Exactly Graham!

Simply put, a good businessman knows when to cut his losses and get out!

Renewables to get cheaper? Really? Don't these folk read? Wages inflation in China is or was running at around 30% P.A.?

I fail to see how one extrapolates cheaper prices from that?

And GENUINE environmentalists would likely go ape or ballistic or both if they saw the mountain of toxic waste these alleged renewables are creating?

Yes there's a place for the things. My roof is covered in solar panels and Bass Strait, with its roaring forties and no reticulated power? Absolutely tailor made for a shiny new wind farm connected to pumped hydro? Minus any subsidies!

If these things are so cheap, take away the taxpayer funded subsidies and allow them to compete on an open market, with all comers!

If we truly want to decarb the economy, without wrecking it or adding mountains of permanent toxic waste to China's industrial provinces?

Then there really is only one choice! And that choice is, CHEAPER THAN COAL. thorium! No it's not untested or hypothetical! Just a threat to all other power and energy producers, given thorium gram for gram, is the most energy dense material on the planet and abundant as lead!

And if used in, walk away safe, molten salt reactors, one can according to Professor Hargreaves, expect the median price of power from the generator, to be as low as a quoted %1.98PKH?

If you want to compare apples with apples coal fired power put more nuclear waste/rads into the environment in a year than safely operated nuclear power!

Had Chernobyl or Fukushima, been operated as walk away safe, molten salt thorium reactors? Neither would have been in the news except for how well they survived and how little they cost to own or operate.

As with any relatively new technology, all the real costs are upfront in the development phase. And in the case of molten salt operating at normal atmospheric pressures, with the most energy dense material in the world, those costs are insignificant. TBC.
Alan B.

But now the horse has bolted, what hope ever of affordable electricity for one and all.
A subsidy to consumers based on economic reality of the user, will be the only answer for access to this essential service.

It is totally unacceptable to have mostly those on fixed incomes ( pensions etc), to freeze through the winter months, and bake to death during the increasingly hot summers.

At what point does this reality finally sink in with those who manipulate what was once a workable and a somewhat affordable network.

But instead of dealing with the above stark reality, Governments subsidised home owners alone to install solar utilities capable of reducing running costs for that group to rediculiously low cost. (One I am familiar with pays $90 a quarter) ...

If you want reliable, affordable, carbon free power? Then based solely on logics rites! It's impossible to go past nuclear power and as thorium based nuclear power!

Thorium is fertile, not fissile, and therefore cannot be compressed like fissile material, to create a thermonuclear explosion!

Meltdowns are completely ruled out, in a molten salt reactor, the material is already molten!

Moreover, they are designed to very safely, operate at normal atmospheric pressure, well below the boiling point of molten fluoride salt!

But produce more heat than a light water or heavy water reactor. And almost tailor made to run gas turbines. Co2 gas turbines, and that being so. Allow much much smaller turbines to be used. A feature which means they can be mass produced in factories and trucked on site to be operational in days or weeks! Decommissioning around a hundred years out, easier. Given fluoride salt is a very poor receptor of neutrons.

And we have enough thorium in our dirt to power the world for 700 years! Furthermore, thorium needs no expensive enrichment. And can be tasked with very safely burning up other folks nuclear waste and be paid ANNUAL BILLIONS, for the service!

And a window closing too fast for business as usual prevarication! Reprocessing this waste, reducing the half life to around 300 years in the process.

Acceptance could mean OTHER FOLK PAY for all the development and construction costs of a few dozen of these generators?

But only if we're lead by FEARLESS pragmatists able to set aside, divise business as usual, political ambition in favor of bipartisan pragmatism!?

Your choice, Tony, Malcolm, Bill, we can do one or the other! Just not both! We no longer have the luxury of being able to waste precious time!

Besides, what will you tell the grandkids?

We had a chance to do so much better, but instead, told all our good angels to F off?

Paradise or dark side of the moon desolation?

CHOOSE! DON'T JUST DO SOMETHING, STAND THERE! 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5!
Alan B.

