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A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

reneweconomy.com.au

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Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#281

Post by caf »

conjecTech wrote: post #22

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…

A new east-west interconnector is in progress: https://www.projectenergyconnect.com.au/

In general though, BESS & overbuild seems to be working out cheaper than very long interconnectors.

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#282

Post by caf »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #46
theptip wrote: post #36

Great analysis. I’m not so familiar with the AU energy market, so I don’t know how much of an update this result is vs. a reasonable prior. The bigger simulation mentioned in the OP is the ISP: https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/major-publications/integr... . Anyone know what that plan proposes in terms of energy mix? > It is interesting to note that the ISP is predicting that approximately 9GW of peaking gas or liqu…

This is completely in line with reasonable priors: https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy... It's more of a science/engineering communication effort, because there's a lot of unreasonable priors out there. edit: also the 6.6GW of 'other' the current model uses, is the current actual gas plant size, not an amount that they predict as optimal or desirable. Similar with the Hydro, they used the cur…

On my reading of it, "Other" is the gap between the other modelled sources and the actual demand.

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#283

Post by caf »

pydry wrote: post #129
skrause wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was Germany's plan. Go to at least 80% renewable and fill up the rest with natural gas power plants that can change the load quickly. Oops.

That was literally everybody's plan. The alternative was to continue using coal while ramping up renewables. For all the handwringing about the turned off nuclear plants they were getting old in the tooth and wouldnt have made a substantive difference to the current crisis. New plants would take 3x as long and cost 3x as much. France is in just as much shit as germany this winter coz their nuke plants are aging out.…

Or build LNG import terminals.

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#284

Post by Manuel_D »

caf wrote: post #279
Manuel_D wrote: post #238

> My simulation used the 24GW/120GWh of assumed storage and existing hydro to firm up the wind and solar and match demand. 120 GWh is not what most would describe as "little storage". The largest hydroelectric storage facilities in existence are in the single digit or low double digit GWh. And this is for a country with a relatively small population. > Both the hydro and storage were assumed highly flexible. Note tha…

120 GWh is not what most would describe as "little storage". The largest hydroelectric storage facilities in existence are in the single digit or low double digit GWh. And this is for a country with a relatively small population. The current pipeline of utility battery storage projects in Australia is estimated to be 26GW ( https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/11/03/australias-... ). Storage ratios of announced…

Only 6.3 GWh of battery storage is actually announced in your link. Plenty of storage facilities are at ratios lower than 2: https://www.energy-storage.news/victorian-big-battery-austra...

And if the batteries haven't actually been provisioned yet, it might be hard to build those without securing additional funding: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#285

Post by mactitan »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #268
mactitan wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very compelling case and the material for 100% renewables is staggering. How this can be ignored is bewildering. A discussion at: https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/wuc4vg/assoc_prof... Simon Michaux presents the deck of data showing details of where his calculations are coming from that show even the first generation of renewables to replace fossil fuels is going to outstrip our capacity to source the mine…

Right from the introduction he assumes all EVs will be using Li ion which is already being phased out of everything but top performance luxury vehicles, then goes on to double count the storage asking where one could possibly find a few trillion Wh of batteries. Then blindly asserts that recycling will be impractical when recycling facilities already exist and are fighting over access to dead batteries. He then bemoa…

I’m interested in the new phase out and the realistic time frame. It’s not this: https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/24/22898666/panasonic-4680-t... Currently recycling is very low. I think he’s focused on what’s likely in production for the near future and the real material problem of all infrastructure ( its massive)

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#286

Post by caf »

inglor_cz wrote: post #185
plantain wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For 25 billion, you could have two Olkiluoto-like nuclear blocks that actually produce energy and not just store it. For several decades. (Olkiluoto is considered notoriously over budget.)

That wouldn't solve the problem though, because the NEM is a very long thin grid.

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#287

Post by ZeroGravitas »

laurencerowe wrote: post #271
thayne wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is a lot more than just California and Texas. Where I live isn't anywhere close to being fully renewable. And home solar is much less economical than it is in California or Texas, largely due to having less sunlight.

Artisanal scale rooftop solar is only economical in Califoria due to feed in tariff subsidies. We could build out utility scale solar of the same capacity for the cost of the subsidy to rooftop solar.

Feed in tariff subsidies are a good policy instrument.

Lots of green tech needed initial subsidies to get started because we currently subsidize fossil fuels and removing those subsidies was politically harder than adding subsidies.

California also very sensibly, introduced net-zero house regulations that mean most new houses will have solar, making it a great deal less artisinal and just another thing you need to build a house.

And rooftop (and generally bulding integrated) solar is in general a good thing. Transmission has a cost and as solar and battery prices plummet, transmission loses the economic battle more and more often when you do the sums. Grids are looking at Non-Wire Alternatives aka Non-Tranmission Alternatives for lots of situations where upgrading or building transmission is the easiest place to minimise costs.

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#288

Post by [deleted] »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #7
WalterBright wrote: post #4

5 hours of grid-scale storage seems like a lot.

It also doesn't sound like actually enough. They never have outages longer than 5 hours? And even with fully renewable sources they would never have periods longer than 5 hours without much generation?

[deleted]

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#289

Post by beerandt »

epistasis wrote: post #234
beerandt wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In engineering speak, what he means is increased grid efficiency, which can happen simultaneously with increased demand and increased cost. But all that does is shift the inefficiencies off of the grid. It's redefining the system boundary in a politically/ marketing friendly way, but doesn't eliminate the problem of storage/buffer capacity. Anyone who thinks the grid can approach steady-state operations near capacity…

> Anyone who thinks the grid can approach steady-state operations near capacity hasn't seriously looked at demand patterns I think that's a bit of a straw man, the key thing is to reduce the peak, rather than get to steady state.

Sure, it's a scale, not an absolute, but maximum efficiency is at steady state.

As you move away from that, the gains drop quickly, especially versus managing the demand variance with on-grid storage.

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#290

Post by ZeroGravitas »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #127
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a lot of people live in Texas and California where renewables are already pretty advanced, plus there's nuclear in the north, and they have hydro and grid connections with Canada who have even more hydro and nuclear so the USA should be easier. The US intends to hit this target (i.e. 95% carbon-free generation) in 8 years I think, with 100% and wider electrification of current fossil fuel uses in 2035 and it di…

The problem is that electrification of fossil fuel applications is going to significantly increase the demand on our grid. So it’s not enough to get to parity in renewables, but we have to go far beyond our current capacity in order to accommodate a world in which almost every car is electric (whether electric hybrid or green hydrogen) and almost every home uses electric rather than natural gas for heating (not to me…

This isn't a problem, this is the solution.

That was why I mentioned the plan (which I can no longer locate) to target 95% carbon-free electricity and focus on electrification instead of the final 5%. That fossil fuel usage can be shifted from cars or heating or industrial uses and used to provide the 5% of electricity instead at a total cost/carbon/pollution saving.

edit: ah, found it (I think, possibly something else quoted this):

https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-futures-study

> In the Decarb+E scenario, an expanded grid electrifies additional end uses (such as motor vehicles and space and water heating in buildings) that had derived energy directly from fossil fuels. In 2035, the grid is 95% decarbonized, but the additional fossil fuel displacement yields total emissions reductions equivalent to a grid that is 105% decarbonized—more cost-effectively than could be achieved by completely eliminating grid emissions in this time frame. These results show the importance of considering flexible, cross-sector approaches to optimizing the speed and cost-effectiveness of overall emissions reductions.

So I was wrong about the specific date, but the same general concept applies regardless of the target date and this was written before the 100% goal was moved to 2035.

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