Australians once enjoyed affordable power, reliably delivered: the chaotic delivery of wind and solar changed all that. Australian power prices have rocketed out-of-control: its wind and solar power capital, South Australia pays the highest electricity prices, in the world.
Mass power cuts (aka load shedding and demand management) and mass blackouts are the new normal. And yet, the lunatics responsible are hell-bent on doubling down to deliver the final and fatal blow to Australia’s Eastern Grid (geographically, the largest interconnected power grid on the planet).
As Jo Nova explains, electricity generation and delivery is a finely balanced thing; and the sudden massive surges and collapses that are part and parcel of wind and solar generation are taking their toll, with much worse to come.
Australians: destroying their grid faster than any country on Earth
Jo Nova Blog
Jo Nova
12 February 2019
Australians are the Renewable crash Test Dummies
As I said for free and two months before the ANU, with a 50% annual growth in renewables, Australia is ramping up unreliable power faster than anywhere.
Now comes a paper: Australia: the renewable energy superstar showing that, per capita, Australia is installing unreliable generators in a blitzkrieg pace, more than twice as fast as Germany is, and 4-5 times faster per capita than the EU, USA, Japan and China. No other dummies are even in the race. The largest coal exporter in the world is working harder than anyone to destroy its largest export earner — which would be noble if only there was more to it than being a magical spell to ward off storms.
This is a legendary paper and very helpful. Save the link, copy the reference, send it to your MP, your friends, your newspaper! Why not head to the launch at ANU at 5:30pm, 14th Feb?
Never again can anyone get away with national flagellation for “not doing enough”. Henceforth Green and Labor M.P.’s will stop calling us a national joke, a pariah, and a disgrace. (Though, actually, all those things are true, for the opposite reason. China is laughing at us, and we are a disgrace to our children for blowing up national assets, squandering resources and teaching them witchcraft.)
Australia is installing renewables so fast it’s even faster than the second top country which is also, Australia.
Apparently the net cost of adding renewables is zero according to the experts at the ANU. In a consistent world this one document would also immediately end all subsidies. No more RET, SRES, LRET, low interest loans, tax breaks, forced market rules or golden interconnectors.
Except, of course, they’re totally wrong on the cost. Australians have the most expensive electricity in the world for a reason. Somehow Chinese hackers or a renewables marketing team must have snuck into the ANU to write most of the report. Of the six summary conclusions, the first two are obvious and the last four are fantasy. They are only “straight-forward” or “sustainable” if you have $10 trillion dollars to spare and you can’t think of anything better to do with it.
The full gloss PR story:
Australia: the renewable energy superstar
Summary:
- Australia is installing renewable energy (solar photovoltaics and wind) far faster per capita than other countries.
- The Australian deployment rate is 4-5 times faster per capita than the EU, USA, Japan and China.
- Stabilising the electricity grid when it has 50-100% renewable energy is straightforward using off-the-shelf techniques that are already widely used in Australia.
- The electricity sector is on track to deliver Australia’s entire Paris emissions reduction targets five years early, in 2025. This is one of the world’s fastest sustainable rates of emissions reduction.
- Remarkably, the net cost is zero because expensive fossil fuels are being replaced by cheaper renewables.
- Australia is on track for deep and rapid greenhouse emissions reductions through deep renewable electrification. Much of the world can readily follow the Australian path. Renewable energy offers real hope for a future liveable planet.
The net cost is zero?
The net cost is only zero if you ignore the glorious subsidies, the extra transmission lines, the rising FCAS bill, the blackouts, the emergency demand management, the damage from surging voltages, the wasted capital expenditure, the squads of flying diesels, synchronous condensors, and the burden that unreliable energy dumps on the whole grid. In the US windpower makes gas power $30/MWh more expensive. Blakers et al might think this is a part of the gas bill but obviously it’s a hidden renewable cost. We can argue the toss with cherry-plucked analysis of wholesale price bidding games, but the end result is a retail price and on that, history is devastating. Coal gave us 30 years of falling prices, and renewables wiped all those gains out.
Renewable energy saves on fuel, but wastes infrastructure, land, labor and resources. How can that be cheap?
Like an infection, unreliable power damages the efficiency and economics of every other generator. And even though solar energy is semi-reliable, it still wrecks havoc on the grid: see the Duck curve, the 1000MW generator that goes AWOL and the warnings. For most of the year solar energy is the extra energy that arrives when we know we don’t need it.
