"...The Australian Energy Market Operator’s preliminary report into the recent South Australian blackout reveals that the primary reason for the total loss of power was a sudden reduction in wind power being fed into the electricity network..."


https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/10/...ylon-downings/





.

From The Institute of Public Affairs - the bastion of the right wing think tanks with no barrow to push.

AEMO are a bunch of dills - certifs has it right, three transmission lines went down - that happened to all lead from wind farms. No generation source would have coped with the sudden, massive impacts to the lines and maintained supply in tolerance.

Page 22 of the AEMO report is also enlightening.

(SRAS are apparently "System Restart Ancillary Services".)

"AEMO has two contracted SRAS services in South Australia. For confidentiality reasons under the contracts, AEMO is unable to identify the providers of these service [sic] but will refer to them as "SRAS provider 1" and "SRAS provider 2."

Of course, both providers failed on the day. :ugh:

I note that the Heywood interconnector was operating at 525 MW prior to the failure. It has a maximum capacity of 600MW. What a great design!

The supply of electricity in S.A. appears to be more about running a market than an essential service. :(

The wind farms had been shut down in any case as the winds were above limits, not that they could have helped with the lines down.

No.
This is a zombie argument. It is not true, yet it keeps being touted as "fact".

It is true that windturbines can (and will) shut down in high winds.
In the case of this event the report clearly shows the windturbines shutdown 1 or 2 seconds _after_ their respective lines went down.

Certifs

Glad someone bothered to read the actual document, to base their opinions on. :)
Yes, _most_ "enlightening" eh. (I didn't mention it in the earlier post as it would have muddied the issue. It still will)
Note that neither of the SRAS providers in SA are renewable energy, in fact one was built to be the black start backup in the old ETSA system. It failed to live up to expectations in the 1980 black start as well, for those interested in history repeating.
Also, if anyone wants to think about this issue a bit more, I'll add one of the (many) things which annoys me about this whole renewables debate;
When you hear a statement that windturbines are "parasitic" and need the system to be operating before they can synchronise. This is true, but it is a twisted truth. None of the big base load stations in SA can start without a connection to a live grid either, so they are just as "parasitic".
And to cap it nicely, the only two generators who said they could do a black start (and took payments on that basis), when came time to do it, couldn't.


Yes. Interesting isn't it.
I recall a discussion I had in 1997 with a senior federal government policy wonk regarding the introduction of the, then new, electricity market. Basically they compared the supply of electricity to the supply of milk, if you can't get enough through your normal supplier, someone would step in and provide the supply you do want. I, and others, pointed out the lead time of a new power station was about a decade.

Certifs

I agree with you certifs. As I said way back in post #7 this will be good pilots telling us how to fix our distrubution problems.It was. We have had all kinds of claims as to how wind farms are the problem etc,which has nothing to do with it. Could have been 1000 chinese pedalling a generator the same would have happened. To put it real simple. Just as a faulty toaster may trip your power circuit in your home it should not take out your lights,stove,hot water,shed etc. Unless you cut corners and say installed your RCD (safety switch) as your main switch which is pretty stupid but happens. Likewise when the trunk main failed at Melrose it should not have taken out Adelaide and the south east.
Problem is we now have a privatised carved up supply network,each with there own protection systems only protecting themselves,not allowing a fault to isolate elsewhere first before shutting down.

Hmmm... Here's me thinkin it were the surge from Victoria that did the black out. How many wind power facility's in S.A. 12, 15, 20. ?


Ten years eh..:hmm: Somebody better tell the Chinese. They open up a new coal fired power station every other week. Obviously they didn't get the memo. ...Or perhaps they just get the advise of competent people..:)

I would reckon, un-edumecaited fellow that i is, that if we asked the Chinese to build us a few coal fired power stations, they'd have them turn key ready in under three years and they'd cost far, far, far less then the unreliable wind generators. Just think, good cheap and reliable power for a clean living result and an attractive business investment state..:)




.

Any statements from SHY.

Binghi you forgot to include 'dirty' in your coal power description. Perhaps this year you can keep warm burning your coal share portfolio and next year follow the UKs example.

