Gas plant a critical brick in a broken power system

The federal government’s proposed gas-fired power plant is eminently sensible, unlike the rest of our energy aspirations.

The federal government’s proposed gas-fired power generator in the Hunter Valley is absolutely critical, whether we continue down the insane path we’ve embarked on to destroy cheap, reliable and plentiful electricity in Australia, or whether we somehow find a way back to sanity.

The plant - to generate up to 600MW of electricity, or about one third of what’s being generated by the Liddell coal-fired plant it’s supposed to replace - is critical not only to keep the lights on in New South Wales, but all down the east coast from the north of Queensland around to South Australia.

This is because of the national grid which links the four eastern states plus Tasmania — and where reliable power generation will become even more critical, as the coal-fired real power stations are closed and we “rely” more and more on completely unreliable and erratic wind and solar.

Batteries, no matter how big and how many, are simply never going to fill the gap when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine.

Not even dozens of Tesla-style batteries plus Malcolm Turnbull’s “big battery” — Snowy 2.

Tesla batteries will still go flat like all batteries do and have to wait for the wind to start blowing or the sun to start shining to be recharged.

This, by the by, rather neatly captures the total insanity of this proposed future: in this magical mystery all-fantasy future we are going to be relying on big Tesla batteries to charge the smaller Tesla batteries in our all-electric car fleet (and our smart phones, for dumb people).

And so what happens if the big Tesla batteries go flat and the wind ain’t blowing and the sun ain’t shining?

Simple: forget about cooking or having the heater, aircon or TV on; eat raw, wrap up in a blanket or a wet towel, read a book if you know what that is, and walk.

Much the same applies to Malcolm’s “big battery”: after the water has all run downhill we have to wait for the wind to blow or the sun to shine to “recharge it” by pumping the water back up the hill.

So in this - utterly insane - future, the only way to keep at least some of the lights on will be the gas-fired power generators that can be fired up quickly and reliably when the wind ain’t blowing and the sun ain’t shining, and the batteries have all gone flat.

Furthermore, we couldn’t rely on Tasmania’s excess hydro generation to keep the lights on in all the states north of it, even if the dams were full; and certainly not if they weren’t.

We would also still need this gas-fired power station and others across the national grid even if we returned to a sane electricity generation future, with a mix of cutting-edge modern coal-fired and nuclear power stations.

Electricity demand can vary by as much as 50 per cent from peak times to midnight.

You need peaking power from gas plants.

It is also precisely in that - rational - future that wind (and solar, if you must) and batteries could play a cost-effective, price-reducing contributory role; with wind used to charge the batteries and not to be fed so unreliably, erratically and so disruptively directly into the grid.

Now to say that we absolutely desperately need the Hunter gas-fired generator is not to say we will actually get it.

Indeed, I’d bet on the massive opposition and disruption that will be unleashed against it will at the very minimum delay it for years if not decades — if it doesn’t succeed in canning it upfront.

There is also the question of where would its gas, reliably over a 40-year lifetime, come from; with even the supposedly Liberal NSW state government almost as anti-gas as Chairman Dan & Co in Beijing-on-the-Yarra.

Originally published as Gas plant a critical brick in a broken power system