Shades of Baldrick. In a nutshell they propose arm waving swaths of renewable energy zones REZ’s. In Vic and NSW I counted 11 new hydro generation sites – do these require dams? Mad.
Even turning to geothermal – which has seen hundreds millions wasted $’s.
Imagine the NIMBY’s that will be stirred up by these dam proposals – stacks of wind farms near Sydney. Large map.
Mass sackings would help and appoint some Australian electrical engineers.
The Integrated System Plan Consultation pdf has some other interesting charts to be checked later.
Looks as though the East’s electricity system has caught the dreaded Pox.
I consider our own electricity supply in Broome as brilliant, every town should have one. From our original diesel generators with smoke and noise, several years ago, clean and quiet gas was installed. Despite that the LNG is still trucked 700km from the Pilbara, one day we may have a pipeline if the Green Blob gets out of the way and lets fracking continue in the Canning Basin where several completed wells are left waiting for an artery to bring them to life.
.
Maybe the hydro sites are there so that the renewables can be used to pump water up into the dam again when there is little demand for their generation.
If this is the case, there is a far better way to do it.
wattsupwiththat.com/2017/08/23/rail-energy-storage-harnesses-the-power-of-gravity-all-the-livelong-day/
This is actually not quite so silly, however it remains to be seen how this costs out against frakking.
Cheers
Roger
www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
The discussion paper strikes me as the best piece of technobabble I’ve seen in years. It points towards an enormous bureaucracy, the NEM tail wagging the Oz dog!
The cost of building and maintaining all of the transmission lines and systems for this massively distributed network would be mind-boggling. Not to mention the fragility and time to repair them when storms inevitably do what storms do.
The oft overlooked benefit of having a few large power stations is that, if a storm knocks out a section of the transmission network, it’s a relatively quick and easy repair. Also, with few transmission towers, you can afford to build them more robustly.