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.
I must admit to having an amusing, voyeuristic interest in watching and waiting for the South Australian train’s full-steam-ahead appointment with the Bridge Over the River Kwai. Germany and Ontario have 100% (or close to it) duplicate capacity. South Australia has no intention wasting effort even considering such options. It’s committed. “More steam! Keep shoveling Casey. We need more steam!” Whoo Hooooo!!
When the major blackouts occur will be the equivalent of watching the bridge blow up. Waiting to see the train engineers apply emergency braking, followed by the train plummeting over the edge and into the chasm will be spectacular.
It’s so neighborly of them to volunteer to be the world’s crash test dummies.
Since when does a real labor government go after laborers like that?
Still these numpties are Hell bent on trying to disprove a fundamental tenet of engineering that you can’t build a reliable system from unreliable components-
http://anero.id/energy/wind-energy/2017/march
We’re up to 50% of unreliable electrons now and Hazelgrove in Victoria has closed. Third world power here we come.
Any experienced folk in the field here care to comment on this discussion of the problems with managing these disperse and fickle generators?
What a smart young man ! I remember the snapped shaft generator case. I was doing rotating machine theory & practice in the 70’s as part of my degree course (Elec Eng). Transmission grids look, to those outside the profession, as simply a bunch of wires interconnecting things together but even pre “renewables” were hugely complicated a.c. circuits with thousands of reactive components. Pretty impossible to model perfectly and so the actual behaviour under any fault or abnormal condition was “data gold”. A vast percentage of the physical grid assets are of course many decades old so you have, as he says, a system designed in a different era to do something different to what we are asking of it now. Stability IS degraded. I liken it to snipping little bits off the edges of your car seat belt. For 99.999% of your journey to work the snips make no difference whatsoever but one day you need the whole 100% of the belt as originally designed. Unfortunately it’s not there. The result is predictable, the timing of the result is not.
A catastrophic grid collapse and destruction of significant grid assets may occur in 3 years, 10 years, 20 years or never. If it does occur recovery will take time and be quite painful. I predict economic loss in the e unlucky first country to exceed any recession they have ever seen, deaths attributable to loss of electricity for weeks to be in the thousands and significant civil unrest. Anyone fancy a sweepstake on which country is going to fall into the pit first ?
Green Leftivists
Boldly going forward, ’cause they ripped out reverse.
They had a great prime minister, tony abbot . Australia is suffering from the “US” disease, wholesale corruption of those who are paid to serve the people.
Who is going to awaken the dead!
C’mon everyone, this is history in the making. We will get to see what it was like in medieval times first hand.
We Germans were the forerunners of renewables and anti-nuclear.
The result?
– Electricity prices have tripled from 20 Pfennig =10 €ct in 2000 to 30 €ct/kWh today.
– CO2 output did not decline for the last 8 years, last year it went up.
– Until 2022 we will dismantle all nuclear power plants = another surge in CO2.
– El Prices will rise further because:
– New high voltage transmission lines are required, (under soil, with six times higher costs.)
– New highflex gas turbines are required for following intermittent RE.
– 2.5% of primary energy consumption is from wind power.
– 1% of primary energy consumption is from PV solar power.
The complete scenery would have flopped, but luckily we have Switzerland and Austria for Hydro power and oil power plants, Poland for coal power plants, Czech Republic, France and Belgium for nuclear power plants and Netherlands for gas power plants, if there is no wind and sun.
If you like to check our power generating system, check here for the actual data:
https://www.agora-energiewende.de/de/themen/-agothem-/Produkt/produkt/76/Agorameter/
This is a must-see! Very often we have nearlay no Renewables at all! You can insert any date of click for last week, last month or last year.
Crazy is what crazy does… and this IS crazy. This station could have been mothballed ready to be useful, in the event reality demands it. Oh wait… maybe it’s stupid is what stupid does… GK
You should feel sorry for these poor folk.
Remember, it is “not their fault” if you lose power.
Also, just as they were born,
their mamas had the doctor “slap their butts”.
and then, like all, good city folk/city hospitals
….the babies were placed in an “isolation chamber” and
……fed by automatons
…….(err, folk dressed up that way)
for at least a week, maybe two!
Just go to look at pictures of “hospital nurseries”!
These poor folk, handicapped since birth, what do you expect?
Besides, they have to “save the world”
…but don’t get hurt, don’t confront, don’t this, don’t that…
they had a real hard childhood being “good”.
Down is the new Up also…..
https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/04/11/tesla-lost-674-million-last-year-while-gm-made-94.aspx
Troublesome sight.
And teeny tiny Switzerland is lining up right behind, as it is going to vote in May on wether we want to ban the possible building of new nuclear power plants (in some distant future) and shutting down any that come to need repair, turn off our lights (save energy, because electricity prices are too low) and search for the abundance of vast land needed to further our native (! not my word) renewable energy sources such as plant for biofuels, wind parks, solar parks and water.
I hope the people still have some sense.
In one way, it’s a positive. The eventual new replacement coal stations will be the latest technology for clean and economical burning.
