Oh dear, if ever there was an admission of government failure I
thought that getting industries to shut down because it is hot was
about the ultimate.
I was wrong; Victoria is installing 105 diesel generator sets in Morwell.
Each set appears to be one megawatt. This we are told is compensate
for closing the Hazlewood station of 1600 megawatts.

Now I have been saying for sometime that politicians cannot do arithmetic.
Further I thought the whole exercise was to cut back on CO2 !
Together with the large number of ex Tasmanian diesel generators that
are now installed in Sth Australia it seems that we are now reliant
on dodgy imported supplies of diesel fuel !

They have gone stark raving mad !

It has been said they could not get batteries installed in time.
Another example of arithmetic blindness.
A study of the UK power system, that also has nuclear backup, found
that the UK would need 13,800 batteries the size of Sth Australias.
The cost would be 850 billion pounds.
So scale to Australia and it would come up at about 6,000 batteries
for a cost of about $800 billion !
So it is time for everyone to stop fantasising about batteries.
Just remember that anything politicians say on this matter is wrong.

Bazz,

All is not lost with solar power.

I have a very efficient solar powered set up in my car, there is a spare battery in the boot (in case the main one fails/goes flat) that is charged by an onboard solar panel, said battery powers a 12V fan that keeps the inside temperature down when the car is out in the sun.

Why have a spare battery?
Well, with an auto car and no provision to hand crank and no possibility of clutch starting, a spare battery is the only way to get out of trouble when miles from help and in a phone dead spot.

Well even electric cars have a 12 volt battery.
The design regulations require it to run parking lights if the traction battery is flat.

Well, as I never go far I am never likely to be out of reach of help.
I have a HF radio in my car but that of course would be useless if
the battery was flat. So I guess a small solar panel would be useful
if I was in the never never, I could charge the battery and use the
radio to summon help.
What would you do if you had a gear box failure and no phone service ?

Bazz,

"What would you do if you had a gear-box failure and no phone service ?"

Walk, carrying an empty Gerry can; people are more likely to stop if you appear to be out of petrol!

that they are prepared to use diesel power in an attempt to avoid the political fallout of their insane and inane policies shows how little they really care about CO2 emissions.

Is Mise I had a couple of solar chargers I installed to keep my tractor battery charged. It seemed like a good idea when the nearest real 240V power was some distance from the equipment shed. The first one did a satisfactory job for 3 years before dying. The replacement lasted only 2.

I gave up on pretend power, & ran a 240V line down there. The 240V 4A trickle charger I bought in 2002 to do the job is still labouring away tirelessly on the tractor battery.

When we moved off the yacht, into a house my 4 year old daughter wanted to know if the house would have real "tricity" like other houses, or just the Mickey Mouse stuff we had on the boat.

Out of the mouth of babes. That kid already had more sense than all the Greens & lefty politicians combined.

If, by some miracle, diesel generators somehow keep the show on the road, it will be trumpeted as a triumph of renewables.

Spot on Joe, but now we have the story that Tans Grid says we cannot
afford to have 24/7 electricity supply.
Well that is true if you dump 200,000 extra people a year onto the grid.
I hear our benighted NSW Labour opposition leader this morning raving
on about putting in batteries. First catch your $800 billion !

To fix the problem we have to first wipe out all the pollies, starting with the greens.

Then stop thinking about these stupid politically correct crappy things called renewables.

Solar, wave, batteries are all lies, spread by the greens. A good punch in the face and breaking their hands will shut them up and stop them long enough to throw them out.

If we had some more snowy schemes we might get somewhere.

Apart from the time and cost factor, nuclear is still the stand alone winner. Oh and I don't believe the old coal burning power plants would cost as much as they let on.

It's another lie so they can keep fleecing the piggy bank with grants and hand outs for all this BS research into renewables. The people are too stupid to challenge these renewable projects because they are as informed as a coconut.

An interesting article in today's Australian by someone from Snowy Hydro.
The proposed scheme for the Snowy will have a capacity of 350000 Mw/hrs.
This is equivalent to about 3500 batteries the size of Sth Aus's battery !
They will pay for it from profit and pay 8% return when completed.
Now that seems like the way to go.
It seems that all the fun poked at the PM about it was totally misdirected.
It does mean that Labour does not understand these things and should keep quiet.

