Essay by Eric Worrall
As coal power operators respond to the new carbon tax by accelerating plant closures, Australia’s big battery, the Snowy 2 pumped hydro project, has just announced more cost and delivery time blowouts.
Power grid at risk as Snowy 2.0 finish date blows out
Angela Macdonald-Smith Senior resources writer
Updated May 3, 2023 ā 10.27amSnowy Hydro has advised that its troubled Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro storage project in NSW will overrun its already-revised $5.9 billion budget and may not be fully online until the end of the decade.
The latest delay, of as much as two years, looks set to intensify worries about the reliability of the east coast electricity grid as owners of coal power stations accelerate closure plans.
The federal government-owned company said it is working to āresetā the timetable and budget for the project with key contractor Future Generation Joint Venture, controlled by Italyās Webuild.
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One of the huge tunnel boring machines used at the project, a 2000-tonne machine named Florence, has been essentially stuck for months in soft ground, while a ādepressionā has appeared on the surface, 30 metres above where it is located. Work is under way to stabilise the ground to allow the machine to resume tunnelling.
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Read more (paywalled): https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/snowy-2-0-faces-further-cost-increases-delays-20230503-p5d54v
Even when the Snowy 2 pumped hydro storage is complete, if it ever completes, serious doubts have been expressed about its viability as a giant renewable backup battery.
The following was published last year in the Sydney Morning Herald – Australia’s answer to the New York Times.
Five years on, Snowy 2.0 emerges as a $10 billion white elephant
By Ted Woodley
March 15, 2022 ā 5.00amFive years ago on Tuesday, then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull announced, with great fanfare, the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project: āThe Turnbull Government will start work on an electricity game-changer … This plan will increase the generation of the Snowy Hydro scheme by 50 per cent, adding 2000 megawatts of renewable energy to the National Electricity Market (NEM).ā
Senate Estimates papers confirm the announcement was cobbled together in less than two weeks after the concept was floated by Snowy Hydro.
The nation-building vision was for a big battery to be added to the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme. It was to be completed in four years (that is, by last year) at a cost of $2 billion without any taxpayer subsidy, bring down electricity prices, generate renewable energy and incur minimal environmental impact on Kosciuszko National Park.
Inspiring stuff. But not one of these grand claims has turned out to be true. Worse, Australian taxpayers and NSW electricity consumers will be up for billions of dollars in subsidies and increased electricity costs, all while Kosciuszko is trashed. Letās have a quick recap.
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… Transmission tariffs in NSW will increase by more than 50 per cent if the NSW government allows Snowy Hydro to get its way, based on analysis in a Victoria Energy Policy Centre report.
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Far from bringing electricity prices down, Snowy Hydroās own modelling predicts that prices will rise because of Snowy 2.0.
As far as the claim that Snowy 2.0 will add 2000 megawatts of renewable energy to the National Electricity Market, Snowy 2.0 is not a conventional hydro station generating renewable energy. It is no different to any other battery, and as such it will be a net load on the NEM. For every 100 units of electricity purchased from the NEM to pump water uphill, only 75 units are returned when the water flows back down through the turbine generators. Not only is the electricity generated not renewable, Snowy 2.0 will be the most inefficient battery on the NEM, losing 25 per cent of energy cycled.
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There are many cheaper, more efficient and far less environmentally destructive energy storage alternatives.
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Read more: https://www.smh.com.au/national/five-years-on-snowy-2-0-emerges-as-a-10-billion-white-elephant-20220310-p5a3ge.html
Australia has just advanced another step towards that green energy wall WUWT described. I think we can safely conclude Australia is aiming for a head first collision, at running speed.
Even if you believe the renewable energy fairy can deliver, Australia’s coal plant closure timetable was already looking terrifyingly tight. Australia’s newly introduced carbon tax just adds to the pressure to close coal plants, regardless of whether the green energy infrastructure meant to replace coal is ready.
Coal plant owners don’t have an obligation to keep the grid viable, their duty is to shareholders. Keeping the grid stable is the government’s responsibility.
The Snowy Project debacle is no surprise, a government project with little planning and gross management incompetence. SNAFU.
As Tim Blair observed quite a few years ago –
“nothing ‘green’ ever works properly”
Situation Normal All Fouled Up!!!!! š¤”š¤”š¤”
āCheaper, more efficientā? Like what? One that actually exists.
Not cheaper but possibly more efficient than chaining all those who promoted this scheme to static bicycles with dynamos.
