Australian coal plant in 'extraordinary' survival experiment | Hacker News Reader

Australian coal plant in 'extraordinary' survival experiment

abc.net.au

102 pointsh0l0cube154 comments

The section of the article that says "Now comes the bad news" actually sounds like a good news.

More pressure from banks, insurances and legislation to limit the development and usage of coal to produce electricity? I can understand there's going to be job losses, and that's never good, but for the benefit of the rest of the world it's a pretty good news. Finally a change in attitude towards carbon intensive energy production.

Lots of good news in the article

> But, more and more, base-load coal plants have been squeezed out of the market as ever more renewable energy – particularly solar power – flooded the system.

And so the coal power plants needed more money to stay afloat, but:

> But Delta, in a letter written to the body that makes the rules in the market, said none of the 15 banks it had met had been willing to provide it the necessary coverage because of environmental concerns.

And so

> "The coal-fired generation is going to go out of business in Australia over the next 10 years," he said.

> And so the coal power plants needed more money to stay afloat,

Green energy is great. Going really well in the uk. Super cheap with all those subsidies……………… I mean contracts for difference we pay for it.

It's an investment in the future, just like the coal power plants and grid received for as long as electricity has been a thing.

CFDs are a "collar trade". They pay the difference between the market price and a "strike price". If the market price is above the strike price, the CFD is a refund. So the CFDs have been returning money to the taxpayer lately.

https://www.current-news.co.uk/cfds-set-to-pay-back-10-5bn-a...

Unlike natural gas, which has been made much more expensive by the war.

It may surprise you, but all energy production is or was heavily subsidized at one point or the other in virtually all states. I'm sure I don't have to spell out where nuclear power would be today if not for the billions of subsidies.

Just visit the Wikipedia page for Hinkley Point [1], read the section on economics, and weep. That's your money at work. And it has been the same for coal, oil, gas, and now solar and wind energy, all over Europe and the US.

On a level playing field without subsidies, where we can build solar and wind power generators at scale like today, they would pummel all the other energy sources on costs alone (just think of all the raw material you don't need to burn to make your turbines turn).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

> On a level playing field without subsidies

On a level playing field without subsidies, we'd be in underdevelopped shitholes. The idea that a modern economy can grow without some agency being brought in somehow is utopia.

> where we can build solar and wind power generators at scale

How do you build those, without the decades of subsidies to ramp up production and decrease costs?

> they would pummel all the other energy sources on costs alone

They would collapse the existing grid. There's a reason why Germany is investing €450bn in its grid to support continued growth [1]. Batteries could make up for it, but scaling batteries won't happen without subsidies.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-rejigs-sprea...

On a level playing field where both are equally subsidized, solar and wind would still outcompete coal. Their point seems to be applicable to the degree to which harmful power generation is subsidized relative to regular power generation, not just the subsidies themselves.

I wouldn't bet on it.

If your accounting model is "build some production, plug it to the grid and let someone else worry about the details", sure, you're right. But if you factor in grid development costs, the picture is different.

For instance, you lften hear about Germany importing lots of energy, and usually there's always someone to say "But they export a lot, too". Well, these imports & exports require lines to happen, and these lines aren't cheap. The EU mandates that countries should develop interconnexion to facilitate the market, but this ruling mostly helps intermittent energy sources.

Another example in France, where the south-western region has a lot of solar, and not many industrial consumers. To make things worse, that region is close to an interconnexion with Spain, which has a lot of solar production. In order to move all that power to places where it can be used, new lines have to be built.

These costs are not factored in if you only price new production, but they're also significant.

This is also not factored into France utilizing ~10 GW of neighboring flexible fossil fueled flexibility to not have to turn down their nuclear reactors as much during the night.

The French grid would be even more uneconomical without the interconnections.

https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/cross-border-electrici...

> to not have to turn down their nuclear reactors

They are reducing production almost daily these days, but usually around 12-14h, due to solar production.

I wonder if that wouldn't be served better by storing the excess solar production into a flow battery, or similar storage dimensioned to serve a city.

Which means the economic prospects for new nuclear power is laughably bad.

Shipping got containerized without a significant amount[1] of tax breaks or handouts for that purpose. Rail standards were developed without significant preferential treatment as were the early electrical standards. Without subsidies of specific tech we'd likely see more balkanization and partial standardization of the grid. Perhaps the grid would have remained less reliable longer. In all likelihood things would "mostly" be the same on a medium-long timeline.

Remember, prior to the 1960s and 1970s expansions of the federal bureaucracy the government didn't really get as proactively involved in this sort of thing as they are now. Though there were several cases in which they lit a pile of money on fire and kept feeding it until they got the results they wanted (I can't think of an example of this that wasn't directed at defense tech though).

I think it would likely be a lateral move, or close enough to lateral that we can't really say with a high degree of certainty whether it would have turned out better or worse. I think it's very possible that without tax breaks we'd have gotten more solar earlier but with a slower adoption curve after that if none of this stuff was subsidized.

[1] I know of none but I don't want some nit picker to find some case where someone got a $2k research grant in 1961 and act like that invalidates the point here.

