Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Awareness is slowly permeating through the media that renewables inevitably lead to higher electricity prices – and that the Australian energy grid is in deep trouble. But this awareness is too little, too late, to save what is left of what was once one of the cheapest electricity grids in the world.
Climate change zealots need to get real
Peta CredlinJune 18, 2017 12:00am
WELL, now we know.
The biggest deniers in the whole climate change debate are those who think we can have affordable power, lower emissions and a reliable network.
We can’t.
And after they almost sleepwalked their way to defeat at the last election, it would appear Coalition MPs have found their voices again on the issue that has defined Australian political debate over the past 15 years or more.
There’s no doubt that any policy that lowers Australia’s CO2 emissions will increase the cost of power and any move away from baseload capacity will make our network more unreliable.
Forget the movie, this is the real “inconvenient truth” that climate change zealots have never wanted to acknowledge. For too long, the views of the Zeitgeist have dominated debate and anyone daring to question any aspect of climate change was branded a sceptic. Scientific fact or not, any issue that’s galvanised the Left to the point of hysteria makes me sceptical that it’s more about the politics than anything else.
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Right now, China’s emissions are 20 times those of Australia and even if they meet their Paris Agreement commitments, by 2030, China’s emissions will be 50-60 times ours. Seriously? We sell off industry and jobs in a mistaken belief the world that is acting with similar intent but it is clear they’re not, and won’t. Again, remember my refugee example and you get what I mean.
It’s claimed that the Chief Scientist’s report to COAG aims to address the “trilemma” of achieving lower prices, greater security and a 28 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030. Wrong. The report is about meeting the emissions reduction aspiration (which it converts into a commitment) at the lowest cost without major interruptions to supply. It’s not about affordable, reliable power; it’s about climate change.
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So what about Finkel? The Finkel Report is a government paper released a few days ago in Australia, which attempts to chart a roadmap for transition of Australia to renewable energy.
Buried under the waffle about energy security and orderly transitions and the need for more energy security is this gem;
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3.2 Agree to implement an orderly transition:
• NEM emissions reduction trajectory
• Clean Energy Target
• Require all large generators to provide 3 years’ notice of closure.
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7.2 Form an Energy Security Board.
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Read more: http://www.environment.gov.au/energy/publications/electricity-market-final-report (page 28)
The requirement for the notice period is repeated several times throughout the report.
The reason for the three year notice of closure is likely the recent abrupt closure of coal plants in several locations in Australia.
Unlike gas, coal cannot be scaled up and down at whim to try to balance the wild fluctuations of renewables. Under Australian rules (and rules in many US states), renewables appear to have pre-eminent access to the grid.
Australian Coal operators are responding by shutting down now unprofitable businesses.
The Australian government response – force remaining coal plant operators to keep operating for a minimum of three years after their businesses become unprofitable, regardless of financial losses to shareholders.
This in my opinion is naked government expropriation of shareholders funds. Not a policy likely to encourage badly needed investment in Australian energy infrastructure, at least not the kind of investment which will lead to a reduction in skyrocketing Aussie electricity prices.
You are entirely right that renewable energy currently costs more than conventional power sources. The question then becomes are the short and medium term gains from lower energy prices today worth the medium and long term costs of climate change. Most of the world is now saying that lower energy prices aren’t worth radically changed weather patterns and all of what that entails – dining coastal cities, shifted rainfall for strictly, more extreme weather events that kill people, etc. And your China argument is ridiculous. You say that China will still pollute 50 to 60 times more than Australians, but there are 55 times more Chinese people than there are Australians. Two metaphors illuminate why this argument about China is wrong given any data set. Are you there type of person that sees your neighbor throw their trash in the local park to avoid paying garbage removal fees then goes and does the same, or do you say that for the good of the neighborhood I’m going to pay for proper garbage removal? I hope you don’t throw your trash in a park to avoid paying for garbage removal. Also, if you are going to talk equality in pollution you should talk about the lifetime pet capita emissions of a country. Think of it like the levelized cost of energy but with carbon emissions. In evaluating the economic rationale of coal power you wouldn’t ignore the first half of the life cycle that includes building the power plant. Similarly, if you are going to moralize about the amount of emissions from other countries then you must include all our emissions. Not to, would be like dumping trash in the local park to avoid paying for garbage collection for 100 years. By now you’ve dumped a lot of garbage in that park. Then you get self righteous because someone else started throwing garbage in the park thirty years ago. Especially when the reasons they are throwing garbage in the park is so they can produce cheap goods for you in Australia and me in the USA and at the same time lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Should Chinese people not throw garbage in the park to lift 600 million out of poverty even though we’ve been doing it for decades more often to buy a bigger house and a nicer car?
