Originally Posted By: turtlevette
I wonder why people don't think and plan. Engineers are usually pretty good and overbuild things. It's the bean counters that influence us to do just enough and no more. It would have been cheap to pour bigger pads expecting that there would be bigger turbines in the future.
Originally Posted By: CharlieBauer
There's been a logic fail in this thread re lifecycle costs.
While you would include mandatory decommissioning costs in the calculations for a current projects roi / viability, you wouldn't include anything to do with setting up the next project. That would form part of a future roi.
Whether you physically decide to do something that isn't necessary for the current project is another matter.
Depends on whether you want centralised planning or not.
When I started in the industry, it was in the State Owned and Run Electricity Commission, established in the '50s in response to regional councils having individual isolated, unreliable, and incompatible systems for the first half of the 20th century...nothing like CEGB, which were the powerhouses of the Industry in metallurgy and standards.
Although Govt owned, completely self funded, building new projects with cash...owned coal mines, every site had on site hydrogen generation, designed all for reliable efficient generation. Trained their own engineers (I was one of the last) and had their own metallurgists, which were hired out to other industries, as they were all cutting edge.
Every new site was planned 15-20 years ahead...lifecycle 25 years, 150,000 hours, with a 25 year "mid-life refit" to more modern blading, generator rewinds, and improved emissions control equipment. Two (I think) sites were earmarked for future nukes, and GTs were insta
New, more efficient baseload would be built a few years in advance of the capacity requirement, then be baseloaded while the older plant became load followers, and suffered the ravages of that until they became uneconomical to repair, then would be DDRed and either brownfielded or rehabilitated.
Early to mid '90s, the State Govt saw all that cash that "wasn't working for the taxpayer", sold the coal mines, broke the generators into three competing Gen Co's, made them sell their assets, and broke off the engineering and metallurgy branch (how I ended up Commissioning a fibreboard factory, and my peers building windfarms for private Cos, and power stations in other states and Vietnam).
Within a short period of time, the order of generation was reversed, the older gear run baseload, and the newer gear run up and down from min to max twice a day...thermal efficiency of the state dropped 3% (relative) in 24 months due to this.
Same time the new market was brought in...but unlike a traditional auction, the bidding system is reminiscent of some others that you may have seen previously.
You bid in, and the cheapest bid gets to generate to max capacity. If more power is needed, then the next cheapest bid is brought in...BUT, the cheapest gets paid the same rate as the most expensive generator in the pool...So if you bid in 1,000MW at $40 (4c/KWh), and my bid is $100 (10c/KWh), as soon as the state needs 1,001 MW, I get 10c/KWh for my single MW, and you get 10c/KWh for every one of your 1,000...it means that sometimes the thermals bid -ve to avoid the $100k of diesel for a restart, some days the price is zero, some days everyone gets $130/KWh for 5 -30 minutes.
The behaviours that this drives in the energy harvesters (wind, solar, riparian dam flows) is to build the cheapest that they can, bid it in at -$10/KWh, and get paid whatever the market rate happens to be at the time, harvesting dollars...their drivers are to get them in, get the grants, then pipe the money to the (offshore ???) accounts.
In spite of SHOZ's assertions, that IS what drives the wholesale costs lower to the point that thermal go broke. I know, I've seen it in real time watching the market screens the last two years in my current world, and lost one of "my" stations to rooftop solar a couple of years ago.
Ultimately, as the schedulable generation goes into mothballs, they make even more money on the peaks, install more capacity...aka the duck curve.
Problem is, that Frequency Control and Ancillary Services are now being managed by a smaller and smaller pool of traditional generation...last month, the regulator forced a gas plant to run "at a loss" to provide security (bet there was an under table payment there to keep the facts out of the media)...South Australia is installing 30% more wind, having lost their last coaler....they need to bite the bullet and install 4 times more wind, and storage.
It's a transition that needs a massive change...and really, centralised planning rather than subsidies here and there and a carbon tax.