Excellent article Graham. If renewables really were anything but a blight on the grid then why has the SA government reactivated gas generators and brought in a 200 MW diesel generator? I have seen it argued that renewables generators would be entirely free, zero cost, and still subtract value from the network, because of all the effort required to work around the variable output, and investment required to connect them in remote places. Another point worth examining is just how carbon those things actually save.. I doubt that it's enough to justify all the investment and extra cost.

A few years ago a new form of desalination was trialled very successfully in Texas as cost effective irrigation.

This new space age, Dutch innovation, produced 90% potable water at around quarter of the cost of traditional desalination. Based on deionisation dialysis.

This method eliminates back pressure and membrane filtration, but instead imposes and electronic shock wave to the water.

Which forces the salt and other problematic/nuisance ions to one side of the water flow, while it's moving! It was cost effective there for broad scale irrigated agriculture, because, even though being heavily reliant on coal fired power, they as attested by Mr Pratt? Have/supply power two and a half times cheaper than ours?

Well if we rolled out nuclear power as walk away safe, molten salt thorium power? Our energy bills could easily be a tenth of theirs!

And allow us to use this new desalination technology to not just drought proof Australia, but turn some of our most arid regions into the most productive!

Energy bills one tenth of America's would reverse the Asia bound exodus. Put more tax paying enterprises right here! And not necessarily in already overcrowded, gridlocked cities.

But rather where there is cheaper (reclaimed) land, space and a ready made workforce, say in former coal mining/nickel smelting provinces, along new rail lines and arid desert regions etc?

As that reverse exodus happens, minus too much infrastructure rollout? Tax rates could be progressively reduced even as revenue dramatically increased!

[Woolworth's highly successful, increased volume economic model?]

To land at around 15% as a flat unavoidable/concessionless tax?

Which would then allow all current tax compliance costs to be returned to the bottom line as an averaged 7% saving? Which would mean an effective tax rate of just 8%?

We'd have to employ folks just to hold them and hordes of self funded retirees back!

And that's why we just have to stop subsidising renewables and allow them instead, to stand alone as competing for the energy dollar, business!

Gentlemen, stop fighting each other/us/other Aussies! In a globalized world the fight's over there, with them!
Alan B

Garnaut's 2011 Review has been mugged by reality.

This was his pie in the sky outlook for Australia's energy market and the options which were on the table:

"Australia has an abundance of high-quality resources of virtually all of the low-emissions alternative sources of energy: gas from conventional sources, coal seams and shale; wind; solar; high-grade uranium oxide for nuclear; land with low value for food that is prospective for biomass and biofuels; special opportunities for using algae in saline marine and land environments; wave and tidal energy; location adjacent to the extraordinarily rich hydro-electric potential of the island of New Guinea; geothermal from deep hot rocks; and opportunities for geosequestration of carbon dioxide."

Garnaut did predict a period of price increases, which would impact low-income households disproportionately, but that the numerous options outlined above would bring prices down. Some time.

The reality is that politicians haven't the stomach to introduce nuclear; geothermal experiments in Australia have failed; and most of the other options remain nothing but fantasies.

Meanwhile, because of the RETs and ridiculous subsidies of solar and wind generation, we now boast some of the most expensive energy in the world, despite the fact that our one great competitive advantage used to be that we had the world's cheapest energy costs.

Of course renewables are ruinously expensive. The people who tell us differently probably know that they are lying but, once you start lying, you have to keep lying; there is no going back.

The entire AGW, emissions thing is built entirely on lies. And, while China and India are building coal fired power plants hand over fist, Wankstralia is cowering under the lies and heading for Third World status.

All renewables are cheap.
All renewables are expensive.
All renewables are green.
All renewables are yellow.
All renewables are tasty.
All renewables are yucky.
All renewables have a long tail.
...
And this list could go on and on...

Because there are no renewables!

If anyone can find a renewable source of energy, they will surely win a nobel prize, but they won't find any - because that would contradict the laws of thermodynamics!

Renewable energy could run a perpetuum-mobile machine - good luck!

