South Australia is the driest state in the driest continent. It's the most perfect place for solar power. Australia as-a-whole is a perfect place for solar power.
A university lecturer of mine got one of the first solar panel installations in South Australia, it was mentioned in the local Adelaide paper, that's how much of a big deal it was. This was around 20 years ago. Twenty years!
South Australia (still) has some of the highest priced electricity in the world. There's been talk of privatization as the cause of this, which has been somewhat debunked[0], and the primarily agreed reason for the high prices is what's referred to as "gold-plating of the network" in which there was an agreement that the 'poles and wires' companies could not lose money on any infrastructure investment they committed to - the regulator would allow them continually increase the prices they charge in order to cover the cost of the infrastructure investment[1][2][3].
So, despite how perfect Australia is for solar power, private or commercial, despite the fact that solar panels have been getting commercially installed on private homes for 20-odd years, and despite the networks being given carte-blanche for infrastructure investment, somehow, Australia is un-prepared for a flood of solar power.
The various organizations that are meant to be on top of this shit have been asleep at the wheel for fucking YEARS. This was highlighted by the big power failure in South Australia in 2016 when a number of wind farms shut down due to 'safety settings' being set at overly paranoid parameters, which was a problem that had already been solved in Europe (the frustrating irony of this is that the wind farms were being blamed for the power failure, when the actual situation was that the wind farms could have PREVENTED it, if their configurations were 'best practice' - the problems in the electricity network that caused the wind farms to trip were powerful winds that took down some big-arse transmission lines)[4][5]
Australia's issues with renewable energy are entirely of their own making. And it's far more likely attributable to incompetence than malice. I'd almost prefer it was malice because malice comes and goes. Incompetence is systemic.
Hello fellow south australian! I agree completely with everything you said.
One thing you left out though is the very real possibility of an electricity utility death spiral, as the (wilfully) rising grid costs combine with obligation of supply and the declining cost of solar self-sufficiency meet on an economic collision course.
The cost of a tesla powerwall in SA right now is about $10k. One or two of these combined with an average size roof PV array will run you about AUD$20-30k. For people used to a quarterly power bill of $1k+ this is an absolute no-brainer. Even if you don't have the money up front it's an easy loan that simply pays itself off, then it's nothing but upside.
Right now that payback period is 5-10 years but as the tech progresses that will decrease. Once the price tag to substantially remove electricity bills from your life reaches $10k or so everyone will do it and the utilities are fucked. Hell, I can envisage neighbourhood power co-ops. I know someone with so much extra power they have no idea what to do with it. They air condition their garage 24/7!
Perhaps a startup opportunity there coordinating and organising "local sourced" power. There would be hardware involved but I know at least 5 people who would love to be able to sell power to their neighbours. Someone just needs to remove all the friction.
I think the concept of micro-grids is the likely direction. The grid itself is too useful to give up, and it's "there". This may be analogous to the co-op that you're suggesting. I think there are already companies that allow you to share your power like that. If I find a link I'll post it.
The grid will become the backup for when there is a local issue with your system, that's my take from a very shallow amount of reading.
I'm fairly certain this is systematic malice (or at least systematic self-interested callousness).
And reading through your linked blog posts, it seems you know it too.
People don't just accidentally campaign against carbon taxes and coincidentally embrace climate change denial and attack science when it benefits their largest donors.
This article itself is knowingly malicious in presenting a false narrative in order to stop Australians saving money that would otherwise go to fossil fuel interests.
>And reading through your linked blog posts, it seems you know it too.
Heh, thanks for taking the time to read it.
I like to try to present the facts as I see them before getting too tin-foil-hat ranty.
Yes, the current Australian Government is as close to being in the pockets of mining companies as it's possible to be, and yes, they rail against renewable energy to an extent that is confusing to anyone somewhat literate and numerate.
Our Energy Minister spoke at an anti-wind-farm rally for goodness sake.
The opposition party seem entirely toothless on numerous issues and just do not, for whatever reason, hold the government to account on any of it's ludicrous statements, policy suggestions, or general direction.
But saying that stuff, in a forum where people can reply, is asking for a flame-war.
Hopefully the facts speak for themselves, whilst Australia's political class continues to shred any of its remaining reputation.
As a follow up, as of the third quarter 2019, I'm $50 away from my solar system having paid for itself. I need to update the graphs...
