Katoomba Monthly Temp average set to be SMASHED!!! AGAIN!!!

[FenceFurniture]

I had to go to Lithgow this morning, and decided to return via Bell's Line of Road and Darling Causeway to Mt Victoria. It was raining very heavily all the way from Lithgow to Mt Vic which restricted my vision somewhat, but it was a very sobering drive. Virtually no unburnt vegetation the whole way.

As you drive out of Lithgow on the north eastern corner you can see that the fires were actually within the town. Then you go up a very steep hill with a few hairpin turns, and that hill was very badly burnt. Because of the heavy rain there was a torrent of BLACK water coming down. In photographic/printing terms the water was about 70% black. It gave me some insight as to what is running into Warragamba dam etc.

For the entire drive there was no clear water runoff - it all contain sediment of one colour or another because there is just nothing but scorched earth. No grasses etc of any kind.

[Bushmiller]

Paul, don't you hate it when you simplify the explanation to suit the non-expert audience and they call you out on it. Can't win sometimes.

Ha ha. Even as I was typing I had thought, well this is not absolutely true, but I think sometimes we underestimate our audience. I have no problem at all on being picked up on an inaccuracy as overall it contributes to our collective awareness and that has become the thrust of this thread. Brett started the discussion probably, quite innocently, commenting on the unheard of Katoomba temperatures. I suspect, whether (that's not weather ) we like it or not and whether we accept it or not we all now have more information under our belts.

So while I have a good understanding of what you mean, I think we are on an overall winner. In fact as a result we have a better understanding of hydro power's place in the equation.

Regards
Paul

[Beardy]

Just like to say that I have enjoyed this thread and have learnt a lot and trust others have too.
It is good to hear other people’s viewpoints and the knowledge they bring to the table.

Cheers

[ian]

Ian in your other post linking the billionaire, the figures seem a little vague. One statistic that to my mind is deliberately mis-represented is the power figure. There is a big difference to how much is produced per hour (this is the figure we refer to in the industry) and how much is used over the course of a year. I am not quite sure how a 280MW solar farm converts to 10GWs even over the course of a year, particularly when you factor in that it can only produce a quarter (optimistic assessment) of that 280MW/hr over the entire day. As to it producing five times as much as the requirement for SA???

Regards
Paul

Paul
yes my figures for a East-West inter-connector are a little vague. But not, I hope, deliberately so.

It's more than 3300 km by road from Portland to Perth. Both these cities were selected on the basis that there are already a 330 kV lines to them and connecting to the local switch yards would be feasible. (You can't start a very high capacity inter-connector in Port Augusta or Adelaide (or for that matter Kalgoorlie) as neither city has sufficient inflow current to allow the energising of a suitable inter-connector.)

Allowing for a windless night (no solar, no wind) I'm figuring that each of the four inter-connectors would need to deliver 1000 amps at 500 kv (= 500MW). Now 2000 MW might be on a bit on the high side for WA's demand, but for redundancy you have to plan for at least one line failing. So in practice, you'd be working on reliably receiving 1500 MW into WA. Hopefully load shedding and smart meters would make up any difference. If not you would need more high capacity inter-connectors which would operate at partial load 99.99% of the time. (BTW, there are approximately 525,600 minutes in a year, so 99.99% means that the inter-connectors would be running at full capacity for about one hour each year.)

My $14B figure involves just a little bit of rounding. It would take a lot more work than I currently have time for, but I would expect that the mooted inter-connectors would need a lateral separation of 40 to 50 km so that at worst you would only lose two lines to the same storm event.
The west-to-east time difference should allow some continental wide power shifting, but by how much ...
And of course, a project of the scale envisioned would require High Voltage DC connectors.



on your other point -- how does a 280MW solar farm equate to an annual 10 GWe ?
Just some thoughts
280 MW will be the peak output, sustainable for maybe 30 mins per day during summer.
The average day-time output might be less than 200 MW for say 6 hours per day.
make a few more assumptions about cloud cover, etc and it's not too difficult to get a number close to the 365 days in a year.

[woodPixel]

For $14B one could build a stupendous set of solar and wind farms, with storage!

[Bushmiller]

on your other point -- how does a 280MW solar farm equate to an annual 10 GWe ?
Just some thoughts
280 MW will be the peak output, sustainable for maybe 30 mins per day during summer.
The average day-time output might be less than 200 MW for say 6 hours per day.
make a few more assumptions about cloud cover, etc and it's not too difficult to get a number close to the 365 days in a year.

Ian

I made a few assumptions in suggesting a 25% output over a 24 hour period.The way I reasoned it was that at least 2/3rds of the day is without direct sunlight. Commercial farm panels may have a degree of solar tracking associated with them, which would increase output, but they also lose efficiency above 26degs). I reduced the overall output to 25% to allow for cloudy or partially cloudy days. Now I concede that this is not a hugely scientific approach, but I thought it would do to question the figure apparently stated by Sanjeev Gupta.

My calculation is therefore 280 x 6 x 365 = 613,200MW per year, which is 613GW, which is not 10GW.

More of an issue is how is that five times the requirements for SA? Their website maintains SA demand is 1.65GW per year!! My calculations are 1200MW (Purely an average observation as I have seen >2000MW and < 1000MW) x 24 x 365 = 10,512,000MW which is 10,512GW. Unless I have messed up the figures (which has been known to happen so please correct me if I am wrong) there is a big discrepancy there. This is not a journalistic mistake. It is from their website:

Enough renewables to meet SA’s needs five times over: Sanjeev Gupta’s plan | Repower Australia

Regards
Paul

[Bushmiller]

For $14B one could build a stupendous set of solar and wind farms, with storage!