Federally funded US hydroelectric dam projects were a big thing in the 20s and 30s. But your point stands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority#His...

"but scaling batteries won't happen without subsidies"

Why not? There is a worldwide and increasing demand for them.

> Why not? There is a worldwide and increasing demand for them.

That demand is created by the variations in prices created by renewables, which are themselves subsidized. In a world with coal, gas, nuclear or hydro, there simply is not enough demand to develop batteries.

So, in a world with no subsidies, how do you pay for batteries, not good ones but bad ones for decades until the industry ramps up? It simply doesn't happen.

It's not an indictment either. Subsidies are simply the way heavy industrial investments work, and in the electricity sector investments are so massive that without subsidy, barely anything happens.

"So, in a world with no subsidies, how do you pay for batteries, not good ones but bad ones for decades until the industry ramps up? "

A world completely without subsidies would indeed work different, but still would have demand for batteries.

There's lots of demand when the payback is very quick and easy. Batteries being built right now make tons of money on grid stabilization services. But once those easy gains have been taken, making the less certain investment scaling up the batteries to handle that cold snap that happens a few days a year etc will not happen in the free market.

In a free market, where everyone is free to ignore consequences, coal would be the obvious solution - but if the climate change costs are priced in - then batteries do become attractive. Lightweight ultrapower batteries are high tech. A simple batterie for the grid, that can be big, is not and quite simple to build.

We started to price in the CO2 externalities - and demand is skyrocketing.

Subsidies are more of a geopolitical/welfare thing in this context.

I see where you are coming from and I could have been clearer. So let me put things straight.

I'm not arguing against subsidies, I'm arguing against ignoring the subsidies we provided and provide for older forms of energy generation while lamenting that we subsidize new forms.

The good news here, and the big picture, is that coal is increasingly less financially sustainable.

It's being squeezed out of the market because of cheaper alternatives. Banks don't want to give loans because they see those loans as risky. Coal companies might go out of business and default on their loans. The risk of that is relatively high with coal. Which is why banks and investors are looking elsewhere for more lucrative or safer investments. It's hard to argue with that.

And the circumstances that make coal increasingly financially unsustainable are only going to get worse. Cheaper solar, wind, and battery means even coal plants that may still be profitable now aren't going to stay profitable much longer.

That seems to be true around the world. Even China is projected to reach peak coal in the next few years; after which it is projected to shrink there as well. World peak coal usage was last decade already. A lot of countries are pretty far done getting rid of it completely. Australia is late to that party.

> Banks don't want to give loans because they see those loans as risky

Banks may be easily not lending because the industry is not "green" and gives bad name to their brand. And since the industry may be getting smaller it's less of an issue for them. However it doesn't mean we may not need coal, since we still need peak energy production.

A right-wing argument against climate change policy is to “let the market forces” do the driving.

“No! Not like that!” I bet they’re screeching right now as megacorps refuse to tie their cart to a dying horse.

The big picture which everyone is missing is that we need 'peaking' gas plants to cover the shortfalls over the next 10-20 years until grid storage catches up. There's no commercial incentive for these to be built, so they'd be at the expense of the taxpayer, and they would be sending GHG into the atmosphere. The 'bad news' is if this capacity isn't built, renewable output will drop enough for blackouts to become common, potentially causing more coal/gas/nuclear to be built, and sending back the progress of renewables by a few years.

Let's hope countries like China and India will put the same pressure on their industry. Otherwise we're just offloading work to them even further.

Atleast in india, we have good subsidies on residential solar, and need to bring as much capacity (blue,green,black, whatever) online for a country whose electricity demand is growing rapidly (most villages now have access to electricity)

https://climatecooperation.cn/climate/china-issues-action-pl...

China installed more wind and solar in 2023 than the rest of the world combined. They’re going to decarbonize well before the US.

You should tell the full story, it was also responsible for 95% of the world's new coal power: https://www.carbonbrief.org/china-responsible-for-95-of-new-...

If you want the fullest story you might want to say that a lot of China's manufacturing energy needs was to supply the rest of the world

Mostly replacing old inefficient plants with modern plants with better load following capacity. Essentially, ensuring the energy security while banking on renewables.

The latest news is that China is likely to enter structural decline on their emissions since the renewable buildout exceeds the electrical demand growth.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-emissions-set-to...

yeah, they seem to be planning on using them like gas peaker plants (because they have little gas). For backup and filling in load gaps. If their renewables keep growing like they are today, the coal peakers will barely ever be used. They wouldn't make sense economically in the west, but they dont have to in china - the single state apparatus can socialize the cost without consequences. A dictatorship fears disruption, so they build them as a backup.

Capacity and usage are two different things. China are using their new coal stations as redundancy (and because of a weird disconnect between national and local governance which means each local government is incentivized to make this redundancy)

Australia's coal industry isn't even all that big. McDonalds employs more people in Australia than the entire coal industry does.

It employs around 40,000 people in total, most of those are in mining, and that is mostly an export industry. Very few are involved in coal power generation.