The latter would be more fun, especially if electricity users were allowed to encourage the peddlers.
Webster Dictionary-
peddler –one who deals in or promotes something intangible (such as a personal asset or an idea)
Not a term I would use for these scammers.
Maybe “pedallers”?
Geoff S
It was always poorly thought out, based on the notion that someday there will be excess renewable energy available that could be used to pump water uphill. It’s business case was based on buying renewable energy at a low price to resell at a high price, only with excess renewable energy that would be otherwise shutdown because of excess capacity into the grid.
I’m not sure that day will ever come, circumstances will mean that sooner or later nuclear generated power will become the backbone of the power supply.
Whilst there is generally a technical solution to most problems, it is economics that ultimately determine which succeed and which don’t in a free market system, not that we have one here in Australia anymore.
That day has come a long time ago in Australia.
Economic curtailment of grid scale WDGs is normal operation in the Australian grid. Two States can already run solely on rooftop PV output from around 10am to 2pm on sunny days and wholesale price is negative. Attached shows yesterday and is not unusual for the NEM with average wholesale price of MINUS $25/MWh. Note that the batteries and existing pumped hydro were negative loads being paid to soak up the power.
Curtailment will occur often in an entirely weather dependent grid unless there is a huge amount of storage capacity.
The government sanctioned theft from consumers to WDGs currently runs at $53/MWh so it is not unusual to see wholesale prices down around MINUS $40/MWh because the WDGs can still make money at that negative price.
That is basically the intermittent “Neros” fiddling whilst the fossil fueled generators burn.
And how do you connect South Australia, (with their very limited interconnection cables), to Snowy 2?
Or is that going to be another cost to overcome. And yes, once you’ve charged that battery, you have to send the power back to them at the morning and evening peak.
I know that you know Rick, (you’ve posted on this before and you understand firsthand the solar and storage problems associated), but the current interconect limits are around 600MW from SA and a little less when supplying SA. Their typical demand, (even in a mild winter), is around 2000MW, (peak).
Clearly SA are NOT going to be using Snowy 2 for their solar battery balance network.
And if you follow AEMO rules, where a single point of failure is not permitted to cause a blackout, then the cables would need to be upgraded to be at least 3 of 1000MW rated to cover this mild peak.
“And how do you connect South Australia, (with their very limited interconnection cables), to Snowy 2?”
Build better interconnectors. Which they are doing now.
they are trying at costs of bilions that WE mugs are paying for..but St Arnaud Vic protest last week AEMO wouldnt even turn up to meetings 300+farmers tractors and a lot of rage and its not just here either
And the cost of the interconnectors, wholly unnecessary without the forced use of unreliable generation, is being paid for by the poorest people with the largest percentage of their income.
Why, Nick, do you H@TE poor people so as to support expensive, unreliable, unnecessary weather dependent electrical generation?
So tell us Nick, are they building three 1000MW connections? Do you even know what is planned?
I went to the EnergyConnect website, (the people building this cable), and you know, they don’t mention the capacity on their factsheets, nor apparently on their webpages. So I assume that it is not going to be something large and certainly not going to be capable of carrying the load as noted above.
So Nick, open your heart to us all and tell us when the THREE connections will be available for carrying SA solar power to and from the battery.
Nick According to the website you linked to it says for March 2023 “Transgrid announced it secured $385 million in underwriting from the Federal Government as part of the Rewiring the Nation program to finance critical transmission supplies for VNI West, HumeLink and Project EnergyConnect. Transgrid also announced that procurement for these three projects will be bundled into one procurement program.”
So they have lined up funding for about 5% (maybe less if cost overruns) of the project cost.
So according to the timing on the same link, they are supposed to finish construction of Stage 2 in 3 months’ time. Really?
The project website does not seem to have been updated since early 2022 as they still write about construction is going to start then.
https://www.projectenergyconnect.com.au/
Actually, nuclear power has historically been a good fit to pumped storage. The nuclear plant outputs constant power and the pumped storage stores it during periods when grid usage is low and returns it at peak times. Classically, the power is stored late at night and returned the next afternoon when it is needed. That works well because the pumped storage is used every day and its costs are primarily maintenance and construction loan payback which are incurred whether the plant runs or not.
Of course if lots of folks are charging their EVs late at night, pumped storage may not work as well.
One good thing about pumped storage is that it is dispatchable. And it sounds to me like future Australians (and Europeans and Americans as well) are likely to be seriously short of the dispatchable energy providers that are needed to provide reliable electricity.