Australia's energy problems are a symptom of a much larger issue.
Australia is run by mining magnates and an energy oligarchy. Its government has very little concern for the future of the country - having sold most of it, out from under the Australian citizens - and its political class is hell-bent on cashing in. Australians should stop being so shocked about the impropriety of the nation and start paying more attention.
This is the nation that watched the Great Barrier Reef die in front of its eyes, for the sake of a few smashed avocados. Its the nation that got away with its genocide, while the world wasn't watching. Its a nation which glorifies war criminals as heroes and hides its political dissidents behind secret courts and non-public processes.
Its political system was specifically designed to allow only the ruling classes to wield power - the riffraff of the general population will never get what they want from their government, if big changes are required to get them.
The argument for Solar always sounds a lot like terra nullius, that was used to dispossess indigenous Australians of their land, and later their land rights.
Large scale solar is likely to cause problems for large numbers of native species. YMMV in how important you find that, but to me personally it is a huge issue.
Why would 'large scale solar' cause an issue for native species? Even if 100% of Australian power were generated by solar, what percentage of the total land area would be used?
Well, lets check! The total power generating capacity of Australia is about 66GW, but about 18 is already hydro, wind, or solar. So we need to come up with about 48GW. Lets take a fairly moderate estimate of 4 acres per MW (4000 acres per GW). It may be more or less than this, but in the long run this is not a terrible estimate. So we need to come up with about 50 * 4000 == 200,000 acres of land.
South Australia by itself is 243,000,000 acres, we need about 200k, so this is about .8% of the total land area. This seems like a lot! However, the total number of dwellings in South Australia is about 768,000. The average size of a roof, according to google, is about .03 acres. So just putting photovoltaics on 1/2 of the roof area (meh, I don't know how to estimate usable roof area with a random direction and I don't know whether roofs in Australia are flat, so lets take 1/2) would get you 11.5k acres.
So 5% of the total power usage of all of Australia could be provided just by putting solar panels on the roofs of houses in South Australia. Seems like a good deal for endangered species.
What about the other 95%? Well, again, you would only need 0.8% of South Australia to supply the energy needs of all of Australia.
Like you said, Australia is a MASSIVE country, and has extremely low population density and an almost perfect climate for solar power production. So what is your point exactly? That if they took less than 1% of the land of one part of the country and converted to 100% renewable energy some lizard which is only 'unique' by an arbitrary human criterion might have too much shade?
Terra nullius is a bit suspect as legal doctorines go, I haven't seen a reference that it was a used before it was created to be rejected when granting the Aboriginals land rights. The 'legal' justification for considering Australia uninhabited was basically (1) Australia was reachable by the British Navy and (2) the inhabitants didn't have a standing army that could inconvenience the British Navy.
The matter was that the High Court recognised that Aboriginals had every right to be part of Australian society & had a pretty solid claim to be the effective owners of the land. That is to say, 'terra nullius' was more about racism and culture than about facts and technicalities. It seems comparatively unlikely that we are going to recognise 75% of the species in Australia as being property-owning members of society.
Solar can be deployed on land that's already being used for other purposes.
For example on top of houses and shopping centres. While we're also looking at shopping centres - there's a huge amount of unroofed parking, throw up some basic shelter to put the solar panels on and you get the dual-benefit of energy generation, and keeping the cars cooler.
They did the analysis for the Square Kilometer Array. WA came up as the perfect place for this kind of construction because of the lack of ecosystem to interfere with. Politics then moved half of it to Africa sigh.
If you had to pick somewhere in the world to build enough solar arrays to power the entire planet, WA is the perfect spot for it.
"excess solar power from households and businesses spilled uncontrolled on to the system, pushing the amount of power needed from the grid to increasingly low levels.... The only way to manage the solar was to scale back or switch off the coal- and gas-fired power stations that were supposed to be the bedrock of the electricity system."
Wow, that sounds like a great problem to have. Note the aggressive rhetoric ... 'spill', 'uncontrolled','pushing', 'bedrock', 'solar smashes utility finance'. Well-crafted FUD from ABC's Mercer, if he wrote it all.
Coal and gas being endangered sounds perfect, if you give a rat's ass about climate change. But let's do everything we can to get in the way of progress by painting the result as blackly as possible. Maybe instead of pushing that excess onto the grid, people can sell it their neighbors instead ... or 'the industry' could install more batteries to store it in.
