The climate change debate continues.

[nomadpete]

Here is a map showing the grid and the major state interconnectors. These have been upgraded from time to time to meet demand. Media has made hysterical claims about 10,000k of grid required for renewable energy. However, most of this comes from progressive upgrades of existing transmission. IMHO it's a misrepresentation.

The AEMO produce annual maps of planned grid development. Note that only a minority of the stuff on it is totally new pathways (land, towers,etc). Most is simply upgrading existing feeders. Eg most of the feeders on the second map (fromAEMO) are already there. Yes it costs to grow. It has always done so for the 40 years I was involved in the industry.

Edited Monday at 10:51 PM by nomadpete
added a map

[Siso]

1 hour ago, nomadpete said:

I disagree:-

I disagree- I disagree:-https://www.re-alliance.org.au/where_are_the_lines_to_be_built plus the transmission lines needed from each farm to the closest major line. all these projects will be over budget as well. This is all extra because of the intermittency of our new generation. But at least we are being told the actual electricity is the cheapest form of electricity generation. Just the extras that make it expensive. We can see the price of coal fired generation rise as the capacity factor decreases. Do you reckon the same thing will happen with the intermittent generation as the overbuild eats into their capacity factors. During the months of high generation we can expect these generators to bid higher prices as their CF decreases due to oversupply. There is only so much extra energy that can be stored. This will also change during the year, pushing up the price of stored energy. Basic economics.

[Siso]

The new stuff is huge, 330KV, possibly 500kV- Very expensive to build to only be used at low capacity factors. Remember, underutilised equipment is expensive. You don't see Qantas just having aircraft sitting around. An intermittent grid is going to have a lot of plant "laying" around for that once or twice a year when needed.

[facthunter]

Supplying Power to remote farms etc can never PAY.   There's extra strength in Aircraft structures for the Occasional Turbulence too and you often carry extra fuel just in case you  need it. Water and sewage systems don't run at full flow either.  AIRLINES would have aircraft sitting around but as few as can be  organised. If there's a 'Plane on the ground" Common Term there must be a replacement or Passengers don't go where they were booked to go and that doesn't win customers. Just in Time, runs risks carrying stock costs money also. Reserve stocks of Fuel. It's all part of the show, and the SHOW MUST GO ON. Nev

[octave]

32 minutes ago, Siso said:

. Remember, underutilised equipment is expensive. You don't see Qantas just having aircraft sitting around. An intermittent grid is going to have a lot of plant "laying" around for that once or twice a year when needed.

The comparison with Qantas aircraft is misleading, because traditional coal-fired power stations already rely on vast amounts of underutilised equipment. Coal plants cannot ramp quickly, they cannot turn off at night, and they must run even when demand collapses — meaning the whole plant is burning fuel simply to stay online. This is the definition of expensive underutilisation.

[facthunter]

Not suitable for Purpose. Goes back to the "BASELINE POWER" argument STILL trotted out by the Naysayers.  Older Coal fired Power stations can't be relied on and IF one fails it's a BIG  problem.  to fix because it an out of date thing. .Nev

[onetrack]

In rural W.A., the State Govt electricity system provider and maintainer, Western Power, has been pulling out long rural power lines to distant farms, and installing stand-alone, off-grid power plants to the farms.

 

The stand-alone power plants are a combination of solar, battery and backup diesel power. WP says the stand-alone systems are cheaper than the cost of installing and maintaining long power lines with only a handful of customers.

 

With this change, there's also the benefits that less trees are required to be cut down for poles, farming operations are easier when they don't have to work around poles, blackouts from storm damage to poles and wiring is reduced, and fire outbreaks from fallen power lines are eliminated.

 

A farmer friend in the W.A. wheatbelt accidently bumped a pole in his paddock with a seeding unit, and the pole promptly fell over - and it took 6 other poles down with it! The holes for the poles are oversized and the dirt refilled around the pole is not compacted, so it doesn't take a lot to make them fall over, especially when the ground is wet.

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-02/thousands-of-renewable-standalone-power-systems-to-be-rolled-out/101479136

 

However, the changeover is not without its problems, and primarily, the problems relate to WP inflexibility and faulty planning. Some farmer customers are not happy with the standalone systems, due to limitations, rules about resetting circuit breakers, and what may happen when the stand-alone systems are worn out and a future cash-strapped State Govt refuses to replace them.

