Things That Go Slump in the Night
Rafe Champion
Severe wind droughts are prolonged spells with next to no wind across continental areas. They also exist offshore as any sailor who has been becalmed knows full well. Wind droughts will kill the green-power fantasy, and they have the potential to deal a massive blow to our lifestyle, depending as we do on abundant, reliable and affordable power. While meteorologists don’t mention them, independent Australian observers discovered wind droughts over a decade ago but nobody took any notice. We may pay a bitter price for this neglect.
Serious questions have to be asked about the silence of meteorologists on wind droughts. At the same time the responsible authorities should be called to account for their failure to check the wind supply before connecting intermittent energy to the grid.
Why wind won’t work
Wind and solar cannot provide reliable power at grid-scale and the reason is as simple as ABC: Input to the grid must continuously match the demand, and the continuity of wind and solar input fails on nights with little or no wind.
- The amount of storage required to bridge the gaps is not feasible or affordable.
Supporters of the transition to intermittent energy invoke a “holy trinity” of strategies to ride through wind drought. These are (1) long-distance transmission lines to shift power from areas of plenty to drought zones, (2) pumped hydro storage, and (3) battery storage.
Long distance transmission lines will not help because wind droughts can extend across the whole of SE Australia. On the other side of the world they have been known to extend across all of western Europe.
Pumped hydro at the scale required appears to be out of the question. There is no substantial pumped hydro scheme in the world that runs on wind and solar power alone.
As for batteries, we read practically every day that more “big batteries” are coming but “big” is an abuse of language in this context because the capacity of even the biggest batteries, like the 1.4GWh Waratah Super Battery in NSW, is negligible compared with the power required in a single night in the grid. That is in the order of 300GWh, while the total capacity of all the battery projects in the pipeline amount to some 60GWh and the batteries at work in the system at present can deliver only 3GWh.
The plan devised by the market operator (AEMO) calls for a ninefold increase in the amount of installed wind and solar capacity, but all that capacity will deliver a pitifully small amount of power on nights with little or no wind. Such nights are the limiting factor for the whole system like the slowest ship in a convoy or weakest link in a chain.
The threat of wind droughts
Subsidised and mandated intermittent energy providers drive out conventional power plants because they can make money when the market price is too low for conventional providers to run profitably. The unreliables can displace conventional power but they can’t replace it! Eventually there will not be enough reliable (dispatchable) power to meet 100 per cent of the demand. At that point, the power supply will be compromised whenever the wind is low overnight.
The day of reckoning has been delayed by the modest increase in demand in recent years due to creeping deindustrialization — directly caused by the increasing cost of power. As the coal generating capacity runs down, the pinch will first occur for a few hours at the dinnertime peak of demand. That can be met using the deceptively named Reliability and Emergency Reserve Trader Scheme (RETS). This sounds like a reserve supply, but it functions by diverting power from major users (with compensation) to protect the integrity of the grid and avoid inconvenience for the community at large. In other words, industrial production stops so he the community’s lights stay on!
If the RETS diversions of supply is not enough, rolling blackouts can be organized to handle the shortfall. As the process goes on, there will eventually not be enough conventional power to service the base load, the minimum that is required day and night. At that point, whenever the wind is low overnight there will be blackouts, and we will officially achieve the status of a Third World country.
Since 2012, 12 coal power stations have closed in South-Eastern Australia, taking out some 8GW of capacity, which in total is down to 22GW. We are now only one coal station closure away from a power crisis whenever the wind is low overnight. The problem surfaced in June 2022 when outages in some coal stations created a crisis that was met by using gas, which spiked the price of gas, and hence the wholesale price of power.
This was seen as a problem with the price of gas, to be solved by government intervention and a price cap. It should have been seen as an early warning of what was coming if the capacity of coal power continued to run down. Gas is too expensive to be used outside peak periods. In addition, there are serious concerns about the availability of gas going forward.
Energy realists know that we will have to burn coal for many years, yet the state of Victoria has ambitious plans to get rid of coal while they also have confidential deals with two power stations to maintain supply. Similarly the biggest coal plant in the country, Eraring in NSW, will continue with publicly funded life support beyond the scheduled closing date next year.
A worldwide menace
It is not entirely facetious to suggest that wind droughts could undermine Western civilization, or at least the way of life that depends on a continuous supply of affordable electric power. As noted above, as wind and solar power displace reliable, conventional coal-fired power, a time will come when there is not enough conventional power to meet the demand. ie., when the sun and wind are off duty. Germany and Great Britain have reached that point, and they survive with the help of imported power, while they shed power-intensive industries. In short, they bet the farm on wind power and lost.
