There is no saving the Australian wind industry from a high pressure cell
Right now 19 out of 20 wind turbines are essentially towers of fiberglass waste
Australia has built 11.5 GW of theoretical total wind power capacity on the National Energy Market (NEM) spread across 80 locations on the Eastern Seaboard, and at one point today only 4.1% of it was working. Another gigawatt of generation on the Western side is only generating at 3 – 5% capacity.
The green bar below represents total wind generation today compared to the total power consumed (the black line).
Total wind generation for the NEM in Australia.
The Australian government is telling us “we’re different” to other countries struggling to make wind and solar work. We supposedly have “world-class resources” and “natural advantages in renewables“. But we also have world-class high pressure cells that stop wind generation across the entire nation simultaneously. On days like these, it doesn’t matter much whether we have 1,000 wind turbines or 10,000 if 95% of them are failing.
Compared to Europe, we have a natural disadvantage in wind power — there’s no one to rescue us when we screw up. We’re surrounded by vast oceans which make interconnectors prohibitively long, expensive and a strategic security risk for communist ships that might drag anchors accidentally-on-purpose through a region with long sub-sea cables. (Which is apparently what happened in the Baltic Sea last year).
So where exactly can we build another thousand wind turbines that would work on a day like today? Macquarie Island or Antarctica?
And it’s not just one day. So far for May 2024 wind generation has been unusually low about half the time.
Macquarie Island is 2,500 kilometers from the closest Australian capital city, and Casey base Antarctica is 3,500 kilometers away. It’s 2,000 kilometers direct to New Zealand, which is bad enough, but parts of the Tasman Sea are 5km deep. They don’t call it the “abyss” for nothing. In any case, wind speeds over New Zealand right now are only 1 – 7 km/hr. (At about 3pm EST Australia).
For the record, the National Energy Grid connects the Eastern five states of Australia and 90% of the population and is running at about 25GW in late autumn. The South West grid is a tenth of that, and all those other dots, apart from Darwin, are “microgrids”. In some parts of Australia all we need is one diesel generator, and we’ll put it on the national map. Kings Canyon, for example is just 1.1MW. The square is vastly larger than the town.
The glut in solar power in Australia is so big that next year solar panel owners in Sydney will have to pay 1.2c a kilowatt hour to offload their unwanted energy between 10am and 3pm. Nearly a million homes in Sydney have solar panels, but only 7% of them have batteries, which means basically, thousands of homes installed hi-tech generators that aren’t very useful. Worse, other homes were forced to pay part of the costs for them. The only winner was China.
Finally, a tiny part of the strangled free market is re-asserting itself, which might slow down future installations, or trick a few people into installing a $9,000 battery. Naturally this unpredictable rule change will hurt the poorest solar owners, but benefit those wealthy enough to afford a battery.
The biggest electricity distributor on the east coast plans to charge households with solar panels to export their electricity to the grid during the middle of the day.
Ausgrid will impose a penalty of 1.2¢ a kilowatt-hour for any electricity exported to the grid between 10am and 3pm above a free threshold that varies by month. During peak demand times, between 4pm and 9pm, Ausgrid would pay 2.3¢ an hour as a reward to customers exporting solar to the grid.
The tariff will be charged by Ausgrid and the retailer will decide how to package it. It is opt-in from July this year, and mandatory from July next year.
The Sydney Morning Herald naturally thinks this is backwards and unfair, and in a sense it is, homeowners were led up the garden path. No one was given realistic information before they purchased another useless panel. But where was The Sydney Morning Herald? — it was selling the garden path. If they interviewed a few skeptics they could have told the hapless homeowners that the forced transition was artificial, unmanageable, and the conditions were doomed to be “adjusted” sooner or later.
Solar power at noon is electrical sewage
The wholesale market was trying to send the message. Negative spot prices show that solar is essentially a waste product at lunchtime which needs to be disposed off, a bit like electrical sewage.
You might wonder why any generator would keep generating during a glut so bad they had to pay for every watt they generated. But it’s logical in a screwed market — the negative prices are close to the value of the “Renewable Energy Certificates” the government forces us all to pay to solar and wind operators. So solar owners can produce a product the market essentially doesn’t want, but the government forces us to pay to make it profitable. See how this works?
The point of a free market is that stupid ideas are supposed to be free to lose their own money. That’s a signal to stop doing it.
And if there was some use for solar power at midday, negative prices would have found it. If there was an AI supercomputer that needed to sleep 18 hours a day and only work at lunchtime, the owners would have been beating down the door to get paid to use that solar juice. It didn’t happen.
Here’s the solar power contribution to the NSW grid this month.
During the solar spikes, hundreds of tons of exquisitely tuned infrastructure that could have kept running, just sits around and waits in case a cloud rolls over. And efficiency gained by solar is lost by the rest of the system.
Like any ideological cult, wind and solar acolytes bury troublesome facts and replace them with oodles of helpful fiction. Start with the supposed cost of the electricity occasionally generated by wind turbines and solar panels.
The usual trick is to invent some model said to capture the unique benefits of running on sunshine and breezes. The model ignores critical variables (such as sunshine and wind and wear and tear on turbines and deterioration of panels) thereby overstating output and understating the actual cost of generation.
Once upon a time Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) was renowned for advancing science and technology using objective and critical analysis, and all for the benefit of the Country. These days. Not so much.
CSIRO is just another government institution overrun by ideological crones obsessed with the conceit that they alone can change the weather 50 years from now and that if we don’t ‘act’ now the world will incinerate some time later next week.
Well and truly captured by wind and solar rent seekers, part of their brief is to put up fictional accounts of the (always understated) costs and (always overstated) benefits of wind and solar: its GenCost report sits somewhere between Science Fiction and rubbery accounting, as Nick Cater explains below.
We now know Labor’s renewables dream is based on economic modelling that isn’t as ‘unimpeachable’ as Chris Bowen claims it to be Sky News Nick Cater 4 May 2024
A scan of Chris Bowen’s media archives on his ministerial website shows that he has claimed that the cheapest electricity comes from renewable energy at least once a week for the last two years.
“Facts are facts,” he told ABC’s Sabra Lane last December.
He cited economic modelling by the CSIRO describing it as “unimpeachable and very, very clear”.
If the Energy Minister is beginning to sound screechy, it is probably because he’s losing the argument.
An Essential poll for the Guardian last month found that 40 per cent of Australians think renewable energy is the most expensive form of energy, up from 38 per cent last October.
