Smeeeeeg Heeeeead.
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Itâs spelt Crichton.
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Supposed to be 24% of Pakistans requirement.
Thatâs incredible. Iâd love to see the working behind the figures.
Wikipedia has Pakistanâs average power demand as 17GW, so if itâs a rate of use then I donât know how 24% is calculated. Maybe itâs enough to provide 24% of their coal needs?
Wikipedia also has Pakistan producing 29% of itâs power from renewables, mostly Hydro.
Just remember that these articles are written by reporters with figures provided to them by politicians.
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Then treated like gospel by those who post them
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ALAN MORAN
A Dead Man Warns of a Dying Grid
Not long before his sudden and premature death, Australian Energy Market Operator chief Matt Zema spoke candidly at a private conference of power-industry executives. The enormous subsidies heaped on renewables, he said, mean one thing and only one thing: âThe system must collapseâ
broken turbineMatt Zema, inaugural head of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), attended a meeting a year ago of the Regulation Economics Energy Forum at which a number of prominent electricity industry executives were present. Proceedings at the meeting were private, but the need for confidentiality was removed with Mattâs sad death three months later. The following were among his remarks:
âThe renewable developments and increased political interference are pushing the system towards a crisis. South Australia is most vulnerable with its potential for wind to supply 60% of demand and then to cut back rapidly. Each new windfarm constrains existing ones and brings demand for more transmission. The system is only manageable with robust interconnectors, but these operate effectively only because there is abundant coal-based generation in Victoria wind, being subsidised and having low marginal costs, depresses the spot price and once a major coal plant has a severe problem it will be closedâŚ
⌠wind does not provide the system security. But the politicians will not allow the appropriate price changes to permit profitable supply developments from other sources. And the original intent of having the generator or other beneficiary pay for transmission and services over and above energy itself has now been lost so there are no market signals, just a series of patch-ups that obscure the instability and shift the problem to include Victoria. In the end the system must collapseâŚâ
A month later South Australiaâs coal-fuelled Northern Power Station was disconnected from the network because it was unable to operate profitably against subsidised intermittent renewable energy that has priority over other supplies.
In September, 2016, as a result of this capacity reduction, South Australia lost all its power when storms triggered outages and several wind generators were unable to âride throughâ, causing the main interconnector with Victoria to shut down. A more limited loss of power took place in February, 2017, when wind supply dropped from 800MW to under 100MW in four hours.
The September, 2016, blackout is estimated to have cost the state $367 million. BHP, whose senior executives have long engaged in virtue-signalling in favour of carbon taxes and exotic âcleanâ renewables, reported a loss of $US105 million with their Olympic Dam project â a loss magnified by the company being forced to suspend its proposed doubling of the mineâs capacity as a result of power uncertainties.
Alan Moranâs new book, Climate Change: Treaties and Policies in the Trump Era
can be ordered by clicking here
Engie, the owners of Hazelwood announced in November, 2016, that the 1600 megawatt facility (supplying between 20% and 25% of the stateâs power) will be the fourth big coal-fired power station to close. Hazelwood had been allowed to deteriorate as a result of subsidised wind making the plant unprofitable, which did not stop Engie being ordered to complete major repairs to at least five of the eight boilers in order to meet occupational health and safety regulations.
The bottom line is that the loss of the coal-powered stations has resulted in at least a doubling of the wholesale electricity price in the southern states and the concomitant loss of reliability.
Blame shifting between politicians has characterised the various events. Reliable coal plants are being forced to close due to competition from renewables which currently enjoy a subsidy of $84 per MWH, double the actual price received by coal plants. The forced closure of these plants has compounded the cost impost by forcing up pool prices. The subsidies favouring renewable energy include several put in place by state governments, but the most important regulations are at the Commonwealth level â especially those requiring increasing shares of wind and solar within the supply mix. These regulations give rise to the current subsidy for wind and solar, currently at $84 per MWh and capped at $92.5 per MWh.
The roll-out of new subsidised power is on-going. And various schemes are being floated for buffering and overcoming windâs intrinsic lack of reliability. Among these is the mooted South Australian battery investment using the technology developed by Elon Musk and the proposal floated by the Prime Minister to augment the Snowy hydro system with âpumped storageâ. These measures, should they go ahead, allow the transfer of power over time and, in doing so, reduce the gross power available.
New âsolutionsâ using subsidised wind and solar abound.
Last week, for example, South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill announced a new solar-battery combination, Lyon Solar in the Riverland, which promises 300 Megawatts of capacity. This is the equivalent of perhaps 80 megawatts of coal fuelled electricity and comes at a cost of one billion dollars.
The now-shuttered Northern Power Station had 540 megawatts, yet Weatherill declined to take up an offer that would, for a mere $25 million, have kept it open. Instead, he plumped to spend $500 million-plus on a gas generator of half that capacity and, plus Elon Muskâs much bally-hooed batteries!
On paper, the new Lyon Solar facility is profitable only because of the penalties imposed on coal. These include the subsidy under the Renewable Energy Target of $84 per MWh. In addition, the facility benefits from the forced closure of the coal-fired stations. This has resulted in the wholesale price of electricity rising to a new norm of $130 per MWh, compared with the average price in the four years to 2015 of $50 per MWh. The bottom line is that the consumer will pay $214 per MWh for $50-per-MWh worth of electricity from the new facility.
