Your taxes at work in a university centre of climate science excellence

Looking at a preprint of a paper by Richardson et al on “compound solar and wind droughts” from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes at the University of NSW. The purpose of the study was to assess the risk to energy security in the NEM posed by periodical shortages of sun and wind.

We believe this is the first study that systematically assesses the role of weather systems and climate modes on the frequencies of compound solar and wind droughts.

That is if you don’t consider the work of Anton Lang and Paul Miskelly over a decade ago. They went straight to the point: are there low points of wind supply that are deep, wide and long enough to threaten the power supply if we replace coal power with wind power? We know there is no sun at night without elaborate research.

Paul’s paper was published in the academic literature in 2012, and this site has open access. Anton’s observations go even further back and can be found in thousands of blog posts covering many aspects of power generation from all sources.

Miskelly concluded that the findings suggest that the connection of such a wind farm fleet, even one that is widely dispersed, poses significant security and reliability concerns to the eastern Australian grid. These findings have similar implications for the impact of wind farms on the security of electricity grids worldwide.

As for Richardon et al contributing the first paper to assess the role of weather systems in relation to wind droughts, Paul Miskelly made the connection of low wind with high-pressure systems that move across the country and sometimes settle for days. Richardson et al know about “blocking highs” that are associated with calm conditions but they did not go directly to the AEMO records on wind power to look for the association, instead they used an elaborate analysis of numerous Renewable Energy Zones to see how often drought conditions might occur at the same time in different locations.

Clearly this is an example of the genre of literature that starts from the assumption that the green transition is going to happen and the studies are all about optimizing the location of RE resources. This is an example from the US, using a massive database and sophisticated models to generate additional data to throw into the mix.

Testing the basic assumption is avoided like the plague. This calls for analysis of worst-case scenarios like the “killer months” in the AEMO records -June 2017, June 2020 and August last year.

This note from the Australian Energy Realists shows the multiple low wind days in June 2020. It is also an early warning to beware the various icebergs in the path of the RE Titanic. There is an appendix on the sources to do your own wind-watching.

Richardson et al wrote “Whether, or how often, the AEMO grid is at risk from widespread, weather-induced reductions to production is not known.”

To the contrary, long periods, up to three days, with next to no wind are clearly visible in the AEMO records. This demonstrates that the system will fail when more coal power is retired, unless gas picks up the slack at crippling expense. These records are available in a processed form at Aneroid Energy and the NemWatch widget, They have been ransacked by the Energy Realists, notably Mike O’Ceirin who has an interactive website to interrogate them, and by Paul McArdle of Global Roam.