TODAY IN THE MACKAY MERCURY
SOLAR panels generated more electricity than coal in the past six months in a historic year for getting energy from the sun in the UK, according to a new analysis. Research by the Carbon Brief website found that solar generated nearly 7,000 gigawatt hours of electricity between April and September, about 10 per cent more than the 6,300GwH produced by coal during the same period.
The figures represent a dramatic turnaround in the UK's electricity supplies.
, solar is one of the cheapest forms of power.

If they can produce cheap solar power in cold cloudy UK it should be a piece of cake over here.:ok:

certifs, from todays reports it seems the zombie argument might, in fact, be fact. It is being reported that the software control systems for the wind farms had been set at too conservative a level in their ability to handle faults. They don't specify the faults which occurred, making mention only of lightning strikes, so wind as I mentioned may, or may not, have have been one of the faults. The interconnector dropped out due to its inability to handle the load after the wind farm dropped out. The wind farm has now had control systems set to a more realistic level of fault toleration, and operator is now wondering about about liability claims as a result of its too conservative an approach with regard to faults. The towers apparently came down after the wind farm isolation.

A couple of days ago... picking a few weeds out of a veggie garden, it occurred to me just how 'dirty' and muddy it all were to get them filthy veggies to the table. Though not to worry, thanks to them 'dirty' coal fired power stations i could go and wash the veggies under a tap and then cook em up and put em on a plate with the roast lamb... While we is with roast lamb, 'dirty' things sheep, dirt and crap all over them all the time and they eat straight off the 'dirty' ground. Though not to worry, by the time that sheep gets chopped up and is on the shelf at Coles it's all clean thanks again to 'dirty' coal.
Good thing dirt. That 'Dirty' earth gives me them veggies and that roast lamb and that 'dirty' earth gives me good cheap power so i can live the clean life..:)

Try again rutan around..:hmm:




.

Good luck in washing the PM10 and PM2.5 particles out of your lungs Binghi. Suck on a VW diesel exhaust for extra effect.

Binghi it must be getting late or you're worn out harvesting and cleaning all those dirty vegetables. I really expected a better response. The thing is every bit of dirt you referred to effected no one other than yourself and whilst probably against your principles you most likely recycled the dirt and unwanted green waste back into your garden.

Burning fossil fuel is a very different matter as you can't keep it in your own back yard.

I also wash vegetables and cook lamb all done with solar power , rainwater tanks and an Onga electric pump.

Your no comment re the UK making more power from solar than from coal was very loud.

I've mentioned this before and I'll mention it again.

Back in 2004 a work colleague suggested they should build a solar panel factory on wheels that operates in the desert and all it does all its life is built and maintain a massive grid of a solar array measured in the hundreds of square kilometres in size.

South Australia would have been an ideal place for such a thing - plenty of silica about.

The SA Government zombies are at it again: "I order you to provide me with stable power!! (thru that brown-coal fired interconnector).

Flow restrictions on SA, Victoria interconnector revoked, AEMO responds to emergency order - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

I assume you are talking about the article in the Australian. More to say on that further on.

No. It really, really wasnt.
There are things which are plausible and things which aren't.
There are a number of systems on a windturbine that you might loosely call protection. Some for mechanical reasons (eg overspeed, oil temperature etc) and some for electrical problems (eg over current, phase unbalance, earth fault etc). The only fact we know is from the AEMO report which shows that the generators stopped working _after_ the lines stopped working.
For it to be a wind/speed related shut down it must be argued that the turbines shut down (remember there are 10's of them, each individually speed monitored) all coincidentally at the same time, coincidentally a second or two after the lines failed (in whatever way they failed). And that happened twice. At different geographic locations.
OR we could assume it was an electrical protection operation in response to the line fault (ultimately by one or two circuit breakers disconnecting the whole farm at once from the grid). In which case, effect does follow cause, the outcome is what could be expected. And because the are a number of different ways, with different settings, that the electrical protection could operate, that would explain the "we don't know the reason" that is being touted around in the media.

