isn't it funny how everything the loonies were arguing about 5-6 years ago, has now been turned on its head and all the arguments the technical people were saying are proving correct.
It's all rather like the Titan, that little sub which imploded on its way to the Titanic.
Marketing gurus and so on can say all they like but physics always wins in the end. Someone might get away with unsound practices for a while but at some point the inevitable happens.
No engineer or other competent person will try and say exactly when it goes bad, but they'll observe that if the current trends continue then it's inevitable we will get to that point.
The good part is significant wind and solar (Variable Renewable Energy, VRE) has been built and if we look at the past 12 months, its contribution to total demand on a state by state basis has been:
Queensland = 23.1%
NSW = 24.3%
Victoria = 34.0%
Tasmania = 17.7%
SA = 70.3%
WA (SWIS only) = 34.4%
What's lost on most, that is the general public and media, is it's not simply a question of scaling it up. Using WA as the example, we can't simply triple the installed base of wind and solar and then say great, we now have 100% renewable electricity. That seems to be what many think, but there's a serious flaw in that idea.
Right now, right at this moment, VRE is supplying just 5.6% of electricity in WA. 5.6% yes and that's a long way short of the 34.4% average and there's the problem.
Variable Renewable Energy.
Talk to a group of engineers, technicians and others about all this and the first thing they'll do is separate the wind and solar farms out from the rest of the data and put them in a separate group. So VRE in one, fossils, hydro and batteries in the other. That's not due to any inherent bias as certain sections of the media seem to think but it's simply due to the practicalities of the situation.
What determines supply adequacy is the ability to meet demand in real time.
Over the past 3 days in SA, VRE's ability to meet demand has ranged from more than 100% to a mere 0.4% and that's the reason for separating VRE into one group, fossils, hydro and batteries into the other, and focusing far more on the latter.
Coal, gas, diesel, hydro and batteries, collectively known as dispatchable generation, most certainly do have outages and at some point each of them individually goes to zero. A point that VRE enthusiasts go to great lengths to highlight.
What differs however is they don't all do so at once. There's no precedent for the entire fleet of dispatchable plant all failing at once and mathematically the probability, whilst not literally zero, is incredibly remote. Versus VRE which does go to effectively zero very frequently across the fleet.
For a fleet of thermal and hydro plant that's well designed and run, as a general rule of thumb it's safe to assume at least five sixths of it will work at any given time. So if peak load is 1000MW, then install 1200 MW of capacity and you should have no problems so long as it's well designed - which will limit any individual machine to not more than 100MW in that example. If there's a desire to use larger machines then the reserve requirement needs to be increased accordingly.
That's what it really all comes down to. Those expressing concern about all this at the technical level are basically observing that one or more of the following apply:
1. Dispatchable capacity has fallen below 120% of peak demand such that there's a reliance on particularly good performance being achieved and/or VRE happening to work during the peak.
2. Plant is so old and decrepit that it's no longer safe to assume five sixths of it works and we now need some greater reserve margin to allow for the increasing rate of breakdowns.
3. There's an actual or at least plausible lack of fuel with which to run some or all of the generating plant(s). Either because the fuel source is running out as such, or because there's some problem with getting it out of the ground quickly enough.
4. There's some single point of failure which, if it fails, will put enough plant out of service to be a problem.
With the key point of relevance being that all four of the above points presently apply in NSW, Vic and SA.
From there well it's back to that little sub and much the same situation. We know things aren't as they should be, we know there's a risk of failure, but it's anyone's guess as to the timing. What we can say thus far is there's been a number of near-misses, some highly publicised others kept quiet, and price is a definite problem. Thus far however well the lights are on so long as you can afford to run them.
Back to the VRE. It does generate electricity yes, it does have value and it saves fuel but the reason it's not what technical people focus on is simply the above. It's the adequacy of dispatchable generation, including storage, that's lagging. That's the likely trigger for failure in practice and no amount of VRE will of itself get around that. We do need more VRE yes, not denying that, but it's the situation with dispatchable generation and/or its fuel supply that'll be the trigger for any crisis that emerges.
The other issue is price and that's now at the point of being problematic in many ways.
Impacts on household budgets are obvious but beyond that it gets more serious in terms of long term implications.
Business costs, inflation and potential relocation of business overseas is one obvious risk. There's already two hydrogen projects which look to be dead, and a broad expectation that more will follow. The idea of Australia becoming a major hydrogen exporter depends on having cheap electricity and thus far, that's a problem. Impact on manufacturing industries likewise is a problem.
The other is on the "energy transition". At the residential level it's hard to sell an "electrify everything" argument when the news media's full of stories about electricity prices and households are receiving emails from their retailers informing them of 50%+ increases effective 1 July. Even if mathematically it still stacks up, it's a hard sell against those headlines.
At the business level it's much the same. There's one significant user building it's own base load (fossil fuel) power station to run the plant. It's either that or go overseas. Location = NSW. Others are doing various fuel conversions and so on too and mostly in the "wrong" direction. But it is what it is - the energy price mess isn't without long term consequences, including environmental ones.