PowerSwitch

This article tells how coal is a threat to the energy security of Australia as increasing temperatures there are forcing coal fired power stations off line. They can't take the extra heat that Australia is experiencing as a result of massive burning of often Australian coal worldwide! Irony??

Go pv and wind! Australia should not be short of electricity ever. Surely it's way less 'intermittent' than just about every other 1st world country?

The problem that they have got is storage for pv overnight and most of their wind is in one state so generation is determined by the wind conditions in that one state in the south. If they had a few more wind turbines further north where the wind conditions are usually different the states would tend to generate at different times and cancel out the down times. The northerly state is governed by coal supporters apparently who do all they can to discourage competition with their favoured fuel. Such is life at the moment!!

If coal is such a problem for Australia, why are they wanting to dig a channel through the great barrier reef, so they can move coal through it?

I don't get it why Australia is not expanding more into solar. There's plenty of sun to power the whole country and even sell excess (maybe). Storage solutions are already being developed and tested...but there has to be a stronger initiative to research the technology.

Also, the average solar panels' efficiency is up to 22% these days...but studies have shown that the potential is much much higher. Think double! Only if they could get engineers to find a way to make them more efficient, and encourage a decentralized solar market would solve a lot of the energy problem...

Coal energy is non renewable and it's going to get more and more expensive. There are tons of reasons to look UP for energy and not DOWN.

woodburner wrote:If coal is such a problem for Australia, why are they wanting to dig a channel through the great barrier reef, so they can move coal through it?

Because the federal and local state government is in the pocket of the coal industry. Think Prostitute State! It works worldwide.

Radnice wrote:I don't get it why Australia is not expanding more into solar. There's plenty of sun to power the whole country and even sell excess (maybe). Storage solutions are already being developed and tested...but there has to be a stronger initiative to research the technology.

Also, the average solar panels' efficiency is up to 22% these days...but studies have shown that the potential is much much higher. Think double! Only if they could get engineers to find a way to make them more efficient, and encourage a decentralized solar market would solve a lot of the energy problem...

Coal energy is non renewable and it's going to get more and more expensive. There are tons of reasons to look UP for energy and not DOWN.

L-ion batteries in a stationary situation are a bit of a waste of a resource really. Conventional lead acid would be much cheaper although larger and heavier but that isn't a problem with a stationary installation. More maintenance, I suppose.

A Molten salt heat store is another way to go which also avoids the use a large amounts of rare earth metals in a vast pv array.

I was on holiday the last week so I could not comment on this article until now. Australia is currently in heatwave conditions, in the South East anyway where most people live.

I read the article with interest but I think he has missed the point that most Australian power stations that use coal are very old, like the UK. It's down to history.
Once upon a time Australian states were responsible for most things including electricity. Now Australian states in general don't like each other and tended to rely on what resources they had available and extractable at the time. In NSW, Queensland and Western Australia this meant black coal. In Victoria and later South Australia (because they did not want to import coal from NSW) they used brown coal and Tasmania used hydro electricity. Bear in mind that the so called National Energy Market in Australia the supposed largest grid in the world is quite new, until 1959 all states had a separate grid and SA and NSW/Vic were not connected until 1990 and QLD and TAS were not connected until 2005. Also the 'grid' is quite linear and states are still weakly interconnected so one state cannot sell that much power to another.

Now we get to privatization which has been completely carried out in SA and we can see how that has worked out and not at all in QLD and something in between in the rest.

So we have South Australia whose privatised power companies gladly closed its brown coal baseload power stations forcing it to rely on wind and solar without storage and have to rely on the interconnector with Victoria with that state closing down one of its oldest baseload stations earlier this year.
Not to be left out NSW wants to close its oldest power station in a few years.

It's all down to bad planning on a state and national level due to state rivalries. Closing fossil fuel power stations before storage or stronger inter-connectors are built does not help either.

As far as I know there are a number of solar plants in development in Australia and up to five are running at the moment. Check out the Renew Economy website for more information. Here is a list of solar and wind projects in development.

For anyone interested in the current generation status in Australia there is a useful app called "Red Dolphin" that even the current Energy minister uses.
Click Here

As for the bit about overheating control rooms being the cause I have not personally been in one but they may exist. I think this reason for shutdowns is not valid - I think most are due to to ageing plant.

As for solar thermal storage I think South Australia are going to put in a 150 MW version of the one in Nevada. I also think there is a company researching molten silicon as an energy storage.

Things are moving in Australia - just slowly. Bear in mind all governments in Australia are in deficit so there is not a lot of money to go around right now.