CHATTER
9 Jan 25
At the risk of seeming an even bigger fool than usual I’ve tried to delve into the outlook for hyper scale data centres and some cost metrics. It’s a great field but as usual many traps for space cadets. Key point is that most of the cost is in the IT equipment and that has a high degree of technological obsolescence. Equally interesting is that the price of processing a token has fallen by, wait for it, 1000% over two years.
7 Jan 25
Doug Lewin does a great job covering the Texas electricity scene. We had him on the podcast last year. His latest update notes over 73 GW of demand forecast tomorrow. Doug notes that every time it gets really cold gas production in the Permian Basin falls significantly and this can impact gas supply to speakers. However TX now can produce, even in Winter, over 21 GW of peak solar! And as Doug points out TX resilience has greatly been increased by now having 10 GW of batteries up from 5 GW a year ago and no doubt more on the way.
3 January 25
Back in 2000 I wasn’t so sure I’d get to 2025 and in some ways I nearly didn’t. Now that I’m here I’ve actually taken out a sub to semi analysis so I can do a better job of understanding data centre development and energy. It’s more than just energy though, development of AI and its infrastructure is just a great analysis topic. Look for more to follow once I get some more reading under the hood.
30 Dec
A couple of things to catch the eye from the weekly update of data from NEM Review.
Coal’s market share in the last seven days is under 50% across the NEM and the total renewable share at 47%. I don’t put too much store by this demand is low over Christmas and solar output is high, but still the trend remains fairly clear. Even in Victoria coal was at just 51%. And if you look at the numbers carefully the potential for wind to pick up share in NSW and QLD is very clear
Supply makeup. Source:NEM Review There are three large wind farms commissioning at the moment:
- Golden Plains East (756 MW) in Victoria;
- Macintyre Wind Farm (923 MW) in Queensland and;
- Clark Creek Wind Farm (450 MW ) in Queensland.
Total capacity is thus a touch over 2.1 GW. The maximum daily output of each project over the past 21 days is shown below. You can see that Macintyre after hitting 70 MW appears to have shut down for the festive season.
Although these wind farms won’t hit 100% of nominal capacity we never the less can confidently look forward to a significant uplift in wind output in QLD and VIC in 2025 and beyond. Each of these projects has a sister project and in the case of Golden Plains West that is already in construction. 2000 MW with say a 38% average capacity factor represents around 6.5 TWh pretty much the same output as the Vales Point B station in NSW over the past 12 months. Equally if there is no demand growth that should go close to pushing VRE production in Spring and Summer beyond coal. Not for a full year though. That still needs more.
Commisioning wind farms. Source:NEM Review
29 Dec
English translation of Huadian’s (Large IPP in China) interim
For some years I have been interested to compare the price of electricity in China with the LCOE of VRE in Australia. That’s because I believe a wind and solar powered aluminium smelter in Australia can be competitive with an unsubsidised smelter in China that uses electricity supplied by one of the big IPPs (independent power producers).
When you think about it China imports coal for Australia, that has to be expensive, same as in Japan.
The evidence for this has always been there. I hadn’t looked for a while but here is a paragraph or two from the interim report of Huadian”
“During the Period, the power generated by the Group amounted to approximately 101.30 million MWh, representing a decrease of approximately 5.85% over the corresponding period in 2023; the on-grid power sold amounted to approximately 94.71 million MWh, representing a decrease of approximately 5.97% over the corresponding period in 2023. The average utilisation hours of the generating units were 1,741 hours, representing a year-on-year decrease of 192 hours, among which the average utilisation hours of coal-fired generating units were 1,926 hours, representing a year-on-year decrease of 225 hours, and the coal consumption for power supply was 285.28g/KWh, which was remarkably better than the national average. The on-grid tariff was RMB509.94/MWh, representing a decrease of approximately 3.25% compared with the same period of the previous year. The unit price of standard coal for furnace was RMB970.88/ton, representing a decrease of 11.16% over the corresponding period in 2023.”
Note: 1 the less than 50% capacity utilisation of coa generationl; 2 On grid price RMB 510/MWh = AUD $112/MWh not so cheap; 3 Standard coal (29 GJ/t) price of RMB 971/t = $AUD$ 214/t = AUD $7.3/GJ
Firmed renewable energy in Australia can compete with that and its time more people realised it.