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-12/farmers-question-western-power-push-standalone-regional-units/103549708

[facthunter]

We'll ALL be RUNED said Hanrahan. They HATE Power poles but still want electricity available. Bl@@Dy whingers. Get REAL! Nev

[kgwilson]

It is not surprising that the right wing of politics are heading down hill. They keep rabbiting on about how they will make electricity cheaper but have no plans on how this will happen. They keep harping on about "base load" power a term from last century when everything was coal. It is "peak demand" that is the issue now and during heat waves with the huge demand for air conditioning etc brown outs are a reality. These have happened even before there was much renewable energy around.

 

We are awash with energy in the middle of the day now with so much commercial solar and wind and the huge amount of rooftop solar on homes and businesses so storing that energy is just common sense. Many early solar farms are switching off during peak production when the spot price goes negative as they never envisaged they would need to store energy.

 

In NSW home owners are limited to exporting a maximum of 5 kW to help prevent grid overload. So if you are producing more and have no storage the excess is dissipated as heat.

 

Storage is what we need. Batteries are expensive though but fast to deploy. Pumped hydro is a great way to do this as well but costly & time consuming to set up.

 

One part of the puzzle is State & Federal subsidised batteries for home owners. My installer said to me that up until June it was all new rooftop solar. From July on it has been all new batteries, most on properties that already have large solar systems & some like me installing both. These do not need any new infrastructure at all and reduce the load on existing poles & wires so the subsidies are paying for them selves.

[Siso]

2 hours ago, octave said:

The comparison with Qantas aircraft is misleading, because traditional coal-fired power stations already rely on vast amounts of underutilised equipment. Coal plants cannot ramp quickly, they cannot turn off at night, and they must run even when demand collapses — meaning the whole plant is burning fuel simply to stay online. This is the definition of expensive underutilisation.

If the whole grid is running on several synchronous generation it gets the capacity factor up and they aren't underutilised. If it needs to ramp quickly every plant just needs to change a little bit and the system load follows quickly. It also has a large amount of inertia. Obviously they can ramp back at night as has been done for many years with controled loads like hot water.. Intermittent generation can't ramp up if there is no extra wind or sun. This is where the batterys come into it as long as they have charge and the people that trade the electricity haven't made a wrong call and emptied them previously. Remember the companys that generate our powers number 1 priority is to make money, not to keep power on to our homes and workplaces. There is definitely a place for batterys in a modern grid for sure as there is for some intermittent generators. We also need to remember these people that are selling this type of grid also convinced the government that the power was going to $275 cheaper. Definitely not dearer. 37% this year I heard. Luckily I have solar and don't feel it yet. I still standby "No-one anywhere in the world has run a large grid on intermittent weather dependent generation." Australia is running an experiment. It may work but at what cost and what help will it do to the environment.(make absolutely no difference.) We saw what happened in Spain when a solar inverter started to fail and put stupid frequencys on the grid. Are we willing to risk it.

[Siso]

Batterys paid for by subsidies, all well and good if you can afford it. Catastrophic if you can't! And there is a lot more people around that can't even buy a house let alone worry about solar and batterys!

[facthunter]

Each Battery no Matter who Owns it Helps the system. You trotted out the OLD 275 Dollar thing from years ago. THAT'S not science Based. NOW I Know you aren't fair Dinkum and the Spanish situation has NO bearing on what happens Here. Free Power for people at certain times.  Lower cost than would be otherwise because of other people's SOLAR. Nev

[Siso]

 

16 hours ago, facthunter said:

Each Battery no Matter who Owns it Helps the system. You trotted out the OLD 275 Dollar thing from years ago. THAT'S not science Based. NOW I Know you aren't fair Dinkum and the Spanish situation has NO bearing on what happens Here. Free Power for people at certain times.  Lower cost than would be otherwise because of other people's SOLAR. Nev

Exactly my point. These scientist mislead the government into believing power would be $275 cheaper. We could also say NP is unsafe because the OLD CHERNOBYL,FUKASHIMA and THREE MILE ISLAND "years ago". Accidents that would not happen today! Also not science based. Unless of course old Albo just flat out lied to the Australian people, your choice. Remember the gas and oil prices spiked and than came down again when the Ukraine war started.

 

What else have they got wrong? Bit like the NPP only last 30 years. May help the system but takes people out of paying for infrastructure making the bills more expensive for those that can't afford them or are paying most of there income on rent already. And they say that fossil fuels are subsidised.

[pmccarthy]

The current government have lied and continue to lie. The $275 was just one example. We will be paying much more for a diminishing supply of electricity. Expect frequent outages.

[facthunter]

What about the cost of anthropomorphic  activity based Climate Change?  Nev

[octave]

Here is a graph of the energy mix for SA for last year. 

 

 

To perhaps oversimplify the argument somewhat. Some people appear to want the green, orange and purple (wind and solar) or in other words, the methods of generation that do not require fuel to be transported and burned, but would rather the teal colour to be 3 times higher.  

