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.