The same problem is looming wherever net zero strategies are in place. Texas had a critical situation in Feb 2021 although in that instance the wind and solar enthusiasts could point out that the gas system was also disrupted by the cold conditions. Subsequently the gas supply has been winterized to the standard of the colder northern states so it will perform in future. In contrast, there is nothing people can do to prevent windless nights.
The power authorities in some 19 US states have signalled there will be grave problems with reliability in the power supply in as little as three or four years if EPA regulations and the incentives to deliver unreliable wind and solar power continue to drive out fossil fuel.
To meteorologists, silence is golden
Questions have to be asked about the failure of the meteorologist to issue wind drought warnings which could and should have averted the connection of subsidised intermittent energy to the grid.
Meteorologists are the official custodians of weather records around the world but the customary metric for wind resources is the average wind velocity which of course hides both the low and the high points, each of which are unsuitable for power generation from wind turbines. Official meteorological records are still not reporting low wind periods in the way that they report every other kind of extreme weather.
Wind droughts had a low profile after the doldrums in sub-tropical latitudes ceased to be a concern when steamers replaced ships under sail. Even the prolonged European Dunkelflautes (still and dark periods) did not arouse attention until they precipitated the crisis in the power supply in 2021, when the cost of power in Britain and Germany surged, even before the war in Ukraine further aggravated the situation. An entry for Dunkelflautes only appeared in Wikipedia in October 2020 although mariners at sea must have known them from time immemorial and millers on land must have experienced them for centuries. H G Wells wrote in 1901 that windmills were not suitable for pumping water from coal mines because “a gang might sit at a pithead for a month, whistling for a gale.”
Apparently some people were aware of wind droughts a hundred years ago and it remains to be seen how the meteorologists explain their silence on the matter. As for offshore wind developments, perhaps those who approve such projects should read Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.
Australians led the world in wind-watching. Over a decade ago, Anton Lang and the Paul Miskelly clearly identified the danger of wind droughts in Australia, but their work escaped the attention of the responsible authorities and is still virtually unknown. They used the AEMO records of continuous wind power generation to decisively refute the view that Australia has superb wind resources, which had been accepted in official circles, based on the average wind speeds reported by the local Bureau of Meteorology and the conclusions of numerous academic studies. The landmark paper appeared here in 2012.
Duringcalendar year 2010 the total wind output across the grid fell rapidly to zero or near zero on 109 occasions in the year. These low wind periods (not yet called wind droughts) occurred when high-pressure systems fell over most of the continent, moving from west to east as shown on the weather maps displayed in the newspaper and TV weather reports.
In 2010 there were only 23 wind farms and less than 2GW of installed capacity. Hopes were high that the supply would become more reliable as sites became more numerous and widespread. This is not happening, with over 11GW installed, and the records show that prolonged wind droughts still occur across SE Australia, most recently for three days in August 2023.
Lang was an RAAF electrician in 2008, when he first started to report his observations on a private blog. His posts are still appearing regularly and there are now several thousand posts on various aspects of the performance of the wind fleet and the other sources of power as well. This is a remarkable achievement and it must be one of the most sustained, singlehanded, unfunded research projects on record.
ITS ALL OVER FOR WIND AND SOLAR ON THE GRID
Wind droughts happen all over the world and they are a fatal impediment to the net zero program.
Given the failure of the official meteorologists to issue warnings, there is a need for two high-level inquires. One should aim to discover why the officials never warned the public or the responsible authorities about the fatal threat to the power supply. Was it incompetence, negligence or something else? That inquiry should be replicated in all the countries with official meteorological offices and its should extend to the World Meteorological Organizer that was a foundation member of the climate alarmists club. The other inquiry in Australia would aim to identify the agencies that failed to conduct due diligence on the wind supply before wind and solar power were allowed to connect to the grid. Imagine building the infrastructure for a massive irrigation project without an exhaustive study of the water supply, including all the available rainfall records.
In the absence of due diligence, tens of billions of dollars have been added to the national debt to allow subsidised and mandated intermittent energy to enfeeble the grid in one of the most costly policy blunders in peacetime. In return for the expense we have got less reliable and more expensive energy, causing domestic hardship and a great deal of unrecorded deindustrialisation. At the same time there has been massive environmental damage and division in regional communities. In short, there has been a colossal negative return with an enormous threat to the nation’s security and prosperity.
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