A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

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

by guerby • 4 years ago

249 341 4 years ago

reneweconomy.com.au

guerby• 4 years ago

David Osmond (author of the simulation) interview on youtube channel "Engineering with Rosie": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgxOlPu9kiM

Twitter : https://twitter.com/DavidOsmond8/status/1562318623359713280

Also see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32567994

anovikov• 4 years ago

Great job! Did a similar study for Germany about 7 years ago based on their published 30-minute production and demand data and arrived to very similar conclusions. It's not as good as in Australia because both wind and solar in Germany is less reliable, also good enough.

WalterBright2• 4 years ago

5 hours of grid-scale storage seems like a lot.

zdragnar2• 4 years ago

On its own, it does seem like a lot.

Thinking about the nature of renewables where I live, it seems so small as to be not worth mentioning; January will often have a week to several weeks of heavy cloud cover and little wind. A mere 5 hours of capacity is a pittance.

Australia, on the other hand, could easily make more sense, as I imagine the outback to be sunnier year round and maybe windier.

plantain6• 4 years ago

Cloud doesn't mean solar stops working - the decrease is 30-60% depending on thickness, but there's still very meaningful generation.

qqqwerty3• 4 years ago

What percentage of the population lives in climates like yours? If I had to guess, maybe something like 10-20% of the worlds population?

My gut tells me the vast majority of the worlds population lives in locations that are more similar to Australia's climate than in climates like yours. So we start there, and overtime things get cheaper, we find better solutions to long duration storage, and then we start tackling the harder climates/geographies.

bluefirebrand• 4 years ago

It also doesn't sound like actually enough. They never have outages longer than 5 hours?

And even with fully renewable sources they would never have periods longer than 5 hours without much generation?

plantain6• 4 years ago

Hence the overgeneration.

Ajedi32• 4 years ago

Looks like they used Gas peaker plants (labeled "Other") to make up the difference during the times that was necessary.

ParksNet3• 4 years ago

Not if we figure out vehicle-to-grid.

adrianN2• 4 years ago

Developed countries have a couple of weeks worth of natural gas in strategic reserves. I don't see why we couldn't do that with gas made from CO2, water, and electricity. Or ammonia. Or maybe hydrogen.

dashundchen• 4 years ago

Is it really though? How many gigawatts of gas peaker plants and all the associated infrastructure sit around waiting for the tens or hundred hours they're needed?

Turns out, it's a lot - and it costs the ratepayers:

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/just-how-much-b...

Wood Mackenzie calculates the average peaker plant capacity factor will sit between 5 and 6 percent over the next two decades. That amounts to a low number of hours for storage to replicate.

In New York City, ratepayers are paying billions of dollars for polluting gas peakers that sit idle.

https://www.cleanegroup.org/ceg-projects/phase-out-peakers/

* An estimated $4.5 billion in ratepayers funds have gone to support the continued operation of the city’s peaker plants – most of which operate no more than a few hundred hours each year.

* Even though the power plants don’t run often, they can be significant contributors to local air pollution – accounting for more than 10 percent of nitrous oxide (NOx) emissions on high ozone days.

Luckily we have the technology to both start replacing gas peakers with storage, and roll out demand response and load shedding to reduce peak demand.

For example, my employer is a big power user. On a couple days in the summer during peak heat, the utility requests curtailment. The plant managers can respond by switching HVAC operation plans, shift some loads to the overnight - the utility saves money on peak generation, and the company saves a ton of demand charges. Win-win.

ZeroGravitas34• 4 years ago

This is going to come up a lot in future, so we should be careful to seperate two things:

1. Money spent on having generators on standby when they are used only 5% of the time

2. Money spent on fossil fuels for those plants when they actually run.

1 is money well spent, 2 is a problem to be solved but just carbon taxing it is probably enough to consider it solved.

Luckily, the high cost of 1, makes it easier to justify adding batteries or a thousand other things that help to reduce 2. But you know people are going to point to the same peaker plants we've had for years and say "look how expensive renewables are!".

Also, we've already built the gas plants. Which is probably a big chunk of the cost (they'll just be spreading that cost across the hours that they intend to run during their working life).

bombcar• 4 years ago

Based on some back-of-the envelope calculations, a single Powerwall would provide about 5-10 hours of "house run" for the average house, and residential use is about 1/3 of all electrical use.

So a Powerwall on every house gets us a third of the way there. That seems entirely within possibility.

plantain6• 4 years ago

The "Victorian Big Battery" cost about 100 million to build and provides 450MWh, so at those prices the 120GWh they calculate for 5 hours would cost about 25 billion.

Not outrageous in the scale of nation building projects.

cinntaile2• 4 years ago

They won't use batteries for grid scale storage, that's a bit too expensive. They'll probably use hydro, some sort of heated mass or compressed air. Or gas, it's much better than coal at least.

inglor_cz• 4 years ago

For 25 billion, you could have two Olkiluoto-like nuclear blocks that actually produce energy and not just store it. For several decades.

(Olkiluoto is considered notoriously over budget.)

