Pipe Dreaming: SA Premier’s Pumped Hydro Scheme an Engineering and Economic Nonsense

 

Wind ‘powered’ South Australia is the place where the laws of nature, physics, engineering and economics get turned inside out.

Run by a former worker’s injury compensation lawyer, and a band of equally deluded acolytes, South Australia has become the butt of international jokes, thanks to an obsession with nature’s wonder fuels, sunshine and breezes.

When the sun goes down and wind power output collapses, as it does every single day, SA relies upon anything up to 800 MW of coal-fired power drawn from neighbouring Victoria and NSW via two interconnectors; two large gas-fired generators (the 1,280 MW gas-steam Torrens Island plant and a 440MW CCGT plant at Pelican Point); a few small peaking plants, including piston-engined diesels at Port Stanvac and Open Cycle Gas Turbines at Hallett; and 276 MW of diesel-fuelled Open Cycle Turbines that cost taxpayers $400 million and which chew up 80,000 litres of diesel, every hour.

Oh, almost forgot, Elon Musk’s $150 million, 100 MW mega-battery that’s capable of powering SA for just under four minutes; more like a rounding error in calculating what’s actually powering SA.

Having blown up its last coal-fired plant at Port Augusta last December, and with that menagerie of costly and highly inefficient generation capacity, it’s no wonder that SA pays the highest retail power prices in the world.

Unhappily for SA’s households and businesses, its Premier, Jay Weatherill is prone to policy brain farts.

A couple of weeks ago, it was a ‘virtual’ power plant, said to comprise thousands of solar panels and Tesla batteries which he plans to bolt on to Housing Trust homes (publicly owned, low-rent properties, mostly occupied by pensioners and the terminally unemployed). The cost to taxpayers is north of $1 billion, and the returns in terms of meaningful power, just peanuts.

Along the same lines, clearly panicked renewables rent-seekers have put forward another economic and engineering nonsense, involving pumped hydro proposed for the Adelaide Hills.

Hardly the Himalayas, and more like humps than hills, the Mount Lofty Ranges to the East of the City are the most unlikely place for another Snowy Hydro Scheme. Indeed, as David Bidstrup details below, what’s being put up will turn out to be yet another risible response SA’s renewables debacle. We’ve added a few pics care of Aneroid Energy to help David make his point.

Will “pumped” hydro save us?
Catllaxy Files
David Bidstrup
12 February 2018

Two reports in the Adelaide “Advertiser” caught my eye. One was headlined “Hydro to keep our electricity pumping” and the other concerned another billionaire who wants to save us – “Gupta pledges to fix SA’s energy debacle”. At least he was right in describing it as a debacle.

The hydro article lists five proposed “pumped hydro” schemes and lists capacity and output for each, but fails to mention how much water might be needed and that the schemes are nett users of electricity rather than generators.

Mr Gupta says he will install “one gigawatt of dispatchable renewable energy” which will power his Whyalla steelworks and have a bit left over for the rest of us. The articles confuse power with energy; the reporters constantly claim we “use MW”. Clearly they have no idea what they are talking about. The critical question is how long Mr Gupta’s “one gigawatt” will produce electricity for.

It is interesting that there are two mutually exclusive terms used; renewable and dispatchable.

I thought I would analyse the 5 hydro proposals to see how much they can provide as a percentage of average daily consumption, how much electricity they need to re-fill the dams and how much water is needed to run them.

The following analysis is based on a head difference of 150 metres. This is a bit generous but I do not have access to enough detailed topography. Remember, Mt Lofty is only 711 metres high and it is the second highest peak in SA.

The table below lists the 5 schemes and shows installed capacity, water flow required in cubic metres per second, stated output in MWh, the time each needs to operate to achieve that output and the total quantity of water in Megalitres for that time period.

Scheme	Capacity MW	Water flow M3/sec	Output MWh	Hours	Total water, Megalitres
Goat Hill	230	174	1,840	8	5,000
Baroota	200	162	1,600	7.5	4,350
Cultana	225	170	1,770	8	4,800
Iron Duchess	90	68	390	4.5	1,060
Highbury	300	226	1,200 (see* below)	4	3,260
Totals	1,060		6,800		18,500

(*: Cannot confirm this number but have seen it somewhere).

South Australia’s average daily power consumption is 31,600 MWh so the total output of the 5 schemes above can contribute 21% but they require the equivalent of 24% to pump all that water back uphill, so they are nett energy users, not generators.

