Getting a better Energy deal - WHAT A JOKE!

[FenceFurniture]

.... continue later this week if anyone is interested.

Yes please.

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?

Sounds like even more reason to be on Solar and as little dependent as possible on the grid.

WRT smart meters, I don't quite understand how a retailer can reach out and shut off one particular appliance during a power pre-crisis. For example, in this 1920 house there are two general power circuits, a lights circuit, an oven circuit, and the CL1 Hot Water circuit. To shut down an appliance on the general circuits they would have to shut down the whole circuit.

To the best of my knowledge, and using a pool pump as an example of something that could be shut down (i.e. non-urgent power usage), pool pumps would just be on a general circuit, so how can they be isolated? Or is it the case that they can only shut down a circuit that has dedicated non-urgent appliances on it (or something)? Furthermore, how would the consumer know it's the electricity retailer shutting it down, and not just some power or appliance fault?

There is another aspect that I don't quite understand about the transmission of power (And I turn mean politically). IF SA is using power generated by a plant in QLD wouldn't there be tremendous losses along the grid as it travels such huge distances? What sort of time frames are we talking to send the power along the distances? Surely WA would have to generate 100% of the power it consumes?

[swk]

Yes please.

WRT smart meters, I don't quite understand how a retailer can reach out and shut off one particular appliance during a power pre-crisis. For example, in this 1920 house there are two general power circuits, a lights circuit, an oven circuit, and the CL1 Hot Water circuit. To shut down an appliance on the general circuits they would have to shut down the whole circuit.

No, the whole circuit doesn't have to shut down. I don't know how any particular smart meter works but if the appliance itself has an appropriate detector, a shut down/start up signal can be sent to the meter* which can selectively switch off the appliance(s) by sending the signal to it (them) via the house wiring (even though you have 240 volts on the wires you can _also_ put other signals on them, do you remember plug in intercoms?). Using digital signalling codes _can_ also allow switching of different appliances at different times (if needed).

* the command signals to the meter most likely will be sent via the digital communications used to send the metering data back and forth. However it can be done just as easily through the electrical lines from the zone substation to address all the meters in a particular area, rather than one by one digitally. In fact, there are old analogue off peak HWS systems from the 90s that work in that exact way.

(what I really mean is, there are plenty of ways to do it, but the appliance in question needs a detector of some sort so it can be remotely switched. Getting the signal to it then is not so hard)

Regards
SWK

[swk]

There is another aspect that I don't quite understand about the transmission of power (And I turn mean politically). IF SA is using power generated by a plant in QLD wouldn't there be tremendous losses along the grid as it travels such huge distances? What sort of time frames are we talking to send the power along the distances? Surely WA would have to generate 100% of the power it consumes?

A quick answer (I have to run). Bushmiller may elaborate.
Earlier in the thread Fletty talked about Arbitrage

There are actually _two_ electrical markets. One is physical with real electricity flowing about the place. The other is financial with money flowing about the place.
The power generated in QLD (say) will likely be used up near where it is generated (or at least never goes so far as SA) but the market itself allows for a person in SA to "buy" from QLD. Think of it like two big pots. The QLD generator puts his power in to the power pot due to some agreed rules and takes his money out of the money pot according to some other rules (those arbitrage rules). The SA consumer pays his money into the money pot and gets his power out of the power pot and doesn't really care where it really comes from. The money may go from SA to QLD, but the electricity never really did.

Poor old WA "misses" out because, even though it is easy to include them in the money pot, they cant play in the electricity pot unless there are physical wires to join them to the east coast.

Regards
SWK

[FenceFurniture]

Ok, so saving elec drain on big usage days to prevent blackouts won't be particularly useful until there are enough smart big drain appliances in the market. That could be "quite some time".

I don't see much future for that up here either. There are very few air-conditioners, almost nil swimming pools (there isn't a pool shop within cooee), and a pretty high take-up of solar panels. Mind you, I doubt we'll have any say in the matter.

Speaking of the take-up of solar panels, my partner's daughter has just had house built in Oran Park - near fletty. This is one of those new Landcom estates, so everything is brand new, fibre to the house and all that.