Only 36 per cent said nuclear was the most expensive, and 24 per cent picked fossil fuels.
For the first time in an Essential poll, a clear majority supported nuclear energy, 52 per cent in favour compared to 31 per cent against.
The findings should trouble not just the government but the CSIRO.
It has suffered self-inflicted repetitional damage by venturing outside its area of scientific expertise into the complex microeconomic world of energy pricing.
Despite Bowen’s insistence, most Australians know that computer modelling of future prices are not facts but predictions that must be truth tested against observations made on the ground. Observations of the upward trend in household electricity bills, for example.
This week, the Centre for Independent Studies published a devastating critique of the CSIRO’s modelling which shows it to be unworthy of the paper it’s printed upon.
The CIS’ conclusions confirm that our peak scientific body has been wading out of its depth, cherry-picking data and making rookie calculation errors.
Significant costs attached to renewable energy are conveniently ignored in the CSIRO GenCost analysis.
The cost of storage and associated transmission lines incurred before 2030 are treated as sunk costs, even though investors will expect a return over the asset’s life.
The Australian Energy Market Operator’s Integrated System Plan – Bowen’s roadmap of the transition to renewables – requires considerable rooftop solar and home battery investment.
Householders and businesses bear this cost, but it is not included in the GenCost analysis.
The cost of decommissioning turbines, solar panels and batteries at the end of their life is also excluded.
In estimating the carbon emissions savings that are said to come by adopting renewals, AEMO’S roadmap excludes emissions from the manufacture of wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and the other paraphernalia required by intermittent renewable energy, making them seem cleaner than they are.
CSIRO’s method of evaluating individual projects doesn’t consider the energy system as a whole but as separate parts.
This approach allows financially unviable projects to get approval, leading to costs being transferred to consumers.
Most egregiously of all, the CSIRO cherry pick the data to make other forms of electricity generation appear more expensive.
It bases its cost estimate for Small Modular Reactors for example on the cost of a failed project in Utah, which faced peculiar cost overruns, technical challenges and regulatory hurdles.
It includes the finance costs for SMRs but not for wind and solar, where the assumption is that money is borrowed for free.
The GenCost report would likely have found nuclear was considerably cheaper if it had examined a mass-produced reactor like GE Hitachi’s BWRX-300, which is about to start production in Canada for installation at Darlington Point in Ontario.
Previous nuclear reactors have been one-off projects.
SMRs like the BWRX-300 will be made on production lines similar to those used to manufacture aircraft.
GenCost uses unrealistic assumptions about the construction costs of new coal plants, making them appear more expensive than renewables.
The ISP selectively chooses specific future years in its cost-benefit analysis to justify transmission projects and ignores years where reliability breaches are likely to occur.
In its determination to stack the cards against fossil fuel generation, the CSIRO assumes that the current price spikes for coal and gas caused by the Ukrainian war will remain constant throughout the lifespan of new plants.
In reality, world gas prices have already returned to levels close to those before Russia’s invasion.
The complete list of errors and biases in the CSIRO GenCost is extensive.
The CIS report is available online.
The CSIRO’s errors are forgivable in part.
The organisation’s expertise is in scientific research and innovation, not microeconomics.
It is hard to fault its work on insect control, fine wool processing, radio astronomy, WiFi protocols or polymer banknotes.
Yet its work on energy pricing is not just economically naive but a departure from the established scientific method.
It commits the most egregious error in the scientist’s rulebook: a priori reasoning, the formation of conclusions based on deductive logic or pre-existing knowledge in which the search for empirical evidence becomes superfluous.
The CSIRO researchers knew what the answer should be and proceeded to torture the evidence until it made a false confession.
A priori reasoning can be helpful in mathematics and logic, but it should never be applied to empirical questions or phenomena in the natural or social sciences.
It leads to confirmation bias, where investigators selectively interpret evidence to support their preconceived notions.
It encourages logical falsehoods and oversimplification, where conclusions are drawn from established principles and ignores the complex, dynamic systems that operate in the natural world or human behaviour.
It cannot cope with complexity or uncertainty, is inherently speculative and runs a high risk of error.
It leads to the delusion that computers are intelligent and that the ability to compile a spreadsheet is the path to omnipotence.
These are increasingly common symptoms in the laptop class.
It’s a condition that might be called Excel syndrome, the delusion that the ability to put a spreadsheet together is a substitute for knowing what you’re talking about. Sky News
And check out Nick’s interview with Alexandra Nicol on the extortionate costs of wind and solar subsidies:
Twenty-three years ago, a Chinese-Australian solar scientist moved from Sydney to Wuxi to build China’s solar panel manufacturing industry from scratch, using technology developed in Australian universities.
Shi Zhengrong became the world’s first clean energy billionaire, nicknamed “The Sun King”. China went on to dominate global solar panel manufacturing and, thanks to a mix of innovation and cut-throat competition, made solar the cheapest source of electricity in history.
Australian science graduates filled the top technology roles at the biggest Chinese solar companies. And a solar cell design developed in Australia became the global standard.
Now, with the federal government preparing to ramp up Australia’s own tiny solar manufacturing industry, Dr Shi sees the story coming full circle.
“It’s an exciting opportunity for Australia,” he said, speaking to the ABC from China.
“I think you definitely need collaboration [with China], but I think Australia is in a better position compared to 20 years ago in China.”
…
The public reaction in the weeks since has been mixed. Many energy experts welcomed the plan as a way to ensure supply of a critical energy resource (solar will soon generate most of Australia’s electricity) and carve out a slice of a growing global industry.
But some economists and the federal government’s own Productivity Commission warned it could lead to the government wasting money by subsidising the production of panels that China can make more cheaply.
What did we do wrong, to be cursed with such a parade of economically incompetent politicians? The government’s own productivity commission is warning it’s a bad idea, but politicians would rather listen to an Australian trained Chinese scientist who has already made billions of dollars off Australia’s economic incompetence, and stands to make billions more if this plan goes ahead.
The following article is from 2006 – why Shi Zhengrong, the Sun King, chose China over Australia;
Arise the Sun King
September 12, 2006 — 10.00am
…
Many factors, including China’s determination to attract its brightest minds back from overseas to help create new high-tech businesses, have contributed to Shi’s good fortune. His company’s rapid expansion has also been fuelled by rising global demand for solar cells, as governments in countries such as Germany and Japan, unlike here, have embraced clean energy.
