Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Subsidies for everyone – the Aussie Federal Government is pushing to make electricity retailers responsible for continuity of supply, which will likely force them to pay for fossil fuel generators to maintain reserve capacity to cover gaps in the renewable energy supply.
States push back against subsidies for coal and gas-fired power plants
By political reporter Melissa Clarke
Posted Thu 26 Aug 2021 at 6:27pmKey points:
- The government wants to introduce a scheme that would require energy retailers to pay for spare energy capacity in case it is needed
- Energy Minister Angus Taylor wants it to include coal and gas generators
- Renewables companies are lobbying against the plan
The Federal Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction, Angus Taylor, is battling to get support from the states and territories for his plan to get electricity retailers to pay coal and gas-fired power generators to keep operating.
The federal government wants to introduce a Physical Retailer Reliability Obligation (PRRO) to ensure there is enough energy available in the National Electricity Market (NEM) at all times to fill gaps when wind and solar power cannot meet demand.
The PRRO would require energy retailers to pay for spare energy capacity in case it is needed.
That spare capacity could come from renewable resources like batteries, pumped hydro, and demand management, but the federal government wants it to also include unused capacity in coal and gas-fired power plants.
That could see energy retailers giving money to coal-fired plants and prolonging their use through the system, if their existing spare capacity is cheaper than developing new storage options.
While the Commonwealth is aggressively promoting it, the states and territories are yet to be convinced, given the scheme could undermine investment in the renewable alternatives.
…
What can I say – as an Aussie, there is a reason I have a big generator downstairs.
Aussie electricity providers in my opinion long since gave up on the idea that it is their job to maintain grid stability, so there has been a rush to the exit door, with operators of unfashionable coal and gas generators embracing the new renewable energy age.
The Federal government has belatedly realised that, unless they do something, the only people who will be held responsible for the inevitable blackouts and grid instability are the politicians who created this mess.
I doubt this last minute outbreak of almost sanity will save the situation. Coal and gas plant operators still have no motivation to invest in proper maintenance, or build new plants, so Australia’s end of life fossil fuel generators are likely rapidly becoming almost as decrepit and unreliable as the renewable energy systems which are supposed to replace them.
And somewhere squeezed in the middle of this circus will be the energy retailers, who will now be forced to buy expensive unreliable electricity from renewable plant operators when it is available, yet at the same time they will be forced to pay the owners of decrepit coal and gas plants to stand by, allegedly ready to jump in when the renewables fail. Under the new reliability obligation, energy retailers will also likely be expected to pay large fines to the Australian Federal Government, when everything inevitably falls in a heap.
No doubt energy retailers will soon start demanding subsidies of their own, to continue operating in such a hostile regulatory environment.
Ya gotta love this! “The beatings will continue until harmony is restored!”
Government regulations create major production problems and then tries to ‘fix it’ through even more punitive regulation of the producers.
I think that is somewhere in the politicians creed.
In other words, the one group who won’t have to pay anything to maintain grid stability, is the group that has caused all of the problems in the first place.
The renewable energy providers.
The
renewable energy providerspoliticians.A more appropriate apportioning of blame.
You let these subsidy leaches get a foothold and entitlement becomes the norm. This is exactly the way alcoholics and cocaine addicts reason when denied their fix. They’re angry and abusive to their enablers when the enabling stops.
The government just has to weather the storm. They have been complicit, no doubt about it, but the larger public good has been egregiously neglected and exploited. The public surely didn’t vote to quadruple their electricity cost (on the monthly bill plus the unreckoned subsidies to the wealthy crony caps) to get intermittent power, and to lose well paying jobs in large industrial projects that are closing because of costs and reliability of power.
Sheesh, you kidding me? Regulations are punitive because they require grid operators to make sure power is reliably delivered to meet demand?!! The cronies don’t realize that they are admitting renewables can’t do the job. They aren’t being blocked from the market, they simply have to up the quality of their product to match other sources of power.
The grid actually has a critical purpose. And it’s not to be forced to accept a shabby product in order to provide wealth to purveyors of of it. Many Olympic sized swimming pools of tears have to fall and when it’s over, laws have to be passed to protect the public interest. Maybe product quality laws already on the books can easily be used: ‘You can’t use arsenic as an insecticide on your carrot farm.
How about ending any kind of energy subsidies and let the free market decide how to best provide. Any honest person who believes in carbon based warming would admit that the only feasible solution is nuclear power.
I’m for that!
Central Planning, regardless of the type of government, is doomed to failure!
President Ronald Reagan: “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
The cost of backup for wind and solar should be borne by the wind and solar investors, as one major effect of mandatory buy in for renewables is to make investing in conventional sources less desirable.
What went down inTexas in February is an example of the effects of having too much wind and solar on a grid, despite how the greens are spinning it otherwise.
No, Texas went down entirely due to natural gas fossil fuel and ignoring repeated advice about winterising fossil fuel generation.
Griff,
There was insufficient back up power to totally replace the failure of the wind and solar power during a high demand period of colder than normal weather. We had a similar event here in California last year, and we will have similar problems in the future.