• This is an area that is VERY hot in summer
• There are NIL trees anywhere.
• I'll wager that 80% or more of the houses have ducted aircon
• EVERY house has a black (or near to) roof.
• NONE of the houses have Solar panels
• From any given back "veranda" you have between 3 and 6 black rooves crowding in on you - that's all you can see, apart from kilometres of Colourbond fencing!

When Lola returned from a visit there yesterday, she said "Guess what? I finally saw a roof with a few solar panels today!"

[Chris Parks]

A quick answer (I have to run). Bushmiller may elaborate.
Earlier in the thread Fletty talked about Arbitrage

There are actually _two_ electrical markets. One is physical with real electricity flowing about the place. The other is financial with money flowing about the place.
The power generated in QLD (say) will likely be used up near where it is generated (or at least never goes so far as SA) but the market itself allows for a person in SA to "buy" from QLD. Think of it like two big pots. The QLD generator puts his power in to the power pot due to some agreed rules and takes his money out of the money pot according to some other rules (those arbitrage rules). The SA consumer pays his money into the money pot and gets his power out of the power pot and doesn't really care where it really comes from. The money may go from SA to QLD, but the electricity never really did.

Poor old WA "misses" out because, even though it is easy to include them in the money pot, they cant play in the electricity pot unless there are physical wires to join them to the east coast.

Regards
SWK

This is how my idea of selling excess power to a selected user works. I export into the grid and it gets pooled and the person buying gets some electricity from the pool not the exact electrons I exported. Some years ago there was an attempt to sell green power at a higher cost, it may still be done for all I know and it worked on the same principal of pooling.

[FenceFurniture]

Poor old WA "misses" out because, even though it is easy to include them in the money pot, they cant play in the electricity pot unless there are physical wires to join them to the east coast.

Hmmmm As I thought, but in the light of "The money may go from SA to QLD, but the electricity never really did." why would that matter?

[Chris Parks]

Speaking of the take-up of solar panels, my partner's daughter has just had house built in Oran Park - near fletty. This is one of those new Landcom estates, so everything is brand new, fibre to the house and all that.

• This is an area that is VERY hot in summer
• There are NIL trees anywhere.
• I'll wager that 80% or more of the houses have ducted aircon
• EVERY house has a black (or near to) roof.
• NONE of the houses have Solar panels
• From any given back "veranda" you have between 3 and 6 black rooves crowding in on you - that's all you can see, apart from kilometres of Colourbond fencing!

When Lola returned from a visit there yesterday, she said "Guess what? I finally saw a roof with a few solar panels today!"

You're just jealous of life in suburbia , be damned if I would go back there to live. Ozzie houses are badly designed but that is for another thread.

[FenceFurniture]

Some years ago there was an attempt to sell green power at a higher cost, it may still be done for all I know.

It is, and it's ridiculous. You can have the pleasure of paying anything up to an additional 10c per kWh to purchase Green power. How they expect that to have any kind of take-up rate I will never understand. Consider the following:

• The best form of Green energy is having your own solar panels (not accounting for the manufacturing foibles of solar panels, and the carbon footprint involved)
• Your peak energy costs might be say 22c pkWh
• That might result in a 5-7 year payback for your panels (remembering that they only produce power in peak or shoulder)
• You elect to pay an additional 10c pkWh for Green energy
• That extra 10c would mean that your payback period would reduce 3-5 years if you devoted your philosophical 10c to the panels instead.
• That's a pretty stoopid commercial decision to make

Paying the extra money is for people with more money than brains, and is still just rewarding bad behaviour, because I am not at all confident that the retailers would purchase that Green power, as they say they will, particularly in times of high drain. Who holds them accountable?.

It may be that some of those people paying for Green power don't have a viable Solar roof, and they need to feel good and Green, but surely it would be better if their money was sent towards solar panel or battery research?

[FenceFurniture]

I just forget the numbers now, but Germany is producing more Green power than dirty power IIRC, and one of the Euro countries (maybe Germany again) will be totally self-sufficient on Green power much earlier than any other country - somewhere in around 15 or so years, from memory.

And yet here we are, on the sunniest continent of all, building new estates with no solar panels in sight. That would be a classic example of needing legislation for mandatory panels on every house. Put in some extra subsidies if necessary. The cost of a 7.5kWh array is around $8-10k after rebates, which is pretty small beer in the context of a new house build costing about $350-400k, especially given that these air-con hungry houses will repay that $8-10k within just a few short years and provide virtually free elec for >20 years after that.