You could also read about the effectiveness of battery back up:

https://theconversation.com/a-month-in-teslas-sa-battery-is-surpassing-expectations-89770?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20January%2011%202018%20-%2092027806&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20January%2011%202018%20-%2092027806+CID_89945028a0ff14c0f1dc94fb14ab7cac&utm_source=campaign_monitor&utm_term=A%20month%20in%20Teslas%20SA%20battery%20is%20surpassing%20expectations
you may just be surprised.

Bazz you must have missed the bit where re-evaluation of the costs of the project are suggesting a minimum cost of 4 billion, & Judith Curry has suggested about 10 billion, once the required additional transmission & other gear is added.

All this will produce not a single watt of extra power, let alone megawatts. All it will do is provide the availability of emergency generation capacity. That of course will only be available after the power +15% has been expended pumping the water up there in the first place.

As renewable power only supplies a few percent of our power usage, it will have to be coal, diesel or gas generated power that does the pumping. Thus the project increases the use of probably coal fired power by the 15% that will be lost/wasted in the exercise.

This being the case, building a much cheaper coal fired power plant, without all the hidden extras such as transmission lines would be a much better, more reliable & cheaper option, offering lower emissions as well.

As with anything Turnbull, [think NBN, or subs] the costs do have a habit of escalating, while the promoted benefit fails to materialise.

Tks Hasbeen I must have missed it I'll go back to it.
Does it mean they have reduced costs by 99% ?

Yes Baygon I have read the article, It has worked well but it is not
there for backup of power generators, it is there as a buffer, to fill
in when there is a sudden shortage, lasting perhaps a minute and to
push other generators up in speed if the frequency falls.

Snowy 2.0 is about storing and using renewable energy, not backup for the failure of thermal generation.

The whole deal is supposed to complement other generation, which would be laudable but for the astonishingly poor cost to benefit ratio when all the infrastructure spending needed is taken into account.

Snowy 2.0 is a political appeasement project. The cost of a modular nuclear plant with the capacity of Hazelwood would cost far less initially and over its lifecycle.

Here in South East Queensland it has been hot.

As usual when it is very hot, apart from the odd thunderstorm when it blows trees down, & is far to high wind speed to run windmills, there has been very little wind, definitely not enough to make windmills produce useful power.

Now even I have been running air conditioning. I can't afford it, but it is just too hot to do without it. It is over 2 weeks now, & the forecast shows another week or so still.

Strangely the same thing occurs when it is very cold, the wind just stops.

I doubt the Snowy 0.2 will deliver enough power for such extended periods, & what it does deliver won't have been provided by water pumped by excess wind or solar power. There aint none, & can not be any without trillions of investment in unreliables.

No it will be coal pumped water, with 15% of the power produced being waster in the effort. Thus the Snowy 0.2 will be carbon intensive power, more intensive than direct coal power generation.

Bet idiots like Ant will be unable to understand this.

Hasbeen, not sure I understand you either. I thought Snowy 2 was another water powered generating station which relied on gravity and the weight of water as it passed through the turbines which turned the generators which created the electricity on the way down to the runoff below.

I'm not sure what your argument is. Is it that the Snowy 2 will not produce enough power to satisfy the needs of the community it will serve?

Or is it some other reason?

Can you please clarify for me and others?

Altrav it works like a large battery.
The article yesterday said they could make a return of 8% with it.
The water could be pumped up when there was excess power available
be it from coal fired, solar or wind, just whatever was going at a low enough price.
It is a principle used in many other countries.
According to the article it could have a capacity of 35,000MW/Hrs.
That figure seems to be the Dam full capacity.
That capacity is equal to 350 batteries like Sth Aus's.

I will be interested to see what is Hasbeen's take on this.

Luciferase, I think it is meant to be a backup for conventional
generators. It could if the dam was full replace Hazlewood for 17.5 hours.
Or if a coal fired station lost one turbine, say 250 Mwatts it could replace it for 140 hours.
In the situation we have now it could be very valuable.

Guys, from what I recall the Tesla battery system was only good for a very very short time. And that was only for a very few suburbs.

It cannot sustain normal base load power for the kind of time that would be required of it.

It was a political stunt at best.

ALL the renewables and batteries and so on are band aid fixes. None of them are cost effective and able to give on-going reliable base load power like Hydro, or Nuclear.

Greens go home get out of politics you are costing us and wasting our money so that you can remain in politics for NO good reason other than to satisfy your own personal and selfish agenda at the expense of the Australian people.

And take all this renewable crap with you!