While it is true that wind and solar did not deliver, clearly the culprit is the natural gas 🙂
That is hilarious however I think you should have included the “/s” sarc tag as witnessed by your -3 rating.
Explain to me how you spin that theory….?
The reason why natural gas failed was because the EPA required the pipeline companies to replace that compressors that were powered from the pipelines, with compressors that were powered by the electric grid.
When the renewables predictably failed, and the grid became unstable, the compressors lost power and weren’t able to deliver enough pressure to feed the power plants.
The reason the Texas grid went down is (1) they did not go back far enough for the reference freeze (stayed in this millennium, minor), needed 1989, even further would have helped. (2) the wind died, same lack of historical knowledge, this time centuries (3) various backup plans inadequate. They are still bringing in the turbines, the experiment continues despite us knowing the problems from another experiment a couple of generations ago.
I recall a saying about that those that ignore history, well that’s they way it goes. Examples still abound, links all over the place, require homework.
natural gas failed because too much emphasis over the last decade was spent on the Unreliables. The Unreliables did what they do. They stopped producing electricity when the wind stopped blowing. That left not enough gas fired generation reserves to deal with inevitable drop-outs in very cold weather. Put anoither way, grid system resiliency had been sacrificed on the altar of “renewable” insanity and virtue signaling nonsense.
Blaming Natural Gas generation is dumb than dirt, because the solution is more Natural Gas, not more Unreliable wind and solar. But then Grif is dumber than dirt.
Griff, don’t worry, you will be made a high lieutenant in the New World Order after the Great Reset, due to your comments and your leftist mind, and you will be allowed to SOAK THE RICH that is anybody with more than Berie Sander’s $37M they will have to pay their fair share, and $100 bills will be floating down out of the sky to your kind, yes, the dream is alive, but then later you find that you are harvesting the crops with your bare hands at the point of a gun (no fossil fuels) because you advocated for CLIMATE ACTION NOW!
Griff, there was very little wind during the three days of freezing rain, so the windmills would have not worked even if the deicing could handle that much ice.
Of course, the weatherizing could have been better, but using too many heat pumps and the damnfool decision of Obama’s EPA to require electric compressors on gas pipelines did not help
Precisely.
Only in the fantasy world of Griff the Idiot
Well done Griff for reading from your hymn sheet.
The reality is more nuanced of course.
It can be found here in “planning engineer”‘s article on JC’s Climate Etc site:
Assigning Blame for the Blackouts in Texas | Climate Etc. (judithcurry.com)
Here’s the conclusion:
Anyone can look at Texas and observe that fossil fuel resources could have performed better in the cold. If those who owned the plants had secured guaranteed fuel, Texas would have been better off. More emergency peaking units would be a great thing to have on hand. Why would generators be inclined to do such a thing? Consider, what would be happening if the owners of gas generation had built sufficient generation to get through this emergency with some excess power? Instead of collecting $9,000 per MWH from existing functioning units, they would be receiving less than $100 per MWH for the output of those plants and their new plants. Why would anyone make tremendous infrastructure that would sit idle in normal years and serve to slash your revenue by orders of magnitudes in extreme conditions?
The incentive for gas generation to do the right thing was taken away by Texas’s deliberate energy only market strategy. The purpose of which was to aid the profitability of intermittent wind and solar resources and increase their penetration levels. I don’t believe anyone has ever advanced the notion that fossil fuel plants might operate based on altruism. Incentives and responsibility need to be paired. Doing a post-mortem on the Texas situation ignoring incentives and responsibility is inappropriate and incomplete.
Yes, that was the most maddening thing about the Texas February Freeze – the ridiculous bills that people were getting, just because they had the audacity to want to stay warm. We have ‘time of use rates’ here but they don’t vary according to the weather like in Texas. How was the insanity allowed to continue for so long that the February Freeze was allowed to happen?
Griff seems to believe that if he repeats a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.
As soon as he hears a lie he likes, it becomes the truth. After that he just keeps repeating his “truth”.
Rubbish as usual, griff. Texas went down because gas distributors were forced to use electric pumps instead of the far more sane gas pumps. When the wind power stopped, as it inevitably does, they couldn’t pump gas.
Exactly right. Had they been allowed to do the reasonable thing, use gas pumps to fuel the gas generators, there would have been no problem. Forcing them to use electric pumps meant that once the electricity failed, the gas generators would automatically fail. Everything went according to plan, except it was a FUBAR plan.
Any company supplying the grid should do so under a 24/7 supply contract with guaranteed deliverability.
So if renewables are the way to go they still have to provide the missing juice from backup from their own pockets. Otherwise they should not be allowed to connect to the grid.
Spot on ThinkingScientist – Working from the consumer back & in the absence of empirical evidence proving the case against CO2; I’m very ‘comfortable’ with power generators using any technology that they believe best suits their individual business plans for optimum energy generation purposes.
