17 March 2017, Energy & Climate Unit UK; Tilting at windmills: The energy debate down under. Battlelines have been firmly drawn in Australia’s power debate, with politicians backing their favoured energy sources like a die-hard footy fan his team. Against a backdrop of record temperatures, blackouts and high prices for consumers, the greatest casualty has been good policy. As a breezy sun-baked country with plenty of space, Australia is in many ways the perfect environment for renewable energy. Its steady growth over the past decade in particular has cut deeply into the business model of coal-fired power stations, which have previously been the mainstay of energy generation, but are largely coming to the end of their working lives. The coal industry is fighting for its existence, and the onslaught against the inevitable advance of renewable energy has been fierce. Cost and reliability Maximum temperature anomalies (difference from long-term average) for Australia from 31 January to 13 February 2017. Image: Australian Bureau of Meteorology The main lines of attack on renewables are two-fold: cost and reliability. Neither of these has much basis in reality. In terms of cost, the fact of the matter is that retail electricity prices in Australia have more than doubled in the last 10 years. Many people are struggling to pay bills, and disconnections have particularly hit the poor. The rise of renewable energy has frequently been blamed for the increased prices. However, analysis from the Australian National University comparing electricity prices across the states shows this is simply not the case. The ANU study shows absolutely no correlation between increased renewable energy penetration and rising cost. In fact, Queensland, the state with the highest proportion of coal and gas generation, also faced the highest growth in electricity bills. The state with the lowest increase in bills, Tasmania, also has the lowest levels of thermal power generation. Of course, price rises are not just related to generation, whether that be coal, gas or renewables. In sparsely populated Australia, network costs – the transmission towers and poles and wires – account for over 50% of bills. To a large extent, the gold-plating of network infrastructure has driven increases in cost. Read More here
Tag Archives: Renewables
29 March 2017, The Conversation, Hazelwood closure: what it means for electricity prices and blackouts. Victoria’s Hazelwood power station will be shut down this week after nearly 50 years of supplying electricity. The imminent closure has led to concerns about blackouts, raised most recently by Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, and rising electricity prices. So what does the evidence suggest? Blackouts ahead? Last week The Age reported that Victoria is facing “72 days of possible power supply shortfalls over the next two years”. While that sounds bad, it does not mean the state is facing imminent blackouts. This was based on a report from the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), which is in charge of making sure that Australia’s energy markets work. Every week, AEMO produces something called the Medium Term Projected Assessment of System Adequacy. This report assesses the expected supply and demand of electricity for the next two years. In a recent report, AEMO did indeed forecast a “reserve shortfall” for 72 days in Victoria in the coming two years. AEMO has actually been forecasting many days of reserve shortfall, since early November last year when Engie announced the closure of Hazelwood. AEMO has also been forecasting an even greater number of days of reserve shortfalls in South Australia for well over a year. The shortfall forecast is based on a combination of factors. This includes the amount of local energy supply, the import and export of electricity from other states, the maximum daily demand for electricity, and the “reserve requirement”. The reserve requirement is essentially “spare” capacity that can be used to maintain a reliable supply if something goes wrong. If there is not enough supply to meet this requirement, there is a reserve shortfall. Forecasting maximum demand is incredibly challenging and uncertain. AEMO does it by using probabilities. This gives us a measure of the probability of a particular demand forecast being exceeded in a year. For example, a 10% chance would be expected to be exceeded one year in ten. A 50% chance would be expected to be exceeded one year in two. To illustrate the point, AEMO forecast that demand over the past summer in Victoria had a 10% chance of exceeding 9,900 megawatts. In reality, the maximum demand was only 8,747MW. That’s not to say the forecast was wrong, but rather that it was not an exceptional (one year in ten) summer. Read More here