Reality BITES! This mountain-born, high plains of Alberta, mixed farm raised person, saw how far the morning weather forecast was, from each days weather. This resulted in laughter when first I saw Climate Forecasts for 1, 5, 10, and even 100 years hence. After looking at the database details, especially the policy of jumping weather observation numbers across many empty Data Boxen, from the nearest filled D.B., I reread my Geophysical Textbooks, about proper handling of Stacked Reflections in a 3D Seismic Survey project. If a 12- Stacked 3D Boxen had only 10, or 11 valid reflections, that was all the Boxen got = there were no neighbouring numbers jumped in.
These coal generators are allegedly closing because of “safety” – needing $$$ bigly spent to come up to code.
Good luck forcing an “unsafe” power station to remain open.
If the intention was to close it, presumably the govt can nationalise it at nil cost but would have to run it at a loss for 3 years. Which was in fact the deal offered to the People’s Republic of SA – for $8m pa they could have had a slightly used power station, saved $240m of price spikes and $350m of damages from the blackouts.
It has nothing to do with safety but economics as these unreliables free-ride on thermals as their insurers and don’t pay them their just insurance premiums. Consequently they haven’t been investing in continuous upgrades and reinvestment(new boilers and turbines) but running them on sticky tape and string to extract the last drop of revenue from them before closing. The corporate owners are generally philosophical about that as they have a foot in both camps, or should I say a snout in the trough of subsidised unreliables.
Finkel would understand that now and hence the 3 year notification baloney as he dances on political eggshells with the other no-brainer that future unreliables must guarantee despatchability, but with an eye to the political, has nothing to say about existing unreliables (I ask you what polly is going to tell mums and dads with their rooftop solar that they can keep their fickle electrons if they can’t guarantee despatchability?)
So we have a Chief Scientist dishing up more half baked political seance and with the 3 year closure notification rule, ignoring the other bleeding obvious fly in the ointment-
http://www.asic.gov.au/regulatory-resources/insolvency/insolvency-for-directors/directors-consequences-of-insolvent-trading/
Still he probably doesn’t plan on being around when the manure really hits the wind turbines and the sun no longer shines out of every watermelon’s backside.
Stating the obvious I know but the most economical of all energy sources is in fact renewable – hydro power.
And that is the one the radicalized environmental movement is most against, right after nuclear.
Yes, but they still like to include it in the graphs of “aren’t renewables doing so well”. The Aswan high dam was finished by the 1970’s. Green thinking stagnated in the 1960’s.
Energy continues to get more affordable as new sources become lower in cost.
Solar in California and Wind in Texas are good ‘trend-setters’ to watch.
Localized successes spur investment that lowers cost and expand markets.
Much-reviled fracking has lowered the price of fuel to the point that there is no longer an economic justification for coal-fired power plants. Suppliers are closing these as fast as they are permitted. (These closings are NOT driven by renewables; but, result from new, lower cost energy technology.)
Solar presently provides enough power to the California market to reduce the demand for baseload power, During Daylight Hours, by about 50% of the historical (pre-solar) demand. That is a huge quantity of energy.
Solar is used because it (like fracked-gas) is far cheaper. However, looking at the data of the independent energy suppliers’ organization, CAISO, and understanding the implication of their eponymous ‘Duck Curve’ reveals the growing challenge of power management as this huge quantity of Solar power enters the grid in the morning and disappears at night.
Motivated by the opportunity to gather cheap Solar energy during daylight hours and save it to sell back to the grid at baseload process in the evening, people are developing machines (including battery-based facilities) to store the solar-based energy). There’s an enormous financial incentive to remove the cost of fuel from power plant operations, and people are pursuing this (not merely to remove the carbon footprint).
As storage is developed, costs will go down and fuel-sourced energy will subside (like the coal plants).
Renewable Energy is already “affordable”. The question is how long will it take to convert to a baseload system that is powered by renewables?
What color is the sky on your planet?
