Australia’s journey towards 100% clean energy

“[The clutch] “It’s like 1950s technology — it’s really boring,” Westerman said (“boring” for network operators is the highest form of praise). “The marginal cost of putting this in is like nothing compared to the cost of the station.”

A company called SSS has been building these clutches for decades. One is almost operational in Queensland at the Townsville gas-fired plant, which Siemens Energy is converting into what it calls a “hybrid rotary grid stabilizer”. Siemens says that this project is the first conversion of its kind in the world for a gas turbine of this size.

This retrofit took about 18 months and included some additional component relocations in Townsville to make room for the new clutch. So, it’s not instantaneous, but it’s much easier than building a new synchronous condenser from scratch, and at about half the cost, according to Siemens.

Some new long-term storage technologies also offer their own yarn block. Canadian startup Hydrostor expects to break ground early next year on a fully contracted and permitted project in Broken Hill, a town deep in the New South Wales outback.

Broken Hill gives its name to BHP, which began there as a silver mine in 1885 and developed into one of the world’s largest mining companies. More recently, the desert landscape played host to the post-apocalyptic car chases in Mad Max 2. Now, nearly 18,000 people live there, at the end of a long line connected to the wider network.

Hydrostor will support local energy by drilling an underground cavity and compressing air into it; The release of compressed air drives turbines to regenerate up to 200 megawatts for up to eight hours, serving the community in the event of a grid outage and charging clean energy to the wider grid.

But unlike batteries, Hydrostor technology uses old-fashioned generators, and its compressors help spin the extra metal.

“We have a dedicated clutch for NSW, because they need inertia,” Hydrostor CEO John Norman said. “It’s very simple, it’s just like the same clutches you have in your regular car.”

Transmission network operator Transgrid conducted a competitive process to determine the best way to provide system security for Broken Hill in the event it had to operate off-grid, Norman said. This analysis chose to offer Hydrostor to simply insert the clutch when installing its hardware.

The project still needs to be built, but if rising clean storage technologies can step in to provide grid security, it won’t all have to come from ghost gas plants stuck in the system.

“It feels different [in Australia]“There’s something that can be done, go get them, put me in the coach’s position,” said Audrey Zibelman, the US network expert who ran AEMO before Westerman. “When you’re intentional about saying how best to do this, rather than saying why it’s hard or why it won’t work, solutions emerge.”