Dysfunctional wind turbines!

Turn off the Money Tap, and the Wind Scam will “Dry UP”!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Doomed & Desperate: UK Wind Industry Attempts to Engineer Backdoor Subsidies

February 24, 2016 by

panic-disorder-971

David Cameron’s Conservatives strode to outright power on the back of a ‘crystal clear’ manifesto to cut subsidies to wind power and to give locals the right to veto wind farm projects at the planning stage.

But, in a ‘never-say-die’ last ditch attempt to obtain ‘backdoor’ access to the perpetual subsidies that are the only reason it exists at all (see our posts here and here), the wind industry – along with its plants in the Department of Energy and Climate Change – have hatched a plan to get around Cameron’s pledge to permanently cut its lifeline.

Humpty Dumpty was famously (and rightly) challenged by a scornful and quizzical Alice for haughtily claiming that he – as ‘Master’ in a ‘Looking Glass’ World – could make words mean whatever he chose them to mean.

Taking its cue from that pompous and brittle egg, the wind industry – in pitching a panicked salvation package – has primed its DECC’s puppets to call a “government guaranteed fixed price for wind power” a “subsidy-free contract”, in what can be fairly described as very scrambled logic.

Revealed: the great wind farm tax ‘con’
The Telegraph
Emily Gosden
13 February 2016

Ministers may break pledge to stop funding onshore turbines with consumer subsidies

Ministers have been accused of planning a U-turn that would see consumersFUND new onshore wind farms through green levies.

The Government confirmed it was “looking carefully” at a wind industry proposal to continue public financial support for new turbines, despite a manifesto pledge to halt expansion.

Critics described the proposal as a con, and said the Conservatives’ policy had been “crystal clear” that the subsidies would stop.

Under the plan, households would still be forced to pay millions of pounds on their energy bills to fund new wind farms – but the payments would no longer be defined as subsidies.

The wind industry’s plan hinges on the fact that no new power plants are commercially viable to build at the moment without extra financial support from bill-payers.

If wind farms can be built at lower cost to consumers than alternatives, such as new gas plants, then payments toFUND them should no longer be classed as “subsidy”, the industry argues.

Andrea Leadsom, the energy minister, admitted that the proposal for so-called “subsidy-free” contracts would not in fact be “cost free” for bill-payers, but said the Government was “listening carefully to industry on how it can be delivered”.

Opponents called the plan “outrageous” and said that the proposals under consideration would still constitute subsidies.

Owen Paterson, the Tory MP and former environment secretary, said: “Hard-working energy consumers will not be conned by a change in name. The Conservative manifesto was crystal clear that public subsidies for onshore wind will stop.

“There is absolutely no place for subsidising wind – a failed medieval technology which during the coldest day of the year so far produced only 0.75 per cent of the electricity load.”

The Conservatives pledged in their 2015 manifesto to “halt the spread of onshore wind farms” and vowed to “end any new public subsidy” for the turbines.

More than 5,000 wind turbines have so far been built onshore in the UK under efforts to hit renewable energy and climate change targets.

Consumers are already estimated to pay in excess of £800 million a year in subsidies for the turbines, adding about £10 to an annual household energy bill.

David Cameron has said that Britain does not “need to have more of these subsidised onshore”.

But the proposal being considered by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) would see onshore wind farms continue to qualify for an existing subsidy scheme that guarantees developers a fixed price for electricity generated.

The most recent onshore wind farm contracts awarded under the scheme, early last year, were at prices of about £80 per megawatt hour (MWh) – more than double current market prices of about £35/MWh. Consumers willFUND the difference through green levies on their energy bills.

Under the proposals being looked at by DECC, prices of between £60/MWh and £80/MWh would be regarded as “subsidy-free” by 2020.

John Constable, of the Renewable Energy Foundation, a group critical of renewable energy costs, said it would be “outrageous” to regard the proposal DECC was considering as “subsidy free”. “It is justSPIN doctor stuff, it’s playing with words,” he said.

Glyn Davies, the Tory MP, a member of the energy select committee, said: “I don’t think we should be introducing mechanisms that continue with subsidy – just to say there’s no subsidy when there actually is.”

He said he would be “very concerned” if ministers continued payouts to new onshore wind farms.

Fellow Tory Peter Lilley said the wind industry’s proposal “wouldn’t be subsidy-free” and that wind farms should not receive the same support as gas plants, because the power they produced was not reliable and was therefore worth less.

Mr Paterson added: “If we must support energy, we should help develop combined heat and power which increases efficiency from 50 per cent to 80 per cent or we should develop new technologies which actually work.”

A DECC source insisted energy secretary Amber Rudd was “crystal clear that the manifesto commitment to end new public subsidies for onshore wind and give local people the final say is delivered to the letter”.

“Any idea that doesn’t do this is simply not going to get the green light,” the source said.

The influential think-tank Policy Exchange has said that “subsidy-free” contracts should be offered to support the construction of new onshore wind farms in Scotland and Wales, as well as replacing old turbines with new, far bigger ones.

Maf Smith, deputy chief executive of Renewable UK, said it would be “anti-competitive” to bar any technology from competing for the financial support being offered for new power plants.

A DECC spokesman said: “There is no change to our commitment to end new onshore wind subsidies. Our actions have shown that we will be tough on subsidies, in order to keep bills down for our families and businesses.”
The Telegraph

Maf-Smith

****

Maf Smith has a somewhat confused take on ‘competition’. It’s precisely what David Cameron has given the wind industry a chance to finally experience; with an opportunity toBACK UP its endless (but empty) claims about being cheaper than gas and coal-fired power. Well, Maf? What are you and your paymasters waiting for?

The only reason the UK has to offer any financial support to conventional generators is thanks to the perverse policy that, until now, has guaranteed prices 3-4 times the price of conventional power, for the chaotic, weather-driven delivery of a source that – but for the subsidies it attracts – has NO commercial value.

A rebranded wind farm subsidy is still a subsidy
The Telegraph
Telegraph View
24 February 2016

The public aren’t fools. If the Government wants them to pay for the construction of inefficient wind farms, let it admit to it

The 2015 Conservative Party manifesto took a clear and sensible stance on the issue of wind farms. It stated that while they can form part of the “energy mix”, they are “unable by themselves to provide the firm capacity that a stable energySYSTEM REQUIRES”. The manifesto pledged to “end any new public subsidy for them”. So it is more than a surprise and a disappointment to discover that the Government is considering a reversal – keeping the subsidies and simply rebranding them.

Popular opposition to wind farms is practical, not ideological. Most people recognise that we need to develop sustainable technologies and reduce pollution. But Britain also needs cheap, plentiful energy – to fuel its economic growth and provide a highQUALITY OF LIFE for all its citizens.

Wind farms often fail to meet these criteria. Some people complain that they despoil the environment by being ugly, loud and deadly to birds. Others point out that they can be desperately inefficient. Britain demands energy most in the winter, to heat our homes. But at this time of the year it is often windless, despite recent storms. The turbines stand still and useless – a complete waste of the generous subsidies that come from levies on consumers’ energy bills. To make matters worse, when the wind blows too hard, the Government actually pays the industry to turn the turbines off. Strong wind conditions in late January threatened to overwhelmTHE GRID with more power than was needed – so the National Grid offered lucrative payouts of between £58 and £115 per MWh to shut down the supply.