> "excess solar power from households and businesses spilled uncontrolled on to the system" ... Wow, that sounds like a great problem to have.
It's also a problem that has already been solved at the technology level.
Australia just needs an equivalent to California's updated "Rule 21" regulations for smart inverters, which came into force in 2019. These rules require inverters to support "remote control" management by utilities, so that their output can be throttled back in low-demand scenarios.
Rule 21 also specifies features like dynamic volt/VAR (dynamic reactive compensation), so inverters actively work to stabilise the grid in the event of voltage deviations, as well as ramping and "ride through" requirements to prevent large numbers of inverters tripping simultaneously during voltage/frequency deviations which could result in a cascading fault.
Yes, that is in fact exactly what the original article is arguing - that the stability of the Western Australian grid requires a switch to "smart" solar which the grid operator can remotely curtail the output of on demand. Hence all the rhetoric about how excess power "spilled uncontrolled" onto the grid which the previous comment complained about.
This is also not, in fact, a good situation to be in. The stability of the power grid depends on balancing supply with demand in real time, and if that can't be done then the whole thing fails. Not only that, the old-fashioned gas and steam power plants have inertia that helps stabilize the grid and as that decreases overall stability margins fall. I think wind farms can emulate this inertia to a certain extent, but that doesn't always seem to work so well...
> Wow, that sounds like a great problem to have. Note the aggressive rhetoric ... 'spill', 'uncontrolled','pushing', 'bedrock', 'solar smashes utility finance'. Well-crafted FUD from ABC's Mercer, if he wrote it all.
Hmmm, it must be a dog whistle. I read it. Those terms had me cheering the rooftop solar roll out on. You are saying that wasn't the intended effect?
And the article did say what the solution was - pour resources into storage and wind. I'll grant you it was at the end, but there was no mention of stopping the solar roof top rollout. That continuing seemed like a forgone conclusion, and more to the point - how could they stop it?
Mind you, I didn't quite understand the problem with "lots of output on cool spring days". The solar inverters are required by law to protect the grid. As the output rises above consumption the grid voltage rises. When the voltage crosses a threshold every solar inverter is required to disconnect itself from the grid. The effect is very well known among root top solar owners, and is the topic of a hot conspiracy theories. (The conspiracy is when the major supplies aren't making enough money, they mistakingly/on-purpose let the voltage rise for a small time.)
Interestingly they didn't mention the obvious solution - more gas generators. I guess the gas people didn't pay for it.
I’m skeptical of cryptocurrency solutions to everything but what if they tackled the under-demand problem instead of the over-supply problem and spun up cryptocurrency miners to eat the excess instead of shutting down the coal plants.
So, "jeopardising" in the seense that, say, me driving west on a road which comes to a north-south "T" in the road, would be "jeopardising" the car's safety...if I don't turn the car in an appropriate manner when I get to the "T". Yes, if you add solar with absolutely no changes elsewhere to accommodate that, you will eventually have problems.
But, that's like saying smartphones jeopardized the cell phone infrastructure, which they did except the cell phone companies added capacity. Bicycles can jeopardize the road network of a city if they become widely used, and you don't do anything (e.g. bike lanes) to accommodate that change. Every change in technology can jeopardize the network it is part of, if nothing else is changed to accommodate it.
But, you know, there are several (already known, developed) methods of handling this (big batteries, utilities being able to turn off your solar like they can currently remotely control my thermostat). It seems a bit of an overstatement to say that it's jeopardizing the grid.
The powers that be in Australia are very, very, very friendly (read: in bed with) the coal industry. For the last 5 years they have been doing everything possible to discredit renewables, and there is a lot of money at stake.
It's a fascinating view into what happens when a few very rich and powerful people control essentially all the media in an entire country.
Yeah, it's a stupid headline. The real story here is that the government owned energy utility made a massive loss and is blaming rooftop solar. The headline should say: "Energy planners fail to account for obvious and foreseeable structural change to energy generation".
> But, you know, there are several (already known, developed) methods of handling this (big batteries, utilities being able to turn off your solar like they can currently remotely control my thermostat).
That was the point of the article: the solar CANNOT be switched off, it's dumb. That's what's causing the problem, all the dumb solar.
