By Jo Nova
Panic-stations in Renewable Utopia
Even the AEMO, our green grid operators, have realized Australia is not ready to shut down the last coal plants by 2037 which was the plan up until five minutes ago.
Things must be desperate. After 20 years of telling us how wind power was absolutely, definitely cheaper — for the first time, an official admitted the blasphemy — “wind is becoming too expensive”.
Now they tell us.
Reality for ALP as coal will be needed until 2049, says AEMO
By Colin Packham and Richard Ferguson, The Australian
Coal will be needed to stabilise the energy grid until 2049 under an extraordinary 12-year extension of the fossil fuel that threatens Labor’s net-zero target, as the green-energy revolution leads to a 100 per cent explosion in power transmission costs.
In a 115-page document that mentions “net zero” just once, the Australian Energy Market Operator has warned that wind is increasingly becoming too expensive and there is a risk the nation is overbuilding transmission lines through rural and regional Australia.
So, “Net Zero” has vanished from the pages, and what appears in its place is a 100% explosion in transmission costs. The AEMO must have realized how daft the Net Zero label would look next to a plan to keep coal fired power on…
So where are the apologies?
The AEMO should have known all this three years ago before the Labor Party launched their rocket mission to a Renewable Moon. Or were they expecting some miraculous discovery, some wonder-battery, hydrogen plant, or supersized windmill to pop into existence in 2024 and it didn’t happen? Perhaps they thought they understood the Australian climate… What a shame they were willing to place a $128 billion dollar bet (of our money) on it. They could have just read poetry from 1904 and been better prepared.
Ponder that the AEMO could have told Minister Bowen the bad news this three months ago, before he supersized the national Net Zero Target. The fact that they left him hanging in the breeze, suggests something has shaken even the AEMO in the last few months. Was it the catastrophic collapse of transformers at the Waratah superbattery? The breakdown occurred as the battery was being hooked onto the grid to start. Did the failure signal that a battery driven grid was going to be much more risky and difficult than they had expected? Was it the steady stream of wind turbine projects that collapsed before they were started, or the hydrogen dreams that fell to pieces? Or was it the fierce opposition to the high voltage lines?
And lets not forget last week — when the AEMO also got a nasty shock. The Australian pointed out they assumed the wind power never goes below 14% capacity for days on end only to find out that it already has?
The plan is still to build massive infrastructure that doesn’t work most of the time:
Optimal for who? China?
AEMO’s Optimal Development Path said grid-scale wind and solar capacity would need to rise from 23GW to 58GW by 2030, and double to 120GW by 2050, to replace coal.
Their excuse is that solar power is surprisingly popular, ignoring the fact that all the demand for it was created by government subsidies and incompetence, and everyone hates living next to a wind turbine.
Rising capital costs and supply-chain constraints have pushed developers more firmly toward solar rather than wind, a tilt that has implications for storage requirements given the daily generation profile of each technology.
Now, apparently, the old coal plants will keep going through the 2040s. The story is that they will shift to a “flexible role” (also known as an inefficient role). They will be used “sparingly” during the extended dunkelflautes that the AEMO forgot to plan for.
So either the giant shell of the old coal plants will be left running on standby most of the year to provide the frequency stability for a few weeks a year, or this flexible-coal-fantasy is just the marketing spin to disguise the truth. It’s what they would say to the Greens to soften the blow. It’s how they pretend this is just a small policy tweak.
They could hardly come out and say “we’ll just keep running the coal plants full bore…”
The A.E.M.O. is growing apprehensive,
Because “wind is becoming more expensive”,
So wind power isn’t cheaper,
As the cost is much steeper,
For Australia, with coalfields extensive.
— Ruairi
h/t Bally