If the Government believes there is a case to be made for continuing to subsidise the industry then it should make it openly and honestly. What the public does not want to hear isSPIN – which is what the proposal of redefining a subsidy amounts to. Lobbyists say that any new onshore wind farms will cost less to build than the old, non-renewable plants they are replacing, so they are a fair deal. Yet not only will the new turbines be less efficient than gas or coal, but there is also no escaping the conclusion that hard-pressed consumers will still be bank-rolling the expansion of a controversial energy source through their domestic bills. We sincerely hope that the Government rejects any advice to rebrand this arrangement as subsidy-free. The public deserves transparency in this debate.
The Telegraph

SWITZERLAND-WEF-DAVOS-CAMERON

Wind Turbine Projects Suck the Life Out of Another Economy!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

South Australia’s Economy the Victim of a Wind Power ‘Suicide Pact’

February 23, 2016 by

suicide-note

****

South Australia – Australia’s ‘Wind Power Capital’ – is like the cooking show moment where – through the magic of clever editing – a perfect soufflé is slid in front of the camera and the grinning, self-satisfied cook announces ‘here’s one I prepared earlier’.

Except that, in SA’s case, what’s been plated up is an unmitigated energy disaster; that no amount of post-production cutting and splicing can salvage. In SA, its wind power soufflé failed to rise and, once failed, has no hope of rising again.

The recipe for the disaster in SA was drawn up by the boys from Babcock & Brown (aka Infigen) and a disgraced American lawyer and convicted con-man, Tim Flato (who robbed his clients of close to US$400,000, got struck-off, and scuttled off to set up the wind industry in SA and elsewhere) – with plenty of eager help from Greg Hunt’s staffer, Patrick Gibbons and his best mate, Vesta’s Ken McAlpine (back when they both worked as advisers to a Labor Minister in Victoria, Theo Theophanous) (see our post here).

STT operatives have been feverishly digging up more dirt on Tim Flato and his fellow travelers. Turns out Tim was, at various critical times, a director of Babcock & Brown and several of its subsidiaries. But, we digress.

Back to South Australia and its costly wind power flop, with a short and sharp piece from Alan Moran.

South Australian electricity – the state’s suicide mission
Catallaxy Files
Alan Moran
19 February 2016

Here is an object lesson of the effects of winner picking by governments. South Australia’s electricity industry is now threatening to seriously undermine the state’s economy.

Back in October 2014, the electricity market manager, AEMO together with the South Australian state based transmission business, ElectraNet, made some ostensibly soothing comments that the wind dominated South Australia system could continue to operate securely.

Wind is inherently unreliable as well as costing two and a half times as much as coal. But the 2014 report said that this reliability depended upon transmission support that allowed increasing amounts of reliable coal generated electricity to be imported from Victoria and NSW.

South Australia is able to boost wind only because of the subsidy which the Commonwealth’s renewable program and the state’s own measures force consumers of other fuels to transfer to the renewables.

Wind and solar account for 40 per cent (p.5) of South Australia’s generation.

By October of last year the officials’ balm was being used less sparingly.The head of AEMO, following a series of high priced events in South Australia as a result of the wind stopping – as it does – was warning of increasing blackouts in South Australia unless the transmission system was augmented. And the effectiveness of such a patch up would diminish if subsidies cause the share of wind to increase in other states – in this respect the ALP has an “aspirational” goal of 50 per cent renewable share.

South Australia’s problems are about to become more acute with the closure next month of the coal fired 550 MW Northern Power station, a measure brought about by the increasing amount of subsidised wind becoming available.

The latest report [press release here and the full report here: Joint AEMO ElectraNet Report_19 February 2016] again addresses the issue in technical language but is foreshadowing major new investment being required – $1 billion to duplicate the existing transmission links plus other expenditures to allow for coverage of short term drops in generation.

All this spending is necessary in order to facilitate a shift from a low cost traditional electricity supply to high cost rent-seeker sponsored and trendy wind. These measures hammer additional nails in the state’s coffin.

Perhaps the ultimate solution for South Australia, where coal costs are quite high, is nuclear.

The ALP has shifted to support a waste dump but a nuclear generator is a long way off. And in the interim, the government is opening the door to the coal seam and shale exploration that has been rejected by green influenced politicians in NSW and Victoria but again South Australia may have less promising reserves.
Catallaxy Files

Here’s one STT prepared earlier, with a little help from Aneroid Energy – the chaotic ‘output’ from SA’s 17 wind farms during May 2015:

May 2015 SA

Winweasels Will Say Anything, To Try To Protect Their Scam!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Orwellian Eco-Fascist Ideology Ramming Wind Turbines Into Everyone Else’s Backyards

February 22, 2016 by

200355536-002

****

Those that accuse community defenders of being nothing more than self-interested ‘NIMBYs’ are hardly what you’d call ‘disinterested observers’.

No, it’s their willful ignorance and lack of human empathy that gives them away – that and the fact that they will never, themselves, have to tolerate a ‘life’, suffering incessant turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound.

Reminiscent of the porcine ‘elite’ that ran Orwell’s Animal Farm (with one of its central themes the promised construction of a windmill that was said by its piggy-proponents to offer ‘free electricity’, a life of leisure and wealth for the lower orders) in his obsession to carpet your patch of paradise with hundreds of whirling Danish-Dervishes, the eco-fascist is always ready to line you up to make the sacrifices that they themselveswouldn’t tolerate for a second.

Some might call it ‘green hypocrisy’: STT calls it an inexcusable form of malevolence of the very worst kind – one, long on sanctimony, and short on either scientific or economic logic. Precisely the attributes exhibited by Orwell’s selfish and mean-spirited barnyard overlords.

These days, the characters drawn by George don’t grunt, they rant – and use self-affixed titles such as “Friends of Mother Earth”. Here’s a run-down on how these characters roll, from Virgina.

Van Velzer: Botetourt ignores the hazards of wind energy
The Roanoke Times
Bill Van Velzer
15 February 2016

On Jan. 26, Botetourt County’s Board of Supervisors gave its unanimous blessing to the construction of 25, 550-foot tall wind turbines on North Mountain.

This decision has brought cheers from local environmentalists who identify themselves as “friends of Mother Earth.” As with the siting of any industrial facility, the proposed Rocky Forge project is replete with enough technical minutiae that any complete understanding of its true environmental and human impact requires tremendous attention to hours of intense study.

For this reason, Rockbridge County’s Board of Supervisors requested of Botetourt County a reasonable 90-day delay period. This delay was denied while the project was allowed to proceed.

Wind does not respect arbitrary political boundaries; neither do the impacts that industrial wind facilities have on nearby residents and wildlife. So when one of the speakers referred to a need to push wind turbines into the view sheds of “the wealthy Rockbridge elites,” one wonders if there is another agenda at work that has little to do with the facts of this issue. Unfortunately, this seems to be the world we live in nowadays.

Indeed, it seems that discussions of wind energy fit into a larger political matrix. We must avoid this. This issue — when properly vetted — should transcend political ideology and rest on factual evidence. Each of us has a right to define our own quality of life. When someone insists that their emotionally-driven opinion is more important than my factual analysis, I have to begin wondering if I’m getting too close to a larger ideological vulnerability.

Having said this, there are legitimate issues concerning both Botetourt County’s rush to judgement and the larger assumptions about wind energy. From local to global, here is where we are:

First is the issue of “unconstitutional taking of private property.” In short, your right to enjoy your private property cannot trump my right to the enjoy mine. This is an essential ingredient of American jurisprudence, originating in English common law. It is at the heart of how we define fairness. Yet the precedent set by the Botetourt Board of Supervisors allows 550’-tall wind turbines 605 feet from a neighboring property line, and 820 feet a from a neighbor’s home.

Moreover, the 60dBA noise limit “restriction” is commensurate with sound at a busy urban intersection. North Mountain is clearly a rural environment with an ambient noise level at exactly half of this figure. Will these allowances not impact neighboring property values?

