Feed aggregator

The energy sector was supposed to be the showcase for privatisation and market deregulation. Yet competition has failed to deliver on its promise of lower prices for customers.

The latest state by state guide to retail electricity markets and their components.

The gas initiative and the ministerial powers are interesting, but the biggest thing is the battery storage tender.

The ATA has welcomed the South Australian Government’s embracing a clean energy future in its energy plan released yesterday.

Potential for up to $16.8m revenue and $15.2m EBITDA.

Lane Crockett shares his thoughts about the industry, including opportunities, solar costs and battery storage.

In the first of a series about communities building renewable energy projects, we look at how Victoria’s Hepburn Shire overcame local opposition to deliver a new homegrown, community-owned generator

From the fertile spud-growing country of Hepburn Shire, 90km northwest of Melbourne, has sprung what many hope will become a revolution in renewable energy in Australia.

On Leonards Hill, just outside the town of Daylesford – famed for its natural springs – stand two wind turbines that not only power the local area, but have also added substantial power to the community-owned renewable energy movement in Australia.

Continue reading...

Kicking off our six-part series highlighting innovative community renewable energy projects across Australia, we visit the town of Daylesford in Hepburn Shire in rural Victoria. Despite early local opposition, residents have tackled the electricity crisis by building their own renewable energy projects, starting with a cooperative-owned windfarm and moving into the hydro power that was once a feature of the town

Continue reading...

ANCIENT ALGAE: New scanning technology gives scientists an extraordinary view inside the cells of what may be 1.6 billion-year-old red algae, the oldest plant-like fossils ever found.

Underground aquifers are usually replenished from October through to March, but hydrographs reveal progress was slow until January

In the UK, about one third of the water that comes out of our taps is sourced from groundwater. The south of the country is particularly dependent on this underground store of water, with Cambridge Water and Cholderton Water relying entirely on the water found in the chalk and sandstone rock formations of the south-east.

After a dry winter, groundwater levels are lower than normal for the time of year, and scientists from the British Geological Survey are keeping a close eye on the situation.

Continue reading...

More than 8000 pelicans have descended on to a series of islands on an inland lake in central NSW to breed.

‘We hope that these estimates and their significant magnitude raise public awareness and increase the level of appreciation for spiders,’ study authors say

The world’s spiders eat 400-800m tonnes of insects every year – as much meat and fish as humans consume over the same period, a study said Tuesday.

In the first analysis of its kind, researchers used data from 65 previous studies to estimate that a total of 25m metric tonnes of spiders exist on Earth.

Continue reading...

South Australia’s government has unveiled its keenly anticipated new energy plan, with the aim of making itself more self-sufficient.

Against the backdrop of repeated crises such as the blackouts of last month and September last year, and a dramatic offer from Tesla founder Elon Musk to fix the state’s energy security problems, the new plan proposes a range of measures to fix what Premier Jay Weatherill has described as the “failures” of national electricity regulation.

Battery storage

First, as almost universally anticipated, there will be a tender for 100 megawatts of battery storage, to be funded from a A$150 million Renewable Technology Fund. The plan document says this project will “modernise South Australia’s energy grid and begin the transformation to the next generation of renewable-energy storage technologies”.

Neither the National Electricity Market rules nor any other federal policy provides any specific mechanism to encourage battery installation. Nor do the existing regulations allow battery operators to be rewarded for other services they could provide, including responding rapidly to price spikes or to sudden drops in voltage on the grid.

Large battery installations, if appropriately configured, would be capable of providing large injections of energy to the grid over short periods, as a way to offset extreme volatility. Both SA and Queensland have been plagued by such volatility in recent months, causing a rash of short-term price spikes indicative of markets without enough competition.

The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) is currently considering a Rule change, termed the 30 minute/5 minute trading interval change, proposed by a large electrolytic zinc smelter in Townsville. The change is ferociously opposed by established generators, but supported by almost everyone else. If and when the AEMC ever gets around to approving the rule change, large battery installations would be able to compete directly with generators, thereby both gaining a new source of revenue and helping to keep wholesale prices within reasonable limits.

