Electricities for Car

"Hello. I am Queensland Australian business."
"Hello. I am Queensland Australian business employee."
"Hellos employee."
"Hellos boss. Can I haves electricities for car?"
"Yes, you can has electricities for car. We has big solar panels and can't exports electricities to grid."
"Why you no export electricities to grid?"
"Because coals."
"How much is electricities?"
"Spare electricities is free."
"Why you no charge?"
"Because hates coals."
"Thanks boss!"
"Gets to work. Them banannas not going to bend selves."

Today an internet comedian suggested people with rootop solar should be charged $40 a day in the interests of "fairness".  That was a pretty good joke considering that Australians at the moment have the electricity they supply to the grid simply stolen from them and recieve a zero cents for each kilowatt-hour they supply.  Besides outright theft we should just add random charges as well.  That's fair.  Apparently the comedian is a  member of the first church of Jesus Coal and believes the more coal we burn the sooner we'll all be able to lie down with the sooty lamb of the lord, and, I dunno, hack black phlem over it from our diseased lungs or something.  Anyway, for him (and it's almost always a him) I reproduced this little ditty based on Bad Moon Rising:

Grid Defection Rising
- by Creedence Clearwater Revival not

I smell a diesel gen-set runnin',
I see grid defection on the way,
Power'n refrigeration 'n lighting,
It's cheaper than on the grid to stay,

Rip the cord tonight,
For gen-set provided light,
There's grid defection on the rise.

They want to take your forty dollars,
Not each month but every day,
Cheaper to use gosh-darn diesel,
Who'd be stupid enough to pay?

Rip the cord tonight,
For gen-set provided light,
There's grid defection on the rise.

 

Solar, Wind and Efficiency Killing Coal Power in Australia

And they've shut down another 360 megawatts of coal power in Australia.  This time very dirty brown coal capacity at Yallourn power station in Victoria's Latrobe Valley.  So much for paying coal plants to shut down, they're doing it on their own.

Solar and Efficiency Gradually Eliminating Coal Power in Australia

I just read that because of reduced demand due to rooftop solar and improved efficiency, Queensland’s Tarong power station is mothballing half of its 1,400 megawatt capacity. So coal power capacity that has been shut down and not replaced in the last two or three years in Australia include half of Tarong (700 megawatts), Playford B (250 megawatts), Swanbank B (125 megawatts), and Munmorrah (600 megawatts), for a total of 1,675 megawatts. And if you want to throw in half of Northern power station’s capacity as it now only operates 6 months a year, that brings it to 1,935 megawatts, or almost two gigawatts of coal power.  That's fairly impressive.

Decent weather and increased grid electricity prices have also contributed to this, but rooftop solar obviously bears a lot of responsibility, as by the end of the year we will be approaching two gigawatts of installed solar capacity.  This means that on a sunny day, Australia's PV could generate as many megawatts as as the shutdown coal plants.  

Update:  Well, not quite as much as the shutdown coal power stations as our solar tends to be a bit higgledy piggledy and generally not optimally aligned, but it it can still generate a heck of a lot of electricity. 

South Australia: Killing the Planet Less.

Last Tuesday wind power supplied 58% of South Australia's electricity. South Australia's carbon emissions from the electricity sector have declined 27% over the past 5 years thanks to wind and solar power, while at the same time wholesale electricity prices have decreased.  Not too shabby by world standards.

Letter to John Williams, Former Executive Manager of Pacific Power

Dear John Williams, former Executive General Manager of Pacific Power,

Just thought I'd write a letter to you to let you know that you missed a couple of points in the letter you wrote that I found lying on a seat in Sydney Airport. The first and probably most important thing is that the vast majority of solar power in Australia is point of use. That is, it saves the people with solar panels the retail cost of electricity rather than the wholesale cost, and the retail cost is often five or more times the wholesale cost. This is why solar panels with lower installation costs are now around grid parity in Australia. And since you don't mention this in your letter I'll just point out that solar panels have minimal maintenance costs and zero fuel costs. A lot of people regard these two points as major features of solar power.

I'm kind of surprised you didn't know about the point of use stuff already, what with working in the power industry so long, but I guess executing might have kept you too busy to keep up with everything. Anyway, I'm just glad to be able to fill you in on this.

But then you start to get weird, John.

You state the efficiency of the best coal and gas plants at converting heat into electricity and then you compare this to the efficiency of a solar panel at converting light into electricity. You declare that solar panels have to be more efficient at turning sunlight into electricity than an advanced coal plant is at turning heat into electricity in order to be competitive.

Are you pooping me? Are you seriously ignorant enough to believe this, or are you just pooping everyone? Did you delegate your thinking to an idiot? Are you really comparing the efficiency of converting sunlight into electricity to the efficiency of converting the heat of burning fossil fuels into electricity and saying that comparison determines competitiveness? If I developed a method for turning sewage into petrol at no cost would you say it wasn't competitive if it was only 15% efficient? You state that gas can be more efficient than coal, so how come we generate most of our electricity from coal if efficiency determines competitiveness? Or could it be that something other than raw efficiency measures determine where we get our electricity from? I'm sure you must have known this at some point. If you cast your mind back to when you were Executive General Manager of Pacific Power you might remember.

Anyway, I hope you found this helpful. And don't feel too bad. Age gets to us all. Why just the other day I could not for the life of me remember the name of the green Teletubby. Took me hours before I remembered its name was Dipsy. But I swear I'll never forget the name of that bastard Laa-Laa.

MUST BURN COAL! 24/7!

I've been in communication with someone who appears very convinced that solar power won't reduce greenhouse gas emissions because coal power plants HAVE TO run at full capacity 24/7. I explained that, according to my admittedly limited knowledge of combustion, if you stop putting coal inside a coal power plant it will shut down, but he still seemed rather insistent that this wasn't possible. I'm afraid that he might have stumbled upon the horrible truth:

PLANT MANAGER: Terrible news! During the night someone installed 20 gigawatts of solar panels! It's an absolute disaster ! Fifteen minute spot prices are now below our marginal operating costs!

CHIEF ENGINEER: What? You mean electricity prices are now less than what the coal we're burning is worth? I guess we have no choice but to power down.

PLANT MANAGER: Power down? What do you mean, power down? Are you crazy! It's not one of his appointed holy days of maintenance!

CHIEF ENGINEER: What are you talking about?

PLANT MANAGER: You know exactly what I'm talking about!

CHIEF ENGINEER: You don't mean the stories the night shift workers whisper in the dark are true do you?

PLANT MANAGER: Every word!

CHIEF ENGINEER: So, if we don't... He...

PLANT MANAGER: Yes! If we don't keep the turbines operating at near maximum capacity, Gilgamax will arise and feast upon the carbon of the living! We have no choice but to keep this plant operating at full capacity and dump the surplus electricity into the grid and use it as a huge resistor! It will blow out every mains connected electrical device within ten klicks, but if we don't do it, those poor fools out there will loose a lot more than just TV and refrigeration!

CHIEF ENGINEER: Okay, I'm with you. I'll do it. I just pray to god it works. And I pray that he'll forgive those damn fools and their solar power! When will they ever learn!