With the right Energy Policy in place, I don’t care whether they elect to use; wind, water wheel, tidal power, solar-PV, Bio-fuels, fossil fuels, batteries, nuclear, or even pedal power, if that’s what turns them on. Provided they don’t expect to receive a subsidy from taxpayers to underwrite their fantasy.
In brief, I’m of the view that all we need is a sensible Energy Policy in keeping with market forces that;
Easy IMHO.
Intermittently, unreliably.
The Finkel report to the Government, about two years ago, had at least one good point: all new renewable investment had to provide dispatchable power, that is they had to provide their own back-up (batteries or stand buy fossil fuelled power generation). Why has not bene given a follow up ?
Or they could build some more batteries… which have a quicker response time in outages.
And don’t all catch fire.
Plus encourage more domestic solar, reducing the amount needed from central supply.
Perhaps you could explain that we need more Lithium mines to our government.
I understand Afghanistan has supplies of lithium. Oh right. Never mind.
China got there again
Solar is particularly good after about 6pm until about 9am, when solar naturally reaches its peak…
Plus when the panels are covered with snow.
Or dust.
Best energy output on clear cool days between 10.00 am and 2.00 pm
Fact.
Those are the hours when we are advised to exercise caution when sunbathing because that is when the sun is most intense.
Don’t all catch fire….TRUE. All don’t, but many eventually do. As Australia just discovered.
That is a brilliant advertisement for battery manufacturer’s – “buy our batteries, some of them won’t catch fire…” I may have to copyright that slogan for future marketing purposes!
We’re incredibly expensive, sure, but you many not wake up in the middle of the night with your house in flames. Some of our batteries wear out without catching fire.
Only Griff could try and pass that as a convincing argument
Batteries are a dumber solution to an already dumb solution. Dumb on top of dumb. The way to build resiliency is to not build more unreaiable sources that regularly crap out. Batteries Energy Storage simply provides about 3-4 hours of juice than are discharged and must be charged before they can be used again, obviously. Tha nearly always means using fossil fuel or nuclear power generated electricity to charge them because wind calm periods can last days. Better just to skip the BESS altogether and build in reliable generation sources.
Joel, best for authorities to keep in mind that the Grid has a life and death purpose and is not to be put under threat with shabby add-ons to sugar the wealthy crony welfare system.
If we were to be heading for deep trouble with the climate, we should be working harder ensuring the grid and the economy serves us well to deal with it.
The very last thing we want, is to have the elitists that are at the front of the line to be governing us in any kind if crisis. How did we let this all happen to us? Why can’t we tell these destroyers to just “Бчgger off and do things the right way?
Solar panels work so very well covered in forty millimeters of ice, which was about the minimum we had Valentines Day? It would be less of a fantasy to rely on unicorn farts.
Unicorn future are UP!
Sometimes I wonder if Griff is really as stupid/ideologically possessed/whatever as he looks. He/she/it could actually be a truly brilliant satirist. Poe’s law
He certainly achieves more publicity than he deserves.
griff isn’t writing for us, commieBob.
There are multi-thousands of readers here who never comment. (The guy who sold me my 1-ton pickup truck is one; reads here daily, never comments.)
There are CAGW believers who wind up here. Some have semi-open minds, else they wouldn’t have landed here. And there are those who read WUWT just to “see what the other side is up to.”
Those are the people griff is writing for. We knew years ago griff wasn’t here to ponder facts. That is a fact.
The Climazombies cheer at his fact-free talking point comments. “That’s right griff. You tell ’em. Way to go!” [Aside – 1342, German church, flood mark w-a-a-y higher than most recent flood. griff… *crickets*]
A lot of the regulars post raspberry responses to griff, and then there are some regulars here that post detailed, referenced refutations of griff’s mindless talking points du jour.
So griff’s cheerleaders for griff’s fact-free comments are soon slapped upside the head with a fact-filed, detailed response. (Yes, griff gets a lot of name-calling. I’m not a fan of that.)
–
–
Blessings to all who drop those detailed fact-based responses to griff’s nonsense. You are giving those lurking readers a counter to the CAGW narrative that they must consider.
It is quite obvious griff is not writing to convince us to change our minds. It is very obvious that griff is writing to prevent CAGW believers from changing their minds.
Right! If enough batteries are built, the ones that burn will not matter because there will be battery backup for the battery backup. Great plan!
More Griff the Idiot fantasies. You’re on a roll today, dear.
It’s the long term effect of being repeatedly told by his mommy that he’s brilliant
Well done Griff for reading from your hymn sheet.
The reality is more nuanced of course.
It can be found here in “planning engineer”‘s article on JC’s Climate Etc site:
Assigning Blame for the Blackouts in Texas | Climate Etc. (judithcurry.com)
Here’s the conclusion:
Anyone can look at Texas and observe that fossil fuel resources could have performed better in the cold. If those who owned the plants had secured guaranteed fuel, Texas would have been better off. More emergency peaking units would be a great thing to have on hand. Why would generators be inclined to do such a thing? Consider, what would be happening if the owners of gas generation had built sufficient generation to get through this emergency with some excess power? Instead of collecting $9,000 per MWH from existing functioning units, they would be receiving less than $100 per MWH for the output of those plants and their new plants. Why would anyone make tremendous infrastructure that would sit idle in normal years and serve to slash your revenue by orders of magnitudes in extreme conditions?
