North Island National Grid at near Capacity

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#2758650 11-Aug-2021 15:58

tdgeek:

mattwnz:

Don't they lose too much of the power through the lines? I think the problem with that hydro station is it's location. It is in the wrong place to be used for much else. Maybe we should be increasing the population of NZ down there instead of Auckland. But people don't like the climate as much down there.

From past threads here on that topic I thought it was do-able, at about a 600 million cost. Which is not much. I might be wrong though

Yes its doable, new transmission required and almost certainly new HVDC to shift that power north.

duckDecoy

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#2758651 11-Aug-2021 16:01

RedactedRetracted:

I was thinking even outside of the whole Tiwai question, as it seems to me (from what is very much a layman perspective) that there is a lot of future generation capacity in the south, but little demand, and very little future generation capacity in the north, which has quite a bit of demand, but at the moment there's no incentive for a business to be based in the South Island as they're paying exactly the same transmission costs regardless.

Transpower is actively consulting on how it charges for transmission to make it far more 'user pays', if you need more of the network to get power to you, expect to pay a larger share.

duckDecoy

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#2758657 11-Aug-2021 16:07

mattwnz:

It probably shows that the government need to do the building of new hydro.

The RMA and basically very small groups of interested parties have scuttled a few damned good hydro proposals. The additional tunnels proposed for Project Lachie comes to mind

CYaBro

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#2758664 11-Aug-2021 16:13

Haven't read through this whole thread but has the option of installing a battery, as they've done in some states in Australia, been looked at?
Would that work for the North Island?

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elpenguino

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#2758694 11-Aug-2021 17:27

mattwnz:

Don't they lose too much of the power through the lines?

I had the opportunity to ask this same question to a Transpower engineer some years ago (10?). The answer was 'low single digit percentages'.

That's because so much money is invested in transformers to swap amps for volts and transmit power at 220kV (or more)

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Handle9

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#2758700 11-Aug-2021 17:34

CYaBro:

Haven't read through this whole thread but has the option of installing a battery, as they've done in some states in Australia, been looked at?
Would that work for the North Island?

It's not really the right technology. Battery systems are being used in SA due to large scale solar and wind which don't have the same availability as hydro.

The energy mix is very different in NZ.

alexx

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#2758704 11-Aug-2021 17:42

Meanwhile Genesis are not planning to build NZ's biggest wind farm at Castle Hill
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/448948/amid-power-supply-scrutiny-genesis-not-planning-to-build-nz-s-biggest-wind-farm-at-castle-hill

The wind farm was given the green light in 2013 by the Environment Court. Its resource consent expires in 2023, with no construction planned.

No need for more generation capacity it seems.

#include <standard.disclaimer>

tdgeek

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#2758707 11-Aug-2021 17:49

alexx:

Meanwhile Genesis are not planning to build NZ's biggest wind farm at Castle Hill
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/448948/amid-power-supply-scrutiny-genesis-not-planning-to-build-nz-s-biggest-wind-farm-at-castle-hill

The wind farm was given the green light in 2013 by the Environment Court. Its resource consent expires in 2023, with no construction planned.

No need for more generation capacity it seems.

Thats the difference between taxpayers paying for a taxpayer used utility, and shareholders needs being met

tdgeek

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#2758711 11-Aug-2021 17:59

Ouch

Hamilton-based lines company Wel Networks says it was erroneously instructed by Transpower to make massive cuts to the load on its network of “more than 20 per cent” on Monday night.

Information provided by Wel indicated that if Transpower had not made the error, it would only have needed to cut off 1373 homes from power, instead of cutting power to a total of 17,752 homes as it did.

Technofreak

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#2758713 11-Aug-2021 18:15

tdgeek:

Ouch

Hamilton-based lines company Wel Networks says it was erroneously instructed by Transpower to make massive cuts to the load on its network of “more than 20 per cent” on Monday night.

Information provided by Wel indicated that if Transpower had not made the error, it would only have needed to cut off 1373 homes from power, instead of cutting power to a total of 17,752 homes as it did.

Someone get their decimal point in the wrong place? Apparently WEL queried the size of the required cut but was told that was what was needed.

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raytaylor

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#2758762 11-Aug-2021 20:33

CYaBro:

Haven't read through this whole thread but has the option of installing a battery, as they've done in some states in Australia, been looked at?
Would that work for the North Island?

Batteries have a very specific use in South Australia.
Most of SA's electricity comes from coal and gas fired power plants which take a long time to warm up, and cant scale up and down very easily. Its either on or off.
So offpeak they turn a bunch off, and then a few hours before the onpeak arrives, they start them up so they start outputting at the right time.

The problem for SA is when something goes wrong, they dont have spare power available immediately - its always hours away. So the spot price of electricity would randomly go up to amazing amounts causing problems for consumers.
Sidenote: SA has been doing solar subsidies to try and reduce their coal emissions output.