Both China and India are progressing thorium based nuclear energy/molten salt reactors, with India, abandoning solid fuel thorium experiments in favor of tried and not found wanting, molten salt technology. with China, presently building 50 nuclear reactors and rolling one million, affordable electric cars (17 grand, with a range around 200 kilometres) out of her factories just this year. With ramped up production to follow. And conventional engined cars, slated to be outlawed production by 2020?

Nobody in the investment world has an appetite for coal or coal fired power, with clean coal being both prohibitively expensive and energy consuming, to the point of never ever being ever able to return an actual profit? Unless we see a threefold increase in household/industrial power prices!

China has a Great Wall. We with our stone walling, recalcitrant moribund leadership, are hell bound and set to build a great big coal fired one, we can drive most business into, on a hitherto, unknown scale!

What will we say then? Give that man a hand and well done Tony? Nobody else could have pulled that one off! Unless both diabolically diligent and doggedly determined! Ah say boy, shovell that coal! Coal?

We was going round the bend doing ninety miles an hour, when the whistle broke into a scream.
He was dead bout an hour, when they found him in the wreckage.
His hand still on the throttle, scalded to death by the steam!
Alan B.

yeah evolution fantasy is fact, ,man made gw is killing planet, sodomy is not unhealthy, babies born with penis not boys

regressives always lie often enough that dumb regressives really believe their religion. You would think uni trained people would be smart enough to know that saying something often enough does not make it true. What a dumbed down generation.

Thanks, Graham, for reminding us of another aspect of the climate fraud, the nonsense of “renewables”.

I think the real fraud is those who are trying to stampede us into more renewables by saying they are cheaper than existing sources of power like coal. They have a vicious self-reinforcing cycle if that happens, where the cure for higher prices is more of the cause!

They will also call for the re-nationalisation of what power has been privatised, again by asserting that privatisation is the cause of the increase in prices. In this respect you should look at https://aip.asn.au/2017/09/fact-checks-of-premiers-electricity-claims/

Yes, Graham, and the basis of the climate fraud is the assertion that human emissions govern climate, when there is no science to support the assertion.

.

Dear Graham,

.

Unless I have misunderstood your calculations, it seems to me that there is a major cost factor missing from the pricing structure of the fossil fuel numbers you indicate.

The IMF produced a report in May 2015 in which it calculated the human cost of fossil fuel-based energy — “for example, the local damages related to having particles in the air, breathing problems, health-related problems that are believed to increase the mortality rate, or just lower quality of life”.

It calculated the “true cost” of fossil fuel-based energy, in 2015, to be $5.3 trillion a year. This article by Public Radio International (PRI) sums it up :

http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-06-07/imf-true-cost-fossil-fuels-53-trillion-year

Here is the IMF Working Paper :

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2015/wp15105.pdf

The Cambridge Judge Business School of the Cambridge University had previously produced a Working Paper along similar lines. Here is a brief presentation :

http://insight.jbs.cam.ac.uk/2015/measuring-fossil-fuel-hidden-costs/

Here is the Working Paper :

http://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/fileadmin/user_upload/research/workingpapers/wp1502.pdf

.

I think it is important to point out that the numbers you indicate do not represent what economists refer to as the “true cost” of fossil fuel-based energy, defined as “the difference between the market price of a commodity and the comprehensive cost of that commodity to society. The term is normally used to draw attention to missing or hidden costs that are not found in the market price, even though it could theoretically apply to hidden benefits as well”.

Positive and negative factors that are not reflected in the market price are called “externalities”. In economics, an externality is the cost or benefit that affects a party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit. Economists urge governments to adopt policies that "internalize" an externality, so that costs and benefits affect parties who choose to incur them. Action must be taken to correct this kind of market failure.

It is more than likely that the end result is in favour of the so-called “renewables”.

Sorry to be a bit pedantic, but I think it is important to see the whole picture before forming an opinion on such an important subject.

.