23 Dec
Excellent ref to the social cost of carbon. I doubt if any single study can get close to the real answer, but this is one of the most comprehensive studies ever done.
Here we show that improved probabilistic socioeconomic projections, climate models, damage functions, and discounting methods that collectively reflect theoretically consistent valuation of risk, substantially increase estimates of the SC-CO2. Our preferred mean SC-CO2 estimate is $185 per tonne of CO2 ($44–$413 per tCO2: 5%–95% range, 2020 US dollars) at a near-term risk-free discount rate of 2%, a value 3.6 times higher than the US government’s current value of $51 per tCO2.
22 Dec
A few NEM Review observations or no great import.
2025 futures have shot up about 10% across the NEM.
- NSW is the State to be a generator in, I’ve shown the average prices by State by fuel for the past year since this is in essence an end of year update. There are probably a lot of things to focus on in the table. I choose to look at the good prices wind was able to obtain in NSW and QLD
Fuel weighted prices, 2024. Source:NEM Review
The next 3 figures are some I’ve been monitoring for many years now. They kind of speak for themselves, as a good figure does.
Although I need to make rooftop a different colour in this one: 
And why would you want to stop the trend in the following figure to wait 20 years for some mythical nuclear BS? Although I’ll be the first to agree the crocodile jaws closing hasn’t made much progress this year. But as the oft quoted Billy S. put it ” the course of true love never ere ran smooth”
19 Dec
Can’t drive just yet so spending some time trying to make this chatter file update without reloading entire site. Making the technology doing something Quarto wasn’t really designed to do.
Also spending pleasurable time watching Danny Price on the defensive, trying to justify the house of cards he so carefully built to justify nuclear. In the process amongst many other issues seeing him dismiss the AER cost of carbon as just wrong, like how would he know, state as a fact that AEMOS’s ISP coal closure timetable was wrong and in general try to show that what he did was fair and reasonable when in fact it was very far from that.
And seems like I have the netlify serveless function working :-)
18 Dec
A vote for the LNP is a vote for blackouts.
Australia has relatively few coal stations now although they still account for about 61% of total NEM wide energy. Every unit that has a forced outage, or even a planned outage represents a material share of supply just now.
If the LNP has their way they will expect to keep this already unreliable system as the backbone of supply for the next 15 to 20 years while nuclear plants are built. The risks for the sake of ideology are basically insance from Australia’s best interest. National security, growth in the economy, the well being of the “State” are all threatened by this ideological crusdae. A crusade that is entirely unsupported by the industry on which it will be forced.
Australia cannot afford the risk.
And I hear Danny Price is being his usual difficult self.
Finally for today it was a pleasure to interview Chris Bowen for the last episode of EnergyInsiders, and a good interview it is, in my opinion. The audience was down a touch this year to 700k so we have a way to go catch “the rest is history” and yet I felt well on top of the subject. Priorities next year will be a little more international interviews, and a little more climate change.
17 Dec
Changes to the front page look, hopefully for the better. Actually took all day fiddling with various Quarto options and demonstrating my lack of skill at this task but now part 1 done.
16 Dec
Back from hospital. I had excellent surgeon and I believe anaesthetist but I still dont recommend a major mitral valve repair, 7 hours on the table emerging like a pin cushion with garden hoses popping out the tummy etc until its necessary. Mine was and glad to get it done.
As a result haven’t caught up on the electricity data fully for a couple of weeks and there are a couple of temporary data issues. I update my data for key charts and tables only once a week and the latests is available from the “NEM-dash” menu item. Nevertheless spot prices are clearly way higher this year than last running over $200/Mwh in NSW.
The reason for high prices is obvious. Coal generation is down and besides rooftop its gas and hydro that have had to make up most of the difference.
Overall wind conditions have not been all that special and its quite normal to have a wind down turn at this time.