“He was the right person at the right spot at the right time to move in both Chinese and Western cultures,” says Professor Martin Green, of the University of NSW, about his former student. “He was successful because of his own personal skills as a technologist and his ability to handle the managerial and political aspects of setting up and manufacturing in China.”
…
Content with his comfortable life in Sydney, he took Australian citizenship, but his homeland kept a close eye on this rising solar expert. At Chinese New Year and other festive occasions Shi was invited to celebrations at the Chinese embassy. “It was the policy of the Government to attract people like me – overseas scholars – to come back,” he says. In 2000 representatives of the Wuxi region approached him with an offer of $US6 million to establish a conventional photovoltaic solar cell manufacturing plant. Shi was sceptical that he could turn a profit in China. “The system was corrupted. I didn’t have any confidence [in returning],” he says.
He was also reluctant to give up his work on thin films – the technology of the future. But a two-week visit to China changed his mind. The infrastructure had improved and he could see that the handful of solar cell manufacturers there were losing money because of a lack of good technology.
With his experience and plentiful ideas for how to set up a plant, he realised the business could be a winner. “There was already a great demand for solar panels.”
I’m not criticising Shi Zhengrong’s choices or actions. In Shi’s place, if I had his skills and background, I might have made similar choices. He is undoubtably a brilliant scientist and a Chinese patriot who made a good decision for himself personally and for China, which made lots of Chinese people, including Shi, very rich – “the right person at the right spot at the right time”.
What I am criticising is the economic incompetence of Australia’s politicians. Shi had sound economic reasons, in addition to the subsidy cash, to relocate to China. But what is the competitive advantage which suddenly makes solar in Australia a good idea?
China dominates solar manufacturing because they have cheap coal energy. Low wages helped their competitive advantage, but the real key advantage is their low cost energy.
But Australia still has higher wages, higher energy costs, more environmental regulations and higher taxes than China. None of the economic advantages which convinced Shi to move to China have changed – China is still the more cost effective location to manufacture solar panels.
Even if you believe Australia is the better place to deploy solar panels, and there are arguments for and against this position, this doesn’t change whether China is the best place to manufacture solar panels.
If there was a real economic opportunity to manufacture solar panels in Australia, Australian businesses would be jumping all over it, leaping to fill the gap in the market. No government subsidy would be required to convince Aussie businesses to take advantage of a big profit opportunity.
The only competitive advantage Australia is publicly offering right now is lots of free money. But free government money is not enough to build a sustainable business, because solar manufacturing in Australia will dry up the moment the money stops. Giving away subsidy money with every sale of subsidised Australian manufactured goods would impoverish Australia, not give us a competitive advantage.
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
The ultra-high-decibel sonar emitted by wind industry survey vessels during wind farm construction deafens marine mammals, so does piledriving: the repetitive, percussive pounding of the columns that support the turbines (see above); the piles are 8m in diameter and over 100m long – 30-60m of which gets punched into the seabed.
The offshore wind industry is killing whales and other marine mammals by a variety of means, including collisions with boat traffic in areas where there previously was none. Whales and other marine mammals – deafened in the manner described above – become disorientated, calves become separated from their mothers and prone to fatal or mortal collisions with surface vessels – particularly those used in the construction of offshore turbines, cabling and other infrastructure.
Further, confused and disorientated whales are driven away from their natural feeding grounds by the noise generated underwater by sonic mapping and turbine construction and into areas where food is scarce, leaving them hungry, prone to disease, and liable to end up beached in shallow water.
The wind industry has been killing an increasing number of whales, dolphins and porpoises all along America’s Atlantic coast for years now – and doing so with complete impunity, thanks to US Federal government authorisations euphemistically called the ‘Incidental Harassment Authorization’.
Now the wind industry wants to repeat the slaughter in Australia, targeting its southern coastline, including the south-west coast of Western Australia and Victoria where, as detailed in the 2nd article, local Aboriginal groups are furious about the damage the proposed offshore wind industry will cause to whales and other marine mammals.
Federal government proposes wind farm in the middle of a whale migration route News.com Emma Kirk 9 April 2024
In what is believed to be a world first, the federal government has proposed developing an offshore wind farm in the middle of a whale super highway off Western Australia’s southwest coast.
Each year, tens of thousands of whales use the water in and around Geographe Bay on their annual migration to Antarctica.
The bay is described as a pristine marine ecosystem off Bunbury, about 168km south of Perth, and stretches 98km along the coastline to Cape Naturaliste, between Dunsborough and Yallingup.
The area is one of WA’s most popular tourist destinations and recreational playgrounds, with endless sandy beaches, turquoise waters and an abundance of marine life.
More than 30,000 humpback whales pass through Geographe Bay on their way south as they head towards their feeding grounds.
Endangered southern right whales use the bay to rest and nurse their calves.
The community is in disbelief that an offshore wind farm has been proposed in Geographe Bay and say there has been a lack of information and consultation from authorities.
Geographe Marine Research have monitored the movement of whales through the bay for years and believe a wind farm would be better located on land.
They recently started tagging blue whales in the area and have recorded whales outside the bay area using an acoustic data log, inside the proposed wind farm zone.
Geographe Bay Marine research board member Rodney Peterson said their concern was that the wind farm would be the world’s first in a whale migration route.
“No one can predict how the whales will react to that,” he said.
“It wasn’t that long ago that we nearly wiped whales off the planet.
“The blue whales and southern right populations haven’t come back like the humpbacks.
“We need to see more details about the wind farm and the area that is being proposed.
“The government has not come forward with any details and that is what’s lacking.
“They just need to come forward with research to show why this is a good area, although if they did the research, they would probably find it is not a good area.
“We nearly killed all these whales now we are going to do this to their migration path.”
In February, the federal government started seeking community feedback on the proposed wind farm area, which could span about 7674 sqkm
While the project is still in the early stages, if the area is approved by the federal and state governments, it could be located 20km to 70km off the populated coastline.
One of the proponents looking at the project is Copenhagen Energy, a Danish renewable energy developer, which is looking at up to 200 wind turbines operating in the proposed area.
Copenhagen Energy has submitted an application to the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water based on their initial environmental, social and economic studies.
A self-proclaimed ocean rat and fourth generation diver Kyle Treloar said he “just loved the water” and shed a tear when he learnt about the proposed wind farm.