My dad worked on something similar, when during the 1980s the coal-fired station he worked at had to convert to two-shift operation, from the three-shift operation that it's 1950s design had intended. He described this process as, "bashing hell out the machines to make them do things they weren't designed to."

One interesting detail was that the more rapid startup and cooldown of turbines meant that blade spacing couldn't be as tight as before, reducing efficiency during operation. (The turbine casing has less thermal mass than the rotor, and hence contracts faster during cooldown. The spacing of the blades needs to account for this.)

Would it not be more efficient to increase the mass of the casing so that the blades can remain as they were? or was that a non option for other reasons?

No matter the mass of the casing it will absorb and lose heat over some timescale and will expand and contract, changing dimensions.

The design is optimised so that the blade dimensions and the interior casing diameter closely match to a very high tolerance at the optimal operating tempreture.

The challenge is that the casing material and the blades are made of different materials and these materials will have different coefficients of expansion (although there is some room to 'dope' materials to change the CoE at the xpense of other material properties that can be more desirable).

The CoE means that the two expand at different rates as the tempreture changes - if they are "close" at optimal temp then they will drift away as the temp changes due to not expanding in lock step.

It's a tricky thing to get right.

( Also a challenge in multicoloured glass works as the differing colours must be batched to have similiar properties including matching CoE's so they don't pull away when anealing from hot glass work temps to room temp. )

I wonder what kind of arrangements they had to make to keep things hot while not producing power. I'm assuming that you could keep the shaft spinning at near operating speed, and hold the temperature of the turbines, etc... the big question for me is the boiler tubes themselves you'd have to essentially turn the whole firebox into a superheater, pulling just enough steam out to keep the turbine supplied, and the make-up water flowing.

This stuff really isn't designed to be throttled up and down like a yo-yo. I'm amazed they were able to do it at all, and seem confident they can keep it up.

Well said, but as the article goes on, it seems even with no technical hurdles this innovation seems dead in the water with policy. At least they're not doing what the Germans have done, shutting down coal power plants and buying Polish electrical generation... made with coal power plants.

Germany is a net exporter of power to Poland.

Exactly, Germany in 2024 mainly import electricity from France, Denmark, Switzerland and Norway, which are all low carbon producers.

It's strange to see Germany so against nuclear, but happily buying all that clean nuclear energy from it's neighbour. Nuclear accidents don't care about borders, you'd think if they really meant what they preached they'd boycott their closest nuclear plants aswell

It's "not in my backyard" politics, but Europe is full of that.

In bavaria, chernobyl was an event my parents generation fully experienced.

It was very clear (especially when you watch the old reports, i did a presentation about this in school) people didn't know a lot about nuclear and how to act upon an accident. Kids were not allowed to play on playgrounds, food had to be washed etc.

Even today if you shoot a dear, you have to check it for radiation!

its not strange.

And another reason why politics are stupid: Bavaria is reigned by the CSU. They have the majority for a very long time and the partner CDU was in power for over 16 years. None of them made any long term nuclear power strategy ever.

No one cared to plan longterm enough at all. Building nuclear is not easy and its a lot harder in a country like germany were we want to be extra save.

Even the newest europeon nuclear power plants take very long time. The last one took i think 18 years instead of 10?

Poland imports slightly more from Germany than it exports to it, and isn't in the top 5 countries that Germany imports electricity from.

> Poland imports slightly more from Germany than it exports to it

Why do they import/export the same product between each other?

Honest question. In general, not just about Poland and Germany.

Because electricity is difficult to store, but because of how the grid works you always have to generate exactly as much as is used. Not electricity generation fluctuates (obvious with wind and solar; all plants need maintenance; nuclear often has to shut down in the summer either because rivers don't carry enough water or are so hot that feeding warm cooling water back into them endangers fish). Demand also heavily fluctuates both over the course of a day and with the seasons.

Trading electricity over geographically large areas smoothes out some of these fluctuations and gives you more options to deal with planned outages

> nuclear often has to shut down in the summer either because rivers don't carry enough water or are so hot that feeding warm cooling water back into them endangers fish).

I don't believe this has much impact on Germany's export patterns: in fact, summer is usually the time scheduled maintenance is planned in France, because electricity usage is much lower during summer than during winter. So there's still a lot of wiggle room before France ends up being forced to import in the summer because of that phenomenon.

The main driver for import/export patterns are different consumer patterns (not all countries have the same daily load curve - for instance, France and Spain both benefit a lot from trading because France's peak use time is an hour ahead of Spain's) and renewables availability.

If you look at the electricity map at various times of day or over a week, you'll see the import arrows flip direction depending on the weather and time of day.

The UK exports wind power at night, but imports power during the day. Scandinavia often exports hydro power.

Taxes on carbon emissions mean Poland will import green power if it's available, as it will be cheaper than burning their own coal.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

For instance, Germany could import on windless winter days, and export on windy summer days.

Super simplified (and not real) example.

Say it's a super sunny day, Germany generates more solar power than they use themselves (Germans don't usually have aircon at home anyway), Poland is happy to import and use it since it's basically free since it has no input costs of fuel, so they can idle their coal plants and use less fuel. Now it turns to night and the sun goes down and Germany generates 0 solar power. Then they can import coal power from Poland.