Of course, these issues have everything to do with whether or not prospective purchasers of your property — should you decide to sell — would want to hear this cacophony of noise, and see spinning blades from your deck or picture window at all hours and days of the year.

Infrasound belongs to the above argument, but really deserves space of its own. The wind industry denies its existence like tobacco companies used to deny any link between smoking and lung cancer.

Not surprisingly, Botetourt County doesn’t recognize infrasound, either. This cannot and will not continue, due to the rapidly accumulating evidence that infrasound’s wave pulses are a much greater health concern than is audible sound.

Infrasound deprives people of sleep, causes irritability and loss of concentration, and general anxiety. Don’t take my word for it — scores of YouTube videos have documented the abandonment of homes due to this unforgivable negligence on the part of local government officials.

Impact on wildlife is the flip side of human impact. Infrasound impacts animals in the same way that it impacts humans; the difference is that wildlife simply leaves impacted areas.

sleep with turbines

However for avian populations, the destruction is more graphic. For this reason, wind turbines have been called “Cuisinarts of the air.”

“Windustry” denies this, while claiming that cats, windows and cars take far more birds and bats than do wind turbines. This is beyond disingenuous. How many house cats kill an eagle, a hawk, an owl annually? None other than the American Bird Conservancy documents bird and bat deaths in the U.S. as 573,000 and 888,000 respectively, as of 2012.

dead_eagle_at_base_of_turbine

The “kicker” here is that Botetourt County doesn’t require independent monitoring of bird and bat kills — even for resident eagle populations. Ditto for threatened and endangered bats. Is this prudent?

So while Rocky Forge supporters congratulate themselves, more deliberative minds ponder the future. Unbeknownst to most valley residents, Botetourt County’s master wind resource map identifies 11 ridges and mountains as potential industrial wind energy sites. I’ll leave the last assumption to you.
The Roanoke Times

lake winds

One Billion Dollars to “Fix” Mistakes that Should NOT Have Been Made!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

‘Saving’ South Australia from its Self-Inflicted Wind Power Disaster Needs $1 Billion Right NOW!

February 21, 2016 by

head slap

****

Wind and solar create headaches for energy market operator
Australian Financial Review
Mark Ludlow
19 February 2016

State governments may have to spend billions of dollars to duplicate the electricity network to cope with the unreliability of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, according to the national energy forecaster.

As the Australian Energy Market Operator released a report [press release here and the full report here: Joint AEMO ElectraNet Report_19 February 2016] that found there could be reliability issues for the South Australian market, which has embraced renewable technology, its chief executive, Matt Zema, said the rise of wind and solar could also create problems throughout the country.

“It is becoming more and more of a challenge. We might need to build another interconnector to the South Australian market to improve reliability and in the longer term another bigger loop across the nation to be a back-up,” Mr Zema told The Australian Financial Review.

Electricity prices spiked in South Australia late last year after problems with the Heywood interconnector to Victoria, effectively cutting off South Australia from the NEM. South Australia did not have enough of its own locally generated power to cope with demand, which significantly pushed up prices.

A joint report between AEMO and South Australia’s electricity transmission company Electranet found there will be ongoing issues with controlling reliability in the state’s power network either during or following any future loss of the Heywood interconnector and the closure of coal-fired power stations.

Interconnectors are high-voltage transmission cables connecting electricity markets.

“Measures can be taken in the short term to address some of the immediate operational effects, but as the power system continues to evolve, in the longer term there could be an increasing need for changes to market arrangements or infrastructure to continue to meet security and reliability expectations, particularly at times when SA is synchronously islanded [separated] from the remainder of the NEM,” the report found.

AEMO is conducting further studies to maintain power system security in South Australia if it becomes isolated from the NEM.

Grappling with implications

Mr Zema said state governments were still grappling with the implications of moving away from the more reliable coal and gas-fired generation. He said they may have toINVEST billions of dollars in a back-up “loop” of interconnectors to ensure there are not reliability issues which could lead to blackouts.

“South Australia is at the front end of this [renewable] curve, Tasmania is not far behind as they are finding out with Basslink connection to the mainland,” Mr Zema said.

“If you build another interconnector to Victoria you may well extend it from Victoria to NSW.”

A new interconnector between South Australia and Victoria which would cost about $1 billion.

Mr Zema said the only alternative to building back-up interconnectors or more gas-fired power stations to cover for wind and solar – when the sun isn’t shining or the wind is not blowing – would be to dismantle the NEM.

“You either strengthenTHE GRID and have more reliability and more paths or you break it up and its gets smaller and smaller and each state becomes an island,” he said.

“You either become better connected toTHE GRID or you become your own grid which would result in huge price fluctuations.”

South Australia is leading the charge towards renewable energy, especially with the closure of coal-fired power stations, including Alinta Energy’s coal-fired power stations at Port Augusta.

South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill last year said the price fluctuations would not last and the state would benefit from leading the adoption of wind and solar power.

The precarious nature of the electricity network was further demonstrated by Tasmania also being isolated due to problems with the Bass Strait undersea power cable.

Victoria’s energy market could also be facing an overhaul with Alcoa’s Portland smelter – a large energy users – close to closure. It is negotiating with AEMO about an energy subsidy for its poles and wires.
Australian Financial Review

jay weatherill

****

SA’s vapid Premier – a former worker’s compensation solicitor – wouldn’t be STT’s first pick when it came to sorting out a power market in absolute crisis and a grid on the brink of total collapse. His ‘belief’ that betting his beleaguered State’s failing ‘fortunes’ on more of the same smacks of child-like delusion, but, given more sensible (but costly) moves made recently (albeit under pressure) politically driven deception.

Contrary to Jay’s let’s all ‘hold-hands-around-a-turbine’ chanting Kumbaya – and Matt Zema’s line about “moving away from the more reliable coal and gas-fired generation” – SA’s Labor government has just signed their constituents up to throw $50 million a year in subsidies at the French owner of a mothballed CCGT plant at Pelican Point.

That panicked move is all about ensuring something like a reliable power flow (for the time being); and, at the political triage level, is an attempt to avoid any more ‘unhelpful’ wind power blackouts: like the one that plunged almost the entire State into Stone Age darkness last November; and that has businesses, like Uni SA coping with power supply ‘interruptions’ and total blackouts on a regular basis.

email ML

Once upon a time, thanks to the pragmatic vision of its longest-ever-serving Premier, Sir Tom Playford, South Australians enjoyed both energy autonomy and the cheapest and most reliable power in the Country – if not the world; and, with it, unparalleled growth in population, employment and incomes. Now, the reverse is true on all counts.

Always the mendicant State, SA’s Labor government – having willingly signed up to an economic suicide pact – will do what it does best: beg like fury for the Federal Government to bail it out, which means its neighbours will end up footing the bill for the most ridiculous power ‘policy’ ever devised.

tom playford-anzac-parade

the Harsh Reality Of Wind Turbines, as an Electricity Source….

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

SA’s Wind Farm Fiasco: $Millions in Subsidies Thrown at GDF Suez to Reopen Mothballed Gas-Fired Power Plant

February 14, 2016 by 2 Comments

May 2015 SA

South Australia has the dubious honour of being referred to as “Australia’s wind farm capital”. That ‘accolade’ has brought with itrocketing power prices, an unstable grid and routine blackouts.

As to the latter, South Australians are learning to live with daily ‘load-shedding’, that even its premier academic institutions have to suffer, along with thousands of other businesses and households.

This telling little email from UniSA’s management was flicked to us by one of our SA operatives (who just happens to be an engineer):

email ML

The source of the “failure to the incoming electricity supply” is, as our engineer contact informs us, all about ‘grid instability’, caused by SA’s chaotic, intermittent and unreliable wind power supply.

