Tag: AEMO

Grid not-fit-for-purpose: On a warm day, Crazy Australia paid $3.5m to industry to *stop* working

Last Wednesday, during the near-miss of a blackout in Sydney, the AEMO spent $3,558,000 on “demand reduction” which means they paid productive industries to stop working to save the grid from a blackout. What it really means is that electricity users in New South Wales paid $3.5 million to businesses to do nothing, because the grid didn’t have enough energy, and the people in charge really didn’t want any embarrassing blackouts so close to an election.

From CFACT

By Joanne Nova

The Australian electricity grid is not-fit-for-purpose. And failure is being normalized.

Last Wednesday, during the near-miss of a blackout in Sydney, the AEMO spent $3,558,000 on “demand reduction” which means they paid productive industries to stop working to save the grid from a blackout. What it really means is that electricity users in New South Wales paid $3.5 million to businesses to do nothing, because the grid didn’t have enough energy, and the people in charge really didn’t want any embarrassing blackouts so close to an election.

So renewables are wonderful, clean and cheap but your workers, assets and capital will sometimes need to sit around and do nothing so we can stop some storms in the 22nd century.

In political spin, planned blackouts can also be called “Virtual Power Plants”

“Demand Management” is a smarmy marketing word for a lot of little Blackouts. In the lexicon of a failing grid, all the bad-words get tortured into iced doughnuts — if your company has agreed to be ready to shut down at a moment’s notice on a warm day, that’s not being on “Standby to Close”, instead your business is a ““pre-activated” extra reserve.”

In Renewable-World-Psychosis bad is good: your smelter used to make aluminum, but now you can sell “electricity use reduction” as well, and the AEMO (the grid manager in Australia) will call you a “Virtual Power Plant” too. Australian companies can now sell their own blackouts back to the grid. Neat eh?

Indeed, you and I are probably thinking about this all wrong — like electricity is a net good, and a dead smelter is a waste of space.

John Rolfe, Daily Telegraph

… AEMO CEO Daniel Westerman told an energy planning and regulation Senate committee hearing that the market operator spent $3,557,700 on reducing demand to increase emergency reserves in NSW on Wednesday November 27 as a supply shortage took shape.

Mr Westerman indicated AEMO did not end up having to reduce Wednesday’s demand by as much as first expected. But, in anticipation of a greater shortfall than eventuated, AEMO had “pre-activated” extra reserves.

Mr Westerman said the purchased electricity use reduction came from “virtual power plants”, which were an “aggregation of … smaller demand.”

For what it’s worth, which is not much, the large aluminium smelter Tomago, was not forced to shut down, but it was “pre-activated” and ready to close. Apparently, even though the cool weather change came through, they shut down that afternoon anyway, or perhaps they just gave up.  Who could blame them?

Australians are not just paying companies to do nothing, they pay them to be ready to do nothing too. There’s a part payment for the pre-activated companies, even if they don’t have to switch off. It reflects the hassle of running an industrial outfit with your hand on power lever, and your brain in the state of uncertainty. And that’s the thing isn’t it — no company is going to be more productive “on standby” than it is running full tilt. It’s a stupid way to run a nation.

Australia is on the road to becoming a “pre-activated nation”

We’re a first world country ready to be the third world at a moment’s notice.

Pretty soon the whole country will be paying itself to be on standby, or selling our own blackouts back to the grid, what then, eh? The Stone Age?

Your air conditioner can be a virtual power plant too

Image by Эльвина Якубова from Pixabay

John Rolfe in the Daily Telegraph found a Monash Uni professor who was cheerfully telling the world Australians will need to give up control of their air-conditioners so their AEMO masters can turn them down on hot days when they need them the most.

Dr Dargaville is an expert in “large-scale energy system transition optimisation” —  a thing that’s never happened once, anywhere in the world. So it’s like being a specialist in Yetis except with less credibility. There’s a possibility that a real Yeti exists, but we know for a fact, there aren’t any optimal large-scale renewables grids. There aren’t even any optimal small scale grids, just different scales of blackouts.