Interesting because I've got a box to just shut off my power. If I don't pay my bill the company can shut off my power. Seems to me that the power company should be looking at ways to handle the free power generation the public is providing and being the storage utility, otherwise the homeowners can just start storing it themselves and cut the power company out of the picture entirely.
Jeopardizing it as in a problem to solve. No one is saying that this is the end of solar energy, good grief. I'm sure they'll figure something out. The article is just pointing out that it is an issue and it's coming to a head. No one said it was unsolvable. Big oil/coal isn't trying to take your solar.
No, they are just working with the Murdoch press and LNP government to stymie and delay the uptake of renewable energy and ensure that enough of the electorate has sufficient doubt about possible, future ramifications of mass renewable uptake to protect the returns on coal power station investments.
To begin with, nothing is jeopardising the grid right now in Western Australia, it is running just fine.
The claim seems to be that if we do not account for the increasing share of solar power in the future generation mix, then we may grid stability have problems sometime in the future...
Given that the solutions to such problems are well known and inexpensive - how about we don't plod stupidly into the future? Was that ever the plan?
And the "lesson for Australia" is what, exactly? Plan ahead?
>On those days, excess solar power from households and businesses spilled uncontrolled on to the system, pushing the amount of power needed from the grid to increasingly low levels.
>Ms Zibelman said WA's isolation amplified this trend because the relative concentration of its solar resources meant fluctuations in supply caused by the weather had an outsized effect.
>The only way to manage the solar was to scale back or switch off the coal- and gas-fired power stations that were supposed to be the bedrock of the electricity system.
>The problem was coal-fired plants were not designed to be quickly ramped up or down in such a way, meaning they were ill-equipped to respond to sudden fluctuations in solar production.
Sounds like it's time rebalance the system with lower baseload assumptions for coal and gas plants. I'm quite sure the incumbents are loathe to suggest that since it means investment in buffers to soak up so-called excess power from solar panels and splitting the profit with solar panel owners.
Traditional power plants are perfectly able to adapt to weather patterns. Weather forecasts on a time scale of 12 hours or a day are very accurate. For very shorts fluctuations you can always buffer into batteries.
The real problem is that fossil fuel plants are designed to be profitable at high load factors. Building a coal plant and only running it at 50% load is not profitable.
Exactly as I described above - by assuming fluctuations will first be buffered by battery or other storage and only addressed if required by gas peakers and increased coal-based energy production in extended periods of lower light.
In 2008, when I was working in geothermal in Australia, I was at a meeting where the 2008 AUD price of a transmission line was quoted at 1.4 million/km.
Multiply that by 1100 or so km across the nullarbor (rough guess; what really matters is the path between closest transmission lines of sufficient capacity) and you begin to see the scale of the problem.
Oh, and Australia has roughly the land area of the lower 48 of the US, with roughly the population of Southern California. In other words, it's bloody empty.
This issue has been known for quite some time, so it sounds like they basically failed to plan ahead sufficiently.
It would have been 5-10 years ago that GE put out research warning that electricity retailers needed to shift their fee models from charging actual power usage to charging to be connected to the grid (even if you only sometimes used power).
They simply really need speed up investment in infrastructure that can take up any available free power. For example, there are two large seawater desalination plants in WA that run mostly off wind power. You would think water scarcity/security would be a top priority, so building more would be a priority.
There is also some opportunity for pumped hydro (far cheaper to run and maintain than coal-fired power stations) despite the lack of a prominent mountain range. Just needs someone to put up the money.
> electricity retailers needed to shift their fee models from charging actual power usage to charging to be connected to the grid (even if you only sometimes used power).
I can't speak for the rest of Europe and Scandinavia but that is how it has been in Norway for many decades. I buy my electricity from one entity and I pay a fixed fee for the connection plus a fee proportional to the usage for the transport to another entity that provides the connection.
To be nitpicky: you don't have to multiply by 1100 since Australia has two power networks that are not connected - one for Western Australia, one for the rest
And you are going to connect those two networks precisely how?
The point in the article is that WA's grid is isolated from the Eastern States' grid. If there was any hope of "following the sun" (or indeed the wind) to leverage the geographic diversity that is Oz' one true strength, those networks would need to be interconnected.
The SWIS has transmission out to Kalgoorlie and the South Australian network reaches Woomera - those are 1500km apart as the crow flies, but the transmission lines out to those places wouldn't have enough capacity for a worthwhile interconnection so you'd have to go further.
