From STOP THESE THINGS

Sunset kills solar output the same way calm weather renders wind turbines utterly useless. Around the world $trillions have been squandered on occasional power generation which is always and everywhere dependent on sunshine and/or the weather.

In the beginning, there was a perfectly functional power supply with reliable generators connected by a systematically designed grid to every home and business – delivering power that was affordable and available, whatever the weather.

Then came the wind and sun cult peddling the delusion that wind and solar power can totally replace coal, gas and nuclear (with rent seeking crony capitalists in hot pursuit).

That delusion rests on the hidden fact that for every single MW of wind and solar capacity has to be another MW of dispatchable generation connected to the grid, meaning the only hope of keeping the lights on is premised on having coal, gas or nuclear power capacity equal to, or greater than, the total demand for power on any given grid, on any given day.

The wind and solar industries’ propaganda wing started out calling it ‘backup’, these days they talk about ‘firming’.

Shine a light on the total output of wind and solar over time – and whether you call it ‘backup’ or ‘firming’ – there’s an awful lot of it.

In Australia, the average annual power output of all of the wind turbines connected to the Eastern Grid sits at 28% (their total capacity is 11,400MW).

At 28%, those turbines are working less than 2 days a week. With 168 hours in a week (24 x 7), 28% of a week is 47 hours (168 x 0.28) – 60 minutes less than 2 full days. But it’s even worse than that, because wind power outfits can never tell you, with any meaningful advance notice, which two days of the week they might be generating a little power; the power that they keep telling us is powering X million homes every day.

Given that power consumers are pretty keen on having electricity delivered 7 days a week, those ‘backup’ or ‘firming’ generators are doing an awful lot of heavy lifting, and will continue to do so forevermore – at a staggering and entirely unnecessary cost.

In the pieces below, Alan Moran outlines the cost of so-called ‘firming’ the occasional output from wind and solar, a cost born by power consumers and taxpayers.

Australia’s government-induced transition to a high-cost, unreliable electricity supply
Canberra Daily
Alan Moran
2 April 2024

Australian governments are forcing a “transition” in electricity supply from coal (and gas) to wind and solar. Though the ACT has virtually no electricity generation other than that from rooftops, it leads the way in terms of its purchasing contracts for grid-sourced renewables.

Wind and solar have different operating characteristics than coal and gas electricity generators. Coal and gas (and nuclear) can operate pretty much continuously but weather and nightfall limits solar to generating only 20 per cent of the time and wind to about 30 per cent. And electricity supply from wind and solar generators is highly variable.

With wind/solar at their present market share of about 30 per cent, both coal and gas can fill their troughs in supply. But it is the policy of all Australian government jurisdictions to force coal and most gas out of the market. Moreover coal (or, for that matter, nuclear) is ill-suited and costly as a backstop to variable wind and solar supplies.

Recognising the need to compensate for the intermittency of wind and solar energy, 15 months ago, Commonwealth Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, proposed a Capacity Investment Scheme to iron out the peaks and troughs of wind and solar generated electricity.

The idea was to induce a build-up of storage systems to enable uninterrupted supply of electricity. This becomes increasingly necessary to provide support as coal, which still supplies over 60 per cent of the nation’s electricity, is phased out.

Approved storage systems under the Capacity Investment Scheme are pumped hydro like Snowy 2 and batteries. Pumped hydro generates by releasing water when alternative supplies are short and uses electricity at other times, when it is in excess supply (and therefore cheap), to pump the water back uphill. Batteries supply and replenish on a similar basis.

Snowy 2 (providing the boring machine named “Florence” can be made to work) with other pumped hydro is projected to provide enough storage for about 9 hours supply as the market grows. The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) reckons we need to increase this to 12 hours by using batteries.

Mr Bowen’s Capacity Investment Scheme was earmarked to help do that job. But, in the event, 23 of its planned 32 gigawatts of installed capacity is earmarked for additional wind and solar. Rather than capacity support for wind and solar, it has become just another subsidy scheme to induce additional supplies of this renewable energy. In passing, it is worth recalling that 20 years ago we were assured that all such schemes would be unnecessary, as wind and solar would by now have become lower cost technologies than the archaic coal plant they would replace!

With the Capacity Investment Scheme and other measures, the Albanese Government has turbocharged the renewable energy subsidy programs from an annual cost of $9 billion under Scott Morrison to over $15 billion. The various measures are summarised below.

So, we have seen a vast increase in subsidies (that is, costs to energy users and taxpayers) which has brought about a considerable increase in government outlays and in the price of energy to households and commercial users alike. For energy-intensive industries, like smelters, the increased prices are crippling and governments have introduced offsetting support – ironically, they are providing subsidies to offset the effect of the subsidies that they have already imposed!

All this aside, AEMO’s planned half a day of storage is hopelessly inadequate in view of the high variability of wind and solar. Overseas estimates are that a wind/solar system requires at least 20 days storage, while the highly regarded Australian consultancy, Global Roam, has estimated that Australia would need at least 10 days storage. And this is with a perfectly designed system involving a 20 per cent over-supply of generation capacity without any losses during storage or transmission.

These are early days of the energy “transition”. But our politicians are plunging us into an electricity supply system with perilously higher costs and lower reliability than we are already experiencing.
Canberra Daily

The grim cost of firming up solar and wind
Substack
Alan Moran
22 April 2024

The ‘transition’ of the electricity supply industry has been forced by government subsidies to renewable energy generators with increased impositions on coal and gas with higher royalty charges and bans playing a secondary role. The first subsidies were introduced by John Howard in 2001 as the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target. He later described this as his worst political decision. It required electricity retailers gradually to include wind or solar to comprise 2 per cent of their additional energy. This was quantified as 9,500 megawatt hours.

