SA is reaping the rewards of its foolish Greeny foolhardiness. Is the sun setting on all those futile home solar systems wrecking the power network ?



Solar Owners worried Big Brother AEMO wants to turn off their panels at noon in emergencies
May 22nd, 2020

Last November at lunchtime 64% of the entire generation of South Australia was coming from across thousands of small generators that the Grid Managers had no control of, and that clouds could wipe out. This is the junk conglomerate infrastructure that billions of dollars in forced subsidies have created.

The AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator) has no control over the vagaries of two-thirds of the electricity generation. Audrey Zibelmen has described it as “”It’s almost like driving without your headlights.” She wants new panels to get “smart inverters” which means they can be dumb servants — controlled by the AEMO, just in case there is an emergency — lest the state suffer another System Black. They also want old panels to get the new style inverters when the next replacement is due.

Who could have seen that coming (only anyone with an engineering degree).

Poor solar home owners are feeling pretty miffed. They didn’t realize their panels were never economic, a burden on the grid, and they’ve been riding on the backs of fellow Australians for years. And after reading this ABC story (below), they still won’t know. So it’s a complete surprise to them that the green electrons they produce are expensive and unwanted, and so useless — worse than useless — the Energy Market Operator wants to have the power to turn them off at their peak time of day.

Craig Kelly M.P. has a much better plan. He thinks if China can cancel our barley because of alleged subsidies that don’t exist, we ought to axe the subsidies that do exist for the Chinese solar panels and save that $1.7billion dollars a year which hapless Australian electricity consumers are forced to cover installation costs of.

Concerns over plan to switch off household solar panels when grid is unstable
Ange Donnellan ABC

Thanasis Avramis has been an advocate of solar panels since he had them installed in 2008.   “In the last 12 years we’ve probably earned about $9,000 worth of feed-in tariff. That’s been a very substantial reduction in the cost of our electricity,” Mr Avramis told 7.30.

Thanasis is not happy and blames the regulator and the network. He says it would make “Australian families pay for the mistakes of others”. Which would be not much different to his solar panels where Australian families pay for him to get cheaper electricity.

Since 2010, the number of panels across the nation has grown from 100,000 to 2.2 million.

But the proliferation is at times leading to grid instability, prompting the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) to call for the switch-off measure.

AEMO CEO Audrey Zibelman said it would only be used in emergencies

When we have way too much solar there’s so little load we can’t even manage to keep the balance with the generators, and in that context there’s always a risk that the system could fail and will go black.”

ABC advertising writers (called journalists) manage to find a quasi industry spokesman to say exactly what the ABC staff want to hear — including his own big conspiracy theory:

Energy analyst Bruce Mountain said solar helped keep prices down.

When Australia had only 100,000 solar panels wholesale prices were $35 per megawatt hour. Now that we have two million, we pay $80. That’s not the kind of “down” most people are thinking of.

He is worried that once the ability to switch off solar systems is added, there could be pressure to externally control them more regularly.

“The threat lies not with the market operator, but the control mechanisms that they establish may well be taken advantage of by other forces who want to throttle back rooftop solar to look after their own commercial interests,” he told 7.30.

Bruce Mountain is director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre (VEPC). He is in a sense, a de facto employee of The Victorian Government, an entity that benefits from renewables propaganda.

All those new “smart inverters” — add them to the bill for solar power.

Handy questions journalists could’ve asked
Is there any country around the world which has a high penetration of intermittent renewables and cheap electricity? Name them…
If renewables are so cheap, why is China secretly building more coal power plants?
Australian electricity wholesale costs were around $30 per MWh for years on the national grid, then we added 2 million solar panels. Shouldn’t the prices have gone down?

http://joannenova.com.au/2020/05/solar-owners-worried-big-brother-aemo-wants-to-...

juliar wrote on Jul 17^th, 2020 at 7:40pm:


Typical brain dead LNP propaganda. FYI All of the PV inverters cut out above a certain voltage so any mains over voltage is most likely a consequence of your privatization racket

Sir lastnail wrote on Aug 8^th, 2020 at 1:58pm:


Maybe the fossil fuel companies to keep the generators going as backup. 

Sir lastnail wrote on Aug 8^th, 2020 at 5:02pm:


Good turn back.

I believe the retailers get it. They sell the power to us and pay the feed in tariff. Different retailers pay different feed in tariffs. I believe, based on last I looked, AGL pay the highest, up to 20c/kWh, but I would not go with them/support them because of their fracking.

I'm currently with Red Energy, Snowy scheme. I'm a shareholder in Enova and they are installing a community battery but their feed in is not good. I'll just see how things go balancing FIT and renewable/carbon policy. We produce more than we use and it's winter, yet to see how it goes as days get longer.

Two weeks of winter patchy solar results on the last 90 day bill. With govt handouts yo keep the economy ticking over, this has cost us $0. You go tradies, I might have some more work for you. I'm going to have an awning built on over the northern aspect of the house with another four panels as the shading. This will shade the kitchen and the sleepout and reduce heat of direct sunlight into the house and produce an additional potential 1.2kWh.

