Australia electricity grid Nov 27

[GregLocock]

Well, that's been an interesting day. 3GW of NSW's coal plants have been knocked off line and it looks as though the interconnector from Vic to NSW is broken. We've had a hot sunny windy day, so Vic and SA are pumping out juice and sending it to Tas which is being used as an energy sink, they've turned their hydro down (no that doesn't make sense the price would not have to be so high - well that's a puzzle). As you can see the price in the two northern states is around 25 c/kWh, whereas SA and Vic are charging anybody generating about 3 c/kWh.

As we head into the evening and NSW loses all its solar things are going to get ugly. People have been asked to minimise electricity usage. I'll plot the day's usage for NSW tomorrow.

The fundamental reason for this is the coal generators dropping out. The operators have them on EOL maintenance schedules which increase unreliability because there is no point in looking after a $0 asset. The second plot shows the daily usage in NSW, I heard a politician claiming that there's been record power demand this week, as you can see he is talking utter rot.

 

[GregLocock]

Oof that's got to hurt $2 per kWh. They are fixing the interconnector Vic-NSW so can feed more power up to NSW.

 

[dik]

Price per kwh in Manitoba is $0.09587, day or night... Province owns Hydro...

 

[TugboatEng]

Great. Australia doesn't have hydro. A solution that works for you doesn't work for everyone else. Maybe we should move everybody from Australia to Canada so they too can have hydro powered electricity.

 

[GregLocock]

That's not the retail price, that's the price the generators get. Yesterday due to the interconnector failure and the 3 coal stations out of action and a warm day the price hit the regulated maximum of $17.5/kWh. Total daily demand came in at 243 GWh, well shy of peaks seen earlier in the year , 266 GWh/day. Yes Australia has very few good locations for hydro, the only one of any significance is in Tasmania. An attempt to extend hydro in Tas caused the formation of the Green party. Its usefulness is undeniable, but is limited by (a) insufficient rainfall/catchment area and (b) the interconnector to the mainland. yes if you've got it hydro is nice, but you can't wish it into existence.

 

[Tomfh]

Slow-motion train wreck. But don’t worry, Greg—Bowen assures us the plan for 82% renewables by 2030 is right on track. Once those remaining “unreliable” coal generators—who are responsible for shortages by not producing enough power - are completely out of the system, everything will run smoothly.

 

[GregLocock]

...and it'll get even smoother once they get rid of natural gas. The sad/good thing is, as we the only one of the Net Zero crash test dummies who are "Islanded" we are going to demonstrate to the world how expensive and destructive the wind+solar+storage model is. Germany, California, and NY can hypocritically depend on their fossil/nuclear fuelled neighbors to get them out of trouble, at least some of the time.

 

[XR250]

WTF? $17.50 / KWH? I'd be pulling my main breaker and running my fridge on a generator.

 

[Tomfh]

...and it'll get even smoother once they get rid of natural gas.

The sun doesn't send you a bill, mate.

 

[TugboatEng]

Neither does natural gas?

 

[GregLocock]

Tom is quoting the idiot-in-charge's justification for why renewables are cheap. Of course they still haven't come up with costing to support that.