New York Just Isnt Funny Anymore
If it were simply intended as a joke, wind power would be hilarious. Notwithstanding, the power pricing and supply calamity that follows whatsoever endeavour to rely on sunshine and breezes tend to sober things upwardly.
Random 3,000 to 4,000 MW air current power output collapses are at the heart of Australia's cocky-inflicted renewable energy debacle. The consequences of an obsession with subsidised wind and solar were as perfectly anticipated, equally they were perfectly avoidable. Power rationing is now routine and power prices are soaring out of control.
What's depicted above – courtesy of Aneroid Free energy – is the output delivered past Australian wind ability outfits to the Eastern Grid last month. To draw current of air power as a ability generation system, given that kind of performance is non merely delusional, it'southward dangerous. Commonwealth of australia's Eastern Grid is, literally, on the brink of collapse.
I of the few that gets it is, the Australian's Graham Lloyd. And to assist him to make his rather timely signal we'll throw in a niggling more data from Aneroid Free energy.
In the dark on the power struggle: inconvenient truth proves renewables can't cutting it
The Australian
Graham Lloyd
9 June 2022
Australia's low-emissions free energy journey is locked in a struggle between engineering and hope.
The nation has lost its style on energy considering it has failed to think long term, excluded emerging technologies from the word, and refused to acquire the lessons of failure from elsewhere.
Debate this week almost how a capacity market should piece of work to keep the lights on and industry in business organization underscores the point.
Too many people with too picayune understanding have turned a problem of physics and applied science into one of politics and economics. The breakdown in electricity supply is every bit serious as information technology has been predictable. Engineers know that grinding the coal sector into the footing won't brand renewables produce electricity when the wind isn't blowing or the dominicus isn't shining. Leaving gas in the ground, as NSW and Victoria take washed, won't ability a dorsum-upward supply. Stealing back supplies of gas from companies that have contracted to sell it elsewhere will compound the issues.
Governments mostly don't last long enough to reap the product of the anarchy they sow. But new governments should acquire the mistakes of others.
Opposite to popular stance, Frg'due south transition away from nuclear power has not been fuelled by air current and solar. It has been powered by greater employ of chocolate-brown coal and a dependence on Russian Gas. Power shortages in South Australia, California, Texas, Britain and Europe all share a common feature, a naive hope that renewable energy volition do the job it is non equipped to do.
Politicians have been cowered into supporting solutions they don't understand. No serious thinker believes it's economically sensible to firm upwards a national filigree with batteries just a whole industry is willing to take government money to give it a endeavour.
It might well be an expensive prepare for individual households, only not manufacture. Spending billions to extend the national filigree is based on the premise that the wind will always be bravado somewhere. The reality is this is non necessarily the instance.
Hydrogen is a promising technology but experts who have worked in the field maintain it is a unsafe substance, difficult to contain and invisible when information technology burns. From an environmental perspective, the vast corporeality of materials and area of country needed to effort what is being proposed using wind, solar, batteries, pumped hydro, hydrogen and manual lines does not meet the cost/benefit test. A bigger concern is electricity is only a small role of the claiming ahead. Bigger and more important for industry is process heat, something that current of air and solar can never deliver.
Alinta Energy chief executive Jeff Dimery belled the cat this week that the free energy crisis was caused past chaotic market place planning that had swamped the country with renewables that in turn made coal uncompetitive.
"Nosotros're committing economic suicide if we rush and effort to practice it besides speedily when we haven't got the culling supplies in place," he told a Melbourne conference.
To illustrate the point, he said renewable energy plants in South Commonwealth of australia last Wednesday at six.15pm were producing one megawatt of electricity, a tiny fraction of capacity. There was no wind in Victoria either.
"So information technology wouldn't have mattered if you doubled the capacity of the transmission, and it wouldn't have mattered if y'all quadrupled the capacity of intermittent generation. Without coal and gas, the lights would accept gone out in South Australia, that is a fact," he said.
Watching on, as the nation's energy thinkers wait for Band-aid solutions to potentially fatal atmospheric condition in the energy market place is the former head of Australia's Nuclear Science and Engineering science Organisation, Adi Paterson, who has besides commercialised pioneering enquiry on lithium ion batteries and participated hydrogen policy work in Southward Africa.
Paterson says the nation is locked in a false struggle. "This debate has become about economics and the universal law of economics is that information technology does not trump physics," he says.
"We have the burden of explaining more clearly to people what the real energy choices look like. Carbon-free process rut is a much bigger trouble than electricity. And the fundamental trouble is, if nosotros are going to electrify everything, we are going to demand reliable, predictable, 'ever-on' electricity for a rational society to function.
