More red flags are flying for the power supply and more badly-informed commentary from RenewEconom and the Fin Review. This (Friday) morning the wind supply was negligible in SA and Victoria, just like Wednesday which was reported on Climate Realism, a Heartland Institute site.
This evening at sunset, wind in Victoria was generating 3% of demand at CP 5%, the comparable figures in SA were 17% and 8%. In SA gas accounted for three quarters of local generation and they were burning diesel. The battery was making money by discharging while the state had the most expensive power in the nation.
Victoria was in deficit and power was draining from the battery of the nation (Tasmania).
The response to impending blackouts.
At RenewEconomy we read:
A new tender has been launched by the New South Wales government for a new big battery that will help replace the capacity that will be lost when the country’s biggest coal generator, Eraring, closes in 2025.
The tender is officially for firming capacity of at least 380MW and two hours storage, and is open to a bunch of different technologies, including hydrogen electrolysers, gas peaking stations, but battery storage is probably the best bet for that particular mandate, and the tight timeline.
And in the Fin Review, a more respectable rag than RenewEconomy, one would hope.
Adding big volumes of new wind and solar power capacity are contributing to supply security, with AEMO pointing to 401MW of battery storage committed since its last report, involving more than 600 megawatt-hours of storage capacity.
What does it mean to have batteries helping to replace Eraring? This is the biggest station in the grid with four 720MW turbines (2880MW). Batteries don’t generate power, (nor does pumped hydro like Snowy2.0), they store it when there is power to spare. “Replacing” means feeding the stored power back into the grid to avert blackouts.
Consider the amount of stored power required to substitute for Eraring through 14 hours between sunset and sunrise on a windless night. Say 2000MW to allow for a realistic capacity factor, well short of 100%, to make the sums easier.
That comes to 28,000MWhours which is more than 40 times the 600 megawatt-houres mentioned above. In the RenewEconomy report they refer to “firming capacity of at least 380MW and two hours storage,” which amounts to 760 megawatt-hours of capacity. That is 1/36 of 28,000 MWhours.
What is more, the output from Eraring is continuous in contrast with the battery that has to be charged, and what if there are two or more windless nights in a row, when the wind drought persists for two or three days?
How is this reckless folly sustained?
During the day the sun and wind together provide about 50% of power at their peak on a bad wind day and that gets up to 60% and a bit more on Sundays if there is a lot of wind about.
This is enough to keep the greens happy, as though we are almost half way to getting rid of coal. But, one more time, it is the windless nights that do the damage, as explained by the Iron Triangle of Power Supply. In summary, wind power will not work in Australia due to the need for continuous input to the grid, the interruption of wind power by wind droughts, and the lack of storage at the scale required to bridge the gaps.
Consequently, when the next coal power station closes, every wind drought will threaten the power supply, and prolonged wind droughts will be potentially catastrophic.
We need more “wind literacy”. People need to be alert to the frequent lack of wind, and this could easily be achieved by incorporating a windpower report in the regular weather reports that go out with the news on radio and TV all day and night.
Alternatively, anyone and everyone can glance at the NewWatch widget on phone or computer to check the wind supply, especially at breakfast and dinnertime! This is the picture on Wednesday morning: find the wind, that is the green segments on the bars.
Droughts have been recognized in Australia for a long time but defective advice (neglecting the droughts) resulted in the the worst policy blunder in our history – connecting subsidised and mandated intermittent wind and solar power to the grid.
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