There's theoretical potential pretty much everywhere -- in that hot rocks exist underground, and some form of permeability can be created. Economical potential is quite limited, and technology dependent.
In particular, the Cooper Basin project, while technically viable with demonstrated generation capacity, died after failing to get investment needed for a transmission line. At the same meeting I referred to in my top post, I also heard that the CB project was about 600 km away from the nearest transmission lines.
N.B. I was not working on that project, so my knowledge is not firsthand.
Birdsville Qld, is still the only operating geothermal power generation plant in Oz as far as I'm aware.
If you are only interested in hot springs, there are developed baths on the Mornington Peninsula in Vic.
While I dont disagree with the point of your statement. that number is the "gold plated" number and highly disputed.
1.4 million per KM is a bullshit value.
Funny how things are a matter of perspective. I view the baseload / coal generation as what is jeopardising the grid. It can't react to fluctuations in demand or supply so it's just not a tenable solution for a modern power grid where demand is intrinsically variable.
Having said that, I feel like some regulation mandating a certain amount of storage be supplied with rooftop solar wouldn't be a bad thing. It doesn't seem responsible to set up generation capacity without the storage to buffer the effect of that capacity's generation on the grid.
Sorry not everyone in SW Australia has a solar energy supply, so just because you have that advantage doesn't mean others should have to suffer with blackouts. Has the whole world forgotten how to compromise and work together as a society rather than "my solar tribe" vs "your coal/poverty stricken populace who can't afford solar roofs tribe". I thought you Aussies were more civilized than us people in the States.
This really is just another poor-me major piece of spin that we Aussies have had to cop in the media in the last decade - following on from these other two gems:
1. too much air-conditioning is overloading the grid;
2. the power bills have been high because they've over-spent on the grid (apparently preparing it for future demand);
3. too much solar is stressing the grid...
Looks like the grid is the weakest link. Time to go off grid perhaps?
1. could be loosely verified - mid-day black-outs were a common occurrence on extremely hot days in Sydney, esp. in the noughties. Or was the grid just not up to it? Lucky they over-spent on it.
2. price gouging is still be rampant, the rates are still as high as ever, and solar feed in tariffs are a joke; If we're swimming in free/cheap electricity, where is the lowering of the rate? and why is green energy still much higher for the consumer? Good reasons I'm sure... probably something along the lines of "the grid can't handle it".
3. Given that we're now (apparently) swimming in all this extra grid-damaging power, maybe it was the solar that really stopped the blackouts - after all, the air-con comes on when the sun shines! Just tell everyone to turn on their air-con. That should solve it!
Good luck to anyone trying to get a clear answer on any of it - like it's been noted, too many vested interests in politics and the media. My view: go-off grid as soon as you can.
Readit News
South Australia is the driest state in the driest continent. It's the most perfect place for solar power. Australia as-a-whole is a perfect place for solar power.
A university lecturer of mine got one of the first solar panel installations in South Australia, it was mentioned in the local Adelaide paper, that's how much of a big deal it was. This was around 20 years ago. Twenty years!
South Australia (still) has some of the highest priced electricity in the world. There's been talk of privatization as the cause of this, which has been somewhat debunked[0], and the primarily agreed reason for the high prices is what's referred to as "gold-plating of the network" in which there was an agreement that the 'poles and wires' companies could not lose money on any infrastructure investment they committed to - the regulator would allow them continually increase the prices they charge in order to cover the cost of the infrastructure investment[1][2][3].
So, despite how perfect Australia is for solar power, private or commercial, despite the fact that solar panels have been getting commercially installed on private homes for 20-odd years, and despite the networks being given carte-blanche for infrastructure investment, somehow, Australia is un-prepared for a flood of solar power.
The various organizations that are meant to be on top of this shit have been asleep at the wheel for fucking YEARS. This was highlighted by the big power failure in South Australia in 2016 when a number of wind farms shut down due to 'safety settings' being set at overly paranoid parameters, which was a problem that had already been solved in Europe (the frustrating irony of this is that the wind farms were being blamed for the power failure, when the actual situation was that the wind farms could have PREVENTED it, if their configurations were 'best practice' - the problems in the electricity network that caused the wind farms to trip were powerful winds that took down some big-arse transmission lines)[4][5]
Australia's issues with renewable energy are entirely of their own making. And it's far more likely attributable to incompetence than malice. I'd almost prefer it was malice because malice comes and goes. Incompetence is systemic.
