But, Malc, bless his extremely compromised soul, has come out and said the energy security group recommended this. No they didn’t. Coming from someone who sat in on the meetings (no, not me), no they didn’t. The government just ignored that part and inserted the bit about requiring a coal percentage. And Turnbull is out there saying this is what the security mob wanted. This ■■■■ is crooked and limp.
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When so many of the loudest people in the debate either don’t or refuse to understand the difference between ‘baseload’ and ‘despatchable’ power, and refuse to acknowledge that AGW is a real thing and that it needs to be taken into account when setting power policy, I don’t have a great deal of hope things will get much more sensible any time soon.
Not surprised the power companies have come out in support of the plan though. It’s a licence to print money for anyone who owns coal generation capacity.
The generators and providers are just going to do whatever suits them. This might make things a bit tricky but they’ll just pass it on. That’s where the prices keep going up. But, don’t worry, they’ll come down by 2 bucks a quarter some time in the future. Awesome!
As someone said earlier “it makes perfect sense”.
That’s why they’re called the Lieberals.
They simply could not exist as they do without Murdochs media brainwashing the bozo’s as it does. Nothing will change until the prick keels over, … and then we can only hope the whole shithill he’s built and controls nations with falls into oblivion.
Out of interest do we know what snowy 2.0 would cost?
Approximately.
The thing is, though, it’s not even about partisan politics now. It doesn’t make any sense on a market level. So, the argument should be, “why are we subsiding industries at the expense of modernisation? Industries that can’t get investment and actually do something with our energy security?” And, the answer is, because you’re crazy or, you’re getting paid to do something weird, or don’t care about energy security.
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I don’t agree with that. It 100% IS about partisan policy. It’s SUPREMELY about partisan policy, simply because it doesn’t make sense on a market level or any other level. Propping up coal generation and undermining renewables isn’t about actually achieving goals in any meaningful way, it’s about giving those hippies greenies one in the eye (and more to the point, allowing Abbott to have a policy win in the vain hope he’ll stop undermining Turnbull’s leadership, as if that’s ever worked the other 947 times it’s been tried)
This isn’t policy based on evidence, It’s aimed firmly at the Three Word Slogan level. It’s ‘virtue signalling’ for the climate denialist set, if you like, with a quiet side order of ‘rip off the suckers as much as you like but FFS don’t close any more coal plants’ to the power companies.
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On Turnbull’s electricity trilemma, are we being negged?
By Simon Holmes à Court on 18 October 2017
In the despicable world of pickup artists, there’s a term for a subtle, insulting comment meant to undermine the self-confidence of a woman so she might be more vulnerable to advances. It’s called a neg.
Now perhaps it’s too much to ask the government to run the new NEG (national emissions…, sorry national energy guarantee) past focus groups, given that the body that ostensibly devised it only met for the first time last month, but you could excuse the Australian public for feeling negged.
The Australian public loves renewable energy. As this week’s Essential Report shows, support for incentivising renewable energy outnumbers disapproval 74% to 10%, and in case you’re tempted to think support is tribal, the split for Coalition voters is 75% to 12%. Even a majority (52%) of Coalition voters support Labor’s commitment of a 50% renewable energy target for 2030.
An estimated 4.4 million Australians live under a solar roof and the rate of installations this year is blowing previous records out of the water — Australians buy solar panels every time electricity costs are in the news much the same way that Americans buy guns after massacres.
The Australian public has been ‘negged’ by the myth of blackouts. We have been repeatedly told, by media of all stripes, that we have a reliability problem. We don’t. Not even in South Australia.
The myth began when a series of tornados — tornados people! — took out three major transmission lines, setting off a cascading series of events that resulted in a blackout. Much of the more populous areas of the state came back online within 3–4 hours, but, spare a thought for the technicians working through impossible conditions to restore 23 downed pylons, there were significant parts of the state that had to wait for transmission towers to be replaced and wires restrung.
Thankfully, the engineers and economists who designed and operate our electricity system really know their stuff. It’s not well known that we pay a group of generators to stand-by, as System Restart Ancillary Services (SRAS), for eventualities like 28 September 2016.
One of the more interesting stories of that fateful day is that both SRAS providers in SA failed, and the state had to be ‘jump-started’ through the interconnector from Victoria.
(I imagine a young engineer proposing the plan, a la Apollo 13, with the silver-backs responding “It’s so crazy, it might just work”, followed by the Hollywood scenes of back slapping and cheering as the lights came back on suburb by suburb. Ron Howard, you can have that pitch for free.)
