I hope everyones turning their radios off tonight to save the national grid from collapse. With 2 units going down at Yallourn Power Station over the weekend (some 700MW) Tassie is keeping the mainland topped up. Hopefully the Basslink interconnect holds up. The blame game is entertaining to say the least.

What we need is some new BIG RELIABLE EFFICIENT COAL POWERED STATIONS , backed up by atomic generators that will provide clean steady power both using Mr James Watts' steam pressure to turn the turbines and chuck all the fans and mirrors and batteries out where they belong, in the skip.

Fix the transmission lines with some real COPPER transmission wire, decent transformers, and the rest of the world running around crapping on about global warming can go and get......... you know what. We have the coal and the uranium whats the problem?

(of course the globe is warming what do you want, the joint covered in ice like it was in the past? Its called cyclic planetary epoch.
Come on warming, huge areas of land will be unlocked for farming and food production that is now permafrost.)

See, that is a cranky old mans view not tainted by silly Nordic children and idiots with IQs of 60.

Fred.

We have the coal and the uranium whats the problem?

Do you really have to ask?

Was it not Einstien that predicted a generation of Morons. There here....

I like to fool around with people who want to lecture me on the evils of coal. I ask them to tell me the difference between a milliwatt and a megawatt and how many solar panels are needed to generate each.

Unfortunately the push for renewables has more to do with a return of investment than the overall health of our planet. Population growth is the real issue globally but that's a forbidden subject.

It's Gunna take twenty years to build a nuclear power plant so I think we are stuffed, we may even get those submarines first lol.

Consider this, though....

How many readers are old enough to remember looking at, with a sense of muted wonder, the very first Light Emitting Diodes? Darkened room, a pinpoint of feeble light.

Now if someone had said back then that in 40 years we'd be using LEDs to light our houses and as car headlamps, would you have believed them?

Never underestimate the advances of technology, particularly when there's money behind it.

€�Never underestimate the advances of technology, particularly when there's money behind it.”

Yes I can agree with this, but not before time. The way I do things today is vastly different to how I did them 10 years ago all because of technology. The past a nice place to visit, but no place to live.

The national grid has lacked reserve capacity for years. Back when motor cars started replacing the bullock and dray they actually allowed the invention of the car to improve with time, be better engineered than Karl Benz's first sample and go further before considering the old ways outdated. People were still riding horses here in Sydney in the 1940s and letting them poop on the tram tracks. With regard to transport, it was a slow, steady process to where we are today.

What the greenies and climate luvvies are trying to do with electricity generation is shoot the horse, burn the cart and force the country to come to a standstill until the motor car has reached a stage where it can travel more than 50km without breaking down.

I drove past Bayswater and Liddell power stations at the weekend. Usually, the NSW Central Coast and Hunter Valley accounts for just over 2/5ths of Australia's electricity generation but not at the moment, where we are importing power from every other state that is connected to the national grid. Baywater is down to one unit. Two are broken down and a third is undergoing very well-timed preventative maintenance. Liddell is down to two units with one breaking down and another permanently decommissioned last month.

Along with similar situations at Callide in QLD and Loy Yang A and Yallourn in VIC, something has to give. The luvvies think that solar and wind work all the time. Nope. Nothing could be further from the truth. When I go camping I can survive with a battery and a big solar panel. A municipal electricity supply has to be a bit better than that however.

Ideology has trumped engineering for far too long. It is time for grid repair but we don't currently have anyone in government with the strength and fortitude to do the job.

Brad, very well said.

I have lived through technological change, aware of my surroundings from the 1950's.
I also had parents that lived during the early 1900's and grandparents before that who lived in an age that most people now could not comprehend.
Their memories have painted in my mind how life was in the late 1800's through the 1900's to now.

You describe camping, well life 3 generations ago was just like that, less the solar cell and battery!!
I know that the current generations have no concept of that life, perhaps only the American the Amish would understand.
If the power went off in America, the Amish would just shrug their shoulders and carry on without a hiccup.
In the cities people would die.

My parents saw horses turn to cars, electricity allowed lights and refrigeration.
My generation saw life explode with electronics that changed communication and entertainment.
The last two however, being the focal point of the latest generation are just cream on top of the cake.
That is, remove them and the basics still have to be met, remove them and nothing much changes really.

Pity that the focus of so many people is on the cream, and not the cake.

Fred.

It is time for grid repair but we don't currently have anyone in government with the strength and fortitude to do the job.

Remember at privatisation time when the NSW government was complaining that Ausgrid was "spending too much on poles and wires"? Well, as sensible people would know, that's called capacity planning and preventative maintenance -- two concepts that politicians have no clue about.

