Updated 17/12/2021
Nearly every Australian has felt the heat lately. It seems like a no-brainer to turn our air-conditioning on to beat the heat, but it’s now looking like it won’t be that simple. South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales have in previous years experienced power shortages, leaving more than 200,000 homes without power as energy demand exceeded supply. It seems like a nightmare, but it does beg the following questions: how will our electricity grid cope with the pressures of increasingly extreme weather? How do we moderate our energy consumption if there’s a chance power supplies can’t cope with our needs?
How can our electricity grid handle a heatwave?
Demand is changing
Power is divided into demand-based categories – base and peak. “Base,” or average, is relatively constant and similar to day-to-day usage. Peak demand is the maximum demand, and may only happen for a few hours on a few days of the year (like mid-afternoon on the 35+ degree days when air-conditioners are in full force).
Electricity demand in Australia is getting ‘peakier’. On average, we use less electricity per day as people and businesses become more efficient. However, more electricity is being used on particularly hot days, such as what we’ve seen in the past few weeks.
In some cities, the peak demand can be double the average demand. This is a real challenge – to avoid blackouts, electricity generating and carrying capacity is required to supply peak demand. That capacity, however, is only used a few days of the year.
Managing base and peak demand
In order to keep our lights on and manage peak demand periods, there are small actions you can take to reduce your power consumption, such as keeping your air-conditioning temperature at 24-25°C, closing the blinds and turning appliances off at the switch.
However, there also needs to be a change from our electricity generators, classified as ‘baseload’ or ‘peakers,’ to cope with our growing population.
Traditional, baseload generators have been the steady, on-all-the-time electricity generators that supply constant electricity. In Australia ‘baseload’ generators have usually been large coal-fired power stations.
Generally, baseload generators are fairly slow in changing the amount of electricity they generate. To match sudden changes in electricity from peak demand, we use ‘peaking’ generators which are more flexible and dynamic in producing electricity. They quickly ramp up or down to match changes in demand and are usually based on hydro or gas generators. However, the electricity that peaking plants (especially gas) produce is more expensive than baseload coal plants. A suggested solution is for cheaper coal-powered plants to supply baseload, and more expensive gas plants (or hydro) to supply the variable peak component of our demand.
A role for renewables
To ensure reliability, we need an electricity supply to closely match demand. Electricity systems around the world are showing this can be achieved without ‘baseload’.
These systems have:
- Flexible generation that can quickly vary its output, like wind and solar.
- ‘Demand management’ techniques that can vary electricity demand to match supply. For example, electricity loads such as hot water or pool pumps can be turned on/off, matching the available supply, and the consumer would never notice any change.
- Energy storage (for example, batteries or pumped hydro) to fill in any short-term gaps between supply and demand.
These concepts, matched with sophisticated load and generation forecasting schemes and careful control, mean that electricity systems can operate reliably with a large amount of renewable energy without needing baseload generation.
More about reliability
Australia needs to be certain of exactly what percentage of renewable energy our power system can cope with while staying reliable. Is it 40 per cent? 60 per cent? 100 per cent?
We don’t yet know how far this can be pushed, or more accurately, what the trade-offs are between cost, reliability and variable renewable energy penetration. It is likely supply could be reliable with 100 per cent renewable energy in the grid, but this might be much more expensive than (for example) only 90 per cent renewable energy.
Our ongoing energy research is focused on solving these challenges, and ensuring a secure, affordable and sustainable energy future for Australia.
Read the original version of this blog here
13th May 2021 at 5:39 pm
People need to learn to or be incentivised to turn their A/C on earlier in the day to pre cool their house when solar power is plentiful rather than waiting until they get home after work when the house is hot but solar output is declining. Store some cold in the house rather than electricity in batteries.
11th February 2019 at 6:17 pm
there is a great deal of ignorance and misinformation out there; some people really believe that somehow, renewable energy causes the grid to crash, they don’t seem or want to know that its the existing coal / gas / hydro supply is – withing itself – inadequate, that renewable energy is in many instances the ONLY thing that is preventing more brown and blackouts
9th February 2019 at 2:30 pm
yes we need large base load batteries and maybe help people with solar get batteries especially in outer areas and farms etc.this could be cheapest way to get power evened out.
greg
8th February 2019 at 3:54 pm
The businesses that “are becoming more efficient” are doing it by going overseas.
As for “Big (fossil) projects that take years to come on stream”, big renewable projects like wind farms are not start in the morning, finish by evening.
We must not use that dirty word “N-c’-l-a-“. Anyone who reads Fairfax press knows the world is moving out of that, particularly Japan which (quote) is “weaning off nuclear”. By a funny method, building new reactors, including a fast breeder, more enrichment and more reprocessing plants. At any time there are over 20 reactors under construction around the world taking 3 to 4 years to complete. That Argentinian reactor that took 33 years was not typical.
Of course we all know that: all nuclear reactors can explode like Chernobyl, Fukushima was a minor tidal matter and a massive nuclear disaster and nuclear reactors are a cover for making atom bombs. 200 bombs can be made from the plutonium in one batch of spent fuel. It must be true, I’ve read it in a book. And the radioactive Hersey Bars.
5th February 2019 at 11:01 am
Nothing new there, the main difference is that the peaks can really only be supplied quickly from either, ‘spinning reserve” such as a large steam or gas turbines under very light load, so it has considerable reserve capacity, and even then this is sometimes cannot respond quickly enough. However a grid size battery system can do this in milli seconds, which has been demonstrated by the tesla battery already installed. The pumped hydro systems cannot respond anywhere near quickly enough, unless they are also “spinning reserve” they cannot
go from pumping to generating in milli seconds. So it sounds like ONLY a grid size battery system can work with the intermitant nature of renewables. On top of this, all the spinning reserve units are big project tasks that take years to come on stream, we don’t have that amount of time, climate change is now URGENT. (IPCC report) The conservative side of politics needs to “get out of the way” and let the progressive get moving. The “wrecking the economy” argument is now redundant, climate change IS the economy wrecking factor now. CSIRO wrote a book about this years ago, Tim Flannery’s book “the weather makers” both should be compulsary reading for our politians.