I could not believe what I heard our Minister for No Energy say.
Then someone added to the hysterical laughter by saying batteries
would be used to supply the overnight power.
Didn't say where they would get the power to recharge such enormous
batteries before 3pm.
There is now absolutely no question that the government is in the
hands of absolutely stupid nincompoops.

Aside from the enormous cost of the batteries calculated to be about
six Trillion dollars. If however they worked on winter times of a
reasonable output of solar cells they would only have about six hours
of maximum output. So the night is about 16 hours of low output.
So 6 x (16/12) trillion dollars worth of batteries needed.
As I have said before it is elementary arithmetic.
Our schools have failed our politicians.

Everything you hear from Blackout Bowen is rubbish.

Are they stupid, or are they milking the scam for their own profit?

Battery storage costs $150 US per mwh. Given solar capacity is less than 25% and you need about eight times as much capacity for 24/7 supply, and assuming a very low cost of $15 US per mwh solar generation, your average supply cost is $147 US per mwh. Compare this with sub $30 US per mwh cost of nuclear power from Sweden. The best low carbon energy option for Australia would be a fleet of nuclear reactors, but this doesn't fit with the renewable energy lobby nor the irrational hatred of nuclear power held by many adherents to the global warming ideology.

Maybe correct Fester, but you did not take into account the extra
banks of solar cells needed to recharge the battery that was discharged overnight.
You can't use the existing bank because they are busy running the country.
You have to have another solar farm just devoted to recharging the
ones used at night provided it is not an overcast day.
That problem can be overcome if you provide extra generation somewhere else.
That is the advantage of a big country.
It is exponentially proportional to the inverse of the country size.
This would be the situation when you get a wind drought that runs for
a few days in a row.
In any case the windfarm should be busy running the country not
recharging Chris Bowen's flat batteries.
As I inferred it really has not been thought out and it is a case of
THEY REALLY ARE STUPID !

Fester where did you get $150 per Mwatt/hr ?
I thought the battery in SA cost about $100M plus for 1 Mwat/hr.
That was a while ago now but I have not seen anything that suggests
batteries are now well under a $1 a watt/hr.

Hasbeen, your suggestion is always possible but it is such big money
surely they would take financial advise first. hmmm maybe not.
MAYBE THEY REALLY ARE THAT STUPID !

Hi Bazz,

$150 US per mwh is a battery storage cost I often see mentioned. The point of the calculation was not accuracy but to demonstrate that even a calculation for solar with battery backup using generous price assumptions was still about five times the cost of long term nuclear power. The following is an article on current and projected costs of battery storage:

http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79236.pdf

Fester, I have just had a quick read of that paper to which you referred.
They complicated for me by referring to 4 hour batteries.
Looking at the table at the end they are working on around $200 per Kwatt/hr.
That seems to be much more than I had seen for that Sth Aus battery.
So much so I think I must have misunderstood something.
Perhaps the price has to be divided bt 4.

I do not know why they are considering lithium batteries.
Nickle Iron batteries are much more suitable for fixed location
long life service.
They can be serviced annually and restored as new. They are rugged
can be short circuited without permanent damage and can be left
unused for years.
They are much larger but that is not a problem on wind & solar farms.
A lot cheaper also.

Thanks Bazz,

Whenever I start doing cost calculations for 24/7 renewables I quickly stop when I realise that they are way above the lcoe of conventional generation.

If you only need intermittent power or are remote then I think solar plus storage a great idea. I have also heard of the concept of local domestic grids, whereby a number of households share a battery charged by rooftop solar.

I appreciate you mentioning the nickel iron battery.

Cheers

https://micropowergrids.com.au/_Energy_Storage/Nickel_Iron_(NiFe)/index.html

Oh, and you could source the batteries more cheaply if you were happy to arrange shipping, e.g.

http://hengmingbattery.en.made-in-china.com/product/HFKQmiDdhzkJ/China-Edison-Nickel-Iron-Battery-for-Solar-12V-24V-1200ah-Ni-Fe-Battery.html

Great if you want to play around with such things, and I may yet go on that adventure for the fun of it, but if the government were to pursue conventional and proven power supply options there would be little incentive for me.

Solar cells and Wind turbines and batteries last max 20 years. What does the next generation use when we have dug up every source of Lithium and copper?

Candles and fat lamps.

Maybe they will enjoy a cheap energy revolution with msrs and and reflect on their stupid forebears who pursued renewables and ignored people like Alan?

http://youtu.be/fz5oYdzm_Z8
(video contains swearing)

It gets worse. The Treasurer has said that from next year companies
will have to report their "Climate Risk Disclosure".
http://tinyurl.com/52a6tvk4
How the hell will they do that ?
What if they just said "NO !"
If they then said to the government "Prove It !"
I think the government would be in a hard place. There has not been
any proof ever, just an IPCC "Best of Probabilities" or similar waffle.
The socalled "Settled Science" is anything but settled.
Just how would a company go about fulfilling the government's request?
I can foresee a new industry of "consultants" which will fake up these
reports for a very nice sum of money.
It is all part of the Great Reset !

I needn't have worried, the Bureaucracy is already cranked up for the job.
What could possibly go wrong ?

The Treasurer says he has ­already written to regulators asking them to double down on efforts to combat greenwashing.

I am sure smaller companies will be encourage by that.

Manufactured energy crisis gets crazy.
German official limits shower to 2 minutes in unheated home.
http://youtu.be/EPWhC4NOLnw

David Osmond did is a renewable engineer that heard people whinging about intermittency too much. This is what he found. Note "Other" is natural gas where the existing pumped hydro can't cope.

"Wind tends to generate above average during the night and during winter, complementing the solar generation. I have a bias to wind as it requires less short-term storage, which is used primarily to shift solar generation from the day to the evening and night...

..."Renewables met 98.8% of demand over the year, with the remaining 1.2% met by ‘Other’"

"Most weeks from late April through to the present required some levels of ‘Other’, due to the inability of wind, solar, storage and hydro to entirely meet demand throughout the week. The week starting on June 29 proved to be the most difficult week of the simulation, with ‘Other’ having to provide 8.1% of demand that week."

(The present in this model was August - so April to August all needed some gas.)

OK? That's it! Conclusive proof - from a renewables effort - that it CAN'T BE DONE! It NEEDS natural gas.

Except he isn't finished.

"If we built enough wind and solar to meet approximately 170% of demand over the year (ie, 70% over-generation), then supply and demand could have been matched on every day of the year with the help of existing hydro. It could eliminate all instances of ‘Other’ or long-term storage requirements. For comparison, this study had 18% of over-generation. Ideally a use would be found for all this over-generation, such as producing hydrogen or charging EVs, so long as they are able to reduce to near zero on the most difficult days of the year."

http://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-grid-is-well-within-reach-and-with-little-storage/

So today's power needs CANNOT be met by 100% renewables - and increasingly the experts are agreeing. But an ALL renewable grid is possible if we overbuild.

Hey max Green,
I remember a year or so back WA was talking about purging a heap of excess solar power and I thought what a waste, all that excess power could be used to run bitcoin miners.

In any case I think they need some type of use case to make use of excess power in these situations.
Don't purge, find a use case for that power, run pumps and refill the dams from a lower holding pond if you have to.

Yes! Any work that can be done seasonally.

Imagine an industry that can run pretty much 11 months of the year and then pause for a few weeks – take some holidays.

You could desalinate water and store it. You could use Plasma Burners to recycle all our landfill. Indeed – the main reason we are NOT using them now is the cost of power! You could make extra hydrogen to store for industry or airlines. There’s just so much that could be done with 3 or 4 times your national grid’s ORDINARY electricity demand.

As long as they can pause for a few weeks in winter or whenever there’s a strong “Dark Lull” – imagine what could get done? This started off as an exercise in adapting to the intermittent, variable nature of Renewable Energy. But now just might help solve many other problems as well.

Evidence of stupidity is abundant on this thread, but not on the government's part.

Just look at the title! Base Load? Seriously?
Bazz, I'm having trouble believing you're sufficiently stupid to think the objective is (or should be) to turn renewable output into something that stays constant regardless of demand. So why the strawman? What do you imagine you gain by fudging the figures to make renewables look bad?

The real objective is to reduce reliance on expensive gas, and importantly to reduce the amount of time the gas fired generators are setting the electricity price.

Of course in the longer term we need to get to 100% renewables, and this requires an overbuild. But it is deceptive to consider the costs of an overbuild without also considering the benefits. The surplus will be used to generate hydrogen, for which there's a large and growing industrial demand. And some of the hydrogen will be turned back to electricity on those rare occasions when pumped hydro and battery storage are insufficient.

______________________________________________________________________________

Josephus,
Batteries are recyclable. There's a lot more copper out there than you realise. And solar cells and wind turbines are likely to last much longer than 20 years.

______________________________________________________________________________

Armchair,
One German limiting the time of his own showers is insignificant, no matter how much spin the Russians try to put on it.

Hey Aiden,
It's not just about 2min showers

http://www.efginternational.com/insights/2022/are-eu-natural-gas-prices-sensible.html

"On August 26, the European natural gas price hit a new intraday record of EUR 340 MW/h, before falling at the time of writing this note to EUR 230 MW/h.1 The price has increased by about 200% since mid-June and is about six times higher than its 2021 average. Furthermore, the European price of natural gas is almost eight times more expensive than the US Henry Hub benchmark."

It's about jobs, and industry which will never return, because it's no longer competitive.
And the US under the Inflation Reduction Act is taking all European industry.
The 2min showers will just help to push a fracture of EU unity.
- Wait a few months till the gas starts running out.

The war in Ukraine isn't just military.
It's also economic against all those who supported Ukraine.
Even China has criticised Germany after Merkels admission that they never really intended to implement the Minsk agreements, which were supported by all the West and ratified by the US at the UN and which became international recognised agreement.

As for militarily, I said recently that the next few months will be very bad for the Ukraine.

Russian Assault Units Have Entered BAKHMUT!
http://youtu.be/vqm2XVKdaio

Putin rejects Zelensky's plea for withdrawal; 'We aren't leaving, accept new realities' | Ukraine War
http://youtu.be/KYHhwpBXYdE

Russia Storming Bakhmut, Marinka Encircled. FT, Ukraine Short of AD Missiles, China Slams Merkel
http://youtu.be/sc-KoIH1cH8

And FYI the earlier video wasn't 'Russian spin'
- The bloke is Romanian born during the Soviet era who moved to the US when he was still young.

Hi Aidan,

Solar arrives in a big bell curve in the middle of the day and misses the evening peak when we all get home and start watching huge TV’s, boiling water for a cuppa, cooking dinner, and putting the aircon on for the night.