The total cost quoted for the 5 schemes is $1.86 billion and the result is a deficit in power available for consumption. We are told that they will use “spare capacity” from wind farms and perhaps some solar installations to provide their pumping power. Today at noon wind was producing 1.25% of the total grid load.

[Total output from all wind turbines on the Eastern Grid, notional capacity of 4,360 MW]

In SA we managed half of that, running at 250-400 MW. This is common during summer and lots of wishful thinking will not change it.

[Total output from all wind turbines in SA, notional capacity of 1,698 MW]

My recent article on a proposed solar farm indicated the minuscule amount they can provide [reproduced below].

Adelaide’s average daily water consumption is about 550 Megalitres per day so the schemes require about 33 times this amount to be stored in “turkey’s nest dams”, an appropriate word. Where will this come from in the “driest state”?

If we consider a dam of 100 hectares surface area the depth of water needed for the largest scheme is 5 metres. Intakes must be submerged below the minimum level otherwise they will suck air so the full depth will be even greater. Also evaporation of around 3 metres per year needs to be considered.

There is some naive idea that these schemes can be a bit “agricultural”, just get some gear and build a couple of “turkey’s nests”, get some pipes and turbines and Bob’s your Uncle. The reality is very different, having been involved in a couple of hydro-electric schemes myself.

There is also the added cost of transmission and the complexity of running these things on the fly whenever we are a bit short of juice.

The point that is never mentioned is that the destruction of the Playford B and Northern power stations removed 760 MW of generating capacity, 76% of “one gigawatt”, and it was available every day of the year, night and day, windy or not. None of the proposed schemes can come within a bulls roar regarding economy and reliability and neither can wind and solar. We should remember that when we hear all the bullshit sprouted about “renewables” and recognise that it is all political and has no technical merit at all.

All this pain is to “reduce emissions” when there is plenty of evidence that it is a pointless exercise and that we actually do not have a problem called “anthropogenic global warming”. How do we get off this train to the madhouse?
Catallaxy Files

 

Here’s David’s take on another engineering and economic nonsense being pitched to South Australians (at their ultimate expense, of course).

Solar nightmares
Catallaxy Files
David Bidstrup
11 February 2018

A report on 8 February told of a plan to build a 44 MW solar system “to deliver more reliable power to the grid”. The cost would be $90 million.

I have done some research into solar systems, so thought I would look at this proposal from a state wide power consumption viewpoint.

Using AEMO numbers the daily average power consumption in SA for 2017 was 31,600 MWh.

Using a solar calculator that takes information from stations that record Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) data on solar insolation, cloudiness, temperature and whatever, the 44 MW solar system might generate 69,800 MWh in a year.

Averages are misleading and do not reflect the reality that solar system output declines significantly throughout the year as the sun angle changes in the sky. When the output is shown as monthly figures the picture becomes a bit clearer.

In summer, (December, January and February) average daily output is 252 MWh. In autumn, (March, April, and May) it is 168. In winter, (June, July and August) it is 123 MWh and in spring, (September, October and November) it is 224 MWh.

The table below shows the comparison between daily average consumption and the contribution from the solar farm.

Season	State average daily consumption MWh	Solar contribution MWh	Solar contribution as % of daily consumption
Summer	31,806	252	0.79%
Autumn	31,740	168	0.53%
Winter	35,043	123	0.35%
Spring	27,983	224	0.80%

 

The output never gets to 1% of the daily consumption and when we consider the times that output is delivered it gets worse.

In January the system operates for about 11 hours but output does not become significant until around 9 a.m. and declines after 3 p.m. 90% of the daily output is between those hours but is not a constant amount ramping up from 10% at 9 a.m., reaching 13% at 12 noon and declining to 9% at 3 p.m.

In June nothing happens until 8 a.m. when output is 8%. It ramps up to 20% at noon and then falls off the cliff at 2 p.m.

How this contribution gives “more reliable power to the grid” is beyond me. The proponents also promise a “21 MW battery” which is a nonsense statement – how long will that battery be able to supply energy (MWh)? Probably 5 minutes.

People often confuse power and energy and think that “adding 44 MW” to the system means something rather than looking at things in the context of the contribution to consumption, (MWh). In this case, that contribution is negligible, variable, and intermittent and of no real use except for the proponents to garner renewable energy subsidies, without which there would be no business case.
Catallaxy Files