Why Do Renewables Matter for Grid Stability?

This week we discuss Australia's recent cancellation of wind
projects due to political changes and community opposition, the
complexities of grid interconnects, and the need for strategic
renewable energy planning. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our
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today. Now here's your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro,
and Rosemary Barnes.  Well, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy
Podcast. I am Allen Hall and I'm here with Rosemary Barnes, who's
fresh from. Sweden, she just traveled all around the world to
record this episode. Uh, Phil Totaro is out in California and Joel
Saxum is up in the cold north of Wisconsin. And we, we've been just
discussing off air. All the craziness has been happening in the
wind industry. And I, I have to admit, you know, I thought last
week was. Insane. Well, we just, uh, put it on steroids. So not
only are we canceling a lot of projects in the United States
currently, we're all, we're starting to be
cancel [00:01:00] them on Australia and over in
Queensland. The Queensland Deputy Premier, uh, has used his
ministerial powers to refuse planning approval for the moonlight
range when Farm Near Rock Hampton. Now I, and I'm sure I murdered
that name Rosemary, so please forgive me, but it was gonna have 88
turbines in about 450 megawatts of capacity, enough to power about
a quarter million homes in Australia and tied with, it's about 300
construction jobs and 10 permanent positions to make that wind farm
go. But there's was like a two month public consultation period
that happened. And during that consultation period, about 80 per
90% of the local residents, and when I say local residents are
about 150 local residents, uh, replied back and were concerned
about some of the, the known people that are gonna be there because
it's gonna like double the population, right. And 300 construction
workers in a, an area of 140 people, 150 people. Uh, and based
on [00:02:00] that boom, perhaps the, the project was
canceled. What is happening in Queensland that we need to
understand that projects just kinda get wiped away like that with
140 people, 150 people chiding in.  Rosemary Barnes: So
what's happened is that the Queensland government, the Queensland
State Government, it was labor for quite a while and they had, uh,
renewables targets and net zero targets and stuff like that. And
then, um, the government changed last year, so now there's a, a
liberal government, which means conservative in Australia. They're
in power and they wanted to change their planning regulations. But
what is a bit weird is that they wanna do it retroactively. So
they've changed the rules in April, and now they're going through
projects that have already been approved to see if they meet the
new rules rather than the rules at the time that they were
approved. But the weirdest thing is that I'm pretty sure that this
specific wind farm that they revoked, they were the ones to approve
it shortly after [00:03:00] they came into government.
They approved this wind farm and then they changed the rules a few
months later, and then they did a new round of community
consultation. Um. And they say that 85% of local residents were,
um, you know, in favor of reassessing. The issue is that now we're
at this stage of the energy transition where, you know, we're up
over 40% renewables across Australia. Um, that's primarily wind and
solar. We're getting to the point now where we kind of, you can't
just add things as they're convenient and easy. You have to get a
bit more strategic. Think about the whole energy system. I was
looking forward to that coming online because it will make the
whole system more robust and less, um, yeah, less fluctuations. You
know, it would really even things out quite a lot to have, um, a
lot of that Queensland wind in the mix. So it will be a, a real
shame and a, a problem for, uh, the whole of the Australian East
Coast Grid. If Queensland opts out of any more wind energy. 
Speaker 4: But once [00:04:00] they approve these
plans, it sort of, you have to think about the grid as an entity
and unplugging some capacity. There does have consequences further
down the transmission line in this case. Rosemary
Barnes: Yeah, but each, each state has responsibility if
they're interconnected, but each space, each state has
responsibility that they are gonna be okay regardless of what, they
can't control what the other states do. So. Every, um, every state
has to make sure that they are okay on their own, and they are,
they are planning for that, you know. Um, so yeah, like Victoria's
got, got a lot of plans for, for batteries and interconnectors and
stuff, and, uh. I mean, new South Wales is building renewable
energy zones. Everyone's got their own plans moving ahead. It
would've, it would've made the whole job easier. But you know, like
any interconnector, um, or yeah, interconnection between two, two
grids, you can't, like, you kind of, you plan for it, but you
can't, you have to also plan for the scenario where that
interconnection goes down or you, you know, [00:05:00]um,
whatever reason you might not get the energy that you plan on from
the other states. So. It is a tricky, tricky aspect I think of
planning.  Joel Saxum: Mir. Lemme ask you a question, and
this is popping into my head right now because it's basically
political games between parties and these kind of things. And
normally we don't talk politics on the show and we try to stay away
from that. And I'm going to, I'm gonna skirt it. But a couple
months ago I, when I was uh, down, I was invited to testify the
Texas Senate and I was uh, always amazed. The lack of technical
knowledge in the room, right? There's these people setting their
chain. They're, they're putting bills forward, they're putting
things, doing things that really affect the general populace, but
their knowledge base is coming from like their chief of staff and
their chief of staff is a political science major, and that person
is just googling whatever. They want to see in the bill, so they're
putting things out that just didn't make sense. Right. When it
comes to Australian [00:06:00] politics, is it the same
kind of stuff? Is it more of just like these political arguments
versus the technical ones, or how do they get information into
these decisions? Because this decision to me just seems like. It
seems like it's not based in, in scientific fact or scientific
method around anything. It's just like, oh, we don't like these
things. Let's get rid of 'em.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I
don't think it's trying to be based. They're not, they're not even
the, yeah, the government is not trying to say that it's based on
any kind of science or anything they're saying that it, you know,
they're mostly citing things that community consultation. Um, so
you know, it's more about people's feelings, which is, you know, a
valid, a valid thing. I was listening to a podcast about Texas,
actually, I'm halfway through it still, um, about what's going on
there with, um, some of their proposals to, you know, require
everybody to have a hundred percent firming for each individual
project. And I do think that Texas is trying really hard to, uh,
you know, like, um, to, to, you know, they've got, you've got a
pretty flexible system and allow, you
know, [00:07:00] um, uh. And allow companies to make
their own decisions about how, you know, what kind of energy
sources they're gonna have and how they're gonna make money and let
the market take care of it to a certain extent. And it's really
similar to the Australian electricity market as well. They're, um,
they are, they do share a common basis and some of the same people
worked on the, um, market design of both of them. But I feel like
Texas is trying as hard as possible to intervene to make sure that
none of the, you can get none of the benefits and all of the
disadvantages of a system like that. So. That is a bit
interesting,  Speaker 4: but at some point, Rosemary, and
maybe we'll talk about this after the break, maybe that's the thing
to do, is to talk about this after the break. It takes so long to
get projects approved because of the interconnect that this
engineers have to go back and look, make sure if this is going to
work, how do they connect this energy source into the grid? How do
they make it work in the United States? And I want, I want want to
get over the break here. I want to talk to Phil about this. We
spent all this time doing the engineering work and then all of a
sudden, poof, it's gone. What [00:08:00] is the point of
doing all the engineering work? Engineering? If at a moment's
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Today, Speaker 4: Phil, explain what is happening on the
interconnect and why it takes so long to get projects approved and
all the in supposedly because of engineering, it takes a long time
to understand what effect of adding a 500 megawatts will do to a
grid.