I agree, what I disagree with is that pumped hydro is being used to prop up the dream that 100% renewable is achievable with intermittent suppliers and that it will be cost effective, the money being squandered on wind and solar would be better spent on base load nuclear if the coal is going to be left to export to solve the supply of cheap electricity to other nations
The notion that pumped hydro could function as a renewable ābatteryā was technically foolish from the beginning. Reasons covered in essay California Dreaming in ebook Blowing Smoke. Not going to end well for the SE Aus grid.
In USA, people who grew up in the suburbs might see Australia as a big, flat desert ideal for solar. The movie Crocodile Dundee has inflicted decades of damage?
If you fly over Australia, i is obvious that the majority is a lot like the scenes from CD, except for the water. There isn’t any. But there are large tracts of land characterised by rocks and sand.
As an example of the land, google earth a section of the country in inland Western Australia. If not for the mines, the place would be abandoned.
They should be watching Mad Max reruns.
California Dreaming? Here’s the grinning Cheshire Cat dreaming the big dream-
Labor are ‘attempting what’s never been done’ with your money: Chris Kenny (msn.com)
Yes folks that was a conservative PM at the time and why we’re in even deeper trouble now.
Conservative only because Labor didn’t want him.
Rud,
the utilisation of pumped hydro pre dates large scale renewable grid supply. It’s function is a very fast start generator for times of sudden supply deficit. Chemical batteries can also do this function. It cannot make up for the intermittent nature of renewable generation simply because the capacity is far too small.
Pumped storage is intended for short duration running, and is also a back up to assist if there is a grid failure (Black start) so it is not wise to operate at much more than partial use of the upper dam, i.e. a reserve is kept back.
Pumped hydro is very much misunderstood I feel.
sorta relies on water being available too..we get some good long droughts
You need some. But it is recycled.
What’s the water loss rate for storage and transmission?
There will be seepage and evaporation from an open reservoir, even in that area.
Recycled? Sure, if it hasn’t evaporated before it’s needed.
On the plus side, such a project could act to moderate the Australian climate – if the winds blow the right way.
Unless there is actual excess generating capacity to pump the water up, this plant is useless. There is no mention made of where the generating capacity to do that is going to come from, once the baseload coal units are shut down.
There is huge excess generating capacity in Australia at certain times depending on the weather. Economic curtailment of WDGs is a daily feature.
Two States already have enough rooftop solar to supply the lunchtime demand on a sunny day for much of the year.
NEM wholesale price was negative yesterday at lunchtime. This is normal. Note the batteries and pumped hydro were being paid to soak up power.
The coal generators bid a block of energy at high negative price to ensure they are scheduled at their minimum safe output because it is not practical for them to come off line on a daily basis. That forces the grid scale WDGs out of the market when the rooftops sing.
The pumped storage plant isnt in the city suburbs where the rooftop solar is – which at best can power home hot water storage , AC or pool pumps! Transferring the power in reverse , at grid scale and synchronised seems to create technical difficulties.
More likely the pumped storage will run at night when there is no solar and no grid congestion.
They don’t have to transfer the power from suburbs or rooftops. Rooftops mean that suburbs are not drawing on the main sources, including wind.
Snowy is very well connected to the Vic and NSW grids. In fact, they have been pumping at Talbingo for many years.
Isn’t that cute, Nick actually believes that roof top solar is enough to power an entire house.
He also seems to believe that apartment buildings, offices, hospitals and stores donāt require electricity. And that all those mandated EVs can run off rooftop solar too. Not impressed.
“Rooftop solar meets all local network demand in South Australia for more than five hours”
Howās the cherries tasting Nick? SA is a net energy importer, and regularly has to use its backup expensive gas and diesel generators. As a result, like all locations that use a lot of renewables, its electricity prices are the highest in Australia.
“ electricity prices are the highest in Australia”
Not wholesale, which is where you can compare renewables with others. Grid costs are high in SA because the market is sparse, but that is true regardless of source. Here is a graph from the latest AEMO Q1 report. The high renewables states, Vic and SA, have the lowest prices:
Oh for gawdās sake Nick. We do NOT pay the wholesale rate – itās the actual domestic rate that impacts us all. Mentioning the wholesale cost is a typical diversionary tactic and has no relevance to consumers.
It is the relevant number for comparison of FF and W&S. It is the difference between them that determines it. The rest is just network and retailing costs, which are the same however the power is generated.
“The rest is just network and retailing costs, which are the same however the power is generated.”