He started a group called Save Our Beloved Geographe Bay for the community to share information about the wind farm and images from beneath the sea because many people were unaware of the marine life that lived there.
“Some people are absolutely terrified, it is a way of life, it is business and tourism,” he said.
“We still shake our heads that this is a thing.
“I don’t know how you can put industrialisation over a pristine ecosystem the last thing we need is big spinning structures.”
Mr Treloar has been mapping the underwater environment to give people a better perspective of the marine ecosystem off the coast.
He said they had picked the biggest reef and coral system south of Mandurah.
“The government is willing to risk all this for something that benefits industry,” he said.
“The turbines proposed are 280m tall and 20km away, they have to put the turbines straight over the coral which has a lot of people upset.
“They have done no environmental impact (study), they just picked an area and haven’t looked at what’s at stake.
“When you talk about people’s recreational activities, the thought of losing that is diabolic.”
WA Liberal leader Libby Mettam said she shared community concerns about the lack of transparency surrounding the project and believed the consultation process so far has raised more questions than answers.
“The offshore wind farms will have a profound effect on our beautiful coastline and yet there are still many unanswered questions about the full impact it will have on the health and wellbeing of residents living in nearby coastal communities but also on whales, migratory birds and our fish stock,” she said.
“The recent community consultation sessions provided no constructive information or reassurance.
“Residents deserve open and transparent information about the impact of the project and it is not unreasonable to expect the federal government to be able to provide details by this stage of the planning process.
“I have met with southwest locals who are understandably outraged by the process so far, and I will continue to work alongside them to ensure this proposal does not go ahead.” News.com
‘Undermines our sovereignty’: Custodians speak out against wind farm zone The Standard Jessica Greenan 7 April 2024
The custodians of an area of sea country marked as an offshore wind farm zone off the south-west coast say the decision has shown “disregard for our voices”.
It comes as both the Gunditj Mirring and Eastern Maar Aboriginal corporations expressed their disappointment at the announcement made by Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen on March 6.
In a statement, Gunditj Mirring said there’d been a “complete lack of appropriate and meaningful consultation between the commonwealth government and the Gunditjmara community”.
“By excluding us from the decision-making process, the government has not only demonstrated a disregard for our voices, perspectives and rights, it has overlooked an opportunity to engage and learn the true value and history of our sea country from its traditional owners,” it said.
“Whilst GMTOAC supports the agenda for environmental protection and climate change, this decision undermines our sovereignty as land rights holders.”
The statement said the corporation had written two letters and a submission opposing the designated area and had highlighted the need for further independent research to assess the cultural and environmental impacts of such a designation.
Eastern Maar Aboriginal Corporation said in a statement it supported decarbonising traditional energy sources and understood the critical role it played in combating climate change.
“However we firmly believe that the pursuit of decarbonisation must not come at the expense of marine life that we are inextricably linked to,” it said.
The statement said the corporation had concerns about the impacts on the migratory paths, feeding grounds and nursery areas of the “highly endangered and culturally significant Koontapool (Southern Right whale) species that utilise the oceans and coastlines of south-west Victoria, as well as the globally significant ecosystems that support Koontapool”.
The statement said the declared area was made on the back of preliminary assessments rather than comprehensive environmental studies which was “concerning”.
“We believe that the environmental studies should not have been completed before the declaration of the area not at stage five as per the eight-stage process.”
It said the declaration should have been more comprehensive and the process of declaration should have deployed the services and involved the independent offshore regulator NOPSEMA (National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority).
Federal member for Wannon Dan Tehan said it was “beggars belief” Energy Minister Chris Bowen had not done the appropriate consultation with Gunditj Mirring.
“Given this failure to consult he should immediately rip up the declared zone and start the process again,” he said.” The Standard
In Australia dozens of onshore projects, that have been in the so-called ‘pipeline’ for years, are being quietly pulled. And others are being put to death in full public view.
One recent and very public execution involved Chalumbin, where Ark Energy had planned to wipeout thousands of acres of pristine rainforest to make way for dozens of these things across the ranges of Far North Queensland. But, after the adverse publicity that surrounded the environmental destruction involved in the construction of dozens of these things at a neighbouring atrocity at Kaban – the Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek – baulked at the notion of a repeat performance. Something about the ‘bad optics’ that comes with trashing forests and wiping out creatures large and small.
Before the Minister could swing the axe, Korean owned Ark Energy engaged in the noble art of seppuku and pulled the project.
As Nick Cater points out below, Chalumbin is not the first nor the last wind factory joining the zombie apocalypse.
Zombies cast fear across renewables dreamland The Australian Nick Cater 27 April 2024
Last Thursday, the Queensland parliament passed a law committing the state to reduce carbon emissions by 75 per cent by 2035. Debate resumed at 11.44am, and the Energy (Renewable Transformation and Jobs) Bill was done and dusted in time for lunch. Back-slaps all round.
At 4.32pm on Friday, Ark Energy announced it was withdrawing its application to install 42 wind turbines at Chalumbin in far north Queensland following advice that the federal Department of Climate Change and Energy was about to reject it.
The meagre odds that Queensland can meet its legislated emissions target using renewable energy are now too small to be visible under a microscope.,
For the wind industry, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek’s rejection of Chalumbin is its Franklin Dam moment. It was a test case of the federal government’s willingness to weigh the environmental cost of installing turbines against the assumed benefits of low-carbon electricity.
Last July, when I drew national attention to the Chalumbin proposal in The Australian, I opened my column by noting that it would destroy 1000 of the remaining 8000 hectares of wet sclerophyll forest, the buffer zone between the rainforests and the open plains to the south.
Nine months later, the minister reached the same conclusion, telling The Guardian at the weekend the forest “provides a vital habitat for many birds, plants and animals, including the spectacled flying fox and the northern greater glider”.
Her decision measures how far the wind industry’s fortunes have sunk since June 2022, when the Queensland government approved the Chalumbin proposal under the corner-cutting assessment process. It applies to anything with the word “renewable” attached.
Bulldozers were ripping swathes through hundreds of hectares of remnant native forest at nearby Kaban, blasting 330,000 tonnes of rock and dirt from the sides of hills to build access roads and turbine pads bigger than football fields.
All of this was occurring without a squeak from environmental groups, every one of which appeared to have swallowed the renewable energy Kool-Aid and, in some cases, its cash.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen set a target of installing a giant 7MW wind turbine every 18 hours until 2030. He boasted of the number of projects in the pipeline, the implication being they were just a short step away from approval.