Of the three big wind farms Macintyre (1000 MW) hit max output of 70 MW, Golden Plains hasn’t done much over 50 and Clarke Creek is still in very early days (4 MW)
5 December
At Carl Daley at Wattclarity points out that the last week of November is often when price spikes occur. The only explanation I can think of is that November is when coal generators do maintenance and weather is a bitt hotter than in the main part of Spring so demand can be relatively elevated. Demand in NSW never got with in 10% of its all time record but there were certainly price spikes. The following figure, done in a hurry as I am off to Hospital in an hour for a long standing valve leak repair, shows NSW 5 minute prices for most of this year(or as long as I’ve been downloading the data.)
Until there are more batteries online I expect to see these 5 minute price spikes continue. They certainly push up average prices.
29 Nov
The new CEC Board is a bunch of industry heavyweights including CEOs of Squadron, Iberdrola Australia and Acciona Renewables head Australia.
Despite its work on standards and despite its leading conference I have long felt that the CEC has been losing ground to Smart Energy as the main tempo of the industry. Smart Energy takes stronger positions and is generally more aggressive in its marketing. Attendance at its exhibition/conference is free which is in contrast to the CEFC summit. All Energy equally remains free to visitors.
There are therefore at least three organisations committed in part to lobbying and developing policy, the CEC, Smart Energy and the Clean Energy Investor Group(CEIG). There now seems to be considerable overlap between the CEC and CEIG.
Given that CEC Board positions were heavily contested this year I expect to see some change in the CEC focus and activity over time.
To me it looks like the CEC is increasingly going to be the big end of the industry and Smart Energy is going to be the organisation for everyone else. That’s already been the case I guess for a while but looks to be even more so.
29 Sep
Please to report my latest monthly electricity and petrol bill zero, in fact my retailer stated they owe me $29 which will be applied to the next bill. Despite the cost I expect that attachment rates of batteries to new solar systems is increasing.
Disappointingly even though utility and car battery prices are clearly coming down and in some cases coming down quickly residential batteries have basically been flat for 6 years. At least according to comparison site Solar Choice:
1 Sep
Going forward articles will include a comments section. No login is required at this stage as the traffic volume is expected to be low. Comments are generally welcome. I get some email feedback on my articles, the vast majority of which is quite value adding. It seems to me that in many cases that feedback would often do more good being in a comment for others to read.
23 Aug
ITK’s price forecasts are coming soonish.
7 Aug
Updating some previous numbers the going rate for a 6 MW wind turbine seems about $60k per year. So the 54 turbines of Doughboy windfarm that 9 landowners turned down is about $3.2 m or $97 m over 30 years. Lots of money to give up for any reason. Things must be good in the bush although my understanding 6/9 potential hosts weren’t even residents.
19 July
Whitehaven reported coal production costs of A$114/t. Price received for NSW thermal coal of US$137/t (A$210/t). That’s likely for top quality thermal coal (26 gj/t) but even so translating that back to NSW coal generation for say Eraring gives 9.5 GJ/MWh * 210 / 26 = $76/MWh fuel cost.
8 Jun 24 78
Am emerging leading light in understanding social cohesion and division in the transition is Associate Professor Rebecca Colvin.
“So, for instance, quite a bit of research has shown that Australia is the second most polarised country on climate change along left-right political lines, with the US being the most polarised country.”
A topical quote considering todays headlines that the LNP is more or less turning its back on Paris commitments.
5 Jun 24
A reminder tha there are 20 GW of wind and solar operating
And the total is set to grow 30% based on projects under construction, although Rye Park 400 MW wind could now be regarded as operating reducing the growth rate.
3 Jun 24
CIS scheme webinar
- Not a lot of real news but well attended plenty of Q&A. In response to my question about will it get new capacity built there seems to be a general focus rather than specific provisions. Ie choosing projects that are capable and will be built. Comes down to who is doing the administering.
- Focus on getting the right number of bidders as the assement process will take months, and too many will slow it down.
2 Jun 24
Renewmap is the go
renewmap is the best new site to open in 2024. Great map based coverage of esxising, being constructed and proposed generation
Binsted Chair NSW Energyco
As announced here Paul Binsted, Chair of Stanwell has been appointed Chairpoers onf the Board of the Energy Corporation of NSW. CEO is Paul Hay.