If this is based on the Australian article (otherwise what article was it from?) I will note a couple of things. Their un-named "industry expert" is the one who is talking about liability. I doubt any of the windfarm participants really care too much, there will be some juggling of blame and maybe someone will pay something. This is just cost of doing business. Refer to gerry111's comments on the SRAS. Those people _do_ have something to worry about. Weirdly, no one want to talk about paying millions (yes $50 million over the last few years for all of the NEM, I believe) for a service which wasn't provided.
Anyway, the expert seems to be talking about ride through ability that most power stations should have (I am not sure all power stations do in fact have these performance standards because some older stations had some of the standards waived, at least early on in the transition to the market, but all the new wind farms would/should). There was an interesting report done after a fail to ride through by the now extinct Northern Power Station in 2005. They got fined, some 100's thousands dollars from memory. You should be able to find it on AEMO website.
Anyway back to the Australians expert. He talks about riding through 50 faults in 2 minutes. I am unfamiliar with what part of the National Electricity Code he got that from. There are a number of ride through parameters (how low the voltage can go, for how long etc) in the code. The relevant ride through for windfarms with 100% voltage loss is 430 milliseconds. This seems to line up fairly well with factual data from the AEMO report.
You'll also note from the last couple of paragraphs tucked away at the end of the Australian article, both the AGL chief and an un-named spokesman have fairly carefully worded their responses to indicate they have "read the report" ie they aint sayin' what they have done (if anything) and are pointing the finger at the grid protection settings (which was my first suspicion last week, though I don't hold that view as strongly now, in view of the extent of damage to the transmission system).


Yes, some of them did. Do you think that mean that the ones that came down before the windfarms tripped had no effect?


Certifs

And I'll just add...
 

... when ever an aviation incident appears in the media, on this website there is usually a lot of bitchin' and moanin' and laughing about how inaccurate they are. They cant tell a Cessna from a Jabiru.
And when that same media reports on non aviation topics, we assume they are the fount of all knowledge??

:ugh:

certifs

This is a wonderful thread, surely the thread of the year. I honestly didn;t know it was so complicated. So, some questions from a lay person.

It seems that wind turbines output frequency varies according to the rpm. How do they get a stable 50 Hz output with a constantly varying rpm? Some sort of frequency converter?

Why do power stations require an input voltage to start generating power.

Why do power stations take so long to spool up, if they had steam pressure, wouldn't the generators spool up quite quickly? Do they reduce the steam generation in periods of low demand.

During periods of increasing demand from consumers, does this extra load cause the generator rpm to decay, reducing the frequency, if so why would damage occur if the frequency output of the generators falls below 47 Hz.

How does the system cope with instant demand increases when hundreds of thousands of people put the kettle on at the same time during a commercial break on a popular TV show. I think they call it the East-Enders effect. A TV show in the UK that was massively popular and they could predict the spikes in electricity demand from the Ad breaks.

Lastly, why do we have backup services that are secret (provider 1 and provider 2). This, to my simple mind is unacceptable.

I hope the questions don't sound too dumb, just trying to get my head around it all.

And how long does it take for a wind turbine to repay the energy that went into making the materials that went into it, its fabrication, transport to site, erection and maintenance?

What is considered a normal life for one of these things?

I could ask how many birds and bats one will kill in its lifetime but that may hit a nerve with some.

Certifs, I take your point about the media. Perhaps the truth will out in the end? Or, perhaps not, if prominent heads are on the chopping block.

I gave the article some credibility because he is highly regarded as being a "real" investigative journalist.

I suggest you google large wind turbines. There are plenty of sites to tell you how they work and life span etc. I think it said 25yrs. Interestingly Australia is about 17th in the world in numbers in use.

