Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Australian government is so impressed by the alleged plunge in renewable and battery storage costs they think it will no longer be necessary to subsidise renewables.
Coalition rethinks need for clean energy target as renewable cost plunges
The Turnbull government is rethinking the need to adopt a clean energy target, believing the rapidly falling cost of renewable energy means there may no longer be a requirement for subsidies.
In the keynote address to The Australian Financial Review National Energy Summit, federal Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg will highlight the falling costs of wind and solar energy, including battery storage capacity, as he stresses emissions reduction cannot come at the expense of reliability and affordability.
“It is challenging but possible to simultaneously put downward pressure on prices and enhance the reliability of the system, while meeting our international emissions reductions targets,” he will say at the start of the two-day summit that begins on Monday.
The speech will signal a possible shift away from plans to design and implement a CET from 2020 onwards, in the belief emissions reduction can be achieved without such a scheme.
…
Mr Frydenberg will place great emphasis on reliability. Apart from already flagged reliability measures such a strategic power reserves over the next four summers, and the push to keep open the Liddell coal-fired power station, Mr Frydenberg will flag the introduction of “day-ahead commitments” to apply to the renewable energy industry.
Currently, a wind farm, for example, produces power on the same day it sells it into the market. Under the change, it would have to commit to provide the power the day before, meaning it would need either back-up storage or an agreement with a gas generator, for example, to meet the commitment should the wind not be blowing.
“It is against this backdrop of a declining cost curve for renewables and storage, greater efficiencies that can be found in thermal generation and the need for sufficient dispatchable power in the system that we are considering the Finkel review’s 50th recommendation to which we’ll respond before the end of the year,” he will say of the plans for a CET.
…
Sadly existing subsidies will be maintained for now, but at least at face value this announcement by the Australian federal energy minister appears to provide a roadmap for the eventual complete elimination of renewable subsidies, and a normalisation of the relationship between renewable providers and other energy providers.
If this announcement is followed by swift action to axe all renewable subsidies, and remove all special privileges for renewables in the marketplace, it pretty much eliminates my objections to renewables. All I ever demanded is that renewables compete on a level playing field. If renewables businesses are now able to compete due to plunging costs of renewable installations and energy storage, good luck to them.
Of course, if claims of renewable and energy storage cost parity with fossil fuels all turn out to be a pack of marketing spin, with market normality restored most existing Aussie renewables businesses will die by the invisible hand of Adam Smith.
I notice Tesla’s SA battery build is proceeding at record pace…
(UK new solar and German offshore wind bids have both come in subsidy free in the last few months.)
Griff … everything Tesla does is at “record pace” until it isn’t & then reality strikes and like their recent announcement that Model 3 production is missing the target by almost 82% the truth comes out. Fortunately true believers like yourself have made up their minds and won’t allow themselves to get confused by the facts and so Tesla (and the other green cons) move on the to the next scam.
I just saw an aerial photo of the site… 50% of the batteries are installed on site…
building grid scale battery storage is fast…
Installing them may or may not be fast. Assuming the infrastructure is already in place.
Building them, not so much.
Recycling them at the end of life even less so
Say griff, please explain to us how they will recharge that battery when they only have wind and solar and NO FF backup whatsoever.
Blackout for “up to” 300,000 homes. Just hope none of their “customers” has a Tesla. Dude! Where’s my power? It’s easy with smart meters.
That’s someone else’s problem.
‘Up to’ can be interpreted as ‘no more than’
Treble the Solar/Wind capacity
Griff, again, comments on something he knows nothing about. How can Musk be 50% into building summat he has only just signed to build?
“How can Musk be 50% into building summat he has only just signed to build?”
Getting it signed up was half the battle? 😉
Not at all. I think it was a “done deal” from the initial announcements by the SA Govn’t and Musk. The locations for a start is remote, 200Kms from CBD Adelaide. Why? Out of sight, out of mind!
I reckon that is just outside the perimeter of the blast zone.
It is physically 50% built Patrick.
