Oh Dear, still arguing the toss.
Re oil, it would be useful for those talking about it to read,
Twilight in the Desert by the late Mathew Simmons.

For the life of me I cannot see how wind & solar can generate cheap electricity.
Fester suggested that five times the peak load in a year would be needed.
I am afraid he is very optimistic. In a country the size of Australia
you would need a duplication a few time larger.
However our grid is about half that size and the proportion is the
exponential inverse size of the physical grid. Reduce by half the grid
size and the duplication goes up four times.
Wind yearly output is 33% of the nameplate rating, so you need two
more turbines for each one, but they cannot be on the same site.
They MUST be on two other sites. However there might be no wind on
two of the sites.

As far as cost goes it seems that the modular nuclear made in a factory
are planning on a lifetime of eighty years. Where will the cost of wind
and solar be then ?
There is a simple way to solve the problem before huge amounts of money is spent.
To be continued.

We all know solar and wind are intermittent. We all know winter is especially tough, with “energy droughts” being feared. There are dark overcast weeks without much wind. The Germans call these Dunkelflaute, the “Dark Lulls”.

Even energy hobbyists have studied the weather data themselves and concluded that a moderate overbuild of renewables about 1.5 times the Australian grid would do the job with a little pumped hydro. But what do the experts say?

An Australian National University team have analysed decades of weather data. They’ve analysed different renewables build out plans. Renewables are now SO cheap that you can OVER-BUILD them radically - as in 2 or 3 times the grid capacity in summer months - just to reduce the storage costs for Dunkelflautes. The good news? Dunkelflautes are rare.

“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

Here’s Tony Seba - just click below as I’ve timekeyed it to the spot. He explains the relationship of overbuild to storage and how it reduces the otherwise MASSIVE storage costs. Look at the graph! The irony? While he says you can have a 100% ALL renewable grid - technically he’s saying you can’t. He’s REALLY saying you can only have a 400% or 500% or even 600% renewable grid! Why? Overbuild for your worst weeks in winter! And it’s still the cheapest power system in HISTORY!
http://youtu.be/fsnkPLkf1ao?t=356

Now here’s the question. If you’re building 5 times your national grid’s demand just to cope with your worst month in winter, what do you do with the grid the other 11 months? With 4 or 5 times your national power? Just turn those farms off and waste it? Um, no! You could desalinate water cheap, use Plasma Burners to recycle all our landfill, or run other seasonal work.

100% Renewable
There is much talk of this objective and indeed it will in the long term be very necessary.
With a Labour government there will probably be a variety of irreversible commitments made to implement 100% renewable electricity generation.

So far as I have been able to ascertain there has been no study to determine how many wind and solar farms will be needed and where they must be located. Before even determining how many wind generators and solar panels will be needed we need to determine where they should be located.

What needs to be done to achieve this task is a major study of wind systems over all of Australia. Then it will be necessary to establish where the best locations are for solar farms taking into account the differences imposed by time of year.
The data could be established by installing weather stations in likely locations.
Their readings could be fed into a central computer which would use
real data to compare with the real load 24 hrs a day 365 days a year.
Once that data is obtained then it would be possible to test virtual wind farms in all locations taking into account yearly variations. While Bureau of Meteorology data would be a good starting point only real data from weather stations installed for one or two years would be valid.

This could be modeled in realtime and after a virtual network of wind farms and solar farms was tested that gave a 100% availability of electricity then the number of wnd generators in each farm could be established and also the number of panels in each solar farm could be determined.

to be continued

Is Mise I saw places in PNG where a, automotive alternator driven by water from a small waterfall, with water carried by a bamboo pipe gave lots of 12V power a enough 240 to drive a fridge freezer.

As for tide, that depends on there being enough range. In much of the Pacific for example, the range is only a foot. In places on the reef & inside it, the range can be 16Ft & rate of flow high enough to be useful. The bad thing is only 3.5 to 4 hours of worthwhile flow each tide. The good thing is that places only 100 nautical miles apart can have high/low tides 2 or more hours apart. Tidal power is yet to be made useful of course, just as wave power has failed.

All this is only of interest to the foolish who believe CO2 is responsible for changing the weather. Sensible folk realise more CO2 is an asset, so we should be using coal in all power generation, & to hell with the gravy train riders & their useful idiots.

Sorry for the interuption;

The realtime output of existing wind and solar could also be fed in to
the central computer & it would give a realistic input to the system.

To undertake the project this way would show that weather stations
in all the locations would be a lot cheaper than installing the
turbines in the wrong locations anyway.

I went as far as getting BOM wind data from a number of locations
around the country but as 24 hour data was not available it illustrates
that only by using wx stations installed in likely locations would do the job.
If a site was proven then a wx station would be needed anyway.
A good project for CSIRO !

Hi Max,

Okay, you said that solar was a quarter the cost of nuclear, then you give a link saying that building five or six times as much solar makes sense. How can it be viable if the solar and wind generators alone provide power at 150% the cost of nuclear? You claim that you would just build other industry to use the extra power. How might that work when the extra power would be highly erratic? Remember, all that extra generating capacity only makes a sixth to an eight of the output 24/7, and you only get that after you have spent a motza on batteries, transmission and regulatory infrastructure, pumped hydro and backup generators. Wouldn't it be easier just go nuclear if you wanted low carbon power? I think it a pity that wind and solar weren't made illegal in Australia as we would then match our World's most moronic country status re nuclear energy.

Wind and solar are very applicable to some applications, but for a national grid you acknowledge that it is at least 50% more expensive than nuclear for the cost of the turbines and panels alone. I am finding it difficult to understand how it works.