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44 comments on A gas supply disruption case study - the Varanus Island explosion
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44 comments on A gas supply disruption case study - the Varanus Island explosion
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A good summary of the WA situation.As usual we have a state Labor government stuck in some sort of mind/time warp.The dismissal of the nuclear option is predictable as is the pathetic level of interest in solar thermal.The opposition,as usual display the same disconnect from reality.
While using natural gas for base load power generation is wasteful one would have thought that it would have been prudent to have some sort of backup in place.After all there are huge quantities of gas produced in the region and most of it is exported - another waste.
When cornered the government understandably returns to the coal option - any port in a storm,but then proposes building another coal powered generator.Go figure.
Like Queensland,the powers that be in WA are in the thrall of the resources boom,a very fragile boom.If they have any ability to look outside their cave their vision is clouded by money.
As Aeldric postulated yesterday how do we go about convincing these people to look outside the square?
I live in WA also and I am a member of the Labor Party and have tried to work on some of the policy committees. These so called consultative committees are not consulted or listened to at all.
WA has probably the best potential for renewables with vast open sunny spaces as well and huge wind resources. I do not know how to get Governments away from the hands of the Greenhouse Mafias that actually control policy.
BTW anyone watch the new Working Dog production "The Hollowmen"? Have a look at it and maybe you will get an idea of why we do not think outside the square.
Someone could start a political party, SEG the Sustainable Energy Group, whose policies are purely renewable energy, analogous to the way the Greens represent the environment (supposedly).
The Powers That Be set up these stupid two party systems all around the world specifically so they could control things, being given a choice of two parties that essentially obey the same master is no choice at all, there is no democracy, we've been had.
Actually that is not such a bad idea. The Greens have the balance of power in the Senate. You really only need to get one senate seat to have that sort of power over the Government like the pokies guy.
Big Gav how about we start the renewable energy/Peak oil party with the aim of being a lobby group/political party along the lines of the Greens to combat the greenhouse mafia.
I left the Greens because of the fairies at the bottom of the garden people in it and their drugs policy. If we could steer clear of this perhaps we could have a chance. We need to redirect the Green Car money into electric cars and plug ins rather than subsidising Toyota.
Our first sort of objective could be to get Ausra to build a large scale solar thermal with storage here in Australia.
I'm certainly in favour of another party appearing on the political landscape in Australia - preferably a centrist / small "l" liberal/libertarian party to fill the void left by the Democrats, which isn't beholden to the interest groups that own the Liberal and Labor parties.
I'm not sure how best this could be achieved though - there seems to have been lots of attempts without anyone getting much traction.
Happy to listen to ideas on the topic.
Getting some large scale CSP projects underway is a worthy goal though - I'm hoping the increase in the MRET to 20% gets up, which would be the biggest boost that this aim could receive in the short term.
Ausra have had a few state premiers visit them (as per the Brumby / Bligh visit I mentioned earlier in the week), so hopefully they are already doing some marketing to try and expand back home as well.
Don't know either - just how do you start a political party. Perhaps a start in WA would be the go as there is a State election coming up. If we started then we could get some press coverage for free.
It amazes me sometime that some people here can express their dissapointment in the political process in terms as if it is a consumer item that has been sold to us on certain promises and then found to be a dud.
Politics is something you can choose to participate in and, if you do, you will find that the job of a political executive (minister) is much harder than you think. We don't give them absolute power for very good reasons. We shouldn't expect too much from them either. They don't have super powers just becasue they get elected.
In reality, there is a 2 party system.
Those who love money
And those who do not love money
Everything else is BS
1stly
Nuclear is unsuitable in WA simply due to grid stability issues.
The AP1000 reactor, 1GWe output, would cause unacceptable grid reliability expenses, in standby generators, in the SWIS (South West Interconected System). The SWIS, based around the Perth area of Western Australia, only has a minimum power level of 1.6GW. Nuclear power has multiple reactors sited together as it has large economies of scale in such things as it's skilled labour and shared facilities.
This would be cause an unacceptable cost in WA due to the small size of the grid and the necessity of having alternate generators on standby.
2ndly.
Gas generally isn't used for base load power. Part of the problem with the timing of the gas interruption is that the coal fired plants were our of commission due to servicing, either scheduled or unscheduled in the case of the collie power station.
The only use of gas in the normal merit order of generation is in co-generation(~500MW), the Rockingham-1 combined cycle gas plant (250MW) and the Pinjar (1GW) open cycle gas turbine peaking plants.
This means that gas problems only have a big bite in the summer A/C peak rather than in winter.
3rdly,
There is a backup plan. The Pinjar and Rockingham gas plants can and are use diesel at a rate of ~1ML/day. The local electricity market takes this into account with pricing with a wholesale price up to 40c/kw hr.
It's an expensive plan, it's not too imaginative but it is a plan.
4thly.
There is already a new coal plant under construction right now, the bluewater plant, with commissioning due in November 2008. It's hardly any port in a storm.
All the rest with the fragile boom, looking to coal in a crisis and lack of vision is pretty reasonable, but applies to politicians generally.
Yours,
Lachlan the Accountant (from Perth)
If grid stability problems are an issue with nuclear, I expect they are with wind and solar as well.
After I stumbled across the transmission line issue, it seems like I run into it wherever I go. Private companies think only of what they can plug into the grid. There needs to be major planning, added storage, and transmission lines to make the whole thing work. Somehow, all of the grid costs are "someone else's" and no one ever gets to them. If we want to talk about these additional sources of power, it may be that transmission lines and storage need to be the first items of discussion, not last.