Our contact also tells us that UniSA’s Mawson Lakes campus (located north of Adelaide and south of Salisbury) has been experiencing frequent supply ‘interruptions’ and wholesale blackouts for months now. Air-conditioners no longer function; lectures get cancelled; the campus goes into “lock-down”; and the power surges and erratic supply have damaged electrical equipment and appliances, as well as distribution systems on campus.

The cost of repairing or replacing appliances, equipment or electrical systems – due to erratic wind power supplies (and the power surges, grid instability and consequent grid management chaos that comes with intermittent wind power) – is just another cost that gets brushed aside by one-eyed wind-worshippers. Wind power blackouts are, of course, a little harder for the wind-cultist to hide.

On 1 November last year, a sudden and total collapse in SA’s wind power output saw almost the entire State plunged into Stone Age darkness:110,000 homes and businesses were left without power for hours, with their owners in the dark and operators fuming.

SA 1 Nov 15

Business operators, like Port Pirie’s Nyrstar smelter went on the war path and dragged Labor’s Energy Minister, Tom Koutsantonis into a crisis meeting about average spot power prices that are now double those of neighbouring Victoria; and the fact that, no matter how much generators chisel out of householders and businesses, SA’s power supply will never again be called reliable or secure.

Having given up on the idea of ever having affordable power again, SA’s hapless Labor government has been reduced to throwing $millions of taxpayers dollars at the French owner of a mothballed Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) power plant in an effort to ensure the lights stay on (at least for now).

Here’s the AFR’s Ben Potter (who’s fast gaining a grip on the scale and scope of the wind power fraud) detailing Labor’s costly, panicked – throw $millions of taxpayers’ money at it – response to SA’s wind farm fiasco.

Gas-fired power station bids for SA ‘low carbon’ contract
Australian Financial Review
Ben Potter
10 February 2016

Adelaide wants to become the world’s first carbon-free city, but the South Australian government is open to giving a gas-fired power station a “low carbon”ELECTRICITY CONTRACT.

The bid by GDF Suez, French owner of the partly mothballed Pelican Point gas power station, angered renewable energy advocates. The contract is worth about $50 million a year.

“If the government was serious about limiting carbon dioxide emissions, the tender would be limited to renewable energy projects only,” said Mark Parnell, Greens energy spokesman and leader in the SA Parliament.

GDF Suez confirmed Pelican Point was a bidder for the contract to supply up to 481 megawatt hours of low-carbon electricity a year to the government. Gas-fired power stations have roughly half the carbon dioxide emissions of coal-fired power stations, while wind and solar power have virtually zero emissions.

The SA Labor government sought expressions of interest for the contract in November as industry alarm mounted at soaring electricity prices in the struggling state.

Treasurer and Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis this week emailed industry participants at a December 15 crisis meeting on the electricity market, saying the government aimed to ensure a smooth transition to a low-energy future by inviting a broad range of energy technologies to bid for the contract, and stipulating that bids should not harm energy security or push up prices.

Price spikes

The SA government has celebrated the state’s nation-leading penetration of wind and solar power. But large industrial energy users blame its spasmodic weather-dependent supply patterns for sharp spikes inSPOT MARKET prices and contract prices to levels far above neighbouring Victoria and NSW.

Although described as a “low-carbon electricity supply” contract, the document specified that electricity with an average CO2 emissions intensity of up to 400 kilograms per megawatt hour would be considered.

This is just above the level of a relatively efficient gas-fired power station like Pelican Point. GDF Suez withdrew half of Pelican Point’s 479-megawatt capacity two years ago as SA’s rapidly increasing share of renewable power pushed more costly “mid-market” suppliers to the sidelines.

This and other withdrawals left the stateVULNERABLE to sharp electricity price spikes to more than $2000 an hour when the wind didn’t blow and the sun didn’t shine, and heavily reliant on Victorian brown coal power delivered via high-transmission interconnectors.

“The state is primarily interested in wholesale electricity supply solutions which reduce the emissions associated with the state’s energy use. In the past, the state has sought proposals for GreenPower to achieve this objective,” the document says.

“In this process, however, the state is focused on solutions which maximise economic benefits for South Australia.”

Mr Parnell said Mr Koutsantonis “is very wedded to the future of gas, so it doesn’t surprise me that they are trying to place a gas-fired power station in the low-carbon category”.
Australian Financial Review

How delicious! The SA Green’s Muppet-in-Chief, Mark Parnell accusing Tom Koutsantonis of being “very wedded to the future of gas”, whereas Parnell is simply “wedded” to the delusion that a wholly weather dependent power source – that requires 100% of its capacity to beBACKED UP 100% of the time by conventional generation sources – provides for a reliable and secure electricity supply, delivered at an affordable price.

Always keen to express his sweaty-palmed, adolescent love of these things, Parnell has been known to bunk up in a tent underneath one of these things with SA’s other high-priest of the dwindling wind-worship cult, Crystal Brook’s favourite ‘fan-tasist’, Dave Clarke.

Throwing $50 million a year of South Australian taxpayers’ money at GDF Suez to keep its Pelican Point CCGT plant running around the clock, is like a dog chasing its tail.

GDF Suez stopped operating its Pelican Point plant as a direct consequence of the market perversion caused by the Federal Government’s Large-Scale RET.

Wind power is already heavily subsidised under the LRET, which, as we detail below, allows wind power outfits to flood the market when the wind is blowing, literally payingTHE GRID manager to take it – which knocks conventional generators out of the market, leaving them burning coal or gas (and incurring constant expense), but with little revenue (or no revenue whatsoever) to offset that cost (let alone turn a profit).

In short, wind power outfits collect the same amount of revenue, irrespective of theSPOT PRICE. However, conventional generators receive the prevailing price – and, unlike wind power outfits, do not receive any form of subsidy for what they dispatch: the market perversion driven by the LRET and subsidies for wind power is what has caused SA’s conventional generators to become unprofitable; and it’s that lack of profitability that led to Alinta’s decision to close its Port Augusta plant; and led to GDF Suez mothballing half of its Pelican Point CCGT plant 2 years ago (until now, due to the market distortions caused by wind power subsidies, its working half still only gets a return when wind power isn’t being given away).

The Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) struck between wind power outfits and retailers (which you’ll never see the likes of Infigen or Trustpower talk about publicly) are built around the massive stream of subsidies established by the Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target (LRET) – which is directed to wind power generators in the form ofRENEWABLE ENERGY CERTIFICATES (RECs aka LGCs).

Under PPAs, the prices set guarantee a return to the generator of between $90 to $120 per MWh for every MWh delivered toTHE GRID.

In a company report last year, AGL (in its capacity as a wind power retailer) complained about the fact that it is bound to pay $112 per MWh under PPAs with wind power generators: these PPAs run for at least 15 years and many run for 25 years.

Wind power generators can and do (happily) dispatch power toTHE GRID at prices approaching zero – when the wind is blowing and wind power output is high; at night-time, when demand is low, wind power generators will even payTHE GRID manager to take their power (ie the dispatch price becomes negative)(see our post here). In recent times, wind power outfits in SA have been paying the grid operator up to $20 per MWh to take power with, quite obviously, no commercial value.

However, the retailer still pays the wind power generator the same guaranteed price under their PPA – irrespective of the dispatch price: in AGL’s case, $112 per MWh.

PPA prices are 3-4 times the cost that retailers pay to conventional generators; retailers can purchase coal-fired power from Victoria’s Latrobe Valley for around $25-35 per MWh.

Underlying the PPA is the value of the RECs that are issued to wind power generators and handed to retailers as part of the deal.

