Siso

I find you need to look at a lot of news sites and sort the wheat from the chaff including Sky and the abc

Uranium is also available in seawater. More of it as rivers erode the earth and dump it in the sea. technology exists to extract it.

Except we need to drive 80km to use public transport in my case. Have been in rural Europe a couple of times in the last few years, pretty well public transport on any sealed road, even in the back blocks. Trains as well between city's for very reasonable prices. A$58 Warsaw to Berlin. Makes the whole comparing the price of petrol between Europe and Australia like comparing apples and oranges. Same with CO2 emissions when it comes to transport.

I was thinking of a small generator powered by a 13 hp honda so probably on 5 KVA. while they seem heave, so are the batterys Ianthe car making the whole car heavy so 100kg would be a smaller % than it would be in an IC car. It would only be for a couple of times a year and I was talking about relatively flat going like heading to Alice Springs from Adelaide.

The inverter is used for speed control. They use pulse width modulation to control the amount of current that goes into the motor. uses a square wave. I think the speed control on cordless power tool use the same system. Something that would be cool would be a towbar mount like they do for motorbikes for a 10KW generator to run while you are driving to extend your range for that 1 or 2 time a year when you need it. Could use it for blackouts or your business in other times of the year. 10kW running for 3 hours would give an extra 100 km plus?

Not to sure. Would depend on max demand of inverter. Looks as if motors in a tesla may be liquid cooled as well. Quick google found this info. https://www.evcreate.com/using-tesla-thermal-management-system-parts/ . Looks like the Pipestral electric plane also has liquid cooling for the inverter. WTG's also have large radiators for converter cooling.

There is a cooling system for the inverter

It seems the governments all over the world are pushing for universal EV use almost immediately. This is what I am saying. By all means do a transition but we need to do it at a pace that is not going to cause the country to go broke and cause undue hardship for its citizens. There is all this pressure(82% 2030, 100% 2050) which is costing a lot of money and making it hard for people to maintain an acceptable way of life. By the way, there is no way we will be at 82% in less than 5 years.

We are rushing, 82% by 2030. We need to remember the first 30% is extremely easy. Just throw it on the grid, still enough inertia to compensate for it, all the other generators just need to wind back a little to accommodate it. Now we are getting up a bit it is going to get a lot harder, a lot more expensive. We need storage syn cons, transmission. There is a lot more that happens to get electricity to the consumer than you would think. It is a very finely balanced machine with lots of components. Bluescope is also asking for a hand out from the government to help. Tasmania is importing 447MW at the moment(https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/data-nem/data-dashboard-nem), so to say they are 100%renewable is a bit misleading. Same as the ACT saying they are 100% renewable when they get/buy some of that from Hornesdale in SA while being next to all the thermal generation in NSW. SA than goes to say it is 70 something % renewables, double dipping the same energy. You are right about the other country's. If they all tried to clean up their grids in a steady sustainable way, we all would make quite a contribution, but it doesn't seem to be happening. We are cutting of our noses to spite our faces. Like I said, transition by all means, but do it so the poorer in the community don't suffer. The battery subsidy is a direct tax on the people that can't afford batterys and the way industry is happening we are going to have more people unemployed and those of us that can afford it are going to pay more tax to help them.

My take is if we try to go as fast as we are with a transition, power is going to get really expensive. More people are going to make big decisions whether they eat or keep warm at night. Blue scope steel CEO has commented on the power prices in Australia. There goes more jobs for people to make that decision. By all means transition away to a more green grid but for crying out load, do it sustainably. A 1.5% of global emissions, what we do here is going to make no difference, especially with China and India's emissions still rising. You can't blame them as they are developing their economy's like every other first world country has. As we know China are installing a lot of renewables and nuclear and are seriously developing new nuclear. Looks like a heap of solar tripped off first after a transformer blew in spain. https://wattclarity.com.au/articles/2025/06/18june-ree-report-spanishblackout/ By the way, I like electric cars a lot and would own one if I was a bit closer to Adelaide. If I was within 80km of the city it would be a no brainer. Just on them as charging stations increase, a lot of work is going to be needed with suppling them. If you have a 10 place 100KW station, That is a MW of demand which means a large cable to feed it and possibly a transformer. I realise the power output of the charger can be dialed down as load increases but are people going to accept that when they thought there car would be charged in half an hour , it is actually going to take 2.

Having worked for a renewable company for over 10 years and now working at a synchronous plant I know a bit but some people aren't interested in information they may not agree with.

