Climate Change in Australia (Part 1)

So the system needs to be upgraded to handle the fluctuations (in a very simplistic, non technical way)?

Yup.

Tony Abbott just read that and assumed you mean building another coal-powered station.

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Won’t the fluctuation influence wholesale price more than anything?

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The point is there will be less ask on the grid, hence less fluctuations, full stop.

HM & I will have to agree to disagree I think.

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To some degree, but it’s not the whole story. It certainly will influence that, but the price is determined by the NEM, and to buy power through the NEM you need systems to capture the fluctuation, determine what needs to be done to stabilise supply, bid and purchase power, and then bring the generation capacity for that power online in the grid, within fractions of a second. The systems to do this are not yet in place. Tesla’s battery in SA helped a bit, because the ‘bring online’ latency time for that is basically zero, so that even though it can’t run the entire state by itself or anything, it can respond very fast and keep the grid stable for just long enough to bring slightly slower-response power online and avoid cascading blackouts when the interlocks start to trip.

Somewhat less fluctuations on the demand side, much much more on the supply side. Grid function requires the two to be kept in balance.

Edit: and ok, agree to disagree. Didn’t mean to keep on harping on an argument, sorry…

However Humble One, if I am totally self sufficient with solar and battery backup, then the grid is superfluous.

This is entirely true. You can completely blackout-proof yourself that way. Unfortunately, that solution is only viable for a) the well-off, and b) those who own the place they’re living in. Everyone else will still rely on the grid, and therefore the grid must still exist, and therefore the cost of maintaining the grid must be split among a smaller number of grid users who are disproportionately less-able to pay for it.

Technically and environmentally viable, for individual households. Some major downsides, on a societal level.

Also the grid does more than supply homes. It needs to supply all the industrial and commercial premises too.

Yeah, but the more who can generate there own needs the less those evil, money grubbing bum-wipes need to generate and sell.

Maybe Dan Andrews should follow his heart and just take back all the power generation and elm at the profitmongers.

It’s an interesting discussion. According to my sources there’s plenty of capacity left in the system for rooftop PV even after the utility stuff comes on line over the next few years. The AEMO roadmap is definitely to improve transmission though. I’m still learning about what this will do to distribution, I’ll admit. I like learning though.

The utility death spiral. This is what is happening, I suspect th government will regulate against it (already are in a way, network costs are becoming a major part of the electricity bill).

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Put this one (and part of other points) to a mate in the industry. His response:

“Rolling blackouts is from undersupply, when reserve unavailable. Balancing occurs at market level with rolling forecasts including pricing. Oversupply would never be an issue at system level. It can be an issue at street level where many houses on a local transformer feed in during the day and overload the transformer. Has led to failures in the past or tripping protection settings or fuses, but generally these days is being identified and they just upgrade the transformer, etc.“

“The market is obviously oversupplied 99% of the time, plant just doesn’t operate.”

“In Scotland, they had an exceptionally windy week where 100% of the supply was wind, it was actually 120% of demand, they curtailed output from the wind farms (got some of them to shut down). That’s how the market operates without storage. When you have lots of storage, demand gets smoothed, there are no peaks, many system issues disappear.”

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I don’t think so, so major bummer there. Hopefully he subsidises batteries for us.

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Batteries forecast to drop 50% in the next 18 months once the big Chinese manufacturers enter the market. Might be a similar offer for home storage by the following election if this works alright. 5+kw system with a Powerwall 2 sized battery would get a lot of homes 90+% self sufficient. Yeah, connection fees would end up being expensive and they need to fix the rental situation.

This.

It’s the only bummer in the proposed plan.

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Cheap storage will be the game changer for renewables. Prices have come down a long way already and if those figures are correct things will go the same way as rooftop solar for the domestic market.

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As in making it attractive enough for landlords to install the panels?

Something like that yeah, … given that many that need bill relief will be renters, … but how do you justify subsidising improvements to investers 3rd 4th etc property??

And if you forced it upon them, … or made it somehow worthwhile, they’ll just add the cost to the rent. And many of them would likely do that even if it cost them nothing.

Just can’t find a method to give it to Low income renters in any way, … unless it was somehow portable, and was theirs, so they could take it with them to any property, … but I’m pie in the skying now.

And as has been said, … the more people don’t use Company supplied Elec., … the more they’ll be charging for it to cover their unnecessary investments in the P’s & W’s, … … so it will hit the low incomers even harder.

It’s a dilemma.

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