Taking back control

The second component of the plan is to introduce legislation that would allow the state government to override the NEM’s market dispatch process for generation in the event of an emergency such as the demand peaks that triggered last month’s blackouts.

This is an obvious response to what is widely seen, at least in SA, as the reluctance of the federal regulator to use its powers to suspend the market. Many observers consider that such reluctance was most evident in the morning of the statewide blackout last September, and believe that earlier intervention could have prevented it, despite the massive storm damage to the state’s transmission infrastructure.

The new proposal could be interpreted as a challenge to the federal government over who controls SA’s electricity.

Energy security

Third, the plan will require all new generators with more than 5MW of capacity to demonstrate how they will contribute to the state’s energy security, by providing what are called ancillary services, such as frequency control, so-called inertia, or short-term storage. This is another clear statement that the state government believes the NEM rules, which establish markets for some frequency control services but not the other services mentioned above, fail to offer the state enough of a guarantee of reliable power supply.

Build a new gas plant

The government plans to become a power station owner, 20 years after the Liberal state government sold off the last publicly owned plant, by building a new open cycle (peaking) gas turbine plant. This decision is most obviously a reaction to the load-shedding blackout amid last month’s heatwave, when the operators of the Pelican Point gas power station were either unable or unwilling to increase output. Had they done so, load shedding could have been avoided.

At A$360 million, this seems a rather expensive way to avoid another load-shedding blackout, presumably justified on the basis of avoided political cost. It could be seen as a missed opportunity to provide more support for a far more innovative (though well proven in other countries) project to integrate solar thermal generation, gas generation and molten salt storage.

Solar thermal generation may gain support from the tender for new generation to supply the government’s own electricity requirements, and possibly some from the Renewable Technology Fund, but that remains to be seen.

Energy security target

Finally, the government will introduce a requirement, called an energy security target, requiring electricity retailers to source a minimum percentage of their wholesale requirements from local generators, rather than from Victorian coal-fired stations.

This will provide a guaranteed amount of revenue to local generators, thus reducing dependence on supply through the interconnectors with Victoria, with their associated security risks.

In a direct, though entirely unsurprising confrontation with the Commonwealth, the plan document states that “South Australia’s energy security target will transition to an EIS or Lower Emissions Target (LET) if or when national policy changes in the future”.

The wider context

In the policy document, Weatherill writes that the NEM is “failing South Australia and the nation”. Taken together, the various elements of the plan can be read as a list of how exactly the SA government considers it to be failing, and what powers the state proposes to assume in order to get it fixed.

Although the plan’s objectives are not stated explicitly, it is clear that they are threefold, and seen of equal priority:

• suppress retail price rises by introducing more competition into the wholesale market

• enhance the physical security of electricity supply

• encourage renewable generation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

These priorities neatly match the three components of what the preliminary report of the forthcoming Finkel Review calls the “energy trilemma”, which is the need to “simultaneously provide a high level of energy security and reliability, universal access to affordable energy services, and reduced emissions.”

With the review’s final version set to be delivered to the Commonwealth government in the coming months, it remains to be seen whether federal energy policy will become similarly proactive in the future.

Hugh Saddler is a member of the Board of the Climate Institute.

The keenly awaited new energy policy unveiled today by South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill features a range of headline-grabbing items, such as a plan to spend A$150 million on a 100-megawatt battery storage facility to help stave off the danger of future blackouts.

On page 7 of the policy document, Weatherill explains part of his underlying rationale:

The national market is now widely considered to be failing and in need of urgent reform. The ability of governments to influence the industry requires cooperation within and across state borders and at a Federal level – cooperation that needs to transcend politics and self-interest.

Noble words, but the new policy doesn’t “transcend politics and self-interest”. Quite the contrary – it is a unilateral move by a state government understandably keen to safeguard itself after suffering vicious criticism at a federal level.

There are rules for how SA and the east coast states that make up the National Electricity Market (NEM) are supposed to behave, yet member states seem to be able to flaunt them, systematically undermining the NEM along the way.

