By Phil Kreveld
Large generation investment is lagging, and federal energy minister Chris Bowen knows it. His National Press Club address on Wednesday, 5 August, kind of admitted as much as he commended the mums and dads of Australia for taking the bit between their teeth by investing in rooftop solar and batteries.
Mr and Mrs Kafoops are thinking of their own budgets—not the national good—by investing in solar. The problem is that their investment continually being multiplied makes investment in large-scale generation more and more fraught.
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A good advice for Minister Bowen would be to sit down with AEMC chair Anna Collyer and AER chair Clare Savage. The agenda for the discussions would include the abolishment of ring fencing, acknowledgement of the death of Power of Choice, a brake to granting returns on transmission investment plans, and reconstituting their respective boards with electrical engineers.
Were money no object, we could continue heading the wrong way. It would result in a super-sophisticated ‘white elephant’ electrical energy system that, if nothing else, would make good questions for future electrical engineering examinations.
To put it succinctly, all Mr and Mrs Kafoops need is a stable source of voltage and frequency—if they wish to stay connected to the grid.
Therein is Minister Bowen’s problem—there’s no money in providing just voltage and frequency. The energy market requires the Kafoopses to buy energy. It’s the very thing Bowen praises them for—for not buying but churning it out themselves!
Our glasses are getting fogged up. Too many conferences, to many churnings of the same mantras, and not seeing the highway sign that blares ‘WRONG WAY, GO BACK’.
We are engineering the world’s most challenging electricity system around the Kafoopses. A system that is a sheer intellectual joy for your correspondent, one of matrices of differential equations, Nyquist stability studies, Eigen vectors—etc. Because underneath all that science is AEMO’s migraine—keeping all the balls in the air. Minister Bowen is likely not to be aware of any of this because we do not talk about the engineering contradictions in polite company.
We are a small country of 28 million folk and we have world’s largest, synchronous radial grid in the world, which is very, very expensive in terms of maintaining voltage and frequency stability. Rather than recognising that the solar revolution is making distribution networks more and more independent energy-wise, we are inventing complicated rules to give everybody a living, i.e., also the ‘big end of town’ large-scale wind and solar.
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We have invented dynamic operating envelopes, virtual power plants, fast frequency support services, etc., and refuse to see that all of this complication is to support a last century electrical engineering philosophy.
Any volunteers to go and tell the energy minister?