"With the energy cost issues, people are starting to see that when yous take the baseload out the costs become up."
He said it was important to have an intergenerational view of the problem: "Nosotros practise not have to practice information technology all in x years. In the adjacent century, I believe, if we but take off the simulated time problem, nosotros volition exist looking for the highest density of energy we tin get, and at the peak of that pile is nuclear fusion."
There are critics who tin can betoken to decades of promises merely the world is looking to new-generation nuclear reactors and fusion to solve the problem of low-emissions electrification to run a developed industrial economy.
In the domain of nuclear fission, the offset small-scale modular nuclear reactor by a US house NuScale is under construction and will be completed this decade.
The United states National Academies road map has set a time line to build nuclear fusion reactors from 2035. Australian company HB11 Free energy, of which Paterson is a managing director, is leading the world in exploring nuclear fusion using a new generation of high-energy lasers. The applied science won a Nobel prize for the inventors and tin bring decades of theory into reality.
HB11 Energy is looking at the 2040s to have a constitute operating based on the principles of inertial fusion using lasers.
Despite this, nuclear fission and fusion technology are not part of Commonwealth of australia's official energy discussion. Jim Chalmers, says he has ruled out nuclear energy because "the economics don't stack upwardly".
The Treasurer said he had never been a supporter of nuclear power and would maintain his opposition to it, which was "economic not ideological".
Paterson says this view misunderstands the problem.
"In that location is a trend to oversimplify," he says. "I recollect the cardinal trouble of wind and solar is information technology is highly accessible to the domestic consumer but most of what is useful in our society nosotros don't actually understand. You can win an argument by maxim solar, wind and batteries because people understand it.
"I think we need to accept this discussion nearly fission and fusion every bit a low-cost source of electrons because it gives us predictability and optionality.
"Information technology will give us a stab at solving the energy trouble not just the electricity problem. The question for wind, solar and batteries is 'Where is the process heat?'
"If nosotros solve the issue of nuclear fusion plants – because they volition also provide process rut for industry – they volition exist the anchor tenant of nearly modern economies from about 2060."
This line might non suit the catastrophisation narrative of a climate emergency. But at least information technology might just piece of work.
The Australian
The first graphic in the body of Graham's commodity is the output from SA's armada of whirling wonders (with a nameplate capacity of 2,142 MW) on 1 June 2022.
A little afterward midnight SA's 'team' were mustering up one,311 MW (61% of capacity). But the gang couldn't keep up the effort for very long; by noon Commonwealth of australia'due south renewable energy capital was struggling to generate a trifling 200 MW of wind ability; output bounced along the bottom for hours, and completely flatlined past 6pm – thereafter output was betwixt zilch and 4 MW (0-0.00187% – to the nearest decimal point). Oh, almost forgot to mention, that that evening's paltry current of air power performance coincided with a complete collapse in solar power output. [Note to Ed: that would be dusk, yet over again!].
The second graphic in the article is the output from these things in the neighbouring state of Victoria, which have a notional chapters of iii,105 MW. From a tiptop of ii,376 MW (76% of chapters) there was a 2,038 MW collapse to a trifling 338 MW (10.8% of capacity) – which was the sum full beingness produced at midnight. [Note to Ed: don't forget to mention the fell effect of sunset on solar output].
The graphic immediately above depicts a rather sluggish, ultimately pathetic, but entirely typical, functioning by South Australia'south current of air farms on 2 June 2022. After a brief flare-up of 470 MW (22% of capacity) output slid to 193 MW (ix% of chapters).
We could proceed. Well, in fact, this site has been going on most the crusade and consequences of this brewing calamity since Dec 2012.
Everything we take had to say has proved to be right. Blind Freddie could see it coming. The engineers who designed and built Commonwealth of australia's Eastern Grid and the power generation systems connected to it saw it coming, likewise.
Australia's Renewable Free energy Target – that directs more $seven billion a year in subsidies to wind and solar – is doing precisely what it was designed to do: namely, destroying Commonwealth of australia's reliable and affordable power supplies.
At the political level, the scramble is now on to go on coal-fired power plants up and running, wait for it, with authorities subsidies to the owners of those reliable plants to annul the effect of the colossal subsidies existence doled out to hopelessly unreliable wind and solar. Get figure!
Meanwhile, Australia, which holds the world's largest uranium reserves, maintains its ludicrous ban on nuclear power generation. Australia'southward energy policy is nothing short of treasonous.
Welcome to your current of air and lord's day-powered futurity!
C'mon Aussie, what on Earth are you waiting for?
Source: https://stopthesethings.com/2022/06/11/wind-power-the-complete-joke-that-just-isnt-funny-anymore/