P T Barnum was almost right when he said there’s a sucker born every minute: he didn’t reckon with the Climate Cult. These clowns are popping out suckers by the second and there’s no shortage of dodgy ‘green’ hucksters out there waiting to part a whole lotta fools from their money.
Their latest snake oil is ‘big batteries’.
The company that looks after electricity distribution in South Australia is experimenting with installing large batteries in several small towns to improve the system’s reliability and allow for fast charging of electric vehicles […]
Robe will get a 2-megawatt/2MW-hour battery to improve capacity and reliability during peak demand, as well as a much smaller battery connected with an electric vehicle charger to allow ultra-rapid charging in the seaside town for the first time.
It’s like The Simpsons “Monorail” episode: only the people being suckered out of the money aren’t the rubes of Robe, but Australian taxpayers.
Why install ‘fast-charging’ stations in some hick town in SA, you ask? Because Robe is right in the middle of South Australia’s ‘wine district’. So this is all for the sake of poncy Adelaide hipsters driving their EVs from wine tasting to wine tasting.
Naturally, no such tale of ‘renewables’ cronyism is complete without idiotic government meddling.
Robe is on the end of a powerline that also serves other towns.
Privately owned SA Power Networks is not allowed to upgrade it in a way that would unfairly result in higher power bills for other users under regulations designed to prevent “gold-plating” of the network.
SA Power Networks head of corporate affairs Cecilia Schutz said batteries could be a better way to improve power delivery to places like Robe and for renewable energy to be produced and used locally.
“They could be a very economic and efficient alternative to augmenting the network,” Ms Schutz said.
And pigs might fly, too.
A third part of the project involves installing batteries in remote locations that frequently experience prolonged blackouts, especially during extreme weather.
Well, good luck with that. If the gullible rubes of Robe want to know how that works out in reality, they might try asking the hapless citizens of Broken Hill.
Broken Hill City Council boasted in 2018 that it would be Australia’s first “carbon-free city”. At a cost of 650 million dollars, Broken Hill built a 200 MW wind farm, a 53 MW solar array and a large battery that could provide 50 MW of power for 100 MWh. “This is a great opportunity for Broken Hill and renewable energies,” then mayor Darriea Turley told the ABC. “What they will see is, when there is an outage, the battery would click into operation.”
Well, that was the sales pitch, at least. The reality turned out to be just a teensy bit of a letdown.
This boast was put to the test last October, when a storm took down transmission towers connecting Broken Hill to the grid. Writer Jack Marx, now resident in Broken Hill, described the outcome:
The power comes on from time to time, but goes out just as quickly. It gives us just enough time to power our phones and read emails from energy providers sent the day before, alerting us to the fact the power was about to go out. They also warn we don’t have much time, and to avoid using unnecessary electrical devices – air conditioners, fridges or fans that need a power point.
Far from a glittering showcase of the wonders of “Net Zero”, Broken Hill became its Potemkin Village.
It’s not as if the wind and solar farms weren’t working. The problem is their inherent intermittency, which makes them largely incompatible with existing grids.
Wind and solar energy were available in abundance during the blackouts. The energy just could not be reliably integrated with the grid. Having enough kWhs at the right time and place is not enough to reliably serve loads.
The real problem is that wind, solar and batteries do not readily provide essential reliability services […] The physics of the grid require more than the kWh’s of energy from wind, solar and batteries, even with state of the art inverter technology […]
Mayor Tom Kennedy cautioned that policy makers, should learn from this experience how useful those resources are “almost useless” without baseload power. Solar panels were not only useless, but actually hindered efforts to establish reliability such that customers were urged to turn them off. “(Wind and solar) are worse than useless (in a crisis like this), because it’s detrimental to having a consistent power supply.”
Some $650m worth of renewable energy investment within a 25km radius of Broken Hill has proved to be dysfunctional. The technical challenges of operating a grid on renewable energy alone appear insurmountable using the current technology.
Good luck, Robe. You’re gonna need it. But at least Tarquin Hyphenated-Surname from the Adelaide Hills will be able to charge his EV on the rare occasions he and his life partner swan into town.