Really? Wind and solar are requiring long transmission lines over wide areas and into rural areas, and that cost should just be spread evenly with traditional (reliable and useful, non-Rube Goldberg) energy sources???
All the extra transmission lines and storage should be firmly assigned to the so-called renewables.
Your interpretation of the graph is misleading Nick. That wholesale electricity price is just time weighted averaging the spot price. $0 or negative during the day when they constrain off all the wind and grid solar because of rooftop solar then $200 at night when they are running the GTs or importing Victorian coal power. However, there is another large component, particularly there for SA. It is the network charges. This is all the GTs that are constrained on to run during the day in out of merit running and all the FCAS charges to provide reserves. These is also paying for the High Voltage lines and switchyard equipment (Syncons aren’t cheap). In SA’s case, these are often larger than the wholesale prices. The distribution and retail charges are additional to these.
That is why the power in SA is so expensive and industry has left the state.
What is the feed in tariff for this in South Australia? How does it compare with the normal wholesale price?
My other comment on the link would be, take the chart of generation a bit down in the piece to an open market bid, and see how much a company which has to manage end user delivery will pay for it. They would pay something for some of it. But in a genuinely free bidding process how much?
It looks like its generating usable power from about 9 to 5, and even then its varying a lot within that. Getting constant supply out of that generation pattern is going to be very expensive.
Intermittency. The thing that all advocates of wind and solar are in denial about.
Caught a beautiful 3lb rainbow at Talbingo many years ago.
Nearly drowned tubing the Snowy a few years later.
See, you can never predict what those storage dams and rivers might produce.
For Malcolm Turnbull, it’s just been beaucoup embarrassment.
Itās not that well connected. In fact, they plan to run another transmission line through the mountains to the site, the first line to be pushed through a national park for a very long time.
Amazing how easy it is to get permission to destroy a national park when one can use the “saving the environment” get-out-of-jail-free card.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding this.
In the UK, regardless of how much solar you have on your roof, you still get supply from the local electricity company. Your own generation is fed to them, and you get credit for it at the wholesale rate, the feed-in tariff rate.
For many years in the UK this was hugely over wholesale, like up to 10 times wholesale. I think its fallen recently.
So, if I have it right, if you raise consumption in any particular location, you have to have transmission to it.
Is this wrong?
Or is Australia somehow different, so that a house is actually running off the solar it generates? With an AC converter that is part of the package?
Plenty of people do run off their own solar+battery. But the point for the grid is that a huge amount of power is being generated in a distributed way, displacing the utility product. For parts of the grid, power is flowing in the opposite way that was intended. In SA, the daily minimum demand on utilities has moved from night to near midday. There have been times when they have had to disconnect domestic solar from the grid. More power than they can use.
I don’t see your point about feed-in tariffs. They don’t change the amount of power being generated.
”Plenty of people do run off their own solar+battery.”
You forgot to add, plenty of people also need a generator to run off their own ”solar+battery”
“I donāt see your point about feed-in tariffs. They donāt change the amount of power being generated.”
No, of course not. The point I was making is that the way rooftop solar functions is not to change the pattern of demand. There are two quite independent things going on. A house consumes the same power from the same company for the same purposes. Quite separately from that, the house also supplies power from its panels. Which the company is obliged to buy.
The panels could actually be located anywhere. The output from them isn’t used locally. Well, except in the few cases where there’s a battery installation. Or I know of one case where they use the output to heat a huge water tank. A bit jury-rigged, and one wonders what the insurance situation is for that.
You had said “They donāt have to transfer the power from suburbs or rooftops. Rooftops mean that suburbs are not drawing on the main sources, including wind.”
I don’t think this is true, at least not in the UK. I think with or without rooftops the same grid delivers the same power to the same houses. They do have to ‘transfer the power generated by them’, first to the grid and then back again to the houses. Its not the same specific power of course, they are just drawing on the grid as a whole.
Maybe things are different in Australia, or maybe I am not understanding how this works. I am no kind of expert on power systems engineering and planning.
I think Nick is trying to confuse the issue or playing dumb.
Of course the ‘burbs would be providing power to urban centres, like you said it’s the same interconnected grid, but more specifically: the ‘burbs will probably be producing a surplus of power, to their own or neighbours needs, during the sunlit day when everyone is at work or school, and the urban centres will be drawing from that surplus to feed those hungry air conditioning units and car chargers.