 

As I see it, the objections to producing electricity without transporting or burning fuel are reliability and cost.

 

On reliability, I can't really find evidence that states with more renewables have a less reliable grid. I do have a basic understanding of maintaining grid frequency. This is why synchronous condensors, grid forming inverters and batteries are being installed. 

17 hours ago, Siso said:

We saw what happened in Spain when a solar inverter started to fail and put stupid frequencys on the grid.

 

Siso I have open in front of me here a report on the Spanish power cut. 

 

 Grid Incident in Spain Portugal on 28 April 2025

Excess renewables generation did not cause Iberian blackout

 

Of course, the grid is an extremely complex thing, and from time to time, things can go wrong.   It seems to me, though, that solving those problems has to be a better solution than going back to the old system of just coal and gas. Of course, coal and gas is not perfect in terms of reliability.

 

In terms of cost, according to AEOMO, th ten-year forecast is for prices to drop (not dramatically).  In fact wholesale prices are lower in SA. Yes, this doesn't translate into retail prices yet. Sometimes you have to spend money to save money.  When I bought my solar I added the loan montly payment to my monthly electricity bill. This made my electricity quite expensive for 4.5 years but now it is extremely cheap.

 

Like it or not the world is moving towards more and more renewables.  Businesses are making investment choices.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Siso]

Who cares about wholesale except for lying politicians, I know I certainly don't. What matters is what is delivered to the consumer!

 

Iberian black out - Event 4 and 5 on the pdf. While there was some unusual things happening on the grid, looks like the non synchronous generation started falling over first.  Like the 2016 SA blackout when we lost a couple of transmission lines. Breakers tripped and reclosed as is supposed to happen. 450MW of wind saw too many grid drops in a certain amount of time and shut down. Vic interconnector couldn't keep up and tripped and that was it. see the AEMO report, pge 6 for the summary I think

chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://d1n1o4zeyfu21r.cloudfront.net/WEB_Incident_%2028A_SpanishPeninsularElectricalSystem_18june25.pdf

 

 

[octave]

1 hour ago, Siso said:

Who cares about wholesale except for lying politicians, I know I certainly don't. What matters is what is delivered to the consumer!

The cost of electricity comprises direct generation costs plus the infrastructure required to distribute it and retail costs.  Electricity could be extremely cheap if we decided not to extend the grid or if we reduced maintenance standards. We could decide what level of resilience we are willing to pay for.   Do you think building new coal, gas, or nuclear power would reduce your bills? Would we pay through higher power bills or through our taxes? 

 

The Iberian Peninsula power cut is very complex.   As the video you posted suggests, there were many failings.  Even if the chain of events were precipitated by a component of the renewable system (and I don't think that is universally accepted) do we say "Oh, a failure, let's rip out the renewables and build more coal"? I think a better course of action would be to say "what went wrong and how we can prevent it from happening again."

If your car breaks down, you don't swap it for a horse, even though horses were adequate transport back in the day.

 

I imagine neither of us will suddenly change our minds, and the move towards renewables is not likely to stop and be reversed.  When I post, I spend considerable time making sure my posts can be supported by references.   This makes this a time-consuming activity.  I think I might schedule a reminder email to myself, and I could gather as many stats of, let's say June and December (to capture high and low solar) and look for records of grid failures and see if there is a trend and if so, in what direction.  Could also record price, both spot and retail (as well as daily connection charges)

 

 

 

[nomadpete]

3 hours ago, octave said:

why synchronous condensors, grid forming inverters and batteries are being installed. 

Such devices have been steadily installed throughout the grid, over the past 20 plus years. I was involved in commissioning some in Qld. It was originally done for phase correction back in the dayse before "alternative" energy.

 

Advances in semiconductors has brought a newer, faster breed of active stabilisation.

 

Barring some catastrophy, I doubt the grid is going to collapse anytime soon.

 

 

 

 

Edited 13 hours ago by nomadpete

[Siso]

1 hour ago, octave said:

 

 

The Iberian Peninsula power cut is very complex.   As the video you posted suggests, there were many failings.  Even if the chain of events were precipitated by a component of the renewable system (and I don't think that is universally accepted) do we say "Oh, a failure, let's rip out the renewables and build more coal"? I think a better course of action would be to say "what went wrong and how we can prevent it from happening again."

charges)

 

 

 

The smart thing would be build some NPP and don't replace the intermittent generators that aren't needed or at least look at it without the 1970's mindset and an open mind. That is like saying if you by a car that is a lemon, lets go back to riding a horse. I wasn't a fan until I did some research.