Graham, your article is extremely inaccurate. It lazily parrots old claims while failing to look at the real causes. Worse still, you've misrepresented study findings. When I clicked on "Studies show that for every megawatt of installed renewable generation, you need a megawatt of backup dispatchable." I found the link said nothing of the sort! It quoted one grid manager in Germany giving a figure of 0.8, but there's no evidence for claiming the study itself draws that conclusion. The conclusion that it did come to was " A one percentage point increase in the share of fast-reacting fossil generation capacity in a country is associated, on average, with a 0.88 percentage point increase in the long-run share of renewable energy." Quite clearly that's not a requirement, and I can only guess you've wrongly deduced the figure of 1 for that. If you'd instead thought about it a bit more, you might have realised the real reason for this outcome: dedicated baseload power stations are no longer economic to build. In other words, when old power stations reach the end of their economic life and need replacing, it's no longer profitable to replace them with ones that lack the ability to quickly respond to changes in demand.

You also seem to be ignorant of what "gold plating" is. It's unnecessary spending with the intention of justifying price increases. Making the system two-way certainly isn't gold plating - it's a basic upgrade that should be fairly cheap and non-controversial.

And can you give some examples of those "previously inaccessible places where wind and solar farms are frequently located"? Or is that just an assumption too?

Calling Elon Musk's battery deal with SA a lifeline is a great exaggeration - it will reduce peak power prices a bit and slightly improve resilience, but even without it SA's power supply is far more reliable than it was before the wind turbines were installed. BTW ISTR reading a few years ago that the capacity factor for SA's generation from fossil fuels was 25%, which was the same as the figure from wind turbines.
(tbc)

Graham (continued)

As for cost, renewables have a different cost structure: a higher capital cost and lower running cost. Unfortunately, rather than ensuring cheap finance is available so they can take advantage of that, governments have resorted to expensive cross subsidisation. So electricity from renewables is expensive, but it doesn't have to be.

Fortunately Nick Xenophon's done something about it: secured federal funding for concessions loans for dispatchable renewable power (solar thermal with MSS) at Port Augusta.

I think that the AEMO's latest report sums it up when it measures the output variance from wind and solar renewable power and find that it varies from nearly 100% to as little as 2% statewide and 5% nationwide. This clearly means that wind and solar needs to be backed up by a reliable and dispatchable power to most of the demand.

Germany is a prime example where wind and solar installation has a total equivalent to nearly the full demand of the country and it is clear to see that there are periods where renewable energy supplies nearly 100% of the load and periods where it supplies as low as 15% (where roughly 10% comes from hydro and biomass). The backup supply for Germany comes mainly from France with its cheap, plentiful and safe nuclear generators.

While the debate seems to rage about the cost of various generation sources, the real issue to networks are:
1) The value of power to the customers is time-dependent, which is why the bidding system often means that power stations sell their power at virtually nothing at midnight and at a huge cost at 6 pm.
2) The cost of a lack of power when it is needed vastly exceeds the cost of generation. The blackout in SA cost residents and businesses about $500m which why backup supplies are essential for renewables and must be included in the costs.

The focus needs to shift from generation of power to the consumption and the effect that high cost and low reliability has on the consumers.

Shadow,
"1) The value of power to the customers is time-dependent, which is why the bidding system often means that power stations sell their power at virtually nothing at midnight and at a huge cost at 6 pm."
I think that's a bit of an exaggeration, but I agree with your basic point.
A direct result of that is that dedicated baseload power stations are not well suited to the demands of the market.
A second implication is that there's great economic potential for energy storage.

"2) The cost of a lack of power when it is needed vastly exceeds the cost of generation. The blackout in SA cost residents and businesses about $500m which why backup supplies are essential for renewables and must be included in the costs."
That's a non sequiter, as the blackout was caused by tornadoes bringing down powerlines, not a shortage of backup capacity.

The luxury element with Mickey Mouse alternate power accrues to a fringe group of green fools, who use it to make them feel good & virtuous. That they gratify themselves at the cost of others, who can't afford the cost of their gratification is truly disgusting

There is certainly no virtue in self gratification at the cost to others.