We still have enough coal to make several more generations of efficiency gains in power generation worth the effort.
I think it’s irony that what they are doing hasn’t any provable positive global effect, yet the folks who live in S. OZ have been subject to noticeable negative impacts.
Have no fear, SA, Elon Musk has graciously offerred the use of his PowerWall$ and BatteryPack$, to fix your electricity problems in 100 days, or it’s free. This is from his Dominoes Division of course.
“South Australia, the world’s renewable crash test dummy…”
I’d add an s, ‘renewables’, ’cause I don’t think the dummy is renewable, Eric.
We can rebuild him, we have the technology.
The energy crisis in Australia is fundamentally typical of Australia. I have conducted several studies for state and federal governments on the competitiveness of Australian industries and exploitation of technological developments in order to assist policy makers to assist. Such reports fill the archives of state and federal governments and a theme that runs constantly through them going back to WW2 is the inability of Australians to get their act together and form an effective single entity to compete internationally, a team that combines the strengths of its individual players. Typically there would be five or six Australian partial bids competing with one JV from UK, one JV from Canada and so on. It’s the same in government and public bodies. Take fire-fighting, management of the Murray-Darling, just about anything, and you find a chaotic and non-sensical mess of competing parochial interests fighting over their turf. The overriding priority is the jealous guarding of the local empire.
I remember reading reports on green energy some years ago (15?) arguing that wind power would be great because Australia was big enough to have diverse weather so there would always be good wind somewhere in this vast continent for it to be the bees knees. All that was required was to join up the systems and hey presto. I laughed and laughed and laughed. Join up the systems? In Australia?
The great academic Michael Porter characterised Australia as a niche player. And it is true. It produces highly talented entrepreneurial individuals, first class engineers, doctors, and so on. Small business proliferate, many driven by an individual with a bright idea and a can-do attitude. Its industrial profile is strong in natural resources and what used to be called Elaborately Transformed Manufactures (like Cochlear), with a hole in the middle where Value Adding and integrated industries enable widely capable companies to form. Car manufacturing is something of a ‘Mars Bar’. Very difficult for Australia because success depends on a wide variety of specialist companies, each competitive in its own right, but which can also support the sophisticated integration into a competitive integrated product, not just once but sustain it over generations of product. Australia’s success was therefore, for example in manufacturing engines, in SA as it happens, for some of GM ‘s range of cars.
Coming back to energy, the crisis in SA is not surprising. It was almost guaranteed, given the way politics and government in general work in Australia. It is called the lucky country, not because as most people believe, it is a wonderful paradise on earth, but because its richness of natural resources has been enough to save it from the incompetence of its own governments. Despite it all, Australians are deeply patriotic in a way I think Britain would do well to emulate. It always amuses me to watch Australian political debates escalate through the inventory of standard insults, like scumbag, gutter, blatant sexist, neanderthal, knuckle dragger, etc etc until reaching a climax when someone is accused of being ‘un-Australian’, leaving nothing more to be said.
Patrick MJD you might drive on “the right side of the road” but here in Sydney we drive on the left.
It really is another country down there.
Yes, the left side is the right side. I live in Sydney too.
and right is wrong?
Of course, we Brits drive on the right side of the road.
Is there an award for lack of foresight?
The Darwin Award?
” decades-long subsidy that coal has received in the electricity generation market”
Is this verifiable? Can anyone help me here?
Cheers
Roger
It’s like this- http://joannenova.com.au/2012/09/government-burn-70-billion-a-year-subsidizing-renewables-and-wild-claims-of-fossil-fuel-subsidies-debunked/
and as well the Greenies like to tot up all the normal business tax deductibility, particularly depreciation allowances for energy companies and miners and the like and count them as fossil fuel ‘subsidies’. Naturally you don’t count that with truly subsidised renewables, solar panel manufacturers, etc. That’s how the watermelon hive mind works.
Most Greens can’t tell you the difference between a deduction and a tax credit anyway and the huge value difference. Count that as another detail they never get into because of some mix of shallowness and message management on the part of their handlers.
observa,
Well the calculation of these subsidies is certainy hard to understand, which may imply that they make actually very little practical sense.
My conclusion from your link is that the OECD calculates as a subsidy, the difference between the “world price” of fossil fuels and the price they are sold in any particular economy.
The problem of this calculation is that there is in my opinion – NO WORLD PRICE FOR FOSSIL FUELS – in fact any student of economics 101 would understand that in a free market, prices move depending on the supply and demand.
For instance, no one sells oil at a loss for any significant length of time. A losing oil supplier will shut things down pretty quickly if this happens, and of course this will cause the world price of oil to rise. Should there be a large supply of cheap oil – ie oil that is cheap to get out of the ground – the world price of oil will drop.
It seems the OECD has some notion of a fixed price of oil and any supplier selling below that price is termed as subsidising the market, in spite of this supplier being able to turn a reasonable profit – if he wasn’t he would shut down.
I appears that in some countries, governments allow tax discounts for fossil fuel suppliers which would further increase the gap between this fictitious “world price” and this is also counted as part of the “subsidy”.