The net-zero ‘final solution’ will not be able to function without a massively over-spec’d grid – I say over spec’d because it will need billions of investment just to keep us at our current level of total energy use (electrical and motion).
The AC converter is always part of the package, or else how could the panels’ power be fed to the grid.
Specify in headline that its pumped hydro, an energy storage scheme
There’s a new breed of politician and Prime Minister that started to come to the fore in the 1980s.
They have a unfounded belief in their talents and abilities which considerably less than they think. They think everyone else are fools.
But worse they think that by saying something will happen that it will. No further action by them is required. All that is required are a couple of photoshoots in hard hats and high-viz clothes and it’s doubles all round
They aren’t new, there has always been a list of complete morons trying to ruin your future.
It’s just that the media are now publishing their thought bubbles and promoting their incompetence. Often with not only full compliance but with absolute belief.
The country is run by idiots.
It is probably clear to most free thinking people that the politicians are often the last to wake up to the obvious after it has long been apparent to most ordinary persons.
When the PM idiot of the time didnāt know the difference between an O and a 0 then we knew we were in trouble.
Illiterate leaders (and many others) just canāt be trusted with figures. Funny how they donāt pronounce Net Zero as Net O – too much marketing cos it sounds nice!
There is one simple reason that government should never run any business. No one should be self regulated. If a private firm that was regulated by the government were doing this, there would be hell to pay. The government never takes responsibility, never admits they are wrong and will spend embarrassing amounts of money to convince us that they havenāt failed. All fossil fuel power plants need to shut down immediately and be refurbished and updated on a floating timeframe so some can be restarted before others. They will all be restarted eventually except those that should be replaced by new fossil fuel plants or nuclear plants. No sense in delaying this.
Could anyone please provide a list and give the cost and environmental credentials of each alternative?
Snowy 2 can store 350GWh. Victoria’s Big Battery cost $160M for 450MWh. Scaling that battery to Snowy 2 capacity would cost $124bn.
By FAR the lowest cost alternative is to have no storage and use low cost, reliable, dispatchable generation. In Australia, that is coal fired.
Still better to place SMRs around the country where needed.
Say what? Use electricity to pump water into an impoundment behind a dam on a river? I’m a simple country boy from Oregon, but I believe things work better when the horse is in front of the wagon.
Henry Ford changed all that , his cars were rear drive and pushed rather than pulled.
and they were all fossil fueled, still are despite some claiming otherwise.
“2000-tonne machine named Florence, has been essentially stuck for months in soft ground, while a ādepressionā has appeared on the surface, 30 metres above where it is located.”
Did they not drill the right-away before attempting to tunnel underneath to sample what they would be cutting through? How can you bid on a contract and not know this! Thirty metres thick and the ground is collapsing! There will be no stabilizing this ground to allow the planned work to continue. The machine may even be done for.
They will probably fritter another year or so avoiding the only solution – excavate the ground open pit along the planned route until its solid enough to mine it underground. Do the right-away drilling you should have done. It feels like one of those never completed projects.
The ground assessment was clearly lacking but weak/soft ground tunnelling is proven practice. I have seen a tunnel bored under an existing rail yard with 10m of cover in sand with less than 10mm of surface variation.
Florence is currently being converted to pressurised slurry tunnelling. They are building the slurry handling plant for that now. It would be horrendous if the whole 15,000m required pressurised tunnelling but when cost is no issue and the prize is saving the planet then the work is that of the climate gods.
Please pass the bong.
To my mind that can only mean they’re burrowing under a swamp (a moor, or mire) in which case Florence is well and truly fugged.
Unless they can find a way around the mire, so is the project itself -you cannot run any sort of pipe/drain through that sort of ground.
As regards the project itself, electricity costs in Denmark should have been the clue.
Denmark built vast numbers of windmills and then sent the surplus, when there was any much, to Norway to store in hydro systems there.
And is why Denmark had the highest price electricity in Europe if not the world.
(Until Boris Johnson took charge of the UK, promptly got drunk and fell asleep on the sofa – thus leaving his eco-warrior Princess in charge and able to thoroughly trash the place)
There are plenty of pictures of the sire if you care to look. There was a roof collapse that propagated to the surface 70m above the tunnel about 120m in from the portal.
https://youtu.be/m8TvZ_7p9gg?t=42
The video mentions the new slurry plant.
“Coal plant owners donāt have an obligation to keep the grid viable, their duty is to shareholders. Keeping the grid stable is the governmentās responsibility.”