Thanks for the good question Gail.
There are also grid stability issues with solar and wind but they are different than for nuclear. In WA, it's a small isolated grid, so the problems are more stability of generation rather than stability of distribution.
The WA office of energy commissioned a report exploring wind penetration in small grids and here is a summary.
For solar, given the grid demand situation is always higher during daylight hours, a large amount of solar is able to be adsorbed without difficulty. Existing dispatch and merit order processes will keep the grid stable up to a high penetration rate (~40%).
For wind, the problem isn't when the wind doesn't blow. It's when it's blowing too much during the middle of the night. Coal power plants (in WA at least) are not designed to be throttled up and down, and startup from cold shutdown takes 72+hr for some of the existing power stations. So an excess of wind generation means that the coal plants are forced to shut down during a gusty winters night. This places an upper limit of ~15% of minimum grid load as wind capacity with an additional cost of ~$6/MW hr in spinning reserve at this penetration rate. This maximum penetration assumed only 1 huge wind farm, no SCADA remote disconnection of some wind turbines, no pump storage or hydro power what so ever, and a minimum coal plant output of 80%. If any of those assumptions change then the penetration rate can go much higher with minimal cost.
For larger grids, eg Europe, North America, statistical processes allow wind to penetrate higher than a small grid.
The transmission aspect is a problem, with single sites and renewable "hot spots" generating huge amounts of power that needs to go to meet demand elsewhere. Longer term planing for regulated grids would have to be part of the regulating process anyway. So form a Peoples Power Party to put public political pressure for proper power planing.
Lachlan the Accountant.
Thanks for the useful additional explanations (and the tongue twisting closing sentence).
How old are the WA coal plants ?
My understanding (though I have no data here to confirm my memory is correct) is that the raft of big coal plants in NSW (built in the late 70s and early 80s) have a reasonably wide range they can be throttled up and down - covering a range of something like 350 MW to 660 MW per unit.
Is SCADA disconnect of wind turbines during periods of over-generation uncommon ? It doesn't sound like an expensive feature to add.
Adding storage so you can manage output (and maximise profit by dispatching power at optimal times) would be better of course, but that does add significant cost.
The age of the WA power plants vary, from the 50's for the Muja A/B units that were mothballed and are being crash recommissioned to bring more coal power online, to Kwinana units which are 60's, which were converted from using oil during the 70's to gas, oil or coal, to the other Muja units of the 70's to the Collie power station in the 90's, which had a turbine failure which has exacerbated the gas crisis. The gas pipeline from the north west shelf was completed in '83 and there were only gas plants built in that decade.
The SCADA disconnect is easy to do but any problems with it tend to relate to payment while the units are not generating. Thats more a marketing and contract problem rather than an engineering one.
Unfortunately geography has limited pump storage in WA, due an almost complete lack of hydro power in the SWIS to use for pump storage, as used by the Snowy scheme and the stanthorp corportation in QLD.
With historic gas prices in WA, it's cheaper to use open cycle gas peaking plants to meat the demand peaks than to construct a stand alone pump storage site. The unintended vulnerabilities this causes is why the varanus island accident is worthy of this article.
Thanks.
Hopefully the Warro gas project works out and they decide to put some storage capacity in place at Dongara as per one of the recommendations.
Long term I don't think burning gas as a way of generating electricity makes any sense at all (instead it should be reserved for fertiliser, plastics and other uses where there aren't as many alternatives).
While WA has plenty of gas, and will for some time, I think the LNG price is likely to climb along with the oil price, and the WA domestic market will pay a price linked to the LNG price. So putting a range of renewables online, coupled with some storage options (compressed air - if possible, flow batteries, graphite, molten salt etc) and better demand management, will become the most cost effective option in the medium term.
Regarding the excess night time wind issue, there are groups in the US looking at the same problem there and trying to implement large scale electric vehicle charging as the way of soaking up the excess energy and putting it to good use during the day. I think this will be the long term (10 - 20 years) solution everywhere.
Thanks for the thoughtful comments Lachlan.
The issue with a nuclear plant not being an option because of its size relative to the rest of the grid is a common one for not using nuclear - the New Zealand electricity chief recently made the same point there:
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/latest/200805261525/ebd63aa
Regarding Bluewater - is that the same as the plant the state govt has reported to have asked Verve to build, or are they two separate facilities (ie. is yet another coal fired plant to be built) ?
Bluewater is owned and operated by the Griffin Group, a major local coal producer. It is a merchant coal plant built to supply the progressively deregulated electricity market. This is completely separate to any additional construction for Verve Energy.
Verve energy has an upper limit on the total generating capacity of 3GW (~75% of state demand) as a spur to new market entrants. They will be below this level within 5 years according to scheduled decommissioning of their existing power stations. So, Verve will be in the market for additional power stations in the near future.
Lachlan the Accountant
Lachlan:
If the AP1000 is too large for the WA grid, what about South Africa's proposed PBMR, which is designed to produce 165 MWe? That size is well within the range of the coal fired power plants that are apparently on the grid.
I am also not so sure about your assertions about gas not being part of the base load. Other sources that I have found indicate that WA gets about 60% of its electrical power by burning gas - under normal circumstances, that is. It is hard to get to that kind of portion of the market without supplying at least some of the base load.