But haven’t there been a string of blackouts in SA? Apart from massive storm damage after Christmas (in the distribution network) there’s only been two incidents of ‘unserved energy’ in the past 12 months. The first was due to a transmission line failure in Victoria in the middle of the night last December and was resolved quickly.
But the other ‘major blackout’ shouted from the rooftops (everywhere but in SA) occurred on 8 February. On that hot afternoon, AEMO knew the wind was going to drop off and that gas generators would need to be ramped up.
AEMO screwed up their temperature forecast, ignoring much more accurate Bureau of Meteorology forecasts on the day, and at 3pm determined that SA would soon be short of reserve power.
AEMO scrambled to bring more generation on-line, but a sizeable portion of the fleet was variously unavailable through the afternoon due to communications system problems, unavailability of gas, ‘tube leaks’, inability to spin up in time or unable to work in such high ambient temperatures.
So much for gas being reliable — as New South Wales found out just two days later when a significant part of their ‘reliable’ fleet failed in the heatwave.
Gas generation being ‘reliable’ on 10 February 2017 in NSW. Source: Dylan McConnell, Energy Transition Hub
So, with a predicted shortfall of 100MW, or just 3 per cent of demand, and significant gas generation sitting idle, at 6:10pm AEMO instructed ElectraNet to switch off 100MW, or 30,000 homes. Due to a ‘glitch’ — which has received one-poofteenth as much attention as any other problem in the grid this year — ElectraNet accidentally turned off 90,000 homes. Inconvenient, undeniably, but AEMO directed Electranet to restore 100MW at 6:30pm and the remainder at 6:40pm.
Those mathematically minded might have just done the mental sums and noticed that the Tesla ‘megabattery’, or Big Banana as Scott Morrison would have it, would have been well capable of carrying the 100MW load for the 20–30 minutes of this ‘load shed’, and would still have most of its charge available.
But isn’t it true, as Virginia Trioli claimed when hosting QandA, that “we’re going to have blackouts” this summer? Perhaps we will — no doubt some major generators will fail in hot weather, or perhaps someone will drop a spanner into a switchyard a week before the SA election — but AEMO thinks the chance of ‘blackouts’ is relatively unlikely.
AEMO’s Electricity Statement of Opportunties, released last month, provides the warning that if we have a high-demand summer and if we don’t do the range of things that are already well underway, then in Victoria we might breach the reliability standard, expressed as ‘unserved energy’ (USE) by 0.00025 per cent.
The South Australian story is similar, 99.9975% reliability, but note that AEMO’s report explicitly excludes the measures being taken before summer to ensure we don’t see a repeat of the minor event from last February. (These measures include 1000MW of strategic reserves procured under AEMO’s long-standing Reliability and Emergency Reserve Trader mechanism.)
The fact is that Australia has one of the world’s most reliable electricity systems and part, but certainly not all, of the reason we’ve ‘gold plated’ our grid is because we demand that reliability. While the media and Canberra continue you bleat about reliability, keep in mind that even Dr Kerry Schott, alleged co-author of the NEG, has openly stated that we don’t have a crisis.
At this point, very little detail of the scheme exists — almost certainly because it hasn’t yet been written. But of what has been released, one clause is particularly concerning. As reported by The Australian:
If retailers can’t meet their emissions profile they can buy generation from the spot market which will be assigned an average emissions level, or buy Australian carbon credit units (ACCU) or international units.
The average emissions intensity factor of the NEM is 820 (kgCO2-e/MWh), already below our black coal plants (919 for Queensland’s four ‘HELE’ plants and 1011 for the sub-critical plants) and well below the 1130–1410kg of the brown coal fleet in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley.
In 2016 electricity retailer ERM chose not to purchase renewable energy certificates but instead to pay a penalty for non-compliance. Will ERM have a change of heart and invest in renewables or will it free-ride on the back of others who have progressively brought down the emissions intensity of the highest emitting sector of our economy?
Or will they purchase ACCUs? Ponder this: ACCUs are a by-product of the government’s so-called Emissions Reduction Fund which, to give just one example, has provided 8.5 million certificates to a single company for equipment built before the ERF to capture gas as required by law and burn it for energy and LGC income. I lose count somewhere between double- and triple dipping.
