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5 hours of grid-scale storage seems like a lot.
Not outrageous in the scale of nation building projects.
Interesting, but the title should mention it's localized to Australia so as to avoid arm waving from either side
California, on most days, is generating slightly less power from solar (~10GW) than all of Australia from coal (per https://electricitymap.org ). Texas has over 130GW of renewables in ERCOT’s interconnect queue. There are challenges to solve for, certainly, but broad strokes the decarbonization roadmap is well defined and within reach. Velocity is a function of capital and technology investment. Edit: @usefulcat http…
Interesting, but the title should mention it's localized to Australia so as to avoid arm waving from either side
5 hours of grid-scale storage seems like a lot.
The "Victorian Big Battery" cost about 100 million to build and provides 450MWh, so at those prices the 120GWh they calculate for 5 hours would cost about 25 billion. Not outrageous in the scale of nation building projects.
5 hours of grid-scale storage seems like a lot.
Is it really though? How many gigawatts of gas peaker plants and all the associated infrastructure sit around waiting for the tens or hundred hours they're needed? Turns out, it's a lot - and it costs the ratepayers: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/just-how-much-b... > Wood Mackenzie calculates the average peaker plant capacity factor will sit between 5 and 6 percent over the next two decades. That amoun…
1. Money spent on having generators on standby when they are used only 5% of the time
2. Money spent on fossil fuels for those plants when they actually run.
1 is money well spent, 2 is a problem to be solved but just carbon taxing it is probably enough to consider it solved.
Luckily, the high cost of 1, makes it easier to justify adding batteries or a thousand other things that help to reduce 2. But you know people are going to point to the same peaker plants we've had for years and say "look how expensive renewables are!".
Also, we've already built the gas plants. Which is probably a big chunk of the cost (they'll just be spreading that cost across the hours that they intend to run during their working life).
The averages don’t tell me much. We need to look at percentiles with intermittent sources of energy. 99% still means 3 full days of blackout every year. So it needs to be sufficient to cover an even higher percentile (in fact I don’t even think there is an acceptable number of hours of blackout in a year). I would be curious how they get to that with energies that pretty much go to zero the week there is no wind.
Presumably the entire grid isn't going down.
Brown outs in small parts of the country is what I'd expect.
This sounds like the current state of California.
One thing I would love to see addressed in these kinds of analyses: the efficacy of strategic placement of solar. Electrical demand tends to peak slightly after sundown for much of the year. However, the sun obviously doesn't set at the same time everywhere. Darwin's sunset is currently an hour and a half later than Sydney/Brisbane. Could building more equatorial/western solar installations together with transmission…
Of course, the author didn't model this at all.
This is the problem with 99% of "actually we could totally rip out our entire infrastructure right now" posts - it's usually justified with crappy modeling that falls apart under slightly more scrutinizing consideration.
Solar-only with low storage overhead might become more viable if we get room-temperature superconductors or something.
Interesting, but the title should mention it's localized to Australia so as to avoid arm waving from either side