Altav, from what I have read the SA battery is 120 MWatt/hr.
Of that 20Mwatt/hr is contracted to supply network services ie
frequency control and black restart ability.
The other 100Mw/hr is to buffer the wind farm output to cope with
gusty windy days. Just like putting a large capacitor across the output.

Useful, but will not solve our present problem and was never intended to do that.
Good strong breeze in SA at present 1337 Mwatt from wind alone.

Yes ALTRAV, snowy 0.2 is a pumped hydro system. It only has water to generate power by gravity, AFTER you have used power to pump the water up there in the first place. These are usually used as profit making systems. Cheap power is used at off-peak to pump the water, then the water is used to generate power when prices are higher at peak usage. The generation of the falling water produces about 15% less power than was required to pump it up there to start with.

They are used as a buffer to handle excess power. There is a small one on Warragamba dam in Queensland, although we hear nothing of it's use or usefulness.

As Bazz says, it really is a water battery, with the usual loss power as it requires more power to charge than is returned.

Of course a water battery such as this, has a much longer productive life than any chemical battery, such as the South Australian foolishness, & is effective with coal fired systems.

Currently the Danes with their excessive investment in windmills, have to give much of their power in good wind generation conditions to Sweden. They use the free power to pump water up hill in their hydro systems, then charge the Danes heaps to sell it back when the wind drops. In fact I read the Swedes were charging Denmark to take the power at one stage, although I don't know if this was actually true.

Hasbeen said;
In fact I read the Swedes were charging Denmark to take the power at
one stage, although I don't know if this was actually true.

The story I read was Sweden was charging the Germans to take the
Germans renewable power. So it is probably true that they are charging
anyone dopey enough to overbuild wind & solar.
Can't they just disconnect the wind farms from the grid and leave them
twiddling their thumbs ?

Guys, I did not know about this stupid idea of pumping water up just to let it flow down again, in all with little or no physical or financial gain.

I thought the Snowy scheme used the water stored in the highland lakes due to natural and environmental activity such as rain, melting snow, flow from the mountains above.

And the water naturally collected in the natural formation of the land high in the mountains. Then I thought by building a water/turbine/generator somewhere lower than this natural dam/lake, the water just flowed down and hey presto, we have FREE electricity.

If that is not the case then, as far as I am concerned you can stick this PC version of hydro-electric lies.

We are screwed. If we don't get rid of these scumbags in Canberra we are never going to get off our knees. Their greed and averace prevents them from thinking like socially responsible people, and thus we're screwed!

ALTRAV the existing Snowy system is as you believe. It uses natural water to generate power, then down stream the water is used for farm irrigation. It was a great scheme.

I say was, as greenie pressure has seen a lot of this water diverted to environmental flows. Quite a bit of it is uselessly poured down the old Snowy river to generate flooding flows, before running uselessly out to sea.

A further very large drop has to flow down to the artificial water sky lake at the mouth of the Murray, where millions of litres that could have irrigated farm production, evaporates uselessly every year.

It is only Turnbulls new multi billion scheme that will waste existing power capacity pumping water uphill, to keep the lights on, when his windmills are becalmed. Total stupidity rides the ranges, where once the man from Snowy river rode his horse

Hasbeen this type of irresponsible clap trap from the greens is just not acceptable. I cannot for the life of me understand who is the 'responsible person' in charge and why is he not stopping this useless line of thinking and exorbitant waste of money to continue.

We have consumer laws which protect us against con-men, snake oil salesmen and liars who sell you something which does not perform as per your request or intended as described by the seller.

I believe they are known as 'unfit for purpose' laws, and are policed by the dept. of consumer affairs. This applies to everything to do with consumers and what they purchase.

So why are we not charging these people for selling us things which do not perform in accordance with the terms of reference. And if they are performing according to the terms of reference, then we need to strangle the people who pushed the contracts in the first place. Like the greens.

I know it sounds harsh, but just as I believe in the return of the death penalty so should we gather up the greens and all their supporters and also put them all to death.

A tad drastic I hear you say, well it has become a very real case of us or them. If we allow these childish, petulant fools to continue with these outrageous and impossible endeavours, seeking long term reliable power from toys, we will commit ourselves to death.

And what's more if we don't get rid of them soon and harshly, we will deserve to die.

PC has gone way beyond the pale by allowing these fools to come this far.

Enough is enough. We must become a single voice of reason and stop this green disease from spreading any further.