At a time when clarity on climate change and energy has never been more important, efforts to muddy the water are escalating in the media.
Just look at the latest episode of Insiders this past weekend, when Energy Minister Angus Taylor claimed that as a result of the Coalition government “there’s less carbon in the atmosphere” while Barry Cassidy countered with carbon emissions “are up over the last five years. Indeed the facts are clear: Australia’s climate pollution is rising.”
Monday’s opinion piece by economist Geoff Carmody in the AFR is another classic attempt to muddy the waters.
While Carmody’s scaremongering piece portrays renewables and storage as a prohibitively expensive, unviable undertaking, the reality is vastly different once you strip away all the flawed assumptions.
Australians shouldn’t need advanced degrees in climate and energy issues to make informed decisions on the issues that will affect virtually every aspect of their lives.
Here are some simple ways to tell whether claims about energy and emissions in the media are credible, or, in the preferred parlance of energy experts, “unmitigated twaddle”.
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Is the scenario proposed developed by a credible body?
A scenario is not a prediction, but there is a difference between a well researched scenario and a back-of-the-envelope hypothetical. In his article, Carmody asked us to consider a hypothetical scenario of wind and solar capacity replacing two coal-burning power stations — Hazelwood and Liddell — and then extrapolates the results to 100% renewables. To do this, he had to make a number of assumptions.
The biggest assumption Carmody made was that for every wind turbine you build and every solar panel you install you must back it up 100% by batteries or pumped hydro. The reality works very differently.
While wind and solar generation varies, it does see generation every single day of the year. Over the last 12 months, the average generation of wind and solar combined is 70 GWh per day. The minimum day was 26 GWh, 37% of the average. Even if the answer is to fully back this up with battery storage, it would only require 63% of energy production to be backed up, not 100%. But in the foreseeable future it would be much cheaper to rely on existing generators, particularly hydro and gas power generators, to provide more power on these low renewable days.
The good news is that the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) agrees. In the Integrated System Plan, the AEMO confirmed that the cheapest and smartest replacement for the country’s ageing coal-fired generators will be in solar, wind and storage technologies.
As energy policy expert Tennant Reed from the Australian Industry Group put it: “days-long 100% capacity of lithium battery backup is nobody’s plan,” so the cost of doing this is a moot point.
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Does the author reference sources and are they recent?
While Carmody references the AEMO a number of times, nowhere does he actually reference his sources.
For example, Carmody refers to 15% capacity factor of solar systems. The capacity factor tells us a given power station’s electricity generation output compared to its maximum output capacity. This is a critical factor for a power station’s viability. The higher the capacity factor, the more electricity output. Modern solar farms in our sunniest locations now meet over 30% capacity factors, with over 35% on the horizon, more than double Carmody’s assumption. We are also seeing the excellent performance of solar power across the grid in meeting and reducing peak demand on our hottest days. Things are changing quickly. All this new information means all plans must adjust quickly, and energy analysis can often be out of date.
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What are the people who work in the electricity system actually doing?
If you want to see what the future of the electricity system looks like, have a look at what the companies, households and market bodies are actually doing.
According to the Climate Council, Australian households and businesses are installing rooftop solar PV at record rates. No bank or energy company is planning on financing or building a new coal-fired power station (unless there are billions of dollars of government funding put on the table). Acting on climate change is a top election issue and even companies like Santos are calling for a price on carbon. And AEMO is putting significant resources into learning how to integrate more wind and solar into the system. The world is changing and not in the way people like Carmody think.
Those who say an electricity system powered by clean energy can’t be done and will be too expensive need to get out of the way of those already doing it and driving down the cost in the process.
Jonathan Prendergast is an energy analyst currently working with the Business Renewables Centre Australia and Nicky Ison is a research associate at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at UTS and founding director of Community Power Agency.
You failed to mention Energy Minister Angus Taylor’s beloved pipe dream “Battery of the Nation”.
Stay tuned for his next infrastructure project “Extension cord of the Nation”.
