Australia and New Zealand are being left further and further behind as the world embraces next-generation nuclear technology. Over 30 countries, including all of the leading developed nations, use nuclear energy. The only significant holdouts – for entirely political reasons – are Ireland, Germany and Italy.
And Australia and New Zealand.
Even the left’s most fetishised ‘progressive’ countries, such as Sweden and Canada, use nuclear energy. In the left’s beloved Scandinavia, only Norway, which is one of the rare countries blessed with abundant hydroelectricity, doesn’t use nuclear. Oh, and Denmark – but that’s almost certainly about to change.
The Danes are concerned about possible blackouts similar to the one that struck Iberia recently. Like Spain and Portugal, Denmark is heavily dependent on weather-based renewable energy which is not very compatible with the way power grids operate.
“Not very” is grotesquely understating the problem. Weather-dependent energy is entirely incompatible with power grids. This is the single biggest topic that ‘Net Zero’ zealots either deliberately play down or, more likely, are utterly incapable of understanding.
And it’s not even that complicated.
If you look at the back of almost any mains-powered electrical device, it will somewhere have a little information plate that reads something like this: AC 220–240V 30W 50Hz. The ‘W’ (for ‘watts’) will vary, but the V, for ‘voltage’ won’t. Nor will the ‘50Hz’ – and that’s the key item we need to discuss.
Conventional generators produce alternating current, creating a stable output of current and voltage that alternates at a frequency which is directly – synchronously – linked with the rotating turbines which drive the generators in gas, coal, nuclear or hydropower plants. All of these turbines rotate at a speed of 3000 revolutions per minute, so producing electricity with current and voltage that varies in a sine wave shape with a frequency of 50 cycles per second (i.e., 50 Hz).
The frequency is critical: most electrical equipment is sensitive to frequency. Grids even more so. Power stations, substations, switching stations, all have fail-safes that will trip if the frequency varies outside tolerances. More importantly, grids are perpetually performing a carefully calibrated balancing act between supply into, and demand on the system.
If there is more generation than consumption, frequency increases and the turbines speed up, and if there is more demand than generation, the opposite happens.
Fortunately, conventional generators are large heavy lumps of metal whose speed of rotation is hard to change. They oppose changes to their speed of rotation, providing resistance to changes in grid frequency, a property known as “inertia”.
Then along come the ‘renewables’. Wind and solar do not produce synchronous alternating current. Firstly, they produce direct current (DC), which is why your solar panels have to be connected to an inverter, which converts DC to AC. Which would be all well and good, except that they don’t produce constant power, either. Wind turbines speed up and slow down as the wind rises and falls. Solar output rises and falls dramatically if so much as a cloud moves across the sun, let alone over the course of a day.
So, neither solar nor wind have inertia.
That’s kind of a biggie. It’s what keeps causing large-scale blackouts in heavily ‘renewable’-dependent systems, such as in Spain recently. In a feedback loop, as the output to the grid went outside tolerances, the inverters dropped out. Doing so caused a widening gap between supply and demand, worsening the frequency deviation. More and more equipment dropped out, causing a cascading crash across the whole system.
Contrary to the fancies of the ‘Net Zero’ loons that emergency generators can fill the gap, the whole process can happen in minutes or seconds, or less.
That the incident happened just days after the Spanish grid operator boasted about running with 100 per cent renewables suggests a desire for net zero virtue signalling trumped concerns over grid security.
On the contrary, when the fault crossed the Pyrenees to France, it was quickly contained. Only a small area of France was affected, and power was restored quickly.
This is because the French grid operates with very high inertia, since almost all of its electricity is generated by big, heavy nuclear and hydroelectric turbines.
All of this has made the Danish government sit up and review its ideological opposition to nuclear.
But the Danes don’t have certifiable idiots like Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen running their energy grids.