I dare say you could drive over and look at it.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-29/elon-musk-tesla-world-biggest-battery-reaches-halfway-mark/9001542
“I reckon that is just outside the perimeter of the blast zone.”
Good point, Yirgach. 🙂
Well of course it is 50% built, Musk has had 3 years to produce half the needed batteries
“Griff October 9, 2017 at 8:16 am
It is physically 50% built Patrick.”
Before the contract was, publically, signed Griff, BEFORE THE CONTRACT WAS PUBLICALLY SIGNED. Something dodgy is going on with the SA premier. He wants this to happen regardless of the consequenses. It’s a political stunt, nothing more, nothing less. I hope SA voters respond next election.
Griff, one of those photos looks very much the existing Mira Loma installation. I doubt that the SA installation has reached that stage yet.
Ah! I see your confusion… yes, he appears to have started building before the agreement finally signed. seems a bit hasty… but there it is.
I can’t find the article with the nice picture of the thing, alas..
“wind bids have both come in subsidy free”
Deceptive little [pruned], aren’t you.
The only way funding could be found was through ironcast contracts at stupidly high prices.
Just another BIG SUBSIDY, just paid in a different way.
I and bet you knew that, so your comment is just your usual low-level DECEIT
Some figures, instead of abuse, would be a useful contribution
Meanwhile the UK govt thinks this is subsidy free:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/subsidy-free-solar-comes-to-the-uk
Politicians lie. It’s what they do.
There may be no up front subsidies, but the must buy provisions are still in place, and the above market rates for renewable energy is still in place.
Everybody lies, Politicians are merely Professional liars
When you are the first to do something, everything you do is a record.
That’s not to say that anything you are doing is actually worth doing.
But UK offshore is highly subsidised, something you didn’t mention Griff. UK Solar output will be low for the next 6 months subsidised or not.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2017/10/09/affordable-offshore-wind-the-real-facts-greenpeace-dont-want-you-to-know/#more-30311
German offshore bids this year came in without subsidy. UK offshore will likely follow.
UK onshore if permitted would likely come in without subsidy now.
UK solar without subsidy is a reality.
@Griff: Did you actually read that link you provided from http://www.abc.net.au?
“……..It will store up to 129 MWh of electricity, meaning at full power it will last for a little over an hour.
Construction of the battery was announced in July, in response to an expression of interest process run by the South Australian Government.
The Government has set an operating deadline of December 1 for the battery along with 250 megawatts of temporary diesel generators, to help address expected shortfalls across the summer period…..”.
By “full power” I assume they mean when the batteries are fully charged. Wow, a whole hour after the sun goes down….I am impressed….not. And the batteries will last how long….5 to ten years? Will the SA govt spend the money to replace them every five to ten years? Maybe not? Strike two. And will they spend the money to replace the panels every 20 to 25 years? Will the solar array hold up when another one of those storms which knocked out power back in September goes barreling though SA again? Strikes thee and four. When we play baseball here in the U.S., three strikes means you’re out.
And guess who’s on the way to give Elon Musk a run for his money? Ummmmm…..the Chinese maybe?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-28/china-is-about-to-bury-elon-musk-in-batteries.
Whatever Musk tries to do, the Chinese can more of and cheaper. Surprise surprise, eh Griff?
A record setting pace for? Building humongous battery packs? Seeing as NONE have ever been built before…If he finishes it, it will set the record.
Please leave the hollow hyperbole at the door.
Even the leftwing, alarmist journal Telepolis https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Quo-vadis-Windenergie-3804237.html (german) writes about the real reasons why some desperate companies bid too low for (future) contracts.
Plus, even the windmill-manufacturers’ trade-association speaks out against the obvious deception going on there, as do leftist and green politicians.
95% of all preliminary accepted wind projects are „citizen-owned“; these asssociations are spared many environmental obligations and requirements. In reality, most of the „citizens“ are employees of big contractors who just want to circumvent the law.