The incentive for gas generation to do the right thing was taken away by Texas’s deliberate energy only market strategy. The purpose of which was to aid the profitability of intermittent wind and solar resources and increase their penetration levels. I don’t believe anyone has ever advanced the notion that fossil fuel plants might operate based on altruism. Incentives and responsibility need to be paired. Doing a post-mortem on the Texas situation ignoring incentives and responsibility is inappropriate and incomplete.
Ah yes, that’s always the socialist answer to any problem. Spend unlimited amounts of other people’s money.
Just tell me oh barely sentient guru, where is the 100’s of trillions of dollars to buy the needed batteries going to come from?
Just tell me oh delusional sage, just how will domestic solar work when centralized solar isn’t working?
Yes, sure. The energy retailers could build more batteries, or they could buy cheap and reliable electricity from coal and gas powered generators.
More domestic solar increases grid instability, as even someone like you should be able to understand, and under the rules of reliable supply domestic solar could only sign up to a 0kwh contract.
for the cost of that batteries theyd have nearly paid if not paid for a decent coal plant
Griff’s batteries aren’t toxic, they’re green I tell you, and green is always smarter, gooder-er and nobler too – so there!
Conservative’s batteries are stinky!
It’s amazing how repeated lies can cause so many to become so stupid that they’re willing to significantly harm themselves, to the benefit of others, under the guise of the greater good.
covid vaccines being the latest idiocy
“demand management”
you bet
Demand management. Yeah, that’s the ticket. We will provide reliability by not providing reliability.
Demand management is just another way of saying that you are getting your customers used to not getting what they need.
smart grids gave them total control to reduce or stop power supplies
that was the reason they did NOT want the public aware of prior to installing them
It’s tragic watching Australia’s descent to a failed state.
The same thing is happening in the US, Canada and Europe
The Anglosphere is in full flat out decline…aka the Five Eyes nations of the UK, USA, Canada, NZ and Oz, and most of the EU. Maybe not decline, but full on self-inflicted suicide by leftist marxists.
It is a decline, let’s not mince our words.
its worse living IN it as it slides off the cliff
Western Australia has hard borders up again at the moment and we aren’t and don’t want to connect to your national grid. AT some point you Eastern States will get the message 🙂
The planet spends billions to stop people dying from Covid then spend trillions more to make sure they die from hypothermia caused by their Alice in Wonderland fantasy that Co2 causes climate change and catastrophe. If you carpet the whole planet with wind solar and battery farms fit heat pumps drive EV’s don’t fly pay a fortune in green carbon taxes bankrupt every economy on the planet – except China – something magical will happen and the climate will never change, it beggars belief. When I pose this scenario to those who believe then turn away unable to comprehend simple logic, the just frown because they have been educated to belief not think.
All the UN said was that Co2 will make it worse but worse than what. The UN admitted it was never about environmental conservation but changing the economy but still the confected dullards fly in the face of reality to embellish their green credentials based upon belief.
I remain convinced that by a vast majority humanity still struggles to recognise the finite difference between belief and fact. As if humanity can stop the climate from changing by any means let alone farting about with Co2.
It because the people elected to run things, the ones entrusted with the keys to the nation and treasury, are traitors. Harsh words yes, but that is the essential truth, when elected to care for the country as best they can, and they turn around and pander to special interests, especially Marxist so-called environmentalists who espouse crazy ideas that end up hurting the environment and economy.
“When I pose this scenario to those who believe then turn away unable to comprehend simple logic”
I don’t think so. They can’t agree with you, because then they will be labeled “climate deniers”, and probably “racists” as well. When the Soviet Union was still in power, nearly everyone there believed the government lies. The day it wasn’t able to send them to concentration camps in Siberia, everyone found that nearly no one had believed that stuff in the first place.
When you poll people about climate change being a major danger to the planet, some 90% agree with that. Then when you ask how much are you willing to have your electric bill go up to help stop that planetary danger? 5% say $50 a month, 20% say $10 a month, and 75% say NOTHING at all.
That shows you that hardly anyone really believes in this scam. People are just afraid to say out loud that they don’t believe it. They would lose their liberal and Rino friends for sure, they could quite possibly lose their jobs (quite a few “deniers” already have) and in the future maybe end up in a “reeducation camp”.
For the most part, the country is divided between the few who make money or gain political power from claiming to believe in CC. And the many who are afraid to say out loud that they don’t believe in it.
When it’s dark and there’s no wind get out your patented griff generator
A bicycle with a dynamo fitted Get pedalling …
Sorted
Great idea!
Get everyone in the household to pedal a stationary bicycle all day long. You’ll get a bit of electricity and the family will stay warm due to the physical exertion. Health costs will plummet because the population will be in great shape.
At the end of the day, folks can crawl into arctic insulated sleeping bags. They will sleep great.