Rather than building new coal power stations, or propping up filthy 50 year old ones for another 5 dirty years, wouldn't it be better to put those massive funds into building community-serving batteries. One very large battery complex in each neighbourhood with solar panels everywhere that is viable? It must surely be cheaper to build one large battery complex than one for every house. It would also be better for drain and distribution I would think (low vol consumer's batteries would be somewhat wasted).

Mass production is the way to get prices down. Battery tech is getting very close now.

What am I missing here?

There would have to be the inevitable exemptions for heritage houses and so on, but they are a pretty small percentage.

[Chris Parks]

What am I missing here?

Big business fears change unless there is a benefit in that change that makes more profit for them because they fear the shareholders will write down the value of their companies. That is one view, there are other reasons as well of course then the executives would lose money so it is in the end a greed system IMHO. That might sound simplistic but get between any person, you or me for instance and their money and the fangs come out.

[Bushmiller]

A few thoughts off the top of my head that we have to bear in mind when discussing the market as a whole:

WA,NT and some other districts (Mount Isa for example) are not part of the Eastern Seaboard electricity market. They are stand alone.

The Eastern Seaboard is interconnected. There are interconnectors between

NSW and QLD
NSW and Vic
Vic and SA (two)
Vic and Tas.

These interconnectors are limited and have varying capacities. There are often constrained so also cannot always deliver their full nominal power. None of these interconnectors is even remotely capable of delivering all the power to a neighbouring state. So if all the power stations in Victoria shut down SA, tasmania and NSW would be unable to supply the demand. Vicoria would have a blackout and they have the most interconnectors (ie. from three states.

There are in simple terms two markets supplied by the generators: The contract market and the spot market. Wholesalers enter into contracts at fixed prices to avoid excessive cost during times of peak demand. I am not privy to the intricacies of these commercial arrangements, but I am led to believe they are for a minimum of three months typically and could be longer. However not all power is sold like this. The remaining power is sold on the spot market and this is the area that is volatile and so full of controversy. It is the area that is quoted in the media. At any one time the contract area may represent around half of the market bearing in mind that it is fixed and not a function of demand.

I believe this is an area that Fletty can contribute far more than I.

A high demand, say in SA, does have an effect on QLD but not directly. A scenario is that the price rises in SA so Victoria starts supplying via the interconnectors. Victoria buys power from either NSW or Tasmania at a cheaper rate and NSW buys power from QLD. There is a cascade effect.

There are indeed transmission losses. Initially power stations were built at the load centres. However the majority of people do not chose to live next door to a power station and even more importantly, as fuel is the single largest cost in a thermal power station, increasingly in recent times the stations were built close to fuel supplies. Bayswater's coal is delivered by conveyor. Millmerran, where I am employed, sits on top of it's own coal mine and consequently has one of the cheapest fuel sources in Australia. Remember again that all coal fired station burn absolute rubbish quality coal. Today that is as it was not always that way.

Solar power using photovoltaic cells takes up a huge area. Really huge: Acres and acres. The great outback (the desert preferably) would be perfect except that it is in the outback: Miles from anywhere. That means huge expense with transmission lines and voltage losses even at high transmission line voltages up to 500KV (500,000 volts). So solar rooftop is a very good alternative, but again not perfect.

Domestic power comes from the three phase power lines that run down your street. Roughly speaking a third of the houses use each phase (which gives us our 240V). They were designed to deliver power and tend to balance out fairly well. However they were not made to have power fed into them and if all the solar power in the street comes primarily on to a single phase rather than spread evenly there is a resulting imbalance. This is why some antagonists say solar is bad. Unfortunately the owners of these lines have not met up to the challenge and they have not anticipated changes in the nature of supply.

Lastly, solar, until an economic form of storage has been developed and whether it is batteries or something else, only delivers an average of say 25% (that's a figure off the top of my head, but it is to convey an idea) as there is not night time generation, reduced generation leading up to dark and after sunrise and varying amounts dependent on the time of year and cloud cover.

Having said that I am a big fan of solar power. When I mentioned this at work to my boss, he said he was OK with that, but I would be the first to go!

