Tom Quirk on the SA electricity debacle

 It looks like a natural disaster but brought on by the fragility of the South Australian power system caused by the size of the variations in wind power.

 The failure is most likely to have been triggered by the violent fluctuations from the Snowtown wind farms (Figure 1 and 5). Shortly after 3 pm there was a loss of 200MW with a partial recovery some twenty minutes later of 100MW. The total wind farm supply for South Australia also shows these variations (Figure 2).

This would have put a shock to the system for frequency stability at 50 cycles per second. For most of the day the local gas fired generators were only supplying 100 MW (Figure 3) with the balance to match demand with supply coming from Victoria. But the local generators started to increase and vary their output with first a 150 MW loss at Snowtown just before mid-day and then 50 MW variations that followed. Shortly before 3 pm the Hallett wind farms lost and then recovered 70 MW in a 20 minute interval (Figure 4 and 6). This added to the final Snowtown wind farm 200 MW loss. This detail is shown in Figure 5.

So the system instability could trigger Victoria shutting off the link to South Australia and the blackout followed.

The physical network may not be very robust as can be seen in images of broken pylons. Transmission lines are expensive at $1 to $3 million per km. Each wind farm must be connected to deliver maximum power to the network even though its average performance might be only 33% of maximum so connection costs may have been held to a minimum..

The trouble was north of Adelaide so could it have been isolated with the remaining network continuing or was so much power coming from the north that a blackout would follow no matter what was done

Figure 1   Snowtown `1 2 3    150 km north of Adelaide

Figure 2 Total South Australian wind farm production

Figure 3 Total fossil fuel supply from gas turbines (and diesel?) generators

Figure 4Hallett 1 2    150 km north of Adelaide

Figure 5Snowtown wind farms Data source AEMO

Figure 6 Hallett wind farms Data source AEMO

Post script.  AEMO  somewhat corroborated this analysis at 9 a.m. on 5 September as follows

"The preliminary report explains how severe weather moved through South Australia on the afternoon of Wednesday 28 September 2016, with high winds, thunderstorms, lightning strikes, hail, and heavy rainfall. The weather resulted in multiple transmission system faults including, in the space of 12 seconds, the loss of three major 275 kV transmission lines north of Adelaide.

"Generation initially rode through the faults, but at 16:18hrs, following multiple faults in a short period, 315 MW of wind generation disconnected, affecting the region north of Adelaide. The uncontrolled reduction in generation increased the flow on the main Victorian interconnector (Heywood) to make up the deficit and resulted in the interconnector overloading.

"To avoid damage to the interconnector, the automatic-protection mechanism activated, tripping the interconnector and resulting in the remaining customer load and electricity generation in SA being lost. This automatic-protection operated in less than half a second at 16:18hrs and the event resulted in the SA regional electricity market being suspended."

Flawed economic modeling used to destroy mining

Alan Moran

The Australia Institute has commissioned research seeking to demonstrate that banning investment in coal mining would have a negligible effect on the Australian economy.  The research results rests on a near total transferability of capital, labour and technology to almost identical opportunities deemed to be present elsewhere in the economy.  

The research found a ready market with kindred spirits within our very own ABC.  But the message behind it also has a wider currency not only with The Greens but also with sections of the ALP and even withing the coalition.  We must find a way to deliver the message that investment in resources (and modern agriculture) is not only essential to our standard of living but also fully consistent with maintaining a pleasing environment.  

See the following piece at Spectator on line.

Fracking restraint denies us wealth & has no upside

Alan Moran

The Andrews Government in Victoria has set in motion regulatory arrangements that will permanently prevent hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and other measures of tapping “unconventional” gas while maintaining in place an embargo of all other on-shore gas exploration until 2020.

Such intervention to prevent wealth creation has come a long way in a short time.  Five years ago, Friends of the Earth and other green alarmist agitators garnered support among the farming community to oppose fracking and other production technologies that allow gas and oil to be extracted from coal seams and shale.  The farmers had little to gain from the mining and were susceptible to opposing anything new that someone said would hurt them. For the green groups it was just another step on the way to banning search for and use of all fossil fuels.

Fracking involves the use of tiny quantities of benzene and other chemicals to tease out gas and oil from geological structures that are difficult to mine under conventional procedures.  Fracking itself has been around for 65 years but it is only in the last decade or so that it has been extensively used.

Two million of wells have been sunk worldwide – mainly in North America and, though green groups raise scare campaigns, the US EPA has found not one case of harm.

Meanwhile the technology has revolutionised the energy positions of the US and Canada, and now accounts for more than half of oil and gas production.  Though the Obama Administration has been antagonistic, banning fracking on federal lands and opposing pipelines carrying the gas the technology has transformed the US into a net energy exporter.  In Canada it has driven down electricity generation costs – in the case of Ontario from the previous five cents per kWh to two cents – and a tenfold expansion is expected over the next 25 years.  Energy developments based on fracking and similar technologies have been a rare bright spot in the US economy over the past decade.