 

You are right it is very complex, but having a lot inverters with their high frequency switching is jut another issue the grid that has to deal with. The WTGs I use to work on had a DFIG generator (really smart bit of gear but the person who thought of it must have ben smoking good gear.) which has a converter on the rotor side of the generator. The filter capacitors use to shift there rating and would stop the turbine. In the end there was a fix but it tripled the amount of caps. Just goes to show how many parts of an inverter based system can go wrong verses a magnet spinning in a coil of wire, A few large passive capacitor banks and some switch gear.

 

This link goes to some more inverter based issues although I believe this was caused by human error.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-23/connection-issue-causes-lights-to-flicker-across-sa/101176004

 

chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/electricity/nem/market_notices_and_events/power_system_incident_reports/2022/south-australia-power-system-oscillations.pdf?la=en

[facthunter]

Sychronisation is an issue with any grid AC system. We should reduce reliance on a Grid. Distance equals Losses, cost and unreliability.  Nev

[Siso]

This bloke has some very informative videos regarding all things nuclear and energy. 

Illinois EnergyProf

https://www.youtube.com/@illinoisenergyprof6878

[Jerry_Atrick]

On 01/12/2025 at 4:47 AM, Siso said:

Australia has only about 7% traditional Hydro. A country of 26 million people is going to have to pay and build the Transmission infrastructure. 

The country of 28m has to pay for the existing infrastructure. The older the infrastructure, the more maintenance, and eventually replacement (in segments) is required, And of course, as the population expands, the network has to expand with it. I would love to see the transmission and distribution maintenance and upgrade budget over the years to compare incremental upgrading/installing upgrades to handle renewables over a similar period Rome, after all, wasn't built in a day,  The stats provided by @octave already bear out the major cost of your bill is infrastructure, so it would be interesting to compare that cost to a new build and its projected costs over time. 

 

You also speak of this under-utilisation of capacity - which is not quire accurate. I am sure there are times the grid is underutilised - for example, around 3am Easternm - this would be factored into the price you pay. All utilities are underutilised at some stage. Yet it is even more expensive with coal, as you have to keep those furnaces burning.. That is under utilisation. I think what you mean and I may have misread it - the cost of writing off the capital before the end of its useful life. Yes, that is a cost, however it is borne from continual investment in obsolete technology. And isn't the grid being upgraded for renewables, and transitioning rather than abruptly stopping legacy network infrastructure?  Sounds like they are trying to make the transition (as oppose to switching) from legacy to upgraded grid as cost efficient as possible. But this sort of thing happens anyway, as even with legacy infrastructure, components time expire, become obsolete and are replaced (sometimes before their useful life if the benefits of replacement technology can provide a quicker economic return).

 

Then there's the extensions to nuclear plants. This is not a simple visit from the NRC or NII (as it was called then), a few patch jobs and biob's your uncle. I was involved in a two life extensions (not the whole thing). They are years in the planning and delivery and are major refubrishment programs. Both cost well above USD$600m and that was (jeepers!) 25 years ago. Typically, plants have two generation facilities - and that well above $600m was for each facilitiy (which is why they do one at a time). So, yeah, you can get life extensions, but they don't come cheap and are still full of risks to budget, timelines, etc.

 

Thee was mention of it's great if one can afford the subsidies for renewables.. I am not even sure what the issue is here. Virtually all new nuclear builds, at least in the Western word are subsidised or guaranteed one way or another. The LNP caolitiion's plan was to significantly  subsidise the new builds in Australia. Great if it can be afforded. Hinkley Point and Sizewell C - Government guaranteed and guarateed price post commissioning, indexed, which are eye watering. Have a look at tax credits, government grants, loan guarantees, retail bill levies, etc that all prop up the industry in these countries.. As you say, great if you can afford it.. Obviously it can be afforded. 

 

Lastly, no other country has relied on intermittent generation? No one had done much more than jump of a tree or a cliff,yet now, through technology, people fly safely. What sort of argument is that? It hasn't been done before, let's not do it? Is that really your argument.

 

Everything else @octave has dealt with competently. 

 

Keep investing in coal - lets see where you are in 20 years time.

[Jerry_Atrick]

Apols was tapping the above on a train and had to end it quickly..

 

Add @nomadpete, @rgmwa  @kgwilson and others to competently addressing the issues..

Edited 7 hours ago by Jerry_Atrick

[nomadpete]

Catering for brief system underutilisation does not equal overcapitalisation.

 

The old capacitor banks are stoll doing their job. Old style mecanical system inertia (to maintain 50 cps system synchronisation) is now being replaced by fast electronic system synchronisation. I know which one is fastest to respond to sudden load changes.

Hint:- not the old steam engines!