While we wait for the reason for a power pylon toppling over in Glorit, Kaipara Hills to be determined, there's no question that a mains grid with such a single point of failure affecting such a large geographical area is unacceptable.
On Thursday, the 220 kilovolt pylon fell over, leaving most of Northland without electricity supply for hours. Grid operator Transpower said Friday power has been restored to most customers in Northland, but as the supply is via a 110 kV line and local generation like Ngāwhā, customers north of Warkworth are asked to go easy on their electricity use during the peak hours of 6 am to 9 am and 5 pm to 9 pm.
That means using large appliances sparingly, only charging electric vehicles as needed, and turning off heating and lights in unused rooms.
There's no doubt the power outage is a kick in the guts Northland did not need, particularly after the closure of State Highway 1 over the Brynderwyns, and further up north, through Mangamuka Gorge.
For people living in the region, it was a long wait for basic services such as traffic lights to come back on, fuel pumps to work, and the hope their freezers wouldn't defrost and the contents spoil - again, as happened during the long outages following Cyclone Gabrielle.
Now, lobby group Sustainable Energy Association of New Zealand (SEANZ) is suggesting the government prioritises energy resilience, with batteries for energy storage at grid scale.
Energy resilience through batteries is not a new idea, with South Australia installing the Hornsdale Power Reserve in 2017, now upgraded to 150 megawatt/193.5 MWh, and the enormous Victorian Big Battery in Geelong, which supplies 300 MW/450 MWh.
WEL Networks this year commissioned a 35 MWh battery near the Huntly power station, which can supply the daily demand of 2000 homes. Meridian's Ruakākā battery should come online in December this year, with 100 MW/200 MWh, with a 120 MW solar power array near Marsden Point.
SEANZ represents mainly smaller players in the energy sector with companies that focus on solar generation, and the organisation said the government can introduce reward-flexibility pricing, allowing for homes and businesses to be reimbursed for their ability to support the grid.
This would include EVs, small and large scale solar and batteries, plus other energy systems being able to alter their behaviour to sell energy to the grid when needed, when supply falters.
Financing options for homes and businesses could also be implemented, SEANZ suggested.
Even if times are tough economically, losing power catastrophically as happened yesterday is costing everyone. If adding battery backup to the grid is workable technically, and doable fast, now might be a good time to get cracking with it.
A recent report by Bloomberg suggests Chinese battery makers are producing several times the marketable capacity needed in the world. They might just be open to deals to clear inventory.
28 Comments
Households with solar and battery storage is attractive. A Tesla obsessive I know is adamant that Powerwall 3 (coming next year) will be a game changer. Maybe more adamant than the rest of us but other brands are available.
Battery storage for distrbuted (read: domestic) generation would also take the stress off the ageing electricity network, which seems to be an argument against private citizens feeding back into the grid.
Except Tesla don't actually make their own batteries - https://evknowledge.com/tesla-battery-suppliers/ - meaning the cell supply may get disrupted because the suppliers are in China, Korea and Japan as well as the US. And there are better domestic solutions available.
I'm attempting to get Lavo in Australia to talk to me about the residential fuel cell solution they've developed as it is a vastly better solution than cell batteries for LDES.
Does the government need to get involved when Flick already offers exposure to wholesale pricing for residential customers with solar and/or batteries, and Octopus is offering a more fixed approach offering 20c/kw hfor peak hour export and 40c/kwh during the depths of winter?
yes i did, was there something i missed?
>the organisation said the government can introduce reward-flexibility pricing, allowing for homes and businesses to be reimbursed for their ability to support the grid.
why does the govenment need to get involved when the private sector is doing it already? Octopus also paying people not to use power during grid emergencies
So a renewable group is promoting batteries as the solution. How unusual. If they are so good, why does SA generate more power at sundown from their diesels than their batteries, even when spot prices are over $300. SA has domestic power prices about double nz. Why is that? Even Vic and NSW get next to nothing from their batteries.
I note that even after Ngawha came back up, there was no more contribution from grid solar that day.
If domestic solar and batteries are the panacea, it is a pretty stupid question. How many batteries would last to 9am? How would you deal with the mid-day overvoltage - SA is finding it is frying people's appliances?
According to the current Transmission Planning document, the lines to Northland are nowhere near rating, even with the 220kV out of service and just on the 110kV at n-1. The local distribution networks might be, but that is not the issue here.
South Australia had high power prices long before renewables. The causation is the other way around, high power prices attracted early renewable development, and renewables have brought down prices. They have very high transmission and distribution costs as peak demand vs average demand is way higher than any other australian states (and NZ) due to enormous summer air conditioning loads in heat waves.
No jack
Don't rewrite history to suit your beliefs.
Back about 20 years ago when Northern Station was still running, the prices weren't high. They had huge renewable development because the subsidies, particularly for rooftop solar. Then they needed to build all the diesel engines and the battery because wind and solar were so unreliable. SA has a smaller transmission and distribution network than the South Island, a comparable population. Their demand has dropped because of the deindustrialisation from industries closing down, in part because of high power prices. You can get the historical prices from AEMO files
The true demand curve is quite flat, a lot less peaky that NZ. The grid demand curve is very peaky because of behind the meter solar generation. Go here Australian Energy Market | Aneroid and not the bit "Rooftop solar does not feature in the AEMO dispatchable/SCADA data used for the rest of the sources. This data is merged for display here, however, in order to create a more complete representation of supply."