But not reliable though. ho hum

So we make it someone else's problem. a bit selfish and we have better environmental and HSE practices than some other country's that supply us as well.

we probably could know if we had the will to develop our own resources.

some figures on what it would take to power a large tractor on batterys

The early turbines where connected to the grid directly but had slippage like an induction motor. When they went faster than synchronous they were a generator, when they went slower they were a motor. some of the smaller ones even had a motor mode. The newer turbines are full inverter like your home solar panels. The GT we have at work has a rotor weight of over 150 tonnes plus the weight of the generator rotor. This is more that the weight of a 4.5MW wtg Nacelle. These turbines follow the frequency of the grid. If the grid drops to much the turbines drops off. See 2016 SA blackout was caused by 450MW of wind not being able to ride through the grid drops caused by the earth faults at the transmission towers. But what would I know, only worked with them for 12 years.

We are seeing some these hanging under the smaller transmission lines around the midnorth of SA. Right in the middle of Wind turbine country. https://www.energyknowledgebase.com/topics/voltage-regulator.asp The grid is synchronous but WTG's aren't. The earlier ones were just large squirrel cage motors over driven hooked straight to the grid. The higher percentage of synchronous generators kept the frequency stable.(Vestas V82 1.65MW) Newer turbines have full or partial inverters. Not so common now but google DFIG wind turbine generator. The stator is connected directly to the grid, the inverter connects to the rotor and artificially moves the magnetic field around to give 50 Hz at the stator. Once it gets above 3/4 power, the rotor starts generating as well and this goes through the inverter the other way and gets put back on the grid. Vestas V90 3MW, V80 (2 MW). Someone was smoking some pretty wild sht. Gas, coal and nuclear run at the exact speed to get the right frequency. 3000, 1500 RPM in Australia depending the number of poles in the generator. The weight of these rotating generators and turbines are what give a traditional grid its inertia.

Australia should be in the top 3 with our resources. have a look where we were in 2000 https://www.comparethemarket.com.au/energy/features/changes-in-electricity-prices-globally/ Steam = reliability and stability if it is not to old and well maintained. Solar is reliable as it turns off reliably every night😁 Solar loses efficiency the hotter it is. Older turbines shut off above 40 degrees. Newer ones start to constrain themselves from 35 degrees(can't remeber exact temp and shut off at about 43 dgrees. It isn't just steam plants. GT's lose a bit as well as it gets hotter.

Not saying anything about free lunches, just the misleading press releases that the state government release. People really only care what they get in the mail every 3 months.

Its not the local area that is the concern. It is when Queensland has a day of little wind and solar and SA has excess. We are talking several GW worth of transmission. Nuclear is able to be wound up and down, it just has never had to be in the past. Duttons plan is not to replace the whole grid with nuclear, just enough to take care of the black, brown and orang lines at the bottom of the graph here. Open Electricity: NEM. Dispersed source are good, but the need to be reliable. EG peaker gas plants. As far as the SA power prices it is wholesale prices. As a homeowner who gives a crap. It is retail the average person cares about. Remember Wind and solar is the cheapest form of electricity, it is the extras that cost the money. Syncons, battery's, energy connect and other transmission. All the voltage regulators we are seeing on the power lines around the country that weren't needed when we had synchronous generation.

Nuclear is a serious possibility for Australia. We need to look further than politicians carrying on. Even the CSIRO don't take albo's 600 billion seriously. We don't make all the solar and wind we can use yet, we just can't transport or store it in the places we need it. Australia has a long skinny grid and the transmission is going to have 1000s of km of under utilised transmission which sill needs the same amount of maintenance as a fully used system. Not very good business practice for the country unless you are one of the company's building and running these assets. Both sides do agree with solar and wind, their just seems to be one side that is smart enough to realise that wind solar and batterys can not do it by themselves. The costs won't be way up. We will need gas turbines that will all be needed only a few times a year. More underutilised plant. Even if they are only needed for 5% of the load, chances are this 5% may be need once or twice a year which means we will still need a large amount of capacity.

Sometimes hard unpopular decisions need to be made. We had the same problem on Kangaroo Island a few years ago.

While I am not really a Dutton supporter, I hope he does get in and his NP gets through. Have been watching power prices for about 15 years now. When I started the price in SA was variable, but as the penetration of renewables increased it got more and more volatile while wild swings. We are starting to see the same volatility recently in Queensland and NSW now as the percentage of renewables increases. It will make any high energy using industry less and less viability which will affect jobs for our kids. Unfortunately even if he does get in I fear he will still have a hard time getting things done.

We will see, unfortunately

I go back to original comment, nothing ever gets cheaper. We apparently have "cheap" wholesale energy in SA, but it doesn't transfer to retail.