Expand this over a whole content and you get flows of electricity between companies depending on how the grid interconnect loads look and the prices of the various power sources. If Polish coal costs more then French nuclear, then Germany can sell their cheap wind power to Poland for something in between polish coal costs and French nuclear costs, and then buy nuclear from France and pocket the difference. Assuming the grid interconnects can't handle Poland importing direct from France.

Again none of these examples are real, just an explanation of why you would want to trade electricity and why you have a big market like the EU power market.

This is a common talking point, but it really doesn't mean much in terms of the reliability of electric systems.

If you import a lot and export a lot, that doesn't mean both countries could be autonomous, it may mean your country strongly depends on imports sometimes, and on exports at other times, which typically is the case for Germany.

Oh this is the oldest trick in the book. If you need to greenwash, then just burn the coal somewhere else. Easy.

Los Angeles has been doing this for decades - for years the largest single energy source for LAPW has been an 1800MW coal burning plant that they operated in Utah, which has very loose environmental regulations.

I sometimes wonder how directly some of the big flashy renewable energy projects in Australia are funded by coal exports to China...

But it's offset by Australia being able to validate approaches e.g. South Australia's battery.

Yeah, unlike e.g. European countries or US states, Australia is an island and they can't import / export electricity or connect grids easily.

I was under the impression that China had large coal deposits of its own. Do they really import a lot of coal?

Yes, but not for power generation. The majority of Australia's coal exports are metallurgical coal, for manufacturing. Australia owns about 58% of the global trade for metallurgical coal, which means everyone imports it from us.

Interesting. It is as bad as you say (21% coal), but after a decade of planning, coal is about to be phased out next year[0].

> The Agency planned to build the third unit of 900 MW capacity. This unit was expected to go online in 2012; however, the project was cancelled after its major purchaser, the city of Los Angeles, decided to become coal-free by 2020. [0]

> The plant includes a HVDC converter. It is scheduled in 2025 for replacement with an 840 MW natural gas plant, designed to also burn "green hydrogen."[0] (released by the electrolysis of water, using renewably generated electricity)

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermountain_Power_Plant

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Department_of_Wa...

So they will replace coal with gas. Better (?) but not great overall.

Hydrogen is a total joke of greenwashing (apart from some niche use cases) so I am not taking it into account

Yeah, I don't understand the use-case for hydrogen here. Why convert from electricity -> hydrogen -> electricity if everything is stationary? I suppose it could be useful for storage or long-distance transmission, but it seems like it would be much less efficient than other, simpler options.

Even storage is a nightmare. That thing really wants to leak.

It's because hydrogen scales up to much greater energy capacity.

"Chevron joins Mitsubishi in 300 GWh hydrogen storage project as construction continues"

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/chevron-mitsubishi-hydrogen...

The ACES project aims to use electrolysis to produce up to 100 metric tons of hydrogen per day, which will be stored in naturally occurring salt caverns at the site. The caverns have a potential storage capacity of 300 GWh of energy, according to Mitsubishi Power, which is developing ACES jointly with now Chevron-owned Magnum Development.

For comparison, last year the largest battery system in the world was the Moss Landing project in California with 3 GWh of capacity:

https://www.energy-storage.news/moss-landing-worlds-biggest-...

The largest pumped hydro station in the US stores 24 GWh:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...

At 300 gigawatt hours this underground hydrogen storage system can store more energy than all utility scale batteries in the US combined.

Do we need that much storage, though? Presumably we won't have the hydrogen-powered generation capacity to use that much energy quickly, so the comparison to utility-scale batteries isn't quite apples-to-apples.

From the article about the Chevron project:

> The project will initially provide fuel to the Intermountain Power Project, an 840-MW blended gas power plant also under construction in Delta, but Chevron believes there will be opportunities to supply hydrogen to the transportation and industrial sectors as well.

So even if the hydrogen storage facility was full, we're still limited to 840 MW of generation capacity. Sure, we get ~350 hours of runtime, but that's not really needed.

The Bath County Pumped Storage Station has 3003 MW of generation potential, with 11 hours of runtime from full.

Looks like the Moss Landing project is rated to be able to discharge 1/4 of its capacity per hour, so that 3 GWh facility can provide 750 MW. Batteries also have the advantage of being able to be sited much closer to the end user.

It's a demonstration project to show how a renewable powered system can cope with weeks of bad weather. If deep decarbonization doesn't actually require weeks of storage, not many systems like this will get built in the future. But if they are required at least we'll know how to build them.

It’s short term measures while it transitions to a heavily renewable based energy system. Aren’t they currently at 60%+ renewable and are aiming to be 80% by 2030? Claims of greenwashing with those stats is disingenuous.

A part of the increasing of the renewable share in Germany electricity production is also the result of a decrease in total electricity production. In 2017 Germany was producing 560 TWh (with 138TWh solar + wind) vs 430TWh (with 192TWh solar + wind) in 2023 and probably even less this year. That's why Germany is importing electricity.

