as I would to SCotland if they leave the UK, or charge Southern Australia renewable energy rates for interconnect energy so the cost of their stupid renewable science denial at least matches the cost of their subsidies..
FACT: Any energy physicist knows what works best, and expert officials. It’s not climate science, its proven. The delusionals don’t like what works best, and especially not what that is after fossil use is ended, the most sustainable, zero CO2, renewable, cheapest new build and safest of all clean energy source. But the decisions are made by cynical politicians in the short term though, for their lobbyists, and they know what makes the most subsidy profit from the beliefs of the indoctrinated or science denying Solar PV subsidy loving voters. Good luck with that. CEng, CPhys, MBA
PS CCS. The almost uninhabited but coal filled counter continent would be a great place to develop what could be very useful zero carbon energy source while we transition to nuclear longer term, over a few hundred years, CCS coal fired power that Sir David MacKay FRS, DECC Chief Scientist from 2008 -2014 was so strong on, carbon may well be securely held in the geologocal stratas of what I beleve to be very ancient and stable geology. Here is his master calls on energy reality before his untimely death in 2016. If the facts are of interest, his science covers CCS and the place of solar PV in hot countries, BTW..
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/03/idea-of-renewables-powering-uk-is-an-appalling-delusion-david-mackay?CMP=share_btn_fb
“Who cares? Really. This tiny demography uses 12TWh pa, a tiny area of an almost uninhabited continent ….”
BZ
I have a longer list of places I do not care about, UK, Germany, Spain, ect. It is because I do not live there.
I find policies that work far more interesting. For example, modest mandates in Texas during Governor Bush and windfarms in the Pacific Northwest balanced by BPA hydro.
https://transmission.bpa.gov/business/operations/wind/baltwg.aspx
Of course both of my examples are about adding modest amounts of renewables and not tearing out existing power plants that are still needed.
“I’d cut the interconnects to make the point, as I would to SCotland if they leave the UK”
Well Scotland produces more renewable energy than it needs so it is England which would suffer
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/scotland-wind-turbines-more-electricity-country-needs-four-days-renewable-energy-power-national-grid-a7517066.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/scotland-wind-turbines-more-electricity-country-needs-four-days-renewable-energy-power-national-grid-a7517066.html
And what happens the 99.999% of the time when renewables aren’t producing enough power?
The storage unicorn recharges the storage batteries.
Obviously wrong on the facts anyone can check. We don’t need Scottish over priced renewable energy at 100% and 200% premium if we have enough baseload unsubsidised energy, and a bit of our own overpriced technically BS renewables. But Scots are increasingly dependent on low duty cycle renewables (48%?) so rely on our cheap base load energy from nuclear and fossil generation when the wind doesn’t blow to avoid massive power cuts.
Why Poland and Czeckoslovakia have put asymentric thyristor connections on the grid between themselves and Germany, so they don’t get dumped with Germany’s unwanted surplus renewable energy, most of it, and can export their reliable coal and nuclear fired energy to renewables over-dependent Germany when the wind isn’t blowing, sun not shining much or at all.
Your statement is simply wrong on the facts of the obvious energy science on the grid, and economics. Putting more chronically intermittent renewables on the grid and locking in their 70% fossil backup instead of replacing coal with clean low carbon gas and gas with zero carbon nuclear AFAP is making CO2 emissions avoidably and expensively worse by law, on the facts rather than the science denying deceit of renewable lobbyists for easy profit and greenshirt zealots for … what exactly? Hatred of poor people in growing renewable energy poverty? As Sir David MacKay FRS, Chief Scientific advisor to the DECC 2008-2014 and author of the globally respected “Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air” famously said,”do the arithmatic”. And “renewables (in the UK) are an appalling delusion” . But that’s only the proven and costed physics, not the regressively deceitful remewable clap trap for a fast buck for lobbyists, politicians and senior civil servants, locked in for 20 years by laws they made. And dumb people simply believed the justifications for, all of which are made worse by renewable subsidies in the joined up facts of the grid.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/03/idea-of-renewables-powering-uk-is-an-appalling-delusion-david-mackay?CMP=share_btn_fb
JB “smart meters”
Reading the electricity generation trade journals in the early days of the smart meter roll out “easy disconnection” was seen as a major benefit to cash flow. Previously it took quite a bit of time for the electricity company to send out a person to disconnect your power for non-payment. it could drag on for months. With smart meters the power is cut automatically from a central office accelerating your pain and scrounging to pay the bill. Cash flow thereby enhanced. Since very few people have fully or even partially networked appliances in their homes so there have been few other benefits of smart meters.
Of course they may come one day. We guess that they will. Maybe. For now its been all pain to the most vulnerable consumers. Green but not human friendly.
the attorney general office declared the ONLY benefit to smartmeters was TO the suppliers
our service charges rose sharply and are now fully 1/3 of the bill.
and as for supposed ease of dis and re connecting
well ,a friend moved house and the company took the same time to sort out new owner and connection timing. lot more peeved people since the were forced on us.
