Hello Geoff, pleased to see someone else come to the same conclusions
that I have. Interestingly I was never in a position to be able to
conclude what the duplication factor might be.
I notice that you have decided on 12 times to be a good starting point.
I have seen another study on the US that came up with 12 times.
The best figure for the cost of batteries that I have seen is about
$1.35 per watt/hr.
If a battery pack to store the grids demand for one day is needed
then the cost becomes astronomical.
I was pleased to see your conclusion that a separate generation
system is needed to recharge the batteries.

It seems to be that every article pushing battery backup never takes
into account of "Where and when do you get the power to recharge the battery" ?

24/7 renewables power is just not going to happen. Renewable power is unreliable and expensive.

However, the wankerati among the powerful rich, and the political class think otherwise, so there is no point in discussing it. We will all have to end up in deep trouble before the penny drops, particularly in Australia, where people making the decisions are much dumber than anywhere else in the world.

Now we have ministers insisting that firmed renewables are cheapest. I doubt that has fully included subsidies, the high capital cost of long term storage, frequency correction, the rising price of gas backup and unsightly new transmission for Renewable Energy Zones. A recent US estimate put the cost of net zero as $433 trillion. Earlier I saw on NEMwatch that SA the vaunted renewables leader was getting 1500MW out of 1900 MW demand from gas fired electricity.

I fear we are being led up the garden path by dreamers that now have the ear of government. The joint AEMO and CSIRO GenCost study insists that small modular reactors will have an electricity cost of over $300 per Mwh. Several manufacturers give cost estimates well under $100. Evidently the GenCost authors think we don't need baseload power despite the obvious fact it still generates most of our electricity.

Solar thermal is the only renewable worth considering for a number of very valid reasons. First is the location out in our vast inland where the sun shines but for a few days. And because molten salt is the medium it can be stored for several days in large vacuum vessels to store useful heat for up to a week.

That said, nothing beats 24/7 MSR thorium (nuclear) for cost effective power generation. Moreover, this technology is the safest, the cheapest, the cleanest available, and is carbon-free!

Can be re-tasked to burn and burn other folks nuclear waste where, it is mostly unspent fuel! Is reliable, dispatchable 24/7!

As a thorium burner, costs can be as low as 1 cent PKWH! As a waste burner all but free given the millions other folk pay us to take this free fuel off of their hands. With routine maintenence, these systems ought be good for 100 years.

Just 8 grams of thorium contains enough recoverable energy to power your house and car for 100 years! The cost of mining and refining 8 grams of thorium 100 dollars, meaning you can run your house and car for 1 dollar a year! And that's why prices as low as 1 cent PKWH are not just feasible, but guaranteed.

Funded and facilitated energy co-ops competing for your energy dollar will ensure these or lower costs. And energy that cheap will have the high tech manufacturing beating a path to our door!

All we need do is ensure we build enough houses (a million) to house the workers we will need to make it happen!

As for transmission, a cling wrap thin layer of graphene laid under our highways and byways will be the new (poles and wires) transmission of the future. And given graphene is a superconductor and 200 times stronger than steel, almost eliminate current transmission and distribution losses, especially if microgrids are the order of the day and planned for!

And a planned energy paradigm would make a very nice change from the last generation of political polly waffle. Wouldn't?
Alan B.

If sanity does not prevail and we are forced by asinine government policy to waste billions on intermittent renewables, then the battery of choice will be the sand battery. Simple, ultracheap and able to hold heat (500C) for many moonlight hours. Can be as big as whole block, office blocks! And an ideal companion for very large inland solar thermal projects! TBC.
Alan B

Solar thermal is something we can build here with materials and resources that are locally available, don't have to be imported! Economies of scale and automation of the steel mirrors production and polishing, will ensure construction costs compete with new coal-fired power! The difference, the power is forever free!
Alan B.

Even old lefty Graham Richardson says we'll be using coal for a long, long time. All the common sense went out of Labor a long, long time ago. Ditto Liberal party, who are now indistinguishable from Labor.

Why do so many not realise that renewables as they are available at this stage are just way too polluting from raw material to disposal !
The only clean energy is hydro ! Nuclear is second !
Nr 1 problem is over-demand, Nr 2 problem are the people using more than they need !

Another thing about renewables in Australia is that they are making China rich, China can produce them cheaply using cheap, reliable coal. Are we even selling them any coal these days, or are they getting it cheaper from the BRICS countries, which all export the things Australia does, but at lower prices.