We need to take the questions about the intermittent and unreliable nature of renewables seriously, or we’ll lose people. Some promoters like Amory Lovinss even sneer at people who ask about reliable overnight power. He asks if they even know how little electricity we use then? But that's moronic. Amory seems to have forgotten about this little thing called THE ELECTRIC CAR REVOLUTION and WEANING OURSELVES OFF OIL!

Studies I’ve read suggest we’re going to struggle to charge all our vehicles once they're EV's without frying the grid. One answer will be charging that is slow and staggered overnight. In other words, there will be a new, even higher 'baseload' of demand that will just not drop! It will be all day, all night, 24/7. Unceasing. And all this talk of a 'smart grid' isn't really that well costed. Let alone the fact that we want to run cinemas and restaurants and hospitals and aircon overnight. As the climate gets weirder, reliable heating or cooling becomes a matter of life and death! The first 'wet bulb' heatwave could kill MILLIONS if tropical regions are not ready for it!

I'm not saying there are not answers - but that we have to answer these questions carefully and not seem to try and turn a problem into a virtue! Imagine a worker that comes in, sees there is WAY too much work to do that day, and then just says "Good luck, I'm taking a break!" The last thing the boss would say is “Oh isn't he just so FLEXIBLE!"

In fact, it is such a serious question it’s why many climatologists like the grandfather of climate change - Dr James Hansen himself - is a fan of nuclear power. Let alone big environmentalists like Steward Brand and Dr Barry Brook.

"Of course in the longer term we need to get to 100% renewables, and this requires an overbuild. But it is deceptive to consider the costs of an overbuild without also considering the benefits. The surplus will be used to generate hydrogen, for which there's a large and growing industrial demand. And some of the hydrogen will be turned back to electricity on those rare occasions when pumped hydro and battery storage are insufficient"

If we want H2, and we do, why make it inefficiently with costly overbuild? HTGR's blow this approach away, and work on demand.

The cost of storage sufficient for 100% renewables is astromically humongous. The conclusion here (page 21) is supported by ample argument and calculation: http://tinyurl.com/ybz484rm

Chief-Fantasist, Chris Bowen, is in control until the chickens come home to roost.

Aiden copied; Just look at the title! Base Load? Seriously?
Bazz, I'm having trouble believing you're sufficiently stupid to think the objective

Indeed Aiden, the title was a quote by the hon Chris Bowen.
He said it out loud !
Most people look at the problem presuming that their proposed system
can cover a cold windless night.
When I first started to look at this problem I wondered about that
problem so I started to log the output of my own solar cells.
I was surprised how small the total output was in a day.
It peaked near enough midday, but was near enough dead by 4pm in summer.
Then as it happened a couple of days later there was four days in a row
of heavy overcast. A real system would have to rely for its solar feed
on solar farms perhaps hundred or thousands of miles away.
No matter how you distribute the generation around the country you
will never manage 100% several times or more a year. Not happy Jan !

Hi Luciferase,
First of all you’ve been had by the GWPF.

>>The “Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is a right-of-center climate skeptic educational charity based in the United Kingdom that was created by Nigel Lawson and Benny Peiser in November 2009 three days after the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) controversy, also known as “Climategate,” became public.<<

The reason we overbuild renewables is precisely to cope with our worst weeks in winter. To RADICALLY REDUCE the amount of storage required – that your GWPF paper wouldn’t admit is an option. Because renewables are about ¼ the cost of nuclear – it’s still cheaper if we build twice or three times as much!

I happily grant nuclear is great, and baseload, and reliable, and all that. I happily grant that breeder reactors can eat the waste, getting 90 times the energy out of it and being reduced to fission products that are SO hot they burn themselves out in 300 years. That’s all great. What isn’t? They’re illegal. They’re unpopular. (I KNOW this as I’ve been a nuclear activist for the last 16 years.) They’re actually EXPENSIVE compared to wind and solar. But if we need a few in Australia – I’m fine with that.

Meanwhile, the ANU, CSIRO, independent energy analysist etc all conclude we should overbuild the solar that runs in the day, the wind that runs overnight, and the PHES for backup.

Then the question is – what do we do with all the EXTRA SPARE capacity the other 11 months of the year? It’s effectively FREE power we can do stuff with. It’s a bonus. It should be celebrated – not begrudged.

Bazz said...

"A real system would have to rely for its solar feed on solar farms perhaps hundred or thousands of miles away."

Yeah - no one's ever thought of that before! (Slaps hand to forehead!)

I mean - the hypocrisy when just recently there was a whole thread here BEMOANING HVDC lines across the country. You renewables deniers can't whinge about Blaker's plans for HVDC lines from Queensland down to NSW and Victoria on the one hand, and then act like it's this whole amazing new idea no ones thought of before!

Making a virtue out of the shortcomings of intermittents is typical blarney, as is shooting the messenger. If hydrogen is good, the cheapest and most reliable method of making it should be followed. Overbuild is a tail wagging a dog. I won't get too excited about Gen 4 until it's commercially here, Gen 3 is just fine. Bring in the Koreans and let's get going instead of pissing around with the proven failure of fantasists for another minute. Storage is THE issue that isn't licked and we must stop pretending it is. My poor sodding country, guided by Bowen and his institutional advisers. What an enthusiastic circle-wank of ideological group-think.

Max Green said;
Because renewables are about ¼ the cost of nuclear – it’s still cheaper if we build twice or three times as much!

You wish ! The number of duplication needed is inversely proportional
exponentially to the physical area of the grid.
If WA is included you might be able to get the duplication down to
say four times. That is the reason the UK and indeed Europe are bound
to fail with wind and solar. Europe is just too small.
Instead of wasting all that money why not do a virtual simulation with
weather stations until you can show that you only have supply failure
about once in two or three years. To introduce realism include real
wind and solar farms.

The warnings some raise about the charging load of electric cars is
very valid. I can foresee a time when load control will be implemented
to enable closing charging district by district.
It is a major problem the government is trying to ignore as it is
contra their own policies.
You may not have heard, it has already raised its head.
A street in Northern Sydney had three houses with Teslas.
They kept blowing the fuses on the street pole transformer.
The supply company had to replace the pole transformer for a larger one.
It is only the beginning of this problem.

'Now We know they Really are Stupid !'
- Sadly Bazz, I've been aware of this fact for quite some time already.

Luciferase
"Overbuild is a tail wagging a dog."
No, Overbuild is CHEAPER then nuclear or coal or gas.
Overbuilding renewables just makes economic sense!

See what I did there? Bland contradiction - without any evidence. I just took what you said and contradicted it. As a point of illustration. To show your own argument style.

See how bland assertion works as an argument technique? It's great because it lets you be lazy. You just ASSERT the opposite. There, done. Give the arms of your armchair a good celebratory slap! Didn't have to look up any pesky data to back a sophisticated argument or anything - just used good old contradiction.

Which of course reminds us of Monty Python's argument skit...
"An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition... Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says."
http://montycasinos.com/montypython/scripts/argument.php.html
I guess a hater's gotta hate, and a denier's gotta deny. But I'm just trying to be clear as to exactly what you're doing! (Winks, and wags naughty naughty finger.)

Hey Max Green,
"See how bland assertion works as an argument technique?"
- Seems similar to assertions the climate cult has been screaming for the last 40+ years.

I'm fairly sure the ocean is still in the same place it was back then.
No-ones going surfing on the great dividing range, as yet.
- Who knows, maybe tomorrow the predictions will finally come true.

At the heart of this discussion is the renewable delusion. Finland has a core policy of phasing out all fossil fuels. However, in an article published this year Simon Micheaux demonstrates that the maths simply does not stack up. (Michaux, S., T. Vadén, J. M. Korhonen and J. T. Eronen (2022). "Assessment of the scope of tasks to completely phase out fossil fuels in Finland.") The same argument applies across the globe. If we really want to achieve anything to approximating net zero CO2 we need to face the reality that we need to radically change our lifestyles. If the aim is business as usual but replacing fossil fuel energy with solar and wind we will simply not be able to do it. The one bright spot seems to be nuclear fusion - recent advances suggest that if enough money is thrown at it we could have nuclear fusion plants in by 2050 but even that may be too late.

Bazz: "The number of duplication needed is inversely proportional exponentially to the physical area of the grid."

As they used to say in the Army, "Bulldust baffles brains." Just use big words as you blandly contradict - again without any evidence. You dressed up "No it can't!" with clever sounding words. I know what you’re doing – everyone’s playing this game in here! (Winks).
"If WA is included you might be able to get the duplication down to say four times."
Well it's a good thing the Blakers model includes WA isn't it? Yet their total costings are STILL well below today's prices.

"That is the reason the UK and indeed Europe are bound to fail with wind and solar. Europe is just too small."
Dude. Chill. Distance can be offset by PHES. It depends on your geography – you either shoot for a super-grid or smaller grid with more PHES. The variable appears to be 5% either way. That’s NOTHING!
This paper on an Asian grid compared building a Super-Grid to a more local grid with more pumped hydro. It's only plus or minus 5%, depending on your particular topology.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544221016352

But remember this is CLEAN energy. Coal is some major dirty stuff. It chokes us to death. Coal electricity you have to nearly DOUBLE to count the ‘externalized costs’ to our health departments.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/
http://www.energyandpolicy.org/value-of-solar-versus-fossil-fuels-part-two
http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-06-27/climate-policies-ignoring-billions-in-health-savings-experts-say/9836894
BAZZ: "Instead of wasting all that money why not do a virtual simulation with weather stations until you can show that you only have supply failure about once in two or three years."
Why settle for 2 or 3 when you can access 42 years?

Here it is. 42 years data of what would have happened. Griffith university. What did they conclude would help firm renewables, amongst others?

““overbuilding” the renewable energy fleet (that is, allowing for some spilled energy over time) is also likely to be an efficient source of energy firming.”
http://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/1615614/No.2022-04-VRE-droughts-modelling-Griffith.pdf

Max said; Why settle for 2 or 3 when you can access 42 years?

Indeed but it is not 24 hour continuous data.
That would be OK if you did not need continuous electricity.
Your acronym PHES, sorry do not recognise it, in someone else's words
Please Explain ?
I think the standard BOM figures that people have worked with are
good but there must be some really good wind sites that the BOM does
not report on. Wx stations in place for a year or so would be a lot
cheaper than a blunder with a 50 wind turbine farm in the wrong place.

BTW, I see the Greens are arranging for people's gas stoves and ovens
to be subsidised by us all to change to electric.
Just what we need a larger peak hour load !
I wonder if Chris Bowen had 22,000 solar panels installed yesterday ?

