Hillhater said:
Pick this up at about 7:21 in for a brief insight on some of the issues wind/solar introduce to a grid system..
https://youtu.be/kU6izpryqqw
Yep,
AEMO is forcing the use of "synchronous condensers" on all new large RE projects as far as I know. Because the power on the grid has become incredibly dirty/noisy from all the dodgy renewables jumping on the grid.
AEMO imposes tough conditions on new wind and solar in Victoria's 'full' grid
https://www.afr.com/news/aemo-imposes-tough-conditions-on-new-wind-and-solar-in-victorias-full-grid-20181012-h16l0h
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_condenser
https://www.energymagazine.com.au/synchronous-condensers-support-australias-clean-energy-transformation/
Apparently, the Renewable generators were angry about doing this, since it costs more money to put a synchronous condenser on their wind/solar farms and the fact is clear these renewable generators only want to collect the subsidy money out of the project to make money and don't give a stuff about the environment or even if the noisy power they are dumping on the grid is killing the grid.
But the renewables people went quiet after initially opposing it ( remember seeing a flood of articles on Reneweconomy about how evil AEMO is forcing RE companies to have to install synchronous condenser, but then it stopped) , I guess the RE subsidy miners did the sums and worked out they can still make a lot of money mining the RE subsidies even with having to install a synchronous condenser to actually provide useful power to the grid.
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Depends on the time of year and if SA has a good week or not on their imports or exports, right now SA is importing coal-electricty, but just a tiny bit.
Here are the last 3 days, you can see the purple for victorian coal imports to SA, but weirdly now you can see "gas coloured" exports going to Victoria, I don't know if this is a charting error or Victoria really does now buy SAs gas generation and SA instead elect to use their own wind, this is possible since Victoria has more of its own wind energy now and is probably incentivised to buy and use its own wind compared to SA's.
https://opennem.org.au/#/regions/sa
http://www.aemo.com.au/Electricity/National-Electricity-Market-NEM/Data-dashboard#nem-dispatch-overview

It was June last year when SA had a week with practically no wind (about 6%).
If you carefully look at the SA electricity charts on hot or cold days, you can almost read into the chart see the general population refusing to use the grid power despite getting really hot or cold, simply because the cost of electricity is too much.
If they wanted to work out how much they should charge for electricity so folks won't use it to stay comfortable unless they really have to, they found that point with SA.
Choosing not to use electricity to stay arguably only "remotely comfortable" because the cost is too high reflects the lifestyle of people of the 3rd world.
Reminds me if this interesting interview with this PhD scientist on his belief on how lowing the IQ of a nation by a mere average of 5 points can have dramatic effects in the well-being and general costs of living for the whole society
https://youtu.be/Zsh_b70NSFQ
^To me, this seems to be happening in Australia.
SA really has at best average 1500MW of power requirements, you can see it visually or you can take the MWh's consumed annually and average it by total hours in a year and see its about 1400MW.
So with SA having 2142MW total of wind-farms online now, it really does have well over "100% renewables", in installed capacity, so does Germany.
https://anero.id/energy/wind-energy
With SA at about 150% wind capacity installed, it's clear that the general gains of building any more would be small, especially if Victoria doesn't want to buy it because it wants to build/buy from its own new wind-farms.
Fact is, both of these states still emit about 10 times more co2 than France based nuclear, on an average basis.
We have all gone over this, in circles. It really comes down to this, some people are going to look at Germany/SA's setup at 10 times more co2 on average and say "yes I am OK with that, simply because I like renewables more than Nuclear, and I don't really care what the truth is", while others will say something else about it.
And Lithium battery storage isn't a solution,
battery storage doesn't create any power, it just stores power, because of the incredible amount of co2 released in lithium storage manufacturing, it is about 10 years worth of just buying fossil fuel for energy generation, as proven consistently with EV cars.
https://www.thegwpf.com/electric-vehicles-emit-more-co2-than-diesel-ones-german-study-shows/
The natural "cheaper solution" is just to burn fossil fuel to produce the energy, the natural high cost of lithium cells forces the reality of the relationship between co2 emissions intensity to create something just for storage vs just using that money to burn fossil fuels.
Batteries cannot make renewables reliable
https://www.cfact.org/2019/04/26/batteries-cannot-make-renewables-reliable/
https://stopthesethings.com/2019/05/09/batteries-not-included-trillions-spent-on-storage-wont-save-intermittent-wind-solar/
Supermassive artificial hydro electricity batteries made out of concrete, like in the style of swimming pools are not viable, because of all the concrete construction costs and thus energy to create such a storage facility makes it unviable, if we did make super massive concrete swimming pools it would be clear there was far more energy to create it than was worthwhile.
Lithium storage on the grid is the exact same problem, its just an invisible problem.
Lithium grid storage is just co2 displacement, making pre-emissions, thus making the emissions invisible.
Almost all hydro is geologically pre-made, this was given for free, if there weren't a large pocket to hold water naturally formed it wouldn't be worthwhile.
The worlds biggest lithium battery from Tesla is in the electricity chart above, the Tesla battery's power was dumped into the grid in full power when SA imported coal electricity in the purple colour part, the problem is Teslas "huge battery" is so tiny that its almost impossible to actually see it on the charts any more. 30MW on a 2000MW chart is a few pixels of colour.
https://hornsdalepowerreserve.com.au/
^You can see the worlds biggest lithium grid battery from Tesla here (scroll down to see the charge/discharge chart), still constantly dumping 30MW of power to keep things stable.
It used to be common that you would see it dump 30MW for up to 4 hours (its 129MWh battery) but lately its been very short bursts.
It's possible the Tesla battery is already showing signs of wearing out and they have changed its usage profile to just very short bursts of 30MW instead of more extended discharges at 30MW that were quite frequent.
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The UK celebrated a week without using coal, but it has just been replaced with gas, so its still 10 times more co2 on average than France being on nuclear.
Also note that the UK imports a remarkable about of Frances nuclear via undersea grid cable, 2000MW of nuclear from France,
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-07/u-k-sets-record-for-life-without-coal-as-green-power-grows
https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=country&countryCode=GB&remote=true
Despite all this, Eleciticitymap looks terrible for actually having co2 emissions they could be proud of, it looks like there hasn't been any wind on the UK for almost a week.
If we were comparing co2 emissions of these countries like with cars than the UK would be considered a complete joke with a 10 times more co2 emissions "renewable energy car" vs the "nuclear energy car" from France.
Also, note that Electricitymap is dubiously unable to show any of Australia right now, its been like this for a few days, obviously someone doesn't want Australia's electricity usage viable on elecitrictymap for this upcoming election this weekend. People love to look at SA on Electrictymap and laugh at the results of South Australia wind/solar/battery grid compared to nuclear based France.
Also, remember what this is all about. We should all be listening to scientists who have a PhD in Ecological Climatology, worked for the IPCC, along with Nobel awarding prize work. The only difference between this guy and other scientists who work for the IPCC is they smear the facts saying it's just a "hiatus" or "pause" in warming etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA5sGtj7QKQ
[youtube]fA5sGtj7QKQ[/youtube]
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EU dragged to court for backing forest biomass as ‘renewable energy’
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eu-dragged-to-court-for-backing-forest-biomass-as-renewable-energy/