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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

#81

Post by mattferderer »

syncsynchalt wrote: post #40
atoav wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 82% of demand was directly powered by wind and solar without having to pass through storage or be curtailed. This is amazing. As an EE I wonder about transportation losses, but wind and solar should be pretty easy to decentralize, so maybe this is a non-issue. Wind might be a little harder to decentralize, but I don't know how the regional differences are in Australia. I'd suspect the coasts (or even offshore) woul…

Solar can be decentralized, wind less so. I don't know what wind looks like in Australia but in the US it heavily favors places like the Front Range and the Wyoming Divide: https://california-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com/77/87/8... EDIT: Looking at the same map for Australia I see that wind power potential tends to be strongest coastally, which matches population density (nice!) I'll still say that overall you c…

That map doesn't take off shore into an account though. Lots of potential in the oceans & Great Lakes.

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

#82

Post by hammock »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #69
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 di…

> even before the recent climate bill passed

What is in the bill that is investment in renewables? My understanding is that there aren’t so much subsidies to generators-suppliers, but rather rebates and savings for homeowners and consumers.

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

#83

Post by cma »

cbhl wrote: post #70

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.

Maybe folding@home; desalination for farming; pumping and spraying water to re-glaciate areas in the winter.

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

#84

Post by skrause »

colechristensen wrote: post #73

If you lower this to, say, 75%, a good analysis will show that a renewables grid with zero storage is possible around the world. Storage is only required for the last n % and n is much larger than most people realize. If we accept that the energy economy will shift with supply-and-demand based pricing, what can actually happen is having peak production oversupply which will find users with its lower prices enabling o…

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.

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

#85

Post by stevesimmons »

cbhl wrote: post #70

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.

Stop some of the wind generators. Disconnect some of the solar panels. Both are standard practice today.

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

#86

Post by jnsaff2 »

cbhl wrote: post #70

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.

PV can be throttled instantly to anything down to 0. Otherwise no offgrid setup would be feasible.

You can mandate smart control signals to PV inverters or don't do anything and let the frequency go up so even inverters installed today will start cutting power as this is a requirement from grid code.

Wind has a bigger lag (seconds) but it has brakes to save them in storms.

So those are easy problems (technologically).

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

#87

Post by usefulcat »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #9
passwordoops wrote: post #5

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…

> Texas has over 130GW of renewables in ERCOT’s interconnect queue

I'm curious to know where you got the 130 GW figure? Texas consumption rarely exceeds 80 GW, even in summer, so 130 seems like a lot.

https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/supplyanddemand

(Note: the Y axis in the above chart is megawatts)

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

#88

Post by cptskippy »

cbhl wrote: post #70

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.

Is over generation an issue that needs to be solved beyond disconnection from the grid?

Gas and Petrol Plants are commonly run in stand by mode because the ramp down/up times are too great to take them off line.

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

#89

Post by nicoburns »

happyopossum wrote: post #58
earthboundkid wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They could loan the money interest free. that would make it rather a no-brainer

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

#90

Post by ZeroGravitas »

hammock wrote: post #82
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…

> even before the recent climate bill passed What is in the bill that is investment in renewables? My understanding is that there aren’t so much subsidies to generators-suppliers, but rather rebates and savings for homeowners and consumers.

Lots of little things, but a big one is that I think you can generate Green Hydrogen with Renewables and get tax credits on both (though I did read some conflicting stuff on that, think it still makes sense if you don't get the credit on the renewables, but if you do then it's another big push).

https://www.woodmac.com/news/opinion/us-inflation-reduction-...

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