{"id":7490,"date":"2017-03-08T15:28:03","date_gmt":"2017-03-08T14:28:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=7490"},"modified":"2017-03-08T15:28:03","modified_gmt":"2017-03-08T14:28:03","slug":"australian-power-cuts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=7490","title":{"rendered":"Australian power cuts"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"HOLLOW2\"<\/a>Australian power cuts have led the Australian government to reach completely the wrong conclusions about the Australian energy system.\u00a0 I would hazard a guess that they are deliberately misleading conclusions based on ideology rather than fact.<\/p>\n

The Australian electricity system developed on an autonomous state by state basis.\u00a0 After a series of power cuts in the 1980’s most states except the Northern Territories and Western Australia were interconnected and in 1998 the National Electricity Market regulator was established which controls trading between them.\u00a0 The great majority of Australia’s electricity comes from coal.\u00a0 Exact up to date figures seem hard to find but its about 75% with about 13% from natural gas and about 14% renewables.\u00a0 The biggest contribution to renewables was hydro very closely followed by wind.\u00a0 The renewables is spread far and wide although some states have a lot more capacity than others.\u00a0 For example Tasmania gets 99% of electricity from renewables.\u00a0 Most of this is hydro, but the systems have always been very controversial with huge anti-logging battles in the 1980’s.\u00a0 Australia’s electricity usage is disproportionately high, in 2015 253TWhs compared to the UK’s 337TWhs.\u00a0 In addition Australia’s coal use has got to make it one of the most coal dependent countries on earth.<\/p>\n

The problems started in September when a violent thunderstorm in South Australia led to a power transmission line tripping followed by some wind farms, then the Victoria interconnector.\u00a0 Unfortunately the state was importing a large amount of electricity at the time (air con use was very high).\u00a0 Some people say there were software glitches<\/a> as well.\u00a0 In any case there were large scale blackouts.\u00a0 Subsequently there have been more problems (in other places as well) due extremely high temperatures in the Australian summer.\u00a0 This has led to more power blackouts.\u00a0 The political right in Australia are extraordinarily reluctant to admit to the merest existence of man made climate, much less do anything about it.\u00a0 Irony counter overload, this is despite Australia being one of the few developed countries that is really being affected by climate change.\u00a0 Such is the state of denial that one MP waved a bit of coal around in the Federal Parliament and said there was nothing to be afraid of.\u00a0 The liberals obviously believe that wind power brought South Australia down.<\/p>\n

What you cannot say is that this is the case.\u00a0 The strongest thing you can say is that wind power was not meeting all the states needs. \u00a0 A whole series of events brought the system down in a “50 year event”.\u00a0 The problem is that 50 year events are getting more common.\u00a0 The solution to part of the problem is more solar.\u00a0 In Northern Europe we have increasing problems in summer with our excess solar electricity.\u00a0 This is because we use little air con (although its use is increasing).\u00a0 However solar output meshes perfectly with demand in Oz.\u00a0 In addition you are using by it and large where its generated putting less demand on the system transmission.\u00a0 Another thing that may make the current government think is that a lot of the coal powered power stations are coming to the end of their lifetimes.\u00a0 These will be difficult and expensive to replace.<\/p>\n

Neil<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Australian power cuts have led the Australian government to reach completely the wrong conclusions about the Australian energy system.\u00a0 I would hazard a guess that they are deliberately misleading conclusions based on ideology rather than fact. The Australian electricity system … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,33,4,176,1],"tags":[269,275,61],"class_list":["post-7490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climate-change","category-coal","category-renewables","category-solar","category-uncategorized","tag-climate-change","tag-coal","tag-renewable-energy"],"yoast_head":"\nAustralian power cuts - The oil lamp - shining God's light on peak oil<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=7490\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=7490\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=7490\",\"name\":\"Australian power cuts - 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