29 March 2017, Renew Economy, How AEMO’s new boss will reform Australia’s energy vision. Audrey Zibelman, the new chief executive of the Australian Energy Market Operator, has been in the job for little over a week, but is already making her mark, signalling the biggest shift in energy management philosophy in a generation. If Australia’s fossil fuel industry had hoped that last September’s state-wide blackout would lead to a u-turn on the shift to cleaner and decentralised energy system, then the release of the Australian Energy Market Operator’s final report in the event would leave them bitterly disappointed. And if they had any thoughts that the new CEO of AEMO, Audrey Zibelman, was going to afford them the indulgences that they had gotten used to over the last few decades, then they are going to be disappointed on that too. Several hundred energy market participants converged on Adelaide’s Hilton Hotel on Wednesday to hear the findings from the final report into the now notorious system black and, more crucially, to hear the first public insights from the new AEMO boss. “Thank god you’re here,” said the Grattan Institute’s Tony Wood, referring to a former TV program, but echoing the mood of most. And while many in mainstream media chose to focus on the role of wind farms in South Australia’s “system black,” and wonder why the shuttered Northern coal fired station is not being fired up again, both AEMO and its new boss were looking to the future, and with a sense of urgency. Zibelman is the former head of New York’s Public Service Commission, charged with implementing that state’s ambitious Reforming the Energy Vision program, and its target of 50 per cent renewable energy by 2030, which is going to focus a lot on decentralised generation. “When I arrived on the scene in New York, it was just after Hurricane Sandy,” she said in her opening comments on Wednesday. “After seeing New York city witout electricity for a number of days and people living in 40-storey buildings walking down to get water and cell phones charged – these were not young people, these were grandmas and granddads – it was clear that this industry was going to have to fundamentally change.” And Australia, she says, is actually going to lead the world on this, both on the breadth and the scale of what she, chief scientist Alan Finkel and many others describes as the inevitable and unstoppable energy transition. “We built systems in the 20th century around large centralised power plants,” Zibelman said. “That made a lot of sense. Now the industry is changing, cutomer preferences are changing, choices are changing, so we are creating what lot of people are calling the internet of things. “The idea is that you need to create a very flexible network that can respond in real time, and truly real time, to a lot of different events and a lot different sequences. “That is going to need a whole different approach … and my excitement about Australia is that, quite frankly, Australian is going to be leading the world on this.” Read More here
24 March 2017, Renew Economy, Fear and loathing about renewable grid in Coober Pedy. There is uproar in Coober Pedy, the iconic mining town deep in the South Australian desert that is known as the Opal Capital of the world. What should have been a positive story about a project to shift the town from diesel to a renewable-focused mini-grid based around wind and solar and storage is causing outrage among consumers and councillors, and embarrassment to the developer and the federal agency that backed it. Last year, as we reported at the time, the final plan for the Coober Pedy Renewable Diesel Hybrid project was unveiled, featuring 4MW of wind, 1MW of solar and a 1MW/250kWh battery to provide up to 70 per cent of the power needs of Coober Pedy. The idea was that it would dramatically reduce the amount of diesel consumed from the existing 3.9MW diesel power station, reduce costs, and provide a possible blueprint for the rest of Australia to follow. But what should have been a flagship project for the country – as ARENA CEO Ivor Frischknecht touted it at the time – looks like turning into a disaster for the town and an embarrassment for the renewable energy industry; and a legal dispute between the council and the developers. It has now emerged that the cost that will be charged to the council, which owns the local grid, and which will subsidised by the government, will be more than double other alternatives. Graham Davies, from Adelaide-based Resonant Solutions, who completed an assessment on behalf of council last year, says that the average cost of generating electricity, not including distribution but including rebates, will be 48c/kWh. The deal signed by council will translate to total cost of $192 million over 20 years, a saving of a dismal $5 million over the diesel only grid staying as is for 20 years – which would simply not happen. The company’s own presentation on the project, made last May, appears to confirm that there is little difference between the ongoing cost of diesel and the solar, wind and storage grid. (see graph below). Renewable energy experts say that is absurd. Read More here