Nomorecatering, I was hoping someone else would pad up and answer your questions but I will have a crack at it for you.
Firstly let me tell you I have never worked in a power station but have worked with co generators in Hospitals and the like that work in unison with the grid. I will make this as simple as I can as I have no intension of writing a 100 page thesis or would anyone want to read it.
Imagine you had 2 petrol engines. 1 a v8 running at say 1200rpm and 1 a 4cyl doing 2300rpm but both producing the same hp at those revs. Now say through some clutch mechanism you suddenly joined them together as one. The result would be catastrophic at the very least,with broken crankshafts and bent con rods as a minimum. Now hold that thought. While joining 2 generator outputs together is totally different the end result is similar. For two or more generator supplies to run in unison 4 things have to match up. Voltage magnitude, Phase sequence, Frequency and Phase angle.
Large generators produce 3phase power. In Australia we call these, red phase,white phase and blue phase. All are 120 electrical degrees apart (phase angle). To see this on a scope it looks something like the ABC logo only 3 of them all intermingled but rotating 120deg apart.
The best way to describe how this works is look at the basic 3phase motor.
Around the stator of the motor are sets of winding in groups connected to each phase. Unlike a single phase motor where the current comes in on the active runs around the winding and then out the neutral (return) a 3phase motor has 3 actives but at any given time 1 of those actives is acting as the return.(without a return you would have no flow so no motion)In Australia this changes 50 times/second and is what we call the frequency and measured in Hertz. The rotation direction of that motor is determined by the sequence of each phase supplying the motor and return. eg RWB sequence might result in a clockwise direction. By simply swapping 2 phases at the motor to produce say RBW sequence will cause the motor to rotate counter clockwise.
Now can you imagine the result if we put 2 supplies together that were in opposite sequence or different frequencies ,voltages etc? we are back to our petrol engine senario.Motors would stall,reverse (or try to)burn out, not to mention what it would do to appliances with electronics and also destoy the generators supplying it all. Fortunately this cant happen as there are numerous protection devises installed at different points in the network to monitor and switch off if some event outside the set parameters happen. I use it only as a simple explanation as to why it take such a long time to get it all up and running again once the grid goes off line.
Will continue as time permits with your other questions

Cont...
Why do power stations require input power to start generating?
Some can but most can't for variety of reasons. If the place is dead totally there is no power to start anything with,such as open motorized gas valves,run cooling pumps, run or monitor protection devises ,meters etc. excitate the generator field windings it just sits there as one big block of useless concrete and steel.

Why do they take so long to spool up?
They don't really, Torrens Island has I believe 6 generation sets. They would start or stop them as the load demands. While there is some lead in time required to say get them running they can see demand rising on their monitoring load meters etc and so should be ahead of the game for normal increases. I include your eastender effect scenario in this.

During periods of increased demand does this extra load cause the generator rpm to decay? No because it isn't allowed to. If the load became so great and all sets were running at maximum, load shedding would start occuring. Usually by turning off some suburbs for 1 hour each in rotation which has happened before in Adelaide. If load shedding was not carried out the protection devises would start disconnecting as happened with the interconnector.The rest of your question is answered in part 1
Why are the back up service providers secret?
I have no idea either and it is a disgrace!
Hope I have given you some worthwhile info be it in very simple terms.

Nomorecatering, to answer your question re-individual wind turbines. They are individual alternators turning out AC. This output is rectified to DC and transmitted to the farm substation. In the substation, the load is sensed, from here the power is converted from DC to synchronous AC at the one point for transmission into the grid. It is at this point where the "Software Issue" occurred.

Two lines were subsequently found to be ok and were returned to service without need of repair.

Looks the the system is heading east.

Melbourne to be blown of the map tommorow. 120kh winds.

Overheard on a talk-back Radio show on Friday morning; Apparently there is an Electrical retail business '..in Adelaide's north...' which specialises in 240V gen sets.

As of around 11.30 am Friday morning, their entire stock on hand had sold out and they have over 300 units on back order!:ooh:

Here in the Riverland area of SA, the local Honda Dealer has sold 3 Gen Sets (around the 3kva size)in the last four days! And has had several enquiries re larger sets.

As for me; I am making the appropriate enquiries.