Schroedingersat15• 4 years ago

Prices have roughly halved since then, and will likely halve again when a winner of the not-lithium battery competition emerges (which is looking very much like sodium ion as it's entering mass production). Everyone is expecting another halving after that but before 2035 even with no single clear winning outcome. After that prices become dominated by steps that don't typically get cheaper, so prices much below $30 (or a bit over 10% of the Big Battery) are unclear.

passwordoops• 4 years ago

Interesting, but the title should mention it's localized to Australia so as to avoid arm waving from either side

toomuchtodo3• 4 years ago

California, on most days, is generating slightly less power from solar (~10GW) than all of Australia from coal (per https://electricitymap.org). Texas has over 130GW of renewables in ERCOT’s interconnect queue. There are challenges to solve for, certainly, but broad strokes the decarbonization roadmap is well defined and within reach. Velocity is a function of capital and technology investment.

Edit: @usefulcat https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/rampant-solar...

earthboundkid• 4 years ago

Yeah. As a consumer, I put solar panels on my house in 2017. They generate about as much electricity as I consume. In theory, I will break even on the cost in another two years. Obviously, they're going to depreciate and break at some point, but the only reason ~every house doesn't have them is the price of installation. If everyone did this, you're talking about a world where we would still need non-renewables for load balancing, night time, cloudy days, etc., but we'd still have a huge reduction in carbon. The only thing stopping us from having near carbon free consumer electricity with current technology is the capital costs. So duh, the government should just loan the money to consumers and get it done. We can figure out load balancing etc. later once we pick all the low hanging fruit.

usefulcat• 4 years ago

Texas has over 130GW of renewables in ERCOT’s interconnect queue

I'm curious to know where you got the 130 GW figure? Texas consumption rarely exceeds 80 GW, even in summer, so 130 seems like a lot.

https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/supplyanddemand

(Note: the Y axis in the above chart is megawatts)

cinntaile2• 4 years ago

It's the first sentence in the article, you can't really miss it.

smileysteve• 4 years ago

It's suggested by the url, but if mods wanted to add [AU]

jakewins2• 4 years ago

This survey paper shows the same holds true pretty much everywhere, with lots of different labs using different models arriving at the same finding:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

cm2187• 4 years ago

The averages don’t tell me much. We need to look at percentiles with intermittent sources of energy. 99% still means 3 full days of blackout every year. So it needs to be sufficient to cover an even higher percentile (in fact I don’t even think there is an acceptable number of hours of blackout in a year). I would be curious how they get to that with energies that pretty much go to zero the week there is no wind.

toomuchtodo3• 4 years ago

Fossil gas short term, green ammonia long term. With enormous amounts of clean energy and air source carbon capture, you can carbon budget for last resort combustion generation. You might have to burn something to keep the lights on, you’re just on the hook to pay Climeworks or someone else to pull that carbon back out of the atmosphere (which will be done with clean energy) and that cost is built in the per MWh spot price.

https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/low-carbon-e...

philipkglass4• 4 years ago

That's what is different about this new study. It uses real time supply/demand figures instead of annualized averages. It meets 98.8% of demand with renewables and fills in with fossil power the rest of the time. To quote from the article:

Key results from the 52 weeks of simulations are summarised as follows:

- Renewables met 98.8% of demand over the year, with the remaining 1.2% met by ‘Other’ (fossils)

- ‘Other’ generation peaked at 6.59 GW on the night of July 12. Over the year its average capacity factor was 4.3%.

- Hydro met 6.9% of demand. This was lower than my target of 7.5%, and also less than actual hydro generation of 8%. This means that dam storage levels in my simulation would have ended the year higher than they did in the real world.

- 17% of the wind and solar generation was in excess of requirements and ended up being curtailed.

- 11% of wind and solar generation went into storage. Storage discharge met 10% of demand.

- 82% of demand was directly powered by wind and solar without having to pass through storage or be curtailed.

atoav• 4 years ago

82% of demand was directly powered by wind and solar without having to pass through storage or be curtailed.

This is amazing. As an EE I wonder about transportation losses, but wind and solar should be pretty easy to decentralize, so maybe this is a non-issue. Wind might be a little harder to decentralize, but I don't know how the regional differences are in Australia. I'd suspect the coasts (or even offshore) would be windiest, which is also where most people tend to live.

onlyrealcuzzo• 4 years ago

99% still means 3 full days of blackout every year.

Presumably the entire grid isn't going down.

Brown outs in small parts of the country is what I'd expect.

This sounds like the current state of California.

themitigating• 4 years ago

https://slate.com/technology/2022/07/texas-power-grid-electr...

bcrosby95• 4 years ago

I grew up in California, and brown outs have been a problem here for at least the last 30 years.

I don't know if renewables had much of an affect one way or another.

ebiester• 4 years ago

Or, alternatively, a handful of gas plants working at this load like peaking power plants work now. So, for 72 hours or so, where the full need isn't met, we have some very expensive alternatives. According to wikipedia, some peaker plants may work as little as a few hours a year.

Or, we have a set of solar thermal energy power plants that can function as peakers down the road.

ZeroGravitas34• 4 years ago

This isn't an average it's modelled on real-time demand and supply and the 99% means 3 days worth of power met by non-solar/wind/hydro peaker plants over a year, not instantly plunging into a 3 day long version of Mad Max.

pydry6• 4 years ago

99% still means 3 full days of blackout every year.

