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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

#51

Post by throwawayyyyyy »

plantain wrote: post #15
zdragnar wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On its own, it does seem like a lot. Thinking about the nature of renewables where I live, it seems so small as to be not worth mentioning; January will often have a week to several weeks of heavy cloud cover and little wind. A mere 5 hours of capacity is a pittance. Australia, on the other hand, could easily make more sense, as I imagine the outback to be sunnier year round and maybe windier.

Cloud doesn't mean solar stops working - the decrease is 30-60% depending on thickness, but there's still very meaningful generation.

the solar panel's I've used in off-grid applications put out 10% on cloudy days.

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

#52

Post by 5d8767c68926 »

mikeyouse wrote: post #39
wyager wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transmission losses would eat any benefit, unfortunately. 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 supe…

This is pretty outdated.. HVDC has solved most of the transmission problem. Even the typical "3.5% per 1,000km" assumption that shows up on Wikipedia is pretty out of date. Modern projects are built with much lower losses (since they're running much higher voltage) and central Australia with massive solar potential is no more than 2,000KM from anywhere else in the country so generation transmission losses would be mo…

Even if losses were something absurd like 15%, I don't see how that would meaningfully change the numbers. Location offsetting sunlight seems like a huge win.

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

#54

Post by nonameiguess »

malfist wrote: post #34
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 99% still means 3 full days of blackout every year. 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.

Quoted post unavailable.

Honestly, it's gotten better in the last few years, but when I first moved to Dallas, the most noteworthy thing wasn't even these high-profile large-scale outages. It was the poor state of infrastructure in general. Above-ground power lines combined with trees the city never trimmed meant we had outages from lines going down virtually every time there was a rain storm. Really, that still happens, but they seem to have finally built enough redundancy in that it comes right back, instead of coming back hours later like it used to.

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

#55

Post by mattnewton »

Meanwhile in the US, we have states allowing counties to ban solar and wind energy production specifically on privately owned and industrially zoned land. I hope Australia can push through the fossil fuel lobby as they start to fight harder.

https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2022/08/23/nine-ohio-counties...

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

#56

Post by ZeroGravitas »

cm2187 wrote: post #10

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.

This isn't an average it's modelled on real-time demand and supply and the 99% means 3 days worth of power met by non-solar/wind/hydro peaker plants over a year, not instantly plunging into a 3 day long version of Mad Max.

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

#57

Post by thayne »

"in Australia" is an important qualification here. Australia has a very high ratio of available solar and wind energy to population.

Not that getting Australia fully on renewables wouldn't be exciting. But it is definitely an easier target than say the US.

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

#58

Post by happyopossum »

earthboundkid wrote: post #23
toomuchtodo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah. As a consumer, I put solar panels on my house in 2017. They generate about as much electricity as I consume. In theory, I will break even on the cost in another two years. Obviously, they're going to depreciate and break at some point, but the only reason ~every house doesn't have them is the price of installation. If everyone did this, you're talking about a world where we would still need non-renewables for l…

> the government should just loan the money to consumers and get it done.

I'm not sure everyone wants to borrow money - there are a ton of financing options for solar right now, what makes you think adding yet another one would get everyone over that hump?

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

#59

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

mattnewton wrote: post #55

Meanwhile in the US, we have states allowing counties to ban solar and wind energy production specifically on privately owned and industrially zoned land. I hope Australia can push through the fossil fuel lobby as they start to fight harder. https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2022/08/23/nine-ohio-counties...

It's odd that the party that claims to be in favor of a free market is passing laws that actively restrict the free market.

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

#60

Post by dymk »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #59
mattnewton wrote: post #55

Meanwhile in the US, we have states allowing counties to ban solar and wind energy production specifically on privately owned and industrially zoned land. I hope Australia can push through the fossil fuel lobby as they start to fight harder. https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2022/08/23/nine-ohio-counties...

It's odd that the party that claims to be in favor of a free market is passing laws that actively restrict the free market.

That's just the free market greasing the palms of politicians. A greasier solar lobby needs to come long and out-grease them, obviously.
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