We can take other folks nuclear waste and be paid annual millions to store it! And if we build mass produced SMR, MSR thorium we can task a number of these safest of all reactors to burn this waste and produce retail prices for industry that are all but free and with carbon-free power! No renewable, hydro or coal can produce power at 1 cent PKWH and still produce a handsome profit! And what we need do to become an energy super power!

But I'm not advising Ministers, the green dreamers are and if their pie in the sky simple cost effective advice is followed, we will not become and energy super power just a bankrupt debt riddled banana republic.

Solar thermal is something we can do here with Australian steel, the mirrors and Australian stainless steel the heat tower and vacuum vessels. And the fuel is forever free! The steel and Nickle required sure to given mining/refining a significant boost and construction of the solar thermal plants as well as the Graphene transmission and cost effective sand batteries.

Solar voltaic only good for 25 years, comes with mountains of toxic waste and we need to import them from China and will need thousands of hectares, pumped hydro and community battery backup.

Coal may be reliable but the price is through the roof and it still produces carbon and a number of nasty toxins in the smokestack, arsenic, mercury, sulfides/sulfur dioxin (acid rain) and uranium.

Once the war in Ukraine ends the world will be flooded with cheap as fossil fuels and we won't be able to give our coal away! We need to make hay while the sun shines and use the extra export income t0 transition to MSR thorium as the only rational choice on the table!
Alan B.

One of the things that make windmills very polluting in instillation is the very large amount of cement used in their instillation.

Don't forget Indyvidual that dam construction uses really huge amounts of cement. If CO2 is a pollutant, just like windmills, some dams may never produce enough power to compensate for the amount of CO2 produced in the manufacture of that cement.

I wonder if anyone has ever done the math on that, or the tunneling involved in things like Snowy 2.0?

Mad edicts trumpeted from the mummy’s boy Temple, where our proud English flag lives in the dustbin while the sniffling maggot stands compliantly before the Aboriginal symbol of revolt, the new National emblem!

No choice but to tolerate the insult to intelligence, while the circus of clowns drag us to the bottom.

Dan

Hasbeen,
Well, everything humans do to improve their existence is detrimental to the natural environment.
Mostly it's just utterly unnecessary excessive frivolities. Whilst cement does cause pollution, once done it's generally in place for many years unlike plastic & steel glass fibres & resin etc etc.
A lot of times, pollution is unnecessarily increased by poor design from poorly educated engineers for the just as poor mentality masses.
Traditional dam design leaves a lot to be desired. Perhaps it could be improved by making the designers live down-stream.
But, to solve or rather make the electricity supply problem less of a problem, small nuclear power stations are probably the best option at this stage. They could perhaps be taken out of decommissioned war ships & modified for land-based use but the main thing would be to keep these plants small to prevent future Chernobyls or Fukushimas !

Interesting comments thanks.

Indydivual- Good points on "Nr 1 problem is over-demand, Nr 2 problem are the people using more than they need!"

Indyvidual- "prevent future Chernobyls or Fukushimas"
Fukushima's issue was a lack of modern safety systems- they were GE Reactors- but the retrofit was considered too expensive.
I suspect that Chernobyl suffered for a similar reason.

Canem Malum,
Cheers for that. Although not exactly flavour of the month, Russia appears to do what should be done elsewhere. Considering how the West prides itself on having superior technology, they don't appear to use superior thinking for electricity !

https://theconversation.com/russias-floating-nuclear-plants-to-power-remote-arctic-regions-19994

Although we see propaganda about how nuclear power is "too expensive", it actually stacks up very well, and it also stacks up well in terms of safety.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

France gets 70% of its power from nuclear reactors and is the world's largest exporter of electricity. Its energy prices are well below the average for Europe, although not the absolute cheapest. The Scandinavian countries do better, but this is because of an abundance of good sites for hydroelectricity and easily accessible geothermal power (in the case of Iceland).

https://www.energycouncil.com.au/analysis/international-electricity-prices-how-does-australia-compare/

It is never explained how the firming of solar or wind power can be done at a reasonable costs or how we will deal with the enormous waste problem from solar cells that cannot be easily recycled at the end of their lifespan. Wind turbine blades also end up in landfill.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-21/wind-turbine-waste-landfill-recycling-costs/101168442

Divergence,
I believe the Sun is just one huge lump of nuclear energy & guess where we'd be without it ?

Wind turbine blades can be recycled into the hobby field which is suffering from high prices for balsa wood which is used in wind turbine blades, or so I read.

Is Mise,
That'll need one hell of an increase of interest in hobbies to make that argument stick ! Something tells me that way more electronic gadgets will be bought that Balsa model kits.
I find it absurd how they can continue producing these blades when it's already known how polluting they are.
I just hope someone can find good use for them before we all have to live on top & around them !