Or using some excess wind capacity to generate some windgas at and keeping it stored using existing natgas infrastructure.

The windgas process is only 50% efficient at converting electricity so it's only cost effective if it's used for say, <1% of electrical needs.

These calculations also dont take into account demand shaping. If you can convince people to stop smelting aluminium so much and charging their cars on the off day that reduces storage needs still further.

ajross• 4 years ago

99% still means 3 full days of blackout every year.

Or 3 days running otherwise-mothballed (and, yes, quite expensive per MW) gas plants or whatever to fill the gaps. There's a real problem in this discourse that wants to interpret things in absolutist ideas, when real solutions always end up looking a little patchwork in those last few percent.

Reducing electrical grid carbon output by a factor of 100 (!!) is more than sufficient to meet anyone's climate goals. At that point, the low-hanging-fruit analysis will have long since moved on to transportation anyway.

adrianN2• 4 years ago

If you want to play around with a toy model of this problem, there is this website: https://model.energy/

conjecTech• 4 years ago

One thing I would love to see addressed in these kinds of analyses: the efficacy of strategic placement of solar. Electrical demand tends to peak slightly after sundown for much of the year. However, the sun obviously doesn't set at the same time everywhere. Darwin's sunset is currently an hour and a half later than Sydney/Brisbane. Could building more equatorial/western solar installations together with transmission defer some of the need for storage, even with the same amount of solar deployed?

wyager6• 4 years ago

Transmission losses would eat any benefit, unfortunately.

Of course, the author didn't model this at all.

This is the problem with 99% of "actually we could totally rip out our entire infrastructure right now" posts - it's usually justified with crappy modeling that falls apart under slightly more scrutinizing consideration.

Solar-only with low storage overhead might become more viable if we get room-temperature superconductors or something.

theluketaylor6• 4 years ago

Losses wouldn’t be bad with HVDC, with the added benefit of HVDC ties not needing to be frequency synced across the entire grid, so you have some opportunity to increase resiliency.

I don’t think it’s a one-sized fits all solution. There will be places where storage will make sense, and other where longer distance transmission makes sense. I think the reality is it will be a mix of both, along with a nice diverse mix of generation methods.

mikeyouse3• 4 years ago

This is pretty outdated.. HVDC has solved most of the transmission problem. Even the typical "3.5% per 1,000km" assumption that shows up on Wikipedia is pretty out of date. Modern projects are built with much lower losses (since they're running much higher voltage) and central Australia with massive solar potential is no more than 2,000KM from anywhere else in the country so generation transmission losses would be more like 5% total...

theptip2• 4 years ago

Transmission losses would eat any benefit, unfortunately.

Big “citation needed” on that assertion.

HVDC is a widely proposed option and it’s an oversimplification to dismiss it with a single sentence.

For example the old DeserTec made a feasibility analysis for HVDC interconnects across EU and into Africa; the problem with that one seemed to be more about geopolitical issues and upfront investment costs, rather than long-term feasibility of transmission losses.

A newer analysis at the top of Google does not say “this doesn’t work because of transmission losses”. https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/electricity/hvdctransmi....

snek_case• 4 years ago

I see a lot of cynicism around renewable energy and electric cars and I frankly don't get it. The typical cynical approach is to point out one potential problem, and dismiss the entire solution as if it was worthless, which is obviously false.

As others have pointed out, there are now HVDC lines that can go over thousands of kilometers (transcontinental scale!) with reasonable losses. There's no reason to believe that we've hit the peak of HVDC technology either. The need for this technology to exist will drive further innovation.

Even if the OP's estimate is off. Even if we "only" get to 90% renewables by 2045, that's still pretty damn great compared to what we have now, isn't it? Is your cynical opinion that we should just keep going with the status quo because we can't get 100% ?

Even if we need 15% more wind and 15% more storage to than the OP's estimate reach 99%, that's not impossible either. It will create a lot of jobs. Why not just roll up our sleeves and do the best that we can? Thankfully, the world is not only made up of cynics, and a lot of people already are.

We aren't done innovating on the renewable front either. There's LOTS of research into cheaper, safer, more scaleable grid-scale batteries. The current state of the art is cobalt-free and nickel-free lithium iron phosphate, but people sodium-ion batteries look like they're going to be viable soon.

I also feel pretty confident that we'll eventually manage relatively efficient ways to store energy over the long term. If we could turn electricity into methane or ethanol with even 25% efficiency, that would allow us to store energy from the summer to use in the winter, or to power transatlantic airplanes with renewables. That seems pretty exciting to me.

caf13• 4 years ago

That's the whole point of what the author did. He didn't model putting solar out in the Western Desert or something - he scaled up the existing wind and solar generation on the NEM, implying more generation in the places where we know transmission works just fine, because we're doing it now. Of course if we put more utility scale solar in New England or Central West we'll need to augment the existing transmission, but that's just increasing the capacity of transmission where we already have it.

stjohnswarts• 4 years ago

Not true. Transmission lines can be made quite efficient especially the really high voltage ones like 345kV look it up. Other alternatives are High Voltage DC which is more expensive but much less lossy. There are solutions, nothing is cheap but these things last for decades and when amortized against losing our planet to global warming have great potential. Sorry but you are wrong.

fomine35• 4 years ago

It's fortunate for solar that most populated cities in AU is located on east.

caf13• 4 years ago

A new east-west interconnector is in progress: https://www.projectenergyconnect.com.au/

In general though, BESS & overbuild seems to be working out cheaper than very long interconnectors.

biomcgary• 4 years ago

A relatively simple model that is still a reasonable ballpark. However, throughout the article I was wondering about the effect of transmission efficiencies across Australia. The author addresses transmission at the end by acknowledging that they didn't model it. Not sure how much it matters, but I suspect that lots of wires would be required.

