301–310 of 328 posts
California is also adding a lot of battery storage… but why are electricity prices falling in Australia and not in CA? Are they outpacing us?
Lots of other stuff affects end-user prices though.
The program has so far spent $2.5bn, and installed 11GWh. That's just the cost of the subsidy (~30% discount), not the cost of what home owners tipped in. Utility scale batteries are now at ~$66m/GWh, or about ~$726m equivalent. It does not make sense for everyone to be doing a bespoke installation inside their own home. It is ridiculously inefficient. We are a society. We don't build our own roads, water, grid, scho…
That equates to AUD$66/kWh, after shipping, installation and connection to the grid. It seems very low. Have you got citations for that number?
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OK. lots of people confuse a $75-$120 / kWh cell price for grid scale battery installed price, which these days is about $300 / kWh. 1 gigawatt hour of installed BESS therefore at current prices is roughly $300 million. Snowy 2 is 350 gigawatt hours, which would cost $105 billion in equivalent batteries which is about $150 billion in Australian dollars, or ~7x cheaper per gwh.
If you price it on throughput and not storage size, because Snowy 2 is very constrained on when it can charge and discharge then the realistic 8Twh per year you can get out of Snowy2 loses to batteries by a factor of 3 based on your costs. But that's assuming the batteries can charge and discharge in full every day. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle where Snowy can act as seasonal storage with a big capac…
Or the ones that remind you that batteries are useless for seasonal storage.
Or that the wind doesnt always blow.
Yes, individually all of them have crippling flaws and all of them work best when combined with technology that has complementary crippling flaws.
Snowy 2 won't be used instead of batteries it'll be used alongside batteries.
Right now nothing comes close to beating its price / gwh no matter how much the cost overruns or how many people dump on it for being 7x cheaper per gwh than batteries instead of 10x.
More countries should be building one as well as building out grid level batteries. They complement each other.
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Distribution infrastructure capacity is a current and ongoing concern for summer peak loads (every house turning on air conditioners at once) even with the large government subsidies that have existed for residential solar panels, residential batteries, reverse cycle heat pump cooling/heating and insulation. The cost to rebuild every distribution substation, change every pole-top transformer and rewire suburbs would…
> As a side note, perhaps Australia perhaps has the most open and transparent electricity market in the world? I did some light research. I would mostly agree. Other honorable mentions: The Nordic Pool, Europe, Great Britain. They are all excellent. How do you know so much about the Australian power grid? Is it a hobby (personal interest) or profession-related?
Sometimes when trying to improve OSM with a new substation, wind farm or otherwise, you might have missing information such as a wind farm that is covered with stitched imagery--left half is a 2024 swath showing construction underway and concrete foundations prepared, or a pad excavated, right half is a 2026 swath showing turbines installed and operating. Sometimes it can be helpful to double check assumptions made about an excavated pad being a wind turbine foundation against public data--e.g. press release stating how many turbines have been ordered for the wind farm, or a low resolution map in a company report indicating rough placement of turbines.
Or for a new substation with a 330kV bus and 110kV bus confirmed by tracing transmission lines to other substation buses, there could be a dangling transmission line traced to a tower next to the new substation, but it's not clear which bus it may connect to. This is where some more detailed public data, in the rare case it may be available (such as in Australia), can be useful to combine together to confirm an assumption. A real case I found recently was in Saudi Arabia where a press release from a company stated something to the effect of "We just successfully installed a 330kV feeder 9281 to substation G40", which confirmed how the the transmission lines connected to the substation.
I have however mostly mapped in countries where OSM is most lacking--and for electricity infrastructure that is China--by orders of magnitude. An example I worked on previously is Hainan, which was previously mostly missing from OpenInfraMap.[2] China publish nothing and even require their street view imagery providers to blur substations. Even so--this is largely a pointless effort because with a bit of extra puzzle solving (such as switching between 4 historic satellite images to find the one where a shadow or a tower or pole is visible) it's almost always possible to get an accurate map produced. Gaps are mostly limited to out of date satellite imagery which for China is a huge accuracy problem because the scale of electricity grid expansion is absurd. It's commonplace to start tracing a transmission line to only find half way along, the transmission line disappears on a stitch in satellite imagery, and then more recent imagery on the other side of the stitch shows 3 new 500kV+ (including HVDC) transmission lines routed in parallel, replacing the old line. You can open an OSM editor almost anywhere in China and scroll around for a minute to find an unmapped high voltage transmission line, wind farm, substation, etc (having a list of coordinates where new satellite swaths are available would help most here).
For a global list of electricity grid data sources, [1] is very detailed list that is well maintained. Countries in Africa are particularly challenging--some you'd be lucky to find even a single 800x800px image of the electricity grid... or even a website for the transmission network operator.
[1] https://github.com/open-energy-transition/Awesome-Electrical...
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I found the challenge with our own was just matching the peak of the panels to the peak voltage accepted by our inverter (including a safe margin for cold+snowy days where peak voltage is the highest), otherwise I totally would’ve loved to overpanel like crazy. George Costanza voice, I would drape my house in panels, if it were socially acceptable.
Tell me more? Why can’t you 2x or nx the number of panels by wiring those additional panel in parallel (as opposed to in series)?
It started with a solar boom, many small home scale solar roofs popping up everywhere. Australia has a free trade agreement with much of the world, including China, and solar panels have literally dropped to 1/50th of the price they were in 1990 ($10/W to $0.2/W today). A shout out to the work that was done to establish dynamic grid pricing too. Anyway that caused power prices to reliably go negative during the day a…
Free Trade is amazing when it works. But it doesn't in many cases. Even with those solar panels: China has put many western manufacturers out of business by selling them under cost price with government support. It's cool for the consumer but it's an artificial trick that actually reduces the free market viability. They did this with a reason. Either to raise prices later or to create a dependency. Even if you don't…
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Solar overcapacity is really cheap, because panels are really cheap. Dedicated seasonal energy storage technology doesn't even exist right now, much less economically efficient storage technology. The closest thing would be a massive thermal store used for district heating, but only prototypes are starting right now. Industrial scaling and mass deployment? That's a decade+ away at a minimum. We could build seasonal o…
Indeed. Solar overcapacity can be used to produce green hydrogen for industrial uses (high heat), green ammonia (fertilizer), etc. Ammonia has supply chains and is known quantity to ship and store. Could be used in fuel cells. Of course, the efficiency is low, but thats a necessary cost for seasonal storage. Australia has so much land. And sunny everywhere. I'm sure Europe will buy green ammonia or fertilizer to meet…
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A lot of people still prefer gas stoves for cooking Yes you can get bottled LPG gas, but it is a pain – you worry about running out, you have to call up and get them to deliver it. With piped gas you just set up a direct debit for the bill and never think about it ever again. Also, some people prefer gas heaters because it is a different kind of heat. My father replaced his wood combustion heater with a gas one, even…
Key words here are 'some people' and 'prefer'. I think this causes prices to spiral up (but this might be papered over by government subsidies). Do you prefer gas enough to pay $300/year for the connection fee? Or will you take the less-preferred but economically more palatable option and disconnect? And everyone who disconnects drives the prices higher for the fewer holdouts. Until retailers and suppliers pull the p…
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Solar panels were made in China. The reason that solar panels are so cheap there is that the state has bankrolled these companies to produce them at a massive scale.
Good for them. They really can’t win: if they don’t modernize they get blamed for high CO2 emissions and used as an excuse for the US to shirk its responsibilities to the Paris Agreements. If they do , and help the rest of the world at the same time, they get accused of dumping. If only everyone else had the guts to follow their lead.