Guest essay by Eric Worrall
South Australians, the world’s renewable crash test dummies, have just overwhelmingly rated affordability and reliability of supply as more important than tackling climate change in an online survey – but they still want their green energy revolution.
Your Say survey finds South Australians rank power bills, supply over tackling climate change
Paul Starick, Sunday Mail (SA)
December 9, 2017 5:30pm
SOUTH Australians are abandoning support for tackling climate change by cutting carbon emissions in favour of demanding affordable and reliable electricity supply and developing a renewable energy industry.
In agenda-setting results on a cornerstone issue for the March state election, more than 3500 respondents overwhelmingly ranked affordability and reliability as the most important components of electricity supply in the Sunday Mail Your Say, SA survey.
Forging a renewable energy industry was also popular among respondents, demonstrating support for solar, wind and batteries.
This indicates a clear public distinction between perceived hip-pocket and job creation benefits of renewable energy and the costs of curbing carbon emissions.
…
Support for developing renewable energy was strongest among females and people aged under 25. This indicates likely approval for Mr Weatherill’s decision to link his government with tech giant Elon Musk, whose Tesla firm has installed the world’s largest lithium ion battery near Jamestown.
In the wake of a statewide blackout last year, Mr Weatherill in March announced a $550 million energy plan in a bid to stem electorally disastrous blackouts this summer, centred on the battery to store renewable energy and a government-owned power plant.
Labor’s northern Adelaide heartland was least supportive of reducing carbon emissions, which was most popular in the Liberals’ eastern suburbs stronghold.
Developing a renewable energy industry was most popular among respondents in the eastern and western suburbs.
…
This survey is fascinating for a number of reasons (full survey available from the link above).
People under 25 are the strongest supporters of renewable energy, though they worry more about job security. I suspect this is because a lot of them don’t pay energy bills. After a decade of self inflicted national economic misery and sky high house prices, a lot of young adult Australians are choosing not to leave home, even into their 30s in some cases.
The fall in support amongst left wing Labor voters is interesting. My personal impression from reading left wing sites and watching a few video speeches is that a lot of left wingers support green policies because green narratives slip easily into the left wing narrative of corporate irresponsibility. Since a lot of lefties already believe corporations are selfish, greedy and arrogant, they are very ready to believe when greens claim corporations are also messing up the planet and their children’s future.
This complacent leftwing cheerleading for bashing businesses appears to come unstuck when the businesses start to break under the pressure, when lefties suddenly wake up that people’s jobs are on the line – which has been happening a lot lately in South Australia.
The survey suggests South Australians strongly believe other Australians look down on them – they have a very negative view of how outsiders perceive South Australia.
Despite all this, South Australians don’t appear to have entirely lost their faith. Affluent South Australians who can afford sky high electricity prices still support renewables. A substantial minority of South Australians view green jobs as being critical to the state’s economic future.
I suspect Greens must still be getting traction blaming everyone else for the job losses, renewable power price hikes and electricity blackouts. Despite the job losses, the factory closures and the painful cost of living price hikes, I suspect South Australians will continue to believe the green lies, they will keep chasing their impossible dream of a renewable future for a long time to come.
Update (EW): Nick Stokes points out the survey is paywalled – I didn’t notice this as I viewed the full article without a paywall via Google search results. The breakdown of the first question of the survey is below:
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“Australian: Weatherill’s green power push leaves SA in the dark
“Weatherill has yet to admit that the closure of Northern power, with the loss of 520 megawatt generating capacity, had anything to do with the blackouts that have afflicted SA for the past 18 months. Instead he points the bone at dark, malevolent forces. He accuses the power companies of “pursuing profits at the expense of reliable, affordable power”. He denounces the mendicancy of neighbouring states. A blackout last December was caused by “a fault on the Victorian side of the border”. He blames the Turnbull government, claiming “South Australians have been let down by a broken National Energy Market”. Most of all he blames the weather gods, who deliver their wrath more frequently on SA than any other state, directing mighty winds and lightning strikes to the weakest points about the grid.