The cheapest power by a country mile is brown coal. There is currently no international market for the stuff, so still at 2000 prices.

Of course as Europe goes dark, & Germany reopen their brown coal power houses & mines, it just may be needed there. Meanwhile it actually works 24/7 producing power.

Incidentally no one ever mentions the wind drought that occurs along with solar drought at night. It appears no one has noticed the way the wind dies down with the sun, just like solar generation. On the coast it often dies completely at night, A even the reliable trade winds more than halve at night.

I used this fact on a sail from Cairns to Townsville with my parents on board way back in the 70s. Leaving Cairns we hit the South east trade winds at Fitzroy Island. My mother was horrified, near hysterical, at the yacht crashing into the short steep waves they generate. Knowing those winds would reduce by more than half at sundown I anchored behind the island then proceeded after dark to Mourilyan. She enjoyed the sailing in the gentle evening breeze.

I repeated this procedure for the 10 days it took us to make small nightly hops, with the days to explore our anchorages, & she enjoyed her holiday. Gentle night breezes are good for sailing south in the trade winds, but no use at all for generating power when the solar has gone to sleep. Don't ask a green though, they'll claim the wind is always blowing somewhere, perhaps in the antarctic.

Hasbeen said;
It appears no one has noticed the way the wind dies down with the sun,
just like solar generation

I mentioned that here a few times but I guess the stupid just do not believe it.
I remember telling them to notice how many sailing yachts are coming
back to their moorings on motor after a days sailing.
I think that is the sort of info that the sun & wind people don't want.

BAYGON, can you be a good boy and just BEGONE?

"Assessment of the scope of tasks to completely phase out fossil fuels in Finland."

Nearly a third of Finland is north of the Artic Circle. It gets DARK for months of the year!

"The same argument applies across the globe"

Ha ha ha ha - what are you snorting to come to that conclusion? Which month does the sun 'go down' in Australia's winter and not come up for a while?

I'm a FAN of nuclear power, especially in those Arctic countries. Unless they have geothermal or something, they'd be mad not to consider nuclear.

But ANU and Griffith uni's (and others) have modelled Australia's abundant resources - and concluded with a little overbuild we'll be fine for winter!

And the extra PHES we build for storage can also run grid services like frequency management. It sounds like they know what they're doing! I mean, they're a bunch of Professors in a University - but what would they know.

Like I'm going to listen to some internet bloke that names himself after a bug-spray!

Bazz,
It says so right there on page 5!

“MERRA-2 data was downloaded for the period 1st Jan 1980 to 31st December 2021 from the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Centre. Hourly, timeaveraged data was extracted for each grid point (Figure 1) and compiled into a local database suitable for extracting specific sites.”
http://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/1615614/No.2022-04-VRE-droughts-modelling-Griffith.pdf

PHES is Pumped Hydro Electricity Storage – by which I usually mean OFF-RIVER PHES. We don’t want to have any more Franklin dam debates slowing this down – especially when off-river PHES can be built in 3 years. Or less.
Like this one I’ve talked about before. It's small. They've broken ground, and it's going to be finished by the end of 2023. When finished, if a tree comes down and severs the line, the little town of Walpole will have nearly 3 days of power to get them through until that line can be repaired.
Towns being in charge of their OWN energy. That’s what solar and wind and PHES allow! What’s wrong with that?
ABC news story http://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-01/renewable-energy-fix-walpole-power-problems/100579700
Western Power promo - Walpole looks like many coastal Aussie towns. Makes me nostalgic and need a holiday. Kick back and enjoy - 3 minutes. http://youtu.be/vGqdYhVfYwM

Max;
I downloaded the Griffith paper and have only had a brief read of it.
It is probably one of the best "guesses" around.
Their method seems interesting even though a lot of their results
cannot take into account Chaos factors.
I could not find my way into the wind figures for Australia on the
NASA website. More persistence needed I think.
I noted with interest the tracking solar sites did not do as well as
the fixed flat panels. That could be fixed by the employed thousands
that are promised by the government if they were given the job of
manually adjusting the angle by a small amount, say every week.
If each frame supported 100 panels they could adjust the vertical angle
of each frame. That would be a seven day a week job for a few people.

Anyway the records of the last 40 years might not be enough as the cloud cover increases during the next 100 years or so, but then who cares !

Hi Bazz,
who cares? They will care. There's one thing I've found with peak oil doomers - and correct me if I'm wrong because I don't really know you. But I've noticed a very black and white, all or nothing kind of mentality from my old peak oil campaigner friends. The replacement for oil HAD to do everything, from providing transport to plastics to fertilisers. Um, no. We can do transport via trains, trams, trolley-buses and new trackless-trams technologies. We can use EV's. We can use EV trucks - whether fast chargers like Tesla or battery swaps like Janus. We can use massive ocean-regenerating seaweed farms to sequester carbon AND replace plastics feedstocks. We can REDUCE the plastics we need! We can use renewables to run the Haber-Bosch process - or even start to enjoy the new Precision Fermentation products coming our way. (I mean, who the hell knows what is in a 'chicken nugget' anyway?)

It seems to be the same with demands for the future grid. Everything has to be the same! But it really doesn't. With Janus truck battery swaps, they'll take solar panels and batteries out into a rural area and right there and then generate the power to TRUCK 100 TONS onsite - without any oil OR extra demand on the grid. Amazing! With wind and solar so cheap they can overbuild it for the worst weeks of the year. Amazing! Then you have the rest of the year to pump water uphill for both firming normal daily fluctuations AND storing a few days worth of seasonal power for the worst days in the year.

And if they get this WRONG? We might have a blackout for a day or two. That's terribly inconvenient, and what battery power there is might be shunted to hospitals etc. But it's not the end of civilisation. And they would learn from it as they did in Adelaide and build more storage. Wind and solar will be even CHEAPER by then. There's over 300 TIMES what we need in sites - don't go repeating the lie that there isn't enough space to build all the PHES we need! Wind, water and solar. WWS. We can do this!

Hi Max,

You say you can have solar farms powering transport, yet the transport industry requires continuous demand. Consequently you need multiples of generation if you want to satisfy demand, making it more expensive. You might not need battery banks, pumped hydro or upgraded transmission infrastructure, but how do you ensure the batteries are available when and where they are needed?

You also keep claiming solar and wind to be a fraction of the cost of nuclear. Could you direct me to data confirming this? I use the measure lcoe as it is a true measure of cost over the lifetime of a generating utility, not the glossy brochure predictions put out by renewable energy companies. On this basis, nuclear power is cheaper than erratic and intermittent solar and wind generation.

A high capacity factor is a huge advantage of nuclear power, with generation four designs predicted to be capable of running continuously for many years (some pebble bed reactors could in theory run continuously for more than fifty years). If the current problems with aluminium air batteries could be resolved, nuclear power stations could be paired with aluminium smelters and supply transportation with fuel as energy dense as gasoline without the fire risk of lithium batteries.

The following paper debunks Max's often repeated claim of renewables being "four times cheaper than nuclear!" (I'm guessing that Max's bogan English is indicating nuclear to be four time the cost of wind and solar, but it is hard to make much sense of the claims made in glossy brochures.).

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf

Hi Fester,
As usual you haven’t quoted the relevant paragraph. On Page 9 it has Table 1B, which shows column 6 “Total System LCOE or LCOS” as nuclear being $88.24 and “Solar Standalone c” (Solar panels) being $36.49.
So that’s 2.4 times cheaper. Not quite what I’ve been claiming hey?
But wait – there’s fine print under the table.
“c Technology is assumed to be photovoltaic (PV) with single-axis tracking. The solar hybrid system is a single-axis PV system coupled with a four-hour battery storage system. Costs are expressed in terms of net AC (alternating current) power available to the grid for the installed capacity”

Oooh would you look at that? They’ve already gone and included the cost of batteries with 4 HOURS storage! I was talking about the RAW LCOE of each tech, not moderated. Not firmed. Not backed up. But they’ve gone and included some backup for us! That means we don’t have to build quite as much PHES or over-build – but hey it’s still 2.4 TIMES cheaper than nuclear. With 4 hours.

Thanks for that reference - it's really helpful. But I kinda wonder if you even read it?

As for the raw LCOE? Did you even try the wiki?

Under “Global Studies” it measures the cost in various ways. Cost per installed capacity, cost per MWh. Lazard here says PV is $40 /mwh, and nuclear is $164. Interestingly next to that has the NEA (Nuclear Energy Agency) claiming nuclear is only $69 – but what were you saying about trusting the glossy brochure of the boosters of their own product? &#128521;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

From the paper I referred to previously in relation to Lazard LCOS calculations at http://www.lazard.com/media/451882/lazards-levelized-cost-of-storage-version-70-vf.pdf :

"Each (calculation) involves a battery with one or a few hours of discharge capacity, which is more-or-less fully charged and discharged on a daily basis, similar to the battery of a cell phone or an electric vehicle in normal usage. Thus the battery goes through large numbers of these cycles in a year, each discharge getting added to the denominator for a division in the levelised cost calculation.

An example of a situation considered (See p. 17) is a battery used to arbitrage electricity rates, enabling the owner to buy electricity at low rates at night and sell back during peak hours in the late afternoon, repeating this cycle hundreds of times per year. Full backup of an electrical grid powering a city or country does not work like that. Without fossil fuel or other backup, batteries must be procured to cover all worst-case wind/sun droughts and also seasonal lows of wind and solar output, which could persist for months. As shown above, that means enough to cover 20–30 days of average usage, which may then be fully charged and discharged only once per year.

Citation of levelised cost of storage calculations, of the type in the Lazard and Schmidt et al. studies, in the context of gridscale seasonal electricity storage is incorrect and misleading. That advocates continue to do so only points to the need for the public to demand a working demonstration project, from which the real costs could be definitively shown. It would immediately reveal the inappropriateness of the levelised cost of storage metric"

South Australia is best to go forward as the working demonstration project. When its electricity is affordable without subsidies and without emergency extension cords to other states, then Max will have won the day. Instead, the fantasists insist we all must go down the SA path together at once, to find we're up $hit-creek without a paddle. Please, just give us a single 100% renewables success story to believe instead of continuously drivelling bollocks.

Hi Max,

As usual you fail to understand the cost of your renewable energy Nirvana. Note that hybrid solar has four hours of battery backup and is not dispatchable energy. Making it dispatchable would require at least another 12 hours of battery backup and make it more costly than nuclear.

Note also that nuclear gets cheaper with time. No glossy brochures needed either as it is a fact, not the spiel of a con artist. One reason nuclear power was abandoned in the 1980s was its high cost, but nearly forty years on those same reactors have an lcoe lower than most erratic/intermittent wind and solar. That's the power of endurance!

