Posted on 09/04/2023 11:19:39 AM PDT by george76
We’re on the precipice of a radical experiment with a national electricity grid
The AEMO (manager of the Australian grid) has finally released the major report on problems coming in the next ten years on our national grid, and it’s worse than they thought even six months ago. They euphemistically refer to the coming “reliability gaps”. They could have said “blackouts” instead, but a gap in reliability sounds so much nicer.
Bizarrely, the lead graph of the 175 page AEMO report goes right off the scale, mysteriously peaking in the unknown and invisible real estate off the top of the chart. And they’re not projecting troubles fifty years from now. Those cropped peaks of invisible pain hit from 2027.
And even the pain we can see is apparently quite bad. Two states are already likely to breach “the interim reliability measure” in this coming summer. Ominously, just one day after releasing the report, the AEMO is calling for tenders for “reliability reserves” in South Australia and Victoria. Apparently, they want offers of industries ready to shut down who aren’t already on the list, and they want spare generation too — get this — even asking for “small onsite generators”. Does that sound bad to you? It sounds bad to me.
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“Based on current trajectory, we’re in for a world of pain ahead. …the AEMO projections are looking pretty dire.”
Consider figure 1: A decade of blackouts coming..
Have you ever seen a graph like this that hides the peaks? In the “central scenario” of the cropped graph — “only” four states of Australia go off the charts. Imagine what the bad scenario looks like…
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Given that South Australia flew in diesel jet engines for back up generation at one point (General Electric aero-derivative turbines) — perhaps we can ask Qatar Airlines if they can plug some planes straight into our grid? (The government won’t let them fly in more passengers, in case it screws up Qantas profits, but that means they must have a few planes they can spare.)
A leap to Figure 43 suggests those hidden peaks of Figure 1 might be quite high in NSW and Victoria. Figure 43 shows the same “Central Scenario” as Figure 1 — this time as dotted lines — and we are allowed to see a bit more of the graph. The y axis is the same Expected Unserved Energy (%) this time reaching up to 0.007%. But the NSW (blue) and Victorian (grey) lines are doing the Moonshot thing in 2027. They’re headed to infinity or some number the AEMO didn’t want to graph.
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The solid lines in Figure 43 are the slightly better scenarios that include contributions from CER or “Consumer Energy Resources” (that’s you!). This is what the future looks like with more help from things like solar panels on rooftops, home batteries, and Electric Vehicles. It’s also the best we can do with DSP assistance — which means Demand Side Participation — those people who participate by not demanding electricity. In normal English we would call them the customers who are paid to stay away or something.
Ten different ways to go without electricity..
The AEMO doesn’t use the word blackout, but it has a dozen flavours of blackouts-by-another-name, many of them voluntary or subsidized and somewhat prearranged. It looks so much better on paper to say “DSP” but it means someone, somewhere going without electricity when they would otherwise have used it. DSP gets 146 mentions in the AEMO report, giving us some idea on how mini-blackouts are now an essential part of managing a very sick grid.
At a minimum DSP may just be an inconvenience — people have to program their washing machine and pool filter to run at lunchtime, which sounds fine until you have only one sunny day that week and you have six loads of washing. In a rich world without “reliability gaps” you would just run it, conveniently, from 5 to 10 pm the night before.
DSP is code for people willing (or dragged), in some sense, to have a voluntary mini-blackout — and the report notes the major factor driving an increase in DSP uptake is because electricity is now more expensive (what a great thing?). The AEMO notes: “These higher prices have led to more benefits to customers participating in DSP schemes or responding directly to market signals”. Table 5 lists the Negawatts of voluntary outages when prices rise to $1,000, $5,000 and $7,500 per megawatt hour…
Now that Alice lives in Downunder-land — more expensive electricity means customers get more “benefits” when they don’t use it. See how this works? Only the wealthy will have the convenience of electricity whenever they want it. The underclass will be cooking on barbeques, and getting up earlier each day to program the washing machine and set up the timers for the scooters.
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Drowning in complexity..
The message in 42 tables and 100 figures is unspoken, but obvious — the Australian grid is drowning in complexity, there are so many moving unpredictable parts. The report models the various possibilities of low rain, low wind, low stocks of fossil fuels, droughts, heatwaves, and unexpected outages. They try to model some combinations and permutations of multiple troubles occurring simultaneously. Whether we get and can afford electricity now depends on ocean currents in the Pacific that no one can predict. We live in the land of drought and flooding rains, and we’re hoping the weather will be nice.