These are very informative numbers one reads nowhere in the news. From destatis[0], we go from 608 in 2019 to 514TWh in 2023. So not the same absolute values, but same trend. Thank you.

[0]: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...

We often read equivalent figures in the British news, as it shows the energy efficiency push of the last 30 years has reduced power use, leaving space for charging electric vehicles.

Efficiency, sure, but also industry getting wiped out.

Industry which didn't care for investing into energy at all.

For a car its btw. 1%

> At least they're not doing what the Germans have done, shutting down coal power plants and buying Polish electrical generation... made with coal power plants.

And shutting down nuclear power plants and buying French electricity.. ..made with nuclear power plants. Strong the hypocrisy is with this one.

But hey they're doing their part, right? This is the flaw in European and international agreements, they're still done on a per-country basis instead of EU or a continental basis.

You simplify the state of german power import/export.

We did reduce the coal burning from 45% to 23% and not by 'just importing it from poland'.

We importet AND exportet 3 tWh 2023.

And the overall renewable energy part has increased to 25%

The article skirts around saying that not much damage is happening in two-shifting operation.

What kind of damage is expected? Is two-shifting a sacrificial operational mode that’s planned to see the coal be sunset in the next decade?

If you look at the data, capital spend on these things is plummeting because the operators know they aren't here to stay. This has caused decreases in their reliability and increases in their downtime. I wonder if this new "operating mode" will further accelerate the aging of the plants and continue the death spiral?

Am I reading this right? "Yay, we've found a way to keep burning coal for a little while longer despite it being economically prohibitive and ecologically destructive" is the good news?

Hopefully soon their profits will dip low enough they won't be able to buy (excuse me, "lobby") politicians, and the whole industry will just collapse. Kids can go urban exploring in the behemoth ruins in a couple of decades, it'll be great.

> Am I reading this right?

No. Energy storage would need to reach a capacity of several days to completely obviate the need for existing plants to keep running. Until now there's only been two options to deal with this, building new gas peaker plants – bad outcome, right? – or to just keep baseload coal/gas/nuclear online and throttle renewables – bad outcome, right? Now we can limp coal infrastructure for a little longer before they retire in lieu of building new gas peaking plants, which are neither financially viable nor environmentally desirable.

Australia has a base load problem that causes energy prices to become negative during the day when solar production is at it’s peak. Part of this is that the coal plants cannot readily be switched off during the day, and end up producing energy when it isn’t needed. Because we do not yet have the ability to store the amount of energy we use in the evening, we still need the coal plants at night.

Hence why this is good news to us, this can actually reduce emissions and energy prices at the same time. We can basically rely on renewables during the day if the coal plants can be turned off during peak solar generation. Otherwise we might have relied on natural gas as that can ramp up and down faster.

Keep in mind that this is one operator of some plants that is doing this while shifting to a renewable focus because of exactly the economic reasons outlined in the article. The ability to run plants to zero helps them save money and incidentally reduces emissions while they shift focus to the new energy market.

Australia is in the process of shutting down coal fired plants but increasing energy use has meant that the aging plants need to be run longer while we transition technologies. Many are already shut down, and we do not have a short road to nuclear power plants, so the trajectory is looking renewable heavy along with storage. It is not surprise that new plants do not find investors.

These companies are ultimately accountable to us if we make it happen and the economic incentive is already there for a transition to low or no emission grids. Partial transitions and operational changes like this are a sign that those changes are being taken seriously and that operation of coal plants is already seen as a financial risk, largely due to the increasing purchase of solar and batteries by Australians looking to reduce their energy bill

> Delta, the Czech firm that owns the aging Vales Point coal plant near Lake Macquarie, reported that it had been unable to get the financial backing of any major bank in Australia

It is very good news that the banks are refusing to finance the fossil fuel greed heads and vandals.

It makes sense to run coal for another 5-10 years if you can to transition to batteries. This will likely put more stress on the parts and the plant will become unserviceable sooner but that’s better then retiring it now

> It makes sense to run coal for another 5-10 years

No, it does not. It is a bad idea.

We are better to do without the electricity.

Inconvenience, or climate meltdown. Take your pick

Do that and all support for the environment goes completely out the window.

Do this and that's pretty much the end for any kind of green transition.

Is this a valid generic political argument? Do the bad thing or the bad people will support your bad opposition and do the bad thing anyway? No wonder there's so much bad.

The problem is that there is no agreement on what bad actually is. An individual may consider that a loss of their job is worse than global climate change. The environmental sphere is full of arguments that would ideally be a false dichotomy but are not.

Politics is the mechanism we have for deciding what is bad. It isn't very good but it is the best we have.

Absolutely extreme environmental policy alienates most moderates. Shut it down and have poor people freeze or die from heat isn’t going to win a lot of moderate support

Then the winning strategy is to make the opposite side appear as extreme as possible and alienate moderates.

The pollution doesn’t go away it just happens somewhere else with fewer regulations and less filters like China or Bangladesh. All that happens is that Australia uses more expensive nat gas power and the coal gets exported elsewhere.