Plus the rise of subsidized unreliables pushes out the unsubsidized sector leaving the market ripe for bid squeezes that cost nearly a billion dollars a day.
One of the world’s fastest sustainable rates of emissions reduction?
What’s sustainable? Not the price, our industries, or our 50Hz supply. Not our lifestyle.
We can have sustainable rates of carbon reduction but we can’t have a sustainable civilization at the same time.
The world can readily follow the Australian path?
Sure if they happen to be a first-world nation with vast empty space that’s 15 degrees from the equator, in the roaring 40s, and with $100 billion to throw away. Sure.
[Jo thinks “Somehow Chinese hackers or a renewables marketing team must have snuck into the ANU to write most of the report.” she’s too kind, I’d say with the possible exception of one of the janitors and maybe a part-time gardener ANU is wholly and solely part of the renewables marketing team.]
Jo Nova Blog
STOP THESE THINGS 
Like Venezuela, when the calls to help with the “humanitarian” crisis start to come, they should be ignored.
Australia voted for this.
Repeatedly.
They won’t stop.
They should be allowed to commit suicide without interference.
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools. Herbert Spencer
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/herbert_spencer_155826
Many of us are aware that Australia is on one of those “tipping points”. A grid collapse is coming. It’s just a matter of when. Any new power station is going to get tied up in the courts for years before a shovel of dirt can be turned. So the country is left with refurbishing the old ones. It’s not pleasant watching a country throw itself on the rocks.
The costs of the ‘transition’ or should it be called the aggressive take-over of our energy sources are even greater than mentioned above.
What about the cost to a Healthy life for many people (and more to come) of this form of energy production, what of the cost to environment, the flora, fauna and avian species, our farming lands that are being destroyed by the actions of these turbines changing the local hydrology, causing top cover drift and moving the breezes and winds in ways that nature did not designate them to move. Drying the earth so even our most abundant creatures can no longer find a suitable sanctuary free from noise and vibration suited to their needs.
What of the loss of tourism as our wonderful environment is destroyed as each turbine is installed and begins to operate?
Who wants to visit a ‘forest’ of turbines because that’s all that will be left when they eventually acknowledge no matter how many of these whirling monsters they erect, they will still not have enough.
Why, because the climate has been changed not by natural forces but by stupid imbecilic actions of people who think with their wallets and or their easily influenced dulled brains, rather than being able to use common-sense and or rational thought processes.
What about the environment of other places where the batteries towers and nacelles are created, items that cannot be fully recycled – what happens to the waste they leave behind?
What happens when the cost of replacing all this ‘throw-away’
society’s monsters need replacing after only around couple of
decades if were lucky?
No the cost is more than the cost of electricity and more than the cost of subsidies its the cost of a way of life and maybe even our ability to survive as a nation or even a part of another nation that has not fallen to the fallacy of Renewables being a saviour.
The faster we go down this road the faster we’ll find the end of the rainbow and there will be no pot of gold, just a black hole.
Very well put. I agree.
As a life long denizen of the “backwards, inbred and certainly uncultured” American South , I find it humorous to read the travails of the more enlightened, particularly, those voters who seek to attain a more equitable, sustainable lifestyle, evidenced by their more frequent use of the most crude! How dare the common complain about cold water, if they have it, or their lights will not illuminate. We’re saving the planet! Now pass the caviar, the opera is about to start……
YOU ALLOWED THIS!
If you get rid of all the CO2 none of us will be here.
You are correct! I suggest Aussie voters put a government in power that will enforce that those who mandate “green” policies for the populace must first live under those restrictions a year prior. They can use their solar powered high speed rail to go to Davos next year to proclaim their climate virtues and they can cool / heat their government offices with peat moss to espouse their virtuousness. HAH!
Reblogged this on ajmarciniak.
It all works for me. Cannot see a problem anywhere as the learned professors who built the Australian Electricity generation and supply grid can attest to. Now watch the Kaos as the “expensive” coal fired power stations close. The quicker the better then we can burn all the rubbish that has come out of the universities to keep warm during winter.
maybe all the rubbish printed to sustain the green hoax can be used to fuel power plants. That should last a while. Moreover, all socialists should be required to live under their green ideology before they are given a public hearing