Today, the renewable energy industry has a name for projects that slip off the back of the pipeline: zombie projects. Last year was the worst year for the financial approval of renewable energy projects since 2016 and the worst for wind since 2015. The latest Green Energy and Investment Markets Review reports the window is closing fast on the government’s 2030 target.
Assuming an average of two years for construction, 8GW of new projects must receive financial approval every year from 2024 until 2027. That is almost five times higher than the amount approved in 2023.
Bowen could ill-afford the 400MW Chalumbin project to fall into the zombie zone, particularly since it was backed by Korean Zinc, a cashed-up corporation keen to get a slice of Australia’s renewable energy action.
Chalumbin signals to renewable energy speculators that the Dirty Harry days are over. The environmental costs of wind, solar, hydro and transmission will no longer be overlooked because of their assumed noble goal.
Now Plibersek has knocked back Chalumbin, it is impossible to see how she can approve the Upper Burdekin project in an equally sensitive area 4.8km from the boundary of the Wet Tropics World Heritage area. Global tech giant Apple read the writing on the wall a year ago when it walked away from an agreement to buy power from the proposed plant. Andrew Forrest, whose WindLab company is behind the project, might as well throw the towel in today.
The odds must be rapidly closing against Mt Fox, a 350MW wind turbine project in mountainous remnant forest on the edge of the wet tropical Girringun National Park, 50km southwest of Ingham. From there, the ruler must be run through cascading proposals hugging the Great Dividing Range to the Darling Downs. Few, if any, will be situated in already degraded environments since developers seek ridge lines that are unprofitable and, in many cases, impossible to farm. The remnant bush line has provided sanctuary for enough vulnerable and endangered creatures to fill Noah’s ark.
The Chalumbin precedent subjects every proposal to potential trade-offs. How many hectares of bulldozed koala habitat are too many? Which species are so unlovely, small or insignificant that we are prepared to sacrifice them in order to save the planet? If the same rules that apply to mining were applied to wind, solar and pumped hydro, the jig would be up.
Plibersek will be aware of her decision’s taming effect on the animal spirits of renewable energy speculators. On Saturday, she issued a keep-calm-and-carry-on press release announcing she had approved 63 wind turbines at the aptly named Mt Hopeful in central Queensland. “I’ve now ticked off 46 renewable energy projects … and we have a record 130 renewables projects in the approval pipeline.”
Yet the minister’s tick does not make Mt Hopeful immune from zombification. The developer, Neoen, still struggles to make the numbers stack up. Costs are ballooning as it discovers that making a project work on a spreadsheet is very different from making it work on planet Earth.
Even the environmental movement is waking up to the realisation that wind turbines might not be the answer to their prayers. Bob Brown, the father of the green movement, led the campaign to stop turbines chewing up birds in his home state of Tasmania. In Victoria, wetland conservation groups opposed the proposed terminal for offshore wind construction at the Port of Hastings, which Plibersek blocked in January.
The Chalumbin decision brought Queensland conservationists scurrying out of the woodwork to make out as if they had opposed the proposal all along. A year ago, all the Queensland Conservation Council was prepared to say publicly was that the issue was “complicated”. On Friday, the Council declared the Chalumbin decision as “welcome”.
“Today, our community breathes a sigh of relief as those important bits of nature remain intact,” said Lucy Graham, director of the Cairns and Far North Environment Centre.
It is too early to declare that the renewable craze has peaked, but that moment is a step nearer in Queensland, where expectations rise of an LNP victory at the state election in October. LNP leader David Crisafulli’s decision not to oppose Labor’s legislated target invites an intriguing question.
Since the LNP has pledged to pull back Labor’s renewable excesses, might Crisafulli be the first Coalition leader to seek an electoral mandate for lifting the ban on nuclear? The Australian
A horrifying pivot towards Communist Chinese style censorship and tyranny is in progress in Australia, as Aussie politicians threaten Elon Musk with prosecution and jail, for refusing to remove truthful content which politicians deem socially unacceptable from the internet.
Utter contempt’: Elon Musk goes to war with Australian government over violent content
Elon Musk has stepped up his war of words with the Australian government, reacting to one Senator’s call for him to be “jailed”.
Elon Musk has stepped up his war of words with the Australian government over demands the X social media platform remove videos of the stabbing of a Sydney bishop, as the controversy around violent content spirals into a wider free speech debate.
The eccentric billionaire has been publicly feuding Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant for the past week over what he has characterised as an “attempt to censor the entire world”.
“The Australian people want the truth,” Musk wrote on Tuesday, sharing a post stating that X had become the most downloaded news app in Australia. “X is the only one standing up for their rights.”
Mr Albanese had earlier blasted the Tesla chief executive as “arrogant” and someone who “thinks he’s above Australian law”, while Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie — prior to shutting down her X account — suggested he was a “friggin’ disgrace” who “should be in jail”.
“This woman has utter contempt for the Australian people,” Musk responded.
…
“Australia has made clear they believe in stripping away human rights (freedom of expression) in order to satisfy what they deem appropriate for your eyes and ears,” Mr Pavlovski wrote on Tuesday.
The following is an Aussie federal senator demanding Musk be jailed for ignoring Australia’s demands for censorship;
Pro-censorship Aussie news outlets are attempting to use appeals to Nationalism to whip up opposition to Musk’s attempts to defend Australia’s freedom to view uncensored news.
Big victim or big mouth? Time for Australia to put Elon Musk in his place
Elon Musk’s legal team revealed a curious problem for the billionaire when they told an Australian court on Monday night that they could not get legal instructions because it was 2am on Sunday at their client’s American headquarters.
The remark was revealing because Musk’s social media platform, X, has been operating in Australia for more than a decade, collecting whatever revenue it can make, but now lacks a local office to make the big calls on urgent requests to take down violent posts.
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Federal Court judge Geoffrey Kennett ruled against X on Monday night, but another hearing is due soon and a final decision is yet to be made. So far, federal eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has gained the injunction she wanted to force the company to act.
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The legal argument is full of technical questions, such as the way virtual private networks allow people to dig under the barbed wire that countries try to install at their online borders. The VPN is a wonderful invention for dissidents evading dictators in some countries, just as it helps drug-runners dodge police in others. It blurs the idea of national borders.
