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? 😉

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.