BUSINESS AS USUAL
Pressing on with the new energy story that was sketched here not long ago.
The so-called green energy transition has hit the wall. Worldwide, trillions of dollars of investment have shifted the contribution of organic (hydrocarbon or fossil) fuel from about 82% of total energy use to 80 or 81%. In Australia we are one coal station closure from crisis in the power supply every night when the wind is low.
According to the old narrative, South Australia is showing the way. Lately we read a tweet:
South Australia does it again!
70.7% of SA’s electricity was generated from renewable in 2022. A new record and up from 65.7% in calendar year 2021. By comparison the International Energy Agency estimates Denmark 68.9%, Ireland 33%, Germany 26%, USA 12%, China 11%.
As for the performance of South Australia, simply observing the balance of power at sunrise and sunset demonstrates that the state is importing power and burning gas almost every day. The exceptions are when the wind is a long way above the average Capacity Factor of 29%. This has been reported many times before and it is a message that has to spread wider, as indeed it will as the National Information Network is rolled out.
This morning at 7am Sydney time SA was importing 15% of the demand while 20% of local generation was gas. The wind was well above average at CF 40!
Incidentally Tasmania (the battery of the nation) was importing 40% of demand, drawing (mostly) coal power from Victoria. At the time 73% of Victoria’s power came from coal, so you can see that both SA and Tasmania will be in trouble when Daniel Andrews closes the coal stations.
Wind literacy is fundamental to explaining the death of the old narrative. This note contains an appendix on wind-watching. But be warned, wind-watching can be time-consuming and habit forming, so Watch Responsibly!
Fake Weather News
Climate alarm sustained by fake news that ignores the clear evidence of public records of previous fires, floods, droughts and storms. Chris Kenny recently published a good article on this. Our colleague Peter Smith is active in this space as well. Graham Lloyd in The Australian wrote well on this today.
Manhattan Contrarian has another excellent post on the renewables (mis)transformation:
The Coming Future Of Electric Vehicles: Something Here Does Not Add Up (7 Jan)
That one is via Paul Homewood, who also has this one today:
Payments for windfarms to “switch off” soar to quarter billion pounds (9 Jan)
No wonder electricity is so expensive when the grid operator has to pay wind farms half a billion dollars to stop producing. The electricity storage problem is unsolvable – except in the form of stockpiles of coal and uranium which sit there safely and happily until needed.
On the road a bit this morning and Chris “Blackout” Bowen certainly not popular with many callers and texters telling 4BC the renewables push can’t work.
If only there was some way to economically and reliably store electricity …. oh that’s right, there is, nature invented it millennia ago, it’s called oil,coal and gas…
Listening to the local radio while transiting the Hunter this afternoon and the push seems to be on for ‘big emitters’ to each reduce their ‘emissions’ by 5% pa until 2030… I expect what goes unsaid is that this will be achieved by reducing production by c.40% over this period to align more closely with the reduced energy supply. Absolute sh1tshow.
In the meantime, Mr Musk and the French operators have taken hundreds of millions of dollars from South Australians courtesy the big battery at Hornsdale.
What a lark!
Don’t blame them, blame the politicians.
The thing about Tasmania’s hydro is that it is a battery powered by God. And, as such, it is reliable and it works…though it is not inexhaustible.
Potential energy, in the form of rain captured in dams at some altitude, can be converted into usable energy on demand…and when other sources of power are cheaper, it can store the potential energy with minimal loss, essentially indefinitely.
That Tasmania is importing coal-fired power at present is not a fault, but is a feature.
The thing about Tasmania’s hydro is that it is a battery powered by God. And, as such, it is reliable and it works…though it is not inexhaustible.
Potential energy, in the form of rain captured in dams at some altitude, can be converted into usable energy on demand…and when other sources of power are cheaper, it can store the potential energy with minimal loss, essentially indefinitely.
That Tasmania is importing coal-fired power at present is not a fault, but is a feature.
It’s important to realise that Tassie’s Hydro was built to actually resolve an electricity generation problem, not to appease Gaia…
…and, as a consequence, it does.
The hydro works when there is enough water in the dams and when there is not the island is in big trouble as demonstrated twice in recent years when the connection to the mainland was out of order and they had to fly in a fleet of diesel generators to keep things working.
Coal is indispensable until nuclear power is on deck, and we could use coal for some centuries on some estimates of our reserves. The plants would appreciate the extra CO2.
In the old days, we had a cold-spare coal fired power station. The unreliability of Hydro is signalled months in advance, so a “cold-spare” is all you need.
Nuclear would have worked just as well as coal, but we’re talking way back in history.
If the Greens hadn’t insisted on closing this closing down, the system would have worked fine in isolation as it had for decades. Using the mainland as a cold-spare also works fine for Tasmania (at least it does while there is a link).
If I ruled Tassie, we’d have kept the coal fired power station mothballed for use as required and left the mainland to wallow in its insanity. I’d also have built the Gordon below Franklin dam and prohibited bird-shear farms. Tassie would have been better off.