Angus is a true visionary and he plans the 100% capacity increase that will future proof Australia’s anticipated increasing energy demand with, “Double Adapter of the Nation”.
He certainly sounded like a cast member from ‘Utopia’ in the interview on ‘Insiders’. And of course his lips were moving , so…
I’m sure somewhere in the grey sludge that remains of my brain is a file on Tasmania running low on water.
It was a while ago, and there was panic about If the water doesn’t run then the power don’t flow
. With reducing rainfall they may need Ng’s long extension lead.
I do recall that the Kiwis had a similar situation.
I think they were looking at pumped hydro where existing stocks of water are pumped uphill using solar power then allowed to flow back down through turbines when the sun goes down.
I hope that is so.
For mine pumped hydro is a great method. Throw in tidal power and problem solved
The Merkin Isle has had a couple of drought years – not yet ended – which meant that since 2016 the export of power to Victoria has been greatly diminished. Occasionally the Hydro had to actually pull the plug to ensure they generated enough for domestic consumption.
This article is just salesmen’s spin. They want you to spend your money – our money – on near-useless renewables that they just happen to be selling. The condemning analysis by “Carmody” is an article in the AFR subtitled, “Politicians and Greens have never really leveled with Australians about the extraordinary of cost of reliable wind and solar power or battery storage”
The catch is that word “reliable”. Because there is no way in the world that intermittent power from wind or solar can provide our economy with reliable electricity on demand. The article actually admits as much by inserting the weasel words, “and gas”. Because you can be sure while there is any gas admitted in an allegedly green power supply, most of the reliable energy will been powered by the gas. Given that gas turbines inefficiently burn their gas, you might as efficiently have put in gas-fired steam generators to (reliably) supply the lot.
Really Roger, “no way in the world…..”? Time to do a bit of research before making ridiculous statements like this. Its just a tad fatuous to think you know more than the professional energy planners in AEMO, who are in the process of designing the transition process that you mistakenly believe to be impossible.
Okay PacoBello, I’ll raise the ante. The article wants us to believe that AEMO recommends that wind plus storage is the cheapest, effective replacement for coal-fired generators. (Solar is more unreliable than wind so its storage would make it more expensive.) But it isn’t true – the link provided does not support that assertion at all. Check your facts, indeed.
There is no way in the world that wind alone can provide reliable electricity on demand, on any scale. Storage on the gigawatt-year scale would require more unused mountain valleys than Australia has got. In fact, the smartest and cheapest replacement for Australia’s fossil-fired steam generators would be an equivalent fleet of non-fossil-fired steam generators.
We do need professional electrical engineers to be making analysis comments on Crikey despite the abuse to be expected. It would have to be retired engineers, because the engineers at AEMO are bound by their employment to smile politely and stay silent.
Thanks for clarifying that Roger. I guess we’ll just have to shut down all the wind farms and send all the solar panels to landfill. The recent hot weather power cuts in all Eastern power grid states except the one with the most renewables must have just been a hiccup.
“we’ll just have to shut down all the wind farms and send all the solar panels to landfill” [ironic comment]
Good heavens no. Instead, we should help them with a hefty carbon price. We need only require that companies with intermittent generation level out their supply with storage or whatever and, along with other generating bodies, bid every five minutes to supply AEMO a guaranteed amount of electricity on demand. Then, if this legendary storage really is available, the industry can grow to take over the grid.
On the other hand, if they have had to sneak gas turbines in to make up levelled power, they will be motivated by the hefty carbon price to convert some of their turbines to steam… and to send some of their windmills or panels to landfill.
I’ll keep that in mind, Roger, when my solar panels are installed later this year (maybe even with a $2000 rebate if labor gets in) and my bills are slashed by 3/4rs if not more. The last few decades of privatisation of energy and the resulting high prices have left me with little empathy for the fossil fuel industry.