Australians fuming over big change coming to air-con, house power control

Dr Dargaville … said authorities would have to expand their options to deal with more frequent instances of surprisingly high demand and low supply.

Options were likely to include the installation of “widgets” on aircons that allow third parties to engage “economy mode” to reduce power use in peak periods.

When asked in a Newspoll: “Should authorities be allowed to take control of power usage in your household?”, naturally, 94% said “No”. But we know that when they are offered a $400 cashback for a “smart” but government-controlled air conditioner, they may buy the plan. It’s already happening in Queensland. It’s only supposed to be a few days a year, but last summer, the grid officials reached into their homes and turned off their air conditioners six times in two months.

Dr Dargaville speaks for The Blob — You will own nothing (and be hot and bothered):

…consumers should not be alarmed by such moves, he said. “There will be a period of adjustment but it will be become normalised,” Dr Dargaville told [The Daily Telegraph]

Naturally, it’s not their fault — they blame climate change, and fossil fuels.

If the energy system was less volatile you wouldn’t need to use it,” he added, but that was unrealistic given more extreme weather, reduced reliability of coal-fired power and more generation from variable sources such as wind and solar.

Every part of this trend is a step in a dumb direction. We’re paying more for less in every single aspect. More people sit around being useless, or half useful, or distracted. More companies make fewer goods. And more government makes more government which is the worst thing of all…

Those who control the energy, control the people.

h/t David Maddison, Strop

This article originally appeared at JoNova

Cold, windless Victoria may run out of gas before the end of winter

For some reason that no climate model can explain, Australia has run out of wind power three months in a row, which means we had to use more gas than expected. It’s also been colder than climate models predicted, despite global emissions being higher than ever in history. For some other reason that no rational adult can explain, the State of Victoria banned gas drilling for most of the last decade (to reduce the beachy-weather days in eighty years) and thus, as night follows day, the state is running out of gas. Ergo, predictably, it is also facing blackouts, cost blowouts and manufacturers dependent on gas are warning they may have to close down, or move to the US, where gas is still cheap.

From JoNova

By Jo Nova

It wasn’t supposed to be this cold and windless in Australia

For some reason that no climate model can explain, Australia has run out of wind power three months in a row, which means we had to use more gas than expected. It’s also been colder than climate models predicted, despite global emissions being higher than ever in history. For some other reason that no rational adult can explain, the State of Victoria banned gas drilling for most of the last decade (to reduce the beachy-weather days in eighty years) and thus, as night follows day, the state is running out of gas. Ergo, predictably, it is also facing blackouts, cost blowouts and manufacturers dependent on gas are warning they may have to close down, or move to the US, where gas is still cheap.

If only the climate models could predict temperatures and wind even a month in advance?

The AEMO (our electricity grid manager) says Victoria will run out of gas before winter runs out of bite. Apparently Victorians are pulling twice as much gas out of their main storage as they can afford to at the moment. Not only does Victoria need the gas for electricity, but 80% of Victorian homes have gas for cooking or heating. And then there is manufacturing, not just in Victoria but most of Australia as gas prices rise all over the East Coast.

Who needs explosives and fertilizer, anyway?

Orica — one of the largest gas users in the country warned it may have to cut production and jobs in Newcastle due to the gas shortage. Since they supply explosives to the mining industry, and Australia is a big quarry, the repercussions would spread quickly.

Victoria’s main gas facility to run out by end of winter as wind farm output slumps to five-year low

By Perry Williams, and Rhiannon Down, The Australian

The nation is facing a deepening energy crisis on two fronts, with gas shortages so acute that Vic­toria’s main storage plant is set to run out by the end of winter and one of Australia’s biggest manufacturers warning it will slash jobs and close factories if supplies ­remain short.

German Morales, Orica’s president for Australia Pacific and sustainability, told The Australian that “there is not enough gas and there is not affordable gas”.

