Viv Forbes
Degree in Applied Science Geology, Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy and executive director at the Saltbush Club.
Wind and solar energy have a fatal flaw – intermittency.
Solar generators won’t run on moon-beams – they fade out as the sun goes down and stop whenever clouds block the sun. This happens at least once every day. But then at midday on most days, millions of solar panels pour so much electricity into the grid that the price plummets and no one makes any money. And after a good hailstorm they never work again.
Turbine generators are also intermittent – they stop whenever there is too little, or too much, wind. In a wide flat land like Australia, wind droughts can affect huge areas for days at a time. This often happens when a mass of cold air moves over Australia, winds drop while the power demand rises in the cold weather. All of this makes our power grid more variable, more fragile and more volatile. What do we do if we have a cloudy windless week?
Our green energy bureaucrats have the solution to green power failures – “Big Batteries”.
But big batteries bring more big problems – they have to be re-charged by the same intermittent green generators needed to keep the lights on, the trains running and the batteries charged in all those electric cars, trucks and dozers. And if anyone has been silly enough to build some power-hungry green hydrogen generators, they too will need more generation capacity and more battery backups. How long do we allow them to keep throwing our dollars into this green whirlpool?
Collecting dilute intermittent wind and solar energy from all over a big continent like Australia and moving it to coastal cities and factories brings another “green” energy nightmare – an expensive and intrusive spider-web of power-lines that are detested by landowners, degrade the environment, cause bushfires and are susceptible to damage from lightning, cyclones and sabotage.
They call them solar “farms” and wind “parks” – they are neither farms nor parks – they are monstrous and messy wind and solar power plants. And these very expensive “green” assets are idle, generating nothing, for most of most days.
Big batteries sitting in cities have proved a big fire risk and no one wants them next door. So our green “engineers” have another solution to these problems caused by their earlier “solutions” – “Mobile Batteries” (this is a worry – no one knows where they are – maybe they will be disguised as Mr Whippy ice cream vans?)
Train entrepreneurs want to build “batteries on tracks” – a train loaded with batteries, which parks beside a wind/solar energy factory until the batteries are full. Then the battery train trundles off to the nearest city to unload its electricity, preferably at a profit. They can also play the arbitrage market – buy top-up power around midday and sell into peak prices at breakfast and dinner times when the unreliable twins usually produce nothing useful. This will have the added advantage of sending coal and gas generators broke sooner by depressing peak prices. Once coal and gas are decimated, the battery trains can make a real killing.
But battery trains may be the perfect answer to supplying those energy-hungry AI data centres. Let’s start a pilot project and park a battery train beside the National AI Centre near CSIRO in Canberra.
A more ambitious idea is the BBB Plan – “Big Batteries on Boats”.
It would work like this:
The Australian Government places an order with China to build a fleet of electric boats (sail-assisted of course) that are filled with batteries (and lots of fire extinguishers). The batteries are charged with cheap coal-fired electricity at ports in China. They then sail to ports in Australia where the electricity is unloaded into the grid whenever prices are high or blackouts loom.
Australian mines can profit from the iron ore used to make the boats, the rare minerals used to build the batteries and any Australian coal used by the Chinese power plants to charge the batteries.
This solution allows Australian politicians to go to world conferences boasting that Australia’s electricity is “Net Zero”, and more tourists can be enticed to visit our endangered industrial relics – coal mining and steam generator museums.
Of course there is another danger in the BBB solution – some entrepreneurs may load their boats with nuclear generators plus enough fuel on board for several decades of operation. Or they may even site a small nuclear reactor beside a closed coal power station and make use of all the ready-to-go power lines already in place.
This sort of dangerous thinking could well demolish another Queensland green dream – “CopperString” – a $5 billion speculation to build 840 km of new transmission line from Townsville to Mt Isa. We are not sure which way the power is expected to flow. They will probably not get there before the great copper mine at Mt Isa closes.
Why not just send a small nuke-on-a-train to Mt Isa?