CASIO for 6/17 shows solar PV/thermal peak output at 1 pm as 9894 MW which was 30% of demand. During peak demand at 6 pm it was only 19%. In December I’m certain those numbers will be considerably lower. I don’t see where solar is reducing demand for baseload power even during peak output in June.
Edit to above: That should be CAISO not CASIO and I’m missing the 50% for reducing demand for baseload power.
If I was a coal producer, I would announce tomorrow my three years notice. Presumably I could change my mind if conditions change. And, if every coal plant did the same…
Then the gov’t would take them over because that’s what socialists do just ask the Venezuelans. Welcome to third world status Australia.
That is not true.
Check out :
https://jlurtz.wordpress.com/
The deep state does not want cheap energy!
Eric Worrell Thanks for key graph. Please provide a link to the original. e.g. URL not valid.
http://www.energyaction.com.au/energy-procurement/energy-action-price-index
From the post:
I’m not Austalian, but this takes renewable subsidies to a new level. Renewables can’t do the job so let’s force what can do the job to keep supplying the energy even after “green” regulations have made them unprofitable so no one will notice renewables can’t do the job when they flip the light switch and noting happens.
Profitable? Absent Government interference and subsidies, “profitable” to the supplier is also what is beneficial to the user.
The role of Government is to keep all sides honest (false advertising and all that), not to stack the deck.
“Coal is dead.” That is an oft repeated phrase in these comments. Yet, it is just more wish-casting. Those who use the term are not realizing that there will always be a market for fossil fuels, especially coal and oil. It is a world-wide hydrocarbon market. Coal will continue to be used as fuel for electric generating stations world-wide. We have had clean coal burning in the USA for decades, and there is very little particulate pollution.
If you are into long term investments now is the time to buy into today’s fossil energy companies who are smart enough to keep the oil and coal flowing, while being able to scam the phony alternative energy markets.
The 2017 BP energy review records that in 2016:
“Global coal consumption fell by 53 million tonnes of oil equivalent (mtoe), or 1.7%, the second successive annual decline. The largest declines in coal consumption were seen in the US (-33 mtoe, an 8.8% fall) and China (-26 mtoe, -1.6%). Coal consumption in the UK more than halved (down 52.5%, or 12 mtoe) to its lowest level in our records”
coal is dead…
Meanwhile Joanne Nova has a thread up claiming Harry Dale Huffman’s flawless gas energy mechanics are wrong, and that it’s certainly true that magical insulation can make the sky hot.
Even Australia’s so called skeptical journalists have been caught barking that the fraud’s real. It’s not real, not a single word of it.
Joanne Nova stand apprised that addition of Carbon Dioxide to atmospheric air is mandated to lower that air’s temperature whether it’s a jug or a planet. No negotiation, no ”yeah but what about on Tuesdays,”
not ever.
It was Americans who founded this fraud and it was Americans who first stood up to it and we know it inside and out. Its a temperature inversion scam where it was claimed by a bunch of government administrators who were scamming grants, that a cold, thermally conductive bath of turbulent, light blocking compressed fluids, is a glass box.
And that suspension of ever more light blocking insulation in the bath, so less and less firelight warms a rock, will make thermal sensors depict ever more firelight warming the – less firelight-warmed rock.
So until Australia gets the journalists covering their problems capable of correctly answering the question of what happens to a light warmed rock when less light warms it, you guys are going to continue to have bizarre, oddly stultifying results from everything that goes on.
Your journalists have staked their reputations on some of the fraud being real and it’s not, and now they’re caught: busted: not knowing how to properly answer the question of what happens to a firelight warmed rock, if less firelight warms the rock.
Let the atmospheric chemists and physicists discussing this explain to you what we are talking about Jo Nova, we don’t need more journalists who are unable to understand which law of thermodynamics governs the atmosphere, telling us all that we don’t understand it, but less firelight warming a rock, makes it warmer.
[You have 5 different user-id’s. Chose one. .mod]
” addition of Carbon Dioxide to atmospheric air is mandated to lower that air’s temperature whether it’s a jug or a planet.”
You (or someone like you) have made this claim before, with reference to heat capacities. I don’t know what you think is going on, but adding CO2 is not mandated to lower the temperature of the air.
It may help to think of water and alcohol. Miscible in all proportions but with different heat capacities. Alcohol has a specific heat capacity about half that of water. If we add alcohol to water, do we anticipate that the temperature must go down?