Furthermore, only a small minority of the accepted projects has already got all necessary aprovals. Any failure or delay in getting them will create problems for the whole supply chain.
On top of that, the new projects cluster in the north and north-east. Even now all wind-energy from there cannot be transported to the south, where it will be needed after the closure of nuclear-plants , because it is just too much (if and when the wind blows).
New (underground) transmission lines will cost the electricity-customers dearly. Even now avg. grid-costs of 7.5 c/kwh are the biggest part of the residential electricity price, followed by customer-borne subsidies (6.88 c). The power-stations charge less than 5.7 €-cents for electrical energy – one fifth of the retail price.
Consider that; then admit that you earn a little verbal pushing around.
50% done? Great. Now he can start emitting as much CO2 as 8 years of fuel for a regular car, just to build the batteries. What a big step forward: instead of releasing this along 8 years, he can do it in a matter of days. xD
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/06/20/tesla-car-battery-production-releases-as-much-co2-as-8-years-of-gasoline-driving/
Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.
Me thinks celebration is a bit premature. Our “wonderful” leader here in South Australia is pushing for all of the states to introduce their own CET independent of the federal government. Jay and his “mean green ideological taxing machine” will not be swayed by any sensible talk of reducing subsidies.
Still, it is nice to see some movement in this direction.
Something is “out” by three decimal places here. But I get the idea.
SteveT
Forrest – that alone is worth + 999,999,998
Priceless!
Auto, still chuckling.
Pigs will fly.
An increase in price is actually a reduction. Get with the program, citizen!
Yes we are being told and told and told that the price of renewables if falling/plummeting. What will fascinate me is when the renewables need renewing. I am tipping that the economics do not stand up so just who will be paying for the new wind and solar farms??? No prizes here folks.
Something like this should be the standard: all world citizens should be able to enjoy electricity at no more than 0.12 US$kWh. The goal should be to reduce that to 0.10 US$/kWh by 2020, and 0.05 by 2030. Anything else seems to be a re-ordering of carts and horses.
Excuse me? I’m already at US$~0 06/kWhr retail.
Happy you. And you proves this is no dream, but current reality for some.
But he rightly said “all world citizens”; many of them still don’t have reliable electricity, or much more expensive.
And what they advocate to help those people will only make it worse!
Indeed. Although you can question if this is really to help those people, since the very same pushing renewable usually complain there are too many of “those”.
Electricity is the “opium” of society. Like MS O365 subscriptions, once hooked, hooked for life, literally. So, energy suppliers, with Govn’t help, make energy “scarce” and thus increases price. But we are all hooked, and need a “fix”. The fix is available, but twice the cost now. Crime increases. Supply is restricted, demand increases. Does this sound familiar? The Kennedys made their fortune this way (With alcohol).
Government is a source of untold “profits”.
South Australia have had a few close calls with being blacked out again if you read the AEMO comments at the bottom of the page .
http://www.aemo.com.au/Electricity/National-Electricity-Market-NEM/Data-dashboard#nem-dispatch-overview
“Renewable costs are plunging”.
As is the price of my bridge.
Didn’t I read somewhere that there’s a limit to wind turbine performance- somebody’s law- which cannot be beaten by ‘advances in technology ‘ ?
Betz’s law (see wikipedia).
However, this is not really important. What matters is the cost, otherwise, there is enough wind on Earth to provide all our needs.
Just removing subsidies is a long way from assuring a level playing field. Any and all power providers to the grid should be required to be under the control of the grid operators and able to provide power on demand.