ZeroGravitas34• 4 years ago

Australia is currently reducing their transmission length (and risk of bushfires) by creating microgrids with solar and batteries for remote communities.

The battery rollout modelled, would also be able to reduce transmission bottlenecks by distributing them geographically, something the Australian grid has been encouraging for a few years now.

caf13• 4 years ago

Not sure how much it matters, but I suspect that lots of wires would be required.

Sure - the model scales up existing wind and solar generation assets, so you would need transmission infrastructure to those same areas to scale up as well (and likely inter-region interconnectors to scale up as well).

theptip2• 4 years ago

Great analysis. I’m not so familiar with the AU energy market, so I don’t know how much of an update this result is vs. a reasonable prior.

The bigger simulation mentioned in the OP is the ISP: https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/major-publications/integr.... Anyone know what that plan proposes in terms of energy mix?

It is interesting to note that the ISP is predicting that approximately 9GW of peaking gas or liquids will need to be retained in the NEM’s generation mix out to 2050. This is more than the 6.6GW required so far in this study.

Though the OP notes that ISP is doing demand modeling too, instead of simulating a new supply mix for the present demand & supply conditions.

ZeroGravitas34• 4 years ago

This is completely in line with reasonable priors:

https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...

It's more of a science/engineering communication effort, because there's a lot of unreasonable priors out there.

edit: also the 6.6GW of 'other' the current model uses, is the current actual gas plant size, not an amount that they predict as optimal or desirable. Similar with the Hydro, they used the current capacity, even though some are being built right now.

caf13• 4 years ago

On my reading of it, "Other" is the gap between the other modelled sources and the actual demand.

jakewins2• 4 years ago

Models show this same result for most (all?) regions they have been applied to. Here is a survey paper going over the current state of research globally and what mixes different models arrive at for different regions:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

arcticbull• 4 years ago

The Ontario grid has been there for years. 92% zero-carbon. [1]

[1] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...

dont__panic2• 4 years ago

Wow, that's a lot of hydro and nuclear power!

Thanks for sharing. I wonder how the New England and upstate NY power grids compare, since they also have a lot of hydro and nuclear?

theluketaylor6• 4 years ago

New England and upstate NY don't generate nearly enough power for their own needs and buy excess power from Ontario and Quebec. Quebec in particular as Hydro Quebec has a terrifying amount of hydro generation and always has tons of excess. A big chunk of the clean energy in the northeast US comes from Canada.

Super cool tool that shows the CO2 intensity of various grids and where power is flowing:

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-NE-ISNE

Robotbeat• 4 years ago

Model.energy is a good website for modeling a 100% renewables grid.

mattnewton• 4 years ago

Meanwhile in the US, we have states allowing counties to ban solar and wind energy production specifically on privately owned and industrially zoned land. I hope Australia can push through the fossil fuel lobby as they start to fight harder.

https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2022/08/23/nine-ohio-counties...

Sohcahtoa822• 4 years ago

It's odd that the party that claims to be in favor of a free market is passing laws that actively restrict the free market.

dymk2• 4 years ago

That's just the free market greasing the palms of politicians. A greasier solar lobby needs to come long and out-grease them, obviously.

ch4s3• 4 years ago

I don’t think they even claim to be free-marketers anymore. The nat-cons in particular are vocally anti-market.

mperham• 4 years ago

They're only in favor of a "free" market that they control. Decentralization empowers everyone, not just plutocrats.

glial• 4 years ago

As far as I can tell, claims of principle are meaningless with some folks. The only unifying idea is a thirst for power.

CodeWriter23• 4 years ago

IMO the odd thing is people who believe the "Free Market" is or ever was real.

kkfx8• 4 years ago

If you want to play that game here (France) we can made DIY p.v. systems, pass a consuel (third party organism for electrical safety) check and connect it to the grid BUT with only two mode, one is pure-self consumption you might just have few over-voltage rejects to the grid, the other is gifting the grid of your surplus and in this case you do not only give energy for free, energy consumed by some neighbor who pay it to the grid, full price, but you also have to pay "energy transports fee" to the grid handler. You pay to gift something that get sold at full price. That's is.

vbarrielle• 4 years ago

You make it sound unfair, but from the point of view of EDF getting the power you generate in the grid is probably never profitable. If you're in excess it's probable other sources of renewable are peaking simultaneously, but the demand does not change. They have to lower the production of the nuclear plants which is not free. Otherwise there would be a surplus.

And transport fees is actually reasonable, it's a lot more expensive to connect lots of small production sources to the grid than a couple of big ones.

thayne2• 4 years ago

"in Australia" is an important qualification here. Australia has a very high ratio of available solar and wind energy to population.

