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💧simon holmes à court Profile picture
@simonahac
Apr 18, 2021 • 8 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X
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🤓@ScottMorrisonMP's fossil gas announcement today is a poke in the eye for @ClimateEnvoy and @POTUS.

morrison claims south australia needs the gas for cheap, reliable power.

let's take a little look at SA's use of gas for power generation… 🧵

theguardian.com/australia-news…
over the past 12 months fossil gas provided 37% of south australia's electricity — a higher proportion than any other state.

(SA completely phased out all coal in 2016 and doesn't have any significant hydro resources.)
if we zoom out to the last 2 decades, we can see the important but *reducing* role gas has played in SA's generation mix.
in fact in 2021Q1, south australia used less fossil gas for power generation than in any quarter so far this century…
…and AEMO, the energy market operator, predicts that gas power generation will continue to fall in SA…

aemo.com.au/-/media/files/…
gas is facing significant competition from utility scale renewables, storage, new transmission & the growth of rooftop solar.

…SA gas generators forced on to provide "system security" services will increasingly be replaced by cheaper "synchronous condensers" starting this year.
lastly, it it's noteworthy that SA already has the lowest wholesale electricity prices in the national electricity market… thanks to its high proportion of renewables — 61% of demand, and growing.

aemo.com.au/en/energy-syst…
#australia is not short on fossil gas… we export 3/4 of the gas we pull out of the ground!

@ScottMorrisonMP latest move to subsidise gas — in the week of @POTUS's climate ambition summit — is simply about helping his fossil gas industry mates' export businesses.

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More from @simonahac

💧simon holmes à court Profile picture
Jul 20
hardly a week goes by without some 🪿telling me that "saudi arabia built a nuclear power station in just 8 years" or similar.

south korea built it for the UAE & it'll be 16+ years from formal announcement to project completion.

no, it was not on time & likely not on budget Image
any 🪿telling you nuclear can be built in australia in 2-3, 5, 10 or 15 years:
• ignores years of work required before construction starts
• doesn't understand IAEA's "construction" ignores _years_ of actual construction
• assumes an established regulator & warm supply chain.
"from memory, it was 2-3 years" 🪿
Read 6 tweets
💧simon holmes à court Profile picture
Jun 28
🤓 icymi, latest data from @EnergyInstitute is out!

this dataset has been lovingly curated since 1952, until recently by @bp_plc.

a good report, lots of charts and most exciting for energy nerds, lots of raw data!

i knocked up a few charts 🧵

energyinst.org/statistical-re…
🤓 global electricity generation by technology

gas and coal still growing, but at a slower pace than renewables.

quite likely we'll see coal and gas both peak in the next few years. Image
🤓 global nuclear and wind+solar, as energy

nuclear peaked in 2006. IEA expects that a new peak may be set in 2025. Image
Read 9 tweets
💧simon holmes à court Profile picture
Jun 18
☢️ with the #coalition expected to announce its #nuclear plan on wednesday, here are 18 questions every diligent journalist should be seeking answers to:

🧵
1. how will dutton remove the ban?

the coalition would require control of the senate to repeal the ban, which is embedded in two acts.

the coalition hasn’t controlled the senate since 2004-2007.
2. which state(s) would dutton build the reactors in?

only VIC, NSW and QLD grids are big enough to handle a large nuclear reactor.

WA, SA and TAS grids are too small to host a GW-scale reactor.
Read 20 tweets
💧simon holmes à court Profile picture
May 20
🤓 you'll probably hear scary claims today about "blackouts" in NSW, due to a "reliability gap".

…caused by delays with SA-NSW transmission line, a few batteries & mothballed generators.

to meet the 99.998% reliability standard, NSW needs to build more kit.

not a big deal. 🧵 Image
the eraring power station has 4 units, each 720MW. delaying closure of 1-2 units could fill the gap.

a 500MW–1GW gas generator operating <10 hours a year would also suffice. lower emissions and might be cheaper?

helpfully AEMO has provided 9 options to fill the gap: Image
small reliability gaps are forecast in VIC and SA, but far enough out that they'll likely evaporate… as they often do for this regular report.

why? because the reports show what happens if we don't do anything more than committed — and we pretty much always do.
Read 6 tweets
💧simon holmes à court Profile picture
May 15
i attended the ‘navigating nuclear’ conference on monday in sydney.

up front: there were some high quality presentations — on issues such as health impacts, safety culture, regulatory systems. Image
…but sadly there was also some abject nonsense…
the presentation below argued that we have two options:

1. build a complex grid of wind, solar, hydro, hydrogen, batteries, pumped hydro, transmission and EVs.

2. just build nuclear and use existing powerlines.

…apparently #2 is the way to go. 🙄 Image
Read 10 tweets
💧simon holmes à court Profile picture
Mar 21
⚛️ @abcnews's recent #FactCheck made a classic rookie error in calculating that the latest US nukes had "build times of 10.1 and 10.4 years".

depending how you count it, it took somewhere between 13.9 years and ~19 years to build them.

easy mistake to make.

let me explain… 🧵
ABC's analysis assumes the build time is the elapsed period between "construction start" and "grid connection" dates.

in the real world, a nuclear power building project begins years before "construction start" and often finishes months after "grid connection".
"construction start" is defined by the IAEA as the "the date when first major placing of concrete for the base mat of the reactor building is made."

"grid connection" is when "the plant is first connected to the electrical grid for the supply of power."

pris.iaea.org/PRIS/Glossary.…
Read 18 tweets

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