And when it comes to being clueless, for me this takes the cake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyS9uqRLbB8

That is probably what Albo meant when he said he "has a plan" during the election campaign. These people, and I include Matt Kean on the Coalition's side of politics, are complete fruitcakes. There are people across the political spectrum that have no idea what the words "solar" and "photo-voltaic" mean. As we all know, if there is no light shining on a solar cell, it will not work - full stop. A solar cell is a light-dependent diode which converts light to electricity - we've known about this since the late 1800s when the selenium solar cell was first observed to produce a voltage when light was shined on it. The Scotsman, James Maxwell, did this work.

These climate alarmist twits are so infatuated by their approach to the issue that they are making these basic mistakes which deny all reasoning, let alone the laws of physics.

A lot of work was done by the NSW Government since it nationalised the state's electricity generation assets in the 1950s and whilst I don't consider myself over the hill just yet, I am old enough to remember when power stations like Liddell, Wallerawang, Tallawarra, Munmorah and Vales Point held up rural NSW whilst here in Sydney, stations like Balmain, White Bay and Bunnerong were in their final years of service whilst Mt Piper and the two giants, Bayswater and Eraring, were being built. Later came the peaking station, Redbank, which was small but burned coal tailings and other waste products at times when a little extra juice was needed in the system.

This group of eight power stations and the HV grid that connected it to the state's customers was designed with one single thing in mind - always-on reliability. 50Hz around the clock with 240V at every power point in the state. No more big blackouts (caused by infrastructure failures or shortcomings in generating capacity) and plenty of power available for industry, healthcare and business. There was plenty in reserve to share with other states and to allow for future population growth.

There would be around thirty years of reliable electricity supply.

Then, someone breathed the phrase global warming and then it hit the fan. Elcom was split up and sold off. Transgrid was privatised. The 23 County Councils which retailed electricity (which were branches of local government) were stolen by the NSW Government and corporatised into five retailers known as Energy Australia, Integral Energy, Advance Energy, Northpower and Great Southern Energy. The latter three then merged into one company - Country Energy. Following this, the asset arms of each of the three remaining retailers were split off and Ausgrid, Endeavour Energy and Essential Energy were born. All three later merged and then a year later split apart again when Ausgrid was privatised.

After this, the power stations were given away in fire sales. Vales Point went for playlunch money but to the credit of the new owner, Trevor St Baker, he is the most dedicated to keeping his station running. The owners of the other remaining stations seem to be in a race to shut them down. Origin, the owner of Eraring, Australia's biggest power station, is aiming to close its doors in 2025, removing 2,880MW of baseload generation from the grid. AGL, the owner of Liddell, has already decommissioned one unit, removing 500MW from the grid. the rest will close in turn over the next 12 months, then Liddell will be gone, with another 2,000MW also gone forever.

What are these stations being replaced with? Part time solar and part time wind, and the occasional glorified UPS to back things up for a few minutes. This garbage is not suitable to be the backbone of an electricity grid. Anyone thinking otherwise is completely devoid of any understanding of electricity generation. If aeroplane engines were expected to run on this principle, every plane would fall out of the sky minutes after take-off.

As I said before, people sometimes use the replacement of the horse and cart or bullock and dray with the motor car as an example of technological progress and why it should be embraced and not resisted. The things they forget to also mention is that this didn't happen overnight. It was a worldwide process that took decades and people didn't rsh out and buy a copy of what Karl Benz developed. They waited for fuel to become more widely available and cheaper to refine. They waited for car bodies to be more protective. They waited for engines that could move vehicles faster than walking pace safely. They waited for prices to come down, dealer networks to be established and repair and service to be easier to obtain.

Just as all the above is true, so it is with intermittent generation being pushed on to a population of people who rightly expect their electricity to be available at the flick of a switch. To accept anything less, regardless of the reason why, is a backward step.

Get ready for rotating black outs or worse a day or so without power at all every second day.

Funny thing about all those solar cells attached to roofs all over the place.
1/ they dont work at night time
2/ no where have I seen any figures that show they actually contribute to the Mwatts require each day to run every bodies hair dryers and computors. (the most essential electrical devices they tell me).

Brad may have some figures on that.
I suspect the roof top cells are contributing SFA to the total?

Its about time the coal fired stations were serviced and put back on line and run by one authority as it used to be not companies with names like Dodo and Origin making money by selling "plans" to each other. Its all just Pyramid selling in a disguise.

Fred.

Hi all,

A couple of questions re Solar Cells on household rooftops ......

If the Mains power is OFF, then the power generated by the Solar Cells cannot be fed back into the Grid ... power fed back into the Grid needs to be locked 'in-phase' with the Mains .... ???

Secondly, as most houses do not have batteries to store the solar power generated, it is lost ...

No Mains equals no contribution from rooftop solar ... Is this correct???