“Clearly if we fail to secure long-term gas at a reasonable market price, we may be put in a position of rethinking what is the manufacturing strategy for ammonia in Australia,” he said. “The Australian gas price is significantly more expensive than that you can buy in other jurisdictions, such as the US. That’s making it very difficult to justify manufacturing in Australia.”

And we thought wind generation was bad in April and May but June may be worse.

The awfulness of the fickle wind is upon us and reaching into our wallets. This was the total contribution of 11.5GW of wind generation to our national grid this month. Paul McArdle from WattClarity said the capacity factor for wind is as low as 21%.

Anero.id

Not-so-coincidentally on June 4th and June 13th when wind generation was exceptionally low, average prices in the whole system doubled (See below).

And this is a major problem with an electricity market that isn’t designed to find the cheapest solution for consumers. Cheerleaders like the CSIRO will still be saying “wind is cheap” when it’s obvious the lack of wind in a wind-dependent-system is very expensive. But these price spikes that were caused by wind turbines will be slapped on coal, gas or hydro, whatever rescued the grid, not on the wind industry. The more wind fails, the “higher” the prices are for its competitors. Neat eh? If only the “experts” at the CSIRO understood how unreliable wind drives up the cost of everything else on the grid.

Bad days for wind were June 4th and June 13th, then most other days too.

Those prices are awful and often obscenely high across all five states… On June 13th wind generation fell to just 88MW at lunchtime, and was low all day. The spike this produced is obvious.

Some of the lows like June 20th caused mayhem because they were hitting at dinner time when solar power has gone to bed. Back before the subsidized renewables gold rush, prices would average $30/MWh across the whole grid — not just all day, but all month. This month so far, average prices respectively are SA $197, Tas, $287, Qld $132, Vic $182, NSW $165.

It takes some skill to run out of gas when we are also one of the Big Three LNG exporters in the world, but the Australian government has achieved this. Incompetence knows no bounds:

But hey, winter might be warm from now, who knows?

Not to belabor the point, but if we had decent climate models, we would know.

Gas price cap train wreck on the way

by Saul Kavonic, The Australian

The gas industry is scrambling to try to squeeze out any incremental supply, going as far as blending extra LPGs into the gas stream to eke out an extra per cent or two of production. Every lever to lift supply has now been pulled.

Australia’s energy market is one hiccup away from a major crisis, again. The gas market train wreck – long visible on the horizon – is now in front of us. Set in motion by Labor’s hostile gas policies since 2022, there are no easy levers left to pull to keep the lights on, while also keeping us warm in winter, and manufacturing jobs going. And it is only going to get worse in the years ahead.

If we run out of gas, we’ll just have to burn diesel, or sit in the dark, banging our heads on a cold wall.

Image by ThankYouFantasyPictures from Pixabay

Rating the grid. Facts and logic make no impact on the faith of the Woke.

Let´s wait for it to happen.

No lights, no stoves ,no fuel pumps, no supermarkets etc , etc , but the ripper of them all no kids doing the tap, tap , tap .
Just imagine the tantrums , driving the Parents to Insanity .
The Hospitals tragedy may be avoided by emergency generators .

UNITED STATES – AUGUST 15: Manhattan skyline is dark as the sun comes up on the morning after a massive power failure caused the largest power outage in the nation’s history, affecting 50 million people in parts of seven states and Canada. (Photo by Mike Albans/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)

Let´s wait for it to happen.

No lights, no stoves ,no fuel pumps, no supermarkets etc , etc , but the ripper of them all no kids doing the tap, tap , tap .

Just imagine the tantrums , driving the Parents to Insanity .

The Hospitals tragedy may be avoided by emergency generators .

Seriously , it will be a hard object lesson for the unprepared , but the sooner it happens the sooner it will be fixed ..crossed fingers ,toes and testicles !


