Borumba pumped hydro: where Queensland’s 2GW bet actually stands
Drive past Lake Borumba on the Mary Valley road out of Gympie and, on the surface, not much has changed in two years. The lake still sits placid behind its existing wall. It’s the upper site, cut into the range above it, where the real work is happening: tunnel boring, access roads, the early civil […]
Central-West Orana REZ: NSW’s first REZ, status check
Drive the Golden Highway out past Dunedoo on a clear morning and you’ll see the survey pegs before you see any steel. I did this run on the bike back in winter, out from Merotherie towards Wellington, and what struck me wasn’t the wind farms already spinning off in the paddocks. It was how much […]
What a capacity factor is, and why it actually matters
I rode out along the Copper Coast Highway past the Snowtown wind farm a few years back, on one of those long spring weekend rides you do out of Adelaide when the legs are willing, and counted eleven turbines standing dead still in a breeze that felt stiff enough to lean a bike into. Nameplate […]
WA’s SWIS grid: an island with no way to call for help
There’s no button in Perth marked ‘call for help.’ If a generator trips on the South West Interconnected System on a stinking February afternoon, there’s no interconnector to lean on, no neighbouring state to lend a few hundred megawatts while things get sorted. The SWIS is generally described as one of the largest electricity systems […]
Snowy 2.0: past $12bn, Florence stuck, and the timeline again
Somewhere under the Snowy Mountains right now, a tunnel boring machine named Florence is grinding through rock that has, at various points over the past couple of years, refused to behave the way the geotechnical reports said it would. That single fact (a machine the size of a small apartment block stuck in fractured, water-bearing […]
Pumped hydro versus batteries: what actually firms the grid
Two thousand megawatt-hours. That’s roughly what Genex Power’s Kidston pumped hydro scheme, built into an old gold mine near Georgetown in north Queensland, is designed to deliver at 250 megawatts of output, running flat out for eight hours. Compare that with the Victorian Big Battery near Geelong, rated at 300 megawatts but only 450 megawatt-hours […]
Renewable Energy Zones: the plan behind the pushback
Drive the Golden Highway out past Dunedoo on a quiet Sunday and you’ll see the survey pegs before you see any turbines. Orange tape on fence posts, a contractor’s ute parked on a verge, a paddock with a easement corridor mown through the middle of it. That’s what a Renewable Energy Zone looks like in […]
Gas peakers versus big batteries: who firms the grid?
Six-fifteen on a still, hot evening in late January. Rooftop solar has fallen off a cliff, air conditioners across three states are pulling hard, and AEMO’s dispatch engine is hunting for the next few hundred megawatts in five-minute intervals. Somewhere a gas turbine at Tallawarra or Uranquinty is spinning up. Somewhere else, a battery the […]
Grid-forming inverters: why the grid suddenly needs them
On 28 September 2016, South Australia lost every one of its large synchronous generators within about seven seconds, and the state blacked out. AEMO’s final report into that event, Black System South Australia 28 September 2016, is still the document every system engineer in this country has read at least twice. It’s the reason we’re […]
Kidston pumped hydro: the mine that became a battery
Two hundred and fifty megawatts, up to eight hours’ worth of it, sitting in a hole in the ground that used to produce gold. That’s the pitch for Kidston Pumped Storage Hydro, and after years of slipping dates it is finally in the phase where the numbers start to matter more than the promises: commissioning. […]