Helplessly Hopeless: Australia’s Wind Industry Promises Big, But Never Delivers
It takes audacity to call yourself an ‘industry’ when you can’t say when you’ll deliver your product and its only ever delivered 30% of the time, at best. But that’s the business model upon which our wonderful wind powered future is predicated.
Australia’s wind ‘industry’ is literally suffering a case of the doldrums, with its output through June and July approaching something just north of pathetic. Wind watchers have dubbed it the big wind drought: Dead Calm: Australia’s Wind ‘Industry’ Suffering From Prolonged Wind ‘Drought’
One character who’s developed a keen eye for wind industry BS is Rafe Champion. Here he is digging into the data to show just how helplessly hopeless Australia’s so-called wind industry is.
We are all windfarmers now!
Catallaxy Files
Rafe Champion
21 July 2020
We are all in it together, to coin a phrase. Since all the powers that be, state and federal, are determined to move as quickly as possible towards dependence on the wind and the sun for electricity we had better pay attention to the amount of sun and wind power that is available, day by day.
Farmers, those hardy sons and daughters of the soil who get up every day to provide our daily bread, watch the weather like hawks and so we had better watch the wind and the sun with the same intensity. You don’t need to be a Rhodes Scholar to know that the sun is not there in the early morning and the evening, but what about the wind?
Will there be enough for a hot breakfast? Coffee on the way to work? Is the electric train running? And what about dinner this evening?
Check out the extent of the green bars in the picture below, state by state. From the AEMO Data Dashboard (changing every five minutes) we find at that SA is importing and they have had very light winds for 24 hours (see the Aneroid site.)
Not looking very promising at this early hour, but let’s see how it develops!
Some particularly revealing pictures can be found via the Fuel Mix tab at the top of the Data Dashboard. For some strange reason it is updated at 4am every morning and it lags so to see what the mix is today you have to wait for a day or two. This picture shows the mix in SA recently that you can access today.
48 hours from 4am Sat 18 July to 4am Monday 20 July 2020
An attractive feature is a slider that is located at the extreme right in that shot, it can be moved to get the numbers hour by hour over the two days. It shows that the wind was contributing 37% of the power generated in the state at the time. You can see the wind is on the way down towards the low point recorded yesterday and even at that time the sum of wind and gas was inadequate and coal power was coming in from Victoria.
Memo to letter writers. Thinking about a follow up for Bar Beach Swimmer’s remarkable conversation with an ALP staffer who was prepared to make a telephone call and then engage with a heap of ideas that violated every assumption that they would have held about RE. I was thinking about providing some more information, but not too much to swamp him/her, just enough to build on the platform built in the first conversation.
Some graphic pictures would surely help, and then the next step, what if the staffer actually looks at the source data and does his or her own windwatching! So I am going to send the windwatchers guide to every pollie in our data base, my son is looking after this, we have all the Coalition members Federal and NSW plus other parties Federal. He is coming to lunch today and we will set up the Windwatchers Anonymous group on Facebook for addicts.
All children and grandchildren should be trained and invited to join the Junior Windwatchers and give the family a report on the wind power supply at dinnertime every night!
From the comments. Tony from Oz.
Here’s two simple exercises to show you (a) the power actually required on a daily basis and (b) the power that wind actually supplies on that daily basis.
Go to the aneroid home page. (at this link)
When the page opens, scroll down a little. Now see that coloured graph there, well, that’s the Load Curve for power generation in Australia, well everything East of the WA border anyway, so 95% of it anyway, and that power generation is exactly the same as for power consumption, because you only generate what is being consumed.
Okay, here’s the (small) task for you all.
Under that graph, you see the boxes for the power generation sources.
First up. TICK the box which says Total. (a black line now appears across the top of the graph).
Now, UNTICK every other box, EXCEPT wind. (you are now left with a green colour rolling along the bottom of the graph)
Okay, the black line is what is being consumed, and the green colour is what wind power is delivering.
See the scale of the problem now.
Oh, incidentally, now hover your mouse along the graph line and find the low point of that black line.
That low point is the LOWEST that actual power consumption gets down to, not just for this day, but every day, and the year round average for that LOW POINT is 18,000MW.
That’s the lowest power consumption gets down to.
Until renewables can supply that ALL DAY EVERY DAY, they’ve got nothing.
Tony.
Liberty Quote. The government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them — Ronald Reagan
Catalaxy FIles
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