These measures pandered to concerns about the global warming. They also responded to lobbyists, who wheeled out experts claiming that renewable energy technology would follow a variation of Moore’s Law, where computer chip performance doubles every two years. The application of this to electricity supply, it was argued, just needed a short-term leg-up.

Time has demonstrated this to have been spurious. The need wind and solar facilities have for subsidies, far from withering away, have escalated.

The initial measure provided a subsidy to renewables (and cost to consumers) growing to about $380 million per year. To his credit, John Howard resisted pressures to increase this but the Rudd/Gillard governments and state governments vastly expanded the support with new schemes for rooftop facilities and budgetary expenditures. The Turnbull and Morrison governments further expanded the subsidies, which at the outset of the present government’s tenure amounted to $9 billion per annum.

The Albanese government has introduced a number of additional measures. These include the Safeguard Mechanism, which requires the major carbon-emitting firms to reduce their emissions by 30 per cent by 2030 or buy the equivalents in carbon credits. The cost is conservatively estimated at $906 million per annum.

The government is also set to introduce the Capacity Investment Scheme involving power purchasing agreements designed to attract $68 billion of spending on additional wind, solar, and batteries. The best estimate of the cost to the taxpayer is $5,775 million per annum. In addition, the government is expediting the transmission roll-out.

Present subsidy levels are estimated at $15.6 billion per annum.

The effects of subsidies have come in three phases.

The first was in the decade after 2003 when renewables progressively increased their market share as required by regulations. By 2014/15, wind and solar had grown to about 7 per cent of the electricity market. The subsidised supplies placed downward pressure on the market price as well as taking market share from coal. That outcome was intensified by new Queensland gas supplies coming on stream. Without access to export ports, that gas was redirected to domestic electricity generation and the share of gas supplies in the National Electricity Market increased from 8 per cent to 12 per cent. Gas now has more lucrative markets overseas and governments are exerting pressure on the producers to allocate more than is commercially sensible to the domestic market.

This first phase came to an abrupt end when low prices and higher supplies forced major coal generators, Northern Power in South Australia and Hazelwood in Victoria, out of the market.

Those market exits led to a second phase, whereby reduced coal capacity brought a trebling of wholesale market prices from their 2015 level of $40 per megawatt hour (MWh). Covid caused a temporary downward blip but the wholesale price is averaging $119 per megawatt hour in the March quarter, 2024.

These higher prices reflect the higher cost of wind and solar and will continue to prevail and, in fact, increase. Price increases may be concealed by governments entering into power purchasing agreements but this means subsidies financed by taxpayers rather than electricity users.

The subsidies to wind and solar have now resulted in their market share growing from zero 20 years ago to over 30 per cent. This is ushering in the third phase of the ‘transition’, which involves desperately seeking ways to firm up the intermittent and largely unpredictable electricity supply from wind and solar.

Gas, coal, and nuclear can operate pretty much continuously and without special storage facilities, but weather and nightfall limit solar to generating only 20 per cent of the time and wind to about 30 per cent. And electricity supply from wind and solar generators is highly variable.

With wind and solar at their current market share, coal and gas can fill their troughs in supply, albeit unprofitably. But the policy in all Australian government jurisdictions is to force coal and most gas out of the market. Moreover, coal (and, for that matter, nuclear) is technically ill-suited and costly to be used as a back-stop to variable wind and solar supplies. ‘Social licences’ aside, new coal or nuclear plants could not be commercially built except as near continuous baseload.

Other means of ‘firming’ wind and solar supplies are therefore increasingly required. One such is the conversion of Snowy Hydro into a pumped storage facility. Pumped hydro generates by releasing water when alternative supplies are short and uses electricity when it is in excess supply (and therefore cheap), to pump the water back uphill. Batteries supply and replenish on a similar basis.

Snowy 2 is planned to provide 376 megawatt hours of storage. The Capacity Investment Scheme is an attempt to augment this, though, notwithstanding its name, it earmarks 70 per cent of its intended power purchasing agreements simply for more wind and solar. These add nothing to replacing the dispatchable (controllable) power being lost from the forced retirement of coal plants. The Capacity Investment Scheme will add just 36 gigawatt hours of storage from the 9 GW of facilities planned to be contracted.

The Australian Market Operator’s (AEMO) Integrated Systems Plan for 2050 envisages a total storage capacity of 642 gigawatt hours for a system double the size of the present one and overwhelmingly powered by wind and solar. This is utterly inadequate for backing up intermittent power.

Francis Menton has assembled a wealth of evidence of how much storage a renewables system would require. He authored a major report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation as well as many other papers like this. Basically, his work shows that a wind and solar system, if it is to provide a secure and reliable electricity supply, requires some 26 days of storage. For Australia, this means 13,000 gigawatt hours of storage, which is 25 times what the AEMO Integrated Systems Plan envisages.

The highly regarded GlobalRoam consultancy estimated that the National Electricity Market (which excludes Western Australia), with perfect planning and no losses in storage or transmission, would require at least 9,000 gigawatt hours of storage. The costs of this, at $US 350 per kWh, would be three times Australia’s GDP for batteries that would need to be replaced every 12 years.

It might be argued that Germany, with little storage back-up, already has wind and solar providing 45 per cent of its electricity and, although it has some of the world’s highest prices, its supply is reliable. But Germany also has access to supplies

Our politicians are plunging us into a perilous future. Policies have already given us an electricity supply system with costs that cannot support energy-intensive industries. Those policies are now poised to bring about lower reliability than is compatible with a first-world economy.
Substack