“Independent: Australian industry prepares for possible blackouts
“Australia’s summer, which started on Friday, is forecast to be hotter-than-normal in the nation’s southeast. That raises the spectre of a repeat of outages that hit South Australia and New South Wales last February if households crank up air conditioners at the same time as the wind dies down or extreme heat knocks out an ageing coal-fired plant. The threat has prompted global miner BHP Billiton to install 30 megawatts of diesel generation at its Olympic Dam copper mine in South Australia, which was forced to close for two weeks last year after a state-wide blackout that cost it $105m (€89m). Meanwhile, Alcoa, which runs the Portland aluminium smelter in Victoria, is taking a different tack, offering to curb its power use for a fee for up to an hour during peak-demand. “If the power goes off for any more than three hours, our potlines will freeze and they cannot be unfrozen. It’s a catastrophic loss,” said Matthew Howell, chief executive of Tomago Aluminium, owned by Rio Tinto, CSR and Norsk Hydro.”
http://euanmearns.com/blowout-week-206/
Weatherdill is a devotee of the Hillary Clinton school of externalising blame for all negative consequences
SA govt are just plain crazy. Instead of paying A$8m. annually to keep the northern power station running, they dynamited it and then paid hundreds of millions of dollars for wind turbines, then a big battery and now polluting diesel generators which run on imported diesel. And they won’t tell anybody how much they actually paid. On top of this they have adequate unused gas reserves.
Like most government boondoggles, they will expand both so-called green energy and eventually – without fanfare – reliable base load that supplies energy when the green energy goes brown. They can show off their wind farms and just ignore the costs of having both, passing those on to the consumer.
If you can keep taxing people more and more, then slowly raising their energy prices should not be any more difficult. Many people are either are willing to pay more, or too dumb to realize what is happening, or just not focused enough on any one thing long enough to do something about it. And for those that are paying attention, if you can’t control the elections then you are just out of luck – I am really sorry.
I keep hoping the U.S. will re-discover nuclear power, produce a standardized reactor, and build truly reliable energy generation plants, but in the meantime there is plenty of fracked gas here to burn (and coal if gas runs low). California may black out, but most of the U.S. isn’t that far into the tar pit.
The propagandists have been very successful at fooling the young.
Australians have changed . They used to have such a low tolerance for politically correct BS but at least thousands won’t be dying from fuel poverty deaths like the climate conmen in the UK have caused each year . How a massive criminal lawsuit hasn’t been launched yet is a miracle .
The Aussie education system has changed.
When I was a kid teachers had a bit of fun, there was scope for personality.
For example, after corporal punishment was banned, I brought in a high voltage electric zapper to primary school, fun toy for sending a shock through 20+ people holding hands.
My teacher’s question was “does it leave marks?”. Very well behaved class that day.
When I got into a fight with the school bully, and gave him a smack on the nose so he cried, one of my teachers said “good”. Unimaginable that would happen these days.
Teachers could teach kids how to read and write, instead of having to follow the curriculum, the ghastly word recognition programme which results in a lot of people younger than 45 have trouble distinguishing between words like “lot” and “lost”. They have been taught to take a quick glance at the word and try to guess what it is, rather than honing their brain to read the letters very quickly and match the letters in the word to their memory of the word, or sound the word out if the word is unfamiliar.
Nowadays Aussie education is all about indoctrination and social consensus. Occasionally you get a good teacher who strays a little from the official agenda, but without lots of support from home Aussie kids these days turn into brainwashed conformists.
I’m very disappointed that WUWT hasn’t seen fit to publish news of the completion of the 100MW Tesla battery in South Australia. I’ll stand corrected if I missed it…..
It it works reliably, safely and without excessive degradation over time, and delivers on the promise of increased stability of the grid, then I feel that this could prove to be the start of a movement _requiring_ that wind farms include some form of predictable, buffered supply.
If it falls on its face, or goes FFZZTTT-BANG when it gets wet, then that’s an important result too.
Whatever the outcome, here’s an actual live site in use and we should be keeping a close eye on its workings i.e. efficiency (energy in vs energy out), charge level (%age of capacity), voltage/frequency stability and ability to actually supply on demand.
It could be Quite Interesting.
Totally agree with all your premises here but then why roll out the diesel generators if such battery installations can solve the fickle wind problem reliably? Don’t all the Green experts believe they can in the march to 100% renewables? Haven’t they done all the homework on that before deliberately bankrupting reliable thermal power stations and trashing the communal grid? Or is it really the case they didn’t have a clue what they were doing and need to be tarred and feathered and run out of town?
@observa – re generators if batteries work.
I think that’s the big question that this installation may provide the answer to. Does anyone know whether such statistics are available (along the lines of the Templar UK Grid watch site)?
If the measurements are available, then we should be tracking them and exposing any such instances where diesel is needed. If diesel isn’t needed and the grid doesn’t go dark, then we should think more deeply about wind+battery. #opinion
Um……You really don’t need to wait for the result. It’s entirely predictable to the technically numerate.. We have design engineering. Just find out the expected demand in KWh over a worst case period of no renewables, assuming no top up. Multiply that by the Powerwall 2 cost of USD 400/KWh, and you have the 4 yearly replacement cost, roughly.