The issue and transfer of RECs under the LRET sets up the greatest government mandated wealth transfer seen in Australian history: the LRET is – without a shadow of a doubt – the largest industry subsidy scheme in the history of the Commonwealth. That transfer – which comes at the expense of the poorest and mostVULNERABLE; struggling businesses; and cash-strapped families – is effected by the issue, sale and surrender of RECs. As Origin Energy chief executive Grant King correctly puts it:

“[T]he subsidy is the REC, and the REC certificate is acquitted at the retail level and is included in the retail price of electricity”.

It’s power consumers that get lumped with the “retail price of electricity” and, therefore, the cost of the REC Subsidy paid to wind power outfits. The REC Tax/Subsidy has already added $9 billion to Australian power bills, so far.

Between 2015 and 2031, the mandatory LRET requires power consumers to pay the cost of issuing 490 million RECs to wind power generators. With the REC price currently $82 – and tipped toTRADE around $93 as retailers get hit with the shortfall penalty set by the LRET – the wealth transfer from power consumers to the Federal Government (as retailer penalties) and/or to the wind industry (as REC Subsidy) will be somewhere between $40 billion and $50 billion, over the next 16 years:

What Kills the Australian Wind Industry: A $45 Billion Federal Power Tax

With more wind power capacity per head than any other State, South Australians are going to be lumbered with a disproportionate share of the ludicrous cost of the REC Tax/Subsidy, set by the LRET.

A cost that is already forcing major employers like Nyrstar to consider shutting up shop – with the immediate loss of 750 jobs in economically depressed Port Pirie. And that has already led to more than 50,000 SA households suffering along without any power at all (see our post here).

Now, adding State-subsidy-insult to Federal-subsidy-injury, South Australians are about to be Royally screwed twice: once by being forced to throw $93 per MWh (in REC Tax/Subsidy) at wind power outfits (whenever the wind blows); and, on top of that, being forced to stump up $50 million a year to cover the fact that the former will never amount to a meaningful power source. And then there is all of the commercial and domestic electrical repairs required as a result of such a high penetration of intermittent power sources.

South Australians have Premier Jay Weatherill and his merry band of Labor lunatics to thank for, what can only be described as, an ‘energy debacle’.

Notwithstanding the scale and scope of SA’s brewing economic disaster – and its latest move to subsidise its way out of trouble – Labor still seems wedded to pushing the wind industry’s barrow.

Having directed planning panels all over the State to keeprubberstamping wind farm applications – and otherwise encouraging more of these things to be speared into the heart of thriving rural communities; like those situated in the Eastern Mount Lofty Ranges and on Yorke Peninsula – Labor seems simply incapable of retreating from the brink.

Albert Einstein’s definition of “insanity” springs to mind: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.

Backing the likes of New Zealand’s Trustpower or the cowboys behindSenvion (aka REPower, aka Suzlon) in their bids to carpet South Australia’s most agriculturally productive regions with hundreds more of these whirling wonders beggars belief.

What South Australians need is reliable, secure and affordable power – of the kind to be delivered by GDF Suez’s Pelican Point CCGT plant, that – but for the power market perversion caused by the LRET’s massive REC Tax/Subsidy for wind power – would have been happily delivered without costing SA’s taxpayers a red cent.

The very last thing South Australians need is any more of the same.

Not that Weatherill, Koutsantonis & Co will admit it publicly, but the deal done with GDF Suez (using other peoples’ money) to guarantee the 24/365 availability of 479MW of dispatchable (ie ‘controllable’) power, is a monumental concession that SA’s too-long held dream of being powered by the wind has just gone up in smoke.

turbine fire 6

Novelty Energy, Like Wind & Solar, will NOT Keep the Lights ON!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

India’s Quest for ‘24/7 Reliable Power’ Means Munching More Coal, Not Praying for the Wind to Blow

February 13, 2016 by

poverty india

****

Among the selfish conceits peddled by the wind industry, its parasites and spruikers is the notion that a wholly weather dependent power source – which is 4 times the cost of coal-fired power and which will always require 100% of its capacity to be backed up, 100% of the time by conventional generation sources – represents the ‘salvation’ of nations like India, where some 250 million people have no power at all; and, accordingly, live in Stone Age poverty, cooking on twigs and dung and otherwise living a life of misery.

The pontificators that assembled in Paris, and sought to impose what Indians quite rightly regard as “fake electricity”, couldn’t care less about the world’s huddled masses and are, instead, happy to destine them to a world of eternal darkness and poverty. However, thankfully, India’s Power Minister, Piyush Goyal has other ideas.

India’s challenge is 24/7 electricity for all
The Australian
Greg Sheridan
13 February 2016

Piyush Goyal is a name you haven’t heard. But this week he has made one of the most important interventions of any foreign politician in an Australian political debate.

He is India’s Minister for Power, Coal and Renewable Energy. He is a big success politically and in line for more promotion.

I’ll give you his direct quotes in a moment. But let’s cut to the chase. Here are the important things he said in a lengthy interview with The Australian.

India will increase coal imports from Australia. Quite independently from that, if the Adani mine in Queensland goes ahead it is an integrated project and will be its own main customer, so India’s efforts to increase its coal production would not reduce the viability of the Adani project.

India is passionately committed to caring for the environment but also to economic development. That means a huge increase in coal-fired power stations as well as coal’s role in making steel.

The Indian government wants 24/7 reliable energy for all its people. Some 300 million Indians will move from rural to urban living in the next couple of decades. They will be on proper power grids. India’s baseload power will be provided by coal.

India will expand its renewable energy sector but, as the minister says, renewables have never provided baseload power for anyone.

India also will expand nuclear power and keep its gas power stations at roughly their current level.

The massive urbanisation in India means a surging demand for steel. Goyal says coking coal exports from Australia will increase particularly strongly. (Thermal coal goes to power stations, coking coal makes steel). Already nearly a third of India’s coal imports are coking coal.

Goyal’s remarks could not be more clear. Every Greens spokesman and climate-change jihadist who argues on the ABC that India is turning away from coal is inverting reality. Far from coal being a “dying industry”, as Geoff Cousins argued in a ludicrous article, the International Energy Agency forecasts Indian coal imports more than doubling by 2040.

Goyal does want to crank up India’s domestic production of coal but its coastal power stations are geared to take imported coal and that will continue, he tells me.

Now, dear reader, if you ever again hear anyone on the ABC claim that India is moving away from coal, or that Australian coal is not essential to get hundreds of millions of Indians out of poverty, you will know they are talking pure moonshine.

No one more consistently misrepresents what is happening all over Asia than the green lobby. The general ignorance of Asia among journalists allows these claims to be aired uncritically, especially on the ABC.

So let’s take up the Indian story in Goyal’s own words: “The first challenge of our government is to make sure that all Indians get 24/7 reliable power. We will expand the total energy output significantly.

“We are a very environmentally friendly country. We have been for generations. India is one country that has respected and even worshipped nature. So we will give renewed thrust to our renewable energy program. We are scaling it up massively, from 34 giga­watts to 175GW over the next six years. This is the world’s largest renewable energy rollout in the history of mankind.”

It is statements like this that green propagandists sometimes misuse to pretend renewable will replace coal in India. Nothing could be less true.

Gas power, Goyal says, will remain roughly where it is. But: “We will be expanding our coal-based thermal power. That is our baseload power. All renewables are intermittent. Renewables have not provided baseload power for anyone in the world.

“After all, solar works when the sun is shining, wind works when the wind is blowing, hydro works when there is water in the rivers. You must have coal.” Goyal says India will expand its nuclear power but this is a slow process and although nuclear will increase in absolute terms and as a percentage of India’s power overall, he continually comes back to the expansion of coal and its irreducible part in development.