It is a pity they don't go off & get enough education to be able to see through this scam. I am sure there are some among them, who would never promote this rubbish, if the understood the futility of their actions.

Aidan,

1) An actual example from Hazelwood is selling power at $10/MWhr off-peak and $700 at peak. So not an exaggeration.

2) Baseload power is ideally suited for providing the vast majority of the power, as it can vary its load to cope with the low demand, ramp up in peak demand, and use gas generators for meeting the peak load. This used to give Aus the cheapest and most reliable power in the world.

3) The SA example was to give a comparison of the vast cost of power outages. However, the sensitive wind generators tripped when coal powered stations wouldn't have. See the AEMO report. SA also had a partial blackout completely caused by renewables.

Shadow,
1. It's an exaggeration to claim, as you did, that it OFTEN happens.

2. Technically that's load following rather than strictly baseload.
And what is the basis of the claim that it was the cheapest and most reliable in the world?

3. I'm well aware of the causes of the SA blackout. But you seem to be overlooking the fact that had the wind turbines not been set to shut down so abruptly, or if we'd had a bit of flywheel storage, or if the Heywood Interconnect had been set to maintain frequency at the expense of voltage, most of that cost would still have occurred because it was the result of the inability to quickly restore power (because the lines were down) rather than the fact there was a blackout.

And when did SA have a partial blackout completely caused by renewables?

Aidan,

Clearly, you have no concept of how the generation contract and bidding process occurs.

1) It happens every day. The bidding for power occurs in 10 minutes segments, the higher the demand the more of the higher priced bids will be accepted, and the higher the cost of power. In the dead of night when power demand is low, the large base load generators will charge very little say $10-20 /MWhr to keep their turbines spinning, but at 6 pm when demand is a peak, the peak demand charge is seldom below $400 /MWHr.

2) Again your understanding is epic, all generators can and do load follow all the time, Baseload generators can generate 24/7 at a minimum cost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load

3) Firstly, as you acknowledge, the line faults did not isolate the wind generators, but the faults did trigger them to trip out.

Secondly, generation protection settings are designed to protect the generators and not the network. That wind turbines with their electronics are less robust than 300MW generators is not a surprise. The Alinta and Pelican plant turbines that had been closed would not have tripped.

Thirdly, frequency collapse is caused by excess demand and the generators being unable to keep up. The only way that the Heywood interconnector could have helped would have been to supply more power. As the interconnector was already supplying more demand than it was designed for its protection tripped it to prevent damage to the interconnector.

"On 8 February 2017, over 90,000 households in Adelaide lost power for 45 minutes in the middle of a major heatwav

Shadow,
1) I'm well aware of how the generation and bidding process occurs. And I've often looked at http://www.aemo.com.au/Electricity/National-Electricity-Market-NEM/Data-dashboard#nem-dispatch-overview. I'm not denying it's normally cheaper in the small hours than at 6pm. But the huge fluctuations in price you referred to are the exception not the norm.

2. I checked that Wikipedia page, and followed the link on it to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant
"Base load power plants operate at maximum output. They shut down or reduce power only to perform maintenance or repair."

3. I think you've let your imagination run away here. Are you seriously suggesting a thermal power plant would not have tripped if faults were detected in the line?

Regarding the Heywood interconnector, I accept what I wrote was a bit inaccurate. What I meant to say was that the SA network management should have been set to keep the frequency at a level the interconnector could cope with, even if that had to be at the expense of voltage until load shedding could be initiated.

4. The 8 February 2017 blackout certainly wasn't "completely caused by renewables". We had the gas turbine capacity at Pelican Point but it wasn't running.

Aidan,

1 For starters, you have got the wholesale purchase price of power, which is averaged which smooths out most of the peaks and troughs. The peak and trough generation prices are far more variable.

http://www.nemweb.com.au/REPORTS/CURRENT/Dispatch_SCADA/

2 So you are a google expert only. Pity you couldn't read the whole article incl this chart which shows baseload thermal varying with demand.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Baltwg.png

Coal-fired plants don't like dispatching load, but they are perfectly capable of doing so. Networks can't store energy, so even at 2 am, the generation has to match the load.