Watch out, however, for any argument that says Australia should not dictate terms to the social media giants because that’s what China does. That is classic false equivalence. The eSafety Commissioner is acting with the authority of a federal law passed by a parliament that reflects the will of a free people in a democracy.
I’m not sure why “acting with the authority of a federal law passed by … a democracy” makes censorship OK. If every act of a democratically elected parliament is acceptable, would it also be acceptable for an elected parliament to pass a law abolishing all future elections? Would establishment journalists like David Crowe then write an article explaining that the abolition of elections was legitimate, because the politicians who abolished future elections were elected by the people?
You have to draw the line somewhere. A free press, unfettered access to news, is as much a pillar of democracy as holding elections. Would voters choosing politicians based on biased and heavily censored access to news, having their decisions fed to them by one sided media content, with opposition silenced by a government managed news cartel, be any less of a tyranny than a state which completely abolished elections?
What can Australians do about this Orwellian nightmare? Voting for politicians who oppose this kind of censorship is the obvious solution, but most Aussies simply aren’t aware of the danger. With the exception of courageous conscientious objectors, all the mainstream political parties in Australia appear to support a significant increase in censorship. Political parties like One Nation, which consistently oppose prosecuting people for telling the truth, are routinely vilified by the establishment press.
Did I mention the establishment press also has some protection against these new disinformation laws, providing they behave? Of course, if the Aussie government no longer recognises a news outlet as a professional news organisation, they might struggle to remain protected under the misinformation laws.
One option which is not currently illegal to my knowledge is downloading tools which allow circumvention of any censorship. One such tool is the TOR Browser.
TOR makes it very clear where they stand on internet censorship – from the TOR about page: “all of the people who have been involved in Tor are united by a common belief: internet users should have private access to an uncensored web.“
The TOR project was created to allow mainland Chinese and other oppressed peoples circumvent harsh national censorship policies, by disguising the internet route to censored site, using relay stations provided by volunteers.
TOR takes advantage of the fact that it is impossible to conduct commerce on the internet without encrypted communications. But that encryption which makes e-commerce possible also makes it possible to disguise which website you are visiting, with the help of relay stations outside the national firewall, provided by volunteers who support the TOR network.
Obviously use at your own risk – no system is 100% safe. And when it becomes clear that corporate VPNs and tools like TOR have turned the Aussie Government’s attempt to crack down on internet freedom into an embarrassing political failure, they may double down, and make a serious effort to outlaw attempts to circumvent their censorship laws.
Until today, I thought of TOR as a tool only people living under Communist tyrannies need, not as a tool myself or other Aussies might need to use, to gain uncensored access to the Internet. But I guess that is the risk you run living in a nation which does not provide a constitutional guarantee of free speech. What is not guaranteed might one day be taken away from you. And even that which is guaranteed must be defended, by electing politicians who regard upholding and defending the freedoms guaranteed by the constitution as a sacred trust.
Solar panels eat the profits of the reliable generators for lunch
The system is reaching a crisis point and April is turning out to be the month of confessions
His speech was the sound of an industry being tortured. The transition is going backwards. Big projects are stalled. Costs are rising and reliable old assets are being closed too quickly. It’s like we are disassembling the plane as we fly it…
A couple of weeks ago in Australia the chief of Alinta Energy admitted in a big speech that the industry needs to be honest with the public about the costs of the transition. This marks a big shift from the “cheaper and cleaner” misinformation which the renewables industry was practically built on. Jeff Dimery had a stark warning — his company bought a large old coal plant in Victoria for a billion dollars in 2018, and it powers one fifth of Victoria. But to replace that today with renewables would cost $10 billion.
But he also laid bare the crushing effect subsidized rooftop solar PV panels are having on the transition. No news outlets seemed to appreciate the implications of this. Fully one in three Australian homes now has solar panels, but they are all dumping power on the grid at the same time pushing wholesale prices into negative territory that burns the other generators. The midday solar glut, as he calls it, means no one wanted to invest in large scale renewables. But as night follows day, surely that which ruins the market for large scale renewables would also ruin it for large scale fossil fuel plants too? The subsidized solar panels are vandalizing the whole market.
Skeptics who have been predicting this all along, note that the same people who cheered every time a coal plant was struck down are now wading through an impenetrable swamp of their own creation. The same subsidies that hurt coal and gas power, now wipe out the large (subsized) wind and solar plants too. It’s takes some chutzpah to complain about solar subsidies ruining the market for other generators which are also subsidized.
Someone let a plague of solar-locusts on our grid. They eat the profits out of all the reliable providers, which close down. We are actively sabotaging the entire grid — killing off the parts that made it work.
Australians face higher bills as the country struggles to build adequate replacements for coal with soaring costs for new sources of green power and transmission, Alinta Energy chief executive Jeff Dimery has warned.
Mr Dimery said Australian energy stakeholders must be honest with the public about the toll of the transition.
Mr Dimery complains he can’t build anything profitable at $58 a megawatt hour.
“When I sat down to write this speech, the future Victorian energy price for the 2026 calendar year was $58 a megawatt hour,” said Mr Dimery.
“At $58, I can’t build anything to meaningfully prepare for coal to come out of the system. I can’t build more solar, because we already have a glut of solar in the middle of the day, which is sending spot prices deeply negative. If I was just looking at the forward price, I would also be very wary about building new wind, because the margins would be slim to non-existent, and any curtailment – which is a growing problem – could be disastrous.”
If only the energy commentators of Australia could read the same AEMO reports that unpaid bloggers do? Then they’d know that this time last year old brown coal plants were still selling electricity for $15 a megawatt-hour. But Mr Dimery probably knows this, since he owns one of those coal plants, and he didn’t mention it either. (Perhaps he believes in the transition, or perhaps the Hong Kong owners of Alinta might not appreciate that?). He’s being more honest than the other energy chiefs, but Australians need the whole truth. Just what are we giving up by blowing up the old coal plants?
The renewables transition was like a gold rush, but quickly projects started to fail… as Big Government plans do:
11 minutes: I also want to explain what’s caused the drop in investment for large scale renewables. … In the last 5 years the top three gentailers [combined generator-retailers] in this country have collectively written off in excess of $10 billion of shareholder funds. There’s a race to Net Zero but it’s supposed to be for emissions not for profit.
