Of base load...
One of the most important part of electricity supply is hardly discussed... We've all heard about pollies arguing about "base-load" yet the most important part of this is the levelling of the said base-load. It has been calculated by some boffins that there is enough rain and sunshine falling on most average home-area to power the said home with renewable energy. So where is the problem for not doing so?

One of the main difficulties is not so much to collect the energy so freely supplied but to store it and MANAGE it... Appliances are designed to take a range of voltage and frequencies from the electrical supplies. Say an Aussie washing machine might be able to operate at between 210 and 250 volts without much hassle. But should the supply go above 260 or below 210 it might throw a tantrum. Our fuse boxes are designed to detect overloads and protect our systems — especially electronics — from such surges, or changes, in power supply. Remember when we could note the power supply was being upped, our old style globes would instantly seem to go brighter. The new low energy blithers do not react so strongly to change but a power surge might make them go off.

The newfangled power surge "fuses" (they are switchers, not fuses anymore) at the mains power-board are designed to cut off within milliseconds of a surge as well as to remove any residual current in the lines. A surge can happen locally in a circuit should there be a "short-circuit" in a loop such as two wires touching before being used in an appliance.

The diagram above was thus lacking one essential part: An electrical supply arrangement in any country demands a CONTROL of the supply parameters — in the base-load. In the USA, the supply is still on 110 Volts A/C. In most modern countries, the supply is around 220/240 Volts A/C . The supply inside cars is more than likely to be 12 Volts D/C.

Each of these systems need CONTROLS. In a complex supply of electricity say in England or Australia, power stations are "switched on and off" according to public and industrial demand of electricity. Who does not remember this doco on how "power switchers" are well tuned to TV programming for example... In England at the end of each Eastenders program, switchers in the control rooms were at the ready to expect a surge in demand, a surge that would instantly lower the voltage. In order to remedy this, the switchers had to quickly place a power station back online as many people turned their kettles on for a cup of tea.

Remember the Northeast Blackout of 2003...
According to the New York Independent System Operator (or NYISO)—the ISO responsible for managing the New York state power grid— a 3,500 MW power surge (towards Ontario) affected the transmission grid at 4:10:39 p.m. EDT.[3] From then through about 4:40 p.m. EDT, outages were reported in Cleveland, Akron, Toledo, New York City, Baltimore, Buffalo, Rochester, Binghamton, Albany, Detroit, and parts of New Jersey, including the city of Newark. This was followed by other areas initially unaffected, including all of New York City, portions of southern New York state, New Jersey, Vermont, Connecticut, and most of Ontario, Canada.[4] Eventually a large, somewhat triangular area bounded by Lansing, Michigan, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, the shore of James Bay, Ottawa, New York, and Toledo was left without power. According to the official analysis of the blackout prepared by the US and Canadian governments, more than 508 generating units at 265 power plants shut down during the outage. In the minutes before the event, the NYISO-managed power system was carrying 28,700 MW of load. At the height of the outage, the load had dropped to 5,716 MW, a loss of 80%.[3]

Demand on the grid supply always varies. Thus the switchers of power supply are always at the ready to place or remove power stations from the supply grid. This switching can be also be done by computer but often computers are designed to protect the system and won't be able to make a fine gut-instinct correction when needed and will rather shut down the entire grid, in a domino effect as seen in the Northeast blackout.

When renewable electricity supplies are online, these are more difficult to shut down or divert.

A power station that is placed off-line can instantly let some steam off, arrest or slow the turbines, turn the supply of air to the furnaces and basically go in an idle mode. Same with nuclear power stations. They can let steam off, remove the control rods quickly and become idling or work at the level that is demanded by the grid.

Renewable energy coming from solar panels and wind turbine can take many more minutes to be diverted. Some systems have been trialed to transform the energy from wind farms into heat that is dispersed into the atmosphere or stored away, but the output power cannot be instantly stopped without major troubles. It takes a while to "feather" the props from the windmills. Solar panels are another kettle of fish.

Even if the renewable energy supply can be more that enough the power we need, trials have been set up in order to be able to know how to control the "base-load" from renewables. These have shown that a certain amount (50 per cent) of "carbon/nuclear energy supply" is still needed online. This is quite perverse... Basically it has been shown that about 50 per cent of the supply needs to be of the "instantly controllable kind". Like making a diesel/electric generator provide less electricity to balance off a lesser load demand.

