Faraday Grid?

Interesting Article here...

Bill Shorten’s plan to substantially increase the electrification of motor vehicles has suddenly brought into focus the looming grid crisis in our two major cities, Melbourne and Sydney.

It’s a crisis that has been concealed from the vast majority of the population and is unknown to most of the politicians.

The danger really came home to me when I met up with an affluent, long-time Melbourne acquaintance who lives in a street where there are six Tesla cars.

When they all try to charge their batteries at the same time, the power goes out in the street because the grid fails. Sometimes it fails when only three or four of them try to charge at the same time.

And so, I decided to delve deeper into what is causing this problem, how bad it is, and whether there is a solution. The good news is that in Melbourne, technology was developed to overcome the crisis, but the politicians in the southern capital were simply besotted by green inner city votes and couldn’t be bothered listening. Nor would those in New South Wales. So the technology went to Edinburgh - but more of that later.

Along with most developed countries, Australia constructed a magnificent power grid, but it was based on centralised power generation that was regular and predictable. It has served the nation incredibly well.

But then we became concerned at carbon emissions, so we decided to increase the proportion of renewable power generation feeding the grid. We poured this new power into a grid that was simply not designed to cope with new generation sources. Our power grid is designed to transit predictable regular waves of power through its wires and transformers.

But suddenly we began generating large amounts of power from different directions. And it was power that was intermittent and based on the less predictable sources like wind and sunshine.

In many cases, power being generated in our homes and exported to the grid simply could not find its way through.

The most obvious solution is to install additional wires to give the grid more capacity. But that will have limited impact because when power comes from different directions and is intermittent, instead of being regular waves of electrons, the electrons become very choppy. When these choppy electron flows hit the transformers, they greatly increase the temperature. To my horror I discovered that cities like Melbourne and Sydney are in danger of either experiencing explosions or even a complete collapse of the system.

A complete collapse would require unforeseen triggers but would leave these giants cities not only without power, but without water, food and transportation. Research shows that after three days of no water, power, food or transportation there is a social break down.

Such a situation may be triggered this year, next year or maybe not for many years but the danger is ever present.

If we continue to pump intermittent power into the system and then add more electric cars a complete breakdown is almost a certainty. In some ways Bill Shorten has done us a favour by setting out his plan for greater electrical vehicles.

It sent me hunting around the world to see whether other countries whose politicians might not have been as stupid as those in Victoria and New South Wales and actually faced up to the fact that they had created a grid problem. And because other countries were honest and admitted that renewables create grid difficulties, they might also have found an answer.

There may be a number of solutions but the only one I found was the so-called Faraday Grid developed a team of Australians led by Andrew Scobie. I found it incredible that it was developed in Melbourne, which is the city facing our deepest crisis. Andrew and his team found no interest in their inventions in Australia because we didn’t even recognise that we had a problem.

Most of the power grid still uses infrastructure designed for centralised generation. Picture: Justin Kennedy

So, three years ago he and his people went to Edinburgh, where they were able to attract a global team of highly skilled power researchers to add to the work done in Melbourne, and developed the so called Faraday Grid.

This new grid system had its origins in the findings of a whole series of early electricity pioneers including Coulomb, Oersted, Ampere, Maxwell and, of course, Faraday.

In essence the Faraday Grid transforms existing grids by installing systems that stabilise the whole electricity grid pattern and enable the existing wires to handle both intermittent power and power from different sources.

Suddenly the grid, instead of simply being a one-way traffic system, can handle different power sources coming from different directions. The Faraday installations replace the current transformers which, as it turns out, are now being replaced more frequently because they were never designed for the power pattern that is currently running through them.

The Faraday Grid installations substantially increase the amount of power the existing wires can handle, and so will enable at least some electrification of cars - possibly enough to satisfy Bill Shorten’s targets. In London they have been researching the Faraday Grid for some years and are satisfied it works, because they’re now rolling it out.

Similarly, Tokyo is preparing to roll out the technology, along with parts of America and Italy.

The global power grid is arguably the world’s biggest infrastructure and it is now set to be transformed. Australia, having turned its back on its own technology, must now wait in the global queue.

But to even get in the queue our Victorian and New South Wales governments need to look beyond gaining green votes. And we need the new Australian government - from whichever party it comes - to get tough with them.

And while we wait in the Faraday Grid queue (or find some other solution) we have to hope the whole system does not bust apart.