ScoMo's solution to record heatwave: BURN MORE COAL!

[Korto]

Australian Treasurer Scott Morrison has decided that the reason we're risking blackouts from overstressed power infrastructure during what is being described as "Record-setting temperatures" for the weekend (during a record-setting summer), is because we're not burning enough coal, goddammit!
Scott Morrison brings coal to question time: what fresh idiocy is this?
Un-fucking-believable.

PS: I won't be on-line for long, because the library shuts at 12, and there's no bloody way I'm switching on my computer inside my own house.

[Simon_Jester]

To be fair, the one nice thing about a coal-fired power plant (or fossil fuel power in general) is that it is really easy to ramp up extra power for sudden random emergencies. Having coal power plants that you only use in emergencies for peak demand wouldn't have nearly as much impact on global warming as the ones that burn all the time to carry base load.

[Tribble]

Though IIRC natural gas plants accomplish more or less the same thing and are better in terms of pollution and CO2. Does Australia have reserves of natural gas?

[B5B7]

Australia has massive reserves of natural gas. Over half of energy production in Australia comes from natural gas, and estimates are that have enough for 400 years. Also export large amount: LNG exports to Asian nations.
The current government is obsessed with "clean coal", but nuclear power and solar energy are both better than coal for the environment.

[loomer]

Of course, a good amount of our gas reserves are in unconventional form, and having just managed to make the frackers frack off in my home region, I'm not exactly keen to see us ramp up natural gas production.

[madd0ct0r]

To be fair, the one nice thing about a coal-fired power plant (or fossil fuel power in general) is that it is really easy to ramp up extra power for sudden random emergencies. Having coal power plants that you only use in emergencies for peak demand wouldn't have nearly as much impact on global warming as the ones that burn all the time to carry base load.

Coal power needs days to ramp up. The furnaces do not like cooling down either, each thermal contraction is lifespan lost. Were it not for global warming, the solution would be to run coal all the time and dump the surplus energy into desalination plants.

[Zaune]

In that case, the optimal solution might be to run nuclear all the time and dump the surplus into desalinisation.

[Simon_Jester]

To be fair, the one nice thing about a coal-fired power plant (or fossil fuel power in general) is that it is really easy to ramp up extra power for sudden random emergencies. Having coal power plants that you only use in emergencies for peak demand wouldn't have nearly as much impact on global warming as the ones that burn all the time to carry base load.

Coal power needs days to ramp up. The furnaces do not like cooling down either, each thermal contraction is lifespan lost. Were it not for global warming, the solution would be to run coal all the time and dump the surplus energy into desalination plants.

[Blinks]

My apologies, I had neglected those important factors.

[madd0ct0r]

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Electricity market operator denies being ‘asleep at the wheel’ during blackout
Australian Energy Market Operator executive David Swift admitted to Senate committee there was an error in South Australia forecast

View to the top of an electricity tower in Adelaide, South Australia
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Katharine Murphy Political editor
Friday 10 February 2017 07.24 GMT Last modified on Friday 10 February 2017 07.26 GMT

The Australian Energy Market Operator says it was not asleep at the wheel after another electricity shortage in South Australia on Wednesday caused blackouts for 40,000 people.

Senior managers from the electricity market operator faced combative questioning about their management of the South Australian weather event during a Senate committee hearing in Canberra on Friday.

As other states battled extreme temperatures, and faced the risk of blackouts, and as political debate continued to rage about energy policy, David Swift, executive general manager of corporate development at Aemo, defended the performance of his agency despite admitting there had been an error in their forecasting on the day of the blackout this week.

“We certainly weren’t asleep at the wheel,” Swift told the committee.

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Swift went through Aemo’s actions on the day of the blackout. He said Aemo issued market notices in response to what he described as “an unprecedented level of demand”, but despite the market price being very high, there had been no market response.

While the Turnbull government has made much of the role of intermittent renewable energy technologies as a contributor to a run of blackouts in South Australia over the past few months – Swift told the committee the problem on Wednesday was existing thermal generators were not available to come on line.


He said there were three thermal generators in the state on the day that were not available to meet the surge in demand. This lack of availability was attributed to “technical issues”.

Swift confirmed Aemo had powers to direct plants to activate during periods of high demand, but said Aemo had not directed a gas plant at Pelican Point to generate power on Wednesday because the market operator failed to foresee the need to issue the direction early enough on the day.

He said their projection of market demand for Wednesday had been out by 3%. Swift said Aemo had built into its projections that wind and solar power would drop off on Wednesday, but the situation had been manageable until outages were reported.