Not that getting Australia fully on renewables wouldn't be exciting. But it is definitely an easier target than say the US.

ZeroGravitas34• 4 years ago

Quite a lot of people live in Texas and California where renewables are already pretty advanced, plus there's nuclear in the north, and they have hydro and grid connections with Canada who have even more hydro and nuclear so the USA should be easier.

The US intends to hit this target (i.e. 95% carbon-free generation) in 8 years I think, with 100% and wider electrification of current fossil fuel uses in 2035 and it didn't seem particularly a stretch even before the recent climate bill passed, so I'd guess they're well on target, not even sure a second Trump term as president could derail it now.

smm11• 4 years ago

I read somewhere that it's the storage/distribution part that's hurting California. Can't go full-throttle without disaster. If the storage/distribution part was worked out, CA would be full renewable tomorrow.

hammock• 4 years ago

even before the recent climate bill passed

What is in the bill that is investment in renewables? My understanding is that there aren’t so much subsidies to generators-suppliers, but rather rebates and savings for homeowners and consumers.

rednerrus• 4 years ago

62% of the power in Oregon comes from renewables, mostly renewables that are available 24/7.

Schroedingersat15• 4 years ago

For the cost of 5kW nameplate of new western nuclear (>$10/W) you can get, right now, at retail, as an individual: 50kW nameplate of solar, and 8kW nameplate of wind, and 75kWh of storage and a 5kW generator (which will almost never need turning on) and a biogas digester.

And it will produce enough excess power to replace itself (with a cheaper version) or just triple the batteries if you can get 2-3c/kWh for the surplus well before the reactor is built

Mentioning nuclear as an option is about as sensible as a generator bicycle.

throwaway8943455• 4 years ago

The problem is that electrification of fossil fuel applications is going to significantly increase the demand on our grid. So it’s not enough to get to parity in renewables, but we have to go far beyond our current capacity in order to accommodate a world in which almost every car is electric (whether electric hybrid or green hydrogen) and almost every home uses electric rather than natural gas for heating (not to mention all of the industrial applications that will need electrification).

sremani• 4 years ago

> 95% carbon-free generation

I am still not clearly getting the picture here - what exactly this means.

US has about 30% electricity generated by Coal and I do not see that go away in next 20 years let alone 8. What am I missing here?

As of today, US energy portfolio is around 83% fossil. The best case scenario for 2040 is something like 50%, that includes we get Nuclear fusion, massive battery storage, material science breakthroughs that will put a dent on steel and cement consumption.

JumpCrisscross3• 4 years ago

US intends to hit this target (i.e. 95% carbon-free generation) in 8 years I think, with 100% and wider electrification of current fossil fuel uses in 2035

This seems ambitious. Source?

JoeAltmaier• 4 years ago

Everybody leaves out Iowa when mentioning wind energy! Iowa and Oklahoma are both larger into wind that California.

https://windexchange.energy.gov/files/slideshows/wind-energy...

thayne2• 4 years ago

The US is a lot more than just California and Texas.

Where I live isn't anywhere close to being fully renewable. And home solar is much less economical than it is in California or Texas, largely due to having less sunlight.

thrown_226• 4 years ago

Australian energy prices doubled in the last 6 months.

I'm not sure who would ever use the Australian market as a model, other than "under no circumstances follow suit".

qqqwerty3• 4 years ago

Energy prices everywhere are up. That is what happens when the global economy is bouncing back from a pandemic and one of the biggest energy suppliers in the world decides to embark on the first major land war in Europe in over 70 years.

epistasis8• 4 years ago

Anything else happened the past six months that might, say, affect the LNG prices and thus electricity prices overall?

European prices are up far far higher than 2x

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-23/european-...

olddustytrail5• 4 years ago

The reason for that is because of high natural gas prices. And the reason that increases overall prices is because they are treated as a single purchase so renewable sources (who are obviously well aware of gas prices) push their prices up to match.

This is so obviously a bad idea that even the CEO of a major energy firm has suggested the purchase market be split between renewable and fossil, so there are effectively two markets, and everyone can take advantage of cheap renewable prices.

You should learn about this stuff rather than parroting the nuclear fanbook.

dougmwne• 4 years ago

The US also has plentiful natural resources vs. population size. It seems that Europe would be the least naturally blessed considering high per capita energy use and less solar resources. China has a high population to support, but also owns all that renewables manuring capacity. Other countries do not have such large and energy intense populations.

fomine35• 4 years ago

I feel Europe situation is by far better than here in Japan. Here, land is small, 75% of land is mountains (so hard to bring wind parts), suitable sea (shallower) for cheaper offshore wind is rare than it looks, much area heavily snows, grid is smaller and divided for 50/60Hz, and almost zero natural resources exists. Even if HVDC connection to foreign grid is possible solution, closer bigger lands (China and Russia) are obviously no one want to rely on.

Hydro is a thing thanks to mountains but building new is unpopular to protect naturals. Geothermal is a thing and should be encouraged more, but it seems that it's not enough. Perhaps South Korea is in similar situation but they are still fine to operate nuclear plants.

pfdietz8• 4 years ago

It's not significantly easier than the US, which also has an embarrassingly large surplus of land for solar and wind.

caf13• 4 years ago

The US also has their population spread out a bit more (and therefore their load centres closer to potential generation sites) - Australia actually has a higher urban population % than the USA.

