Energy Pulse Blog

Terry McCrann recently wrote When the wind doesn’t blow, power doesn’t flow even in Denmark rubbishing wind power in Australia - “Ignore the hot air: in Australia, wind power is nothing more than an expensive vanity”, writes Terry McCrann October 06, 2007 - commenting on times when there is little or no wind in Denmark, requiring other generation to be used, he then runs down the use of wind power in Australia, eg:

“Nor does it explain how it would “work” in Australia. Yes, you can connect all the state grids; but if you had a huge investment in wind in, say, Victoria, you would still need equivalent coal/nuclear/gas somewhere — as essentially idle surplus capacity. Unless you were prepared to literally turn off the lights, and everything else, when the wind didn’t blow. Yes, Denmark’s wind story has a huge lesson for Australia. That there is no way wind can make a sensible major contribution to mainstream power generation in Australia.”

I expect that with such a small land mass Denmark will occasionally have this problem, but as Denmark is only a bit more than half the size of Tasmania, I doubt this problem would arise in the NEM, which spans 4000 km from Port Douglass to Port Lincoln and now includes Tasmania.

There seems to be a widely held belief in government (and the press) that renewable generation is unreliable or unsuitable for large scale deployment because it may be intermitent. This belief, in my opinion, is the result of a poor understanding of renewable generation technology, electricity networks and electricity markets.

Firstly, all power networks need a reserve margin, usually at least equal to the size of the largest generator, for when it trips or goes offline unexpectedly. The bigger these units, the larger the standby needed (typically 600 MW in NSW). Secondly, demand changes introduce their own variability into the load, which is ordinarily managed through existing arrangements. It is common for demand to change by 100-200 MW over 5 minutes in the NSW market. From a system perspective, a 100 MW increase in demand is no different to a 100 MW reduction in supply through reduced wind, sun or any other cause. McCrann also laments that Denmark has to rely on imported power to meet demand when there is low wind. I guess he isn’t aware that NSW, with almost no installed wind or solar power relies on power imported from Queensland and Victoria to meet it’s minimum reserve levels.

There are many studies that have shown that widely dispersed renewable generation doesn’t need equivalent backup. The Utility Wind Interest Group’s paper - Wind Power Impacts On Electric Power System Operating Costs: Summary And Perspective On Work To Date (pdf) concludes:

“The results to date also lay to rest one of the major concerns often expressed about wind power: that a wind plant would need to be backed up with an equal amount of dispatchable generation. It is now clear that, even at moderate wind penetrations, the need for additional generation to compensate for wind variations is substantially less than one-for-one and is generally small relative to the size of the wind plant.”

It’s been a while coming, but it looks like the power industry is going to follow a similar trajectory to the computing and telecommunications industries. Initially these industries were dominated by centralised (”baseload”?) providers. As needs and technology changed, smaller distributed (and more efficient) systems took over. The same criticisms were made at the time about personal computers and mobile telephony (that they could never displace the incumbent centralised technology). The “baseload myth” is going to take some time to be exposed, but if markets are allowed to operate efficiently, these more efficient technologies will quickly spread.