The Tipping Point Approaches As Australia Mindlessly Falls Victim to Climate Political Correctness

Guest post by Rafe Champion via New Catallaxy.

This is a short story to explain why intermittent inputs from the sun and wind can’t power a sustainable energy system. Its all about the wind droughts. Especially at night.

First, the ABC of intermittent energy production.

A. Input to the grid must continuously match the demand.

B. The continuity of RE is broken on nights with little or no wind.

C. There is no feasible or affordable grid-scale storage to bridge the gaps.

Conclusion. The transition to wind and solar power can’t proceed with current storage technology.

Second, wind droughts happen.

Most people assume that the wind is always blowing somewhere. Australia is supposed to have wonderful wind resources. Many academics have told us, and the meteorologists never contradicted them.

We certainly have wonderful independent wind watchers, led by Anton Lang and the Paul Miskelly team. Over a decade ago they sounded the alarm about periods of very low wind across the whole of SE Australia that can last for days.

They showed the way, now anyone can monitor the wind power supply day and night, minute by minute, drawing on the cornucopia of information available from AEMO, The Australian Energy Market Operator. The suite of resources available for wind-watchers is itemised in the second part of this briefing note from The Energy Realists of Australia. All of the briefing notes are available here.

For example, look at the NemWatch widget provided by the great RE supporters at Global Roam. The two peak periods of demand for power are breakfast and dinnertime so we can look at the widget at sunrise and sunset to see how the system performs when there is little or no sun at all, and often enough very little wind.

The picture below was taken at dinnertime, just before solar power faded out for the day.

LOOK AT THE GREEN PARTS OF THE BARS WHICH REPRESENT WIND

In SE Australia, the NEM, the wind was contributing a little over 2% of the demand for power and the windmills were performing at 3.5% of their capacity.

Sometimes there are several periods of severe wind drought in quick succession. June 2020 was the worst case in recent times, with eight severe droughts when the windmills delivered less than 10% of their capacity. The longest periods were 35 hours, 18 hours, 16 hours and 15 hours.

Below is a simplified picture to show that SE Australia has reached a critical point where the capacity of coal, the dominant power source, has run down to the level of the base load required day and night.

Between 2012 and 2023 ten coal stations closed without being replaced. Up to the closure of Hazelwood in 2017 there was enough spare capacity to buffer the system due to shocks from extreme weather and breakdowns.

Since that time there has been a constant threat of outages during very hot and cold weather if any breakdowns occur at the dinnertime peak of demand, which occurs as the solar power has died in winter or is fading fast in summer.

We are now at the point where any further loss of coal capacity will mean that load shedding (blackout) may be required practically every night when there is little or no wind.

The RE enthusiasts expect that increasing the capacity of wind and solar will ensure that the gap is closed but on windless nights there nothing to fill the gap. Heroic load shedding (widespread rolling blackouts) will be required to maintain the integrity of the core of the grid and avert a system black.

#Australia #TippingPoint #Wind #Blackouts