0xy• 4 years ago

It's not even true "in Australia", given the South Australian government, famously pro-Tesla and pro-renewables, has been ramping up the production of NEW gas peaking plants and the refurbishment of old ones.

Australia is doubling down on gas. 100% renewables is the fever pipe dream of a delusional environmentalist who ignores gas in the renewables equation (renewables and gas go together hand-in-hand, because batteries aren't up to the job of smoothing supply across demand).

caf13• 4 years ago

The South Australian government has changed hands twice since the Tesla big battery.

Electranet, the South Australian transmission operator, commissioned four new synchronous condensors in 2021 in order to reduce the minimum number of gas turbines that must operate.

testfoobar• 4 years ago

How does this analysis map to an all-electric car future? People generally need their cars during the day and charge them at night.

dymk2• 4 years ago

An all-electric car future involves charging stations at destinations as well at home, so cars can be charging during the day as well.

kkfx8• 4 years ago

Those who made such "simulation" probably do have forgot or never learn a classic engineering practice (at least in Europe engineering) witch is named resilience.

We need resilient systems as more resilient as bigger is the impact of their eventual failure. In other terms stating we can made a big and complex enough smart grid to run "almost" an renewable means spend an incredible amount of resource to build a hyper-fragile unmaintainable monster that can malfunction at best most of the time.

Also the "little storage" they state is not little at all and most importantly it does NOT LAST LONGER. So far we have some long-lasting storage (pumped hydro) witch is very effective where you have enough mountains and basins, witch might be true for let's say Norway and to a little extent Swiss, but certainly not for let's say Germany. Compressed air storage seems to offer an option at a sufficient scale, but so far only some experimental plants exists and they have a significant amount of fragility and risks. Long story short: we haven't enough storage on scale to deploy almost only intermittent sources of power. BEVs can compensate an unstable grid for homes, but not for industry, hospitals, big infrastructures etc. Long story short those who claim such possibility follow this classic: https://www.commitstrip.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Strip... sorry I do not have one in English but I think anyone can translate quick enough. A video equivalent is https://youtu.be/BKorP55Aqvg

It's not much different than https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... something that MIGHT BE partially true, in pure math, but practically false. Fails to understand the real feasibility of such projects is probably the root cause of all managerial driven projects fails.

trashtester19• 4 years ago

Norway has very little pumped hydro, even though they have 50% of all hydro in Europe. The flexibility is gained by just postponing consumption if demand is low or alternative supply is high.

Of course, these days, there is rarely any surplus power being generated, so Norway is just exporting as much as they can spare (and then some).

KingOfCoders• 4 years ago

If all cars in Germany would would be EV and could be used for storage, it would be 2 days of power consumption.

cbhl• 4 years ago

Do we actually have effective strategies for dealing with significant over-generation? The author glosses over it as being necessary to get to 98% renewables throughout the year ("we'll just run our hydro dams in reverse"), but I'm under the impression that over-generation that is unhandled leads to grid instability/desync.

nicoburns2• 4 years ago

I think wind and solar can simply be turned off if need be.

cma• 4 years ago

Maybe folding@home; desalination for farming; pumping and spraying water to re-glaciate areas in the winter.

pfdietz8• 4 years ago

Resistively heated thermal storage for any industrial plant that uses process heat.

stevesimmons2• 4 years ago

Stop some of the wind generators. Disconnect some of the solar panels. Both are standard practice today.

jnsaff22• 4 years ago

PV can be throttled instantly to anything down to 0. Otherwise no offgrid setup would be feasible.

You can mandate smart control signals to PV inverters or don't do anything and let the frequency go up so even inverters installed today will start cutting power as this is a requirement from grid code.

Wind has a bigger lag (seconds) but it has brakes to save them in storms.

So those are easy problems (technologically).

pydry6• 4 years ago

It's better to use price signals to ratchet demand up if you can.

The UK already has a tariff that can warn you about upcoming periods of free power. Electric car users like it. They like it a lot.

cptskippy• 4 years ago

Is over generation an issue that needs to be solved beyond disconnection from the grid?

Gas and Petrol Plants are commonly run in stand by mode because the ramp down/up times are too great to take them off line.

colechristensen2• 4 years ago

If you lower this to, say, 75%, a good analysis will show that a renewables grid with zero storage is possible around the world.

Storage is only required for the last n% and n is much larger than most people realize. If we accept that the energy economy will shift with supply-and-demand based pricing, what can actually happen is having peak production oversupply which will find users with its lower prices enabling off-peak-production to be high enough to meet peak demand. (this is a kind of thing that maybe needs blog posts with graphs to make the most sense)

We would be in a very much better place if we were near n and it's probably not worth worrying that much yet because n is also quite far away.

skrause• 4 years ago

That was Germany's plan. Go to at least 80% renewable and fill up the rest with natural gas power plants that can change the load quickly. Oops.

colechristensen2• 4 years ago

Germany’s problem wasn’t the end goal but the path to it.

pydry6• 4 years ago

That was literally everybody's plan. The alternative was to continue using coal while ramping up renewables.

For all the handwringing about the turned off nuclear plants they were getting old in the tooth and wouldnt have made a substantive difference to the current crisis. New plants would take 3x as long and cost 3x as much.