Exactly, the quicker they can shut the coal stations the better (& faster than the government want). A major grid needs to fail big time & some people must die so the WWW ( woke western world ) can see their future & reverse this madness
Otherwise it’s a long slow painful decline for the WWW & China will take over without a bullet being fired.
They had that total grid blackout in South Australia , for a day or so.
They blamed everything except the non reliable renewables, and the ‘answer’ was to close the last gas power station and have some grid batteries.
Its no longer science/engineering approach its a religious belief where the answers are found by more praying or relying on ‘icons’ or wind/solar they have put on the altar
“They had that total grid blackout in South Australia , for a day or so.”
And so the mythmaking continues. The AEMO report is here. From it, with the blackout beginning at 4.18pm 28 Sep:
“The first customers had power restored by 7.00 pm on 28 September. About 40% of the load in SA capable of being restored had been restored by 8.30 pm, and 80 to 90 % had been restored by midnight. “
As to cause, the very obvious cause was a violent storm that knocked down many pylons. From the AEMO:
“On Wednesday 28 September 2016, tornadoes with wind speeds in the range of 190ā260 km/h occurred in areas of South Australia. Two tornadoes almost simultaneously damaged a single circuit 275 kilovolt (kV) transmission line and a double circuit 275 kV transmission line, some 170 km apart. The damage to these three transmission lines caused them to trip, and a sequence of faults in quick succession resulted in six voltage dips on the SA grid over a two-minute period at around 4.16 pm. “
“the āanswerā was to close the last gas power station and have some grid batteries.”
No gas stations were closed at the time. In fact, as you can see from the plot below, gas generation was boosted. Some years later the old Torrens station was closed. Here, from the latest AEMO report, is the history of gas generation in the AEMO. SA still has plenty of gas generation:
Nick
As I have pointed out before, that is a very selective reading of the report which you quoted from. AsIt says “The damage to these three transmission lines caused them to trip2F3, and a sequence of faults in quick succession resulted in six voltage dips on the SA grid over a two-minute period at around 4.16 pm. As the number of faults on the transmission network grew, nine wind farms in the mid-north of SA exhibited a sustained reduction in power as a protection feature activated. For eight of these wind farms, the protection settings of their wind turbines allowed them to withstand a pre-set number of voltage dips within a two-minute period. Activation of this protection feature resulted in a significant
sustained power reduction for these wind farms. A sustained generation reduction of 456 megawatts (MW) occurred over a period of less than seven seconds. The reduction in wind farm output caused a significant increase in imported power flowing through the Heywood Interconnector. Approximately 700 milliseconds (ms) after the reduction of output from the
last of the wind farms, the flow on the VictoriaāSA Heywood Interconnector reached such a level that it activated a special protection scheme that tripped the interconnector offline.The SA power system then became separated (āislandedā) from the rest of the NEM. Without any substantial load shedding following the system separation, the remaining generation was much less
than the connected load and unable to maintain the islanded system frequency. As a result, all supplyto the SA region was lost at 4.18 pm (the Black System).3F 4 AEMOās analysis shows that following system separation, frequency collapse and the consequent Black System was inevitable”
It was the wind farms tripping off because of incorrect settings on the protection and the lack of grid inertia causing high RoCoF (3.1.3) that caused the system black. Section 3.5.1 notes the system would have been OK with the 4 lines out if those wind turbine stations hadn’t tripped.
You are correct about GTs closures – but most weren’t generating at the time, and it was the GTs that brought the system back
.
Thank you Chris for the correct interpretation. The renewables enthusiasts always manage to carefully ignore the actual timeline of events during the blackout.
Chris,
Well, you can say endlessly that if this hadn’t happened, there wouldn’t have been a blackout. Or this. It takes a chain of things.
But one thing is obvious. If there hadn’t been a storm, there wouldn’t have been a blackout.
Nick,
Storms happen all the time. That is not a valid excuse for a black out event. It is inevitable that future black outs will occur from storms if no changes are made.
You’ll notice “It was the wind farms tripping off because of incorrect settings on the protection and the lack of grid inertia ” is the reason. Most of the gas turbines were not generating at the time, yet their starting was needed to bring the system up.
Fossil fueled generation saved the day didn’t it?
Do you foresee a day when fossil fueles generation is completely gone under net zero? I hope not!
This was an exceptional storm. It blew down, I think, 14 pylons. One line it knocked out was the line which had taken power from the sole coal power station in Port Augusta to the grid in Adelaide, 200 miles away. So in the days of coal, there would still have been a massive blackout.