What’s not to like?
Yeah, you could run a lottery on who will wake up in the morning.
A world-class athlete can generate 300-350 W for about — — an hour.
Where does Griff live? Someone close by should grab him and make him do the peddling for us should that day come.
A savvy energy technology investor might think about developing a mobile gas-fired peaker plant whose components can be quickly delivered by rail to the site of a former coal or older generation gas-fired plant — assuming the power transmission infrastructure is left in place once the coal or the old technology gas-fired plant has been shut down.
Once the components are assembled, these mobile plants could then be fueled by LNG tank cars which are also being delivered by rail. Depending upon how severe the yearly peak power shortages become, a ‘just-in-time peaker plant’ concept could pay off handsomely.
Isn’t California doing something very much like that at the moment?
Newsom has relented slightly because he fears the noose tightening around his political neck.
Information provided on the radio today (it is an MSM station, so it must be true) indicate that slightly more than half the votes received so far are from registered Democrats. (Isn’t marvelous that you have sign the outside of your secret ballot envelope, and print your name and address?!) No worries if the trend continues.
If only slightly more than half of the votes are registered Democrats, Newsom is in deep trouble. Democrats hold a huge majority of registered voters in CA.
AndyHce: “Isn’t California doing something very much like that at the moment?”
As I understand it, some legacy gas-fired plants in California which are targeted for complete and final shutown are being held in reserve for peaking purposes.
Assuming those plants are in fact fully shut down at some point in the future, what will become of their plant site power distribution equipment? Could it be left behind for use by a mobile peaker plant whenever the need arises?
If they are finally shut down at some point, they will become useless as “peaking plants” anyway. Sell them for scrap and the transmission equipment too.
I don’t think that would even be investable, as they could just pull operating permits, add taxes, or just flat out reneg on any contractual obligations including price paid. Especially fixed assets that become stranded. The only thing maybe investable would be floating barges with floating LNG storage supplying floating CCGT plants plugged into the grid, that could be barged off in a New York minute when things go south. However, when things get that bizarre, then they just seize whatever assets you have floating. If we don’t turn this ship around, then Western civilization is no longer the global model and we are sunk. It is getting that bad with wholesale criminals in positions of the highest power now. Just witness the fall into planned flat out chaos the last 8 months.
Earling2: “I don’t think that would even be investable, as they could just pull operating permits, add taxes, or just flat out reneg on any contractual obligations including price paid. Especially fixed assets that become stranded.”
These peaker plants would be completely mobile. They could be quickly disassembled and retrieved from where ever it was they had been originally sited and then be moved elsewhere for the purpose of supplying power to a different utility or region which was facing a rapid increase in demand.
These mobile plants would be deployed in situations where a utility was not only desperate for power, but was also in a situation where that utility was being forced to pay whatever was being demanded for access to it, doing so in competition with other utilities which were likewise strapped for generation capacity.
Any power market regulator which attempted to interfere with a peak power purchase transaction where a utility is desperately short of power would think twice before they said no. (Unless of course the regulators behaved like mindless bureaucrats and just said no without thinking about it.)
Yes, you make perfect sense in a normal world. My point was about when things get bizarre, and we are nearing that point of many things going completely off the rails all around the world at once. Perhaps a local court makes a ruling (because of climate emergency) that nothing can be removed before some fictitious condition is remedied. Or they make profits impossible through impossible red tape, so that it was worthless to initiate the endeavour, or cheaper to abandon things. Technically of course, it would work flawlessly and be common sense to do so. But we are longer in those times, presently. Especially given the politics of carbon/CO2 madness with fossil fuels.
A copper/gold mine in a third world country would be an example of unfair seizure, which happens from time to time. I fear we are nearing third world madness, as is evidenced in many things all around us. The investments in many proposed pipelines such as Keystone XL would be an example. I suppose they can sell their pipe that isn’t yet in the ground, but the majority losses are now booked. They were even fully permitted.
Earthling, everything which happens in the world of our transition into renewable energy happens for a reason.
Someone somewhere is making Big Money off the chaos which is now ensuing. But the chaos will only be allowed to go so far.
Lines will be drawn as soon as the chaos and the insanity begin to seriously threaten someone somewhere from making Big Money.
This is where investors in the kind of mobile gas-fired technology which can be quickly deployed whenever and wherever it is needed should be placing their bets.
I hope you are right BB, but when they make laws you can’t cook with natural gas, or maybe not even heat your house with NG, then I worry about them allowing nat gas for peaker plants when their stated and admitted aim is to shut this down. Maybe there is a revolt at some level, or the military or secret service have to restore some sort of legitimate command, but currently there is no one in charge representing the best interests of the West. Every leader in each 5 Eyes nation is flat out evil or has gone insane. They are destroying us faster from within than our enemies could.
This is flat out planned destruction of Western economies by the powers that be in our chain of command. Sometimes when things go too far, things collapse. Empires go bust, people get wiped out in genocide, and sometimes things just spiral out of control past the point of no return. I hope we aren’t on that tangent, but the events of the last 8 months make it look like we are being ‘cancelled’ by own leaders in power.