France is in just as much shit as germany this winter coz their nuke plants are aging out.

The realistic alternatives for germany avoiding a gas crisis were dont turn off coal plants "just in case a war with russia starts" or dont try to rile up russia.

pfdietz8• 4 years ago

They could use hydrogen instead of natural gas. Today, green hydrogen in Europe would be cheaper per BTU than natural gas.

wiz21c• 4 years ago

120GWh of storage is needed (5hours). A MegaPack of Tesla has 3 MWh capacity, so we'd need the equivalent of 40000 of them... Ouch!

Koemul• 4 years ago

According to [1], there were about 20 million cars registered in Australia in 2021. If we turn them all electric, with an average battery size of 50KW/h, we'll get about 1TW/h of storage that can be charged during periods of overproduction and feed part of their capacity back to the grid when needed.

Electric car sales are currently low in Australia, with ~2% of new cars sold in 2021. But they are growing exponentially: ~2000 electric vehicles were sold in 2018, ~7000 in 2019/2020 and ~20'000 in 2021. [2][3]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/632547/australia-registe... [2] https://electricvehiclecouncil.com.au/wp-content/uploads/202... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/31/new-elec...

beloch• 4 years ago

While 120 GWh of electricity storage may be remotely feasible to build now, I would not characterize it as "little" in any way, shape or form.

Retric2• 4 years ago

It’s roughly 2 years worth of EV batteries sold in Australia right now.

So, calling it little storage actually sounds reasonable.

edwiecron• 4 years ago

I believe that this model is built using Excel and VBScript. I would love to see the source code for this.

These sorts of things should be shared before anyone starts basing policy on it. I want to know the inputs, the outputs, etc. I want a lot of people going though this, looking at the data.

radium3d• 4 years ago

As a homeowner (1750 sqft, 100% electric with one EV [no gas appliances or fireplace]) in a dry (9-10 inches of rain per year) climate with a small 8.4kW solar installation with one 13.4kW battery, I can tell you that if we had 5-10kW more battery storage our home would be 100% off grid. As it stands now we're 71% self-powered with a current energy offset of 106%.

voqv• 4 years ago

I'm very impressed to learn about Snowy 2.0. Of course, it's not a silver bullet - in a renewable world, storage will have to be fairly distributed across the grid to maintain frequency.

For comparison, it seems Germany uses nearly 2x more electricity than Australia and currently has about 10x less pumped storage (including wip) than what Snowy 2.0 will have alone.

ciconia• 4 years ago

A few random thoughts:

1. There are symbiotic relationships between different sources of energy. In order to suck petrol out of the earth we need coal (used in steel manufacturing). In order to mine coal we need petrol (used by diggers and for transport). We still don't know how to manufacture solar panels and wind turbines without fossil fuels. The mining, steel forging and international transport of these products is still based on fossil fuels.

2. Electricity consumption represents only about 30% of total energy consumption. A lot of people seem to underestimate the difference in energy density between petrol and lithium batteries. This difference makes it highly unlikely that we'll move to electric ships and aircraft in the near future.

3. The mining activity associated with manufacturing solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, smartphones and electric cars is highly demanding in energy, is highly polluting, and demands great quantities of fresh water as part of the process of refining the different metals. With the rise of electric cars, the continuing demand for smartphones mining is expected to demand even more energy and fresh water, and pollute even more our rivers and soils. This, in a period of constrained energy sources, droughts, and an already degraded environment.

4. Judging by the comments on here people demand an always-on supply of energy, be it electricity, petrol or gas, which is a privilege only some countries enjoy today, and is relatively recent in human history. I think the idea of intermittent energy supply is worth exploring, and might make it easier to achieve 100% renewable energy production, in conjunction with a lower energy consumption.

intrepidhero• 4 years ago

And random responses.

1. I don't know if the coal used to make steal can be replaced with synthetic sources but petrol (and diesel and oil) can absolutely be replaced with synthetic fuel powered by renewable energy and carbon capture. The tech is old and boring. What's needed are cheaper renewable sources and more expensive oil, both of which are happening right now.

2. You're absolutely right and there is some debate that battery production can ever scale to level needed. Fortunately some combination of batteries and synthetic fuel almost certainly can get us to 100%.

3. Spot on and highly concerning, particularly as demand for these things at low cost has driven mining operations to places with poor environmental protections.

4. Great point. Demand side management and spot pricing are already things and more wide spread implementations will definitely make renewables more economical. I personally will be super excited to see one of the companies pursuing synthetic fuels figure out how to take advantage of surplus generation to capture carbon and turn it into essentially high energy density storage.

ktzar• 4 years ago

I wonder how would the results vary if for every MW of renewables there was 100kWh of storage (using flywheels, lipo, thermal rock, gravity, etc...). I really believe a future with 100% renewables is very, very close. Will happen in the 2030s.

sokoloff3• 4 years ago

That’s only 6 minutes of peak load worth of storage (assuming it’s rated on output kWh, perhaps only 5 minutes otherwise). If you have three different types of renewables, all equally sized, and uncorrelated, it’s 18/15 minutes against a single type of renewable being offline.