I doubt it. Otherwise there would be blackouts in prior years. I don’t know the design there, but here the grid would probably not have gone black. I don’t mean to say there wouldn’t have been a lot of people without power but I doubt if there would have been lots of large coal plants tripping off. A grid with a small number of large plants allows a much better protection scheme to be designed. That’s another problem with wind and solar plants all over kingdom come.
As Jim points out, storms happen all the time. The blackout was caused by there being too many windfarms on the grid and then they tripped off during the storm. If you can accept that, there wouldn’t be the issue.
Also, along with net zero, there probably won’t be gas running all the time. Start up from a blackout is a perilous task. You can’t just plop a 100 MW gas station onto a grid because it will immediately trip. You have to have proper syncing to small areas where wind and solar are connected also so they can begin to pick up a load.
Separating generation into multiple companies and then those from transmission and transmission from distribution will complicate this to no end.
Judith Curry’s site, Climate Etc. has a good article by Planning Engineer that covers some of this.
If it is the articles about the Oz grid and their problems, I was the co-author.
Doing a black start on a grid is a very tricky business. You can easily get a lot of real problems that will collapse things, so you need to start again. In SA case, it wasn’t that bad because they are only a sub-grid.
In simple terms, they tripped all the feeders, back-livened a GT station from the Heywood line, started a number of GTs, then slowly switched in distribution circuits, using the generation from the loading up GTs with Heywood as the float.
It would have been a lot more difficult problem if the interconnector wasn’t there. They couldn’t have used the DC link for this
Yeah. A lot of people think you just throw a switch and plop a generation plant onto a dark grid. That is far from what must occur. I would liken it to turning everything in your house on like plug in heaters, every light, range, furnace, bathroom heater, motor, etc. and throw the main breaker! It will probably trip immediately.
You must have the ability to control the load. If your grid is dark, being able to accomplish this will probably require manual intervention in the distribution network. Lots of joy!
Closing Liddell last week has highlighted how close Australia’s electricity grid is to chaos. With the current reliance on weather for power generation, the lack of dispatchable power is already in the spotlight. Attached shows the price volatility in the SA region overnight. Power price went from MINUS $46/MWh lunchtime yesterday to peak at $15,000/MWh early morning. Lack of Reserve notices are now hourly occurrences. These did not exist 8 years ago.
There is no way another coal fired power station can close unless there is a substantial increase in dispatchable power to offset the reduction. It will not be coal or nuclear. It might be gas. It might be Snowy 2. Getting rid of more coal could very well hinge on having Snowy 2 running. Whatever its cost will seem cheap after the grid fails.
The TBM Florence has progressed 120m of its 15,000m tunnel in 16 months. The lack of assessment of ground conditions meant they have to completely change the mode of operation to cope with weak rock so currently building s slurry plant for pressurised boring.
Story tip – Price volatility and Florence progress both potential stories.
āThe Turnbull Government will start work on an electricity game-changer ā¦ This plan will increase the generation of the Snowy Hydro scheme by 50 per cent, adding 2000 megawatts of renewable energy to the National Electricity Market (NEM).ā
Well that’s only true if you have lots of excess renewable power AND you’re able to connect it up to the proposed big battery. Therein lies a massive problem when you ditch the proven large hub and spoke electricity model for a novel spaghetti and meatballs approach-
Australiaās Renewable Energy Boom ā The Good, The Bad and the Downright Ugly – WattClarity
“the governments responsibility”. Well, we know how that will turn out.
I say this one more time folks:
“To err is human, but to really screw things up requires government.”
BTW, tell me again how much was spent on those desalination plants in Australia that ended up not being needed?
“For every 100 units of electricity purchased from the NEM to pump water uphill, only 75 units are returned when the water flows back down through the turbine generators. Not only is the electricity generated not renewable, Snowy 2.0 will be the most inefficient battery on the NEM, losing 25 per cent of energy cycled.”
By the time the Aussie govt gets done spending money on massive projects that are not needed or do not work, your blessed country is going to be flat broke (as we probably will be in the U.S.).
Yes the heavens have opened more recently filling the dams for water supply.
Pumped storage seems to be depending on cheap power – which occurs in mid day- and the water flow in the river to be pumped uphill- which disappears in the dry seasons
Its bizarre but those grid batteries make more sense than pumped storage as they too need recharging from grid , but dont waste so much power, can be located near urban areas and dont depend on river flow to have water to store
Pumped storage can store GWh of power. Batteries can only do MWh. Big difference.