Sorry about the typos. If this dumb tool allowed editing of reply posts after finishing… but no meaning was harmed by my Typos.
And here I thought that California was limited to the US. Apparently Oz has its own Moonbeams.
If this coal plant had been in operation and there were no wind farms at all, SA would still have had a blackout when the power lines went down.
If SA had set the trip on its windfarms as they do in Germany, they would NOT have gone offline and the grid (that part of it not blown down) continued to operate.
When it has the new grid storage in place for frequency response, it will be far les likely to have any blackouts.
It really is fascinating how Griff actually seems to believe the propaganda he preaches.
Do you mean frequency regulation Griff? That is what is hampered by having many small generators trying to stay synchronized to the power grid. In a 60 Hz grid, the frequency of each input device must be maintained to prevent automatic disconnection and power loss. Disconnected generation due to loss of sync causes voltage drops, causing amperage spikes and brownouts for customers until automated protections drop out the area drawing the high current at low voltage. This is often remediated within minutes by increases of base loading as the tripped transformers in the field auto-restore. Without large base-load generators to compensate for input interruptions, the grid will fail more often.
By the by, Frequency response is ideally 20-20K Hz. At least for the audiophile.
Yes…
But this is remediated within SECONDS using grid scale storage.
What “grid scale storage”? The only practical storage on that scale is pumped hydro, which is not practical in South Australia. Not quite generators running on unicorn farts, but close.
Don’t expect Griff to know what he’s talking about. He just copies what’s on the notes his handlers have given him.
1) Grid scale storage is a myth.
2) Seconds, it needs to be milliSeconds if not microSeconds.
Tom, Griff is planning on spending a few trillion dollars (Or whatever that works out to in Austrailia’s currency) to buy enough batteries to keep the country running for the half hour or so that it will take for the wind to start blowing again.
If it takes longer than that, it’s just proof that the consumers are being greedy and demanding too much power.
IF –
“If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same …”
(Rudyard Kipling)
Well Griff you’ve ticked that box already.
A chart showing SA electricity rates since the adoption of renewables may be helpful. I believe that this undergirds the arguments being made around the edges of debate. A very real scenario “why cant I get a raise this year” answer “electricity costs were up 10%. We are unable to pass the increase through to our customers”
Our governments are going to beggar and bugger us.
It becomes very easy to understand how the bankrupt basket case I saw in Leningrad in 1992 comes to be . The arrogant willful stupidity of statists is the most dangerous force in our lives .
Thanks be to the electoral college system which saved the population of 84% of the counties won by Trump from domination by the disconnected-from-reality urban drones .
“The arrogant willful stupidity of statists is the most dangerous force in our lives .”
The only thing big government is really good at is making really big mistakes.
From the article: “South Australia, the world’s renewable crash test dummy, has wasted no time demolishing their last viable coal power station, to lock in their pursuit of an energy free future.”
I think that is a perfect summation of the situation, Eric.
The inmates are running the asylum in Australia. They think they are so right, but in reality they are so wrong. Completely blind to reality. Unfortunately, they are in charge.
Only the completely insane are completely convinced of their own sanity.
What wastefulness and foolishness.
No doubt Griff will spend the next 6 months touting this action as proof positive that wind/solar are cheap and dependable.
if wind and solar is so cheap and reliable, governments should pull the subsides. That’s what Griff is saying right? Aren’t they upside down on usage? rather than demanding energy from solar and wind first, shouldn’t it be from the least cost provider? How can they say its cost effective? Is this a state monopoly or establishing monopolies? Its an involuntary tax. Not voted on. Perhaps somebody could put a cap on the unlimited costs. That’s what Public utility commissions used to do in the US. While they are at it, before they destroy more power plants, demand that the power be as reliable as the power they are supposedly replacing.
Putting people out of jobs through infrastructure changes is a good thing? That’s what I see happening in SA.
I’ve recently been falling to sleep with Outback Truckers which is now on Netflix .
As a rather rural American I’m astounded by the lack of even the most minimal infrastructure shown . It makes one wonder about those storied prison winnowed genetics .
They don’t even seem to know how to make trivially small bridges and culverts and instead get stuck in streams and rivers and bogs submerging the dirt tracks season after season .
Sheesh Bob,
It is a big far flung place.
Not so easy to build infrastucture everywhere.
So’s the western USA . These infrastructure problems are too trivial to excuse . They bring in graders and dozers to pull our road trains when a few days work with the same equipment could have built a culvert to eliminate the problem . Instead they just seem to be content to let the streams run across the road year after year . I’m sorry , but they show chronic situations which just look retarded .
Australia is a similar size to the USA, with 1/10 of the population. It’s not such a big problem in the heavily populated areas, because they’re concentrated around the coast. But most of the country has very few people.