That doesn’t seem like enough for a 100% renewables grid to be 3 9’s reliable.

fulafel2• 4 years ago

Demand can be regulated to meet supply using various ways (eg pricing, quotas, etc).

ParksNet3• 4 years ago

Its unclear if we even have the metal mining capacity (or the ores in the ground) to do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBVmnKuBocc

mactitan2• 4 years ago

A very compelling case and the material for 100% renewables is staggering. How this can be ignored is bewildering.

A discussion at:

https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/wuc4vg/assoc_prof...

Simon Michaux presents the deck of data showing details of where his calculations are coming from that show even the first generation of renewables to replace fossil fuels is going to outstrip our capacity to source the minerals (lithium, copper, vanadium, manganese, cobalt, etc required for only the first generation of renewable energy) and the amount of energy to be replaced based on efficiencies is exorbitant. Summary: EROI going down, mineral requirements going way up spell issues moving forward.

Schroedingersat15• 4 years ago

Right from the introduction he assumes all EVs will be using Li ion which is already being phased out of everything but top performance luxury vehicles, then goes on to double count the storage asking where one could possibly find a few trillion Wh of batteries. Then blindly asserts that recycling will be impractical when recycling facilities already exist and are fighting over access to dead batteries.

He then bemoans the lack of a better solution which, as the people who have been promoting renewables for half a century have been saying the entire time while the infrastructure was torn down, is trains and ebikes (or just bikes in most areas).

Every single statement is fractally wrong and I'm only a paragraph in.

iammjm• 4 years ago

each time somebody claims something is impossible, consider how much he is benefiting from the status quo

trashtester19• 4 years ago

When somebody claims something is impossible, maybe the status quo will be maintained, or maybe some alternative plan will be started.

On the other hand, if someone argues for doing something that they know is impossible, it may be an even stronger indication that they may benefit from the status quo. In such a situation, those who advocate for an alternative, proven but less sexy option may be those who really seek progress.

tomohawk• 4 years ago

Speaking as an electrical engineer with a grid tied PV system for many years, this claim is just bonkers. It's exactly this sort of magical thinking that we don't need more of. Electric utility is a deadly serious business. The cost of getting a massive transition like this wrong is going to be measured not just economically, but in people's lives.

Manuel_D3• 4 years ago

My simulation used the 24GW/120GWh of assumed storage and existing hydro to firm up the wind and solar and match demand.

120 GWh is not what most would describe as "little storage". The largest hydroelectric storage facilities in existence are in the single digit or low double digit GWh. And this is for a country with a relatively small population.

Both the hydro and storage were assumed highly flexible. Note that I did not use the actual hydro generation data. I completely changed the dispatch of hydro so that it had minimal generation on days when it wasn’t needed, and elevated levels whenever there was a day with significant shortfalls of wind and solar relative to demand.

This is also a big simplification. While dams can just totally shut off the flow of water downstream, this has big ecological impact and also impacts availability of water in population centers that draw from the river. Most dams always release a minimum amount of water to ensure the river never runs dry. Much of his simulation has dams bottling up water for long stretches of time.

caf13• 4 years ago

The current pipeline of utility battery storage projects in Australia is estimated to be 26GW ( https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/11/03/australias-... ). Storage ratios of announced projects seem to range from 2 to 4, so that would be storage in the range of 52GWh - 104GWh - not quite up to the assumed mix in the model but not too far short either.

This is also a big simplification. While dams can just totally shut off the flow of water downstream, this has big ecological impact and also impacts availability of water in population centers that draw from the river. Most dams always release a minimum amount of water to ensure the river never runs dry. Much of his simulation has dams bottling up water for long stretches of time.

Did you miss the part where he imposed minimums on the hydro generation in order to keep it within historical limits:

  However, to maintain consistency with historical generation, 
  hydro generation was also subject to the following constraints:
  
    * Hydro generation was kept between 200 MW and 6,000 MW
    * Weekly hydro generation was kept above 168 GWh
    * Annual hydro generation was targeted at between 6% and 9%
      of demand, though ideally closer to 15,000 GWh, or about 
      7.5% of demand.

I do however agree the hydro part is a little too oversimplified (going by what is in the article). A lot of Tasmania's hydro is run-of-river; the dam-based hydro systems can be very limited by weather-based issues (both too little rain, which hasn't been concern in the previous year due to a persistent La Nina, and too much, which limits how much can be discharged when downstream pondages are too full).

Manuel_D3• 4 years ago

Only 6.3 GWh of battery storage is actually announced in your link. Plenty of storage facilities are at ratios lower than 2: https://www.energy-storage.news/victorian-big-battery-austra...

And if the batteries haven't actually been provisioned yet, it might be hard to build those without securing additional funding: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium

Incipient2• 4 years ago

The missing piece for me in any renewable puzzle is evidence. At a grid level (either state or national) has anyone actually figured out how much storage we need? Based on say a P90 worst case, what % of power is down, for how long, and how much storage do we need to manage that?

Or any such similar study. Traditional power gen is much easier. Plonk it down and essentially it works (with various stabilisation mechanisms in place). Renewables however take a lot more planning.

Incipient2• 4 years ago

If anyone does end up checking this. I'm pro-renewables. I'm genuinely interested in to get info on this. I've searched and can't find squat.

A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

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