Now even the Australian Energy Market Operator has admitted our electricity transition will have to rely on gas for decades. On November 12, Uhlmann quoted Australian Energy Market Operator CEO Daniel Westerman saying “gas would be essential to ensure the reliability of the eastern grid to 2050 and beyond”.
Given likely gas shortages in Australia without a domestic gas reservation policy, Westerman admitted there may be times when there is too little gas during periods of low solar and wind output to keep gas-fired power stations running.
The politics of this have not yet hit home in Canberra: because of engineering difficulties, Australia may never reach a time when it does not need fossil fuel back-up of renewables.
Adi Paterson, former CEO of ANSTO (the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation), says there is too much politics in power system discussions and not enough engineering expertise.
“The Australian east coast power grid is the single biggest machine in the southern hemisphere. The grid is the precision timing signal for hundreds of industries across the country. This links not just to manufacturing but to things like landing aircraft safely and even to pumping sewage,” Dr Paterson says.
“People who use the grid to do precision manufacturing are starting to get the rattles. In fact, South Australia has lost 4000 precision manufacturing engineering jobs but no one will talk about it. Those jobs have gone to the west coast of the US.
“Data centres also depend on precision timing systems in the grid. All sorts of things are wobbling as the grid becomes less stable.”
This is an inevitable function of using inverters to introduce power from wind and solar into the synchronous grid stabilised by spinning turbines.
Dr Paterson believes neither AEMO nor the CSIRO understand the engineering challenges and are yet to consider weather events such as east coast blocking lows that could affect wind and sun for up to 10 days at a time.
He points to the latest GenCost report’s admission that the CSIRO had underestimated the life span of nuclear plants and their average operating capacity, but against all logic had found correcting both had no positive effect on the economics of nuclear.
Dr Paterson points out Gencost “does not actually measure the cost of power at the meter but the cost of generation to the fence.
One of its fatal flaws is not measuring the cost of the big new grid needed to make renewables work.”Interestingly, in considering the wider economic effects of renewables, France – 70 per cent-dependent on nuclear power – is not facing the same industrial downturn as Germany.
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Nuclear power to cost almost half ALP renewables (Read 3836 times)