I know this is a little off the retial topic, but it may be regarded as background information as to why the retailers work the way they do. I hope Fletty will contribute more on that front.

Regards
Paul

[Bushmiller]

I just forget the numbers now, but Germany is producing more Green power than dirty power IIRC, and one of the Euro countries (maybe Germany again) will be totally self-sufficient on Green power much earlier than any other country - somewhere in around 15 or so years, from memory.

And yet here we are, on the sunniest continent of all, building new estates with no solar panels in sight. That would be a classic example of needing legislation for mandatory panels on every house. Put in some extra subsidies if necessary. The cost of a 7.5kWh array is around $8-10k after rebates, which is pretty small beer in the context of a new house build costing about $350-400k, especially given that these air-con hungry houses will repay that $8-10k within just a few short years and provide virtually free elec for >20 years after that.

Rather than building new coal power stations, or propping up filthy 50 year old ones for another 5 dirty years, wouldn't it be better to put those massive funds into building community-serving batteries. One very large battery complex in each neighbourhood with solar panels everywhere that is viable? It must surely be cheaper to build one large battery complex than one for every house. It would also be better for drain and distribution I would think (low vol consumer's batteries would be somewhat wasted).

Mass production is the way to get prices down. Battery tech is getting very close now.

What am I missing here?

There would have to be the inevitable exemptions for heritage houses and so on, but they are a pretty small percentage.

For a long time Germany was the leader in solar, but it was only 3-4% of their total. I don't know what it is now. Unfortunately the advantage Australia has is that coal is so cheap. It put solar at a severe disadvantage.

It the power industry we have thought that there would never be another thermal coal fired station built and I suspect not, but Turnbull has, possibly mischiefly, raised the prospect again. As the governments (state) seem reluctant to build stations it will be down to private industry and they will look at the market and say no way: No stability with governments running around like the proverbial chook.

The batteries are not close to delivering economic storage. The Tesla power wall is an emergency back up. The one in SA when complete will deliver 100MW for one hour and then it's stuffed. They have the smallest demand of the mainland states at up to 2500MW (peak). It will help but it is not an absolute panacea.

Regards
Paul

Regards
Paul

[FenceFurniture]

The batteries are not close to delivering economic storage.

I'm thinking that the tech will probably be right in about 2-3 years and then a couple of years of early adopters so pay for the R&D. That's why I think that batteries will be viable in about 4-5 years.

However, there's a couple of things that could expedite that with some Govt $$ input (perhaps all 3 levels of Govt). It is clear that we are going to have to do something about generating electricity, and very soon. Power stations take years to build (5 years? Longer?). By starting to mass produce batteries there would surely be a speed up in the R&D process. If the Govts were to fairly heavily subsidise the take up of batteries (in other words make the nett price about the same as post-early-adopters price) there would be a much higher take-up rate which would start to become a self fulfilling prophesy. The money for these subsidies would be from what they save in building coal-fired power stations (surely we are looking at some enormous investments, very soon).

My point being that we need the solution before it can be delivered via new power stations.

There would also be a side-benefit for WA - they have significant Lithium reserves (should quell a little of the political wailing and gnashing of teeth).

Power generation has been neglected for too long by both persuasions of Govt. SA last summer was a timely warning to everyone, and a glimpse of the future. The blackout may have been for different reasons, but it happened, and should be heeded.

I would have thought that it is because of increased population individual consumers, rather than industry, that we need these new stations. There is, after all, not a great deal of manufacturing happening here now. O'course, Climate Change and record temperatures aren't helping at all, with increased air-con needed.

There would still be a need for (new) industrial strength power, and I don't know what kind of clean generation can supply that. Pumped Hydro running off Solar arrays?

[woodPixel]

I saw a story last week that said if we have widespread rooftop solar AND pumped hydro in a few hundred dams all our problems can be solved within a decade.

let me see if I can find it.

[FenceFurniture]

I saw a story last week that said if we have widespread rooftop solar AND pumped hydro in a few hundred dams all our problems can be solved within a decade.

Yes, out of a paltry 22,000 suitable sites nationwide for pumped hydro (which is 100s of times more than we need forever, or something ridiculous like that).

Pfffft. What are we thinking? What would the scientists know? Business & Govt is always right.