When Aemo contacted the plant operator at Pelican Point at just after 5.30pm eastern time to check whether it could begin power generation in order to prevent the blackout, the market operator was informed it would take up to four hours to kickstart the plant, and by that time, it was too late.


Extreme heat brings health, fire and power cut warnings across south-eastern Australia
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Swift told the committee he was unaware why Pelican Point had failed to respond to its market requests.

The South Australian energy minister, Tom Koutsantonis, has lambasted Aemo about Wednesday’s incident. After the blackout, he said Aemo had been “caught short”.

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“There was obviously more demand than they had generation turned on in SA. There was an issue with the ElectraNet transmission lines in Port Lincoln, which meant that the Port Lincoln generators couldn’t turn on,” he said. “They were caught short by not instructing the second unit at Pelican Point to turn on.”

But Malcolm Turnbull has played down the prospect the problems in South Australia are being caused by regulatory failure, or by commercial decisions by gas generators.

Earlier this week Bruce Mountain, an energy economics consultant at CME, said the underlying cause of the SA blackout on Wednesday was the same as those behind what happened in July last year, when low supply led to massive spikes in wholesale electricity prices.


Energy companies withholding supply to blame for July price spike, report finds
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“When the renewables are not operating flat out or making enough electricity, the fossil fuel generators have the market to themselves. And as we know from studies that I’ve done from 2008 onwards they can and do corner the market,” Mountain said.

After the July price spikes, Mountain’s analysis showed electricity generators were withholding supply in order to push up prices. “This is just classical market cornering,” he said. “If you decrease your output by half but as a consequence increase your price by a factor of ten, you’re better off decreasing your output.”


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Turnbull again on Friday declared the problem was the South Australian government not doing enough contingency planning to secure the grid. The South Australian government had “just mindlessly, complacently, negligently introduced more and more renewables into their grid,” the prime minister said.

“They have not put in place the backup gas-fired generators to come into play when the wind isn’t blowing. They have done nothing on storage at all.”

The government will need renewable energy to meet the Paris emissions reductions targets Australia has agreed to. A range of experts have told the government a form of carbon pricing for the electricity sector would allow the required transformation to low emissions energy sources to occur in the national grid at least cost to households and businesses.

But late last year, after government conservatives expressed objections, the government ruled out any form of carbon trading for the electricity sector.

The prime minister was asked on Friday whether it would be best to let the market drive the required transformation through putting a price on carbon, or setting up an emissions intensity scheme.

He said the market would not fix the problem at the moment. “You’ve got a number of big obstacles to the market, actually, right at the moment. Gas is not available. We’ve got masses of gas in Australia, but you’ve got bans on exploration and moratoriums on exploration in many parts of the country,” Turnbull said.

“Gas is more than twice as expensive here, as it is in the United States. It’s more expensive here than it is in Germany. Think about that. They’re importing it from Russia. So we’ve got a big problem with the availability of gas.”


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[/quote]


So three existing gas /fuel oil plants were down for maintenance, the agency Ballard up their forecast by 3% and then the remaining fuel plant refused to respond to market incentives...

Sounds like a confluence of factors. Fossil fuel power stations spend much more of a percentage of their time down for maintenance than most people realise

[Adam Reynolds]

If the current problem is extremely short periods of high peak demand, the best solution is probably energy storage rather than even more power plants that will do absolutely nothing for 98% of the year. This is also nice in that it serves to potentially offset fossil fuels by increasing the relative value of renewables, as the need to produce energy on demand decreases and thus the value of electricity produced by solar or wind can remain relatively high.

As for coal, it is notable in that coal plants actually have more than a bit in common with nuclear reactors, at least in America. Besides the point about operation, they are also similar in the high fixed costs of both, thanks to the scrubbers needed to eliminate sulfur and thus acid rain. With the price of natural gas plummeting in recent years due to fracking, there is no real effort to build coal fired plants at this point. Fracking is really the culprit more than environmental regulation, which Trump doesn't recognize. Just like how he doesn't recognize that automation rather than free trade is mostly what has caused the reduction in American jobs, but that is a different point.

There is something of an odd relationship between the various sources of energy and when they can be used. In the current generation system, natural gas is currently required regardless of what other sources you use, as it can fill peak demand more efficiently than anything else. Even when replacing coal with solar, you still need natural gas plants to fill in the gaps in production from renewables at this point. Unless you built up a truly ridiculous level of energy storage to fulfill that need instead.