In the early era of renewables Australia had the perfect investment climate for wind solar and pumped Hydro. It could have been seen as the gold rush for renewable generation and certainly we saw no shortage of companies trying to get a piece of the action, but very quickly projects started to fail, loss factors increased and investment cases started to crumble. With a lack of planning and proper infrastructure we quickly found the grid overwhelmed…
Costs are rising rapidly:
15 minutes: Let me tell you why higher cost and uncertainty about recovering those costs that’s why in 2017 Alinta energy developed and built the first big battery in Australia for around $1.5 million per megawatt. Right now we’re building another one that will cost roughly $1.7 million per megawatt . In 2020 it cost around $850,000 to insure a gas fired power plant. Today it’s around $1.75 million — that’s up 40%. I shocked people when I spoke at a conference two years ago and said that it would cost $8 billion to hypothetically replace our Brown Coal fired power station which was acquired for $1.1 billion. Replacing it with pumped hydro and offshore wind today would now cost in excess of $10 billion. That’s up two billion in a mere two years. Developers rightly are afraid to lock in high costs in case they can’t be recovered.
The Alinta chief admits his biggest problem is the glut of solar panels at midday
Everything he says about the problems with massive solar input at lunchtime is true for all the original baseload generators on the grid too. In full honesty he would admit coal plants were not retired because solar and wind were cheap, they were driven out of the market by the subsidy on an essentially irrelevant unreliable form of extra generation that always turned up when we didn’t need it:
18 mins: Without the deployment of new private capital, state and Commonwealth balance sheets simply cannot carry the financial burden we have a glut of daytime rooftop solar energy at the same time that 95%of all large scale renewables are getting curtailed — basically switched Off in some hours of high rooftop solar. The percentage of all energy produced by large scale renewables that was curtailed increased from 10% in the last quarter of 2022 to 13% in the last quarter of 2023. Now you might think 3%, who cares? Well boards care, investors care, and developers care. No one wants to lose 13% of their output and no one dares think just how much more could be lost that could be the difference between profitable and unprofitable. In short, ladies and gentlemen, continued subsidies at one end of the market are driving higher uptake into a glut and undermining the economics of new and existing large scale renewables.
But let’s be real eh? We were happy to destroy the profitability of the old coal plants and the gas plants that taxpayers built, which is what all the subsidized intermittent players did. We’re only complaining now, Mr Dimery, because we care about “renewable” profits.
The solution to the solar panel glut is battery storage
I know how much households love their solar and how important solar is to the transition, but as with any of the intermittent technologies on its own it has pluses and minuses. … the daytime production from rooftop solar needs to be stored and shifted to when it’s required. We’ll need household batteries but they’ll fill up quickly. We’ll need big batteries, and they’ll also fill up quickly too. EV’s will take time to build up to critical mass and for vehicle-to-home and vehicle-to-grid models to alleviate some of the imbalances of homeowners dominating solar and battery installations. We’re exploring other options too like inviting retail customers to be co-investors in wind farms and giving them a portion of the output offset against their bill as well as providing better insights about their appliances via itemized bills that show what’s being spent on heating and cooling and refrigeration.
It’s a solar death spiral
He points out that solar PV owners themselves don’t care about the negative wholesale prices at lunchtime (but in a real market they would).
Rooftop solar is contributing to low energy prices at various times in daylight hours but it isn’t affected by price signals in the same way large scale generators are. It’s a problem we need to solve.
So we subsidize lunchtime solar we don’t need, which makes electricity more expensive for those without solar. Eventually everyone feels they have to buy solar panels, but at the same time the solar glut is driving out the generators we need the other 75% of the day. This is a spiral that only goes down. The end is coming. The subsidy game can’t go on forever.
We need to put real prices on solar panels now, and if that stops all new solar being installed (except in remote locations) so be it. Then we then need to rejig the billing system so those who installed the panels aren’t being subsidized by those who couldn’t afford them. It will take years to unravel this mess.
The land of truth is arriving at the magic renewable tree.
Jeff was a founding member of Australia’s Clean Energy Council, and previously served on the boards of The Renewable Energy Generators of Australia, Australian Energy Council (including as both Chair and Deputy Chair), and the Australian Wind Energy Association.
Alinta owns 3GW of power, gas, wind, coal, and “co-generation” in NZ, and has about 1.1 million retail customers.
Alinta Energy is an Australian electricity generating and gas retailing private company owned by Hong Kong-based Chow Tai Fook Enterprises (CTFE). The sale for $4 billion was approved by TreasurerScott Morrison in 2017.[2] Alinta Energy has an owned and contracted generation portfolio of up to 1,957 MW, approximately 1.1 million combined electricity and gas retail customers and around 800 employees across Australia and New Zealand.[1]
Alinta Energy’s approximately 3,000MW electricity generation portfolio includes:[8]
“Previous energy transitions adopted energy sources of greater density and efficiency than those they replaced. Those advantages became a natural incentive for their adoption. In the current ‘transition’, the process is reversed unless we are prepared to countenance the mass use of nuclear technology.” – Nick Cater, below
The political “energy transition” has predictably violated comparative energy physics and thus consumer preferences–and best industry practices. A re-look at the failing, impossible “energy transition” was penned by Nick Cater, senior fellow at Menzies Research Centre in Australia. [1] His analysis deserves wide attention, as does his other work at the energy-centric Reality Bites.
As the First Fleet vessels, propelled by wind and muscle, made their way to Australia, the last energy transition was making headway in Europe and the United States. The first commercial steamboat completed a successful trial on the Delaware River in New Jersey on August 20, 1787, heralding the arrival of a more powerful and efficient source of energy.
The ability to turn energy-dense fossil fuel into usable energy would be the key to accelerating economic growth in Australia, which began with European settlement. By the time the colony of New South Wales marked a century of settlement in 1878, steam-powered ocean-going vessels were starting to be constructed from steel. Frederick Wolseley was demonstrating a prototype set of steam-driven mechanical shears. This Australian invention secured Australia’s dominance in the supply of wool to steam-powered woollen mills on the other side of the world.
Preparation was underway for the first export shipment of frozen lamb, a technological breakthrough that would measurably improve British diets and longevity. Australia was joined to Europe by electric telegraph, the first stage in developing electronic communications that would break the tyranny of distance. A massive infrastructure investment project that would supply homes, factories, and civic spaces with electricity on demand was beginning to be contemplated. Tamworth in 1888 would become the first town in Australia to be serviced by an electric grid.
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This potted history of Australia’s industrial and economic progress tells us much about the nature of energy transitions. They don’t happen overnight, nor do they respond to government command. They take place incrementally in fits and starts. Innovation is just the beginning. Engineering and economic viability take decades to accomplish, not days.
