Goodbye Yallourn, hello power blackouts

No matter how many wind ‘turbines’ or solar panels you scatter across Victoria, or the whole of south-eastern Australia, when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine, the power don’t flow.

Victoria is now into an official relatively rapid countdown to brownouts and blackouts.

And thanks to the national grid, Victoria’s looming disaster will also be a national disaster.

There is simply no way that wind and solar so-called renewable energy and even the world’s biggest battery can reliably replace the coal fired Yallourn power station in the Latrobe Valley.

No matter how many wind – oh so quaintly-named – ‘turbines’ or solar panels you scatter across Victoria, or indeed the whole of south-eastern Australia, when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine, the power don’t flow.

When arithmetic used to be taught in schools, most people would intuitively understand that if you multiply zero by 100 you get exactly the same answer as when you multiply zero by one. That’s zero.

So if the wind don’t blow, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve got ten ‘turbines’ or 1000, you get exactly the same amount of power: zero, or close enough to it.

On the weekend I detailed what happened in the UK last week.

They have close to 25,000MW of wind so-called installed ‘capacity’.

For comparison, Yallourn is 1500MW, but you can pretty much get that 24/7 – maintenance and the occasional breakdown aside.

At times the UK gets as much as 13,000MW from wind.

But for two whole days last week it was getting between just 500MW and 800MW.

For two whole days – barely half a Yallourn; for two whole days, all the turbines in and scattered around the UK, delivered less than 2 per cent of the electricity needed to keep the Brits warm and their lights on.

So where did the UK get the other 98 per cent of its electricity from through those two days?

Well around 72 per cent came from burning stuff – mostly gas, but also by turning on an old coal-fired power station about the size of Yallourn, and burning wood chips.

Another 11 per cent came from nuclear power stations – which we don’t have and are prohibited from building.

And a thumping 13 per cent came from the power cords into France (nuclear), the Netherlands (coal and gas) and Belgium (gas and nuclear).

Yes, we have power cords between states, but when we are all looking for power after closing our coal fired stations and the wind ain’t blowing, who is Australia going to plug its power cord into?

EnergyAustralia worker Peter Broeren at the Yallourn coal-fired power station. Picture: Jason Edwards

Ah, but then there’s the planned big battery – but in 2021, most people might understand that their so-called smart phone batteries run down pretty quickly when used.

Then, they have to be plugged into that ‘thing’ in the wall which connects to a real power station.

After 2028, you can hope that the wind will choose to start blowing again – to charge your phone and that flat big battery.

When Hazelwood in the Latrobe Valley closed in 2015, Victoria’s power system shuddered and prices shot up.

But both the state and the national grid have got by; when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine, Victoria sucks in power from the coal-fired stations in NSW and Queensland.

SA also gets by on wind and a lot of gas when the wind ain’t blowing – and the power cords into Victoria’s Latrobe Valley.

Good luck on that after Yallourn closes, while we all first have to get past the closure of Liddell in NSW, scheduled for early 2023, just two years away.

Like Energy Australia, Liddell’s owner AGL has promised a ‘joke’ portfolio of replacement ‘power’.

It’s a funny thing about these sorts of ‘long’ dated announcements – whether power station closures, or assorted ‘targets’.

The clock keeps ticking, the calendar keeps turning, and before you know it you’ll be there, learning to love blackouts.

Originally published as Goodbye Yallourn, hello power blackouts