Well, this one really put a bee in bonnet of the anti-renewables crowd on social media. Their arguments are faltering and spluttering like the old coal units they so love.

All fossil fuel infrastructure buildout is an example of Bastiat's broken window paradox. It simply creates harm, and we will have to pay, again, for energy systems that actually add value (ie low carbon sources).

Check out “Planet of the Humans” to see the value added by RE, especially biomass!

I have often wondered if you could target a coal plant by giving a subsidy for rooftop solar to its customers. Here in the U.S., Bloomberg has said he will spend $500 million to take down coal plants, but I think that is mostly going to legal confrontation. If a coal plant is doing poorly already, it might not take much to push it over the edge.

All very well to trash coal plants, what will replace the 20GW of coal capacity across the NEM, bearing in mind the well known “Four icebergs” that the good ship “RE Titanic” has to negotiate – (1) wind droughts, (2) the need to service all the demand all the time, (3) the island factor (no extension cords to neighbours with spare power) and (4) the lack of adequate grid-scale storage?

In the afternoon in WA just now, near 19.00 NEM time, coal and gas are providing about half of the power in the state and wind 13%, No doubt solar is undermining the economic prospects of coal but soon the sun will set in WA and what will keep the lights on from sunset to sunrise if the coalers driven out?

As to the European experience, there is a prolonged wind drought there and coal stations are firing up in Britain and France.

In the US, California is the canary in the RE coalmine. The have been going through blackouts because they import 30% of their power and when the wind is low across several states the neighours don't have enough spare power to satisfy the needs in the Golden State. When the green new deal drives more conventional power out of the market California will really be in trouble.

The answer is **policy**!
WA is a clear example of what happens when government goes at the pace of a speeding bureaucracy. Unlike the federal government, WA has been developing a DER (Distributed Energy Roadmap) for a few years, but it is yet to implement it in any substantial manner. Movement so far has been limited to small scale batteries and punishment of daytime solar. WA desperately needs a policy direction similar to SA.

No matter what happens, coal is still dead. It either dies by load following, as is the case now, or by low prices, as will be the case when storage and load deferral is able to level the daily consumption to a generation cycle that is compatible with coal. No wonder Sumitomo has written off Bluewaters.

What sort of storage do you have in mind to carry a prolonged wind drought of the kind we experienced across the NEM last June?

CA is the canary in the RE coalmine? Texas will produce more renewable generation than CA in about 2 years. We'll be about 40% renewable in 2024, 50% 0-carbon, with no real rooftop market and about 47GW of average load with near 80GW summer peaks. Right in time for the storage sonic boom. We're not going to have any problems, outside of working on transmission, as we add 25GW of renewables from 2020-2023. Storage will then help with that, as well, storage added via a competitive market, I might add. All expected.

I wonder what people are going to say then? Especially when our retail electricity is going to fall to about US $0.07c/kWh in 2030, with a 30% higher load than CA and 30GW higher peaks.

Installed capacity of wind will increase but the problem that has to be overcome is the frequent spells with next to no wind – see June 2020. When there is no petrol in your tank the size of the tank is irrelevant and similarly when there is next to no wind the number of turbines is irrelevant.

Batteries are not grid-scale storage so they do nothing to help during wind droughts.

Race people way more meticulous than you have thought thru this question armed with sufficient data and computing power to get a credible answer. The Integrated System Plan sets out several solutions to several scenarios. NSW is now implementing their part of the plan. I suggest you read both then hopefully these already solved conundrums will cease to bother you.

As I replied to someone else Mike, what will replace the 20GW of coal capacity across the NEM, bearing in mind the well known “Four icebergs” that the good ship “RE Titanic” has to negotiate – (1) wind droughts, (2) the need to service all the demand all the time, (3) the island factor (no extension cords to neighbours with spare power) and (4) the lack of adequate grid-scale storage?

The NSW plan fails to address these issues. It is based on the assumption that you just have to increase the installed capacity of wind and solar, regardless of the low points that are the limiting factor.

You must have made a fairly superficial reading of the documents. The modelling fully takes into account wind droughts which a) never occur across the whole NEM at the same time simply because the weather that brings them in one place provides wind movement elsewhere and b) are negated during the day by solar which never experiences droughts even if locally attenuated by cloud. As costs continue to fall it is seeing a level of overbuild that will amply compensate for the inherent variability of wind. Islanding between regions is sensibly obviated by ample local resources including storage, but these events are so rare that their occurrence is noteworthy, and in the worst case are simply covered by buying curtailment options: businesses are not in the business of being in business, they are in the business of delivering value to shareholders, so if someone pays more for you to curtail than you can make by operating, you would be wrong to turn it down. And in fact, AEMO has found no difficulty in procuring curtailment.

Grid scale storage is overtly part of the NSW strategy so I can't fathom why you missed it. Coupled with solar overbuild (largely by households where it is more valuable), it readily meets "low points". NSW in particular has a surfeit of low cost excellent PHES sites, and the NSW plan provides financial instruments to overcome the market design failures that have held back project commitment. I fully anticipate oversubscription of projects to supply the 2GW of storage, all of which can easily be delivered before coal power stations shut down. In fact, given the projects that are already identified, I would expect close to double that figure to be funded for further development.