With that sort of money being littered around the industry for gee-whizz exotic projects it is little wonder that moochers are circling the state like moths round a candle. In the end, renewables require at least three times the price of the supposed dinosaur facilities they are displacing; consumers and industry will need to pay this and, in addition, fork out for grid additions to offset some of the inevitable deterioration of reliability the brave new energy world entails. Obviously many outfits, especially those in the energy intensive mining and smelting and agricultural processing sectors will not find it profitable to remain in an Australian market where wholesale electricity prices have more than doubles and the systemâs reliability has deteriorated.
We are seeing the future with these renewable energy facilities and it is not working. The contagion that is undermining the South Australian economy and impoverishing the stateâs households is spreading to Victoria.
Ominously, on the very day that Hazelwood closed, Victoria evidenced what will be the new norm.
Incredibly, with no heatwave or any other factor to inspire a spike in electricity demand, it had to import electricity from New South Wales and Tasmania.
Read part of it. Continually promotes coal but neglects to make a single mention of global warming or coalâs emission problems. Got to where it said renewable power was âvirtue signallingâ and gave up, not going to waste any more of my time reading an article lacking any scientific honesty at all.
Iâm fine with critiques of energy policy & suggestions of ways it could be improved, but anyone who purports to do so need to have the basic intellectual integrity to at least address the issue of greenhouse emissions if they want to be taken seriously. This article is either the work of a propagandist or an idiot.
âVirtue signallingâ FFS. Yeah, pardon me for wanting to avert the worst of catastrophic climate change, youâve got me bang to rights, Iâm only doing it to pick up chicks. What a fuckknuckle.
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Well that bloke is now meeting his maker
Ironically enough, as he decomposes he has become a source of greenhouse gas emissions. As in life, so in deathâŚ
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I donât have the time or the inclination to pick the whole article all apart - full though it is of half-truths and unsupported claims - but this quote is completely disingenuous.
Without Hazelwood, Victoria has nearly 10.7GW of generation capacity, of which only 1.2GW is wind. The demand on 30 March never went above 5.2GW. Even if the wind wasnât blowing at all, anywhere in the state, thatâs still 4.3GW spare.
If we were importing electricity from NSW or Tassie, it would be because itâs a NATIONAL electricity MARKET and we take the cheapest available power, wherever it comes from. Not because we donât have enough capacity.
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Repeated because I liked it.
A lot.
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Heâs an ex-IPA staffer who got sacked because he was too extreme even for them. So both, maybe?
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sorfed is quickly proving himself a Tripper prodigy/clone.
Here is the reality of your future.
As of 5:55am, Thursday 13th April 2017.
Brown Coal: Capacity 4730Mw Output 4152Mw at 87.78% of capacity.
Gas: Capacity 2446Mw Output 700Mw at 28.61% of capacity demand driven.
Hydro: Capacity 717Mw Output 190Mw at 26.51% of capacity demand driven.
Wind: Capacity 1270Mw Output 90Mw at 7.09% of nameplate capacity.
If you want wind as a renewable energy source you had better be prepared to build at least six times the capacity you require.
Expect no more than 17% of the theoretical capacity on a long term basis.
Inconsistent, wildly fluctuating, highly expensive âfreeâ power.
Of your claimed 10300Mw, 6616Mw are coal with Labor wish to rid Australia of and Natural Gas which is a fine resouce the Labor have banned the exploration and exploitation of future reserves.
Hydroelectricity is reliant of rainfall and I know that even you must have noticed a slight lack of over the last 10 years.
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Great article just dealing with reality. It got the standard response from the standard lefties but it does not change the reality that we are being driven down a path of crippling electricity prices and power outages that will not make a ratsarse difference to climate change.
- This is not the future, it is the (inadequate) present
- You utterly neglect rooftop solar in your list, which is in the order of 1GW peak capacity if I remember right
- Gas reserves are more than adequate & production is booming, itâs just getting exported to Japan for a pittance rather than used to generate power here. The only exploration ban Iâm aware of is on fracking, which is far from the only way to obtain gas.
- The reason brown coal generation is at such a high % of capacity is that it canât just be switched off. The furnaces take ages to get going again if shut down so they basically run 24/7, burning coal even if theyâre not needed.
- Do you even see the irony in using the fact that there are more droughts these days as an argument for more reliance on coal? Itâs almost like the climate is changing, isnât it? What could possibly be causing that I wonder?
- Once again you refuse to acknowledge the fact that emissions reduction must be a factor in power policy making, alongside price and reliability. Simply closing your eyes doesnât make it go away. There are going to be inevitable hiccups and expense in transitioning from greenhouse fuels to renewables, but this doesnât remove the reason the transition is happening or the necessity of making it.
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Yeah, well, thatâs just a standard response from a standard lefty because you believe in the so-called âgreenhouse effectâ.
Canât you see that climate change isnât real/Australia canât do anything about it/I donât want to think about it/George Christensen is an all-knowing, all-powerful deity?
Also, Iâm going to ignore the rest of your post that countered the point I was trying to make, and then claim that youâre the delusional one.
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Yep.
That is the path we are on. Would you expect power prices to go down with more investment in coal? Do you expect $500 from scrapping the carbon tax soon?