Or will retailers simply buy international offsets to, at best, help transform and future-proof other economies?
So if we don’t have a reliability issue and if the scheme is compromised on an emissions front, how is it placed to reduce energy prices?
What’s been lost in this debate is that the impost of the RET on consumers is on track to evaporate. Between Stockyard Hill and Coopers Gap almost 1 GW of wind energy has been contracted this year with an effective certificate price of $0. If, and it’s a big if, retailers can be trusted to pass on the savings obtained by the falling technology costs of wind and solar, the LRET portion of retail charges will also head towards zero.
The incredible RE prices we are seeing in the market, among the lowest in the world according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, have only been achieved because such projects are ‘bankable’. Banks only look at these projects because they are underwritten by long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) with top-tier retailers.
Without PPAs the projects would either have included a significant risk premium or simply not be built. The obligatory and stable nature of the RET has delivered cheaper and cheaper power, resulting in a ready supply of LGCs — for those who can write a 15 year PPA — increasingly available at no cost.
The NEG proposes to leave annual target setting in the hands of a government appointed board. Without a table of bipartisan, legislated and therefore stable targets, most projects won’t get a look-in with banks. But don’t take my word for it. This from Rob Koh of Morgan Stanley Australia:
Working off initial information only, we highlight that the NEG includes a Government-set emissions reductions pathway (rather than by an independent body). The risk of political interference in the targets may reduce investor confidence in the scheme, particularly where there is no explicit linkage to Australia’s Paris Agreement commitments.
Unless the NEG is legislated with prescribed targets, fewer projects will enter the market and those that do will face higher financing costs. This is not recipe for affordability.
It’s not fair to comment much more until the detail is released — but it’s not looking good for the so called energy trilemma — reliable, low emissions and low-cost energy.
Australia, we’ve got to ask ourselves, are we being negged?
Simon Holmes à Court is senior advisor to the Energy Transition Hub at Melbourne University and can be found on twitter @simonahac
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While I am Simon Holmes a’Court would never tell a porky, it is relevant to note that he is part owner of a Wind Farm and has a vested interest.
However I did check his assertions about SA and it all is 100% correct. Funny how Trip and Mr Wolf try to use the same facts to push their climate denial.
It’s amusing to see that when the warmists know they are on a loser trying to say that building wind farms is cheaper than existing coal generators they flip to climate. Funny stuff but very transparent.
Building wind farms is cheaper than maintaining old coal power stations.
That’s like saying building a bike is cheaper than maintaining a truck.
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I get your analogy, Trippo, but it is poor.
I am no lover of wind farm industry, as they have sucked millions in government subsidy out of our tax payer hands. Then again so have the farking mining industry, but that is another argument.
It is a fact that if you gave me the money required to build new coal based power generation, that I could build equivalent generation through renewables more cheaply.
And even with the $500 million required to maintain a dirty old shiteheap like Liddell, I could do a great deal using only renewables.
Ideally for me, I would let all these money grubbing power companies rust away and once again nationalise power generation through 100% public ownership on a Federal basis. Privatisation has not worked.
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I probably should rephrase. The validity of building renewables has gone beyond the partisan politics over the validity of climate change. It should now be done simply because it has become the better economic direction to take. You’re right though. Only partisan idiocy would ignore this and stubbornly keep marching in the wrong direction economically and environmentally.
Forgot to wish you a happy birthday @benfti , so as a special gift to my Greenie comrade and I going to buy a hybrid car today !
And if you visit Melbourne, I will let you drive it. Not sure what colour though, red or black ?
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Surely green?
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So in the last decade and a bit this argument has raged from both sides. Left/Right, Labor/Liberal, Republican/Democrat, CC is real/No it’s not.
During this time energy prices have risen (see any power bill in Australia) and the environment is in a state of decline (see any of the ‘once in a century storms’ that occur with regularity).
Clearly the current system of hurling abuse at the other side isn’t working, that the facts used by either side aren’t correct or aren’t properly communicated/discussed (I blame the 24 hour news cycle sound bite), so what can be done and how can it be achieved?
This is a questions to anybody that feels like/can be arsed responding.
Don’t fall back to party lines, don’t attack the other side. sound reasonable debate and ideas.
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Nah, they do not have a green colour.
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It doesn’t matter what method of discussion, debate or abuse hurling you use if one side of it has no regard for facts, scientific insight and is in an active campaign of disinformation financed by and dreamed up by certain industries.