Off on a tangent, here's my 10-years of electricity usage / costs investigation: http://electricity.atcf.com.au/economics/
[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-25/fact-check-does-priva...
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-10-02/senate-inquiry-to-pro...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-25/grattan-urges-consume...
[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-04/energy-policy-solar-e...
[4] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-28/wind-farm-settings-to...
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/oct/19/south-au...
One thing you left out though is the very real possibility of an electricity utility death spiral, as the (wilfully) rising grid costs combine with obligation of supply and the declining cost of solar self-sufficiency meet on an economic collision course.
The cost of a tesla powerwall in SA right now is about $10k. One or two of these combined with an average size roof PV array will run you about AUD$20-30k. For people used to a quarterly power bill of $1k+ this is an absolute no-brainer. Even if you don't have the money up front it's an easy loan that simply pays itself off, then it's nothing but upside.
Right now that payback period is 5-10 years but as the tech progresses that will decrease. Once the price tag to substantially remove electricity bills from your life reaches $10k or so everyone will do it and the utilities are fucked. Hell, I can envisage neighbourhood power co-ops. I know someone with so much extra power they have no idea what to do with it. They air condition their garage 24/7!
Perhaps a startup opportunity there coordinating and organising "local sourced" power. There would be hardware involved but I know at least 5 people who would love to be able to sell power to their neighbours. Someone just needs to remove all the friction.
The grid will become the backup for when there is a local issue with your system, that's my take from a very shallow amount of reading.
And reading through your linked blog posts, it seems you know it too.
People don't just accidentally campaign against carbon taxes and coincidentally embrace climate change denial and attack science when it benefits their largest donors.
This article itself is knowingly malicious in presenting a false narrative in order to stop Australians saving money that would otherwise go to fossil fuel interests.
Heh, thanks for taking the time to read it.
I like to try to present the facts as I see them before getting too tin-foil-hat ranty.
Yes, the current Australian Government is as close to being in the pockets of mining companies as it's possible to be, and yes, they rail against renewable energy to an extent that is confusing to anyone somewhat literate and numerate.
Our Energy Minister spoke at an anti-wind-farm rally for goodness sake.
The opposition party seem entirely toothless on numerous issues and just do not, for whatever reason, hold the government to account on any of it's ludicrous statements, policy suggestions, or general direction.
But saying that stuff, in a forum where people can reply, is asking for a flame-war.
Hopefully the facts speak for themselves, whilst Australia's political class continues to shred any of its remaining reputation.
As a follow up, as of the third quarter 2019, I'm $50 away from my solar system having paid for itself. I need to update the graphs...
now that is a quote
Australia is run by mining magnates and an energy oligarchy. Its government has very little concern for the future of the country - having sold most of it, out from under the Australian citizens - and its political class is hell-bent on cashing in. Australians should stop being so shocked about the impropriety of the nation and start paying more attention.
This is the nation that watched the Great Barrier Reef die in front of its eyes, for the sake of a few smashed avocados. Its the nation that got away with its genocide, while the world wasn't watching. Its a nation which glorifies war criminals as heroes and hides its political dissidents behind secret courts and non-public processes.
Its political system was specifically designed to allow only the ruling classes to wield power - the riffraff of the general population will never get what they want from their government, if big changes are required to get them.
Australia is a MASSIVE country, that is largely uninhabitable by humans. It is estimated that 75% of the species on the continent are undiscovered: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-07/75-per-cent-of-specie...
Large scale solar is likely to cause problems for large numbers of native species. YMMV in how important you find that, but to me personally it is a huge issue.
A patch of land 20 miles by 20 miles generates enough electricity for the entire Aus requirements.
That’s an order of magnitude less than area taken by austrailia’s roads.
Well, lets check! The total power generating capacity of Australia is about 66GW, but about 18 is already hydro, wind, or solar. So we need to come up with about 48GW. Lets take a fairly moderate estimate of 4 acres per MW (4000 acres per GW). It may be more or less than this, but in the long run this is not a terrible estimate. So we need to come up with about 50 * 4000 == 200,000 acres of land.