Like lots of this discussion Ozbusdrivers explanation is sort of, a bit right. There are actually a few different types of wind turbine configurations (search on types 1, 2, 3 etc) I dont know a lot about them as I only do work marginally related to any types of power generation these days. However, my understanding is that the earlier (?) types 1 and 2 were basically AC generators driven more or less straight from the blades (pitch control or blade shape controlling energy transfer from the blades to the alternator. Type 2 uses a wound rotor so can also have some electrical control. Later types 3, 4 (and 5?) do use various sorts of AC/DC conversion sort of like how Ozbusdriver describes. All the turbines types individually produce AC outputs (not DC) which is usually fed to a common AC bus for the farm as a whole. This bus is what is connected to the grid and to the grid the whole collection of turbines appears as one generator.
You will see comments that wind farms can't provide support to the grid (ie frequency and voltage support). This is certainly true of type 1 and 2, but the other types can (I think type 4 can actually be used as a stand alone generator, without being part of a wind farm bus).
I believe SA farms are mostly type 2 with some type 3. I would expect that future wind farms will only be allowed if they are the higher type numbers.
Which will then make some peoples heads explode as it seems one possible solution to make the SA system "more secure" is to build ... more wind farms!
(Of a suitable type, see, nothing is simple)

My simple explanation. There are two reasons. One being to run auxiliary plant, the second being to synchronise the generator to the "system". Mostlytossas posts are a good basic analogy for starters. He and I might quibble about better ones, but they are good to start with (I did work in a power station for a good few years).

In simple terms it takes a long time to heat up a lot of water to make steam. A big boiler with big output will take longer. There may also be limits of rate of heating of eg. turbines if they are not up to operating temperatures. From dead cold, some power stations may take _days_ to get to full load.
Yes, steam generation is reduced at times of lower load. As a basic relationship, power out exactly equals steam in and power out is exactly needed to match the load on the system.

If the boiler and turbine is up to temperature and operating at some level, yes, it is possible to dynamically extract a bit more steam out (like a big compressor receiver) to generate a bit more power in the very short term. This is how the Eastenders problem is overcome (and everyones kettles on all at once is still quite small compared to the overall system). Problem is, if you drop the pressure too much, wet steam can get into the turbine blading, which will destroy them in short order and the multi ton alternator with rotor spinning at 3000 RPM will leave the floor shortly after that.:ooh:
The 47Hz thing is not the problem as such (although there are problems because of it) Rather it is an indicator that other bad things are about to happen(like alternators leaving the floor). In a normally functioning system the turbines wont (cant) slow down as they cant change speeds due to being synchronised. If they have, then something is bad wrong with the whole system.
Note that .
As an aside the NEM pays power stations to be able to quickly pick up this transient load. These are some of the ancillary services that generators can bid and contract for in the electrical market (like the SRAS mentioned by gerry111 earlier). It isn't just about MegaWatts. The boiler of the power station in Port Augusta is (was?) a "once through" design (Benson boiler) so actually was worse than normal for being able to cope with rapid load changes consequently they couldn't provide this support and so couldn't get money in this part of the market.



I know who they are. Electricity industry participants would probably be able to easily find out who they are if they dont know already. I suspect it is a "commercial in confidence" contractual thing.


No (good faith) questions are dumb. Some answers may be. :)

Certifs

.....Meanwhile, in the time this thread has been running, China has opened up another new coal fired power station. In less then two weeks China will open up another new coal fired power station, and a couple more weeks after that another, and so on...


It were interesting looking through the auction catalogue for the equipment of the recently closed South Australian power plant. A lot of the equipment had Made in Australia on it. ...And down the hole we go thanks to idiotic green hysteria..:hmm:




.

Meanwhile in the real world China is closing old power stations, banning new ones and closing down mines.

From Wikipedia:

In early 2016 the building of new coal capacity continued at a significant pace with 406 GW proposed.[8] However, the central government issued directions in April 2016 curbing construction of new coal fired plants throughout the country.[9] This is in line with a moratorium issued by the National Energy Agency in 2015 banning new coal mines in China for a period of three years and closure of thousands of small coal mines.[10]

Can you explain what you men by this? What exactly is hysterical? How,specifically, are the Greens responsible for us going down the hole? They have never been in government so I don't really understand how they can be responsible for anything?