For some strange reason, renewable folks have hypnotized themselves into believing that batteries, a storage device, can transform an unreliable renewable power source iinto a reliable power source. A small
amount of investigation should reveal the problems with this myth- where does the power stored in the batteries come from? How much power are you storing, in terms of hours, days, weeks? How do the batteries get recharged ? If batteries are depeleted and then renewable power resumes, how fast can those batteries be recharged with renewable power? If you are expecting fossil backup for recharges, then what’s the purpose of the batteries in the first place? The answer, obviously, is that the main benefit of the batteries is to transpose power from one time of the day, when renewable power greatly exceeds demand, to a later time of day, when renewable power disappears but demand still exists, as it always does. But wind doesn’t lend itself to this strategy very well. The best situation would be a desert, where the sun shines with great reliability (I assume) and you can count on a certain amount of power collected, and available, regardless of the time of day. That is in line with our Energy Dept’s requirement that commerical solar farms should only be located in deserts of the Southwest. Sorry about the rest of the country. But the main complaints of renewables is their complicated and Rube Goldberg contortions, plus the toxic visuals presented by humungous windmills, whose propellers turn and cause psychological discomfort, and which require enormous tracts of land – their geographical footprint is astoundingly huge. A really crappy and primitive way to generate power (18th Century style), especially when one looks to the obvious alternative – nuclear power. Especially the revolutionary (and revised) molten salt reactors, that occupy a tiny spot of land, that can be located absolutely anywhere – there are no requirements for a body of water for cooling (they are air cooled) and they can load-follow (act as baseload AND peak load generators – little or no need for fossil fuel peak generation). Thus the supposed advanatge of solar roof generation (non-centralized generation) is also
present to a large extent in molten salt small modular reactors – in fact far better for a city’s power supply – the reactors can be lcated within the city itself. Or right next to a power distribution center. Their geographical footprint is tiny. In a sense, these reactors are not new, conceptualy, and proptotypes have operated
over most of the past 70 years. It is the new materials and some bright ideas that has made these ultra-safe, ultra cheap reactors now practical. They will produce power cheaper than any other generation technology and can be built in factories, and installed with minimal site preparation required. Rushing to install windmills and solar farms and not waiting the few years before these molten salt reactors are commercialized is a really big mistake. There is no purpose nor reason from rushing into a bad energy strategy – nothing whatsoever is to be gained by any emission reductions that might be realized in these next few years.
What is incredible is to read all these silly estimates of the future that take as their premise that no new
zero emission energy technology will arise in the next 50 years!!! Do these experts live on Mars? That’s where Elon Musk wants to go.
“Currently, a wind farm, for example, produces power on the same day it sells it into the market. Under the change, it would have to commit to provide the power the day before, meaning it would need either back-up storage or an agreement with a gas generator, for example, to meet the commitment should the wind not be blowing.”
Finally the penny is dropping with despatchability and a level playing field but you think only one day is going to cut it Minister?
http://anero.id/energy/wind-energy/2017/june
All suppliers of electrons to the communal grid should be restricted to that amount they can reasonably guarantee 24/7 all year round and they can keep all their fickle ones. Finkel recognised that with the recommendation for any investment in future unreliables but predictably he squibbed the political hard yards with retrospectivity to save so many red faces with the current mess. In my eyes that simply makes him a chief political scientist.
The electrons don’t get sold. What is sold is the work done by the field created by their back/forward movement in the AC circuit.
Figure of speech.
Actually, the average customer pays for a right to use power AND, within this power limit, energy he uses (kWh), when he wants. The “when he wants” part is very important. Price would be very different in a “when the provider can” world.
This is where the “apparent” low cost of renewables meets the law of unintended consequences.
Actually, it’s about time. They were protecting the lesser players and throwing money at over-sized demonstration projects for too long. The sector leaders are still out there and have been ready and willing for some time.
solar record in SA:
https://cleantechnica.com/2017/10/09/rooftop-solar-provides-48-south-australia-power-pushing-grid-demand-record-low/
Imagine what it will be like with the solar CSP switched in and the Tesla battery…!!
(and note the amusing link: Malcolm Turnbull’s solar installation)
A few days with no sun and no wind will fix the problem.
I see… there are many days with no sun and no wind in SA?
Well, half the day see no sun at all, for sure. This is called “night”, you know.
Tomorrow Griff will learn another word.
As for the wind, the real question is, how many days have enough wind (but not too much, either)
You do realize they also have to about double the installed solar too, right?
