Future of the Australian Electricity Market

[AlexS]

I would say that it's more likely that the coal industry is lining the gov's pockets and until there are better offers the policy won't change.

Such cynicism in one so young.

[Bushmiller]

Cynical, but fair.



Regards
Paul

[Chris Parks]

I still lean to them trying to look after themselves rather than the community they represent and do anything that helps them stay in power. I think there was only one who did put the community before himself and that was Ted Mackie, a man who stood up for what benefited others to his own cost.

[Lappa]

I saw a snippet of a Federal Govt minister being interviewed and he was asked why there was no incentives for buying electric vehicles and his answer was why give incentives for luxury vehicles as the people buying them could afford them. I’m determined to find who it was and name and shame.
Talk about being out of step!

It was Angus Taylor who said “ we’re not into subsidising luxury cars ……… people who have the money to buy a luxury car are welcome to go out and do that” etc. Etc.

He’s the Minister for Energy and Emission Reduction no less !!

[Bushmiller]

I saw a snippet of a Federal Govt minister being interviewed and he was asked why there was no incentives for buying electric vehicles and his answer was why give incentives for luxury vehicles as the people buying them could afford them. I’m determined to find who it was and name and shame.
Talk about being out of step!

It was Angus Taylor who said “ we’re not into subsidising luxury cars ……… people who have the money to buy a luxury car are welcome to go out and do that” etc. Etc.

He’s the Minister for Energy and Emission Reduction no less !!

Not quite in touch!

Regards
Paul

[Bushmiller]

Just to get away from the political comments (not really permitted under Forum rules), which arguably is very hard to do, this is a little more information on the incident just recently at Callide Power Station. Some information I have is confidential and I am not a liberty to divulge it, but the following information is mainly available through mainstream media, Callide bulletins or through AEMO bulletins.

Firstly a pic of the badly damaged Unit 4.

Callide No.4.jpg

My apologies to those of you in the industry as this next information is not for you. Steam enters the turbine from the right into the HP (high pressure)and IP (intermediate pressure) cylinders. They are housed in the square box on the right (well it was originally squarish), which is actually a containment device in case the turbine overspeeds (more on this in a moment). The blackened section is the LP (low pressure) cylinder and the relatively intact section on the left is the generator.

This unit was rated at 425MW. That is quite a lot of power: Enough power to run about six 747 aircraft. If you are going to have such a disaster this one was very well contained. That box on the right is designed as a safety device in case the turbine lets go. It is primarily to prevent the blades acting as missiles, 21st century boomerangs that don't come back. It did it's job. The whole station was evacuated after the other two units that were also running were shut down as a safety precaution. Nobody was hurt.

You see that shiny, rather phallic looking piece of steel sticking provocatively out of the floor and being used as an improvised device to support the barricade tape? Well, as you may have imagined, that was part of the shaft. The operators were unable to open the electrical circuit breaker that connected them to the grid and the machine ran for around half an hour without any steam or oil to the bearings: While the turbine did not overspeed, because it was attached (locked in actually) to the grid it was running at 3000rpm, which is it's normal speed. However,withoutsteam to cool the blades and oil to lubricate the bearings it overheated and eventually seized. At the time it was estimated that it may have been powered by almost the equivalent of a 747 aircraft. We call it "Generator Motoring," because it is being driven by the electricty system just like our electric motors. Coming to an instantaneous stop from perhaps 50MW was never going to work out well. Back to our "symbol" in the floor: An engineering colleague estimated that piece of shaft embedded in the concrete including the part that is not visible weighs around 4½ tonnes! Another piece of the apparatus weighing 80+Kgs did manage to escape the building. It was found half a kilometre away. Clearly a few pieces did enough damage to let more light into the building than was ever intended. The incident resulted in a fire from the escape of hydrogen, which was contained with the help of more than twenty firemen.

Needless to say this unit will not be repaired any time soon. Initial estimates were twelve months. It would not surprise me if it was a lot longer than that. I don't know if some of it is even repairable. Maybe it has to be replaced, which arguably would be quicker, if a brand new one was available (probably not).

Regards
Paul

[woodPixel]

This looks like the part that decided to free itself.... mighty indeed!


callide-2i9y5eb3g8s01vht7m2_t1880.JPG KakaoTalk_20191120_065904780_06.jpg

[Bushmiller]

WP

It might well be. Your pic shows the LP rotor and the shaft is the connector between this last part of the turbine (the third cylinder) and the generator. It won't be looking like that now.

Regards
Paul

Edit: There was only the pic on the left when I looked before. The pic on the right shows the IP cylinder and the HP cylinder. Steam enters the two cylinders and travels in opposite directions to balance thrust. With the LP cylinder it enters in the middle and travels out in both directions. As steam moves through the turbine it both cools and expands. Consequently the blades get larger and larger to cope with this transition. Between the HP and IP cylinders the steam is returned to the boiler and reheated (to 590° C at our station). One of the crazy things in power stations, because of the pressures we use, is that we have water at 300° C and because of the vacuum in our condensers we have steam at around 50°C.

[woodPixel]

I simply searched for "callide power station"... there were plenty of diagrams, videos, a few engineers snaps of the install and even a good discussion on welding the beasties up....

Here is a video of the install (of one of them anyway)...