“India does have certain development imperatives which we expect the world to accept. All ourINVESTMENT in coal is either supercritical power stations or ultra-super critical.” These produce about half the greenhouse emissions per unit of power as do older coal-fired power stations.

He refuses to accept lecturing from the West on India’s environmental responsibilities: “The people of India want a certain way of life. They want jobs for their children, schools and colleges, hospitals with uninterrupted power. This needs a very large amount of baseload power and this can only come from coal.

“I do wish people would reflect on the justice of the situation. Europe and America and Australia have messed up the world and the planet, and they’re saying to us, we’re sorry but you Indians can only have power for eight hours a day. The rest of the time you must live in darkness.

“We are fortunate that countries like Australia and Canada enter into serious agreements and we can rely on an uninterrupted flow of fuel.”

India is the fastest growing substantial economy, with a growth rate above 7 per cent in an anaemic global economy. This growth will be central to global economics. Goyal believes India will hit double-digit growth next year or the year after and stay there for a decade. If he is right, the development, and the economic opportunity this offers for Australia, is enormous, beyond anything that has yet entered the Australian imagination.

He says: “In the next couple of decades, imagine 300 million people moving from rural to urban centres. As we improve productivity in agriculture, the population will shift to manufacturing and services. Energy consumption will go up in agriculture itself with greater use of technology. There will be increased energy use in infrastructure. The government wants decent homes for every Indian by 2022; that means millions of homes will be built.” He points out that India’s per capita energy consumption is still below that of the US in the middle of the 19th century and says it will increase for decades.

India will not commit to a year when its greenhouse emissions will peak. This is “immaterial”, he says. On China’s commitment to such a year, his polite scepticism is robust: “We’ve all seen the reliability of that data. It’s up to you to judge what is optical and what is real.”

He is pro-Australian and wants the warmest relationship, but is utterly unimpressed with lectures from Australians about global warming: “Australia’s power consumption is coming down now anyway. Its economy is not growing, manufacturing is moving overseas, your economy is moving to services. You have jobs for everyone and a society satiated with energy. It’s easy for you to nominate a peak year. We have 250 million Indians without energy now. We have years and decades of growth ahead.”

Every word he says is true. It would be good if Australians listened.
The Australian

piyush goyal

Wind Turbine Scam Destroys Power Supplies in Britain!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

UK’s Wind Power Gamble Ends in Power Supply Bankruptcy

February 12, 2016 by 3 Comments

roulette-table-2

Until David Cameron’s Conservatives took full control of the UK Parliament, Britain had lumped every last chip on wind power: apparently hoping that a wholly weather dependent power source, that requires 100% of its capacity to beBACKED UP 100% of the time by conventional (dispatchable) power sources, would come up trumps and lead to oodles of secure, reliable and affordable electricity.

After more than just a fewSPINS of the energy wheel, it seems that Britain is blessed with the punter’s curse: a dwindling bag of cash and no hope of better ‘luck’ anywhere in sight.

Government energy policy will hike bills and lead to power supply gap
The Northern Echo
Sandy Richardson
26 January 2016

DAVID Cameron’s decision to close coal-fired electricity stations and scale back nuclearINVESTMENT will lead to massive power shortages and hike energy bills over the next decade, industry leaders have warned.

Growing electricity demand will leave the UK facing a 40 per cent to 55 per cent electricity supply gap, according to a new report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

It says plans to plug the gap by building Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) plants are unrealistic, as the UK would need to build about 30 such plants in less than 10 years.

The UK has built just four CCGTs in the last 10 years, closed one as well as eight other power stations. In 2005 twenty nuclear sites were listed for decommissioning, leaving a significant gap to be filled.

According to the report, the country has neither the resources nor enough people with the right skills to build this many power stations in time. It is already too late for any other nuclear reactors to be planned and built by the coal shut-off target of 2025, other than Hinkley Point C.

The report also highlights that a greater reliance on imported electricity from Scandinavia and the Continent is likely to lead to higher electricity costs and leave Britain at the mercy of foreign suppliers.

Dr Jenifer Baxter, Head of Energy and Environment at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and Lead Author of the report said:

“The UK is facing an electricity supply crisis. As the UK population rises and with the greater use of electricity use in transport and heating it looks almost certain that electricity demand is going to rise.

“However with little or no focus on reducing electricity demand, the retirement of the majority of the country’s ageing nuclear fleet, recent proposals to phase out coal-fired power by 2025 and the cut in renewable energy subsidies, the UK is on course to produce even less electricity than it does at the moment.

“Currently there are insufficient incentives for companies toINVEST in any sort of electricity infrastructure or innovation and worryingly even the Government’s own energy calculator does not allow for the scenarios that new energy policy points towards. Under current policy, it is almost impossible for UK electricity demand to be met by 2025.

“Government needs to take urgent action to work with industry to create a clear pathway with time frames and milestones for new electricity infrastructure to be built including fossil fuel plants, nuclear power, energy storage and combined heat and power. With CCS now out of the picture, new low carbon innovations must be supported over the course of the next 10 years.”
The Northern Echo

consequences

Spain First to Eliminate the Wind Pushers.

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Spain’s Subsidy Cut sees Wind Industry Collapse: NO Capacity Installed Since 2014

February 11, 2016 by

Bullfighter

****

The Spanish wind industry faces its coup de grâce for the very same reason that the wind industry is on the ropes in the UK, Germany, the US, here and elsewhere: either the massive subsidies that have driven the greatest fraud of all time have actually been cut; or there’s the inevitable prospect that they will be, very soon.

In Spain’s case, its government worked out long-ago that pouring never ending €billions into a meaningless power source – that has no commercial value – was never going to end well, on any level – political, social or economic.

While the wind industry – wherever it plies its subsidy soakedTRADE – deludes itself that the principles of economics are suspended in relation to it, once the massive (and seemingly endless) subsidies go, so does the interest of power retailers, bankers and investors. Funny about that …

SpainINSTALLED No Wind Power for First Time Since 80s in 2015
Bloomberg
Alex Morales
26 January 2016

Spain didn’tINSTALL a single megawatt of wind power capacity in 2015, the first time the industry has had a dead year since the 1980s.

TotalINSTALLED capacity stalled at 22,988 megawatts, with wind covering 19 percent of power demand in Spain last year, the Spanish Wind Energy Association, known by its Spanish initials AEE, said Tuesday in a statement. Just 27 megawatts of new capacity has beenINSTALLEDsince 2013, when a new payments system was introduced.

Spanish renewable energy companies that once reaped Europe’s biggest subsidies have looked abroad for projects since the domesticMARKETstagnated following a moratorium on support for new wind farms and solar parks in 2012. The standstill has left Spain needing an additional 6,400 megawatts of wind energy capacity by 2020 in order to meet binding European renewables targets, according to the association.

“TheINSTALLATION of more than 6,000 megawatts of wind power in four years has been done in Spain before thanks to regulations that favored it,” the association said. “If certain aspects of the regulations were modified to give confidence back to investors and ease access to financing, it could be attempted again.”

The industry group called on the government to consult with the wind sector on changes to auctioning arrangements, after an initial 500-megawatt auction yielded no subsidy for the technology. It said that was an “unexpected result that brought even more uncertainty to the already complicated situation of the wind sector.”

The association called for an end to provisions in rules that allow the government to change the reasonable returns for projects every six years. It also said the government should hold auctions for the remaining 5,900 megawatts of wind power it needs as soon as possible.
Bloomberg

Remember all that wind industry guff about the world hungering for wind power; how it’s free and getting cheaper all the time; and how it’s the ‘plug and play’ solution to our future electricity needs?