The suggestion of a subsidy after the election must have hit solar panel sales temporarily. I’ve put off getting mine until I find out whether there’ll be a subsidy.
well roger, you`re clearly ill informed, brainwashed or just plain ignorant on solar, I generate up to 70 kwh a day in spring.summer and autumn and 40kwh in the depth of winter and use 10kwh per day for my own use then sell the surplus for 15c a kwh hour to my supplier who then onsells to non solar home owners at a reduced price to them, my supplier company is D.C power, a new co operative set up that sells shares to its customers with the plan to create an expanding solar network to increase roof top solar and reduce the instalation costs and power cost to all members with or without solar , only $50 to become an investor member, its the future roger and you and your kind are the past like the abbottaurus rex dinosaurs your kind will soon be extinct and I thank god for that.
Brian Crooks strikes out with abuse because he is unable to strike out with facts. For all of his praise of the the solar feed-in rort, he is unable to point out how it can decarbonise Australia. Indeed, he cannot point out any emissions reduction at all.
You may have been persuaded that your intermittent solar injection will get transported (somehow separate from the normal electricity) to a company that stores it up until somebody actually demands extra power than the grid can supply. The truth is a lot more shabby. Your unsolicited power is injected intermittently, directly into the grid. The grid operator compensates by reducing steam generation and replaces it with the less efficient but fast responding gas turbines. Thus, your band of solar investors may have caused an increase in gas usage.
Check out the facts on this apparently generous company that you are pouring money into. It doesn’t actually generate power. It doesn’t even invest in storage. Like other retailers, it on-sells fossil-generated electricity to you on demand, just when you need it, not just when the sun shines. It offers to sell you more solar panels and batteries, no doubt at a cheaper rate because you are a member. However your membership is costing you a flat rate of $1200 a year (and another $50 to become an investor member), whether the government of the day is continuing to fund the rort or not. That’s a bit like putting money in the plate at church, after the sermon that forgives us our remaining emissions.
Far from helping with eliminating emissions, those solar panels are distracting the public from the main threat – any emissions at all.
That should say, a flat rate of $120 per year, not $1200.
My red flags are when they start off with “when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine!” Then there is the Andrew Bolt standard attack on alarmists, warmists by attacking Tim Flannery for some comment he made a decade earlier about it never raining again or that he bought a house near a river that could be inundated by sea level rises etc. The other one is that the earth is actually cooling based on the 1998 extreme world temperatures but this bull Shyte argument has disappeared from discussion because the 1998 temperature levels have been blown out of the water in the last decade. By now I suspect we know the climate charlatans.
Why people still doubt the value of roof solar really astounds me, are they just dumb or simply brainwashed by the political sceptics and the coal barons, I`ve had roof solar since 2008 and have not paid a cent for my power since, in fact I get a credit every bill, the trick is to put as many panels as you can fit on your roof, it not only generates power but protects it from storm damage by its sheer weight also provides protection from the sun and helps keep the home cool, its a win win all round.
Totally agree.
It works the same for me.
I also need to check roger,s figures on thermal efficiency of gas turbines Vs steam turbines.
124CU, thank you for checking the facts. I wish more people would do it.
According to Wikipedia’s entry on “Combined Cycle Gas Turbine” a CCGT plant achieves 62% thermal efficiency. The corresponding entry on SCGT, single cycle combustion turbines says that when used as a peaking power plant, “a typical large simple-cycle gas turbine may… have 35–40% thermal efficiency”
A wind farm is generally considered to have a load factor of 30%. An isolated system might have a wind farm backed by SCGTs. Thus 100 units of average power consume 100*0.7/0.40 = 175 units of gas. If the system were replaced by CCGT, the hundred units of power would consume 100/0.62 = 161 units of gas, less than a system using maximum wind. That is, the maximum possible wind penetration cannot reduce our gas consumption.
To be fair, when wind or solar have negligible penetration, the effect of their intermittency is similarly negligible and big steam power stations are able to supply the intermittent loss by varying the spin of their majority turbines. However, we don’t want negligible carbon-free power – we want 100% carbon free power. And wind can’t do it.