By Phil Kreveld
The National Press Club is not the very first source of useful engineering information when it comes to a better way of constructing Australia’s electricity networks, but here goes anyway.
Kevin Rudd—erstwhile Prime Minister, lately the Ambassador to the USA and now head of thinktank the Asia Society—recounted some history in his National Press Club address of 10 September. The carry-out was: Government sets policy—the civil service carries it out… or rather that is how it should be.
Rudd cited the rearmament of Australia in 1940. The government coopted three engineers: Essington-Lewis, Storey, and Harnett to get things organised. Similarly, in the immediate post war period, Nugget Coombs, Doug Copeland, and John Dedman took care of national reconstruction. Rudd went on to say that now we no longer have such strongly directed effort: Government departments are “departments of words” and not of action.
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Think of the national energy policy as it relates to electricity which is the concern of the Department of Climate Change, Environment, Energy and Water. DCCEEW is nominally ‘in charge’. But actually, it’s about massaging—buck passing—about slogans like ‘technology-agnostic’ solutions, meaning ‘we’ll refer your question to someone else’.
If somehow one landed in DCCEEW and launched a question—why are we constructing a 900km transmission (EnergyConnect) line when energy sources should be as close to consumption as possible and we could avoid this with more synchronous sources in South Australia—there would be a standard answer pointing to the necessity of transmission for the renewable transition.
Rudd said every data centre must have its own dedicated power (he specified solar)—but there are other dedicated but more compact and clean solutions—and providing a strong source of voltage stability, for example thermal storage driving combo synchronous generator-syncons. Boy, wouldn’t that simplify things for the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO).
Rudd’s statement is a convenient segue into transmission line projects, large and variable loads, and voltage and frequency control. And yes, big data centres feature largely as they are good at causing stability problems. There’s only one small issue—who exactly do we put in charge of the engineering because, let’s face it, we have huge emerging voltage and frequency stability problems just around the corner as it is—and associated protection and control headaches.
Let’s apply a little common sense. The best way to transfer energy from a generator to an energy-consuming load is to put the two in close proximity—hence Rudd’s comment on power for data centres. We have drifted far from this ideal in the grids we have and are constructing.
Long transmission lines and highly variable power flow—a fatal combination. It is a nightmare for voltage and frequency stability control. Whether adding more data centres really makes matters worse is an open question. In some ways it provides a convenient scapegoat for what is a really bad design, which has come about because there is no equivalent to an engineering-led transition to renewables—no equivalent to a capable team that led Australia’s rearmament back in 1940.
Instead of functioning primarily for power transfer, our transmission lines are required to keep inverters of renewable sources working stably. This has come about because of haphazard allocation of synchronous resources amongst the jurisdictions. The worst example is South Australia which in essence cannot operate as a stable island at full power. The only exception is Queensland—fortuitously the state government owns the whole shooting match.
In many ways, long transmission lines are rapidly becoming an anachronism—but, okay, having remote energy generating zones require them. Under the watch of people with no knowledge of electrical engineering, we have seen a proliferation of long lines being constructed and planned to politically convenient energy zones—far from centres of energy consumption.
Related article: Renewables vs fossil fuels: Why can’t we walk and chew gum at the same time?
Getting into the physics of transmission lines is not helpful in this instance—a lot of equations without necessarily grasping the essentials. The longer the lines, and the more variable the power flow, the more challenging are voltage and frequency control, the more difficult is adequate protection engineering—and therefore necessitating control regimes not currently part of AEMO’s methodology. It’s not that we lack sophistication at AEMO—its digital twin of the physical networks is an engineering marvel. It allows very sophisticated testing of variable loads and generators. It is a necessary tool. However, our ad hoc, often politically inspired ways of allocating resources for the national electricity system drive the tech’s at AEMO nuts—and the folk who want to get permission to connect generation resources.
Data centres are not part of an integrated design—instead they are subject to ministerial ukases. As your correspondent listened to Kevin Rudd’s address and his reference to Government Departments of Words (instead of Works)—the awful truth of how ineptly we are handling the transition to renewables was brightly illuminated,
Minister Bowen, turn your DCCEEW into the Department of Works.
