Getting a better Energy deal - WHAT A JOKE!

[FenceFurniture]

Hmmph.

[ian]

Sorry, will send suitably sympathetic emoji.....

uhhm, no...

nah

probably not

maybe......

that's it!

[Chris Parks]

Sorry, will send suitably sympathetic emoji.....

uhhm, no...

nah

probably not

maybe......

that's it!

An excellent response. As for the rant in the opening post I give it a 7.5 out of 10, good but could have been better in sticking it to the companies that supply your power.

[bryn23]

Interesting thread,

I didn't even give my electric company the chance to better the price, before switching, if they wanted to keep me, then they should have offered a better deal.

I am about to embark on seeing if i can install solar panels on my industrial workshop (not being used as a business) and link both addresses to the single electric account so i can automatically access the excess power credits for my inner city apartment, as i can't have solar panels there

It seems simple enough, but it'll be interesting if i can do it.

[NCArcher]

• Re outages due to lack of generation, (In NSW for example) by far the bulk of electricity is transmitted to the 3 distribution utilities by Transgrid, the transmission utility. Their Control room is constantly monitoring the input into their system from the generators and the output to the 3 utilities (plus (I think) 2 mega customers. If it looks like the required output is going to exceed the input, Transgrid advise the 3 utilities who will implement very well planned and rehearsed load shedding actions. IF THIS DIDNT HAPPEN, then the whole network can collapse, as happened in the North East USA about 20 years ago. The consequence of a complete collapse is horrendous and requires what is known as a 'black start' to get the network up again. A 'black start' is also planned and rehearsed but can obviously only be a virtual exercise. The problem is that you require electric power to start a generator and, if you don't have that power, then.....

Tomago aluminium smelter is one Mega customer, who's the other?
Loy Yang PS in the Latrobe Valley has a massive gas fired back up generator for black starts. It sounds like a jumbo jet taking off when you start it. Loy Yang has 4x 500MW generators. From memory, you need around 20MW for a black start. Older power stations don't have that facility so have to wait for Loy Yang to start before they can go back online. In the control room for each generator there is a button labelled "Prepare to offload". It tells Transgrid that they are about to lose 500MW of power. Things really get interesting if you inadvertently press that button.

[FenceFurniture]

Here you go Chris:
Perth start-up using blockchain technology for peer-to-peer trading - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

[fletty]

Tomago aluminium smelter is one Mega customer, who's the other?

All of the re/incarnations of BHP at Wollongong

[Bushmiller]

Tomago aluminium smelter is one Mega customer, who's the other?
Loy Yang PS in the Latrobe Valley has a massive gas fired back up generator for black starts. It sounds like a jumbo jet taking off when you start it. Loy Yang has 4x 500MW generators. From memory, you need around 20MW for a black start. Older power stations don't have that facility so have to wait for Loy Yang to start before they can go back online. In the control room for each generator there is a button labelled "Prepare to offload". It tells Transgrid that they are about to lose 500MW of power. Things really get interesting if you inadvertently press that button.

I think any significantly large consumer can enter into the contract system so that includes all the aluminium refineries. Actually that brings up the aspect on which Fletty touched: load shedding. There is a smelter in QLD which is the last to load shed. They don't want their pot lines to solidify as it takes months to dig them out with a jackhammer. Consequently up here the consumer sitting down to tea gets the chop first. Not so in NSW. It's the other way around.

Restarting after a blackout is problematical as you have stated. In any thermal station there are several very large electric motors. The first will be an electric feed pump ( ours is 5MW and small, Bayswater's was over 9MW), but although the largest motor it is not the most difficult to start. The biggest problem is the Induced Draft Fan (ID Fan for short). Although smaller (Bayswater's ID is >8MW) it takes about 20 secs to get to full speed as as it is a multi pole motor. During that time it draws about four times it's running current. It's enough to make a gas turbine bounce on it's pedestal if it is not big enough.

So yes, other stations have to start first. The stations with Gas Turbines or the stand alone Gas Turbines of which nowadays there are plenty. A "Black Start" is still one of aspects most feared by power stations. It is the equivalent to the nuclear holocaust in war. It is also a situation that is rehearsed in case it should ever happen.

Regards
Paul

[swk]

Here you go Chris:
Perth start-up using blockchain technology for peer-to-peer trading - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Yes, beat me to it. Pretty much anything you can think of as far as trading goes can potentially be done. The issue is really how do you manage who uses what and who pays, but that is getting easier with smart meters and more massive computer power.

Someone earlier said that people in apartments wouldn't be able to use solar panels because they dont have the space. Perfectly simple, put up a set and manage it as any other strata title service. Here is an article from 4 years ago.

Landlords. It's only their reluctance to have a more complicated life and they see no benefit to _themselves_. There are a number of companies already which will do leasing plans no upfront costs, so landlords dont even have to do anything now, smarter long term thinkers will start to take this up and cream some of the payments off for themselves. At an extreme, when (if?) the economics swing to such a point that a company can make enough from generating into the system (imagine a distributed solar farm in the city) it's quite plausible that they may even pay to use a landlords roof. Watch the landlords fight each other to get some solar installed then (no good for the tenant in that scenario though).

Basically there are people now thinking about how to game this new technology and they do it for a living. We are only at the start of it.

