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.
> 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.
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 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.
“No! Not like that!” I bet they’re screeching right now as megacorps refuse to tie their cart to a dying horse.
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.
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, 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...
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.
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.
The French grid would be even more uneconomical without the interconnections.
https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/cross-border-electrici...
They are reducing production almost daily these days, but usually around 12-14h, due to solar production.
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.
Why not? There is a worldwide and increasing demand for them.
We started to price in the CO2 externalities - and demand is skyrocketing.
Subsidies are more of a geopolitical/welfare thing in this context.
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.
A world completely without subsidies would indeed work different, but still would have demand for batteries.
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.
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...
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.)
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.
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.
> 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...
Hydrogen is a total joke of greenwashing (apart from some niche use cases) so I am not taking it into account
"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.
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.
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.
Why do they import/export the same product between each other?
Honest question. In general, not just about Poland and Germany.
Trading electricity over geographically large areas smoothes out some of these fluctuations and gives you more options to deal with planned outages
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.
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.
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.
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?
And shutting down nuclear power plants and buying French electricity.. ..made with nuclear power plants. Strong the hypocrisy is with this one.
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%
[0]: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...
For a car its btw. 1%
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?
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.
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
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.
It is very good news that the banks are refusing to finance the fossil fuel greed heads and vandals.
No, it does not. It is a bad idea.
We are better to do without the electricity.
Inconvenience, or climate meltdown. Take your pick
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
Do this and that's pretty much the end for any kind of green transition.
Politics is the mechanism we have for deciding what is bad. It isn't very good but it is the best we have.
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.
The other option is to shut down the coal plants that are destroying the climate.
And put up with the consequences.
But, money.
Let's just do nothing now and leave it for later :)
You flinched. But you came through.
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.
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.
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'm with AGL, and don't tend to shop around (because hassle), but this might inspire a review.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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>
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
- 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...
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-...
(or you conclude that it's Australia itself which is the rounding error?)
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.