The most profound consequences of energy transition can be unexpected. Technological applications for steel, reinforced concrete, and electricity were emerging by the end of 19th century. Still, it is doubtful anyone at the time in low-rise Sydney would have imagined the futuristic streetscapes a century and a quarter later.
The magnitude of the transition to net-zero is seldom acknowledged in public and political debates. There is a scant appreciation of the technical difficulties of decarbonising our energy supply and limited discussion about the costs.
The last transition — from wind, water, biomass and muscle, both human and animal, to fossil fuels — took more than a century to complete. It required constant innovation and an incalculable amount of capital investment. Our current net-zero path requires us to abandon fossil fuels entirely in favour of so-called renewable energy sources, namely wind, solar, biomass and water, in just 26 years.
Previous energy transitions adopted energy sources of greater density and efficiency than those they replaced. Those advantages became a natural incentive for their adoption. In the new “transition,” the process is reversed unless we are prepared to countenance the mass use of nuclear technology.
The last transition gave us more dependable sources of energy independent of weather patterns. Transitioning to a net-zero economy based purely on renewable energy presents the seemingly insurmountable problem of overcoming weather- and solar-dependent variability.
The last transition considerably reduced land demand and lifted the pressure on biodiversity. Vast hectares of woodland ceased to be felled solely to produce energy. A transition to renewable energy will once again make heavy demands on land. One recent study estimated that a transition to net zero-2050 in Australia that only used land-based renewable generation would require 129,179 sq km of land, an area roughly the size of Victoria.
The last energy transition sought greater efficiency by centralising energy production in industrial-scale fossil fuel conversion plants located close to most consumers of energy in cities. The proposed transition to renewables decentralises energy production from a few dozen power stations to cottage-scale roof-top generators and hundreds of small, part-time generators often distant from population centres.
The engineering demands are matched in scale by the economic challenges. The transition from an economy powered by muscle, water, and wind to fossil fuel means the average human has nearly 700 times more useful energy at his or her disposal than their ancestors had at the beginning of the century, according to Vaclav Smil, a Czech-Canadian scientist and energy policy analyst who writes: “An abundance of useful energy underlies and explains all the gains, from better eating to mass-scale travel; from the mechanisation of production and transport to instant electronic communication.”
According to physicist and economist Robert Ayres, economic growth and energy flow are intrinsically linked. “Nothing happens without a flow of energy. Not in the natural world and not in the human world. Thus, it is perfectly true that energy — not money — makes the world go round.”
Yet the economic consequences of pursuing ambitious renewable energy targets seldom enter the debate. Brian Fisher, Australia’s leading energy economist, is one of the few who have attempted to model the economic costs of a forced energy transition. In a 2019 study, he estimated that the cumulative GNP losses of pursuing Labor’s then 45 per cent 2030 target would be between $264 billion and $542 billion, depending on the chosen parameters. A rising energy price would lead to a minimum three per cent reduction in real wages and 167,000 fewer jobs in 2030.
The economic consequences of the government’s current policy are likely to be similar. Scant attention has been paid to the consequences of allocating vast amounts of capital to the net-zero energy transition. Australia’s Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, claims the capital cost of Australia’s energy transition will be $120 billion. Yet a new report commissioned by the Menzies Research Centre found that the Australian Energy Market Operator’s data put the capital cost at $320 billion in terms of net present value (NPV). The MRC’s report concludes that the price will be substantially higher, resulting in higher energy costs for consumers and businesses.
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Australia has taken a leap into the unknown. The scale of investment required to achieve the 82 per cent renewables target is unprecedented. The engineering challenge of incorporating such a large amount of variable renewable energy (VRE) is immense. No country has achieved anything close to such a concentration without a considerable contribution from nuclear, geothermal, or hydro generation.
The sorry history of central planning inspires little confidencethat the top-down, target-driven approach taken by AEMO’s roadmap (its Integrated Systems Plan) will work. The risk of failure is high. The timetable for construction is impossibly tight. The schedule for the withdrawal of base-load coal and gas is not synchronised with the timeline for expanding the capacity of renewables. The target will increase the risk of blackouts, as the National Energy Market (NEM) will only be able to meet reliability objectives with significant investment in storage and other forms of firming capacity.
Experience has taught us that the risk of escalating costs and overruns in renewable energy infrastructure projects is extremely high. A lack of expertise, the use of non-standard technology and design, rent-seeking behaviour, community resistance, and supply and labour shortages mean that projects of this size and complexity carry considerable risk. Bent Flyvbjerg’s Iron Law of Megaprojects applies: ‘Over time, the estimated costs of megaprojects tend to increase, while the benefits tend to decrease.’
The presence of these and other hurdles invite disturbing conclusions. The cost of transition to a net-zero emission economy by 2050 will be substantially higher than the $320 billion estimated by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO).
Capital formation on this scale will be a significant challenge. The opportunity cost of the allocation of capital to the cost of transition will be high. The retail price of energy will continue to rise in the short to medium term as capital costs are absorbed. Without rapid technological developments, costs in other heavy-emitting sectors, such as heavy manufacturing, agriculture and transport, will increase. In an intricately linked, dynamic economy, the effects on employment, taxation, and growth will be substantial.
There are no quick fixes. Nuclear power would be a far better replacement for coal than wind, water and solar. It is denser, cleaner, more efficient, and more reliable than renewables or fossil fuels. It is widely used as a source of affordable and dependable electricity worldwide. It could be used for industrial heating and some forms of transportation. Yet, it is hard to foresee the technological breakthroughs that would enable it to meet all the energy requirements of a modern economy.
The last energy transition occurred organically and took hundreds of years. It was driven by the natural attraction of abandoning old ways of doing things for new ways that were demonstrably better. The energy transition we are currently being asked to undertake is different. It is driven by central planners who expect it to be completed by the middle of this century, which is just 26 years away.
We are being asked to give up tried and tested ways of doing things for unproven technology or technology that does not yet exist. As Alex Epstein has written, it requires a radical departure from how any energy economy has ever worked. A calm assessment of our progress so far must conclude, as does Epstein, that abandoning fossil fuels in the timescale required is virtually impossible. The proposal to replace them with renewable energy alone is totally crackpot.
[1] The Menzies Research Centre is a Liberal think tank promoting the free, just and prosperous society in Australia. More information can be found here.
Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
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