Also keep in mind that there is pretty extensive pollution created by manufacturing a power plant in the first place. It’s often more environmentally sound to use up existing facilities even if they are a bit dirtier than to build brands new ones

It would be a good thing if you could trust utilities and energy companies to use this new-found flexibility as a way to minimize coal use on the way to carbon neural energy generation.

But I think we've seen there can be no trust there and so this is a bad thing that will help the coal industry survive. I'm not saying other industries are "good" but this industry is definitely evil.

It's a matter of necessity. Until grid storage catches up shortfalls in renewable output need to be mitigated somehow. The other option is to just keep all the gas and coal baseload and switch off the renewables, which would be much worse for emissions

> The other option is to just keep all the gas and coal baseload and switch off the renewables

The other option is to shut down the coal plants that are destroying the climate.

And put up with the consequences.

But, money.

The consequences of "just shutting of coal" right now would be blackouts. People would riot and people would die. It would kill any support for climate action.

U so right

Let's just do nothing now and leave it for later :)

No, what we need to do now is not "just shut off electricity lol". It's building carbon free alternatives as quickly as we can.

Homie

You flinched. But you came through.

Exactly. We have to choose between everyone dying and everyone rioting.

No, there are more options. In fact it’s rather impossible to choose „everybody is rioting“ in democratic countries, and very difficult in dictatorships.

That's a transparently gross oversimplification, and I find it very hard to believe that you're not aware of that fact.

But.. health services. But.. utilities. But.. transport. But.. basic goods. But.. writing comments on hacker news. Sure, big business will suffer, but so will everyone else. It's fairly understandable why rolling blackouts are not politically sensible.

Words that the author uses to associate with coal: "extraordinary", "celebrate", "quintessential", "a feat", "flexibility", "savings"

Words used in the article in association with cleaner energy production: "squeezed", "flood", "forcing", "waste", "pressure", "plight". An the fact that banks are no longer financing coal is "bad news".

> "It's exacerbated in Delta's case because they are very unashamedly totally pro-coal"

Yeah, well, so is the article's author.

The author is a regular on the ABC, and I have never noticed or suspected any bias from him. He covers energy matters well, particularly for a mainstream media outlet.

Well what can I say. Perhaps he wanted a bigger house.

In general the narrative in Australia is extremely pro coal and anti renewable. Going back after 20 years away felt like almost nothing had progressed. Kind of sad really.

Reasons for "...the narrative in Australia is extremely pro coal and anti renewable...." Its said that the cause of this, is the big increases in electricity prices due to lots expensive renewable projects

If you look at the numbers, it’s government policy that pushed prices up. E.g.: misplaced incentives that resulted in excess infrastructure construction.

Source: the horse's mouth, having worked at an energy company and asking pointed questions from the people involved.

PS: Because of these policies I was installing network equipment with capacity to switch an entire city of Internet traffic… for five people.

I can't tell if this is a good thing. It seems like maybe a good thing that you can shut off plants that historically couldn't be shut off. But it seems like a bad thing since it means these plants will likely stay in service longer. Is there a tipping point in the foreseeable future where these plants are unprofitable regardless of whether they run only part time?

Probably once there enough batteries in service to soak up enough negative-priced rooftop solar power produced during the day to meet the overnight demand, baseload coal/gas will be less needed or no longer needed.

Correct. It will take around 10-20 years for this happen at current scaling of grid storage. In the meantime it doesn't make sense to scale up new gas, coal, or nuclear, as they won't have a decent ROI over their lifespan.

At least in Australia, the oversupply of rooftop solar is already getting to be enough of a problem that its a signal to investors that getting into grid scale batteries could be profitable, and to home owners that house scale batteries are a good idea.

Sodium-ion battery packs are starting to enter the market, and are already quite cheap. I think within a couple of years the economics will be difficult to resist.

> and to home owners that house scale batteries are a good idea.

There's a middle ground to exploit for business that I've seen few (although some) examples of in Australia - "neighbourhood" batteries that cover 200 homes or so.

Good for small towns, developments, suburbs, etc - about $1 million (AUD) as I recall, decent economics - work with grid provider to soak charge container sized battery from surrounding solar, feedback on demand, etc.

To encourage this, here in South Australia, households can get free power between 11am and 2pm, to charge their EVs.

We also charge our home batteries and run other things like the dishwasher, washing machine and so on...

It's actually a bit of a thing, where you can be out and the 11am alarms on peoples phones will start going off!

I haven't come across this. Our power company has cheaper 'shoulder' rates between 10am and 3pm, during which I schedule more things to be 'on', but haven't heard about a free power time range.

I'm with AGL, and don't tend to shop around (because hassle), but this might inspire a review.

If you own an EV and have a Smart Meter, you can get these rates with OVO!

Also need to factor in the possibility of grid connectivity.

If there is ever a Western to Eastern Australia connector that would have a big impact on excess capacity given the 3 hour time zone difference and just how warm it gets there.

It sounds like it's a mixed bag. It'll be quite difficult to transition to renewables before storage projects like Snowy Hydro 2.0 are complete, and an increased service life really just means an increased service life before we need to pay for an expensive infrastructure project the cost of which companies will try to recoup, so a longer lifespan might actually cause the plants to shut down sooner.