3 All generators have a certain "ride through" capacity to tolerate faults for a certain time without damage and the networks are built with redundancy and protection systems to trip out and isolate parts of the network that have faults quickly before the generation is threatened. In SA when the faults occurred the wind farms tripped out, but the thermal power stations did not, they only shut down when the network collapsed.

Aidan, I don't have enough space to point out all the laws of physics you would have to violate to do what you suggest, but basically:

Generators, power lines (Heywood interconnector) etc are limited by the current.
Over demand on generators for power slow them down (under-frequency)
Power = Voltage x current x power factor.
Now take a wild guess what happens to the current when the voltage drops?

4 Half of Pelican point like Alinta had been mothballed and had no gas available primarily because the variability of wind power had made it economically unfeasible. So yes renewables and their inability to provide peak power were the main cause.

Shadow,

1. AIUI the prices shown at http://www.aemo.com.au/Electricity/National-Electricity-Market-NEM/Data-dashboard#nem-dispatch-overview are the spot prices, NOT the average prices. If you click on the PRICE AND DEMAND tab, you'll see the quoted prices are the five minute spot prices for each state. I am of course aware that a lot of electricity is forward sold, and of course the price for that is much less volatile than the spot price.

I don't know what you thought the significance of the link you supplied was - it appears not to show prices.

2. I accept that most (though not all) baseload generators give some ability to vary output, though they're not good at it. They're certainly not ideally suited for providing the vast majority of power, precisely because they're crap at ramping up.

3. The wind farms were connected directly to the powerlines that were hit by tornadoes. The thermal power stations were not. So of course it was the wind farms that tripped first.

Though the continuous rating of generators and powerlines is limited by the current, a slight drop in voltage for a few seconds shouldn't affect how much power a generator can output.

AIUI (from reading the Advertiser online around the turn of the millennium) when SA's power was at its most unreliable and there were no wind turbines, they did let the voltage drop when there was a shortage of power. Following complaints that this was damaging equipment, they switched to a policy of rolling blackouts instead. So there is a precedent for letting the voltage drop to keep the frequency up, and I'm suggesting that we can do it again if the frequency ever drops too much for the interconnector to cope. Never ever for more than the few seconds it takes to implement load shedding, though. And flywheel storage should also be considered to stabilise the frequency.

(tbc)

Shadow (continued)

4. The mothballing of Pelican Point had more to do with competition from the old coal fired power stations than from wind power. And there was plenty of gas in the pipeline, but we had the ludicrous situation where the power station had to find someone to sell them the gas before they started using it, resulting in inability to make power available when needed. A use now buy afterwards policy would be far more sensible, though you may find it counterintuitive.

Aidan,

1) The power generators don't bid all their power at one price, their bids are layered with a large portion of their generation being contracted. The bids are based on chunks of power increasing in bid price so that as the price increases so does their output. I am talking about the peak price, the variation in the wholesale spot sales price will be considerably less.

2) All baseload generators can vary their load even nuclear power stations, they might be slower than small gas generators and doing so is not profitable, but they can and do.

3) The powerlines that faulted were not the only power lines connected to the wind farms. The AEMO report clearly indicated that the oversensitivity of the wind generators protection systems was a major contributing factor to the blackout.

Decent networks have several layers of redundancy and should be able to cope with several failures simultaneously. With the loss of the coal-fired plants, this redundancy was whittled down to dangerous levels.

Network frequency drops when power demand is higher than supply, the way to stop the decline is either by shedding load, or increasing supply. As for dropping the voltage, most consumers can ride through a 10% 20% voltage drop for a short time but will not reduce their power consumption by much. Voltage drops by more than this will start to damage consumers equipment. Heywood tripped because the power required to maintain the network frequency was too high, once Heywood had tripped, it was all over.

4) If your logic was correct, Pelican Point would have started up its second half of plant when Northern power station closed.

The experience in Germany is that as wind and solar came on line it was the gas generators that closed and not the coal-fired plants.