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.