Surely this kind of experiments must be first done in controlled conditions and not on a live plant. The article doesn't mention any sort of fatigue study. Remember how a Russian hydro plant blew up because one of its turbines was throttled back and forth?

It's presumably not practical to find a multi-GW load to test with aside from the grid. The plant probably had arrangements in place if things didn't work out.

The base problem I see is how energy is provided when extended periods of no renewables ( no solar or wind ) . batteries are not suitable for extended periods. The abc article e even admits this problem ... ie ..." opened up the possibility of coal plants being left on care-and-maintenance after they retired from full-time service – of using them as back-up generators when the system needed the help."

> batteries are not suitable for extended periods

Yet. It's just a matter of capacity. Yearly growth in grid storage is increasing at a rate even greater than solar. Crucially grid storage isn't limited by energy density, which leaves room for cheaper options – like sodium ion – which don't have the scaling bottlenecks of li-ion.

Something like 35% of Australia is desert. There's no good reason for solar to not work on almost every day, so all you need is overnight coverage not a full seasonal battery.

Australia is HUGE and mostly empty. You need some mechanism for getting that energy from source to sink.

Transmission lines are relatively few and far between. The eastern states have an interconnected grid. Western Australia is not only isolated, but its internal grid doesn't even reach the northern part of the state.

There was a ~GW scale geothermal development in the Cooper Basin in the late '10s. The (pilot) plant was in and operating demonstrating the feasibility of (so-called) Engineered Geothermal Systems. The entire operation died on the vine because the geothermal site was 600 line-km from the nearest transmission line, and the company that developed the geothermal field was counting on the government to fund that connection. It didn't.

On the other hand, there is active development of the grid now in the Eastern states.

Plans for extensions of the transmission network in Victoria to support offshore wind as well as to a renewables zone, plus new interconnectors to NSW.

The problem is the amount of people not willing to invest into energy storage.

If we would now buy a lot more EVs and make bi-directional charging mandatory, we would have a lot more capacity available 'out of the box'.

Additional investment into grid storage batteries would also add to economy of scale.

But noooo we are to slow, to careflu, we don't like it, we <add your excuse here>

Pumped hydro is a battery, Snowy 2.0 for example [1]

> Snowy 2.0 will provide an additional 2,200 megawatts of dispatchable, on-demand generating capacity and approximately 350,000 megawatt hours of large-scale storage to the National Electricity Market. To provide context, this is enough energy storage to power three million homes over the course of a week.

Every EV is a battery. V2H (Home) and V2G (Grid) standards are evolving to allow them to be managed as part of the grid/mesh.

[1] https://www.snowyhydro.com.au/snowy-20/about/

There is lots criticism of this project , including its rising cost, currently $12 billion. My point is there needs to be large amounts of storage , KEPT IN RESERVE for unexpected weather events that last several days. Then there needs to be the (to be constructed) network capacity to get it to where energy is needed. ( At present , most just assume a infinite copper grid) Then there needs to be excess generation capacity to recharge the storage after its use. (Hopefully no back to back extreme renewable droughts) The present electricity supply system has evolved over several decades. Completely re engineering the electricity grid over a relatively short time , like a decade, is bound to have lots expensive problems leading to high electricity prices and un reliable grid supply. Every EV as a battery , skeptical about that, sounds good, I can see implementation problems.

Yes, it's blown out on cost, primarily because of tunnelling issues.

Your point about large amounts of storage and the network capacity etc is correct, however, no one "just assume[s] a infinite copper grid". AEMOs ISP includes transmission network upgrades to both connect Renewable Energy Zones (eg offshore and rural REZ in Victoria).

The problems of "baseload" disappearing both because of the age of the generators and the variability of RE because "always on" generation doesn't work well with variable generation has to be solved, but storage is growing now at the same sort of rate as generation, especially co-located solar/storage.

It is exceedingly rare for unexpected weather events lasting several days across the entire NEM. In fact, it has never occurred.

Why isn't this transition happening in the United States - or is it?

Money.

There is a lot of gas in the US.

The Navajo Power Plant near Page, AZ closed a few years ago largely due to economic reasons.

Australia, despite being often equal largest gas exporter and massive coal importer (an energy super power) has the highest gas and electricity prices charged to its citizens compared to the US/UK/etc. IMO a lot of it is due to local corruption of politicians.

As an example there is a nice trade for Asian gas importers at the moment where they buy Australian gas and Australian's import it by from them (the surplus they don't use) and they take an arbitrage profit. The stuff they do use powers a lot of manufacturing from what I understand. Australia is even building gas import terminals right now to take pressure of local energy prices because the global market has better pricing than locally (despite being one of the cheapest places to produce and/or mine energy). A massive government policy failure; unlike Norway and other energy sovereigns.

This high price has the silver lining of making a renewable transition viable as gas power in particular becomes extremely expensive despite Australia having one of the most lowest cost gas and coal production globally. Of course its people are paying for that in their cost of living, and decline in manufacturing due to high energy prices.