The AEMO brightly says that it can be managed, see Figure 2, if we just build 10,000 kilometers of high transmission lines through farmland and forests, and then finish all the wind farms and solar magic panels, along with lots more voluntary blackouts, “consumer investments” (home batteries) and dispatchable capacity (whatever could that be?)
The last thought is the predictions for South Australia:
There is an 84% chance under a “neutral/unknown climate outlook” that South Australia will have no blackouts this summer. But there is a 16% chance that some will occur, and these are most likely to be 1-3 hours long affecting 5 to 30% of the region (which means “of the state”, presumably). But there is a tiny chance they might lose half the state for as much as 16 hours (spread over four different nights, say). I bet they are praying they don’t get a hot windless week?
But even if they don’t have one blackout, more of people’s lives will be wasted paying electricity bills and reading articles on how to save electricity, how to reprogram the pool filter, how to charge the kids scooter, how to put out fires started by the scooter…
The green agenda is all about intentionally engineered, forced scarcity
Cheap electricity brought prosperity, the elite must take that away.
The Global War on Thought Crime
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-global-war-on-thought-crime/
Laws to ban disinformation and misinformation are being introduced across the West, with the partial exception being the US, which has the First Amendment so the techniques to censor have had to be more clandestine.
In Europe, the UK, and Australia, where free speech is not as overtly protected, governments have legislated directly. The EU Commission is now applying the ‘Digital Services Act’ (DSA), a thinly disguised censorship law.
In Australia the government is seeking to provide the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) with “new powers to hold digital platforms to account and improve efforts to combat harmful misinformation and disinformation.”
One effective response to these oppressive laws may come from a surprising source: literary criticism. The words being used, which are prefixes added to the word “information,” are a sly misdirection.
Information, whether in a book, article or post is a passive artefact. It cannot do anything, so it cannot break a law. The Nazis burned books, but they didn’t arrest them and put them in jail.
So when legislators seek to ban “disinformation,” they cannot mean the information itself. Rather, they are targeting the creation of meaning.
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-global-war-on-thought-crime/
As someone who is half Australian; I am so disgusted to Australia sink to this level. They used to be better than this.
The head of Britain’s electricity and gas systems’ operator has told households to prepare for blackouts.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4101421/posts
From the post:
when prices rise to $1,000, $5,000 and $7,500 per megawatt hour…
That translates to: $1, $5, and $7.50 per kilowatt hour, or about 10 to 75 times the cost of electricity in the USA.
There were quite a few stories in Australia, about how homeowners were paying more for electricity than their mortgage, and that was doing a lot to conserve energy.
These prices are about 3 - 20 times as expensive as it was just a few years ago. All driven by the insane push to "renewable" fuels.
Just 30 years ago, Australia had some of the most reliable and least expensive electricity in the world.
Thanks for this data.
The reality is really bad news for the average Aussie struggling to keep his family fed and not go bankrupt.
Luckily for Australia gas turbine generators are relatively easy and quick to build (I’ve seen one go in in three months from concrete pad to connection).
And LNG terminals likewise. If they take all these things seriously and murder the quibblers right off they have lots of time to handle their peaking problems.
Luckily for Australia gas turbine generators are relatively easy and quick to build (I’ve seen one go in in three months from concrete pad to connection).
And LNG terminals likewise. If they take all these things seriously and murder the quibblers right off they have lots of time to handle their peaking problems.
Work to become less dependent on the grid, folks. Blackouts are coming to the US too.
AEMO unleashes ‘roadmap’ to 100% renewables
Published 22JAN2022
https://aemo.com.au/en/newsroom/media-release/engineering-framework-roadmap-to-100-per-cent-renewables
Right now the AEMO grid generates 68% of its electricity with renewables. Their goal is 100%. The rule of thumb is that you should not have more than 15% of energy generation to be renewables.
If you want cheap, reliable electricity you build and utilize coal and nuclear. If you want expensive and unreliable, you go with renewables.
Never give up your guns.
Hitachi makes some nifty little reactors.
Brown(out) is the new green.
Blackout is dark green
Most people I have met from Australia are wonderful—smart, great sense of humor, fun to be around...
Unfortunately they have been brainwashed into obedience and serfdom.
Good meme.
Australia has been shutting down the cheap coal plants, which delivered reliable, cheap electricity, for years now.
It is deliberate.
Failure is their superpower.
They gain much more political power from controlling the rationing and exempting from blackouts than they would from cheap, reliable electricity.
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