WP

Agreed you could, but could you get a commercial return on your $14billion investment?

Regards
Paul

[Bushmiller]

I had to go to Lithgow this morning, and decided to return via Bell's Line of Road and Darling Causeway to Mt Victoria. It was raining very heavily all the way from Lithgow to Mt Vic which restricted my vision somewhat, but it was a very sobering drive. Virtually no unburnt vegetation the whole way.

As you drive out of Lithgow on the north eastern corner you can see that the fires were actually within the town. Then you go up a very steep hill with a few hairpin turns, and that hill was very badly burnt. Because of the heavy rain there was a torrent of BLACK water coming down. In photographic/printing terms the water was about 70% black. It gave me some insight as to what is running into Warragamba dam etc.

For the entire drive there was no clear water runoff - it all contain sediment of one colour or another because there is just nothing but scorched earth. No grasses etc of any kind.

Brett

Did you get any pix?

I was talking to a friend here in Millmerran about our local fire and he said some areas were already regenerating, but there are other areas where the fire was so intense there are only stick remaining and nothing except the wattles are going to regrow. I must go out and have a look for myself.

Regards
paul

[FenceFurniture]

I think I may have missed the reason why it is better to link WA to the eastern states, when they never have been before, especially at such a cost. Could someone just touch on that again please?

[FenceFurniture]

Did you get any pix?

No Paul, unfortunately it was persisting it down far too hard for that - it did cross my mind though. It was double speed windscreen wipers all the way....

Think of some bloody foul charcoal mix that you may have been encouraged to drink for health reasons, and you'll get the picture.

[Lappa]

Agreed that recharging EVs from locally produced Solar power is the optimum way to go, but isn't it a bit misleading to compare figures for a sedate car such as the Corolla which does 0-100 in around 8-9 seconds (petrol), with figures for a performance vehicle (EV only) which does 0-100 in "as little as 3.4 seconds"?

If it were two petrol vehicles with those same 0-100 figures, wouldn't you expect an even bigger difference in the gm/km CO2?

The point was that even if it is fully electric it is still considered a CO2 producer.

If you looked carefully you would have seen that the Corolla entry also included their hybrid.

It just so happened that those vehicles were being used in the paper on vehicle noise I was preparing. I just looked at the CO2 and thought it was interesting and worth posting.

[FenceFurniture]

The point was that even if it is fully electric it is still considered a CO2 producer. Yes of course - even in their production, just like solar panels are. Anything produced in a factory that runs off power from the grid is a CO2 producer. That an EV car is still a CO2 producer is no revelation at all.

If you looked carefully you would have seen that the Corolla entry also included their hybrid.

It just so happened that those vehicles were being used in the paper on vehicle noise I was preparing. I just looked at the CO2 and thought it was interesting and worth posting.

Of course I looked carefully. In fact I suspect that I pay much more attention to the detail than some other participants who post wild claims that are somewhere between inaccurate and flat out fatuous, and without supporting evidence. I deliberately ignored the hybrid Corolla because we don't know what % is attributed to the EV part, and what is attributed to the petrol part. Those figures for the hybrid can only ever be guesstimates because they don't know how the car is driven (or charged).

[doug3030]

For $14B one could build a stupendous set of solar and wind farms, with storage!

I don't know what you can build for 14B but I assume it would be more than 14 million times better than the $1K approx system of solar panels, batteries, and inverter in the back of my ute.

While this system was primarily intended for "glamping", which it does very well (plenty of power for fridges, lighting and entertainment devices) it has also proved useful during blackouts at home, when I have been able to run two fridges and a freezer, lights, TV and sound systems, fish tank and of course a cable modem for a day and a half (with some load sharing/rationing between fridges and freezer which I really did not have to do if I had known for sure when the power was coming back on but I was preparing for the worst). I have also used it to run power tools when working at remote locations.

It allows a level of camping off the grid that many motorhomes would struggle to compete with but you would struggle to sustainably run a modern house with it. People have been talking about micro systems, so there's a successful example. You would think that with the buying power of a $14 billion project you would be getting the components at a fraction of the cost I got mine for It makes me wonder if it was a mistake to have all the rooftop solar connected into the national grid. Running them all as micro systems makes them independent of the base load issues and can take a substantial load of the grid. Yes, it removes the "buy it when its cheap and sell it back when it's expensive" attractions of he scheme and probably there would be other issues that I would have no idea about but it seems that the base load requirements are what is currently preventing the further advancement of renewables.

[Lappa]

Hmm,

I don’t remember posting that

46AB4AFF-83C5-4E02-9AF9-20967B8A307F.jpg

[FenceFurniture]

Hmm,

I don’t remember posting that

46AB4AFF-83C5-4E02-9AF9-20967B8A307F.jpg

Crikey, anything to score a point eh? Quoting a post with bold responses is quite a common technique on here - have a look around. Are you seriously trying to suggest that I would try to get away with embellishing your post (and hiding it by making it bold)? That really is laughable.

Or not.

If you have a look at post 552 it is very hard to tell the quotes apart from the responses because bold wasn't used.