I happened to live through the Victorian Gas Crisis of 1998. When a catastrophic explosion shut down the state’s natural gas processing plant, the state went without gas supplies for 20 days. Victoria at the time heavily relied on natural gas for cooking and heating, especially in the commercial sector.
Unlike the two workers killed and the eight injured, the Gas Crisis was for most of us an inconvenience. For two weeks, electric kettles ran overtime, we bathed in buckets and used barbecues and microwaves to cook. Luckily for us, the accident happened at the tail-end of winter, when Victoria is well past its coldest days. Industry, on the other hand, lost well over a billion dollars.
But for the past few summers, Victoria has been staring down the barrel of an energy crisis that would make the Gas Crisis look like a cake-walk. It’s a looming crisis that’s entirely the result of that state’s foolish, “progressive” politics.
The Australian Energy Market Operator has told only part of the story and has held back the shocking details of the Victorian power scandal — commercial scandal that ranks with the banks.
Accordingly, Victorians and every business that operates in Victoria need to hope and pray that the 2019-20 summer will be mild.
And the energy scandal-ridden Victorian government will join them in those hopes.
Or they’ll end up like South Australia, which was totally blacked-out in 2016. Despite a fierce and ongoing campaign of lies and obfuscation by politicians and their media allies, the catastrophic blackout was in fact due to that state’s over-reliance on “renewable” energy. Victoria has been barrelling down the same path, with as little heed for the obvious consequences. Last summer, the state was lucky to be merely hit with rolling blackouts on the hottest day of the year.
In the last two or three years the Victorian government has punted that the state’s power system would not break down.
And each time the gambles have been successful and so it believes it can roll the dice again. But in 2019-20 and subsequent years the government actions have actually made the dangers far greater and increased the risk of a total Victorian breakdown […] If the Victorian situation deteriorates at the same time as it is very hot in NSW and South Australia they too will get caught up in any Victorian disaster.
As Victoria increases its reliance on renewables, its electricity market is riding a financial roller-coaster, as the wind rises and drops, and the sun comes in and out. That market mayhem is directly destroying the generation system. When renewables are – for once – pumping out power, wholesale energy prices plummet. Coal generators respond by shutting down output. Then, as renewables fall off again (as they inevitably do), coal generators ramp up production and go flat out.
The problem is, they are not designed to work that way. Neither is the grid. A planning engineer warned of exactly this situation, on Judith Curry’s blog years ago.
In Victoria the Latrobe Valley brown coal generators are old but with good maintenance and proper care they are capable of producing power for some decades.
But with no certainty of their long-term life the owners of the generators spend what is required on the maintenance but no more. And worse still, because of these vast changes in price they are forced to run coal plants more flexibly, like hydro or gas plants. These old coal generators were never designed for such operating style so not surprisingly they are breaking down at a rate that is much higher than would be the case if they were able to operate more consistently.
To make the looming summers more dangerous, coal generators like those in the Latrobe Valley are never at their best when temperatures are high.
What all this adds up to is an increasing likelihood that Victoria’s power grid will collapse under the summer heat – and almost certainly drag neighbouring states down with it. In Tasmania, where I now live, we recently experienced near-collapse first-hand, when Mainland states’ guzzling of Tasmanian hydropower via the Basslink connector, almost completely drained our lakes and threatened to cripple our own power supply.
Meanwhile, Victoria’s left-wing government is doing everything it can to stack the odds of an energy disaster this coming summer.
Victoria plans to put even more wind and solar farms in, again with no back-up — nothing […]the state needs an extended blackout (no food, no water) to teach the politicians a lesson. But the voters must pay the price for those lessons.
theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/power-blackouts-on-the-table-in-victoria-as-government-gambles-with-supply