Giving it the gas [updated]

 

NZ Electricity Generation, 8:10am to 11:20am, 13 June 2024.
Source: NZ Interactive Electricity Grid by @morganfrnchstgg

Today's a normal kind of cloudy, breezy winter day around the motu (as they say).

As you were enjoying your breakfast toast and coffee this morning, at today's first peak-power time, the electricity grid was supplied with 82% renewable power. Good stuff, right! 

As you can see above (and I've enlarged it for you just below), the bulk of that renewable power came from hydro — almost two-thirds — with a decent amount (17%) from geothermal. Good stuff. Thank you. But can you see the anaemic offering from the other two renewable contributors, solar and wind? Just 129MW from the country's wind farms — contributing just 2% to your breakfast toaster — and from solar just a risible 1.3MW. Virtually zero percent.

And that's a normal morning.  (As we were reminded by Transpower on May 10th, we're so close to being underpowered here that the gap between peak production and consumption on still, cloudy days is dangerously small.) If we zoom out to see the contribution of New Zealand's largest solar "farm" up in Kaitaia over the last seven days, even it's useful-but-insubstantial peak of 20MW is only achieved momentarily in the middle of the day, offering little help for morning or evening peak.  Sure, more solar "farms" are planned, but they all have that same problem. And they all take time to get going. Lots of time.

But what about wind? Sure, this morning it only gave the grid a measly 2%. But on other mornings (Monday for example, see below) wind "farms" put in around 17% of the power that made your shower hot and your kettle boil.

But — and here's the big but — that wind doesn't blow all the time. If we zoom out again to the last seven days (below) we see that the contribution of New Zealand's largest wind farm, just outside Palmerston North, is literally up and down. from zero to 150MW (and back again, see that drop-off on Monday afternoon) in the time it takes to yell "turn that bloody heater on!"

In fairly simple terms, that's why we need gas. Even when the wind does blow and the sun still shines, it's gas that helps make up that sizeable difference. Just one plant, Todd Generation's Junction Road plant running on Taranaki gas produces almost as much peak power as the windmills do on the Tararuas, and at times that the windmills don't, and can't. It's almost like the two are symbiotic. (Just for fun, compare the two graphs above and below, and with the peak morning and evening times at which we need to cook.

Maybe that's why we say, "now we're cooking with gas!"

Even at Huntly — which uses both gas (light brown below) and Indonesian coal(because we're no longer able to produce our own) — and which  produces up to a massive peak of 850MW, you can see it keeping your kettle on the boil even when the wind isn't blowing.

This is why commentators like Alex Epstein describe unreliable wind and solar as "parasitic" on reliable power. And not cheap. Essentially to rely on wind and solar, we need generators to build enough capacity — in the form of power that's easily turned on and off — so that when wind don't blow and sun don't shine the lights can still be kept on. Which essentially means that the more wind and solar are built, exactly the same capacity of reliable power needs to be built to double that, so it can come on the field as a reserve.

But we can't build dams any more — too expensive, takes too damn long under the RMA, and too many objections. And batteries, while promising, still only contribute a maximum of 13MW here, and take oodles of new mining to produce. (And the more unreliables you have, the more expensive battery power would be necessary, one reason this is still is not being tried anywhere.)

So what does that leave? Answer: gas. If you want your breakfast sausages, you need this place to be be cooking – or at least producing power — with gas.

Sure, good old Chloe Swarbrick told the nation on Monday that Australia does all this with domestic solar panels. She didn't tell you however that the price of power in Australia has gone through the roof those solar panels are on. Or how often Victoria, say, suffers brownouts. Or how small a proportion of the grid those panels produce even at peak time. (All of Australia's solar panels, domestic and commercial, contribute just 12% of the grid's power and, like here, need still non-existent battery power and reliable backup generation of the same capacity when they're not producing.) But in any case, New Zealand is not that sunburnt land — not even as sunburnt as Victoria.. And no amount of solar panels can fill the gap when the sun don't shine.

For that, and for some time to come, we still need gas.

(NB: These graphs come from the really neat interactive electricity grid charts made possible by Morgan French-Stagg. Thank you sir.)

UPDATE: The UK has noticed the results of Jacinda Ardern's 'energy suicide note' of banning gas exploration, and warns its politicians not to contemplate the same there. The Telegraph writes:

[UK Labour leader] Keir Starmer is standing by a pledge to ban new drilling in the North Sea, despite New Zealand abandoning a similar policy amid blackout fears. [UK] Labour’s manifesto, due out on Thursday, will feature a pledge to block all new licensing for oil and gas as one of its key energy policies. It follows last weekend’s announcement that New Zealand’s government was lifting a ban on new oil and gas exploration.
    The ban was announced by former prime minister Jacinda Ardern in 2018. “The world has moved on from fossil fuels,” Ardern proclaimed at the time. New Zealand’s trailblazing policy, which was the first of its kind, became a key inspiration for [the UK] Labour Party’s own plan. However, some in the party are now questioning the commitment after New Zealand resources minister Shane Jones last weekend denounced its own ban as a disaster – and revoked it. It followed three years of rising energy prices that have left 110,000 households unable to warm their homes, 19pc of households struggling with bills and 40,000 of them having their power cut off due to unpaid bills, according to Consumer NZ.
    Since April the situation has further deteriorated: Transpower, the equivalent of our National Grid, warned that the nation was at high risk of blackouts. New Zealand’s shift to renewables meant it no longer had the generating power to keep the lights on during the cold spells that mark the Antipodean winter, said Transpower, as it begged consumers to cut their electricity consumption.
    The threat to New Zealand’s energy security comes despite the fact that geologists have discovered billions of cubic metres of natural gas in the seabeds around the country.
    Sean Rush, a leading New Zealand barrister specialising in petroleum licensing law and climate litigation, called the oil and gas ban “economic vandalism at its worst in exchange for virtue signalling at its finest”.... [Shane] Jones said last week: “Natural gas is critical to keeping our lights on and our economy running, especially during peak electricity demand and when generation dips because of more intermittent sources like wind, solar and hydro.” ...
    

Jenny Stanning, director of external affairs at OEUK, says exploration is essential to simply slowing the decline in output. “The New Zealand experience shows how important it is for countries to carefully manage energy transition and energy security. We will need oil and gas for decades to come so it makes sense to back our own industry rather than ramping up imports from abroad.” ... Russell Borthwick, chief executive of Aberdeen & Grampian Chamber of Commerce – the region that lies at the heart of the UK offshore industry – says the UK needs a managed and nuanced transition to low carbon energy. ... New Zealand’s experience suggests much of the UK industry would not survive a ban on new drilling.
    “Back in 2018, at the time of the ban, there were 20 international and five local companies engaged in exploration and production in New Zealand,” says John Carnegie, chief executive of Energy Resources Aotearoa, the local industry trade body. “Since then, exploration has fallen dramatically. We only have nine remaining investors, seven international and two local. The rest have left.” ...

Robin Allan, chairman of Brindex, which represents the UK’s independent offshore companies, says: “New Zealand’s ban was a politically motivated decision which ignored data on oil and gas demand, the advantages of domestic production and a realistic pace of decarbonisation. The [UK] Labour Party should see what is happening in front of their eyes in another island nation which has already implemented a poorly reasoned policy – and think again.” [Hat tip Ele Ludemann]