NOT the kind of thing likely to be spare in storage, ready shrink wrapped

[Bendigo Bob]

Wow, that's some serious damage.

I missed this in the news (hope no-one was injured), but I imagine with the ongoing mothballing of older power stations this is not a happy place to be for Qld/Aust over the coming year that it will take to repair.

[AlexS]

I still lean to them trying to look after themselves rather than the community they represent and do anything that helps them stay in power. I think there was only one who did put the community before himself and that was Ted Mackie, a man who stood up for what benefited others to his own cost.

Ted Mack was the type of politician we need, an exemplar of honesty and service in all three levels of government. Resigned from federal parliament the day before he would have become eligible for a fat pension.
The only other one I can think of who comes close was John Hatton, who forced the Greiner state government to create ICAC, after they fought tooth, nail and dirty against it.

[Bushmiller]

Wow, that's some serious damage.

I missed this in the news (hope no-one was injured), but I imagine with the ongoing mothballing of older power stations this is not a happy place to be for Qld/Aust over the coming year that it will take to repair.

Bob

Nobody was injured at all. The correct procedure was followed and the station evacuated.

Suffice to say the electricity system up and down the Eastern seaboard is being severely tested at times. This would have been exacerbated over the last couple of days with Yallourn in Victoria shutting down some of their units because of flooding in their mines. I think they are left with only a single unit at a reduced load (200MW?) to conserve coal.

Tough times.

Regards
Paul

[woodPixel]

Haha!

Solar =sun don't shine, what then...
Wind = wind don't blow, what then...
Coal = mine floods, machine explodes, what then...


There's some very big bucks in those stink factories.

I'd imagine going to the banks, cap in hand as a coal using generator looking for a loan to fix it! Tough sell.

Wonder what would happen if we spent a BILLION or 5 on solar, wind and CAES?

Apparently the gov spent a Trillion during COVID for support. Imagine if 200 billion of that went to SWC? mmmm, futureproof everything....

BuT wE cAnT aFfOrD iT!

[woodPixel]

This is interesting.... Bloomberg -The Future of Power Is Transcontinental, Submarine Supergrids

(read it in a Private Window)

Bloomberg Businessweek reports on "renewed interest in cables that can power consumers in one country with electricity generated hundreds, even thousands, of miles away in another" and possibly even transcontinental, submarine electricity superhighways:Coal, gas and even nuclear plants can be built close to the markets they serve, but the utility-scale solar and wind farms many believe essential to meet climate targets often can't. They need to be put wherever the wind and sun are strongest, which can be hundreds or thousands of miles from urban centers. Long cables can also connect peak afternoon solar power in one time zone to peak evening demand in another, reducing the price volatility caused by mismatches in supply and demand as well as the need for fossil-fueled back up capacity when the sun or wind fade. As countries phase out carbon to meet climate goals, they'll have to spend at least $14 trillion to strengthen grids by 2050, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. That's only a little shy of projected spending on new renewable generation capacity and it's increasingly clear that high- and ultra-high-voltage direct current lines will play a part in the transition.

The question is how international will they be...?
The article points out that in theory, Mongolia's Gobi desert "has potential to deliver 2.6 terawatts of wind and solar power — more than double the U.S.'s entire installed power generation capacity — to a group of Asian powerhouse economies that together produce well over a third of global carbon emissions..."The same goes for the U.S., where with the right infrastructure, New York could tap into sun- and wind-rich resources from the South and Midwest. An even more ambitious vision would access power from as far afield as Canada or Chile's Atacama Desert, which has the world's highest known levels of solar power potential per square meter. Jeremy Rifkin, a U.S. economist who has become the go-to figure for countries looking to remake their infrastructure for the digital and renewable future, sees potential for a single, 1.1 billion-person electricity market in the Americas that would be almost as big as China's. Rifkin has advised Germany and the EU, as well as China...

Persuading countries to rely on each other to keep the lights on is tough, but the universal, yet intermittent nature of solar and wind energy also makes it inevitable, according to Rifkin. "This isn't the geopolitics of fossil fuels," owned by some and bought by others, he says. "It is biosphere politics, based on geography. Wind and sun force sharing...."

If these supergrids don't get built, it will be because their time has both come and gone. Not only are they expensive, politically difficult, and unpopular — they have to cross a lot of backyards — their focus on mega-power installations seems outdated to some. Distributed microgeneration as close to home as your rooftop, battery storage, and transportable hydrogen all offer competing solutions to the delivery problems supergrids aim to solve.

[Bushmiller]

Haha!

Solar =sun don't shine, what then...
Wind = wind don't blow, what then...
Coal = mine floods, machine explodes, what then...


There's some very big bucks in those stink factories.

I'd imagine going to the banks, cap in hand as a coal using generator looking for a loan to fix it! Tough sell.

WP

Whilst I don't totally disagree I have to point out that the sun doesn't shine every day: For about sixteen hours or more and at other times it doesn't shine at all. Wind certainly doesn't blow all the time. Yallourn may be down for a few days. Callide will have all their units running again by the end of the month(I am not privy to an exact time scale) with only Unit 4 being out of service for a protracted period.

I also imagine that before they go to the banks the owners will be visiting their insurance companies first.

Regards
Paul