Solar Power – The Saltbush Club

The SunCable Gambit

By John McRobert

Refreshing to read Nick Cater’s exposé of the SunCable gambit ‘Sun sets on renewables superpower fantasy’ (The Australian, 26/8/2024). The ‘green tick’ given to the project had the usual weasel-word caveats of strict conditions to completely avoid important species such as the greater bilby and critical habitat. But clearing and cladding with imported glass panels 12,000-hectares of land, would be more devastating to native wildlife and ecosystems than a wildfire, and with far greater long-term damage inflicted on the landscape and our economy.

One might ask what has this fanciful project already cost the Australian taxpayer in subsidies and so-called ‘carbon credits’?

A Pilot Plant for Net Zero

By Viv Forbes

Both solar and wind energy have fatal flaws – solar stops when the sun goes down or if a cloud blocks the sun; wind fails if the wind is too strong or too weak. But every day we hear of some fantastic and expensive plan to keep the lights on when these unreliable energy twins stop work.

The latest thought bubble from Mr Bowen (the Australian Minister for Generating Blackouts) is for him to be able to drain the energy from electric car batteries to back up a failing grid. He suggests that batteries could also power the house or sell energy into the grid. (They are already scheming on how to use smart technology to prevent homeowners from charging their own batteries when flicker power is fading.)

Battery Baloney, Hydrogen Hype and Green Fairy Tales

By Viv Forbes

How low Australia has fallen – our once-great BHP now has a “Vice President for Climate”, the number of Australian students choosing physics at high school is collapsing, and our government opposes nuclear energy while pretending we can build and operate nuclear submarines.

Our Green politicians want: “No Coal, No Gas, No Nuclear” while Our ABC, Our CSIRO and Our Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) are telling us that wind and solar energy plus a bit of standby gas, plus heaps of batteries and new power lines can power our homes, industries AND the mass electrification of our vehicle fleet. This sounds like Australia’s very own great leap backwards?

There are two troublesome Green Energy Unions – the Solar Workers down tools every night and cloudy day, and the Turbine Crews stop work if winds are too weak or too strong. And wind droughts can last for days. The reliable Coal and Gas Crews spend sunny days playing cards, but are expected to keep their turbines revving up and down to keep stable power in the lines.

Grand Land Grab: Wind & Solar ‘Transition’ Needs 70% of Australia’s Prime Farmland

Australia’s prime agricultural land is being carpeted with endless seas of solar panels and thousands of these things are being speared everywhere the panels can’t go.

Dilute and diffuse, wind and solar require a staggering amount of space, and way more than their occasional, weather (and/or sunshine) dependent power generation can ever hope to justify.

Taking up vast tracts of farmland with solar panels means that that land produces nothing else. While the solar panels are lucky to produce power for 5-6 hours every day (ie 20-25% of the time).

Spearing hundreds of 300 tonne, 280m high turbines into productive farmland brings its own range of special ‘challenges’ for primary producers.

Continue reading: https://stopthesethings.com/2024/03/16/grand-land-grab-wind-solar-transition-needs-70-of-australias-prime-farmland/

Brilliant Test

The Great Wind and Solar Land Grab

By Steve Goreham

US Fish and Wildlife Service. Public Domain

Which is more environmentally friendly — an energy source that uses one unit of land to produce one unit of electricity, or a source that uses 100 units of land to produce one unit of electricity?

The answer should be obvious.

Nevertheless, “green” energy advocates call for a huge expansion of wind, solar and other renewables that use vast amounts of land to replace traditional power plants that use comparatively small amounts of land.

Vaclav Smil, professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba in Canada, extensively analyzed the power density of alternative sources used to generate electricity. He defined power density as the average flow of electricity generated per square meter of horizontal surface (land or sea area).

Continue reading: https://www.westernjournal.com/op-ed-one-simple-energy-question-devastates-net-zero-pipe-dreams/

Big solar goes Big Bust: Largest solar plant in the world dies before it can be built

From Jo Nova. Jan 11, 2023

Today the massive Sun Cable project collapsed into voluntary administration four years after promising to build the world’s largest solar power plant in the Northern Territory. Sun Cable was a $35 billion project supposedly to collect those sacred green electrons on a 12,000 hectare “farm” in Australia (120 square kilometers) and send them to Singapore via an 800 km land cable and then a 4,200km undersea cable. It was theoretically going to be nine times bigger than the largest solar plant in the world, and use a cable 6 times longer than the longest one ever built.

Full article: https://joannenova.com.au/2023/01/big-solar-goes-big-bust-largest-solar-plant-in-the-world-dies-before-it-can-be-built/

NOTHING WORKS – Lamentations of a home owner using solar power

By James Kunstler

The solar electric I installed on the house nine years ago is down. It’s supposed to feed that monster called the grid. Since April, I noticed that the electric bill is creeping up way beyond the usual seventeen bucks that the electric company charges home solar producers for the privilege of feeding their system — which, let’s face it, has a downside for them because the intermittency of so-called alt-energy disorders their operations.

It’s counter-intuitive. Many people, I’m sure, assume that the more solar units feeding the grid, the better. Strangely, not so. Electric companies work much better when the production and flow of current is absolutely predictable and under their control — like, when they decide to fire up the natgas on generator number three or tune down the hydro turbines. It’s much harder to run the system with little dribs and drabs of electricity trickling in from hither and yon. But alt-energy is good PR for the government, so they do whatever they can to promote or even compel its use.

Read the original article: https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/its-not-working/

Solar power plus Batteries – Will it work?

Richard Blayden discusses solar power intermittency and the cost of batteries to store power (the image and link refer to the full article, PDF 471 kB):

https://saltbushclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/solar-power-battery-storage.pdf

Intermittent Energy – Wind and Solar

By Richard Blayden

Although much lauded as the future “clean” power generation, wind and solar present serious problems in their unavoidable variation in performance on every time scale.

The extent of that constant variation is hidden neatly (and deeper and deeper) as time-series data are summated into weekly/monthly/annual power generation reports.

Hidden or not, that variation is a serious problem and a major source of inflated costs as more and more “renewables” are added to the grid.

The reality of that variation is glaringly obvious in the base data recorded in the NEM web-site. That source provides a detailed list of every power generation facility connected to the grid together with maps showing precise location and hour by hour performance details over the last few operating days for each and every facility.

The data for solar, wind and battery power is summarised in the link below (click the image to read the full PDF document) and appears to show admirably, the weakness of constant and largely unpredictable variability in both solar and wind power generation across all locations within Australia.

Richard Blayden – Founding Member of the Saltbush Club, Engineer, BSc Hons – Engineering/Thermodynamics (UK) and avid blogger in on-line climate discussion forums.