Can’t charge your batteries, while supplying an equal amount to the grid at the same time.
And then your fail rate goes up 2x.
It’s like this Griff-
“The key here appears to be the moderate temperatures of early spring, which meant few air conditioners switched on, combined with excellent solar output, with the state’s more than 700MW of rooftop solar producing 538.54 MW at the time of minimum demand.”
and that’s the typical ‘duck curve’ with solar and just what do you think has to be up and running ready to ramp up for the 4-8pm peak demand period? Nice sunny spring weather with ideal panel temperatures with no summer or winter HVAC peak but rather than producing solar power at low midday households would be better investing in solar hot water storage.
It’s like this Griff. We have the highest power prices in the world now and we haven’t stumped up for storage for despatchability when the coal goes.
solar output matches peak aircon demand… plus you now have the storage and CSP coming in SA to manage the evening transition from solar (plus all those domestic batteries helping out)
I believe your prices were already high due to past over investment to meet demand which never materialised?
Imagining without a price term again..and again…and again. The no subsidy is not based on any labor-intensive rooftop or battery tech cases. It’s based on incremental cost reduction of PV line costs and deployed at large scale.
Skanky, you’re not just out of your depth, you’re right at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
Now go and apologise to Dr. Crockford.
Malcolm Turncoat borrowed AU$500k to invest in OneTell. Sold all shares about 4months before OneTell went bust. AU$500 turned in to about AU$52mil. Insider trading springs to mind as almost all other investors got screwed. So he can afford solar on his multi-million dollar, sea front mansion.
More lines from evening at the improv. Standup at its best.
I just wish Griff could get some new material.
I wish giffiepooed would stop repeating the same falsehoods and fabrications.
I haven’t seen any figures refuting what I say from you, have I?
We already knew you are blind, Griff.
Many times.
Making your refusal(s) to accept facts willful ignorance.
giffiepooed’s utter fealty to false science, specious claims and absurd assumptions is simply paid trollop dependent upon the green funding scam.
“I haven’t seen any figures refuting what I say from you, have I?”
YES!
As have many other posters, and corrected your BS more times than can be counted.
A more accurate question from you would be “Have you ever seen any figures that DO NOT refute what I say?”
Email I received from GWPF in UK says they filed a formal complaint with government over exaggerated advertising claims by wind companies saying prices are plummeting 50%. These firms know theres little chance of pushback on their outrageous claims. Nice to see some are pushing back….with formal complaints and cutting off subsidies
Why stop there? Cancel all of the subsidies, including the fake fossil fuel subsidies!
Then equalize solar and wind energy with all other energy producers!
• Tax wind and solar energy producers, just as fossil fuels are taxed!
• Include surcharges for road maintenance, electric grid maintenance and improvements.
• Require bonds to cover the costs of repairing land used for wind turbines and solar.
• Apply penalties when wind and solar fail to meet demand.
• Penalize wind and solar for every animal injured or killed.
• Penalize wind and solar for any negative effects on humans, wildlife and land.
This is simply a cynical grab for some political credits. The govt has lost its way completely on energy policy. They dont want to upset any warmists by building another coal plant (yet the rest of the world seems to be able to do it), but dont know how to fix base load power provision issues. This also appears to be a way around the Renewable Energy Target (RET) for the govt who are meant to publicly announce an RET prior to the end of the year. The leftist opposition simply wont let the Govt get away without a nominating a target.
The left are masters of deception. This whole thing sounds to me like a walking back on renewables. There has been no break through on these technologies. The deception that they are on a par with fossil fuels is based on the manufactured “fact” that they call legitimate business deductions for fossil fuel production a subsidy! Because fossil fuel production is an enormous business, deductions for costs are large and so is the enormous taxes they pay to governments. To compare ‘welfare’ energy to real, abundant, on demand, cheap fossil fuel to renewables is a GrouchoMarxist joke.
the only reason we MIGHT stop throwing $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ to wind farms is Australia is broke