Inertia Power System - How Much is Good Enough?

GA

Going green is not cheap. The initial cost is financially painful. Making distributed power production reliable requires refinements yet to be discovered. (How reliable was the coal fired grid a few years after installment?)

As for your pricing, it seems to me SA is more honest in your pricing structure. Here they claim my kWh charge is 7¢ but the additional charges dwarf my power usage part of my bill. Then again I'm still paying for an unused nuclear power plant.

That price was only for the power usage, there are also distribution costs on top of that.

Here in NSW I paid 26.4c/kWh last bill but will pay 30.58c/kWh next bill - an increase of almost 16%. My availability charge has gone from $1.54/day to $1.57/day - about 2% up.

This has been the pattern every quarter for a couple of years now (I paid 14c/kWh 3 years ago), all thanks to this belief in renewables being able to supply our base load power needs.

Factories here are now being asked to reduce their power usage at peak times to allow the now overloaded system to not suffer blackouts. This will only lead to further inability of out manufacturers to compete with overseas markets, particularly in light of our new free trade agreements with Asia who, incidentally, purchase (at ridiculously low prices) most of our Coal and Gas for their own power needs.

Our government has recently had to legislate to prevent our gas companies from selling all of our gas out of the country to a point where we were paying up to 8 times as much for domestic gas as consumers (read the link) in Japan were paying for our exported gas - this because consecutive governments have sold all of our assets to private enterprise and put no controls on providing domestic supply at reasonable costs.

Some of our blackouts were due to no gas being available for the gas power plants, at one point last year the generators were charging SA over $1000 per kWh to provide backup power, and even refused at one stage to do so.

We can only dream of a Nuclear power plant as we have likely the worlds largest supply of Uranium, but again the Greens have that locked down with politicians too worried about the election cycle to actually achieve anything worthwhile. I seriously doubt that the Snowy Mountains Hydro scheme would be built today with the environmental restrictions we now endure.

There is a plan (thought bubble) for further utilising the existing Snowy reservoirs with pumped storage to facilitate our power capacity, but the flaw in this thinking is that we now have insufficient base load power and nowhere near enough renewables to satisfy even minimal load at off peak times - so the pumping would require power to come from otherwise base load supply at the cost of other consumers - over unity doesn't exist, so pumping will require more power than it produces, thus defeating the idea that this will somehow be a saviour for the grid.

When it comes to nuclear power, just be careful what you wish for. We got the Shoreham Nuclear Power plant debacle. The fools actually briefly ran the pile, knowing that it would never deliver electric power to the grid before decommissioning. The executives left with their golden parachutes, too.

Hopefully technology has advanced considerably since then, but it is a concern.

Fortunately Australia has vast tracts of uninhabited land where such a plant could reasonably be sited with little concern for evacuation plans - Maralinga, in central Australia was the site for British nuclear bomb testing mid last century, so it already has background radiation levels there.. The other hurdle is getting sufficient cooling water to such sites, but we waste so much of our Northern monsoonal rains that could be redirected South or inland as required with just a little political will - the Ord river scheme is a prime example of the benefitsto be had.

This brings up another Greens inspired debacle - we now have a number of desalination plants that have never been used or are on limited use due to statements by some radicals (one was even made Australian of the year) that our dams would never be full again- they have more water in them now than ever before.

I have to wonder if anyone else is paying attention to the trials and tribulations in SA? There are lessons that will come to light, but I am afraid the rose colored glasses will filter them out.

The linked website seems to be on the side with the pink glasses unless they have a point...

Trying to find out!

Spread the word and hope for the best!

My eyes are on Germany.

Wonder if 2 1/2 minutes is enough to fire those gensets up.

Besides that, is a state wide power grid really possible without the intertia of Rotating mass?

My take is that it is not only about how fast it balances, but also how fast the system could get out of balance. A higher inertia would take longer/heavier impact to upset the grid. Speak you will not change the truck going, but the bike is stopped pretty fast.

It was one of the comments in the discussion (my above link) and I think this is missing in the evaluation of how much inertia is needed.

They would not switch those gensets on all at the same time when the sun is down, would they?

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