A number of operating small-scale renewables plants provide advance warning of the potential problems involved in transitioning the world to renewable energy, but only two of them – Gorona del Viento in the Canary Islands (GdV) and King Island, Tasmania (KI) – provide grid data that allow their performance to be checked. In this post I summarize the results of another batch of KI data covering the period from July 15 through September 30, 2018. Over this period KI generated about 60% of its electricity from renewables, effectively the same estimate as I made for October and November 2017 in this earlier post. Like GdV, however, KI will always need fossil fuel backup to fill in gaps when the wind does not blow.
There are three problems with the KI grid data. First, they are available only though KI’s live data site, which because it changes the readings once every two or three seconds leads to huge data volumes (a month generates over a million lines). Second, the site has recently been down for almost half the time. But two Energy Matters stalwarts, Rainer Strassburger and Thinks Too Much, continue to download what they can, and T2M has succeeded in condensing some of the data down to manageable 1-minute intervals, no mean feat. So a hat-tip to these gentlemen.
The third problem is that KI, despite strenuous efforts on my part, have once again refused to send me their data. They claim a) that they can’t release the data to just anybody and b) that they don’t have the time anyway.
A quick refresher on KI. First a location map:
Figure 1: King Island location map
Installed capacity at KI amounts to approximately 9MW. It consists of:
- four diesel generators (6.00 MW)
- five wind turbines (2.45 MW)
- a solar array (0.1 MW); and
- domestic solar (approximately 0.5 MW)
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In 3Q 2018 Gorona del Viento (GdV) supplied 74.2 % of El Hierro’s electricity (95.4% in July) and 17.1% of its total energy consumption, up from 64.2% % and 14.8% in 2Q 2018. Since project startup in June 2015 GdV has supplied 46.5% of El Hierro’s electricity and 10.7% of its energy. In 3Q 2018 GdV supplied 100% of El Hierro’s electricity for a total of 45.6 days, with 18 days of continuous 100% generation during a sustained period of high winds from July 15 to August 1. Hydro continued to underperform, contributing only 6.1% of total 3Q generation. According to GdV the plant is now performing at its optimum level but is still not capable of supplying El Hierro with 100% renewable electricity – an admission of failure. Adding solar panels, enlarging the lower reservoir and EV storage are among the options now being considered.