Yep, that’s exactly the way things worked out in Venezuela.
Look at the reaction of the liberals because the Supreme Court threw out Biden’s illegal extension of congress’s eviction moratorium. They truly don’t believe that they should be required to follow any law.
For that matter, I don’t see how the eviction moratorium survived court review. That was quite clearly the taking of private property for public use, without any compensation.
Landlords (many small Mom & Pop operations) lost $19 Billion per month since that rental/eviction moratorium went into effect a year ago. And most will never be re-paid, even though many of the tenants were receiving stimy to pay the rent. Biden knew it wouldn’t survive a court challenge (which he admitted on TV) but was trying to delay the decision so as landlords would get screwed over longer. It certainly was the taking of private property, without any compensation. And now he is urging local states, cities and counties to enact their own eviction moratoriums. Just cruel and unusual treatment of landlords that also have mortgages and property taxes/expenses to pay.
There are many more renters than there are landlords.
It’s classic socialism, steal money from those who have earned it, in order to buy votes from everyone else.
The only problem is that the little people only think they are going to rip off those who have more than them. But in the end, they will end up like the little people in Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea. All the money goes to the top of the Party, and nothing for the little people. But after all this time, and historical example after example, they can’t see it coming. 🙁
It is straight out of the Theater of the Absurd.
We told you so.
This does seem really stupid. It is the suppliers of electricity who wish to be part of the system who should be required to assure there is an adequate electricity supply, not the people who are just delivering the available product to the customers.
The regulations are clear if you want to be a supplier to the grid and get paid you are also responsible for stabilizing it. You can’t get around that obligation just because you allow someone else to sell your production on your behalf.
Think about you answer every generator “xyz” would own a retail company “abc” and walk around the obligation because “abc” is only retail.
Show me the [usable] energy! The Aussie government is not so green about Green myths and ham.
How about cutting out the middle man and just building and using reliable gas and coal generating plants?
Plus Uranium, nuclear power generators, even Thorium & Molten Salts reactors.
Utter complete technical, scientific, social and political incompetence.
To introduce renewable energy into the grid slowly steadily and without hiccups, subsidies, batteries whatever whatevers, they should have built, be building a direct current (DC) grid running parallel with the existing high voltage 3 phase AC grid.
Simplicity itself, just hang a pair of phat wires off the existing pylons.
Then, take DC outputs from solar panels and wind turbines and pump it all into those DC lines
In itself save epic complication from inverters, electronics,synchronisation issues and all the rest.
The DC power would terminate at the existing power stations.
When its there, be used as an ‘after burner’ or super heater for all the existing machines that are there.
It keeps them hot, rolling, gives grid voltage and frequency stability, black start capability. just everything we all expect and are used to.
What would happen is that the power station operator would create a ‘Fuel Mix’ of coal, gas or RE in order to meet demand as already happens
Effectively, RE is put into direct price competition with the fossil fuels.
Thus, it can and will be used when it is cheap &plentiful otherwise the existing system is already, constantly, running at sync, at temperature and speed.
Saves epic wear & tear from endless cold starts.
If required, Governement could subsidise the RE. That subsidy would be very simple, straight-forward & transparent and as RE prices fall, as they will do according to everybody, will gradually phase/fade out the use of fossils
There are users of very large amounts of electricity that might tap into the DC grid.
Almost anyone running large variable speed motors, crushing rock, rolling steel or compressing gases. Big intercity trains would lap the stuff up.
Those peeps just want shedloads of raw power and don’t give a toss especially about voltage or frequency. You do not need computer grade juice to make liquid Oxygen or – to smash up Basalt and thereafter (actually) Save The Planet
so simple and ALL the infrastructure is already there – all it needed was those twin red & black wires adding to existing pylons/poles
It reduces CO2 emissions, maintains existing infrastructure and would make RE cheaper, as RE suppliers could build simpler windmills and eliminate all those high power semiconductor based inverters.
If a lightning bolt comes anywhere near your solar farm, all that sensitive/fragile electronic tat becomes instant deep fried cinderised garbage.
One phat DC line eliminates all that complication and grief…
Peta, you are showing breathtaking ignorance of fundamental electrical power systems. Either that or elaborate sarcasm. Just one thing out of thousands: A couple hundred volts DC at the windmill to half a million (plus) volts DC at transmission to a couple hundred volts DC at delivery.
Peta, none of the fundamental physics have changed. Using DC in a grid is as bad now as it was 100 years ago.
There’s a much simpler solution. Keep using coal and gas fired power stations. Most developed nations had their grids to the point of constant reliability, barring natural disasters. The various problems we have now only started after the push for unreliable renewable power generation. Thinking logically if you want a grid that is reliable 24/7 then the very best way to achieve that is by using generators that work 24/7. Except for Hydro that pretty much rules out renewables.
“as RE prices fall, as they will do according to everybody, will gradually phase/fade out the use of fossils”
Heh !
