This week the Bureau of Meteorology officially declared an El Nino Event so it is looking like it could be a hot and dry summer. That means this could be the first summer test of our creaking electricity system since the Liddell coal fired power station shut.
The test does not look like it will go well. Late last month the nation’s energy regulator put out a report on the state of our electricity system. It makes for sobering reading.
If the coming summer turns out to be an event we only get once every 10 years, then there is a 72 per cent chance that Victoria will experience blackouts. There is more than a one in three chance that Victoria will experience a very large blackout.
Other states do not fare much better. There is almost a 50 per cent chance of blackouts in New South Wales and South Australia. Queensland has a one in five chance of blackouts.
These are unacceptable risks to run in a developed country. Large parts of our manufacturing sector cannot cope long term with such a high risk of power outages. If the aluminium smelter in Gladstone loses power for more than three hours, its pots will freeze up and it may never reopen.
The reason we are in this mess is because we have closed down lots of power plants that can stay on all the time (coal and gas plants) and have tried to replace them with power plants that only work some of the time (solar and wind). Over the past decade more than 5 gigawatts of reliable power has been shut down and it has been replaced with just 1 gigawatt of other sources of reliable power.
This 4 gigawatt gap explains why there is such a large risk of the lights going off this summer.
But worse is on its way. Over the next decade more than double this amount of reliable power is set to shut down. While the regulator predicts that 9 gigawatts of storage projects are on the way, these are not like for like replacements of a coal fired power station. For example, most batteries can only run for a few hours but there can sometimes be days without much sun or wind.
And, some of these projects are delayed and running way over budget. No one could guarantee when Snowy 2.0 will be complete for example.
Given the high risk of blackouts now is not the time to be restricting our electricity supply options.
Australia continues to ban nuclear energy despite many other countries turning back towards it. Finland just opened Europe’s first nuclear power station for 15 years and its power prices have plummeted since.
We have an in-principle ban on coal fired power even though we continue to export large amounts of coal to other countries like China and India that keep building coal fired power stations.
Given the urgency of the need we should immediately upgrade our existing coal fired power fleet so they can run harder for longer.
But even these changes won’t help us this summer. We probably only have two options left: buy diesel generators and pray for the weather forecasts to be wrong!
The irony is that we are only investing in solar and wind energy because we are worried about climate change making the weather more extreme. Which raises the question that if we are worried about the weather why are we investing in electricity sources that rely completely on the weather?
