This Is Crazy

Joanne Nova
Joanne Nova is a prize-winning science graduate in molecular biology. She has given keynotes about the medical revolution, gene technology and aging at conferences.

The Australian electricity grid is not-fit-for-purpose. And failure is being normalized.

Last Wednesday, during the near-miss of a blackout in Sydney, the AEMO spent $3,558,000 on “demand reduction”, which means they paid productive industries to stop working to save the grid from a blackout. What it really means is that electricity users in New South Wales paid $3.5 million to businesses to do nothing, because the grid didn’t have enough energy, and the people in charge really didn’t want any embarrassing blackouts so close to an election.

So renewables are wonderful, clean and cheap but your workers, assets and capital will sometimes need to sit around and do nothing so we can stop some storms in the 22nd century.

In political spin, planned blackouts can also be called “Virtual Power Plants”

“Demand management” is a smarmy marketing term for a lot of little blackouts. In the lexicon of a failing grid, all the bad-words get tortured into iced doughnuts – if your company has agreed to be ready to shut down at a moment’s notice on a warm day, that’s not being on “standby to close”, instead your business is a “‘pre-activated’ extra reserve.”

In Renewable-World-Psychosis bad is good: your smelter used to make aluminum, but now you can sell ‘electricity use reduction’ as well, and the AEMO (the grid manager in Australia) will call you a “virtual power plant” too. Australian companies can now sell their own blackouts back to the grid. Neat eh?

Indeed, you and I are probably thinking about this all wrong – like electricity is a net good, and a dead smelter is a waste of space.

John Rolfe, Daily Telegraph

… AEMO CEO Daniel Westerman told an energy planning and regulation Senate committee hearing that the market operator spent $3,557,700 on reducing demand to increase emergency reserves in NSW on Wednesday November 27 as a supply shortage took shape.

Mr Westerman indicated AEMO did not end up having to reduce Wednesday’s demand by as much as first expected. But, in anticipation of a greater shortfall than eventuated, AEMO had “pre-activated” extra reserves.

Mr Westerman said the purchased electricity use reduction came from “virtual power plants”, which were an “aggregation of … smaller demand.”

For what it’s worth, which is not much, the large aluminium smelter Tomago, was not forced to shut down, but it was “pre-activated” and ready to close. Apparently, even though the cool weather change came through, they shut down that afternoon anyway, or perhaps they just gave up. Who could blame them?

Australians are not just paying companies to do nothing, they pay them to be ready to do nothing too. There’s a part payment for the pre-activated companies, even if they don’t have to switch off. It reflects the hassle of running an industrial outfit with your hand on power lever, and your brain in the state of uncertainty. And that’s the thing isn’t it – no company is going to be more productive “on standby” than it is running full tilt. It’s a stupid way to run a nation.

Australia is on the road to becoming a “pre-activated nation”

We’re a first world country ready to be the third world at a moment’s notice.

Pretty soon the whole country will be paying itself to be on standby, or selling our own blackouts back to the grid, what then, eh? The Stone Age?

Your air conditioner can be a virtual power plant too

John Rolfe in the Daily Telegraph found a Monash Uni professor who was cheerfully telling the world Australians will need to give up control of their air-conditioners so their AEMO masters can turn them down on hot days when they need them the most.

Dr Dargaville is an expert in “large-scale energy system transition optimisation” – a thing that’s never happened once, anywhere in the world. So it’s like being a specialist in yetis except with less credibility. There’s a possibility that a real yeti exists, but we know, for a fact, there aren’t any optimal large-scale renewables grids. There aren’t even any optimal small scale grids: just different scales of blackouts.

Australians fuming over big change coming to air-con, house power control

Dr Dargaville … said authorities would have to expand their options to deal with more frequent instances of surprisingly high demand and low supply.

Options were likely to include the installation of “widgets” on aircons that allow third parties to engage “economy mode” to reduce power use in peak periods.

When asked in a Newspoll: “Should authorities be allowed to take control of power usage in your household?”, naturally, 94 per cent said “No”. But we know that when they are offered a $400 cashback for a “smart”, but government-controlled air conditioner, they may buy the plan. It’s already happening in Queensland. It’s only supposed to be a few days a year, but last summer, the grid officials reached into their homes and turned off their air conditioners six times in two months.

Dr Dargaville speaks for The Blob – You will own nothing (and be hot and bothered):

…consumers should not be alarmed by such moves, he said. “There will be a period of adjustment but it will be become normalised,” Dr Dargaville told [the Daily Telegraph]

Naturally, it’s not their fault – they blame climate change, and fossil fuels.

“If the energy system was less volatile you wouldn’t need to use it,” he added, but that was unrealistic given more extreme weather, reduced reliability of coal-fired power and more generation from variable sources such as wind and solar.

Every part of this trend is a step in a dumb direction. We’re paying more for less in every single aspect. More people sit around being useless, or half useful, or distracted. More companies make fewer goods. And more government makes more government which is the worst thing of all…

Those who control the energy, control the people.

h/t David Maddison, Strop

This article originally appeared at JoNova and was republished by CFACT.