On Wednesday the Australian Electricity Market Operator (AEMO) gave a warning that should not have come as a surprise to anyone with half a brain, but it made the headlines, including at the ABC:
Planned coal fired power station closures and increasing demand will lead to shortages from 2025 in NSW, Victoria in 2028, Queensland in 2029, and South Australia early next decade. Of course this is seen as a wake-up call that we need more renewables, more storage, and more transmission lines. Sceptics will say “We told you so”.
In fact, readers may remember my post from 18 June titled “The Gap”, with this figure.
I have crunched the numbers for daily electricity consumption in the eastern states for the 12 months from 1 September 2021 to 31 August 2022. Here’s that gap again, in GigaWatthours.
(The wobbles in the Total show the weekend drops and the Christmas- New Year “silly season”, the summer and winter demand peaks, and the spring and autumn “Goldilocks” periods.)
The gap is currently at the very least 307 Gigawatthours. The average over 365 days is 418 GWhr- and we are supposed to be converting most of our transport to electric (or hydrogen!) in the next few years.
Hydro produced a maximum of 99 GWhr. Snowy 2.0 will only produce another 48 GWhr, and you can forget about batteries- minuscule.
Good luck with filling that gap.
How did fossil fuels compare with renewables over the past year? The next figure shows the percentage of total consumption supplied by coal, gas, and wind plus solar.
Coal had a short period where supply dropped to 52.3%, but averaged 59.9% over the year, rising to 68.9% on Wednesday this week. The plotted trendline shows a decrease of 0.9% over the year.
Renewables decreased by a whopping 6.24%- so much for the renewable transition!
Gas filled the gap, with an increase of 6%.
Just so that you are clear that the crisis we narrowly avoided early this winter was NOT caused by unreliable coal fired stations, here is a plot of renewable supply expressed as daily deviation from the 12 month average- anomalies if you like:
Wind and solar were producing much below expected- and erratically- from mid-March to mid-July.
Finally, the next figure shows seven day averages of the major energy suppliers and the total, overlaid with price per MegaWatt.
The high prices coincide with gas and hydro increasing generation when renewables were unable to meet their average supply- let alone the increase in demand.
Mind the gap.
(Source: OpenNEM)
kenskingdom 