Thus we need to invest and invent new ways to control the base-load — not so much because the renewable cannot supply enough energy — they can — but their electrical supply varies in a far too greater range for a stable controllable base-load.
For example, on the "new Inventors" TV program on ABC, a fellow came up with a system that shuts down the energy output from a small array of solar panels. One of the judges was astonished this had not be made compulsory by government. Should the grid shut down (say an emergency with power lines down) a solar panel system would still be feeding to the grid or at least to the house meter(s). One has to realise that say a six solar panel system can provide enough electrical output to kill a (or two or three) person instantly. Should emergency services not be aware of the panels still outputting electricity people could get killed say by touching the wires, or by just servicing the unit.

Solar panels provide D/C. Thus their output needs to go to an inverter in order for the electricity generated be fed back into the grid. Inverters can be a source of grief, when the supply to them is not too well regulated. Inverters on a typical solar panel system is around 4 kilowatts. Bigger inverters can become cumbersome and some large ones have been known to explode.
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In conclusion, as we are going to place a tax on carbon (as we should), and are going to install more renewable energy online, we need to do several things:
— create more compact smaller "home-sized" renewable energy units with battery storage facility.
     (off grid energy, as in small is beautiful). Make each home as independent as possible.
— consume less energy. Be thrifty and smart.
— invent ways to instantly divert energy (while minimising waste) from renewable supplies in order to manage the grid base-load efficiently with less and less need for 'carbon/nuclear" base load equaliser. This is a problem for engineers. Smart electrical engineers, scientists and inventors. Politicians should recognise this brief and be direct about it. I am not expecting Mr Abbott to understand any of this though...
— invention of new batteries should be a prime area of research. Large alkaline batteries should be the way to go — I have an idea that batteries could use plants sap such as that of agaves (highly alkaline) for example...
— the manufacturing of these ingredients should provide jobs that could be lost from carbon intensive industries being phased down.
— existing inventions that should be made more popular are solar ovens as used in China.
— another invention should be the solar fridge — using a ceramic solar heated core instead of a kerosene heated candle. The refrigeration unit should be made to produce as much cold as it could during the sunlight of the day while transferring cold say to a second unit where the temperature would be controlled as that inside a normal fridge — enough for day and night use...
— like the Chinese (and my grand father Opa Adolph), we should encourage the recycle of human wastes onsite by capturing the methane and composting for gardening...
— Encourage community gardens, including roof-top gardens, as well as large water tanks on roofs or on towers designed to provide a base-load electric supply for a singular home, via a small water turbine, all this in new home developments.
— estimates most difference of potentials available in the environment and use them without destroying them or adding to the carbon equation.
— make sure that any new development is either sustainable or can provide power to already existing set up. For example, the new Barangaroo development should provide all its own electricity supply as well as provide some for the city of Sydney.
— in regard to wind mills output control, another idea that could be considered is the type of clutch that was used in automatic Hillmans in the early 1960s. The early millers had a rudimentary clutch system that would engage the wheat- or whatever-grain grinding-wheel into the spinning wind-mill... In the Hillmans of the 1960s, the clutch was basically a strong electromagnet that was powered by the battery/generator (oh for an alternator in those days!) and disengaged automatically when automatically changing gears. The system was cumbersome as most of the automation was synchronised by unruly levers rather than electronic computer. The very powerful clutch was composed of three main elements: a flying wheel attached to the engine inside an electromagnet that spun — or not — according to the status and, floating between the two, was a fine steel (rust?) powder. When the clutch was on, the steel powder would lock the electromagnet to the flywheel and when the clutch was off, the steel powder was loose. Piece of cake.

All these proposals are feasible... and would be cost effective in a jiffy. Nor is this list limited to those items... But rather than spend money and time on developing new ways to kill each other (which I admit here is a nasty way that helps population reduction), we could also become more aware of other population control without tears...

This article was written by Gus, from his own reseach on the subject after a few chats with people in the know and from Gus' own knowledge of many industrial technologies...