Storing converted diffuse electrical energy as another form of enrgy, then regenerating it later, cost a humungous amount of money and consumes massive resources, mostly not renewable if Li-Ion.
Lead acid is better in fact. Trying to back up the grid with mobile phone technology developed for quite another purpose is a daft idea. In fact a wholly unnecessary solution to a self imposed problem. Electricity generatio doesn’t work like that. It gets seriously self harming once you depend on renewables with duty cycles under 50% for most of the supply.
None of it makes any sense in economic or energy supply terms for South Australia. They need nuclear if CO2 is a real worry for them, even if it isn’t really. They have a huge emptiness of a sub-continent no one wants to live in to put it in, with solar offset to match up to mid day a/c peak loads. Simple and effective, minimal storage required – and no subsidies. Because this rational solution would just work, matching supply to demand in real time, at zero CO2, it don’t need no steenking subsidies, nor storage.
But I expect they’ll go and build some more expensive monuments, scatter some expensive Musk Oil around, then pray for the wind to come. Like the Moche did for rain. Why does Ausralia pay to educate these people, they clearly learn nothing useful – like STEM basics. Do the arithmetic, you Numpties. IMO
You can see the battery in operation real-time on the Aust. NEM website. Apparently it has been through a number of 30MW discharge cycles. It’s difficult to know whether it is achieving its objective because the SA govt won’t tell us exactly what it is supposed to do. One statement was that it is supposed to provide 70MW for 10 mins, which if occurring regularly would seem to shorten the battery lifetime.
I think all I am seeing is the 30MW dedicated to the windfarm (no recorded charge or discharge above 30MW): so far it has seen little action, which is perhaps to be expected while they test and commission the facilties. I think they fully charged it today for the first time, but I’ll need to check the detail of how long it was charging for. I think the data I see are simply spot readings every 5 minutes, which makes it hard to be certain what it was doing in between readings.
I plan to keep an eye on it and analyse its visible use.
Update: I have now seen the battery used at 100MW charge and discharge rates, and charged fully (nominally more than full at around 150MWh, but it probably reflects system losses rather than extra hidden capacity). Still subject to the caveats of reading too much into 5 minute spot data.
Having worked in different areas over the years with different designs of power grids I find the idea of a battery back up system laughable for a number of reasons. In an islanded or isolated system batteries will provide some power for finite time. In the case of South Australia I am sure in a power upset of the major grid of the region will force South Australia into an island mode as the rest of the country sheds it like a unwanted brother in-law. At that point the batteries will take the increased load and begin their discharge decline. If you look at a normal power outage it takes about an hour on average for crews and operators to respond to find the source and to begin to reestablish a stable supply. If it is a quick fix then power maybe restored in an hour if it is a bigger problem then it maybe beyond the batteries capabilities and then the grid goes black. Common sense and design criteria for the battery design and specifications. Look at Puerto Rico for the worst case. Once the power is restored there is an inrush and a heavy demand which is brought on by the system that is trying to regain its equilibrium as quickly as possible. Think of it as every fridge and freezer comes on to try and reach there cooled set points. In the north countries it is furnaces that peak the demand. Now throw in a bunch of depleted battery banks into the mix and the grid recovery becomes longer and more unstable. When running an island system there were times when the demand of the inrush after a power failure caused another black out due to over loads. The answer would be to have control of the charge rates of all the batteries from a central point but that again raises the complexity of the system. In 2007 there was a blackout of the eastern seaboard of the US and Canada that was caused by a power line hitting trees due to over load and temperature on a small feeder line. The master plan and control program for the central power grid control center in Indianapolis had never been fully tested and when it was needed it failed miserably. Full power was not restored in some areas for at least 2 to 3 weeks. Instead of batteries they should install Gas turbine peaking units. One site we installed would bring on 170 MW in 17 minutes from a cold start. Gas turbines would be better if the wind stopped blowing on their wind mills for a length of time.
Boris please consider turning this into a post, send a detailed writeup of the issues to Anthony. It never occurred to me that batteries could make things worse, I thought they were useless, not problematic.
I believe that the use of lithium batteries is wrong for grid backup, where you could expect a number of high-current discharges to be required. There are a lot better battery choices to support these types of high-discharge loads.
Perhaps that poll result shows that the under-25s have passed through the “education system” during a brainwashing period, with little exposure to logical facts. It would take quite a strong personality to disregard all of the nonsense spouted by Gore, the Green Blob, Hollywierd, most of the MSM, and the technically illiterate politicians.
http://www.2gb.com/energy-minister-hopeful-of-no-blackouts-this-summer/ australia in power crises