I don’t think that word “everybody” means what you think it means….
“The spare capacity could come from … demand management…” Isn’t “demand management” really just rotating blackouts? Kinda like “choice” really means abortion and “affirmative action” really means racial quotas? It’s Humpty Dumpty language.
Not exactly. What it means is that your smart meter can either be programmed to shut itself off based on you not wanting to pay more than x for a KWh of power, or in a more fascist world, based on your social credit score being too low to deserve power. Either way, that means that the elites are never inconvenienced and most of the rest of us arrange our lives according to how the wind blows and the sun shines.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Germany face the same issue a few years ago?
Generation Companies announced that they were going to close some traditional plants which had been rendered uneconomic by the crazy green stuff… Only to be told that the government would not allow them to close. Whether this has been dealt with through the courts, or by sweetheart deals behind closed doors, seems opaque to me.
And add the gas pipeline to Russia the Government of Germany is constructing.
AGL is one of our large electricity providers it has 60 generators. The rundown of what they are and the types of fuel they use is as follows.
Company Generator Capacity MW
AGL Battery storage 123
AGL Fossil 8816
AGL Hydro 777
AGL Landfill / Biogas 1
AGL Landfill Biogas 2
AGL Renewable/ Biomass / Waste 30
AGL Solar 156
AGL Wind 1580
What is really being asked for is responsibility from these companies. Maybe we will avert a total collapse for as it stands we are going to just close the fossil in the above and not do anything to replace it quickly enough. So I think renewable energy fury is a nonsense because it is saying they are annoyed with themselves. Eric’s article says that I only object to the title.
I too have a 13 kVA generator attached to the house I think it will be needed.
The regulatory environment punishes responsible behaviour Mike, so the likes of AGL in my opinion have taken the entirely rational view from the POV of their business profitability of embracing renewables as their future roadmap, and treating grid stability as someone elses problem.
Politicians could fix this in a heartbeat, by providing a bipartisan assurance that renewables would no longer receive favourable treatment, and repealing laws granting favouritism to electricity supplied by renewables. But I think we will need to endure a lot more pain before that happens.
Batteries are not generators.
And they do not provide long term energy supply, and when depleted need days or weeks of recharging.
As an Australian until recently I thought state and federal governments would not continue with current policies and allow the electricity supply to collapse, but given their utterly incompetent and hysterical reaction to Covid-19 media support and public apparent acquiescence, now I’m not so sure.
The Australian Federal Government has been arguing with the State Governments about the electricity supply grid system for a long time because States have the responsibility to supply electricity and for planning permission from applicants who want to build new supply sources renewable or fossil fuelled.
In recent years the Federal Government served notice that subsidies on renewables would end, I think that end date is not far away and that has deterred several investors from proceeding with wind and solar businesses to supply the grid – unreliably and intermittently.
Capacity (MW) is not generation (MWh). Batteries are not generators.
When an organism becomes infested with parasites it weakens and dies.
As usual the policticans are the last to wake up to the realities of the real world, and it is not just in the case, but across their whole raft of policy making.
In this case it should have been a requirement from the very start that any operator wanting to enter the market to supply electricity had to guarantee continuity of supply, and how they arranged that by combining base load and intermittent assets was to be at their discretion. All the consumers want is a reliable and affordable constant supply of electricity, nothing more, nothing less, and it was and still is the governments job to ensure that this happens.
This seems to be a step towards what has always been blatantly obvious to all consumers.
The NEM grid in Australia, that covers all of Australia except for WA/NT, reports electricity generation at 6pm last Friday:
Coal 61%, Gas 16%, Hydro 16%, Wind 6%,Solar 1%
Those evil fossil fuel generators deliver when it counts to keep the lights on.
Yet at 1pm, those intermittent generators have free rein to have their moment in the sun, forcing reliable generators to curtail output, damaging their economics:
Solar 35%, Wind 6%, Coal 49%, Hydro 7%, Gas 3%.
The government are ‘ as green as they are cabbage looking ‘.
The new insane policy in Australia is to pay subsidies to ‘unreliables’ to produce electricity now and then, while also paying subsidies to coal and gas to provide reliable electricity when the ‘unreliables’ are off duty. It has now become a costly flood of Subsidies Galore.
Direct subsidies for solar and wind based electricity supply businesses must not be confused with what lefties try to call subsidies – company tax based deductions for expenses incurred making before tax profits, available to all businesses including solar and wind business in addition to their direct subsidy.
And now a similar direct subsidy is being considered to encourage coal fired power station businesses to keep their assets generating past the planned closure timing as so called renewables unreliable supply destabilises the electricity grid.
And fuel tax rebate is not a subsidy, fuel tax is for vehicles using public roads but when fuel is used off road on farms, mine sites, generators, etc., the fuel tax/excise can be claimed back.
As solar and wind farms could claim, maybe for fuel used in on site vehicles or equipment.