Rightly or wrongly, the NEM does not account for schemes such as renewable energy targets or solar feed-in tariffs. This means that when states pursue them, they can distort the market in the process.

There is conjecture about how much blame the Weatherill government should shoulder for the reliability issues that have beset SA’s electricity network. Either way, the decision has been made to fix it with yet more unilateral state government intervention in what is supposed to be a federated electricity market.

As a result, the new policy is likely to cause major headaches for the NEM and its operators. The announcement includes plans to give the state’s energy minister Tom Koutsantonis the power to override the NEM’s operating rules, allowing him to order generators to supply extra power when he deems it necessary.

This might help avert another South Australian blackout, but it will also undermine the role of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), which is responsible for managing the supply of electricity within the NEM. I will be fascinated to see how the SA government deals with the complex issue of what price they will pay for such power.

If the NEM is experiencing a peak in demand and South Australia is facing a shortage, will the South Australian Minister be able to override AEMO and demand private power generators in SA deliver power at a price determined by the minister? Or will the price be the one dictated at that moment by the market?

It is unlikely that the predominantly Labor-run states that now constitute the NEM will allow any adverse action against South Australia. In fact, the SA Parliament is the body through which rules of the NEM are legislated, so it will be nigh-on impossible to toss SA out of the NEM, lest the whole house of cards collapses.

Going it alone

Two other interesting aspects from the South Australian “energy intervention” is the construction of a new A$360 million gas-fired power plant, courtesy of SA taxpayers, and the A$150 million battery bank.

Presumably the SA government would like this new power plant to be able to sell electricity into the NEM, but to reserve the right to commandeer its output when circumstances dictate. It is not at all clear that the NEM rules allow this.

Consider the circumstances during last month’s heatwave, when both SA and New South Wales were facing power shortages. Under SA’s proposed new rules, NSW would be on its own (unless it develops a similar policy of its own). Hardly an example of cooperation.

The same issue will apply to the battery bank. Will it only be on standby for power shortages in SA, or will it be able to discharge into the NEM to take advantages of peak pricing? Could this result in SA finding its batteries empty when the wind stops blowing?

The SA government is correct to point out the deficiencies in the NEM, and even perhaps to claim that it is failing the nation. But an interstate scheme cannot be fixed by the unilateral actions of one state government – in this case, it is likely to be worsened.

The most worrying prospect of all, as far as the NEM is concerned, is the possibility that this will increase investment uncertainty still further, making it even less likely that the interstate grid will attract the new investment it needs.

If that happens, we might well see a few more states deciding to follow SA’s lead and plan sweeping energy reforms of their own.

Jeffrey Sommerfeld is involved with an energy analytic consultancy he established with two other persons with PhD expertise in energy. He/they are not doing this research on behalf of a client and will receive no direct benefit from it. He was an adviser to former Queensland LNP energy minister Mark McArdle from April 2012 to July 2013.

The origins of plants may go back hundreds of millions of years earlier than previously thought, according to fossil evidence.

Last century, the cliff-dwelling bird of prey almost became extinct in Britain. Now it has reinvented itself as a city creature. What is behind this spectacular recovery?

By the four chimneys of Battersea power station, between tower cranes and builders’ cabins, is an unobtrusive metal mast. At the top, a watchful figure looks down upon the 3,000 workers bustling around this vast £9bn construction site.

“Female,” says David Morrison, with a deft glance through his binoculars. “She’s protecting her nest site. There was an intruding female about half an hour ago.”

Continue reading...

Jeremy Hance writes a letter to his young daughter as a part of the Letters to the Revolution initiative.

First published on January 2nd, 2017 at Letters to the Revolution.

Continue reading...

Outside the Kazakh capital, Astana, the river snowscape is populated by strange figures. Detroit-based photographer Aleksey Kondratyev investigated and discovered they were ice fishermen, who brave -40C temperatures waiting patiently for their catch

Continue reading...

The submarine dubbed Boaty McBoatface is preparing to explore some of the deepest parts of the Antarctic Ocean.

Could South Australia's proposed fix to power supply problems push power bills up in other states?