So a battery can easily be switched on and immediately provide a bunch of power to the grid without waiting for the coal plants to be started up.

The spot price does still go up during those times - thats where tesla (or the plant owner) makes its money, but at the same time, the spot price isnt going up by astronomical amounts.
And they can be paid to absorb excess power too - which helps them recharge.

Now in NZ, we have a bunch of hydro dams. Starting them up is almost immediate and as simple as turning a tap. They are our equivalent of SA's batteries.

The problem on monday night was Transpower predicted that NZ would be using more power.
They had asked the generators to put more offers to generate electricity during those time-slots into the market.
The retailers simply didnt have enough offers to buy on the market.
Transpower determined that the market had not had enough offers by 6pm when there simply wasnt enough being generated so issued the notice to lines companies that they need to stay under a certain allocation - if they went over their allocation, they needed to shed load (power cuts).

Now the reason as to why there werent enough offers on the table are up for debate:

- Some say there isnt much water in the lakes down south, so i think those generators would be waiting for later in the season to put their offers on the market when they could get a better price for their limited water supply.

- Some mention the HVDC cable. It wasnt being used because of the lack of offers and the load shedding in the north island taking place, thus reducing the need to transport power north.

- Some say Genesis should have started up another coal burner at Huntley. Genesis have said their own analysis showed everything was fine but they didnt consider the drop in wind and their inability to increase generation at tokaanu

- Megan Woods did what politicians do and went to have some meetings then said some stuff without fully understanding whats going on. She decided it would be a smart idea to blame Genesis though there are many companies that could have offered to generate more power when transpower asked them to put more offers on the table for the retailers to buy.

- Some lines companies who would normally have been running hot water boilers at the time said they were able to switch them off (usually via ripple control) and then could stay under their emergency allocation. Others already had their water boilers switched off (Unison, WEL) so had to cut power to some residential areas to get under their allocations.

- A bunch of people blamed EV's without realizing that most EV owners would be stupid to be charging during the evening peak when it costs twice as much to recharge rather than using their timer to recharge after midnight.

- A bunch of people blamed heat pumps. I'll accept that.

- I blame transpower. At 4pm they should have been alerting the news media for the 6pm broadcast so people could limit the number of appliances they use at once. It would have been smart if some people turned on their heat pumps earlier so they didnt draw so much during the peak.

- Some have suggested tidal power as an option for our green future. Very few places in NZ that this would work.

- Some blame labour for cutting gas exploration permits. Labour responded by saying any permits that would have been issued would not yet be in production. I am against gas but also i think that is hiding another fact - if this happens again, those exploratory permits could be in production by the time that the next event occurs. They are just getting delayed further.

I think this event reinforces our need for the Lake Onslow scheme.
It would add 1200MW to the grid available within minutes and could run at that rate for 4,000 hours though if combined with a home-solar subsidy, could be recharged using solar panels during the day.

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Handle9

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#2758773 11-Aug-2021 21:00

raytaylor:

Most of SA's electricity comes from coal and gas fired power plants

Not anymore. They were 60% renewable last year with no coal.

vexxxboy

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#2758774 11-Aug-2021 21:14

Technofreak:

tdgeek:

Ouch

Hamilton-based lines company Wel Networks says it was erroneously instructed by Transpower to make massive cuts to the load on its network of “more than 20 per cent” on Monday night.

Information provided by Wel indicated that if Transpower had not made the error, it would only have needed to cut off 1373 homes from power, instead of cutting power to a total of 17,752 homes as it did.

Someone get their decimal point in the wrong place? Apparently WEL queried the size of the required cut but was told that was what was needed.

it sounds like Transpower stuffed up big time.

Transpower also asked other lines companies to make deeper cuts or smaller cuts than necessary but Andrew said in some other cases its error was picked up before the cuts were made.

Common sense is not as common as you think.

Linuxluver

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#2758779 11-Aug-2021 21:39

duckDecoy:

mattwnz:

It probably shows that the government need to do the building of new hydro.

The RMA and basically very small groups of interested parties have scuttled a few damned good hydro proposals. The additional tunnels proposed for Project Lachie comes to mind

There's a bit more to it than that. These projects are expensive, take years to build and wipe out habitats for life you may not care about.....but nothing new about people forgetting they live on a planet with other life.

The same amount of money spent on wind / solar and grid scale storage would deliver a better result in a fraction of the time. The technology has moved on.....thank goodness.

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Linuxluver

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#2758781 11-Aug-2021 21:48

morrisk:

Would a facility like the Hornsdale battery farm in South Australia be of some use to cover the situation that happened?

It has the ability to be adding power into the grid at the flick of a switch. No waiting for 6 - 10 hours for Huntly to fire up.

The Hornsdale battery farm is aweome....but limited. It's 100MW and stores 129MWh, which would last just over an hour......

There are other forms of grid-scale storage. Like molten salt or flo batteries..... Well worth evaluating.

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