From New Catallaxy

By Rafe Champion

We read at RenewEconomy that the Reliability Panel is reviewing the way they rate the reliability of the grid. The Panel operates under the auspices of the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC, not to be confused with the Australian Energy Market Operator, AEMO). The reliability of the grid has been a matter of great concern since the closure of Hazelwood power station in 2017 brought us to the point where there is next to no spare capacity in the conventional power system that has always been dominated by coal.

Leaving out a lot of technical detail for the moment, they have woken up to the rising risk of wind droughts. The post goes on…

These risks include [events] such as “dark doldrums”, or “dunkelflaute”, where there are unusually widespread and prolonged reductions of both sunlight and wind, or it could include transmission outages, ageing coal plant failures, or other “acts of God,” or should we say acts of climate change.

Even the very forecasting of “dark doldrums” is complicated by changing weather patterns, which are becoming more extreme and mean that using historic data is not adequate for accurate forecasts.

“The nature of renewable droughts, which require long periods of weather that is similar over time (no wind, no sun), means that the Panel will need chronologically consistent weather and cannot simply over-sample from the more extreme parts of the historic weather distribution,” it notes.

“As such, the panel is considering the need to develop a number of chronologically consistent, weather biased solar, wind and demand adjustments to be applied to existing model inputs.

“That effectively means that the modelling will adjust the period-by-period shape of the demand profiles and solar and wind inputs to reflect a lower solar and wind contribution and rerun the simulations.”

The panel notes that different countries have different measurements and different standards – some defined as loss of load expectation (LOLE), loss of load probability (LOLP), or loss of load hours (LOLH).

LOLE is defined as the expected proportion of time for which the available generation capacity is insufficient to meet demand at least once per day. LOLE is commonly used in Europe, where Ireland targets a LOLE of eight hours per year; France targets three hours per year, and the Netherlands targets four hours per year.

I think that the Reliability Standard needs to be revised to assess how often there will be a break in the continuity of supply of wind and solar power to the grid. In other words, the number of windless or effectively windless nights per annum or per decade when RE, that is wind, solar power and stored RE will break down and the grid will go black unless it is kept up by conventional power (some mix of coal, gas, hydro and nuclear power) that has been kept in reserve to  back up or “firm” the intermittent input from sun and wind.)

The LOLEs at present are applied to grids where there is still a great deal of reliable power in the system so they are only concerned with limited blackouts which sacrifice some consumers for the sake of the grid as a whole.

Wherever there is a seriously diminished supply of reliable power due to the success of net zero policies, then windless nights are a real danger. Britain and Germany have passed that point and we have reached the point where the closure of another coal plant or two will produce a crisis whenever there is a windless or near windless  night.

That is the threat that I tried to convey in the first briefing note that I wrote for the Energy Realists, using the term “choke point” to signal the sudden death nature of choking or drowning where people are completely deprived of oxygen. The comparable situation is deprivation of windpower when it really matters, that is, when the supply of dispatchable or reliable power has been reduced to a critical level that Britain, Germany, Australia and probably some states in the US and elsewhere have reached lately.

There is also the fact that RE can DISPLACE coal power but not REPLACE it.

The RE enthusiasts focus on the high points of RE penetration in South Australia on sunny and windy Sunday afternoons (100%) or the penetration across the NEM on sunny and windy afternoons where it is now routinely near 50% and often approaching 60%. They foster the illusion that our progress towards 100% RE will be sustainable, and on a good afternoon we are over half-way.

To nurture that illusion the AEMO added the Renewable Penetration tag to the Data Dashboard.

In fact we are not being dragged towards net zero by the ever-higher penetration of RE because we are moving towards that destination like a convoy that moves at the speed of the slowest vessel. The “slowest vessel”, the weak link in the chain, the lowest point of a flood levee or a fence is the windless or near windless night

Consequently wind droughts are about to take centre stage in the net zero drama.  The 64,000 dollar question is – how did they escape attention until they are about to crash the system? Spoiler alert, I think the irresponsible authorities in the met bureaux of the world used the wrong metric for “wind resources” namely the average wind velocity.