Essay by Eric Worrall
Life without coal? Within hours of the final closure of Liddell Coal Plant permanently removing 10% of New South Wales’ baseload power, an electricity reserve shortfall notice was issued.
Hilights from the video;
“A couple of hours after Liddell Closed, AEMO, which is Australian Energy Market Operator, well they issued an electricity Market Notice, forecasting a lack of reserve, level one energy supply, New South Wales”
“There’s not one of your viewers, I can tell you right now, which has seen a decrease in their power prices”.
“The reality is coming, that light you see in the distance Peta, that is the train of reality coming to run us all over, and as you said, AEMO has already issued warning notices on the reserve, there’s not enough there”
“What can a battery of that size do? — Well firstly it doesn’t exist, so nothing. But secondly, if they do manage to build it, from the reports I’ve seen, it’s got a capacity of 2GWh. The actual capacity in hours by MW is the important bit. So if it has a 500MW maximum capacity, it can do 4 hours at 500MW, to apparently replace roughly 1300MW of good, reliable coal fired power which runs 24×7. These are not tough numbers to get your head around … I had a good look at all the solar farms in NSW, assuming you had 4 hours of good sunlight, they couldn’t charge it anyway”
“… There is no reliability on intermittent wind and solar…”
“What’s the latest on the gas caps? — Well this is just another shambles, I mean it’s communism 101, from what I can see of the current proposal, it comes to down to the two ministers, Madeleine King and Chris Bowen, to decide if they like your gas company or not … We’ve seen the Japanese Ambassador screaming about sovereign risk …”
Watch the video: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1238552883720592
It’s good to see my local MP Keith Pitt picking up the ball on Net Zero and renewables again. We at WUWT were disappointed in 2021, when Pitt stayed silent as his then party leader publicly embraced Net Zero, in a desperate attempt to save a few of their useless inner city “conservative” colleagues in the 2022 federal election. That last minute green posturing didn’t convince anyone, the Conservative seats they tried to save mostly ended up falling to the Teals (well funded green independents).
Unfortunately, despite these warnings and words of common sense, I now believe it is inevitable that Australia will hit the green energy wall WUWT described a few days ago. Unless there is a radical change of course, sometime before the end of this decade, Australia begin to suffer South African scale blackouts.
Even if there is a desperate last minute awakening, an attempt to prevent the closure of Australia’s remaining coal plants, there will be nothing left worth saving.
None of the legacy fossil fuel power plants have been properly maintained. Australia’s “reliable” energy infrastructure is no longer reliable, all the plants have all been run into the ground, by owners who believe fossil fuel energy has no future in green Australia. The Australian government’s recent introduction of a carbon tax in my opinion just seals their fate.