Electricity export by the Australian sugar industry

With the changing electricity generating landscape around the world, the sugar industry is poised to make an increasingly important contribution to the electricity grid. The sugar industry can produce base-load electricity and has well established processes for fuel handling, transport and storage that gives it the ability to increase and decrease electricity export. One of the main challenges for electricity suppliers is price variability. It is difficult for large-scale coal-fired boiler stations and solar and wind generators to quickly adjust electricity export in response to changing prices. Sugar factories usually have more options for reducing electricity export when electricity prices are negative, such as redirecting high-pressure steam from the turbo alternators to the makeup valve, reducing boiler steam output, reducing crushing rate, or a combination of these options. The trends in Queensland electricity demand and prices over the last three years are reviewed and shows that electricity prices were negative for significant amounts of time during the crushing season months of August, September and October. Substantial increases in net electricity export income were possible if electricity export could be reduced to zero during times of negative power prices.