The Great Battery Conjob Exposed

^^Mains power.

Nuclear is good! Put some wind turbines in front of it and paint kids playing on the side of it.
France is over 70% nuclear. No way of changing that anytime soon. The govt just said no way of meeting the 2025 date of shutting down about 17 reactors and pushed it back to 2035.
It's going to cost crazy amounts too shut the reactors down.

Top article Kato, and quite obviously authored by a fellow with some engineering credibility


I believed that the load shedding was due to network issues and would be interested to see what the effect of domestic battery systems would be on network issues (ie they take load off the network), remembering unlike the big Tesla battery these aren't for network stability and are for energy storage to be discharged when needed.

All this peak demand nonsense but nobody is addressing the cause. Air-conditioning. Is there anyone else out there who doesn't have an air conditioner?

The human race survived for a million of years without them ( myself for 56 and counting ). Of course it is getting a little hotter these days. Why? All the coal burnt to run air conditioners! Classic example of positive feedback. If nothing else the human race is entertaining.

theconversation.com/the-global-impact-of-air-conditioning-big-and-getting-bigger-62882

Yep Ian, we deliberately don't have a/c because we wanted to be acclimatized a bit to the heat. The only reason we could get away with this though is because we deliberately designed our house to be naturally ventilated and not need a/c. I believe a contributor to the root cause (and is possibly Adriano's pet subject) is simply housing design. Simple things like wide eaves to shade walls just don't fit in when "fashion" is telling you the "Mediterranean Facade" looks best

I did get talked into putting a pool in, but don't worry Crusoe, I installed a solar system to offset that. In fact I sell my energy to those who like to live in a/c during the day and then buy it back at half price to run my pool pump early morning and late evening when I'm not generating

It's true Crusoe, we built coal fired power to satisfy consumer demand. But like a lot of resources, the pricing of electricity didn't reflect the true cost (plus a bunch of corporate profit now) and consumers became addicts. Now they're hooked and it's time to pay full price.

You might be right FN, if that's the case then increasing the number of generators to increase competition amongst the generators might be the only thing that helps keep prices down. But you're right, businesses must make profit and the shift to privatised generation was sold to the community as a means of increasing competition to keep prices down, however maybe no-one factored in that prices must increase to cover the environmental cost that maybe no-one could measure properly at the time. Increased regulation/offset of emissions and also increased subsidisation of low emission generation was always going to push prices up in real terms. We just need to hope that the technology becomes cheap and the current generation monopolies get broken down, and prices go back the other way one day.

That's absolutely right Harrow, the original solar scheme (which I'm still on) was like that. The long term economics are always pushed aside for politics, but hey that's democracy. In the end everyone pays more for electricity anyway because of the environmental cost being added in, the price increase doesn't simply go away.

It's interesting reading some of the points of view on this but alot are way off the mark.

After 16 years in the energy game at a pretty high level the reality is this-

1. Privatisation led to approx a 30% drop in energy prices across gas and electricity making us the cheapest advanced economy for energy by quite a margin. More importantly than the cost of living advantage that gave us it allowed high energy use industry to be internationally competitive creating in excess of 300000 jobs in the process.

2. Prices then rose due to 3 main drivers -

1. The remaining regulated portion of the market mainly being the distribution and transmission was gamed to garner outsized profits from the regulator via gold plating the assets. At one stage this accounted for nearly half of energy price rises but has since fallen back to be overall around 25%.

2. The recombination of the privatised generators and retailers into an oligopoly of large "gentailers" was allowed on the ACCC watch and with state govts blessing as it provided them with a windfall lift to their budgets. ( long since wasted) again roughly 25% of the price increases can be accounted for by a lessening of competition here on average. More so in some states.

3. The big one is our emmissions reduction ambitions and theres no sugar coating it though it does amaze me the truth is often hidden here. It accounts for over half of the increase in the cost of energy bills this century and still has quite a way to go.

From the various emission reduction taxes to subsidies to renewables installers both big and small, to the remote network upgrades to plug in wind and solar farms to the system stability mitigation like the big battery. These costs eventually wind up on both residential and commercial power bills as well as state and federal tax bills.

We all pay for it one way or another even if you have solar and a battery. The only way to avoid a decent portion of it is to go offgrid and we will reach the point soon where this is actually economic for the individual household. Thats not a good thing by the way thats a sad indictment on just how inneficient and bloated our situation has become.

What makes me laugh in all this twisting and turning though that has resulted in a serious dent in our international competitiveness is that it won't make the slightest measurable difference to climate change.

Everything we have done and will do in Australia on this front is eaten up in ONE WEEK by the combined commissioning of electricity generation in China and India. One week and just look at the mess we are lumping ourselves with for no measurable impact.

You have to laugh.

for the conspiracy theorist:
the brownouts occur purposefully to manipulate the energy market, and has done so successfully over the last few years, just look at the price.

Have a look at "Damages" on Stan, season 2.

I agree with everything you state Bara, and it makes perfect short term engineering and economic sense. However the one thing you haven't addressed is that we as a nation have to decide whether we can accept the economic loss in the short term and also accept that in the short term we may not actually cause a measurable improvement in worldwide emissions, but take the long term view that we may create change and hope that other nations will follow. We can't simply stand back and say "it's all too hard because China and India don't give a sh!t". But you're right, it's a difficult decision to make and normally these things happen with global treaties being signed such that there is unilateral agreement amongst the developed nations to take the economic hit. Of course treaties become hardly worth the paper they're written on when countries like the USA pull out of them so easily.

Rod, in engineering respect yep it's similar to a battery storage type UPS, it's a battery with a bunch of power electronics that create an AC output. But operationally, it's primary function is not to necessarily supply bulk power but to buy time for generating machines to adjust to changes in the load/frequency.

They're all fair points Bara, so where to from here? Say we meet our existing emissions reduction obligations, and assuming that the world community agrees to reduce emissions associated with electricity generation, where does the world (or Australia) go next to achieve this?