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…
So has Texas, California, and other states.
Thanks. It seems this one is still relevant thanks to all the evil people in the world.
I guess with the new Voice referendum coming up, they are going to make everyone step back a few centuries.
because the crazy government has destroyed the power grid
I thought they bought those big batteries to store all that green energy to even out and save the grid.
Living in NE Pennsylvania there are regular occurrences of power surges and lights flickering now for several years. No explanation is provided - not by the power company, not by our town council, and not by our state representatives. There’s one crypto plant nearby, and perhaps others we haven’t been told about.
The plant close by wants to burn tires for their energy needs. Except many are saying that they’ve already been burning tires for energy. This has all been ongoing for at least a couple of years - with little to nothing being shared with the public.
It’s the usual sh**sh**. Corporations, enabled by politicians and local governments, erode the public trust, and don’t even feel guilty about it. They laugh all the way to the bank.
And then there’s the $30 million studio that a film company want to build - in a depressed coal town - to make kiddie porn movies.
It couldn’t get much better.
Green morons running things there too?
Wait until they see the EMHO report.
I hate it when articles don't break out acronyms and abbreviations.
Sorry, I worked too many night shifts.
Fist Amendment? They're going to be wishing they had our Second Amendment before much longer.
Excuse me, but singling out crypto from all the other power drains of our times, such as EVs, computer processing and data storage in general, digitized telecommunications, social media protected in hardened data centers, plus intelligence agencies storing the metadata from all over the world is laughable.
The days of 24/7 power are quickly ending. At that point it’s every man for himself as blackouts roll through on a regular basis, like it or not.
Crypto mining strains the electrical grid, and increases power costs for local residential consumers.
In Texas…
….data showed that the seven companies alone had set up to tap as much as 1,045 megawatts of power, or enough electricity to power all the residences in a city the size of Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city with 2.3 million residents. The companies also said that they plan to expand their capacity at an eye-popping rate.
Overall, the biggest seven cryptomining companies expected to increase their total mining capacity by at least 2,399 megawatts in the coming years, an increase of nearly 230 percent from current levels, and enough energy to power 1.9 million residences.
and..
Research has shown that a surge in crypto mining is also significantly raising energy costs for local residents and small businesses, and has added to the strain on the power grid in states like Texas
A lot of the articles stress the environmental aspects of mining, so this particular issue happens to be on the radar of Democrats and the green agenda. Nevertheless it's a serious issue, especially since China banned the practice in 2021. The U.S. is now responsible for about 38% of worldwide Bitcoin mining, and the energy consumption needed is mind-boggling.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/09/business/bitcoin-mining-electricity-pollution.html (April 2023)
The Real-World Costs of the Digital Race for Bitcoin
The computers in these buildings in Kearney, Neb., use about as much electricity as the 73,000 homes around them.
An operation in Dalton, Ga., is using nearly as much power as the surrounding 97,000 households.
And Riot Platforms’ mine in Rockdale, Texas, uses about the same amount of electricity as the nearest 300,000 homes, making it the most power-intensive Bitcoin mining operation in America.
Riot’s operation is less than a mile away from the Bitdeer mine. Combined, they use more power than all of the households within a 40-mile radius.
Each of the 34 operations The Times identified uses at least 30,000 times as much power as the average U.S. home.
Altogether, they consume more than 3,900 megawatts of electricity.
That is nearly the same amount of electricity as the three million households that surround them.
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All the things you mentioned as high consumers of electricity are existing parts of the U.S. infrastructure, industry and commerce and have been - with the exception of EV's - for a sustained period of time. Crypto mining is an entirely new game, with no rules and no oversight.
It's a 300lb drunk that crashes the party, drinks all the booze - expecting you to go out and buy more - all the while sucking the air out of the room, and telling everyone how unfair life is.
A typical EV would require about 3,857 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity. For 26.4 million EVs, that’s over 101 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in a year or about 2.5% of what the U.S. grid produced in 2020. Although it’s a small percentage, it’s much more than what we’re currently asking of the electrical grid.Apr 17, 2023
when you deliberately avoid replacing and repairing allows you control
“Work to become less dependent on the grid, folks. Blackouts are coming to the US too!”
Most of the guys in our families understand this. Our great wives, and I mean that, are often slow to come on board.
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