No? It seems Spaniards have forgotten it too.

spain_bullfighting_2

When Windweasel Lies Meet Reality!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Wind Power Will Never Keep the Lights On: Propaganda Obscures Truth About Where Your Power Really Comes From

February 10, 2016 by

mythbusters2

Claims and delivery are a gulf apart, when what’s put up by the wind and solar crowd is measured up against the hard cold facts that reside in ‘reality-land’.

With every new wind farm proposal we’re told how this operation would ‘power’ a hundred thousand homes (for ‘free’) – although these days it’s a line that accompanies moaning by wind power outfits about their inability to obtain power purchase agreements with retailers and, therefore, finance from banks to carry out their threats.

This story highlights the fact that talk about a wind and solar powered future is just that: ‘talk’.

The truth about our electricity supply is too hot to handle
The Australian (BusinessSpectator)
Keith Orchison
26 January 2016

How ordinary Australians are kept informed about arguably their most essential service, electricity supply, is a big issue for companies and competing lobbyists in a game where literally many billions of dollars are at stake.

If it is true that most Australians under 30 get their news from social media rather than newspapers or TV and radio — so claimed by Graham Richardson in a recent op-ed in The Australian — then what appears in the traditional media is no longer the dominant source of public information. (I’m from an era where too many PR types used to present their ‘success’ to their employers via column inches published in newspapers.)

We have had an example of the modern idiom in recent days with a minor hullabaloo about the promise of large-scale solar power based on the official commissioning of the two AGL Energy PV farms near Broken Hill, but not a syllable anywhere about the single biggest issue of the same moment for all electricity consumers: how supply has been sustained as a nasty heatwave baked the east coast.

That our community needs electricity big-time to cope with 40-degree temperatures and high humidity is beyond debate. For day after recent day, the east coast load neared or exceeded 30,000 megawatts, something it hasn’t done often in the past five years as prices (and, in the case of manufacturers, other factors too) pulled down demand.

That the delivery system, so often derided in the recent past as ‘gold-plated’, stood up well to the pressure is obvious. The dozen or so failures of supply (affecting 70,000 homes in one case) were attributable to big storms that ripped down houses and trees as well as poles and wires.

That the network operators have thrown emergency repair crews into the fray to bring back supply as quickly as possible has received little media mention. It’s a given — not that this will stop the networks getting kicked about their charges when the next revenue row arises.

For me, it is particularly notable and regrettable that what is wholly missing from mainstream media coverage is the breakdown of how the much-needed electrons have been generated.

This is not secret engineers’ business. The information is readily available — it’s just not passed on, even briefly, to the hot and sweaty public.

Take New South Wales as an example. It’s home to the largest number of consumers, whether we are talking households (just on three million, or roughly a third of the national total) or business (more than 400,000, also a third of the total).

NSW plus Victoria and Queensland account for roughly 90 per cent of national electricity customers, and on a typical midafternoon in January the trio’s consumers were getting some 73 per cent of their power (by committed capacity) from black and brown coal, with gas turbines accounting for another 11.8 per cent. Hydro-electric capacity (a critical resilience factor on high-demand days for NSW and Victoria) was contributing another 7.5 per cent.

In this situation, the green activists’ love children, wind and solar, accounted for 7.5 per cent of operating capacity, of which rooftop PVs met 5 per cent, a testament to the extra-ordinary emergence of household self-generation in response to public aggravation over retail power bill spikes and over-the-top political largesse (since cut back sharply), demonstrating how fast a fad can become a useful accessory in our affluent society.

Coming back to NSW specifically, at the peak of one of the heatwave days, the state’s generation load pushed past 12,200 megawatts at noon: met by almost 7,500 MW of black coal plant, 1,300 MW of gas plant, almost 2,500 MW of hydro-electric plant, 520 MW of wind power and nearly as much (428 MW) of rooftop solar plus 50 MW of large-scale solar. (The usefulness of rooftop solar, of course, fell away at dusk while, if anything, the heatwave’s grip was being felt more acutely by householders.)

It’s terribly easy to get tendentious about this stuff — you can find the types who do so hard at work all over the media space — but the real bottom line is twofold.

First, the biggest state in the Commonwealth (population, commercially, industrially, economically) would be stuffed without conventional power generation (coal, gas, hydro).

Second, replacing the coal elements of this reliable supply system is a great deal easier to talk about than to do.

Take the two Broken Hill solar farms, officially commissioned with federal and state ministers in attendance and lots of green trumpet blowing. Between them, their 155 megawatts of capacity is expected to produce 259,000 megawatt hours of electricity annually.

By comparison, AGL Energy’s 2,640 MW Bayswater black coal operation sends out 15,000 gigawatt hours a year.

One gigawatt hour is equal to a thousand megawatt hours.

It would take 58 sets of the Broken Hill solar twins to match Bayswater’s output. All the coal plants in the state deliver more than 50,000 GWh a year.

Without doubt, we are in a power transition period where new technology will play an increasing role. To what extent, over what time period and at what cost (in terms of capital outlays, taxpayer subsidies and consumer bills) is a very big question.

An even bigger one, perhaps, is just how much damage can be done to a supply system we take from granted via the posturing of ideologists and rent-seekers, the naivety of politicians and the energy illiteracy of the community?

More than 50 years ago I went to a high school that had as its motto ‘festina lente’ — Latin for “make haste slowly.” Perhaps it should be carved above the entry of our parliament houses and painted on the office walls of ministers (alongside ‘it’s the economy, stupid’).

Keith Orchison, director of consultancy Coolibah Pty Ltd and editor of OnPower, was chief executive of two national energy associations from 1980 to 2003. He was made a Member of the Order of Australia for services to the energy industry in 2004.
The Australian

turbine fire Trent-Wind-Farm

The Wind Turbine Disaster in South Australia…

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Wind Power Disaster: South Australians Grapple with Rocketing Power Prices, an Unstable Grid & Rolling Blackouts

February 9, 2016 by

koutsantonis

****

In Australia’s wind farm capital, South Australia the terms ‘chaos’ and ‘crisis’ are used to describe the aftermath of an energy policy ‘designed’ on desktops by dimwits, who haven’t got the faintest clue about how power generation works (or much else, for that matter).

Wind power collapses and blackouts are now part of South Australian life: Wind Industry’s Armageddon: Wind Farm Output Collapse Leaves 110,000 South Australian Homes & Businesses Powerless

The Genesis of the wind power debacle was pretty well captured by Leo Smith in our recent post – Why Weather Dependent, Intermittent & Unreliable Wind Power is as ‘Useful as a Chocolate Teapot’ – and summed up as follows:

There is, above all, one salient feature that emerges across the board. Sanity and rationalism have been cast aside, and the whole arena is now a political and ideological battleground whose main protagonists understand little or nothing about the industry they seek to bend to suit their ideological (and possibly commercial) needs.

In short the world is full of people who have an opinion about power generation, who understand nothing about how it actually works or even what actually works. …

Rational scientific analysis shows conclusively that renewable energy cannot ever deliver on the very basis that it has been sold to the public. It’s not cheap, it’s anything but free, it’s not environmentally desirable, it offers no energy security, and it cannot exist in isolation from other technologies that are either even more costly than it itself is or have grave risks associated with them.

What we find when we analyse the intermittency problem, is that intermittent non-dispatchable power actually carries very little value at all. What society requires, is dispatchable power – power that can be on tap when it’s required, and turned off when it’s not, and it requires in addition a large component of cheap baseload power, that never needs to be turned off. What it does not require is wilful power that’s here today and gone tomorrow.