“Australia is a similar size to the USA, with 1/10 of the population. It’s not such a big problem in the heavily populated areas, because they’re concentrated around the coast. But most of the country has very few people.”
True. But for wind energy to be viable the system needs to be able to draw power from anywhere in Australia. The diversity of weather across Australia used to be one of the arguments supporting the case for wind. There are many factors hindering the development of an integrated robust system, but without it, high dependence on wind, even locally, isn’t viable.
+1
A lot of countries cut corners.
The money spend destroying the power plant could have constructed lot of culverts so vehicles would drive over those streams instead of thru them .
As a mature (old) Air Quality Control Engineer in the Power Industry it has been very frustrating and disturbing to watch the industry that gave me a rewarding career and that I care so much about crumble. Not because the industry was not successful, not because it was not complying with laws but because environmentalists and politicians decided to destroy it as a sacrifice to the environmental gods.
As I stated above I work in the air quality control arena and the coal fired plants have undergone amazing transformations to reduce the impact on environment. Engineers like me have help remove millions of tons of pollutants like SO2, NOx, particulates, mercury and others to make coal fired plants cleaner. The industry also responded to concerns about what to do with air pollutants that were removed. Instead of wastes the removed air pollutants are now used in the wallboard, cement, concrete, cinder block, and fertilizer industries to name a few. Reclaiming areas where removed air pollutants were placed before the negative impacts on the ground water was known is well under way. Those reclaimed areas will eventually become sites for industry, homes or other uses. But, you do not hear about these amazing advances, just the downside.
Then the bogey man manmade climate change reared its head. A coal fired power plant generates a lot of CO2 due the nature of the fuel. If it is required for a coal fired power plant to remove CO2 it becomes uneconomical to run or build new plants. That was the final death knell for coal fired plants. It is so important to have a serious debate on CO2 and manmade climate because so much is at stake. We are in the process of shutting down a major supplier of electricity because of something that may or may not be true. Billions and billions of dollars in equipment will (is) be(ing) left to sit idly by as we enter a period of an unstable electric grid.
It would be nice to have news coverage that is accurate and truthful, but that is asking too much. So many people have no idea how complex power plants are and what it takes to operate them. Or how the industry has responded to demands for more environmentally friendly plants.
New technologies are now available to make any new coal fired plant very safe, environmentally friendly, more efficient and competitive with plants burning other fuels. However, until the political climate changes, there will not be another coal fired power plant built in the U.S.
garywgrubbs says:
However, until the political climate changes, there will not be another coal fired power plant built in the U.S.
gary, you’re mostly right, but there have been a few exceptions that are mostly fluidized-bed coal plants.
http://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/07/11/dominion-power-begins-operations-at-new-virginia-power-plant/
and:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrior_Run_Generating_Station
I was wondering how credible Loren White’s anti-nuke rhetoric might be since my nuclear expertise does not include CANDU reactors.
“The USA has 50% of its states with Mercury air, water & soil pollution warnings from … Coal.”
‘Warnings’ are generally politically motivated scare tactics issue during debates for new regulations.
For example, Washington State issues a ‘warning’ about eating fish containing mercury caught in state waters. This was immediately followed by a national ad campaign claiming a 50% increase in US waters with ‘warnings’ about mercury from coal plants.
Since Washington State has only one coal plant, I was skeptical. I found the study. Two lakes in Washington State have legacy mercury contamination but it has nothing to do with coal. Furthermore, mercury levels are going down. It is virtually impossible to catch and eat enough fish with mercury to cause oneself harm.
100% bogus warning!
Furthermore, the US Center for Disease Control monitors for environmental pollutants such as lead and mercury. Not one American was found to have have blood or hair samples indicating mercury levels above the threshold of harm. Not true for lead but it is getting much better since removing lead from gasoline.
The correct method evaluating pollution is to compare actual levels to standards based on the level of harm. As hard as I look, I can not find a US coal that is causing harm to people. I do find lots of contrived wild leaps of logic (aka, lying) in models based on bogus unproven theories.
My conclusion is that Loren White is not credible.
Even Cody, at Cody’s Lab Channel, who handles mercury all the time, had mercury results in the normal range.
What’s wrong with people !
Comforts derived from sources with which those enjoying them have no clue whence such comforts come are destructive comforts. In other words, fragmented knowledge is a bitch.
Think I’ll swing by a fast food place in my new, gas-guzzling SUV, before I hitch up my pricey boat to take it to the lake, after which I’ll have a nice relaxing cup of coffee at a coffee shop, where I will compose my next manifesto condemning fossil fuels, on my sleek, latest-model iPad.
“whence”
Really! What a load of crap. Clearly Robert does not have a clue. I find Robert has a mindset that is typical of inside the Washington DC beltway.
Somehow being out on the water enjoying the environment is somehow bad for the environment.