The average South Australian household uses 4950KWh a year. The second lowest of the states and usage per season is near flat.
https://www.finder.com.au/energy/how-much-energy-does-the-average-home-…
So I believe nothing you wrote was correct.
I heard the northland business association asking for government assistance for small businesses effected,( the claims of losses for cafes seemed high ).
Solar + battery subsidy for businesses to at least cover the eftpos, computers, lights and refrigeration would allow most to carry on to a degree.
My understanding is that there is only one Transpower line feed into the region. i.e. there is no resilience and redundancy in the system. One would assume Transpower had it in their plans to address this deficiency???
A second feed would probably be best ahead of battery storage?
That's cheap as.
"Covering dry year risks with batteries would involve spending $270b, equivalent to 87% of our annual GDP in 2019".
https://www.iccc.mfe.govt.nz/assets/PDF_Library/fe507ec27d/Final-ICCC-m….
Cost per KWh of batteries in 2019 was roughly 4x the cost per KWh of batteries in 2023. CATL expects to half battery prices from $130 per KWh in 2023 to $60 per KWh by the end of 2024. That would mean that in 2024 prices your 2019 is likely at least 800% of real cost. If the govt were to subsidise home batteries by 33% they would effectively achieve a 3x multiplier on the cost spent on batteries towards mitigating peak demand events. You don’t even need those batteries to feed back into the grid as they will be stripping load from the grid by supplying the houses they are located in!
The rate at which the price of batteries is dropping means that it won’t be long before battery storage prices drop to half or a quarter of what they are now. 2% of GDP for a mega power project is likely cheaper than the alternatives! Also if the government encouraged home owners to build the mega battery by paying for 33% of new battery installs then the government spend to achieve the battery capacity required would be 0.7% of GDP. Subsidised batteries would need to participate in a scheme where they would be used by the grid in the event of an anticipated peak that required them. Additionally GDP has grown since 2019 so the figures above will alm be over estimates as a % of GDP because they are based on 2019 GDP.
ko
your understanding is wrong. There is a double circuit 220kV line and a double circuit 110kV line between different substations in Auckland and Northland (Whangarei northwards). In Northland, the lines go to different switchyards..
From reports, they had both 220KV circuits out for maintenance and the 110 lines were running at about half load each.
When Muldoon was in, the national debate was framed around NZ having to much power and un-necessary power stations being put in for an aluminium smelter at Aramoana, Muldoons national economic strategy was the same as that of Iceland - generate excess electricity and have high resources per capita and trade off this. So much has changed since then, with poor economic planning and rampant uncontrolled immigration. Our new industry is selling off shares in our electricity sector to whoever wants to front up in NZ with a bit of cash from the third world and we have finally run out of shares in our electricity to sell. We adopted this strategy after running out of state owned assets to sell. One of the fundamentals of a first world country is reliable electricity yet, in NZ, when it gets cold in winter and everyone turns on the oven at 6-7pm mid-winter; we have power shortages and in some provincial areas power cuts. If we had stayed the course with Muldoon, and controlled our population - we could have ended up like Iceland. We could be promoting ourselves as a centre for the Internets data-storage and data wharehousing. A modern high tech first world technology oriented country based on excess electricity resources per capita.
It doesn't even need a tower to fall over. Even a trip of one line can cause the Inverters to fail. Look at the Odessa Texas incidents especially the 2022 when the plants that tripped on a similar fault in 2021 were supposed to have been fixed.
For problems they don't tell you about with DC to AC conversion, here is a relatively easy understanding blog post with deeper links:
Seems we have forgotten the lessons we should have learned from the cyclones just one year later.
Local community must be able to function in isolation, local generation or storage must be able to provide a few days of essential supplies.
The other issue is there is no way to restrict power use to those essential requirements.
Yes, but to be of use as a grid expansion alternative, the power companies need to know they can rely on the savings occurring when they need them.could take the form of an advanced form of ripple control. You cannot import power during a peak, you can get paid to export then. I'm not sure how well straight financial incentives would work in nz.
What about direct conversion of CH4 to electricity. Bloom's been doing it for a while. Here's a farmer converting cow manure to electricity in California. Natural offshore gas is probably more feasible. Bloom sells 10MW fuel cells! Still, it's probably not as cheap as just building more hydro & geothermal.
It's beginning to look like we are becoming ever-less capable of building and managing infrastructure networks of any description. I'm planning on building about 20kM out of town, but I'm also specifying the house to run off grid - and there are some disruptive storage technologies out there that don't involve lithium batteries - people keep talking about Tesla power walls for residential use, but they're expensive and the cells are actually made by CATL, BYD and others, using their own cell-design IP.
https://www.lavo.com.au/ water cracker/low pressure hydrogen storage as a hydride/fuel cell, as one unit, designed to run on solar and has far longer life than residential battery banks - company out of Sydney University and the product is shipping now.
However: this article is about mass storage
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/11/1072865/how-sodium-could-ch… - Sodium Ion batteries for virtual power stations.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/15/1091042/thermal-batteries-h… - Thermal batteries to do the same.
https://amogy.co/ - ammonia powered fuel cells - Ammonia is a good way to store Hydrogen as it's stable, the production and shipping technologies are well understood, and has good energy density. About to enter use in generation and heavy traction applications like ships. In a decade or so, after proof of practice and technology, why not use Manapouri and build a really big Ammonia plant in Southland and ship the resultant NH3 energy in a bottle to avoid having to rebuild a huge transmission network?
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