I wouldn't look to Australia for anything w.r.t energy policy and what you should do. With the energy abundance they have (rivaling some oil states) - a lot of commentary locally there stating that if Australia just had its energy policy adjusted a little bit before now they could of been one of the richest countries per capita globally. They've royally screwed things there IMO.

I don't know why, from the start, we haven't used nuclear power more for baseload.

China is already building between 6 to 8 nuclear power plants a year and plans to expand that number to 10 a year.

It's nothing compared to all the other sources of power they are creating, but it seems to me that rather than investing in mass battery storage, a few dozen modern nuclear power plants would be a good idea.

Assuming, of course, you can actually get costs down and cut through red tape like China can.

China finished 1 reactor in 2023 and are in track for a massive 3 finished reactors in 2024.

On the other hand they are building enough renewables to cover their entire electricity growth.

Even China has figured out that nuclear power is not economically viable.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/chinas-quiet-energy-revolution-t...

You're basically just talking to yourself.

Because no one cares about nuclear whilst the costs are so high, return on investment questionable and there aren't simple solutions for dealing with the waste. Plus for better or worse the politics of it are terrible.

Meanwhile every year solar and batteries are getting cheaper. And we may see a future with lots of EVs capable of being used as grid batteries.

Agreed. Nuclear is cool but beaten in so many ways by the current renewable revolution. Distributed, low risk, cheap energy generation backed by batteries seems strictly superior to nuclear generation.

Backed by batteries is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Batteries required to make them viable are never included in the LCOEs for renewable, because it'd make them ridiculously more expensive than nuclear. The problem is we need power now, all the time. It's much easier to develop new technologies when the lights are still on.

Lazard had figures that include a couple of hours of storage for years. https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost...

It's not true that batteries are required to make renewables work.

In Australia solar is popular because it produces power at the same time it is needed for A/C, computers, manufacturing etc.

There really isn't the need for huge amounts of baseload power. Hence why batteries are used.

Even backed by batteries renewables are still winning. How good things look depends on how much battery you decide to include, but fortunately we don't need that much battery, especially while we still have some legacy dispatchable generation.

It "helps" that nuclear is just so slow and expensive to get going that everything else just ends up looking pretty good. If it were cheap, fast and safe that would have been great, though.

> I don't know why, from the start, we haven't used nuclear power more for baseload.

Because it was too expensive and took a long time to build. At least one utility in the US was forced into bankruptcy due to nuclear builds when power demand growth suddenly slowed during the long construction time.

Lots of reasons, but in Australia it's pretty simple: because nuclear power is prohibited by law.

Nuclear plants are not a replacement for batteries. You either have enough nuclear plants to cover peak demand, in which case you don't need any renewables at all, or you need batteries (or rather, storage, batteries are not the only option). Economics seem to favor storage and renewables over 100% nuclear.

The difference being nuclear only needs something to cover the peak, whilst renewable needs capacity to cover 100% of production because of wild variability.

The difference between minimum and maximum demand is not that far from 100%.

Well, if you believe that 25-33% isn't that far from 100%, then you would be right.

- CAISO forecast for today [1]: peak 28.8GW, low 21.5GW

- France forecast for today [2]: peak 52.7GW, low 35.5GW

[1]: https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook [2]: https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-consommation-delectric...

You shouldn’t consider just one day, you should at least look at a time frame comparable to the construction time of your power source of choice.

How about you give me one day where low point is close to 0% as you claimed.

Which when simulating a carbon neutral Danish grid leads to nuclear power needing a cost reduction of 85% to even enter the picture.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...

Every news article that touts a nation phasing out coal should be forced to mention China increased its coal mining capacity by 1 billion tons to 3.4 billion tons (1), not even counting imports. Then go on to express the peak consumption of the nation everyone is celebrating as a fraction of total Chinese output (e.g., Australia consumes 3.4% equivalent of China's total coal output of 3.4 billion tons (2)).

Congratulations on phasing out your margin of error... Now are your trade and foreign policy divisions going to get serious, or we content patting ourselves on the back here?

1. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-has-more-than-...

2.https://www.worldometers.info/coal/australia-coal/

Some would consider just saving money and not poisoning their children to be reward enough in itself.

The relative populations are 26,639,000 and 1,410,710,000, so Australia has 1.8% of the population of China. Which compared to that 3.4% of coal output implies that per capita coal consumption of Australia is twice that of China.

(or you conclude that it's Australia itself which is the rounding error?)

Soooooo you think we should stop doing anything just because someone else still outperforms us in this aspect?

This is a very cheap excuse and i can't hear it anymore after hearing this stuipid argument for so long.

Look at all the graphs we have, from ocean temperature graph going up, to co2 going up, to amazonas tree coverage going down etc. etc.

Btw. China does the same thing as every other country: They install more and more solar.

"China continues to lead the world in wind and solar, with twice as much capacity under construction as the rest of the world combined"

China will have the same pressure or problem as australia has it.

Yes we are patting our backs here because its good news.

Should we continue pushing for more? Yes.

Do we need to spin everything good into anything negative? No.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com