South Australia by itself is 243,000,000 acres, we need about 200k, so this is about .8% of the total land area. This seems like a lot! However, the total number of dwellings in South Australia is about 768,000. The average size of a roof, according to google, is about .03 acres. So just putting photovoltaics on 1/2 of the roof area (meh, I don't know how to estimate usable roof area with a random direction and I don't know whether roofs in Australia are flat, so lets take 1/2) would get you 11.5k acres.
So 5% of the total power usage of all of Australia could be provided just by putting solar panels on the roofs of houses in South Australia. Seems like a good deal for endangered species.
What about the other 95%? Well, again, you would only need 0.8% of South Australia to supply the energy needs of all of Australia.
Like you said, Australia is a MASSIVE country, and has extremely low population density and an almost perfect climate for solar power production. So what is your point exactly? That if they took less than 1% of the land of one part of the country and converted to 100% renewable energy some lizard which is only 'unique' by an arbitrary human criterion might have too much shade?
The matter was that the High Court recognised that Aboriginals had every right to be part of Australian society & had a pretty solid claim to be the effective owners of the land. That is to say, 'terra nullius' was more about racism and culture than about facts and technicalities. It seems comparatively unlikely that we are going to recognise 75% of the species in Australia as being property-owning members of society.
Bigger problem then coal mines?
For example on top of houses and shopping centres. While we're also looking at shopping centres - there's a huge amount of unroofed parking, throw up some basic shelter to put the solar panels on and you get the dual-benefit of energy generation, and keeping the cars cooler.
If you had to pick somewhere in the world to build enough solar arrays to power the entire planet, WA is the perfect spot for it.
Wow, that sounds like a great problem to have. Note the aggressive rhetoric ... 'spill', 'uncontrolled','pushing', 'bedrock', 'solar smashes utility finance'. Well-crafted FUD from ABC's Mercer, if he wrote it all.
Coal and gas being endangered sounds perfect, if you give a rat's ass about climate change. But let's do everything we can to get in the way of progress by painting the result as blackly as possible. Maybe instead of pushing that excess onto the grid, people can sell it their neighbors instead ... or 'the industry' could install more batteries to store it in.
It's also a problem that has already been solved at the technology level.
Australia just needs an equivalent to California's updated "Rule 21" regulations for smart inverters, which came into force in 2019. These rules require inverters to support "remote control" management by utilities, so that their output can be throttled back in low-demand scenarios.
Rule 21 also specifies features like dynamic volt/VAR (dynamic reactive compensation), so inverters actively work to stabilise the grid in the event of voltage deviations, as well as ramping and "ride through" requirements to prevent large numbers of inverters tripping simultaneously during voltage/frequency deviations which could result in a cascading fault.
This is also not, in fact, a good situation to be in. The stability of the power grid depends on balancing supply with demand in real time, and if that can't be done then the whole thing fails. Not only that, the old-fashioned gas and steam power plants have inertia that helps stabilize the grid and as that decreases overall stability margins fall. I think wind farms can emulate this inertia to a certain extent, but that doesn't always seem to work so well...
Hmmm, it must be a dog whistle. I read it. Those terms had me cheering the rooftop solar roll out on. You are saying that wasn't the intended effect?
And the article did say what the solution was - pour resources into storage and wind. I'll grant you it was at the end, but there was no mention of stopping the solar roof top rollout. That continuing seemed like a forgone conclusion, and more to the point - how could they stop it?
Mind you, I didn't quite understand the problem with "lots of output on cool spring days". The solar inverters are required by law to protect the grid. As the output rises above consumption the grid voltage rises. When the voltage crosses a threshold every solar inverter is required to disconnect itself from the grid. The effect is very well known among root top solar owners, and is the topic of a hot conspiracy theories. (The conspiracy is when the major supplies aren't making enough money, they mistakingly/on-purpose let the voltage rise for a small time.)
Interestingly they didn't mention the obvious solution - more gas generators. I guess the gas people didn't pay for it.
But, that's like saying smartphones jeopardized the cell phone infrastructure, which they did except the cell phone companies added capacity. Bicycles can jeopardize the road network of a city if they become widely used, and you don't do anything (e.g. bike lanes) to accommodate that change. Every change in technology can jeopardize the network it is part of, if nothing else is changed to accommodate it.
But, you know, there are several (already known, developed) methods of handling this (big batteries, utilities being able to turn off your solar like they can currently remotely control my thermostat). It seems a bit of an overstatement to say that it's jeopardizing the grid.
It's a fascinating view into what happens when a few very rich and powerful people control essentially all the media in an entire country.