The one consistent feature of the greenie weenies is…incompetence.
Future Generation??? That’s your problem right there, all the generation is too far in the future.
If pumped hydro can be powered by renewables, then it should work to replace all the “baseload” scheduled commuter mass transport with electric Ubers.
aussies cant handle pumped hydro?
ask the chinese for help
“We said to them, ‘OK, do a business case and come back to us’.
“The only thing they haven’t done is come back.”
That’s just one demonstration town with a headstart already?
Albany’s plans to become WA’s first ‘renewable energy city’ stall as investment dries up (msn.com)
Only $10bn? Pfft. Here in NZ we’re looking into a pumped hydro scheme that is poorly located and won’t do the job for $16bn (Lake Onslow).
A report on the scheme done a few years back when the cost was imagined to be ‘only’ $4bn indicated it didn’t make financial sense. Of course, our government wasn’t put off by that because money grows on trees.
I love the optimism of New Zealand’s pumped hydro advocates. Like the Lake Taupo scheme, 59KM^3 of water sitting in the Caldera of an active super volcano. Start drilling into that, who knows what you’ll encounter.
You do know, don’t you Eric that there are already lots of hydro tunnels around Lake Taupo (Tokaanu, Rangipo), and wells that go down to 3km depth close to lake edge. It is geologically very active volcano, but not actually active like White Island.
1800 years since last eruption. There have been tens of other volcanoes around it erupt in that time.
I hate to rain on the parade of naysayers here in the comments, but pumped hydro-electric generation is viable and has been operating at the Lewiston reservoir near Niagara Falls for 63 years – successfully and economically I might add.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses_Niagara_Power_Plant
The section on the “Lewiston Pump-Generating Plant” describes it’s design and daily operation where it pumps into the 22 billion gallon upper reservoir at night, when electricity demand is low. And during the day releases some of this stored water into the turbines to generate more electricity for the high demand periods.
The problem is not the concept of Pumped Storage Hydroelectricity, but rather the fumbling and bumbling by the “Snowy 2.0” SNAFU trying to implement it.
Mind you being designed and built in 1960, when Engineering and Science were not some airy fairy nonsense which has descended into an abyss of infinite lunacy as now – back then engineering was practical, pragmatic and unencumbered by the idiotic post modernist woke delusions.
You can in fact drive right past the massive turbines of the Lewiston generating plant when entering the US at the Queenston-Lewiston Bridge from Canada, on your way to Buffalo:
https://www.google.com/maps/@43.137836,-79.0354717,8256m/data=!3m1!1e3
above link shows the US and Canadian pumped reservoirs, and driving on I-190 you pass this view in the attached image:
Having pumped hydro to support base load power stations makes sense, having it to support an intermittent supply does not, it too will become intermittent.
But this water isn’t pumped up.
The plant diverts more water from the Niagra River above Niagra Falls into the reservoir at night than during the day. It returns the water into the lower portion of the river near Lake Ontario through its generators.
This arrangement also keeps the Falls more active during daylight hours for visitors.
cant say Im surprised its a total fustercluck
meanwhile theyre shooting horses cos they “damage” the national parks nsw n vic
compared to this?
greenluvvies are screaming to halt it and go for batteries
just as stupid, even better fire hazard as well
For every 100 units of electricity purchased from the NEM to pump water uphill, only 75 units are returned when the water flows back down through the turbine generators.
Actually, a combined efficiency of 75% for a system of pumps and turbine generators is not that bad. There’s always that pesky Second Law that forces energy losses.
The question is, what is being used to power the pumps? Hydro only produces power during (or immediately after) a heavy rain, unless the upstream reservoir is allowed to be depleted during dry weather. Solar power works best in dry weather, and not well in cloudy or rainy weather.
If solar power only is used to power the pumps, this can be used to “store” solar power by pumping water back up into the upper reservoir during dry periods. This would also eliminate the need for rare-earth metals for large storage batteries.
The major question is whether the capital cost of the pumping system per MWH recovered is more or less than the cost of batteries.
The Hornsdale Power Reserve – the Big South Australian Battery – doesn’t seem to be much more efficient these days. It also lost a fair bit of efficiency before the capacity was expanded. Perhaps the reality of that was that the expansion was more replacement than expansion, with the original battery packs only being used when full capacity was needed.
I realised I can add April data to the chart. 74.79% round trip efficiency. Will they shut it down? At about 3 years to decline to 75% round trip, battery replacement could get expensive.