Regards
SWK

[FenceFurniture]

That's just further food for putting up as many panels now as possible while the rebates are highest - worry about what to do with all the lecky later.

[Chris Parks]

Here you go Chris:
Perth start-up using blockchain technology for peer-to-peer trading - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

They must have been reading this thread....damn another good idea stolen

[swk]

• About 80% of outages by time lost, occur at the 11kV level and therefore have nil to very little to do with generation. It is mostly to do with critical equipment failure even though the majority of Australian networks are designed to N-1 standard. 'N-1' means that any single piece of equipment can fail without causing an outage but if 2 pieces fail, then......? The second biggest outage mode is inadvertent damage such a vehicles hitting poles, accidental cable dig ups, animals and vandalism.

I want to expand on what Fletty said here.

In cities and larger country towns the topology of the electrical system is something like a wheel with spokes. The hub is a zone substation which imports power at a middle level voltage (22-66kV) and steps it down through transformers to, typically, 11kV (but maybe slightly more or less). The 11kV is the voltage of the "spokes" which are called feeders. The feeders have a string of 11kV/415V transformers (like a string of beads!) where each transformer supplies its own little patch of houses (or shops or a single factory etc)
The N-1 which Fletty describes is (usually) true for equipment in the zone substations (and most higher voltage systems that supply them too), however from the feeder level and down there is no duplication because it makes no economic sense to have two supplies to your house (unless it isn't your house, it is a hospital for safety reasons or a shopping centre which is prepared to pay extra for the privilege). Anyway, so if a car hits a pole and brings some of the 11kV down or a tree branch falls across it or someone decides to shoot them out for target practice (yes, it does happen in capital cities too, but thankfully rarely) the protection devices in the substation see this and cut off the feeder. The outage time is then determined by the time it takes to get crew out to either fix and restore or check all clear and restore. As fletty says, these are the more common outages by far and most likely what happen to you when your power went out last week. Usually they only affect 10s to a small number of 100s of people and are only for 1-2 hours. But they are very common, there are usually some every day. The distribution companies get penalised if there are too many outages or they go for too long (SAIDI, SAIFI and CAIDI) so they are trying to minimise outage numbers and times. The feeders have always been set up so that they could be cross linked to each other or connected to feeders from other substations so that restoration could be carried out quickly. Similarly (some) feeders have always been set up so that when they detect a fault the substation switches them off, waits a while and then switches back on. If the original fault was say a strip of bark or some wheat stalks blowing onto the line, it may have blown off or burnt up and be gone. You can usually tell when transient faults like this happen as your house lights will flicker. If the fault remains though, the substation will shut off the feeder permanently.
What the distributors are doing now is putting more remotely operated switches on the lines so that once a problem is detected the crosslinking of good sections and the removal of the faulted section can be automatically done.

Which gets us back to the small group of consumers running their own little pool.
If the pool is limited to your local block (ie below the 11/415 transformer level) they must use the distributors wires, how might they pay for that?
If the pool is limited to the feeder level, they have to use the distributors wires and transformers, and what happens during a fault when the feeder automation is isolating a bad section _with power still going into it from all the microgenerators_? (microgenerators, because it could be solar but it could be small wind turbines or little gas turbines which are in use in Europe now or something no body has thought of yet. Batteries dumping into a fault?)
If the pool is not limited to the feeder level, the power can flow from feeder to feeder in the zone substation, this can have imlications for how the protection works (it was never designed expecting power to come back), who will pay for mods there.
And the last thing that might interest Bushmiller, if the power flows back through the substation transformer as the microgenerators share power between zone subs, the step down transformer's OLTC is actually only designed to work one way. This is a big problem and we are on the verge of seeing it happen in real life now (solar has suppressed the current flow through some zone subs under good solar conditions, but not yet to the extent of reversing it. However, this is becoming a plausible if rare scenario)
I'm not saying these things are stoppers, they just give a taste of the complications ahead.

Regards
SWK

[FenceFurniture]

A few questions got lost/buried/ignored in the mix, so if anyone fancies a crack at them:

(in response to fletty's first post) Some questions come out of what you have written so far:
1. Who is it that buys these "futures" of power? I think you indicated it was the retailers buying from the generators, but where does the wholesaler fit into that?
2. What is the daily supply charge about? Is it a rort or is there actually something of substance to it?

In post #73 I was talking about hooking into battery production now, even though the tech isn't quite ready, because:
"My point being that we need the solution before it can be delivered via new power stations."

In my post #118 addressed to fletty:
"Which leaves us with what option/s?"

"I have no doubt that fletty would have the numbers of the large industry/small industry/residential mix in his head." i.e. who are the biggest consumers overall?

And some things that have had no reaction, and some feedback would be useful:
Yep, and I reckon Mike Baird sold the Poles & Wires at the peak time - they won't be worth a bumper once Solar has a decent take up rate.

Anyone have any reaction to my thoughts on Green Power?

[FenceFurniture]

Which gets us back to the small group of consumers running their own little pool.
If the pool is limited to your local block (ie below the 11/415 transformer level) they must use the distributors wires, how might they pay for that?

Until shown otherwise I'm still working on the assumption that the daily supply charge by the retailers is (at least largely) currently a rort. That would be a good opportunity for them to earn it.

[FenceFurniture]

There's hardly a few hours go by without an energy news story:
The Government wants to pay you to switch off this summer - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)