That was the point of the article: the solar CANNOT be switched off, it's dumb. That's what's causing the problem, all the dumb solar.
To begin with, nothing is jeopardising the grid right now in Western Australia, it is running just fine.
The claim seems to be that if we do not account for the increasing share of solar power in the future generation mix, then we may grid stability have problems sometime in the future...
Given that the solutions to such problems are well known and inexpensive - how about we don't plod stupidly into the future? Was that ever the plan?
And the "lesson for Australia" is what, exactly? Plan ahead?
>Ms Zibelman said WA's isolation amplified this trend because the relative concentration of its solar resources meant fluctuations in supply caused by the weather had an outsized effect.
>The only way to manage the solar was to scale back or switch off the coal- and gas-fired power stations that were supposed to be the bedrock of the electricity system.
>The problem was coal-fired plants were not designed to be quickly ramped up or down in such a way, meaning they were ill-equipped to respond to sudden fluctuations in solar production.
Sounds like it's time rebalance the system with lower baseload assumptions for coal and gas plants. I'm quite sure the incumbents are loathe to suggest that since it means investment in buffers to soak up so-called excess power from solar panels and splitting the profit with solar panel owners.
The real problem is that fossil fuel plants are designed to be profitable at high load factors. Building a coal plant and only running it at 50% load is not profitable.
Multiply that by 1100 or so km across the nullarbor (rough guess; what really matters is the path between closest transmission lines of sufficient capacity) and you begin to see the scale of the problem.
Oh, and Australia has roughly the land area of the lower 48 of the US, with roughly the population of Southern California. In other words, it's bloody empty.
It would have been 5-10 years ago that GE put out research warning that electricity retailers needed to shift their fee models from charging actual power usage to charging to be connected to the grid (even if you only sometimes used power).
They simply really need speed up investment in infrastructure that can take up any available free power. For example, there are two large seawater desalination plants in WA that run mostly off wind power. You would think water scarcity/security would be a top priority, so building more would be a priority.
There is also some opportunity for pumped hydro (far cheaper to run and maintain than coal-fired power stations) despite the lack of a prominent mountain range. Just needs someone to put up the money.
https://www.arena.gov.au/assets/2018/10/ANU-STORES-An-Atlas-...
I can't speak for the rest of Europe and Scandinavia but that is how it has been in Norway for many decades. I buy my electricity from one entity and I pay a fixed fee for the connection plus a fee proportional to the usage for the transport to another entity that provides the connection.
The point in the article is that WA's grid is isolated from the Eastern States' grid. If there was any hope of "following the sun" (or indeed the wind) to leverage the geographic diversity that is Oz' one true strength, those networks would need to be interconnected.
In particular, the Cooper Basin project, while technically viable with demonstrated generation capacity, died after failing to get investment needed for a transmission line. At the same meeting I referred to in my top post, I also heard that the CB project was about 600 km away from the nearest transmission lines.
N.B. I was not working on that project, so my knowledge is not firsthand.
Birdsville Qld, is still the only operating geothermal power generation plant in Oz as far as I'm aware.
If you are only interested in hot springs, there are developed baths on the Mornington Peninsula in Vic.
But getting our government to do anything that isn't coal related. Pfft.
(1)http://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/energy/resources/geot...
Having said that, I feel like some regulation mandating a certain amount of storage be supplied with rooftop solar wouldn't be a bad thing. It doesn't seem responsible to set up generation capacity without the storage to buffer the effect of that capacity's generation on the grid.
1. could be loosely verified - mid-day black-outs were a common occurrence on extremely hot days in Sydney, esp. in the noughties. Or was the grid just not up to it? Lucky they over-spent on it. 2. price gouging is still be rampant, the rates are still as high as ever, and solar feed in tariffs are a joke; If we're swimming in free/cheap electricity, where is the lowering of the rate? and why is green energy still much higher for the consumer? Good reasons I'm sure... probably something along the lines of "the grid can't handle it".
3. Given that we're now (apparently) swimming in all this extra grid-damaging power, maybe it was the solar that really stopped the blackouts - after all, the air-con comes on when the sun shines! Just tell everyone to turn on their air-con. That should solve it!
Good luck to anyone trying to get a clear answer on any of it - like it's been noted, too many vested interests in politics and the media. My view: go-off grid as soon as you can.