The temperature actually goes up, but that is due to H bonding and therefore not relevant to dicussion of gases. But if there were no heat generated by the mixing, we would expect the temperature to stay the same if we added alcohol to water at he same temperature.
I do not understand why you think that adding CO2 (with a lower heat capacity than N2) to air means the temperature goes down. Can you explain?
Funny, I just did a post on my Province of BC which is heading for a minority government with the Greens (3 seats out of 87) holding the balance of Power. Their first order of business is to Halt a 5.1 Gw hydro dam well into construction for a “review”. They are looking at figuring out how to stop the twinning of a pipeline from Alberta, and Vancouver is doing Building code modifications to get rid of Natural Gas. Really?
Here’s a link to my post, and yours should be a foreshadowing / Harbinger to BC. But I don’t think they have any STEM cells, so it will likely be ignored. Sigh.
https://notonmywatch.com/?p=1185
By the way, Ota Šik, who was from Pilsen just like myself, found a pair of a coal mine and a power plant near Ostrava. The mine produced the coal needed by the plant – and the plant produced as much electricity as the mine consumed.
Haven’t shared this lately
SUSTAINABLE REALITY
If you like your energy sustainable,
You must first make the climate trainable.
With sun day and night,
And the wind always right…
I think it just might be attainable!
Solar and wind are renewable,
But only on small scales prove doable
They kill birds and bats
And displace habitats…
Conservationists find them eschew-able.
We would, likely, employ keener vision
Funding hydro and nuclear fission.
(The molten salt kind,
For our peace of mind)
With storm-proofed grids, for transmission.
Electricity, for the third world poor
Will unlock the virtual door…
To an affluent life,
A job and a wife
With less children than folks raised before.
So, curtailing overpopulation
Is not about “limiting nations
On what they can do
Which emits CO2”…
It relies on industrialization!
“The reason for the three year notice of closure is likely the recent abrupt closure of coal plants in several locations in Australia.”
They were not abrupt. They were planned and closures had been planned for some years. It was abrupt to the public who were not made aware of the closures until it was too late.
It seems that we among the developed nations have a death wish. Climate catastrophism and the ongoing obsession with wind and solar power (at heavy subsidies that are costly to all, because it encourages not sustainability, but instead a massive waste of economic resources and higher electricity prices) are the latest examples of this death wish.
Wind turbines are unreliable it depends whether the wind blows or not. Also turbines kill off birds and gives problems for humans straight away or over time. Noise.is another factor that is why a couple sued and won in England. I cannot understand why turbines are used as overseas some countries are getting rid of them. Too noisy and too Expensive to have plus they are made of some components that are detrimental to the environment as well as killing birds and bats.
There are no court cases which have been won in England over wind turbine noise, which is not a problem in the UK.
there has been a case won in Eire, but the circumstances are opaque, to say the least.
This article, detailing how UK and German power grids work with large amounts of renewables and the effect this has on ‘conventional’ power suppliers may be of interest:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/17/green-energy-surge-fuels-anxiety-uk-power-grid
The Daily Telegraph article quoted above repeats the statement that Australia contributes 1.4% to the world-wide CO2 emissions. This is incorrect, because it ignores natural CO2 sequestration within Australia. It turns out, that when this is taken into account Australia is a net CO2 sequestrator [1].
[1] doi:10.1260/0958-305X.26.3.457
Making stuff up again on behalf of the spivs who employ you to propagandise for them, Skanky?
Have you apologised to Dr. Crockford for maliciously maligning her professional credentials yet?
Griff
Then why are the Germans building a lot of very large coal fired power stations?
Has anybody here looked at the bladeless wind turbine technology? Interested in non-hydrocarbon energy? May be a way to rip control of a sector of energy away from Big Oil & Gas. See http://kohilowind.com/kohilo-wind-vortex-tech/ Also http://kohilowind.com/about-kohilo-wind/ A wind turbine w no exterior moving parts; operates at low wind speeds; device comes in various sizes for a home, town, factory. Little maintenance. Made of aluminum, not subject to solar flare or pulse-bomb. Not controlled by the Establishment, apparently. The partners, Derek Grassman & Tom Worseca were on Coast to Coast recently. More on the internet.
Here’s a survey article of others working w other bladeless technologies:
https://www.engerati.com/article/bladeless-wind-turbines-cut-energy-costs-40
Fascinating. Is it scalable?