by Graham Palmer | Jun 17, 2017 | Electricity, Uncategorized
Synchronous grids and inertia The Australian NEM spans five states and 4,500 km and has around 260 registered generators, all of which, when online, are synchronous machines spinning in near-exact synchronization at close to 50 Hz across the network (the island state...
by Graham Palmer | Jun 5, 2017 | Oil
Australia’s strategic oil reserve With the current political debates in Australia around energy and climate policy, it’s easy to neglect the sleeper of Australia’s energy policy – the lack of an oil strategic reserve. The IEA was established in November...
by Graham Palmer | May 31, 2017 | Technology
The speciation of technology In the evolving technology space, there can be a tendency to assume that a single class of technology will come to dominate. The stand-out example is Tony Seba’s projection that all new road vehicles—buses, cars, vans, trucks —will be...
by Graham Palmer | May 23, 2017 | EROI, Technology, Uncategorized
The competitive struggle between technology and resource depletion The study of EROI may be of little more than academic interest except for two factors. Energy extraction has conformed to Ricardo’s ‘best first’ principle, meaning that the easiest resources to extract...
by Graham Palmer | May 17, 2017 | Networks
Electricity networks and disruption Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruption was originally based on his observations about disc drives. He saw that the manufacturers of 14” drives for mainframes had been driven out of business by manufacturers of 8” drives for...
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