Also, how long is a piece of (storage) string? Nobody can know. Generation can't be predicted while demand can (and nuclear can ramp up and down to meet it). That the Max's of this world think we should just get over days and weeks of power shortages, as necessary to make the pieces of their mad puzzle fit tells us all we need to know about the veracity of their calculations. http://news.sky.com/story/future-of-renewable-energy-in-balance-as-uk-suffers-wind-drought-with-global-stilling-to-come-12766917?fbclid=IwAR0_VHDupfzuEOpsr_MMu6c-n_t4BDdy7QEwtgriZ7criUVtC-cNVpHaonk

We're all guinea-pigs in the grand experiment Bowen and his band of boffins and enthusiasts are putting us through. Nuclear has over half a century of proof of concept and we ignore this at our peril.

Steam power is the way to go, steam turbines are the best way to generate electricity.

Hi Luciferase,

First – yes – Lazard is perfectly correct to point out that batteries cannot store decent amounts of power for the grid at any reasonable cost. They CAN however hit the grid with extra power instantly – and then 4 minutes later turn off if the crisis is over. So the battery is super-expensive but only built out for say 10 minutes storage, not 10 days. They deploy large amounts of power instantly - but only for short periods of time. Then something else takes over.

Second – I’m not an engineer and don’t have time to read every single paper people throw my way. But I searched for “overbuild” and Lazard don’t use it. Oh well, they’re out. See, many papers are realising that a 100% renewable grid is simply NOT possible. Not when there’s this troublesome few winter weeks where your renewables might drop to half or a third their performance. So what to do?

Overbuild the renewables 2 or 3 times! Then there’s PHES – which really IS a successful grid storage level battery that lasts a CENTURY. We’ve already USED it for a CENTURY. We know how it works – and it works well. And Australia has 300 TIMES the potential sites to build it in.

So if your Lazard paper somehow missed OVERBUILD + PHES – they’re not even conceptually on the same page as Griffith UNI, ANU, and the ANU papers that CSIRO adopted as their renewable standard. 100% renewables don’t work because of winter. But 200% or 300% with pumped hydro? Now that might just be crazy enough to work!

Two to three times overbuild? That makes it two to three times more expensive Max. In Europe they well know the failure of renewables and the "expensive" nuclear lie.

"That the nuclear-powered French pay prices around half that suffered by their wind and solar-obsessed German neighbours is the kind of barebones fact the wind and sun cult absolutely hate."

https://stopthesethings.com/2022/12/14/nuclears-cheap-french-power-prices-half-that-suffered-in-wind-solar-powered-germany/

Who will Australia plug in to when the lights go out Max?

So Fester – I see you’re busy running from the conclusions of your OWN source!
You asserted a bunch of stuff in your last post without evidence.
EG: Why does solar have to be backed up for night when we have wind? Again – you’re not arguing with me but the ANU, Griffith Uni, and CSIRO. They have measured decades of weather data and realised that with a large enough grid around Australia, the wind is almost always blowing overnight somewhere. It will get us through the night. Solar during the day provides a massive cheap boost to charge all our EV’s and pump water uphill.
Like solar, wind has no ‘fuel’. It’s also about ¼ the cost of nuclear.
1 wind grid + 1 solar grid = ½ the price of nuclear. Buy some PHES and maybe overbuild the grid to 180% as per David Osmond’s model – and you’ve still done the job cheaper than nuclear.
Here’s the thing.
Wind and solar are STILL on a significant cost curve.

Max you have clearly not read the article to which I referred. We can only generate a fraction of the energy required to replace the amount of energy that we currently generate from fossil fuels. This applies to where ever in the world we may be located. Essentially what many in this thread seem to be looking for is the ability to continue much the way we are without fossil fuels.
Micheaux's argument and that of other energy specialists is that the greenest energy is the energy we do not use. We do have technologies that will enable us reduce our energy consumption but that would mean investing in things like passive housing, reducing all travel by about 70%, constricting supply chains, painting our house white, developing vertical agriculture, and the rewilding of the planet.
The real problem is not base load renewables it is that we are expecting to transition out of our dependence on fossil fuels without making fundamental changes about the way we think about the world. Google any of these examples I have included and you will find a host of articles and research that sees them as part of a solution. There is no silver bullet and that is where the politicians and indeed much of the commentary in this thread to get it wrong.

Bazz

Now you have really done it: loosed Mad Max on us again.

There is only one solution - back to coal. If China can do it and get rich, so can we.

The promise of lots of employment has come true. Unfortunately the jobs are in China, where a third of a million workers are employed manufacturing panels alone.

China controls 95 per cent of global photovoltaic panel production and its grip on the market is increasing.

Our dependence on China for renewable energy infrastructure leaves us vulnerable to a geopolitical shock not unlike that faced by European nations because of reliance on Russian gas and coal.

An interesting read regarding the Blakers et al 'plan' to which Max adheres: https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/07/future-solar/

Max with the ratbag activists infesting particularly ANU, but also Griffith Uni, and the CSIRO, only a fool would not argue with them.

Anyone who can't be bothered understanding the math regarding power generation has no right to expect those who have bothered, to listen to them. We are not interested in a fools paradise.

Sorry Fester, I was thinking about how I phrased it to you and I was misleading an unnecessarily harsh on renewables. (Sometimes I round things off in hyperbole when in a rush.)

To slow down, and be more specific, let me try this.

We don't have to make solar baseload to get a 100% renewables grid because most studies that have monitored the weather think a roughly 60% wind, 40% solar mix is adequate as there is always some wind running through the night. But studies show a rough patch in winter. So they overbuild THAT MIX of wind and solar out to maybe 170%, with enough PHES for 2 days, and then we're covered.

“If we built enough wind and solar to meet approximately 170% of demand over the year (ie, 70% over-generation), then supply and demand could have been matched on every day of the year with the help of existing hydro. It could eliminate all instances of ‘Other’ or long-term storage requirements. For comparison, this study had 18% of over-generation. Ideally a use would be found for all this over-generation, such as producing hydrogen or charging EVs, so long as they are able to reduce to near zero on the most difficult days of the year.”
http://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-grid-is-well-within-reach-and-with-little-storage/

More on youtube as “Engineering with Rosie” interviews him here: http://youtu.be/lgxOlPu9kiM

Where they talk about 2 or 3 or even 4 times the existing grid usually has other assumptions, like replacing heating gas and / or transport oil. Different geologies require different overbuilds. Australia's resources are excellent, with one of the largest grids spread out over amazing resources that average out wind that's blowing and wind that's quite over huge distances. We'll be fine. Other countries? Maybe not. I'm a FAN OF NUCLEAR for them!

But in 10 years we'll be mostly done here. Then you'll learn to say what I've been telling people. "I never thought it was TECHNICALLY impossible (while I blush) - but now that they're cheap enough I get that we can overbuild."

That's my excuse for being wrong for the last umpteen years.

Hi Baygon,
I read the bit you quoted – and it stank of irrelevance and trite, ideological dismissal. When you quote something that’s actually on topic and of substance – I’ll try to reply more substantively.
“We can only generate a fraction of the energy required to replace the amount of energy that we currently generate from fossil fuels. “
Crap.

“Essentially what many in this thread seem to be looking for is the ability to continue much the way we are without fossil fuels.”
I love passive solar thermal homes, New Urbanism, walkable city designs with a real “Third place” in them, neighbourhoods operating a little like fractal patterns back in on the town square, and that itself a fractal out from a larger city square, etc.
But there is a silver bullet. It’s called “Electrify everything.” Sadly – because I really AM a fan of New Urbanism – walkable neighbourhoods are going to have to be a choice. They’re going to take the hard work of culture change. Because we really CAN drive EV’s charged from solar and wind! They’re abundant, they’ve got high enough EROEI’s, and we can scale up their material build. There’s no real limit.

Wind and solar can do electric – and EV’s and Janus trucks can do driving. Future hydrogen planes can do flying. It’s all ‘electric’ or derived from electricity. 10% of the world’s man made water reservoirs covered in floating solar panels would replace all our energy requirements – let alone rooftop solar – let alone wind.

Crap.
Max Green,
Prove it !

More ugly, unreliable wind turbines to blight the horizon off the Victorian coast. 250 of them - maybe. The media can't get the distance from land right - 10km or 25km - so who knows.

For people who claim to love the environment, climate hysterics sure don't care about its appearance, nor about the millions of trees (in Europe mainly) that have been ripped out to make way for turbines and glittery solar panels. And, I shudder to think of what the vandals will do to the countryside with all the pylons and wires they intend run all over the place not only ruining the environment, but also good farmland.

And to think that one day, we are going to have to pay to have all these eyesores decommissioned just like North Sea oil rigs. That has already started in Europe - wind 'farms' being dug up to get at the coal underneath them.

Hi Max,

No worries. As many are trying to point out (I hope you read Luciferase's link to the Quadrant article), renewables are more costly and less reliable than the glossy brochures tell you. I hope pumped hydro works out, and if it lasts a hundred years it might get quite cheap. Like many here I am completely flummoxed by the adoption of unproven generation and supply technology for a national grid.

Hi Fester,
do you believe in free markets? Why should coal get the biggest subsidies of them all - especially when it costs our health services $6 billion a year ON TOP of the electricity price?

Why should we use coal when a La Nina rain storm can flood a coal mine and put it out of business for a season? Why should we use this dirty energy resource when we've got cleaner, less polluting ones? Have you ever heard Freakonomics about the cost of pollution on our BRAINS?

Seriously - we owe coal some gratitude for giving us the Industrial Revolution. But I wish it had peaked and started to decline in the 1950's and then we wouldn't have climate change. Then we would be 100% nuclear by now - and maybe seeing whether renewables + storage could compete with nuclear. It would be clean vs clean.

But how you can feel nostalgic about something so old fashioned and polluting when we have better just amazes me.

IF new GenIV breeder reactors arrive that are actually commercially competitive with WWS, then I'll be equally happy to support them. I just don't see it happening, as wind and solar continue to drop in price! Solar is now the cheapest form of power EVER - even with backup. I know you deny this but don't care - you people just assert what ever you want and sometimes can't even read your own source material!

But solar + backup might even be able to compete with wind soon. It's that cheap - and various super-cheap grid storage systems - whether chemical or flow or thermal - are all on the way. They might even give PHES a run for it's money! We will see.

"various super-cheap grid storage systems - whether chemical or flow or thermal - are all on the way".

Yep, & just like nuclear fission, these "various super-cheap grid storage systems - whether chemical or flow or thermal - are all on the way", just another 10 years, & they will be just another 10 years, OR SO.