Edit: To be totally honest, the last bill was "estimated" and may be a reasonable part of the reduction since the installation of the smart meter as it was $50 more than usual. Even taking that into consideration you can see the benefits. With patchy cloud today it produced 15.3kWh and our usage averages 9. As days get longer and the sun gets higher this is going to improve greatly. There is a big gum tree that shades both banks of panels between 8 and 10 am in the neighbours yard when I would expect output to be maximised. I'm looking at having it trimmed.

juliar wrote on Aug 10^th, 2020 at 8:03pm:


I haven't heard of any chaos in the NSW energy system, can you enlighten us? In the meantime, I'm enjoying my roof sucking up the solar radiation and offsetting the 18c@kWh I pay at night with an 11c@kWh FIT during the day, it's also an extra layer of insulation for the coming summer along with the solar hot water system. It's just unfortunate my roof is not bigger. Perhaps you can get yourself some with your pay per post and jobkeeper money.

juliar wrote on Aug 10^th, 2020 at 8:36pm:


So no evidence of chaos in the NSW network?

Batteries: Another green scam
By Viv Forbes March 29, 2017

Every day, some green energy promoter or a battery salesman tells us how green energy with battery backup will supply Australia's future electricity needs.

A battery stores energy.  Energy can be stored using lead acid, nickel-cadmium, lithium, molten salt, pumped hydro, hydrogen, flywheels, compressed air, or some other smart gizmo.  But not one battery produces new energy – they simply store and discharge energy produced by other means.  They all deliver less energy than they consume.  Moreover, to manufacture, charge, use, and dispose of batteries consumes energy and resources.

The idea of producing reliable grid power from intermittent green energy backed up by batteries looks possible in green doodle-diagrams, but it would be absurdly inefficient and expensive.

Solar works a six-hour day
Consider a solar panel rated to collect, say, 100 units of energy per day at full capacity, in full mid-day sunlight, with a clean panel, properly aligned to face the sun.

No solar energy arrives overnight, and only minimal amounts arrive during the three hours after dawn or before dusk.  That means that solar energy can be collected for only about six hours per day, providing it is not cloudy, raining, or snowing.  No amount of research or regulation will change this.  The solar energy union works only a six-hour day and takes quite a few sickies.  So instead of feeding 100 units of energy per day into the grid, at best, the panel supplies just 25 units.

Can the addition of batteries give us 24/7 power from solar?

To deliver 100 units of energy in 24 hours will require an extra 75 units of energy to be collected, stored, and delivered by the batteries every sunny day.  This will require another three solar units devoted solely to recharging batteries in just six sunny hours.

Cloudy and wet days are what really expose the problems of solar plus batteries.  (This is why isolated green power systems must have a diesel generator in the shed.)

To insure against, say, seven days of cloudy weather would require a solar-battery system capable of collecting and storing 700 units of energy while still delivering 100 units to consumers every day.  However, if several consecutive weeks of sunny weather then occur, this bloated system is capable of delivering seven times more power than needed, causing power prices to plunge, driving reliable generators out of business, and wasting the life of solar panels producing unwanted electricity.

Solar energy obviously does best in sunny equatorial deserts, but that is not where most people live.  And the huge Desertec Solar Power Dream for the northern Sahara has failed.

The report card on wind energy is different but equally depressing.
When Australia had reliable, predictable coal-gas-hydro power in every state, the need for heavy interstate transmission was minimal.  But green power will require robust and costly interstate transmission facilities to send large amounts of power at short notice from sunny coal-rich Queensland to cloudy Victoria, windless South Australia, or droughted Tasmania.

Playing Snakes and Ladders with Australia's electricity supply
We are told that wind and solar plus pumped water storage will provide adequate grid power.  Unfortunately, those huge hydro-pumps need steady continuous power – something not provided by intermittent green energy.  So are politicians planning to install huge chemical batteries or diesel motors to steadily recharge the elevated water storages in order to get back less energy than was consumed by the pumps?

Both wind and solar are unpredictable, unreliable, intermittent, and weather-dependent energy sources.  They require large collection areas with a cobweb of access roads and transmission lines.  Their output can change suddenly and cannot be managed easily to meet demand fluctuations.  They need flexible backup power able to swing in quickly to maintain stability and supply.

Gas provides the easiest back-up for green energy, but gas exploration is banned in many areas of NSW, SAust, and the whole of gas-rich Victoria.  Canny residents of the green states are now investing in diesel generators.

The perfect solar battery
Mother Earth has already given us the perfect solar battery for long-term storage of energy.  It is called "coal."  Solar power from sunlight is converted by photosynthesis into wood, and thence into coal for high-density long-term solar energy storage.  The downside to this system is that it has tied up large quantities of carbon that is therefore unavailable to the natural world.  The upside is that releasing the energy from coal also releases life-giving CO2 back into the biosphere, where it belongs.

Our growing energy crisis was caused by political interference.  Australian politicians have not learned last century's lessons of central planning in the comrade societies.



https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/03/batteries_another_green_scam.html