Just like SA’s 17 wind farms’ ‘efforts’ during May 2015:

May 2015 SA

And it’s the erratic delivery of ludicrously expensive wind power ($110 per MWh versus $40 per MWh for the reliable stuff) – and the insane cost of paying operators of highly inefficient Open Cycle Gas Turbines that their owners refuse to fire up until the spot price rockets to over $2,000 per MWh, when the wind drops – that has journos using ‘chaos’ to describe SA’s power market and ‘crisis’ to describe the economic aftermath meted out on struggling business, like Nyrstar’s Port Pirie Smelter.

The thing that kills the wind industry is the cost of attempting to integrate a wholly weather dependent power source (abandoned in the 19th Century, for obvious reasons) into a modern power system – where that cost, as it manifests in ever-rocketing power prices, simply can’t be hidden from the voting public.

Here’s another take on the South Australian wind power debacle from Richard Blandy (Adjunct Professor of Economics in the School of Management at the University of South Australia Business School) who – unlike the hacks at Adelaide’s The Advertiser – has a very solid head for numbers, due his background in that dismal science.

Oh, and to help illustrate Richard’s piece we’ve added a few pics courtesy of the boys over at Aneroid Energy – showing the output from SA’s 17 wind farms (with a notional capacity of 1,477MW) on the occasions referred to.

Crunching the numbers on SA’s high electricity prices
InDaily
Richard Blandy
19 January 2016

South Australia has set its energy sights on a renewable future but, asks Richard Blandy, at what cost?

On Christmas Day, according to the average price tables published by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), the Regional Reference Price (average spot price) for a megawatt hour of electricity in South Australia was $91.67.

SA 25 Dec 15

The corresponding prices in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland were $37.33, $20.38 and $36.20.

SA DEC 15

The average daily spot price for a megawatt hour of electricity in December 2015 was $62.19 in South Australia, $43.37 in New South Wales, $46.84 in Victoria and $42.08 in Queensland.

SA 17 Dec 15

On December 17, the average spot price for a megawatt hour of electricity in South Australia was $259.59, while on December 26 it was only $5.06.

SA 26 Dec 15

It is clear that South Australia has the most expensive and most variable power on the eastern states grid.

The reason for the high (and extremely variable) price of electricity in South Australia is our very high dependence on solar and wind generation compared with the other states.

This results from the rapid expansion of renewable energy generation in South Australia.

According to a Deloitte Access Economics study recently released by the Energy Supply Association of Australia, South Australia’s solar and wind generation capacity per head of population is already more than three times that of any other state or territory.

A new Climate Change Strategy for South Australia was released by Premier Jay Weatherill and Minister for Climate Change, Ian Hunter, on November 29. The strategy was conveniently (if implausibly) rebadged as an economic development initiative.

In it they said to realise the benefits, we need to be bold. That is why we have said that by 2050 our state will have net zero emissions. We want to send a clear signal to businesses around the world: if you want to innovate, if you want to perfect low carbon technologies necessary to halt global warming – come to South Australia.

South Australia can be a low carbon electricity powerhouse. We have the ability to produce almost all of our energy from clean and renewable sources and export this energy to the rest of Australia.

But people want electricity to be available when they want it, and for it to stay on, with a steady current, while they want it – not just when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.

The trouble with solar and wind generation is that it only generates electricity intermittently. Covering this intermittency is expensive in terms of idling standby plant.

Generators with the required flexibility (peaking generators using natural gas) produce expensive electricity, but are becoming more and more needed as the penetration of wind and solar in our energy generation mix increases. This is why electricity prices have risen in South Australia.

Wind farms and other renewable-energy generators also undercut the prices offered by efficient, base-load, coal and gas power plants, because they receive guaranteed, non-market, returns from selling Generation Certificates to electricity retailers under the Commonwealth Government’s Renewable Energy Target (RET) Scheme.

Under RET, electricity retailers must buy enough certificates to demonstrate their compliance with the RET scheme’s ever-increasing annual targets.

The revenue earned by each wind farm from the sale of certificates is additional to the revenue received, if any, from its sale of electricity to the electricity market.

The yearly RET targets imply significant annual investment in wind farms, while the sale of certificates to retailers is designed to guarantee a return to wind farms sufficient to justify the required investment, irrespective of the return they receive from actually selling electricity to the market. Well done, wind farm lobby.

If sales of electricity are growing only slowly (as they are in South Australia’s slow-growing economy), the subsidised market share of wind farms and other renewables will rise and the sale of electricity from conventional base-load power plants will fall.

At some point the coal and gas-fired conventional power plants will become unable to contribute towards their fixed costs, and they will go out of business. This is what has happened in South Australia.

But this is the whole point of renewables in climate change terms – to knock off CO2-producing coal and gas-fired power plants, thereby helping to save the planet from climate change.

The Port Augusta power station is closing because of Commonwealth and South Australian Government policy to expand renewable energy generation. This is not an accident. To save the planet, it was always intended to have this effect, but maybe not next year. Leigh Creek is shutting down as an unintended consequence.

Pelican Point has been mothballed and Torrens Island is also slated for closure.

If the demand for electricity is low – on a public holiday, say – while the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, the price of electricity in South Australia will be low. Conventional generators will make losses, while the market losses of the renewable generators will be covered by their sale of Generation Certificates.

If the demand for electricity is high – a heat wave on a working day, say – and it is a still, overcast day, the price of electricity in South Australia will be high, because it will be mostly produced by high-cost, back-up, peaking generators.

The high cost of maintaining back-up generation capacity (sufficient, essentially, to duplicate the generation capacity of the renewables) means that the average price of electricity produced in a system dominated by renewables will always be expensive without strong interconnection, such as in Denmark, to large, inexpensive, electricity-producing regions nearby, that produce most of their electricity from coal, gas or nuclear sources.

We are not in that fortunate position. According to Deloitte, South Australia’s interconnectors with Victoria are able to supply only 23 per cent of South Australia’s peak demand (although their capacity is presently being increased).

According to a report in the Australian Financial Review in December, South Australian Treasurer and Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis called a meeting of energy users and suppliers to deal with the sharp rises and falls in wholesale electricity prices that, in particular, threaten the economics of the lead and zinc smelter at Port Pirie operated by Dutch company, Nyrstar.

South Australian businesses face electricity prices in 2016-18 of between $87 and $90 per megawatt hour, compared with $37-$41 in Victoria and $43-$48 in New South Wales.

South Australian irrigators are said to be facing electricity price increases of more than 100 per cent next year.

According to the AFR, forward electricity prices in South Australia are far higher than when Nyrstar signed up in May.

Further, the threat of disruption of supplies if the inter-connectors to Victoria fail, or become inadequate to meet the demand for electricity in South Australia on peak days, are of understandable concern to the company. Nyrstar is scheduled to start operations in mid-2016.

Options for the Government to stop Nyrstar quitting all look expensive.

In the short run, the Government’s main option could be to cover the extra anticipated cost of electricity and the cost of any supply disruptions with a further subsidy to Nyrstar over and above the $291 million it has already promised. This subsidy could be substantial.

In the long run, the Government’s main option could be to pay for even more interconnection to Victorian, New South Wales or Queensland coal or gas-powered electricity generators.

It will have to do so to protect the stability of the electricity grid in South Australia soon, anyway, as well as to put a cap on wholesale prices (the price of base load electricity interstate plus the cost of shipping it here through an interconnector). This will also be costly.

The high price of electricity in South Australia is eating away at our economic competitiveness. The probability that we will become, sometime in the distant future, a “low carbon electricity powerhouse” looks extremely low.

As often happens with Government initiatives in South Australia, significant Government subsidies are likely to be offered to appropriate companies to locate here, so that the Government’s aspirations appear to be vindicated.

Richard Blandy is an Adjunct Professor of Economics in the Business School at the University of South Australia.
In Daily

nyrstar port pirie