Mike if you look at the AEMO records you will find numerous occasions when there is next to no wind across the whole of the NEM.
As for the storage capacity of big batteries, check out this story on the Victorian Big Battery. https://www.energycouncil.c...

"The VBB will not store huge quantities of surplus energy generated by renewables on sunny, windy days, and release this back into the grid for days and days when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Its energy storage capacity is limited to at most a few hours’ worth of charging and release. Claims that such batteries will magically solve all the challenges of renewable generation variability and set us on a path to 100 per cent renewables tomorrow totally misconstrue the real roles that grid-scale batteries can effectively play.
This limitation is largely irrelevant, because storing and time-shifting large quantities of energy isn’t remotely the justification for battery projects anywhere."

Lets agree that big batteries do not provide grid-scale storage.

Where is PHES working to provide significant input to the grid?

CA blackouts were caused by fossil fuel failures. Sorry. Your rant is colorful, but not factual.

What fossil fuel failures? There was a wind drought across several western states and they had to fire up every gas turbine they could find.

Actually a comedy of errors. Fossil fuel plants failed to ramp up when the sun set - something they do every day. A few other issues as well. You can google this to find the full link as Disqus hates links. "The report blames the need for outages on three things: extreme and widespread hot weather, a failure to update peak-demand forecasting practices as solar generation grows, and mistakes on the grid market that led to some plants exporting power when it was actually needed in-state."

Rafe you write as tho' this is the first transition you've witnessed in your life so that you have to terrify yourself about temporary issues being permanent! Tell me when you last saw a horse and cart in the street?

We have just experienced the hottest November on record, following on from the hottest year on record. We are staring down the barrel of another bushfire season, this time in the north. That is the canary in the coalmine. WA won't be in trouble, nor Europe, nor California, nor any other place, if planning displaces panic and prejudice, and we get on with the job. China, Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam all coped better, and are economically recovering faster and stronger, than France, Britain and the US because they responded to COVID by planning and acting. Foolish wringing of hands will achieve nothing, ignoring the science and chasing superstition likewise.

What sort of plan have California got to keep the lights on when the states that prop up their system run short of spare power by running down their conventional power assets the way that California has done? They will be more vulnerable to the wind drought that caused blackouts in California recently.

You can't trust people who wear hats indoors.

Haha, we were always told it was drivers in hats!

Yes quite correct, I don't wear my hat in the car!

Batteries are highly unlikely to become stranded assets in the WA grid, like solar and batteries, coal and batteries could shift the daytime output to the night.

I'm not sure this has much to do with solar at all. Bluewaters is still the cheapest generator on the SWIS so will be the last generator standing. It has more to do with coal supply and debt.

Sumitomo also actually owns the largest solar company in WA - Infinite Energy.

Is that why Infinite energy is wildly overpriced and happy to sell you the smallest system that they can?

If it had no competition from solar, it wouldn't have any debt, they'd simply charge more for their electricity. If they have a thermal coal supply problem in Australia, something is going badly wrong, like the cost of shipping it from the East Coast isn't competitive.

There's an open-cut coal mine less than a kilometre away. Shipping costs are not the issue.

https://uploads.disquscdn.c...

Ok, point taken, cheap coal is available, so what is their problem, other than those outlined in the original article above? Could it be that pressure from the renewables sector comes through a double-edged sword, super-cheap power which undercuts generating cost of the coal power stations when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, but difficult to replace when they're not? The curse of baseload.

So the solution is to complete the revolution and build out diverse renewables, including wave power, and firm with batteries or other longer term storage. Clean cheap reliable power which can form the basis of new minerals processing and manufacturing enterprises. Let's face it we didn't get through the transition from horses to motor vehicles by protecting the jobs of farriers and stable owners.

But at the end of the day, this is not about relative cost. If we include the catastrophic side-effects of fossil fuel burning, no fossil fuel is cost effective. Ninety-nine percent of the objections to renewables are utterly irrelevant in a carbon constrained world. No ecosystem means no life. You can't have an economy on a dead planet.

Why do we have these endless pointless arguments against reality?

That’s rather the point isn’t it ? Renewables put a floor under the price of electricity enough of the time that they make coal unprofitable. Even in places like WA were the previous liberal government had a no renewables policy. So people took things into their own hands and stuck renewables on their own roofs.

This is just another mark of the hard lessons being handed out by the rapid transition to renewables.

When this coaler was in the planning stages, obviously nobody seriously looked at what was happening in the rapid uptake of solar & wind in other countries such as Germany & the USA, if they had they would have had second thoughts of the economic validity of constructing it.

I imagine it was all being pushed at the time of planning by our good friends in the fossil fools industry, so what else is new?

This is just a warning to the eastern grids coalers and the requirement for a transition plan to be put in place for those currently employed in it.

maybe they thought AnGAS would be able to defy economic reality

Will this penny EVER drop??Incumbents are always the last to recognise disruption!!!

Yes because it's a painful thing to recognise that what used to work is no longer working so they go into denial

Conservatives can never accept change easily and the Libs and Nats are classic examples

And Canavan is still incensed at the banks for not wanting to invest in new coalers.

By his lights, Matt is just protecting the family business.

Well it hasn't claimed the coal plant yet as it is still operational. This is more just an accounting reflection of the problem they face. I can't see things improving in the future for them.