Commercial fusion will be here while affordable storage will remain a dream. Why must we wait for Gen4, btw. Koreans are building Gen3 affordably and on time.

Yeah, but WWS is being deployed right now.
Cheaply.
Safely.
While nuclear remains unpopular and ILLEGAL in Australia. If you have a magic wand to change that cultural and legislative aspect of Australia Hasbeen - then go for it! I've been trying for over 16 years!

By the time you get there we'll have a WIND, WATER AND SOLAR GRID!

Don't believe PHES is popular?

I'll remind you of Walpole. They've broken ground, and it's going to be finished by the end of 2023. When finished, if a tree comes down and severs the line, the little town of Walpole will have nearly 3 days of power to get them through until that line can be repaired.

ABC news story
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-01/renewable-energy-fix-walpole-power-problems/100579700

Western Power promo - Walpole looks like many coastal Aussie towns. Makes me nostalgic and need a holiday. Kick back and enjoy - 3 minutes.
http://youtu.be/vGqdYhVfYwM

Hi Max

"do you believe in free markets? Why should coal get the biggest subsidies of them all - especially when it costs our health services $6 billion a year ON TOP of the electricity price?"

Energy is subsidised because cheap energy is a driver of economic activity. If you read the Quadrant article linked by Luciferase you would know than very large subsidies are given to wind and solar, and Andy B erroneously uses the subsidised prices as evidence that they are cheap.

I would very much like to know where all those coal subsidies go Max, because none of them go to the coal producers I own shares in. One pays over 20% of its revenue in coal royalties. It also pays tax, and I often see Dumbanese complaining about the "obscene profits" of the fossil fuel industry. The company gets zilch in subsidies, unlike many renewable energy companies that would hit the wall without corporate welfare.

Thanks to the efforts of assorted renewable energy spruikers I am getting over a 100% return every three months, so I guess I should be happy that people are being fooled Max.

Hi Max,
There's a big difference between powering a nation and powering Walpole. The comparison point for Walpole is diesel versus intermittents plus PHES where conditions are conducive. That's not the equation nationally but let's not let that get in the way of a good story. Dream on Max, as the boffins and enthusiasts with their hands up Bowen's behind Pied-Piper us to ruin.

The thing is, there isn't that much difference.

Solar + Wind + PHES is cheaper than coal. This is true at Walpole - and the scale of Walpole can be rebuilt across the country for other similar small towns. There is simply that much hilly terrain that off-river PHES resource is something like 300 to 1000 times MORE than we need for an all renewable grid.

Even with HVDC transmission built across the nation it's still cheaper.

There's even times when PHES saves building new transmission. Someone builds a 200 MW solar farm and the local transmission can only take 100 MW. Build new transmission - or PHES to send that 200 MW Daytime into 100 MW daytime and 100 MW overnight?

The point is this is happening, now, with existing technology. If anything cheaper comes along, AWESOME! The human race wins. But Australia will be mostly clean in just 10 to 15 years. Done and dusted.

When it happens, don't worry. The world will be a better place. You'll love us when we win. Then all you silly old national party types can just have a mug of warm cocoa before bed and try and calm the hell down a bit, and pretend you "always knew it was going to go this way ..." (Yeah, right!)

Max,

PHES for Walpole does a few of hours (if fully charged) to displace diesel from the backup task. It's a looooooong way from being 100% renewables yet you claim it serves as an example to be emulated nationally. Nobody in Walpole will sell their diesel generator because supply isn't reliable with PHES. Walpole isn't going off-grid for the same reason. If Walpole teaches anything it is that even where conditions are totally conducive to PHES it will never be enough and backup will still needed, i.e. one reliable system for the price of two.

I do hope the dreamers stand up to cop it sweet when we're suffering restrictions, blackouts, de-industrialization and high consumer prices. That's me dreaming now, of course, as they'll just keep saying more intermittents will fix it.

“PHES for Walpole does a few of hours (if fully charged) to displace diesel from the backup task.”

It’s not my fault you embarrass yourself like this.
It’s only a short ABC article.
It’s not a long technical paper like some of you snap your fingers and demand I read!
“Power Research and Development, a WA-based company, wants to build a 1.5-megawatt pumped hydro project capable of powering the town of Walpole on the state's south coast for up to 70 hours.”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-01/renewable-energy-fix-walpole-power-problems/100579700

“It's a looooooong way from being 100% renewables yet you claim it serves as an example to be emulated nationally.”

I disagree. As far as the storage goes – it’s a looooooong way towards DEMONSTRATING that all sorts of scales of PHES work! What’s the scale of this one?

“A start-up firm will build the world's smallest pumped hydro project at Walpole in Western Australia”

The worlds’ smallest.

Yet it’s economically viable.

That means the MEGA ones that will service our capital cities are even more viable!

I just watched Blakers give the satellite results of his quick WORLD survey of PHES sites, with all the national parks already removed for environmental reasons. The whole WORLD has 100 times more PHES potential than it needs.

Summary: Australia’s largest pumped hydro site is Tumut 3. It has a head of 151 m. But the Blakers team investigated Australia’s PHES sites and confined the search to sites with a head of over 300 metres – so double the head means double the power and energy – but NOT double the costs! The tunnels are just a big longer. What did they find?

Only 22,000 sites – where 20 to 40 (depending on size) would power the whole of Australia.

You sound like you need a refresher. Just watch 5 to 10 minutes of Prof Blakers here.
http://youtu.be/_Lk3elu3zf4?t=982

Hi Max,

Renewables cheaper than coal you say? How is that when there is no working model, just one of Andy B's error laden fantasies? According to the US EIA, renewables are non-dispatchable, and making them so could be twice the cost of dispatchable nuclear. I guess that is why you have to do back of the envelope calculations for dispatchable renewables Max, as not even the redoubtable Andy B is up to telling such porkies.

Oh, and this year alone Queensland will collect over ten billion dollars in coal royalties. In contrast, twice the cost non-dispatchable renewables might be receiving up to seven billion a year in taxpayer subsidies, all for the purpose of destroying Australia's economy.

http://www.spectator.com.au/2022/04/renewables-subsidies-22-billion-by-2030/

Hi Fester,
“According to the US EIA, renewables are non-dispatchable, and making them so could be twice the cost of dispatchable nuclear.”
That's the second time you've misunderstood the EIA. What's going on?

Your memory is really short. We’ve already done this so I’ll copy and paste because it didn’t sink in last time.

(But before I do – typical that you get this subsidies crap from Spectator. They’re a right-biased group. Anyway, what was it one of your fellow deniers said? Something like "I don't see subsidies - I see investment in national infrastructure!" Touche. http://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-spectator-uk/ )

EIA: On Page 9, Table 1B shows “Total System LCOE or LCOS” as nuclear being $88.24 and “Solar Standalone c” being $36.49. Read the C, and that includes 4 hours batteries! (Blakers would never recommend batteries for grid storage when PHES is cheaper.) So that’s 2.4 times cheaper – WITH 4 hours battery storage.

As for the raw LCOE? Did you even try the wiki?

Under “Global Studies” it measures the cost in various ways. Cost per installed capacity, cost per MWh. Lazard here says PV is $40 /mwh, and nuclear is $164. Interestingly next to that has the NEA (Nuclear Energy Agency) claiming nuclear is only $69 – but what were you saying about trusting the glossy brochure of the boosters of their own product? &#128521;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

The bottom line? YOUR OWN SOURCE shows solar to be 2.4 TIMES cheaper WITH 4 hours storage. We could build twice the grid and a bunch of PHES and STILL be cheaper than nuclear.
Thanks for that source. It almost has me convinced we could to a 200% SOLAR grid with PHES! (But really we’ll do half solar and half wind, because spread out over the continent wind works at night.)

Max, 70 hours doesn't add-up (glossy brochures and all that).

From http://www.energymagazine.com.au/construction-begins-at-wa-pumped-hydro-microgrid/#:~:text=The%201.5MW%20pumped%20hydro,generation%20unit%20to%20produce%20electricity, Walpole’s 1.5-megawatt solar-powered pumped hydro facility will use two farm dams to store 30MWh of energy. Presume a generous 100% conversion to electrical energy.

From http://www.westernpower.com.au/media/6094/wp_walpole_minipumpedhydro_brochure_apr22.pdf , there are 500 Walpole customers. The average Perth home uses ~15kWh per day. Applying this to ~500 Walpole users (homes and businesses combined) yields 7500kWh or 7.5 MWh. 30 MWh storage would last 4 hours.

What did I miss? I'd like to see it all spelled out rather than accept glib claims in motivated glossies.

...and btw, the dam is charged by the largely fossil-fueled grid as well as solar. That's good because the chances of frequent mains outages being managed improves. This is not a template for the national grid, it is not proof of concept. There's plenty wrong with Blakers, but that's for another time.

Gosh Max. Here we are bickering about our back of the envelope calculations of dispatchable renewable energy costs while the renewable energy sector is on the taxpayer funded gravy train, receiving several billion dollars annually. Don't you think they might do the calculations themselves instead of pumping out glossy brochures, telling cock and bull stories about coal subsidies, and relying on dodgy research by the likes of Andy B?

All the BS posted here is worth diddly squat. Nobody who matters cares what any of you think.

Thx ttbn, does the same apply to all OLO?

Hi Max, pls acknowledge 70 hrs is BS and the PHES is largely charged from the grid. Walpole is not proof of concept of Blakers, but demonstrates that some diesel fuel can be saved when Govt commits to it with great expenditure of public money to prove its green credentials. It makes me puke that you simply abandon this convo to recommence your BS elsewhere. Unquestioningly smug hubris without respect for anyone who disagrees. I don't demand you read anything but provide support for what I say. What a tiresome troll you are.

Luciferase,

I think people participate here for all sorts of reasons. I am grateful that they take the time to share their thoughts, but what they share and when is very much up to them. The important question to ask yourself is "What did I gain from the discussion?".

Of interest to me was your link to the Quadrant article criticising Blakers. From that I also became aware of the huge subsidies being given to renewable energy in Australia. Also of interest to me was the concept of dispatchable power and the paucity of information on the internet of what dispatchable renewable power might cost.

The idea of nuclear power being low cost over a long service life was supported by the information I found. Wind and solar I found to be worse than I had believed. Closed loop pumped hydro looks interesting, but I suspect that it might not match the portrayal in the glossy brochures.

Although I disagree with Max, I think him a good sport for taking the time on OLO to argue his beliefs. His participation has helped me clarify my opinion of renewable energy.

Hi Luciferase,
It wasn't just the population, but the power divided by the average Walpole demand. Something isn't adding up - and I've been holding off until I can contact the company and ask them to clarify whether the ABC reported incorrectly. Unfortunately I've had a shocking few days. I won't go into details but a colleague asked me to look at something, and they've basically been stuffing up a month's work and it impacts on the CEO's department. I'm just waiting for the hammer to fall - all this right before Christmas!

If the ABC have reported this wrong, I will of course retract my claim that this is a per-capita model for the rest of Australia. Not that a 4 hour battery isn't useful for load shedding etc, it really is! But that it isn't what I claimed - the Blakers 2 days backup.

As to those geniuses going on about the subsidies: Fossil fuel particulates poison us and cost Australia $6 billion a year in extra health costs that our struggling health departments could really do without!
http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-06-27/climate-policies-ignoring-billions-in-health-savings-experts-say/9836894

Then on top of that injury we give $11.6 billion in government subsidies to big coal and oil for the privilege of poisoning us?
http://australiainstitute.org.au/post/australian-fossil-fuel-subsidies-surge-to-11-6-billion-in-2021-22/

So with health & subsidies, that’s like $18 BILLION in extra costs per year. But just the $11.6 billion subsidy could instead do each of these bullet points each year over the next 4 years. Some of them could then be rinsed and repeated for a better Australia!

* Free rooftop solar for 1.5 million low-income households

* 15 Kidston Pumped Hydro projects, which cost $777 million. This would provide 22 gigawatt hours of reliable energy – that’s the equivalent of powering all of South Australia for 8 hours.

* The $11.6 billion could fund a whopping 72,500 public electric vehicle (EV) charging stations for Australians. In Australia, there are 1,653 charging sites. In comparison, Norway has almost 17,000 chargers that support 480,000 electric vehicles. That’s one charger for every 50 kilometres. Australia would need just over 17,500 to cover its roughly 877,000 kilometres of roads every 50km. But with 72,500 chargers, that would mean one charger for every 12km of road in the country.

* For $11.6 billion, we could fully fund around 15,500 buses, which could replace all of the diesel buses in Sydney (around 8000), Melbourne (4000), and Brisbane (1200) with many more to spare.

http://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/five-better-bets-what-11-billion-of-australians-money-wasted-on-fossil-fuel-subsidies-could-buy-us/

Talk about semantics!
When you guys are down to measlely petty little word games, it shows how out of material you really are and how defensive. If I'm a multi billion dollar corporation, earning tens of billions - do you think I care if the government GIVES ME AN UNFAIR CASH payment injection, or an UNFAIR TAX CUT that the average Aussie doesn't get? Don't be so obtuse!

One is a DIRECT subsidy and one an INDIRECT subsidy.
But they are both subsidised!

"Is a tax cut a subsidy?
A subsidy is a direct or indirect payment to individuals or firms, usually in the form of a cash payment from the government or a targeted tax cut."
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/subsidy.asp

You alt-right types are just pissed that the Labor government actually puts money into CLEAN energy and GOOD infrastructure.

This will save us from the $6 billion health burden fossil fuels spew on us.

Once that is cleaned up, and the transmission and storage is built, the renewables will start to pay for themselves! (To say nothing about the fact that most of our trading partners "GET" this climate thing you're all ignorant to, and will soon only want to by green products and green steel etc.)

So stop bitching about renewable subsidies and start appreciating that your kids and grandkids will be that much less likely to get cancer.
Also, the cost curves are coming down on renewables, and even the rooftop solar subsidies are reducing over time and being phased out for new buyers a few years hence.

As I keep saying, you'll love us when we win.

the Labor government actually puts money into CLEAN energy and GOOD infrastructure.
Max Green,
Well, that's what they say they'll do, have they done so anywhere yet ?

While we're on the topic: Blakers explains that while coal use has been rising this year, it won't for long.

"Why? Largely because rising natural gas prices, due to sanctions on Russia, is driving demand for less expensive coal to fill the gap in energy supply. The report finds Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has “sharply altered the dynamics of coal trade, price levels, and supply and demand patterns in 2022”.

The good news, however, is the world’s coal use has peaked – and will soon rapidly decline. This is because new solar and wind power station capacity is being installed 18 times faster than new coal. In many countries such as Australia, retiring coal power stations are being replaced by solar and wind.

Coal use in Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM) peaked in 2008. Since then, the proportion of coal in the NEM electricity mix has fallen from 86% to 59%, and this decline is accelerating."

So given Blakers is talking numbers, anyone want to predict when we'll hit rolling blackouts because of the lack of coal? Coal's already under 60%. When does Mad Max hit because we went renewables instead of coal? Come on guys - money where your mouth is! Pick a percent.

And Max, the cost of electricity has rises at about double the rate that coal has been retired.

Of course worlds wide coal used to supply 82% of our electricity. Then along came wind & solar. After 7.2 trillion dollars waster, coal has bean reduced to 81% of power production.

Do try to get real.

Six billion a year Max? Really? Fossil fuels generate hundreds of billions in export income and tens of billions in royalties and taxes. What sort of health service would Australia have without the flow on from that wealth generation and how many lives would be lost as a consequence?

In contrast, the solar swindlers and windmill wise guys generate no export income or royalties, and the taxes they pay are more than offset by billions in taxpayer handouts. In return we get lies about the actual costs and reliability of renewable energy, high priced electricity that will make it tougher for Australian enterprise, and hatchet jobs on nuclear power, the only viable dispatchable low carbon energy source, albeit a little more expensive than coal.

If renewable energy had something positive to bring I would be all for it, but all I see are pernicious handout guzzling parasites. The renewable energy swindle in Europe is unravelling:

http://netzerowatch.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c920274f2a364603849bbb505&id=5277af6ecd&e=48bb978c50

Hi Fester,
Yes - $6 billion a year in health costs on top of the tax concessions to these immensely wealthy corporations – to equate to an overall subsidy of around $18 billion a year.

The Office of the Chief Economist resources report shares forward projections for 2023 fossil fuel earnings.
http://www.industry.gov.au/sites/default/files/minisite/static/ba3c15bd-3747-4346-a328-6b5a43672abf/resources-and-energy-quarterly-september-2022/index.html

METALLURGICAL COAL Page 53 $44 BILLION
“Australia’s metallurgical coal export values are forecast to track with price movements, rebounding from $23 billion in 2020–21 to peak above $66 billion in 2021–22, before falling back to $44 billion in 2023–24.”

THERMAL COAL Page 63: $38 BILLION
“Record prices are expected to see export values reach $62 billion in 2022–23 before a (price-driven) easing to about $38 billion in 2023–24”

GAS Page 76: $90 BILLION

OIL page 90: $13.4 BILLION.

Total forward projections are therefore $185 billion.

As the world heads towards more and more renewable energy, we will have less and less of this fossil fuel income. What do you suggest we do to replace it?

Even if we were to try and make you alt-truth guys happy and build a vast fleet of nuclear reactors, what are we going to sell Japan? Hydrogen? Really? When they have enough renewable power to run even their highly populated little islands 14 times over?

The world is going renewable, whether you people can admit it or not. There ARE extra expenses like HVDC transmission lines and PHES to open up access to the VAST amounts of very cheap power available from solar and wind. The power lines and storage are nation-building projects - like the Snowy hydro scheme and Harbour Bridge. They'll open up new opportunities. But can you imagine what they are?

Let’s use renewable energy to make renewables infrastructure and batteries and green steel and sell that overseas! $333 billion in CLEAN exports by 2050.

http://bze.org.au/repowering-australian-manufacturing

Thanks Max.

All pie in the sky stories of how great renewables will be. Reminds me of snake oil.

Here is an example of the anti-nuke tripe coming from the renewable energy lobby:

http://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/09/24/nuclear-power-is-now-the-most-expensive-form-of-generation-except-for-gas-peaking-plants/

By the comments I am guessing that people are getting a little more skeptical of the renewable guff. The problem that renewable energy has is the transition from non-dispatchable to dispatchable, and the truth that renewable energy companies want to hide, aside from the huge subsidies they are getting from taxpayers, is the fact that the cost of non-dispatchable renewables is similar to the long term cost of nuclear:

http://www.nucnet.org/news/nuclear-is-most-affordable-dispatchable-source-of-low-carbon-electricity-12-3-2020

"Yes - $6 billion a year in health costs on top of the tax concessions to these immensely wealthy corporations – to equate to an overall subsidy of around $18 billion a year."

$6 billion? Nuclear power has prevented a few million deaths, yet all the renewable energy spivs seem to do is make vague references to it being "dangerous". Energy sector companies are wealthy Max because they give Australia an economic advantage with cheap energy. That is why they generate hundreds of billions of dollars in export revenue and pay tens of billions of dollars in royalties and taxes. In contrast, renewable energy companies reap billions in taxpayer handouts and provide expensive and unreliable energy which harms the economy. The only thing renewable energy excels at is in telling bs stories about how wonderful renewable energy is going to be.

Hi Fester,
Yeah – talk about the ‘glossy brochure’ – you’re quoting from it! See, many nuclear builds simply MUST be eliminated from the LCOE or it shows the true cost. Nukes in the western world are unfairly discriminated against due to our democratic values imposing what I used to call a “fear tariff.” That is, they’re over regulated. The demands are too high, and constantly changing as anti-nuke lobbyists do their thing and shift the goal posts.

Nuclear COULD be affordable if the Australian government decided to standardise a good Gen3 like the CAP1400. Put it on a nation-wide assembly line, get those components coming, get the learning curve and economies of scale to kick in, and build 50 or 60 CAP1400’s and we’d be able to replace ALL fossil fuels – including oil! Because the climate crisis is so horrendously serious – I would support that world, and vote for it even.

But it’s not going to happen. Why? Because by the time we got the anti-nuclear legislation repealed, renewables will already be there.
See, as much as your article might have had a few points, it’s 2 years out of date. The learning curve for wind and solar KEEPS dropping. KEEPS compensating for the intermittency. And studies like Andrew Blakers KEEP being confirmed by independent peer reviewed studies and even independent studies. This is just going to happen, AND be cheaper than today’s power, AND hit before you and your pals here can do ANYTHING to defend good old nuclear.

The sun will come up and Australia’s energy grid will ‘breathe in’ all that solar and pump water uphill. Then night time, and the wind will take over. And if it doesn’t, the PHES might ‘breathe out’ a little. We’ll be OK.

And you will love us when we win

Also Fester, this bit of yours was a bit of a lie wasn't it?

"The renewable energy swindle in Europe is unravelling:"

http://netzerowatch.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c920274f2a364603849bbb505&id=5277af6ecd&e=48bb978c50

What utter rubbish! And you KNEW it before you even typed it. You expect me to take you seriously with utter BS like this?

Gee, what's been happening in the world?

1. Coal mines flooded in Queensland - price goes up.
2. Drought in Hydropower dependent Brazil - demand for gas increases - price goes up.
3. Post-pandemic economic bounceback - price goes up.
4. Oil tanker shipping shortage after pandemic - price goes up.
5. RUSSIA INVADES UKRAINE! PRICE GOES UP!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021%E2%80%932022_global_energy_crisis

You need to calm your alt-right paranoia down a bit and broaden your reading - you're sounding a bit irrational at the moment.

Thx for re-entering the fray, Max, and a Merry Xmas and a happy new year to you. Here is your essential homework, learn to understand the difference between energy and power. It is the case in Walpole, South Australia Japan and the world that with enough intermittent generation, for periods of time here and there, you can even power a nation. The rest of the time you need baseload. Storage at the scale to to make 'base-load renewables' is expensive beyond your dreams and will be so until something absolutely magical happens. Why wait for its coming when nuclear has been doing the job for over half a century?
Just a thought for Xmas, it's possible to change your mind: https://newsbeezer.com/czechrepubliceng/the-nuclear-phase-out-was-a-big-mistake-says-schwarzenegger/?fbclid=IwAR27AjPNbc9oDf5gI9UhoKYKZNhDFYgqCkYMxdJCyo1ziyUUSSMSXr3HDf4

I'm glad Arnie likes nukes.
I like nukes.
I really do - and I've even published a magazine article about why I preferred nukes to renewables. It wasn't very good - I didn't have much space - and it was kind of a philosophical magazine as well.

But Aussies hate nukes. I ought to know - I campaigned for them and got my designer wife to designed posters for various nuclear websites and all sorts of stuff.

And now that the LCOE for renewables IS actually 4 times cheaper than the AVERAGE nuclear LCOE? Awesome! It means renewables actually have a fighting chance to come in as cheap as nukes when deployed.

"Storage at the scale to to make 'base-load renewables' is expensive beyond your dreams..."

Evidence required or that's just a crap anti-science assertion.

See, Blakers and his team have done the science. So have others. Over-build is a thing, and it brings the storage down to a quite manageable few days.

“PV and wind allow Australia to reach 100% renewable electricity rapidly at low cost. Wide dispersion of wind and PV over 10–100 million hectares reduces cost. Off-river pumped hydro energy storage is the cheapest form of mass storage. There are effectively unlimited sites available in Australia. LCOE from a 100% renewable Australian electricity system is US$70/MWh (2017 prices).” http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544217309568

"and will be so until something absolutely magical happens."

No magic required!

Blakers was VERY strict on that at least. His paper is based on off-the-shelf technology. They have years of weather data - looked for the worst Dark Lull - and overbuilt for it. It was economically viable back in 2017 when they published their paper and is EVEN CHEAPER now. And in the years to come I fully expect solar to at least reach 1/5 - maybe even 1/6 the cost of nuclear as the learning curve rates continue to kick in.

Once this sinks in, you'll have an even merrier Christmas! :-)

Hi Max,

Your way of thinking about renewables replacing dispatchable power was commonplace a few years ago, but some very significant emerging problems have dampened the enthusiasm to the extent that renewables are now regarded as having a much smaller role in low carbon dispatchable energy generation. This IMF piece outlines the shortcomings of renewables:

http://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2022/12/nuclear-resurgence-nordhaus-lloyd

Perhaps the main driver of the renewed interest in nuclear generation has been the real world observation that in the long term nuclear power is cheaper, less complicated, and far more reliable than renewables. The following table (source: Nuclear Energy Association, part of the OECD) of long term costs of energy from various sources shows the cost of nuclear power to be similar to that of non-dispatchable wind and solar:

https://www.oecd-nea.org/lcoe/

The hardship from spiraling energy costs created in Europe by the aggressive adoption of wind and solar is making many countries rethink the move to renewable energy, e.g.:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbryce/2021/10/13/europes-energy-crisis-underscores-the-dangers-of-the-proposed-clean-electricity-performance-program/?sh=721788c7473a

I hope that the renewable lunacy ends soon.

Fester - Are you kidding?

First, Nordhaus is an economist. He looks at what's happened so far and says "That's all it can achieve". He doesn't look at the political stuff around delays in the German HVDC transmission lines, etc, that have SLOWED renewables deployment but not stopped them outright. He doesn't analyse the cost curves. He doesn't present weather data models that disprove Blakers.

Instead, he makes a ONE paragraph argument against renewables - with simplistic tripe that even I could write? Indeed, I HAVE written stuff like that in the past. "There's no such thing as a Danish grid" was a favourite quote of mine - pointing out how interconnected most "high renewables" countries are to the Nordic grid and in turn the pan-European super-grid.

I have learned to be a little bit more humble since then - and actually try to comprehend the peer-reviewed energy papers, the decades of weather data they analyse, and the backup methods like off-river pumped hydro.

So other than sharing that these countries share a grid (NEWSFLASH NORDHAUS - the European renewables engineers KNOW this - and indeed are counting on international grids if you bothered to actually READ their papers dumbass!), Nordhaus breaks some more astonishing news!

...
Here it is!

"Second, wind and solar energy alone will not be sufficient to break that dependence."

Well DUH! It's like he's never heard of off-river pumped hydro! Who SAYS wind and solar alone? Blakers certainly doesn't!

Has he heard of PHES?

The Blakers satellite survey that shows Europe has HUNDREDS of times the potential resource it needs to back up its grid economically.

But here's the best bit!

Most of the human race doesn't live in Europe.

Most of the human race lives much closer to the equator.

Most of the human race CAN use renewables because they don't face as harsh winters as Europe and Russia.

And EVEN if it proves Nordhaus is RIGHT about Europe - which I doubt because I've seen too many papers analysing how to do it - it doesn't mean he's correct for the MAJORITY OF THE HUMAN RACE!

In other words, some of us are Eurocentric in our thinking and try to condemn renewables for the majority of the human race when the concerns they raise are mostly European in origin!

That's just totally dishonest!

Hi Max,

As the table I linked shows, wind and solar produce cheap power in Europe too.

The problem renewables face is that dispatchable nuclear costs the same as non-dispatchable wind and solar. Why would European countries bother mucking about with pumped hydro when the modelling suggests that making renewable energy dispatchable would make it five times the cost of nuclear?

Also Max, if Andy B's ideas are so fantastic, why is the rest of the world ignoring him? Maybe they lost interest when he estimated the cost of nuclear power at $300 per mwh when the long term data shows countries producing nuclear energy at a tenth the cost.

“The problem renewables face is that dispatchable nuclear costs the same as non-dispatchable wind and solar.”
Oh look – Fester’s doing the assertion thing again!
You’re going to have to get better at actually quoting the most relevant paragraphs from the most credible sources, and referencing them. I’m kind of bored of your repeated assertions schtick.
“Also Max, if Andy B's ideas are so fantastic, why is the rest of the world ignoring him?”
Another unverified assertion!
“Nuclear power rebounds and increases 2% in 2021, reversing only half of the decline in output that took place in 2020.”
http://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2021/nuclear#abstract

http://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2021/electricity#electricity-supply

Together wind and solar caught nuclear’s output in 2021.
http://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2021/renewables

You can see that in the USA renewables are SMASHING nuclear output.
http://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear-energy-factsheet

“Renewables were already expanding quickly, but the global energy crisis has kicked them into an extraordinary new phase of even faster growth as countries seek to capitalise on their energy security benefits. The world is set to add as much renewable power in the next 5 years as it did in the previous 20 years,”
http://www.iea.org/news/renewable-power-s-growth-is-being-turbocharged-as-countries-seek-to-strengthen-energy-security

Summary: wind and solar have caught nuclear.
Wind and solar are going to grow more in the next 5 years than the previous 20.

Can you say the same thing of nuclear? Do you have a credible source!?

But hey – according to World Nuclear – if it had ANY growth compared to the last 20 years that would at least be something! The last 20 years look fairly flat if you average them out!
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Steady-growth-in-nuclear-generation-continues

By the time we overturned the ban on nuclear wind and solar and PHES would have already done the job in Australia - because they're cheaper than nuclear and are STILL on a downward learning curve!

Gawd help us. Some 'expert' advice from Prince Andrew, who told an old woman silly enough to turn out for the 'Christmas Day Walk' the Royals do that she should stand on a newspaper to get warm.

So TTBN - nothing intelligent to say today then?

You are totally humourless, like most of your sort; and sadly, you seem to believe that the second hand rubbish that you rabbit on about is "intelligent".

Ah, I see. Personal attack. Good on you! Staying true to form for your team then. If you have anything intelligent to say I'm all ears - but as Aragorn said - "Today is not that day".

The "transition" from cheap and reliable energy supplies to wind and solar is driven by extremely costly subsidies. No energy has been produced without taxpayer subsidies anywhere in the world.

On top of these subsidies, it is going to cost $500 billion, according to the CSIRO, to send Blackout Bowen's "cheapest energy" to consumers from all the windmills and glittery panels littering the environment with their ugliness, through equally ugly and productive land-ruining pylons and cables. None of all this costly ugliness can guarantee us a non-stop, reliable source of electricity.

You beaut unreliables are going to cost us at least twice what the current system does.

And, when this crappy system can't provide power because nature won't cooperate with wind and sun, piss weak batteries costing an estimated 30% of GDP, and needing replacement every 10 years, will give us a brief flash of power for a few minutes.

People in the know think that 7 days of reliable storage would be needed to back up unreliable wind and solar!

Good luck to all of you still around when the shite really hits the fan.

Mad Max

Just noticed your "personal attack" whine. Telling me my comments are not "intelligent" is not a personal attack? Boofhead.

Overcharging EV's with Lithium Batteries at home often catches fire and burns the house down. This is a warning published within our village.

tritely taunting "boofhead" now,
Most comments on this board are not intelligent.
You don't have to take it personally.

______________________________________________________________________

Fester,
>Your way of thinking about renewables replacing dispatchable power was commonplace a few years ago,
>but some very significant emerging problems have dampened the enthusiasm to the extent that renewables
>are now regarded as having a much smaller role in low carbon dispatchable energy generation.

Living in SA, I've observed the EXACT OPPOSITE!
Many people used to claim there were technical obstacles preventing the supply of electricity from renewables getting beyond a certain proportion of supply. But as the proportion of renewables increased, most of those obstacles turned out to be illusions, and the rest could be overcome without a huge amount of difficulty.

A few years ago I thought that the last 10% would be harder than the other 90%, and we'd probably always rely on them for production of electricity in difficult conditions, though the gas supply would gradually transition to non fossil sources. But now it's clear that the transition will be a lot faster: there'll be a large overbuild of wind and solar infrastructure, with the surplus power to produce hydrogen. A small proportion of that hydrogen will be turned back to electricity when needed. Of course since reliable supply is of very high importance, gas turbines will remain available for use long after we stop actually using them.

