Reply to Australia has so much solar that it’s offering everyone free electricity

Forum Index » Political Discussion

Reply to "Australia has so much solar that it’s offering everyone free electricity"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]

1.  Every territory in Australia is presently prepping emergency plans for blackouts due to what they are terming "reliability gaps" (euphemism for volatility introduced by transition to intermittent power sources).  If you know better than the people running the system over there, you should probably get on a plane and go help them.

https://cyanergy.com.au/blog/power-shortage-by-2027-in-australia-and-how-to-avoid-it/#:~:text=Coal%20plant%20retirements:%20In%20Australia,power%20stations%20will%20shut%20down.

This is a grid problem not a solar problem. Otherwise Australia’s would not function all the time because grid scale solar is now 21% of their generation and with other renewable reaching 77% of the generation power. If you do not invest in the grid it crashes. The grid does not crash because you use renewables.

In fact, the center-left government just introduced legislation materially reforming environmental review for natural gas and renewable projects because otherwise the system cannot possibly transition to avoid blackouts.  Does that sound like a stable system to you?

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/australian-government-says-its-environmental-protection-bill-will-help-business-2025-10-29/

Australia is a major natural gas producer. These plants are a result of that lobbying efforts. They’re very controversial. The energy generated will be the highest cost on their grid and the projects will not generate enough power to have a meaningful impact. Most experts say it is unneeded and will become a stranded asset. Just solar grid growth will make these plants idle. Add in the residential growth and the new battery program and these will be very expensive government boondoggles.

This has happened in Pakistan with their new coal plants. Pakistani grid is in a death cycle because solar power and batteries are cheaper and more reliable vs the grid. This makes people invest in solar and batteries off the grid. The power company increases in pricing because the customers base has shrunk causing more people to leave.

2.  I am not familiar with India, so I won't comment.

3.  California consistently has the highest or second highest energy prices in the lower 48 (both consumer and commercial).  I'm not sure that is the model I would point to, but you do you.  CA gets about 40% of its energy production from renewable, yet prices are twice as high as Texas, which gets about 31% of its production from renewable.  There are better examples to use.

Electricity is expensive in California because of high costs from wildfire mitigation(climate change), grid modernization and a tiered rate system where usage costs increase after a certain baseline. It is not high because of solar or other renewables. Though the nuclear power plants are very expensive.

4.  Why did the Spanish peninsula need more synchronous power generation (hint: that means hydro or dispatchable power generation, and explicitly excludes solar and wind)?   Would the underlying voltage surge (first known in history to cause a material blackout) have occurred in a fully dispatchable system?  Certainly much less likely.  Again, I am not anti-renewable.  I think it has an important role to play in energy markets.

Please they had one blackout because their grid is old and poorly connected not because they use solar, wind, nuclear and hydro. You seem to over look that Spain is using solar and wind all the time. It is a very large part of their grid and growing. This means you must update the grid.

5.  Wind was around 10-13% of power generation in ERCOT during winter storm Uri and solar was 0%.  Dispatchable power sources clearly failed Texas in that moment, but are you honestly trying to imply that wind and solar were reliable during the Texas winter storm?  Put down the Kool-Aid.

The storm hit a night but when the sun was out solar was generating power. Also residential solar helped reduce the demands on the grid overall. The big problem was natural gas supply was frozen at well sites, pipelines and processing plants were unable to provide fuel to power plants. You know that already. So guess you want to do away with natural gas power now? [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics