Australia is a sunny place and aims to transition its power generation to near-as-dammit 100% 'renewable' Solar [+ Wind]. In this post I offer a glimpse into how achievable that may be.
“Furthermore, I would then be hoping that whoever is setting Australian energy policy perform something like the analysis presented herein, to demonstrate using years of real historical data that, whatever the future energy plan is and whatever the modelling might suggest, the lights will stay on whatever the season.”
If you hoped that, you’d be doomed to disappointment.
Happily I don't live in Aus, so it wouldn't directly affect me if Aus lights *did* go out thru reliance on modelling detached from reality.
Unhappily the new HMGov Dept of Net Zero is staffed by ideologues headed by Ed Milliband who all appear to be completely detached from reality. Be sufficiently 'ambitious', throw sufficient subsidies at the problem, and the problem will almost solve itself, apparently.
Does it have a goal of cheap electricity? If so, then it has clearly failed. Australia's electricity prices are almost as high as Western Europe's prices (the most expensive region in the world for energy). And this is despite Australian having vast fossil fuel resources.
I guess it's not surprising that the wind is so 'coordinated' in Australia - it's very flat. There's essentially nothing in the way if it's coming from the East and if it's coming off the ocean for those in the South-East, well, they're all clustered inside what ranges there are.
Would be interested to see an analysis of Ireland's efforts.
Hello Jacqueline, thank you for your comments. I think it may come as a bit of a surprise to Aussies to see that the can wind drop everywhere at the same time.
but because Ireland has substantial interconnectors with the UK it is in substantially the same state as South Australia. Currently its 'renewable' Surpluses (if any) can be exported if there aren't internal grid constraints forcing curtailment; / or its 'renewable' Shortfalls can be made up from the UK if the EIR fossil power stations can't supply Demand.
Today at 14:30 Irish Wind is 194 MW out of a Demand of 3,888 MW i.e. 5%
At the same time, GridWatch says GB Wind is 4.3 GW 13% of Demand.
And the Agora Energiewende shows 9.06 GW out of Demand 72.66 GW in Germany, i.e. Wind 12½%.
True, currently it's a v sunny day. But across N Europe the sun sets around 6-7pm. By the looks of it Wind will not come to the rescue this day.
Great analysis. I would add that if Australia will have significant problems getting to 100% wind+solar electricity generation, then the rest of the world will have it much, much worse.
Australia has high levels of solar radiance across a massive territory and a relatively small population.
(Oops, sorry I replied to the wrong comment. This was supposed to be a follow-up to my question as to whether there is evidence of solar + wind fully replacing the electricity 24/7/365 from a recently decommissioned coal plant…)
I did some research.
As far as I can tell, Australia has decommissioned only one coal power station in the last 10 years: Liddell Power station near Sydney with a capacity of 2GW. I would think that it would not be too difficult to see if the total electricity generated by solar and wind within its grid was more than 2GW 24/7/365?
That to me would give an example of solar+wind fully replacing a large coal plant. If not, then natural gas and hydro also played an important role.
The evidence for NSW from "Open Electricity" is clear. For example,
from 29Aug2024 20:30 thru 06Oct2024 18:30, i.e. 37.917 d = 910 h:
total NSW Wind = 1,018,343 MWh;
total NSW Solar = 1,812,089 MWh;
total NSW Hydro = 266,835 MWh
grand total = 3,097,267 MWh / 910h = 3,404 MW ... ON AVERAGE.
So ON AVERAGE in this interval the Wind + Solar + Hydro in NSW has more than made up for the loss of Liddel's 2GW = 2,000 MW.
I think this is the key point.
The lights don't stay on if your *average* level of power generation is good enough. They only stay on if your *minimum* power generation covers your Demand.
Which is the whole reason I plot the charts at 30-minute intervals including those intervals of Shortfall.
You do realise NSW has a shortfall every month and has done almost every month for fifteen years.
In fact in the last 12 months it has only imported about 5% of its electricity vs 12% from 2013 way back when it had Wallerawang, Redbank and Liddell coal plants operating.
This winter NSW imported 6.4% of its energy vs 9.4% in winter 2022 when good old Liddell was operating. As Australia has an Energy Only market, spot prices are a good indication of energy stress. In winter 2022 NSW spot price averaged A$320/MWh vs this winter $169.
“Shortfall %” which would be something like “Percent of 30-minute intervals per year when total solar + wind generated in that grid is equal to or higher than the capacity of the coal plant.”
And then “Shortfall” is the cumulative dispatchable electricity that is needed from other sources”
You could also have a “Total shortfall %” and “Shortfall” which is for all coal plants in grid.
Just some thoughts.
And just to be clear, I am only interested in solar + wind replacing coal, not hydro + fossil fuels in general.
Liddell didn't supply any energy at all for a week in July 2022 and averaged 12.5% capacity for 4 weeks straight and 37% capacity for the year. Pretty easy to replace that clunker
Australia has no intention of getting to 100% wind and solar, the NEM gets 8% of its energy from hydro and other renewables and almost 30% of its peak dispatchable demand. It has literally thousands of sites suitable for off river pumped hydro
Australia's renewables are not particularly exceptional, but they are spread over a wide area and we don't have very dark winters so total variability is less than most other markets. We also have a higher peak hydro share. Once the various upgrades and transmission improvements that are under construction now are on line we will get to about 10-11 GW of peak hydro with no further construction, while peak dispatchable output will probably fall to about 28-29 GW i.e we could get close to 40% of peak evening demand, that is way higher than Brittain, Germany, the US and about the same as France and maybe higher than Spain. With Borumba and two or three NSW plants we could hit 50% once or twice a year
Pioneer Burdekin was never included in my numbers because I could never see the justification for it even when it was proposed, but four years down the track as batteries have fallen in cost by 40-60% and they have numerous advantages over pumped hydro, I would not be totally surprised if no new pumped hydro plants are built, but it seems governments of both political colours are committed to Borumba, 48 GWh and there is a lot of private money behind projects in NSW so I suspect a couple of them will be built.
As for gas it is all a question of cost, a lot of bio waste i.e. food, crops, forest thinnings, sawdust is just left to rot generating methane. If we have a proper carbon price, methane digesters may become economical and biomass might move for less than 1% of generation to 3-5%
We are already building some "8 hour" batteries and as battery costs fall, some or most of the older 1-1.5 hour batteries will be enhanced at very low cost with additional battery packs, they all have sufficient grid connections, transformers etc, most have the space and some already have the permits. Then there is V2L, it doesn't even have to be vehicle to grid. 10% of 3m EVs removing 6 kW of load each is 1.8 GW a substantial slice of peak load.
You still haven't indicated how you might back up nuclear in Australia. I notice in Switzerland in May it dropped to less than 5% of supply from an average of 40% on a couple of occasions. Conversely we were recently curtailing up to 70% of grid scale wind and solar because demand was so low, what happens to the NPP in those circumstances which will be substantially worse before any nuclear capacity could be built
Happily you don't live in Australia or influence policy.
Power Supply
You seemed to have omitted hydro and biomass which can already supply 30% of peak dispatchable demand.
Oops 1
Energy Density
1. Queensland is 2.5 times the size of Texas with 1/10th of the electricity demand. Texas this year will generate about 300 TWh from renewables, Queensland's total demand is 65 TWh
2. NSW is 2.5 times the size of Germany and has just a tad more sunlight. This year Germany will generate 175 TWh from onshore wind and utility solar, NSW demand, less hydro and rooftop solar, is 65 TWh
3. Victoria is 90% of the area of the UK with more hydro and a link to Tasmania's hydro, and again much better sunshine. In the last 12 months onshore wind and utility solar in Great Britain have provided 56 TWh. Victoria's total demand, again less rooftop solar and hydro is 41 TWh/y.
Oops 2
Storage
1. In the worst week in a drought year existing hydro can supply a peak of 7 GW and a total of 2,000 GWh, somewhat diminishing the 88 GWh stored in your proposed BESS fleet.
This does not include the 2.2 GW/360 GWh of pumped hydro currently under construction or the 10GW/200GWh currently subject to feasibility studies.
2. 250 MWh storage is subscale in the current fleet. Across Australia there are projects ranging from 1,200- 2,400 MWh being built. Many of the older plants can be expanded for 1/3rd the original cost per MWh when longer duration storage is requires a) because about 1/2 the cost of the first hour of storage is design, planning, permitting switchgear, transformers and grid connections, very little of this changes if you double the quantity of batteries b) batteries are less than half the cost they were when the early systems were built
3. By the time Australia gets anywhere near a 95%+ renewable grid, customer storage in ice, hot water, batteries and cars will be around 250 GWh significantly more than the "impossible" target in your analysis.
What relevance do Texas & Germany have? Looks like a straw man.
Re: Victoria linked to Tasmania's hydro. Plot them on the same energy scale as I've done in the '- Future' post and you see how relatively small Tas is.
New pumped hydro schemes take 10-15 years to build and can only be located in suitable geography and hence requires massive grid reinforcement to those locations. Distributed LDES (IF it ever becomes available sufficiently cheaply at sufficient scale) can be co-located with the intermittent generation assets and hence can be used to greatly reduce the power flows into the grid.
It seems you have difficulty in comprehension so I will spell it out again.
Hydro and biomass form backup.
The East coast needs relatively short backup. We will end up with about 4 x current wind and solar. On the worst wind and solar day in the last 10 years, combined wind and solar supplied more than 25% of demand for five hours. In other words with 4 X capacity storage would be partially recharged every single day. On the average day hydro would be supplying less than 1.5% of demand, meaning that on bad days or even weeks we could easily run it at 80% output for 12-14 hours at a time. As we build more wind and solar, hydro and biomass will be more and more used as backup.
Australia as yet doesn't use food, crop or forest waste for backup, there are a few small plants at piggeries, landfills, abattoirs and sugar mills. As we have a large agriculture industry we could easily have 4-5 GW/15-20TWh/y if we needed to, in the peak week 600 GWh.
In our worst wind and solar week, existing hydro could easily supply 1,000 GWh. We also have a number of large irrigation/city storage dams with no or relatively small hydro plants which could be built, enlarged or duplicated to provide more power for 2-3 days without altering overall annual water use. This might only add 50-100 GWh over a week but that is a lot of batteries
We are building two pumped hydro plants at the moment, one of which is a colossal waste of money, but we are stuck with it, so we will use it. There are another eight to ten under investigation for a total of about 800-900 GWh of storage. Some of that will not all be used in a week, other units will be cycled 3-4 times so it would be safe to say new pumped hydro could easily supply 800 GWh in a week.
It doesn't matter if it is 15 years till the last pumped hydro plant comes on line we have plenty of existing coal gas and hydro until then, besides we have thousands of suitable sites
In other words hydro, pumped hydro and biomass could supply 2,500 GWh in a week. In the worst wind and solar week wind and solar supplied over 800 GWh, 19.5% of demand. Total demand was 4,100 GWh so 4X wind and solar would be about 3,300 GWh. Clearly 2,500 GWh from hydro, pumped hydro and biomass, not to mention the odd bit of tidal, wave or geothermal would be more than sufficient energy storage. batteries would end up at the end of the week at the same or better state of charge as they started
Texas has slightly better wind but worse solar and hydro than Queensland, it is currently generating about 330 MWh/square km from renewables. Even if we only use the area of Queensland within 200km of large population centres it is twice the area of Texas
and could thus generate 350 TWh, total demand is 65 TWh.
Germany has much worse wind, solar resources per square km than NSW but it is planning for 1,500 MWh per square km from onshore wind and solar within a decade and is already at 540 MWh. NSW total electricity demand of 77 TWh/y works out at 94 MWh/square km.
Current model bifacial tracking solar farms in NSW and Queensland are generating 500-600 Wh/year/square metre of solar panel. Germany's current solar fleet averages around 120 Wh//year/square metre. Germany's onshore wind turbines averaged 4 GWh/y last year. 6-7 MW turbines being installed in Queensland and NSW in the next few years will produce 17-23 GWh/y each.
i.e with no more wind and solar density than Germany has today NSW could generate 20-40 times its current electricity demand. Similarly Queensland with the same installation density as Texas could generate 10-15 times its current demand.
As for Victoria it has 2.1 GW of its own hydro which could be expanded to around 3GW with no new dams and with only Marinus I built it could draw another 1GW from Tasmania. Victoria's peak demand from coal and gas is a little over 5.5 GW so hydro will provide most of its long term storage. By the end of 2027 Victoria will have 4GW+ of battery storage and be running at over 60% renewables.
I'm having no difficulty in understanding you, it's just that you persist in talking past me to the points on which *you* wish to opine, rather than addressing the data I've presented. I'll try again in a different format.
Latest full-year NEM data, data-file "20231024 Open Electricity.csv" downloaded 25Oct2024.
In the latest full year, Hydro across grid-connected Aus totalled 13,359 GWh (max 71.2 GWh/d, min 15.8 GWh/d).
In the latest full year, Demand across grid-connected Aus totalled 213,115 GWh (max 686.27 GWh/d, min 498.87 GWh/d).
So Hydro (included in my analysis, btw) was 6.3% of Demand *on average*, with peak Hydro 10.4% of peak Demand. Difficult to see that being effective backup at night when the Wind generally drops, it's an order of magnitude too small.
[Minimum Hydro was 3.2% of minimum Demand... was that when Hydro was being Curtailed? Do please advise.]
Also in this same latest full year, Open Electricity recorded Bioenergy (Biogas) - GWh total 184 in the year (max 0.90 GWh/d, min 0.10 GWh/d): Bioenergy (Biomass) - GWh 183 in the year (max 1.36 GWh/d, min 0.00 GWh/d). So a grand combined total of 0.17% of the year's aforesaid 213,115 GWh Demand.
Over two orders of magnitude too small.
You might be correct that bioenergy *could* be scaled up massively... with all the new facilities required, plus the ongoing transport of all the sawdust and animal dung etc. to those new facilities - but does that represent value for money for Aussie tax- and bill-payers? Hopefully the new Select Committee will answer (per below).
Re: "It doesn't matter if it is 15 years till the last pumped hydro plant comes on line we have plenty of existing coal gas and hydro until then"... Then why do I keep seeing that same timescale being used as the main reason for not building nuclear? Very confusing.
But the cost of nuclear... Yes, of course, all these new dams and batteries and windmills and solar farms and grid reinforcements and so on are all free...
P.S. I see (better late than never) this:
"Select Committee on Energy Planning and Regulation in Australia
On 16 September 2024 the Senate established a select committee, to be known as the Select Committee on the Energy Planning and Regulation in Australia, to inquire into and report on the institutional structures, governance, regulation, functions, and operation of the Australian energy market.
Submissions are sought by the 18 October 2024.
The committee will present its final report on 20 December 2024. "
It would be good if you understood the capacity on the NEM or the geography of Australia. There is currently 10 GW of hydro on the NEM with 2.2 GW of pumped hydro under construction and another 3-5 GW in active development. Limitations on Bass Straight interconnections mean that peak hydro is just under 7 GW,
But upgrades to Bass Straight transmission, new mainland pumped hydro and upgrades to existing plants mean that peak hydro will increase to somewhere between 10 and 14 GW. Peak output from dispatchable sources in the last few years was 30.5 GW and at that time wind was supplying 1.4 GW. With 4 X wind and 10 GW of hydro, that would mean other backup would need to supply 16 GW. Within 3 hours the difference dropped to 9 GW. When Kurri Kurri comes on line there will be 14 GW of gas, distillate and biomass and within four years there will be 8 GW/16 GWh of batteries, so with gas running at 80% and batteries running at 60% peak demand will be easily met even if every coal plant closed and no demand response was implemented and none of the proposed pumped hydro plants was built, not to mention consumer batteries, V2G etc.
As for night time loads, about 20-25% of the night-time load is below cost offpeak power designed to keep coal plants running. Most of that load will be shifted to daytime “solar soaker” rates, so we can expect a 10-15% reduction in night time loads. Already on some nights wind supplies 20-50% of the load so 4 X will be 80-120% of the load so batteries and pumped hydro will be recharged night and day
Now In Australia as I said with 4 X wind and solar we would need 20 GW/600 GWh of backup for the worst week, lets say 800 GWh for the worst two weeks. In every single month there would be a surplus
If we had 22 GW of nuclear and it behaved like Canada 1998, Belgium 2015, 2018, France 2021-2023 etc etc we would need 20 GW/ 70,000 GWh of backup. What would you suggest we source that from or would you suggest we keep half our coal plants just in case?
Peter, I strongly suspect that I will never understand the *special exceptional* nature of Australia's renewables to your satisfaction.
But I do note that suddenly you've stopped mentioning bio-gas as a practicable means of backup: maybe a little of my data did get through.
I note that Queensland's Pioneer-Burdekin pumped hydro project has just been canned once the true likely costs vs benefits were revealed... how many others of your favoured list might go the same way, one wonders.
You are much higher on snark than knowledge of the effects on intermittent electrical generation. The clear result of Green energy policies in Australia and elsewhere has been expensive electricity, which is the opposite of what we should be aiming for.
1) Biomass (depending on the type) emits more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than coal, so it is a step backwards and should not be considered Green. The fact that you consider it a good thing is quite puzzling.
2) I really have no idea why these points in "Oops 1" is relevant to Bond's calculations.
3) For "Oops 2" those numbers for hydro are not very impressive. And most Greens are opposed to hydro because of the damage that it does not river environments and fish. Hydro is only 8% of Australian electrical generation. And most nations do not even have that potential.
Nor are the storage numbers you include that impressive.
You can get back to me when Australia reaches 250 GWh of storage. I am very skeptical that it will ever happen.
1. Using waste biomass in a methane digester for heat and power rather than letting it rot and give off methane is far better for the environment
2. Hydro and biomass can provide 25% of peak dispatchable demand already and 25%+ of weekly energy demand in a low wind and solar week, so somewhat relevant seeing our worst wind and solar week ever was 19.5% of demand and we expect to quadruple capacity.
3. The numbers for hydro are what we already have, Australia has very high peak to average hydro capacity so it is ideal for backup. We are not talking about other countries, the whole article is about Australia.
4. Perhaps you haven't heard about Snowy II 350 GWh, under construction now, early works on Borumba 48 GWh, Tumut 3 Shoalhaven and Wivenhoe already in operation and at least ten other pumped hydro projects in early development stages including Pioneer Burdekin 60 GWh. I don't believe most of those pumped hydro projects will go ahead because batteries are more efficient, faster and cheaper to build and we don't need 250 GWh of new storage in addition to Snowy II
Perhaps you should update your knowledge before being critical
“Furthermore, I would then be hoping that whoever is setting Australian energy policy perform something like the analysis presented herein, to demonstrate using years of real historical data that, whatever the future energy plan is and whatever the modelling might suggest, the lights will stay on whatever the season.”
If you hoped that, you’d be doomed to disappointment.
Thank you, David.
Happily I don't live in Aus, so it wouldn't directly affect me if Aus lights *did* go out thru reliance on modelling detached from reality.
Unhappily the new HMGov Dept of Net Zero is staffed by ideologues headed by Ed Milliband who all appear to be completely detached from reality. Be sufficiently 'ambitious', throw sufficient subsidies at the problem, and the problem will almost solve itself, apparently.
Keep ducking the issue, why don’t you, DEMONSTRATE USING HISTORIC DATA is what the ISP doesn’t.
What do you think AEMO's ISP is. It is updated after extensive industry consultation every year
What it isn’t is “demonstrate using years of real historical data that… the lights will stay on whatever the season.”
You have no evidence for that claim. The whole purpose of the ISP is to ensure its legislated target of no more than 0.002% unserved energy.
Does it have a goal of cheap electricity? If so, then it has clearly failed. Australia's electricity prices are almost as high as Western Europe's prices (the most expensive region in the world for energy). And this is despite Australian having vast fossil fuel resources.
Obviously, ideology is trumping economics.
https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/
I guess it's not surprising that the wind is so 'coordinated' in Australia - it's very flat. There's essentially nothing in the way if it's coming from the East and if it's coming off the ocean for those in the South-East, well, they're all clustered inside what ranges there are.
Would be interested to see an analysis of Ireland's efforts.
Hello Jacqueline, thank you for your comments. I think it may come as a bit of a surprise to Aussies to see that the can wind drop everywhere at the same time.
I've occasionally looked at the Eirgrid dashboard https://www.smartgriddashboard.com/#roi
but because Ireland has substantial interconnectors with the UK it is in substantially the same state as South Australia. Currently its 'renewable' Surpluses (if any) can be exported if there aren't internal grid constraints forcing curtailment; / or its 'renewable' Shortfalls can be made up from the UK if the EIR fossil power stations can't supply Demand.
Today at 14:30 Irish Wind is 194 MW out of a Demand of 3,888 MW i.e. 5%
At the same time, GridWatch says GB Wind is 4.3 GW 13% of Demand.
And the Agora Energiewende shows 9.06 GW out of Demand 72.66 GW in Germany, i.e. Wind 12½%.
True, currently it's a v sunny day. But across N Europe the sun sets around 6-7pm. By the looks of it Wind will not come to the rescue this day.
Great analysis. I would add that if Australia will have significant problems getting to 100% wind+solar electricity generation, then the rest of the world will have it much, much worse.
Australia has high levels of solar radiance across a massive territory and a relatively small population.
Thank you, Michael.
This is indeed the conclusion I'm increasingly coming to wherever the data is good enough.
Hence the variety of territories I've looked at for my Substack posts.
(Oops, sorry I replied to the wrong comment. This was supposed to be a follow-up to my question as to whether there is evidence of solar + wind fully replacing the electricity 24/7/365 from a recently decommissioned coal plant…)
I did some research.
As far as I can tell, Australia has decommissioned only one coal power station in the last 10 years: Liddell Power station near Sydney with a capacity of 2GW. I would think that it would not be too difficult to see if the total electricity generated by solar and wind within its grid was more than 2GW 24/7/365?
That to me would give an example of solar+wind fully replacing a large coal plant. If not, then natural gas and hydro also played an important role.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal-fired_power_stations_in_Australia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liddell_Power_Station
Hi Michael,
The evidence for NSW from "Open Electricity" is clear. For example,
from 29Aug2024 20:30 thru 06Oct2024 18:30, i.e. 37.917 d = 910 h:
total NSW Wind = 1,018,343 MWh;
total NSW Solar = 1,812,089 MWh;
total NSW Hydro = 266,835 MWh
grand total = 3,097,267 MWh / 910h = 3,404 MW ... ON AVERAGE.
So ON AVERAGE in this interval the Wind + Solar + Hydro in NSW has more than made up for the loss of Liddel's 2GW = 2,000 MW.
I think this is the key point.
The lights don't stay on if your *average* level of power generation is good enough. They only stay on if your *minimum* power generation covers your Demand.
Which is the whole reason I plot the charts at 30-minute intervals including those intervals of Shortfall.
I hope that helps.
You do realise NSW has a shortfall every month and has done almost every month for fifteen years.
In fact in the last 12 months it has only imported about 5% of its electricity vs 12% from 2013 way back when it had Wallerawang, Redbank and Liddell coal plants operating.
This winter NSW imported 6.4% of its energy vs 9.4% in winter 2022 when good old Liddell was operating. As Australia has an Energy Only market, spot prices are a good indication of energy stress. In winter 2022 NSW spot price averaged A$320/MWh vs this winter $169.
Yes, that helps a lot. Thanks.
You might call that metric “average replacement”
I wonder if the other metrics could be:
“Shortfall %” which would be something like “Percent of 30-minute intervals per year when total solar + wind generated in that grid is equal to or higher than the capacity of the coal plant.”
And then “Shortfall” is the cumulative dispatchable electricity that is needed from other sources”
You could also have a “Total shortfall %” and “Shortfall” which is for all coal plants in grid.
Just some thoughts.
And just to be clear, I am only interested in solar + wind replacing coal, not hydro + fossil fuels in general.
Liddell didn't supply any energy at all for a week in July 2022 and averaged 12.5% capacity for 4 weeks straight and 37% capacity for the year. Pretty easy to replace that clunker
Australia has no intention of getting to 100% wind and solar, the NEM gets 8% of its energy from hydro and other renewables and almost 30% of its peak dispatchable demand. It has literally thousands of sites suitable for off river pumped hydro
OK, then 92% for wind + solar. 8% hydro is not really that impressive. It is still fundamentally the same problem.
How many new hydro-electric dams are being built in Australia currently? How many have they built in the last 40 years?
How many GW of off-river pumped hydro does Australia have currently?
My guess is that the answer to all of the above is very small compared to total electricity consumption.
Australia's renewables are not particularly exceptional, but they are spread over a wide area and we don't have very dark winters so total variability is less than most other markets. We also have a higher peak hydro share. Once the various upgrades and transmission improvements that are under construction now are on line we will get to about 10-11 GW of peak hydro with no further construction, while peak dispatchable output will probably fall to about 28-29 GW i.e we could get close to 40% of peak evening demand, that is way higher than Brittain, Germany, the US and about the same as France and maybe higher than Spain. With Borumba and two or three NSW plants we could hit 50% once or twice a year
Pioneer Burdekin was never included in my numbers because I could never see the justification for it even when it was proposed, but four years down the track as batteries have fallen in cost by 40-60% and they have numerous advantages over pumped hydro, I would not be totally surprised if no new pumped hydro plants are built, but it seems governments of both political colours are committed to Borumba, 48 GWh and there is a lot of private money behind projects in NSW so I suspect a couple of them will be built.
As for gas it is all a question of cost, a lot of bio waste i.e. food, crops, forest thinnings, sawdust is just left to rot generating methane. If we have a proper carbon price, methane digesters may become economical and biomass might move for less than 1% of generation to 3-5%
We are already building some "8 hour" batteries and as battery costs fall, some or most of the older 1-1.5 hour batteries will be enhanced at very low cost with additional battery packs, they all have sufficient grid connections, transformers etc, most have the space and some already have the permits. Then there is V2L, it doesn't even have to be vehicle to grid. 10% of 3m EVs removing 6 kW of load each is 1.8 GW a substantial slice of peak load.
You still haven't indicated how you might back up nuclear in Australia. I notice in Switzerland in May it dropped to less than 5% of supply from an average of 40% on a couple of occasions. Conversely we were recently curtailing up to 70% of grid scale wind and solar because demand was so low, what happens to the NPP in those circumstances which will be substantially worse before any nuclear capacity could be built
Happily you don't live in Australia or influence policy.
Power Supply
You seemed to have omitted hydro and biomass which can already supply 30% of peak dispatchable demand.
Oops 1
Energy Density
1. Queensland is 2.5 times the size of Texas with 1/10th of the electricity demand. Texas this year will generate about 300 TWh from renewables, Queensland's total demand is 65 TWh
2. NSW is 2.5 times the size of Germany and has just a tad more sunlight. This year Germany will generate 175 TWh from onshore wind and utility solar, NSW demand, less hydro and rooftop solar, is 65 TWh
3. Victoria is 90% of the area of the UK with more hydro and a link to Tasmania's hydro, and again much better sunshine. In the last 12 months onshore wind and utility solar in Great Britain have provided 56 TWh. Victoria's total demand, again less rooftop solar and hydro is 41 TWh/y.
Oops 2
Storage
1. In the worst week in a drought year existing hydro can supply a peak of 7 GW and a total of 2,000 GWh, somewhat diminishing the 88 GWh stored in your proposed BESS fleet.
This does not include the 2.2 GW/360 GWh of pumped hydro currently under construction or the 10GW/200GWh currently subject to feasibility studies.
2. 250 MWh storage is subscale in the current fleet. Across Australia there are projects ranging from 1,200- 2,400 MWh being built. Many of the older plants can be expanded for 1/3rd the original cost per MWh when longer duration storage is requires a) because about 1/2 the cost of the first hour of storage is design, planning, permitting switchgear, transformers and grid connections, very little of this changes if you double the quantity of batteries b) batteries are less than half the cost they were when the early systems were built
3. By the time Australia gets anywhere near a 95%+ renewable grid, customer storage in ice, hot water, batteries and cars will be around 250 GWh significantly more than the "impossible" target in your analysis.
Oops 3.
You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble by looking up the work of David Osmond https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7247101620633714688/
Peter Farley,
Re: "omitted hydro and biomass" - no, for the States where they are there in the NEM numbers they are included. Just more clearly & explicitly in https://chrisbond.substack.com/p/rest-of-australia-future.
What relevance do Texas & Germany have? Looks like a straw man.
Re: Victoria linked to Tasmania's hydro. Plot them on the same energy scale as I've done in the '- Future' post and you see how relatively small Tas is.
New pumped hydro schemes take 10-15 years to build and can only be located in suitable geography and hence requires massive grid reinforcement to those locations. Distributed LDES (IF it ever becomes available sufficiently cheaply at sufficient scale) can be co-located with the intermittent generation assets and hence can be used to greatly reduce the power flows into the grid.
But great discussion!
It seems you have difficulty in comprehension so I will spell it out again.
Hydro and biomass form backup.
The East coast needs relatively short backup. We will end up with about 4 x current wind and solar. On the worst wind and solar day in the last 10 years, combined wind and solar supplied more than 25% of demand for five hours. In other words with 4 X capacity storage would be partially recharged every single day. On the average day hydro would be supplying less than 1.5% of demand, meaning that on bad days or even weeks we could easily run it at 80% output for 12-14 hours at a time. As we build more wind and solar, hydro and biomass will be more and more used as backup.
Australia as yet doesn't use food, crop or forest waste for backup, there are a few small plants at piggeries, landfills, abattoirs and sugar mills. As we have a large agriculture industry we could easily have 4-5 GW/15-20TWh/y if we needed to, in the peak week 600 GWh.
In our worst wind and solar week, existing hydro could easily supply 1,000 GWh. We also have a number of large irrigation/city storage dams with no or relatively small hydro plants which could be built, enlarged or duplicated to provide more power for 2-3 days without altering overall annual water use. This might only add 50-100 GWh over a week but that is a lot of batteries
We are building two pumped hydro plants at the moment, one of which is a colossal waste of money, but we are stuck with it, so we will use it. There are another eight to ten under investigation for a total of about 800-900 GWh of storage. Some of that will not all be used in a week, other units will be cycled 3-4 times so it would be safe to say new pumped hydro could easily supply 800 GWh in a week.
It doesn't matter if it is 15 years till the last pumped hydro plant comes on line we have plenty of existing coal gas and hydro until then, besides we have thousands of suitable sites
In other words hydro, pumped hydro and biomass could supply 2,500 GWh in a week. In the worst wind and solar week wind and solar supplied over 800 GWh, 19.5% of demand. Total demand was 4,100 GWh so 4X wind and solar would be about 3,300 GWh. Clearly 2,500 GWh from hydro, pumped hydro and biomass, not to mention the odd bit of tidal, wave or geothermal would be more than sufficient energy storage. batteries would end up at the end of the week at the same or better state of charge as they started
Texas has slightly better wind but worse solar and hydro than Queensland, it is currently generating about 330 MWh/square km from renewables. Even if we only use the area of Queensland within 200km of large population centres it is twice the area of Texas
and could thus generate 350 TWh, total demand is 65 TWh.
Germany has much worse wind, solar resources per square km than NSW but it is planning for 1,500 MWh per square km from onshore wind and solar within a decade and is already at 540 MWh. NSW total electricity demand of 77 TWh/y works out at 94 MWh/square km.
Current model bifacial tracking solar farms in NSW and Queensland are generating 500-600 Wh/year/square metre of solar panel. Germany's current solar fleet averages around 120 Wh//year/square metre. Germany's onshore wind turbines averaged 4 GWh/y last year. 6-7 MW turbines being installed in Queensland and NSW in the next few years will produce 17-23 GWh/y each.
i.e with no more wind and solar density than Germany has today NSW could generate 20-40 times its current electricity demand. Similarly Queensland with the same installation density as Texas could generate 10-15 times its current demand.
As for Victoria it has 2.1 GW of its own hydro which could be expanded to around 3GW with no new dams and with only Marinus I built it could draw another 1GW from Tasmania. Victoria's peak demand from coal and gas is a little over 5.5 GW so hydro will provide most of its long term storage. By the end of 2027 Victoria will have 4GW+ of battery storage and be running at over 60% renewables.
Peter Farley,
I'm having no difficulty in understanding you, it's just that you persist in talking past me to the points on which *you* wish to opine, rather than addressing the data I've presented. I'll try again in a different format.
Latest full-year NEM data, data-file "20231024 Open Electricity.csv" downloaded 25Oct2024.
(I couldn't find your "The East coast" data-set on https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/nem/... an undefined combination...)
As I said before, my analysis *includes* Hydro.
In the latest full year, Hydro across grid-connected Aus totalled 13,359 GWh (max 71.2 GWh/d, min 15.8 GWh/d).
In the latest full year, Demand across grid-connected Aus totalled 213,115 GWh (max 686.27 GWh/d, min 498.87 GWh/d).
So Hydro (included in my analysis, btw) was 6.3% of Demand *on average*, with peak Hydro 10.4% of peak Demand. Difficult to see that being effective backup at night when the Wind generally drops, it's an order of magnitude too small.
[Minimum Hydro was 3.2% of minimum Demand... was that when Hydro was being Curtailed? Do please advise.]
Also in this same latest full year, Open Electricity recorded Bioenergy (Biogas) - GWh total 184 in the year (max 0.90 GWh/d, min 0.10 GWh/d): Bioenergy (Biomass) - GWh 183 in the year (max 1.36 GWh/d, min 0.00 GWh/d). So a grand combined total of 0.17% of the year's aforesaid 213,115 GWh Demand.
Over two orders of magnitude too small.
You might be correct that bioenergy *could* be scaled up massively... with all the new facilities required, plus the ongoing transport of all the sawdust and animal dung etc. to those new facilities - but does that represent value for money for Aussie tax- and bill-payers? Hopefully the new Select Committee will answer (per below).
Re: "It doesn't matter if it is 15 years till the last pumped hydro plant comes on line we have plenty of existing coal gas and hydro until then"... Then why do I keep seeing that same timescale being used as the main reason for not building nuclear? Very confusing.
But the cost of nuclear... Yes, of course, all these new dams and batteries and windmills and solar farms and grid reinforcements and so on are all free...
P.S. I see (better late than never) this:
"Select Committee on Energy Planning and Regulation in Australia
On 16 September 2024 the Senate established a select committee, to be known as the Select Committee on the Energy Planning and Regulation in Australia, to inquire into and report on the institutional structures, governance, regulation, functions, and operation of the Australian energy market.
Submissions are sought by the 18 October 2024.
The committee will present its final report on 20 December 2024. "
https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Energy_Planning_and_Regulation_in_Australia
I'll be looking out for their report in the New Year.
It would be good if you understood the capacity on the NEM or the geography of Australia. There is currently 10 GW of hydro on the NEM with 2.2 GW of pumped hydro under construction and another 3-5 GW in active development. Limitations on Bass Straight interconnections mean that peak hydro is just under 7 GW,
But upgrades to Bass Straight transmission, new mainland pumped hydro and upgrades to existing plants mean that peak hydro will increase to somewhere between 10 and 14 GW. Peak output from dispatchable sources in the last few years was 30.5 GW and at that time wind was supplying 1.4 GW. With 4 X wind and 10 GW of hydro, that would mean other backup would need to supply 16 GW. Within 3 hours the difference dropped to 9 GW. When Kurri Kurri comes on line there will be 14 GW of gas, distillate and biomass and within four years there will be 8 GW/16 GWh of batteries, so with gas running at 80% and batteries running at 60% peak demand will be easily met even if every coal plant closed and no demand response was implemented and none of the proposed pumped hydro plants was built, not to mention consumer batteries, V2G etc.
As for night time loads, about 20-25% of the night-time load is below cost offpeak power designed to keep coal plants running. Most of that load will be shifted to daytime “solar soaker” rates, so we can expect a 10-15% reduction in night time loads. Already on some nights wind supplies 20-50% of the load so 4 X will be 80-120% of the load so batteries and pumped hydro will be recharged night and day
Now In Australia as I said with 4 X wind and solar we would need 20 GW/600 GWh of backup for the worst week, lets say 800 GWh for the worst two weeks. In every single month there would be a surplus
If we had 22 GW of nuclear and it behaved like Canada 1998, Belgium 2015, 2018, France 2021-2023 etc etc we would need 20 GW/ 70,000 GWh of backup. What would you suggest we source that from or would you suggest we keep half our coal plants just in case?
Your analysis is I am afraid GIGO
Peter, I strongly suspect that I will never understand the *special exceptional* nature of Australia's renewables to your satisfaction.
But I do note that suddenly you've stopped mentioning bio-gas as a practicable means of backup: maybe a little of my data did get through.
I note that Queensland's Pioneer-Burdekin pumped hydro project has just been canned once the true likely costs vs benefits were revealed... how many others of your favoured list might go the same way, one wonders.
You are much higher on snark than knowledge of the effects on intermittent electrical generation. The clear result of Green energy policies in Australia and elsewhere has been expensive electricity, which is the opposite of what we should be aiming for.
1) Biomass (depending on the type) emits more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than coal, so it is a step backwards and should not be considered Green. The fact that you consider it a good thing is quite puzzling.
2) I really have no idea why these points in "Oops 1" is relevant to Bond's calculations.
3) For "Oops 2" those numbers for hydro are not very impressive. And most Greens are opposed to hydro because of the damage that it does not river environments and fish. Hydro is only 8% of Australian electrical generation. And most nations do not even have that potential.
Nor are the storage numbers you include that impressive.
You can get back to me when Australia reaches 250 GWh of storage. I am very skeptical that it will ever happen.
1. Using waste biomass in a methane digester for heat and power rather than letting it rot and give off methane is far better for the environment
2. Hydro and biomass can provide 25% of peak dispatchable demand already and 25%+ of weekly energy demand in a low wind and solar week, so somewhat relevant seeing our worst wind and solar week ever was 19.5% of demand and we expect to quadruple capacity.
3. The numbers for hydro are what we already have, Australia has very high peak to average hydro capacity so it is ideal for backup. We are not talking about other countries, the whole article is about Australia.
4. Perhaps you haven't heard about Snowy II 350 GWh, under construction now, early works on Borumba 48 GWh, Tumut 3 Shoalhaven and Wivenhoe already in operation and at least ten other pumped hydro projects in early development stages including Pioneer Burdekin 60 GWh. I don't believe most of those pumped hydro projects will go ahead because batteries are more efficient, faster and cheaper to build and we don't need 250 GWh of new storage in addition to Snowy II
Perhaps you should update your knowledge before being critical