The sudden winter black out problem in Texas is leading many American journalists to make comments like this:
which I think is pretty applicable to my feelings about understanding Australia's electricity grid/power generation issues too.
Back when I were a lad, I think it was all under direct government control, and if you had too many blackouts, you knew who to blame.
It's rare to see any summary as to when and how that all started to change. In the 1980's, was it?
The whole electricity market thing with spot prices, etc, just always seems too complicated to understand fully, given that it is tied up with grid issues too.
Anyway, back to Texas.
The true story seems to simply be that that State never expected wind to generate much power for an event like this, but the back up from natural gas in particular just hasn't been there.
I have read many times that Texas didn't bother with buying winterised wind turbines, like other, colder, states do; but it remains unclear as to what difference that would have made to this particular crisis anyway.
As for my wish that electricity was just a public utility like it used to be: I do qualify that by noting that it always seems to me that we had a hell of a lot more blackouts in the suburbs of Brisbane when I was a child than we get now. They do seem really rare to me over the last 20 or 30 years. So maybe the more complicated system does something right.
1 comment:
You make a sound argument. I tend to agree. In fact I do agree. They should be able to cut costs with subcontracting. But they ought not give the business and the responsibility away. Particularly since we need to be able to keep the electricity going at all times under conditions of full scale war. If we can do that and the enemy cannot then we will do fine.
Post a Comment