Shouldn’t the the solar/wind guys be using EV’s on site, being hypocrites if claiming a fossil fuel ‘subsidy’? Actually, that is where the RE subsidy pot of gold comes from, the success of the economy powered by fossil fuels all these years. We should be transitioning to next gen nuclear when fossil fuels get expensive and are required for 1001 other things.
There is zero obligation to provide electricity. The concept of “semi-scheduled” generators removed the obligation years ago. This group of generators combined with rooftop solar, now with rated capacity exceeding the average total demand, have no obligation to actually supply electricity.
This is what the Federal Minister sees as an inevitable cliff. It is the same background to the situation in Texas.
If no one is prepared to pay for on-demand capacity when it is idle then it simply disappears. It has been happening in Australia for more than a decade now.
Maybe this is why coal stations were State govt owned public assets once?
This is the responsible minister’s latest spiel.
He begins with how proud Australians ought to be with their emission reductions and then equivocates to outline the resultant reliability and cost problems.
Doesn’t the minister realise that weather and diurnal dependent electricity sources and reliability and affordability are incompatible?
Because you can’t have backup windmills or PV. But you can have back oil and coal.
And definitely from people with brains who get their back up.
According to griff, the solution is to have lots of residential solar to take over when the centralized solar isn’t working.
Let’s not forget that “Demand Management” is newspeak for “rolling blackouts. They’re essentially saying that a Zimbabwe level of electricity reliability is acceptable.
All the brainwashed monkeys applaud the idea of a “smart meter”, not realizing that a meter is just metering and can’t be smart. The smart part is something else. It’s punishing people who consume at the wrong time.
Of course that will lead to electric fire when people try to hack the wiring around the “smart” “meter”.
What happens when they don’t?
Fined and drummed out of the energy sector, made bankrupt?
Or flogged mercilessly with a wet lettuce leaf?
Or does that answer depend on which political party is in the ascendancy in Canberra?
I do not know Australia, so may have completely misreas this, but on the face of it this sounds like an excellent idea and one worthy of the robust ironic element in both Australian and English culture. Its sounds positively pythonesque
Someone has to bear the costs of the current mania. The essence of this mania is pretending that intermittent and unreliable electricity supply is the same product, and interchangeable with a reliable and constant electricity supply.
So this sounds like taking that at face value, and telling someone in the supply chain to make it so. To only sell to consumers an energy product that meets the well established standards for such a product. That is, it shall be available 24 x 7 within certain parameters.
Of course, contrary to the spin of the wind and solar lobbies, you cannot do this with wind or solar, and this is a critical defect. What is being supplied by either, though they and their advocates will not admit it, is a quite different product.
This measure sounds like telling the supply chain, if renewable is so great as part of the mix, generate power however you want, what you have to supply is the conventional end product.
The measure happens to have chosen the retailer. But the retailer then has to secure product which meets the standard, and that means that the whole chain is going to have to restructure.
Surely the logical result of this is that retailers will shortly decide that it costs far more to deliver this with a mix of renewable and conventional than it would to deliver it with conventional?
At that point its game over. The whole scam is exposed. It consists in the fact that once you have backed up renewable sufficiently to generate a reliable supply, you no longer need the renewable, its more cost effective to just use the backup. This measure sounds like it will make that blindingly obvious. In which case, its to be applauded.
This could be a total misunderstanding. I don’t know Australia.
You have not misunderstood, and not because you don’t know Australia. This of course would have happened long ago, EXCEPT governments world wide have forced energy providers to purchase UR energy, whether it makes economic sense or not. Because they would never have made this insanely unreliable and uneconomic decision on their own. Logical results mean nothing when you are being run by government fiat.
It is a simple matter to mandate both a quantity and time length for every power purchase.
For example, 24 hours. You only get paid for the minimum power delivered in that time frame, not the average.
Australia is lost. We have ex-lawyers making medical decisions for 8+ million people.
renewables mob can rot in hell
remove ALL their subsidies if they keep bitchin re decent supplies like coal n gas, that actually provide mining jobs for aussies unlike os made pv and turbines
Turn electricity into a luxury! Only when the wind is clear and the clouds are weak, electricity can be used!
Not how it’s going to be done. Instead, and we are quite a ways down that road, electricity will only be used by the rich elites, who can afford the sky high rates, and the little people will just have to do without. Already I read that @10 % of Germans are having to choose between paying for electricity, or FOOD. Only going to get worse….
Some years ago, the South African ANC government decided to set up “Regional Electricity Distributors” covering larger regions than the existing city-level suppliers. The centralised Eskom generation and country-wide distribution system would be unchanged. This was simply a POLITICAL decision, since the Socialist ANC didn’t like any sort of independence, even of its major cities. Now I can’t speak for other cities, but the Johannesburg electrical department makes a profit on resale, and its infrastructure was about to be GIVEN AWAY to some un-elected political organisation. So, of course, maintenance fell apart – why keep fixing something that’s going to be taken away? And THAT was the start of the despised ‘load shedding’! Eventually, everything returned to the status quo, but there had been 18 months of limited maintenance – and it shows!
Maybe Australia will learn from others’ mistakes – but then they ARE politicians, so I hae me doots.