Hi willal, I got this figure from Professor Ty Christopher in an...

Hi willal, I got this figure from Professor Ty Christopher in an interview he did recently for the smh.

Fitz: Thank you for your time, professor. Let’s start, if we may, with your credentials to make comment on the new proposed wind farms off the Illawarra coast and the energy matters of the day. You’re an academic, a Wollongong local, and have also worked in the power industry?

TC: Yes, I’m now just shy of 40 years in the power industry, including 10 years on the executive of what is now Endeavour Energy, with the last five years as the chief engineer. I am now with the University of Wollongong, helping co-ordinate energy futures research, and I lead a collaboration of just under 100 academics from all disciplines across the university – social scientists, market economists, marine ecologists and engineers, all of varying backgrounds – to bring together those minds in a focused way on energy systems.

I say this from the point of view of being an engineer who’s delivered billions, literally billions of dollars worth of energy projects throughout my life.

with offshore wind, its capacity factor is around 50 to 55 per cent, as it is so much more windy offshore. So that’s why, over the years, globally, the wind farms are gravitating to the oceans. And in Australia, it makes even more sense because as a population, we mostly cling to the coast, and so you can put them offshore near where the energy is needed, with much shorter and less expensive transmission lines.

The capacity factor of coal in the Australian electricity market at the moment is 60 per cent, and it’s falling about 2½ per cent a year as the plants become less reliable – as your generation units and your boilers are not all able to be in service at the same time. Eraring coal power station, for example, has five individual generators of varying sizes, and they can’t all be operated flat out simultaneously. These aren’t my numbers. These are all available on the website of the Australian Energy Market Operator – which is the official energy market regulator. So we’re only a few years away from the ageing coal stations and new offshore wind farms having exactly the same capacity factor.

smh dot com dot au
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