I look forward to a detailed explanation of your argument :ok:

"From Wikipedia" :rolleyes: Your new to this aren't yer certifs..:hmm:

"China is closing old power stations" Considering China has a large number of old power plants it is no surprise that they is closing old power plants. Its like a car, it gets old and uneconomic to repair and gets traded in on the shiny new one with three times the horse power and full of bright new computer screens..:)

"banning new ones and closing down mining" certifs, you do understand that China is a command economy. All sectors of the Chinese economy 'suffer' constraints from time to time as the government 'adjusts' things. Power stations and coal mining is no different. I see they want more thermal coal mining now to act as a price 'adjustment'... amongst other things... NDRC loosens coal production restrictions - Global Times.

certifs, So, if as yer say it takes ten years to get things done in the coal station building game do that mean it will be ten years before they slow down the 'two a month' new station opening regime ? ...:)

certifs, the Chinese are fairly astute. Something tells me that their concerns of a slowing world economy, i.e., a slow down of world demand for Chinese goods, is likely the reason for their looking to slow the break-neck domestic development of the manufacturing sectors power supplies rather then the thinking of those afflicted with climate hysteria wishing it were something else..:hmm:





.

Certifs, that's how they run in Tassie. Methinks the alternators are multiphase...but they definitely feed into the substation as DC...can you imagine phasing more than 10 individual alternators spinning in marginally different wind conditions? ...my info is second hand, the brother does the contract work for comms for TasHydro.

That comment re 47hz...imagine turbine and alternator weigh in about 800tonne of inertia spinning at 3000 rpm...imagine that slows..or wants to slow by 6%. That alternator becomes a motor and the grid wants to drive it back to 50hz...800t spinning and the grid wants to drive it? ...but it only slowed by 180rpm? It may as well be 1800rpm out!

Re Eastenders, that excess load is normally taken up by hydro. Quick start...very much unlike random wind.

Seriously, if there was no interconnector and no wind generation, SA would have only suffered local load shedding! The great social experiment is a bust!

The climate wars....King Canute had the right idea.

Sentient beings living in the intertidal zone with a life span of six hours and no history would come up with a similar theory about weather and statistics.

Latest update

https://www.aemo.com.au/Media-Centre...49F38A36D.ashx

Seems the cause of failure lies in20MW was off line due to high winds >90kph. Thermal power remained connected unit the interconnector blew.

Still not known at what point the towers collapsed. Seems the "Australian" might not be so far off the mark after all certifs

Megan, unfortunately what the AEMO media release says contradicts what the report actually says.

The 'failure' of the wind turbines to 'ride through' faults has nothing to do with the fact that they were wind turbines - the issue is that their protection settings were set to trip after a set number of ride through events. In most cases, this setting was 2 and so event 3 tripped them out. Why was it set to 2? Most likely the manufacturers settings and nobody ever asked them to be set differently (makes intuitive sense - 3 phase failures likely = transmission line failure). A massive failure of the regulator and operator (AEMO) to understand how their network worked and what would happen if a total transmission line failure occurred.

So, yes, the tripping of all the wind farms was an issue but there could just have easily been gas generators supplying via those protection settings and the same result would have occurred. Of course there is no guarantee that if the setting had been higher that the event wouldn't have caused more ride through events and the settings tripped anyway - although AEMO have even suggested that wind farms should just keep on trying to ride through events - and bad luck if these events are destroying your turbines......

AEMO also have to answer as to why, with such a storm bearing down on them, did they have the Heywood inter-connector running at such high capacity and all the spare gas generation shut down? The answer appears to be price - it was cheaper to get power from Vic than start up more local gas generation (wind was already doing it's bit and operating in the 90km/h winds). So when the transmission lines all bent over (and it's still not clear if it was this that actually tripped out heywood or the loss of the wind farms - it was the frequency not the voltage that went haywire first) then there was no capacity in the network to step up supply to try and cope with the problems - thus Heywood went down and dark she went. A market operator paying attention to security of supply and not just price would have fired up the rest of the gas plants, scaled back Heywood and when it all turned to poo might have been able to recover. But it didn't - and surprisingly doesn't mention this in the report....?