Contrast this with the subsidies given to “renewable” energy. Cash straight out of the tax payers pocket and no tax payable.
Well what ever BS is promulgated by these agencies, in the long run the market will win. This means that if the real subsidies – ie the ones on renewables – are continued with, we will see economies crashing and a lot of poor and agrieved citizens.
This is my take on it.
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
Just had a week in South Australia. Stayed for a few days with friends at the southern end of the Barossa Valley. He’s a mechanical engineer graduate of the Munich Technical University and about the finest engineer I know. On the day the Port Augusta power station was shut down he bought a 3.5 KW petrol standby generator. Some people aren’t stupid.
@Mike
“3.5 KW petrol standby generator. Some people aren’t stupid.”
That is stupid! So Mike how would you know if someone is a good engineer?
I can explain why having a standby generator is stupid. I had this conversation a few years back with an engineer at work. We both worked in nuclear power and were x-navy nukes. You know you are a good engineer when the navy lets you operated a nuke plant. After our discussion he did not buy a generator.
Reason one is safety. Handling gasoline and carbon monoxide during power outages are sending stupid people to emergency rooms.
Reason two is reliability. Standby generators owned by stupid people are less reliable than even the most unreliable grid. It will not work when you need it.
Reason three, it to big and not big enough. My wife and go off grid in our motor home. Her job is to make sure we do not run out of food. My job is to make sure she does not get too hot. I have two generators. A small 900 watt two stroke generator that I can lift with one hand to charge batteries. A 6.5 KWe propane generator that will run the AC. Of course I can always start the diesel engine that has belt driven alternator and AC.
Engineers like their toys. Mike’s friend may have been looking for an excuse so his wife would let him buy a generator. I personally find ICE generators irritating. My toy has sails. It would appear that toys that make noise are popular than those that do not not.
You need to keep up with portable generator technology at Aussie prices-
http://www.mygenerator.com.au/yamaha-2800w-inverter-ef2800i.html
That can keep your fridge running plus lights and PC plus telly and gadgets (and the gas stove that won’t run without power to the igniters) but I take your point they can be too small or too large and the question of fuel use but for goodness sake some of us do manage to fill our lawnmowers and whippersnippers without burning down the neighbourhood. Diesel stores better than petrol but since most have petrol cars we could cycle the fuel through them occasionally to keep it fresh and there’s always the car tank to access. In SA we’ll probably be looking at rolling blackouts soon so the ability to tide over the basics during that time can make good sense.
He probably also has a Seagull outboard.
A steel mill in every backyard. … Mao a great leap foward. (Sarc)
Then when that happens, they’ll ban portable generators or the fuel or tax it so high to put us back in the dark ages.
Australians won’t have any trouble getting cars that drive on the left side of the road with the driver in the right hand seat. The Japanese drive on the left side of the road and make the best cars anyway.
Just have issues with “European” controls or “Japanese” controls, often turn my wipers on when I really want to indicate a turn.
“Mike Borgelt April 12, 2017 at 3:45 am
The Japanese drive on the left side of the road and make the best cars anyway.”
I worked for Honda in the mid 1990’s, and yes, they do pay attention to quality. Holden in Australia, not so.
That was before the bad CEO wrecked quality and was fired for it after a lot of damage was done to buyers and with mpg lies to boot.
South Australia is the home of Oooops! CBA July 26th 2012.
“goodness sake some of us do manage to fill our lawnmowers”
Observa, can you explain the difference between outdoors and indoors with respect to an ICE.
Next question, where are you using your gadgets? What precautions should you take?
Just saying if in SA we’re to experience hours of power being out it can make sense to have a backup genny like the one I pointed to. It’s a manouverable, recoil start genny that can run the basics as I said and bear in mind here when the State experienced a complete blackout at 4pm on a workday and it went on for hours after dark a lot of folks got a rude awakening. You know, stuck in lifts, told to finish work early, no traffic lights, no petrol pumps, no shops and home to a dark house with nothing working. Now we all have the odd torch or two but it’s amazing how you keep walking into rooms with them and flicking the 240V light switch out of habit.
OK so if you want to get serious and run everything including airconditioning you’re up for a serious diesel or town gas (I’m all electric) fired genny wired in like these at 6+Kva that will fire up on demand-
http://www.mygenerator.com.au/auto-start-generators.html
However the problem with those as you point out is will they fire up when they’re needed? With intermittent use the starter battery will go flat and diesel go stale and if you don’t have a diesel car to rotate it through you may be wasting diesel.
That’s where in my circumstances and should the need arise with more regular blackouts I’d opt for a largish recoil start petrol genny like that Yamaha and filling it safely with petrol from stored jerry cans is the least of my worries. Nevertheless it’s not ideal and why my ancestors built large power stations and the grid for their convenience and economies of scale as they weren’t stupid like the current lot.
Let the entire system crash. These people are just bat crazy
I make the presiction there will come a time where they will be building brand new coal plants in Australia again.
Or they all end up with a diesel in the shed: https://www.iceagenow.info/a-diesel-in-the-shed/