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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

#61

Post by itsoktocry »

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.

>Ah yes, let's point the finger at California and ignore the one state...

Wow, this comment is so indicative of modern discourse.

The parent makes an off-hand reference about a state where brown outs have been an issue, (Democratic) California, and you feel the need to jump in with "WHY ARE YOU IGNORING (Repulican) Texas???" as if there's some political motivation behind an innocuous statement of fact.

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

#62

Post by blitzar »

mikeyouse wrote: post #41
philipkglass wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia seems especially well suited for long-distance transmission because development is so heavily weighted to the coasts; there's not a lot of existing built-up interior areas to route around. At 800 kilovolts HVDC line losses are only 5% per 2000 km: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J... (See page 11)

Yeah, people really underestimate how efficient HVDC has become. Even that doc is outdated - it was published in 2015 so likely based on 2013/2014 figures. Modern projects, e.g. ultra HVDC (1100KV) in China are seeing more like 1.5%/1,000KM losses: http://en.people.cn/n3/2018/0622/c90000-9474097.html

Australia is ~4,000km wide, so ~6% - totally manageable if it is needed.

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

#64

Post by ch4s3 »

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.

I don’t think they even claim to be free-marketers anymore. The nat-cons in particular are vocally anti-market.

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

#65

Post by dymk »

testfoobar wrote: post #63

How does this analysis map to an all-electric car future? People generally need their cars during the day and charge them at night.

An all-electric car future involves charging stations at destinations as well at home, so cars can be charging during the day as well.

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

#66

Post by themitigating »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #28
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.

> 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.

https://slate.com/technology/2022/07/texas-power-grid-electr...

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

#67

Post by kkfx »

Those who made such "simulation" probably do have forgot or never learn a classic engineering practice (at least in Europe engineering) witch is named resilience.

We need resilient systems as more resilient as bigger is the impact of their eventual failure. In other terms stating we can made a big and complex enough smart grid to run "almost" an renewable means spend an incredible amount of resource to build a hyper-fragile unmaintainable monster that can malfunction at best most of the time.

Also the "little storage" they state is not little at all and most importantly it does NOT LAST LONGER. So far we have some long-lasting storage (pumped hydro) witch is very effective where you have enough mountains and basins, witch might be true for let's say Norway and to a little extent Swiss, but certainly not for let's say Germany. Compressed air storage seems to offer an option at a sufficient scale, but so far only some experimental plants exists and they have a significant amount of fragility and risks. Long story short: we haven't enough storage on scale to deploy almost only intermittent sources of power. BEVs can compensate an unstable grid for homes, but not for industry, hospitals, big infrastructures etc. Long story short those who claim such possibility follow this classic: https://www.commitstrip.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Strip... sorry I do not have one in English but I think anyone can translate quick enough. A video equivalent is https://youtu.be/BKorP55Aqvg

It's not much different than https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... something that MIGHT BE partially true, in pure math, but practically false. Fails to understand the real feasibility of such projects is probably the root cause of all managerial driven projects fails.

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

#69

Post by ZeroGravitas »

thayne wrote: post #57

"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.

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 didn't seem particularly a stretch even before the recent climate bill passed, so I'd guess they're well on target, not even sure a second Trump term as president could derail it now.

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

#70

Post by cbhl »

Do we actually have effective strategies for dealing with significant over-generation? The author glosses over it as being necessary to get to 98% renewables throughout the year ("we'll just run our hydro dams in reverse"), but I'm under the impression that over-generation that is unhandled leads to grid instability/desync.
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