Hi Aiden,

I hope you are right, but the hydrogen economy has fundamental problems, principally the >80% energy loss. It would likely be better to store the excess energy by other means.

I think it rash to go headlong into an unproven system on a large scale, especially when nuclear has many decades of data proving it to be a cheap and reliable source of energy.

I used to get excited by the hype, but I have seen too many bs stories to get excited these days.

Hi TTBN,
“No energy has been produced without taxpayer subsidies anywhere in the world.”
You got that right given fossil fuels get over half a trillion in subsidies a year!
So, $500 billion to go renewables right? It’s a good thing they chose wind and solar then – imagine if they’d gone for something more expensive?

“The fourth GenCost Report (2021-22) considers the costs of storage technologies and transmission network investment that would be needed to support different energy sources. It shows that wind and solar will continue to be the cheapest sources of new electricity generation in Australia through to 2050, even taking into account the cost of storage and new network infrastructure.”
That includes oil, which is replaced by electric vehicles and some hydrogen modelling.
https://publications.csiro.au/publications/publication/PIcsiro:EP2021-3374

It means we’ll finally have independence from the oil barons of the world including Russia and the Middle East and will be good for national security.
I thought you’d be into a bit of that? Or are you recommending that we stay nice and VULNERABLE to Putin and his friends pulling on our oil chain!

Max, "It means we’ll finally have independence from the oil barons of the world".

Now at last we see why this bloke is trying so hard to convince himself, & us, of the usefulness of wind & solar, he hates real industry making a profit.

So Hasbeen - Do you know how much oil is a national infrastructure risk to Australian life? You saying you really don't care about Australia's national security? It seems you don't know and don't care - so why would I listen to a cheap jibe from you?
As the Foreign Investment Review Board says:

Liquid fuels
Liquid fuels (including crude oil and condensate, petrol, diesel and jet fuels) are essential to Australia’s energy security. A compromise or prolonged disruption to Australia’s liquid fuel sector would have a significant impact on individuals, communities, businesses and national security capabilities.
http://firb.gov.au/sites/firb.gov.au/files/guidance-notes/GN08_NationalSecurity.pdf

But hey - being addicted to some petty tyrant's oil or gas never hurt the world economy!
(Facepalms!)

Fester,
Exactly what energy loss are you referring to? Could you have somehow confused the efficiency figure for the loss figure? Or are you referring to the proposals for the later stages of the hydrogen economy, involving conversion of hydrogen to ammonia for transporting it before it's converted back to hydrogen?

If the latter, it's a red herring for three reasons: firstly there's a huge demand for ammonia. It does not make sense to convert it back to hydrogen at the moment (apart from experimental and proof of concept purposes). And there's also plenty of applications for hydrogen that don't require shipping, chief among them being production of sponge iron.

Secondly, technology is advancing rapidly. In the lab, electrolyser efficiency has reached 95% and the Haber process has been replaced by far more efficient membrane based processes. 'Tis only a matter of time before the huge efficiency gains are commercialised.

Thirdly, ammonia to hydrogen conversion is more likely to be combined with refrigeration than in stand alone facilities. Failure to include that in the calculations would give a deceptively low efficiency rating.

Hi Aidan,

Yes it might work as you say, although it still would not be as efficient as battery or pumped hydro, and you would have to design and build the infrastructure.

Another point is that wind and solar are erratic and intermittent power sources, and with that comes inefficiency. With nuclear power you can run a plant 24/7 as you have dispatchable power. With wind and solar you would have your plant operating intermittently, which makes it less productive and the output more expensive. The Europeans have discovered as much from using conventional generation to fill in the gaps for renewables to provide dispatchable power. There is a price to pay for using things piecemeal.

There are good reasons why systems need to be developed and tested before they are put into operation. Prove the product first. You would not release an untested drug on a population no matter how well you thought it might work. It should be no different for a national power grid.

Told you it was coming...

EU approves CO2 tax on heating and transport, softened by new social climate fund
http://tinyurl.com/3bt5a2k7

Oh you told me did you? Which post did I forget to recite as my new LORE - oh my master?

At first glance - from more reputable sources - it seems great! Just what we need here to help move things along.

Clean air, a stable climate (eventually), no more oil wars, Australia as one of the Saudi Arabia's of lithium, and huge green eco-industrial areas like the Hunter valley and parts of Queensland that will earn twice what our fossil fuel exports earn us.

Which, after all, were going to struggle to find buyers soon anyway! Come on Armchair - you KNOW that's coming. You might pretend to be dumb but you know we soon won't have anyone to sell this crap to in the first place!

So, if Europe's carbon tax with green social offset program works - I say bring it here! We'll be healthier, make MORE money, have a more stable tech and industrial sector, and actually help do our bit to stabilise the climate. Especially if we get into selling green tech overseas!

Can't happen soon enough!

You'll love us when we win.

Oh yeah, that Precision Fermentation dairy I was talking about? It has EXACTLY the same proteins and tastes the same but omits one - lactose. We'd better learn how to make this stuff before someone else corners the market and sells it to Asia!

Told you so.

Ice cream
http://www.greenqueen.com.hk/brave-robot-1-million/
Cake mix
http://www.greenqueen.com.hk/food-tech-news-october-27/
Cream cheese
http://www.greenqueen.com.hk/modern-kitchen-perfect-day-cream-cheese

You can't beat physics and economics, so we'll hate you for dragging us downwards into your enthusiastic, whole of nation experiment. When SA cuts its umbilicus to other states and delivers net zero reliably and affordably to its consumers and taxpayers, then the rest can follow. What we are doing is simply insane, and I hope the drongos bringing on this madness are brought fully to account. Instead, they'll be given medals and promoted, as is the usual way and adults will pick up the pieces.

Yeah - right.

It's really insane to try and shift your society from relying on a dangerous and dirty and polluting and finite resource to a cleaner, safer, sustainable resource.

It's really insane to prepare for running out of oil.
I'm insane for getting solar on my roof to be ready for the day I get an EV. That combination is like having an oil refinery on my roof. It means I cut out giant tanker ships floating around the world dropping oil in our port, and big oil tanker trucks driving up and down the Hume highway. It means I'm not buying oil from some nasty regime in the Middle East or Russia.

It's just insane to stop funding tyrannies.

It's just insane to prepare for running out of a critical resource - ENERGY ITSELF - that we need to build out THE NEXT ENERGY SYSTEM.

I think it's SO much more rational to try and build out our oil replacement AFTER the oil's already gone... I mean, we'll just cycle all that infrastructure into place... running on moonbeams and unicorn farts because not only is the oil and gas and coal now gone... but so is our agriculture and the modern world.

Yeah, that's VASTLY more rational!

Who's talking coal, oil and gas? Not I. The insanity lies in our national experiment guided by pied-pipers wearing rose-coloured glasses. The case for this is not supported by Walpole, not by South Australia, nor California. It will fail nationally, just the same.

Only nuclear can displace fossil-fuels. Compare France with Germany, the former going nuclear, the latter going intermittents in the power sector. Irrefutable but ignored facts to those blinded by ideology:
http://www.statista.com/statistics/1291750/carbon-intensity-power-sector-eu-country/

'Only nuclear can displace fossil-fuels.....', COMPLETELY and AFFORDABLY, unlike intermittents and storage. Furthermore, that's true for ALL sectors, not just the power sector.

Who was asking about the Walpole station? I emailed them and they replied:

"As per the brochure on this webpage- Walpole Mini-Pumped Hydro System | Western Power, the Walpole average load is 400kW (0.4MW). So with 30MWh storage (when full) and 0.4MW average town load, the total time would be 30 MWh / 0.4MW = 75 hours."
http://www.westernpower.com.au/our-energy-evolution/projects-and-trials/walpole-mini-pumped-hydro/

Hi Luciferase,
I hear you - I really do. It's why I still am pro-nuclear.

But the thing is - Germany spent all that money decades ago on renewables scaling it up to bring the cost curve down. And it's STILL going down. China is expected to drop solar 30% this year! There's a price war going on.

You're comparing the money invested decades ago with the prices today.

That's like comparing a Gen1 nuclear plant with today's developments in Gen3+ - it's cherrypicking and just not rational.

Western Power can't even do its own arithmetic. Walpole consumes 0.4 MWhr of energy each HOUR (on average over a day) not each DAY! Multiply by 24 (hours in a day) and you have 0.4 x 24 = 9.6 MWhr. It's worse than I calculated using Perth figures, and actually closer to 3 hrs than 4 hrs of backup! Even this presumes the dam is always full and ready to go, after possibly multiple days of grid failure. 75 hours is fanciful nonsense and you should be able to do the calculations yourself to establish this if you are to have any credibility. I respectfully submit that Walpole and Snowy 2.0 are walls and poles apart.

You really are clutching at straws, Max. France's Messmer Plan cost less than a quarter of Germany's investment in intermittents to achieve it's carbon intensity result. Inflation is barely relevant. If nuclear had been given the chance instead of being stymied by over-regulatory, ideological forces, it too would cost 30% less now. Don't even go there.

One path is proven success on emissions, the other is proven failure. The choice is simple, and affordable if we let the Koreans go to work here.

Max, I awoke with a start this morning at my late night stupidity. WP's calculation is indeed correct and it is I who's credibility is questionable, not yours or WP's. By my own reckoning 30MWh/9.6MWh/day = 3 days = 75 hours. Reduced a little for conversion losses and you have the roughly 70 hrs. There was no need for you to do a calculation as WP's was correct, and I was wrong to berate when I was at fault, not WP, or you.

If you can look past this, it demonstrates that for a 3-day grid failure, the situation is covered when the dam is full (which it should be often as it's largely recharged from the grid). After that, out come the home generators, or a central one to service the whole town.

It's the last bit that makes a difference. Whatever the storage method, how much is needed is an unknown question, even before weather dependent generation itself is is affected by climate change (longer wind and insolation droughts). There will always be the need for fossil-fuelled backup with intermittent generation and storage (no point in nuclear for backup purposes as it makes the generation and storage redundant). This is too much expensive infrastructure needing continual renewal and ongoing of emissions to making one clean, reliable, affordable system (without mentioning the enormous grid upgrade needed to accommodate it).

The remainder of what I said re Germany and France are true, only one path to nett-zero is proven and affordable, while the path Oz is on is not.

Apologies again, but I can't thank you for winning the path war.

South Australia does 10 days 100%
http://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australias-remarkable-100-per-cent-renewables-run-extends-to-over-10-days/