Green groups have had great success in focussing opposition to the technology in Australia.

Only in Queensland has the government placed few restraints on unconventional gas production.  Even so coal seam gas now accounts for one-third of total Australia production with most of the Queensland supply earmarked for export.

Working with shock-jock Alan Jones with a claim that fracking will harm farming green groups have bullied the NSW government to place 90 per cent of the state off-limits to the technology.

Even greater damage has been done in Victoria.  Spooked by the FoE campaign, a pusillanimous Victorian Coalition government in 2012 placed a temporary ban on fracking for gas and gas exploration generally.  Reviews of this, notably by Peter Reith, found that the technology poses no threat and the bans can only harm the state’s economy.

But Victoria’s Coalition opposition made it clear that they would extract political capital from an ALP government relaxation of the embargo.  This may have been instrumental in ensuring an Andrews government that is, in any event, opposed to fossil fuel energy is now to impose a permanent ban on fracking and other methods of extracting unconventional gas.  It is also to extend the embargo on conventional gas exploration at least until 2020.

Green groups have expressed disappointmner that a window has been left open for conventional exploration after 2020.  Astonishingly, the state shadow energy and resources minister, the Liberal’s David Southwick, said that, in adopting the Opposition’s own policy, “Daniel Andrews is condemning Victorians to higher energy costs at a time when cost of living pressures are making life tough.”

Nobody knows how much potential wealth is being locked away as a result of Victoria’s ban on gas exploration.  The US Energy Department puts prospectivity in Australia as comparable to that of the US.  It is certain that the policy will mean dearer domestic gas and electricity prices.  It is even possible that the policy is preventing a vast new source of income being created.

All this is being prevented by a body politic that is extremely risk averse and refuses to take on leadership roles to combat green mysticism.

The Climate Change Authority's specious advice

Alan Moran

There have been several hundred Australian analyses of climate change policy and its costs and benefits.  Most have provided profundities and attractively presented impressive looking modelling, normally demonstrating that the medicine, though bitter at first, will make us better and possibly richer in the long run.

The latest such document is that of the Climate Change Authority and it does not disappoint.

It concludes, unexceptionally, that market mechanisms – in plain words a carbon tax — offer the lowest cost means of getting from A (a world where we would be at 650 parts per million CO2 equivalent) to B (a world where we would be at 500 parts per million).

To achieve this means a net return of carbon dioxide, now buried in fossil fuels, back into the atmosphere which brings about a rise in average global temperatures.  That increase is a little over 1°C (during Roman times temperatures were 2-6°C warmer than today) unless there is an additional feedback via water vapour but the climate models on which such a rise is estimated have so far proven to massively overstate the temperature record.  The real world shows temperatures to have increased 0.3°C about a third of the rate forecast by climate models incorporating a water vapour amplification.

At the heart of the Climate Change Authority’s analysis is consultancy work commissioned from Jacobs, which puts the average cost of abatement 2020-2050 at under $30 per tonne of CO2.  This translates into higher prices for electricity and other energy supplies.  In the absence of carbon taxes and regulations, Australia would be able to generate electricity, mainly from coal, at about $40 per MWh; a $30 per tonne tax increases this by about 70 per cent.  For household consumers once distribution and transmission costs are added-in this means a price rise of about 25 per cent; for large industrial consumers the price rise would approach 50 per cent.

Of course, if the economy proves highly flexible, the costs are even lower.  But any flexibility operates largely by choking off large and intensive energy users – making us poorer.  Politicians glibly assert, because the economic advisers they choose tell them, that we can manage with less energy and other inputs into production.  They fail or choose not to recognise that this means reduced output and less income.

Moreover, the CCA’s “modelled” tax of $30 per tonne is a price that is one among a bewildering array of estimates.  These include:

• A Brookings Institute paper which puts the price at $US65-167 per MWh if gas is to displace coal
• The OECD/Australian Treasury paper which puts the price for Australia at the equivalent of $US 75 per MWh
• Buried on page 251 of the Garnaut report is an estimated 2050 tax of $250 per tonne/MWh, a price that itself incorporates some heroic assumptions about new technologies.
• In 1994 ABARE put the tax Australia would need to achieve a 20 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions at $600.

Moreover, it appears that the $30 per tonne tax was selected arbitrarily and the consultants were required to use it.  The CCA on page 13 of Jacob’s modelling has a tax of $67 per tonne rising to $270 per tonne.  A tax of $30 per tonne might mean a wholesale electricity price of $70 per MWh compared with the business-as-usual price of $40.  But a tax of $270 per tonne lifts the wholesale price to over $300 per MWh.

Not only, therefore is the CCA report a case of garbage-in-garbage-out but the garbage put into the report itself has been tampered with.  This document confirms the original intent of the Abbott Government to scrap this sorry excuse for an advisory body as being correct.

No coal. No oil. No fracking. No nuclear. No GMOs. A different world is possible!