Finally, the state having gone black, the wind turbines were still there and ready to generate (albeit possibly not for long as the wind speed was increasing) but with the state gone black, ALL of the contracted black start operators (those paid large sums of money by AMEO to be ready for this situation) failed to do so. Wind turbines are not paid to be black start capable (I suspect they may not be capable of doing so) and so they couldn't come back on line until AEMO managed to organise power back from Heywood gradually across the state to the turbines and allow them to sync and start supplying. Funnily enough, AEMO won't say who their contracted black start providers are......

So whatever AEMO are saying, an alternate story might be:
1. It's not clear what caused the massive frequency variation - was it the farms going off line or the towers going down (i bet it was the towers) that took out Heywood
2. The wind farms shut down as they were designed to but in a way AEMO hadn't considered due to their failure to understand the network
3. The loss of the transmission lines/wind farms guaranteed a dark state because of the %load Heywood was running at and the lack of contingency planning by AEMO who were too busy worrying about the price of bringing on (expensive) gas alternatives
4. Total failure by the operators contracted by AEMO to provide black start capacity

All of which doomed the state to blackout as soon as transmission lines started to bite the dust and ensured that getting the power back on was a long and complicated process. The role of windfarms/renewables was incidental but nice and easy for AEMO to blame when the alternative is to investigate and admit to your own failures.

Waffle; verb (talk)

Meanwhile...
"...China is investing massively in fossil fuel energy – not just at home but across the world, such as this project in the former Yugoslavia...": Shock: 'Green' China Investing Massively in Fossil Fuel Power




.

Yes, they are a command economy, that's why they can do that. You did understand that the article is talking about reducing the _initial_ restrictions, it wasn't about returning to the previous levels of coal production.

Meanwhile, the Chinese thermal coal consumption fell about 3% in 2014 and then again in 2015 (no data yet for 2016) while their economy continued to grow at more than 6%. Binghi, the word you need to edumacate yourself on is decoupling.

No, of course I don't. Its much easier to stop building than to start. That's why about 150 coal power station projects have been cancelled or put on hold in the US in the last 10 years. But when you make silly strawman comments such as these I wonder how much you do understand. The "building" of a power station doesn't begin when someone turns up to clear the site, that is quite late in the process.

For those interested, the process in Australia and other similar western economies (ie non command economies) goes like this:

Finance
A prospective builder has to think that the idea of building a new power station is a good one. They then have to do some basic market research to confirm they aren't mistaken, then they have to convince some financer that its a good idea and get them to promise to stump up a big wad of money when needed. You'll need a good part of a year to do this.

Environmental approvals
Since no one can plonk this stuff down any old place, there's a whole lot of federal, state and local government approvals to get done. This costs money and takes time. Never less than a couple of years. I notice the Carmichael coal mine is in its sixth year of this process and still not finished.

Ordering
No one in the world (even the Chinese) keeps major power station components on the shelf on spec in case someone wants to buy them. You will have at least 2 years lead time for major parts like turbines and step up transformers. If the boiler is coal its design will need to be optimised to burn that particular grade, so lead times might even be a bit longer for that.

Detail design
Once you know your major parts, from all the different suppliers, then all the bits, down to the simplest valve, pipe and motor must be designed to work together. 100s of thousands of hours of design work here. Probably a year or two in design work.

Now some of these things can overlap a bit, but if you can get all of that done in less than 5 years you will be lucky.

And then you can start clearing the site. The actual build time 2-3 years. Add on 6 months to a year for every additional unit in your power station because you need to stagger the work force you have you wont have enough skilled worked to build two, three or four unit simultaneously.

So, a single unit power station with a bit of luck about 7 years. Something with more than one unit 8+ years. Issues with approvals or long lead time equipment not being ready can blow this out past 10 years easily.


Australia was locked into this situation by the creation of the national electricity market nearly twenty years ago, long before renewables were even a remote thought.
A thermal power station is enormously expensive with no return on investment for the best part of a decade. And you can howl at the moon as much as you like but that is why no private entity will ever build another meaningful coal station in Australia and they will be few and far between in the rest of the western world. Gas fuelled boilers (not combined cycle) will follow the same pattern in years to come.

Certifs