this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
28 points (96.7% liked)

Australia

4418 readers
164 users here now

A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.

Before you post:

If you're posting anything related to:

If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News

Rules

This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:

Banner Photo

Congratulations to @[email protected] who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition

Recommended and Related Communities

Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:

Plus other communities for sport and major cities.

https://aussie.zone/communities

Moderation

Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.

Additionally, we have our instance admins: @[email protected] and @[email protected]

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago (7 children)

No, just until such time as storage (pumped hydro/battery/potential gravity/flywheel/liquified air/magical pixie dust - most likely a combination of seperate technologies in seperate locations) is sufficiently integrated to take the grid overnight.
Then dispatchable power goes down to gas etc, which itself gets phased out except for emergency backup when the storage grows sufficient.

Nuclear is just being proposed by certain groups as a way to delay/discourage spending on renewables and storage - maintaining the status quo of coal for a bit longer.

Ignoring the timeline, or even the net zero goal, renewable (solar and wind) + storage is already cheaper to install, and cheaper to run for a given output than anything else we've got.
The only reasons we're still running coal is:

  • it's available on demand
  • it's already there
  • the replacement is not

The primary reason we are changing over isn't because the companies running these coal plants are suddenly huffing the hippie bong, but because their current infrastructure is reaching end of life (the point at which it is no longer financially viable to maintain and must be replaced) and no sane bank is going to lend them the capital to build a new coal plant, because there's just no way it'll ever get paid back.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 years ago (6 children)

Yes cheap storage will solve lot's of problems. Problem is we do not have technology for that yet which is scalable. Snow Hydro 2 is pretty much all we can do for gravity storage in Australia. Only other option is batteries. There is no production capacity to cover demand in that scale, and will take long time to build it up. And for some reason no one takes account ecological impact of building all these batteries/solar/wind turbines. They all very material heavy on per kW basis.

It is a myth that solar and wind are cheaper at scale than conventional generation. It is only the case if covenantal generation is pay for all unpleasantness of renewable instability. As soon too much renewables is in the grid you have to pay to keep it stable.
There are 3 main method: Overprovisoning - to compensate for annual cycles. Australia is happy here as we consume more power at summer than at winter. Long range transmission - to compensate for local weather Storage - to take care od daily cycle.

It is all costs lots of money and not required now as it was taken care off. This is why solar/wind is cheap.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

We will overprovision.
We will use long range transmission to compensate for local weather.
We will use storage.
We will all pay more for power in the short term.

It's a myth that conventional generation is cheap. This was only (relatively) the case in the recent past as that infrastructure was already paid for, primarily by tax dollars; from the power stations, to the rail lines to transport the coal, to the transmission lines and substations.
Now the key part of that infrastructure, the coal plants, are reaching end of life.
Power prices are already trending up, not because evil renewable energy is destabalising the grid, but because the cheap old machines can no longer be maintained. Not tomorrow, but within the next few years, they will need to be replaced with something.
It will not be new coal.
Origin, AGL, EnergyAustralia, Ergon, Alinta etc have all said as much.
It's just too expensive to build, and the prices required to pay back those loans make it a non-starter.

Currently we need coal sometimes, and due to the long start up and shut down times of a coal plant, that means we need coal all the time - contractually.
THAT is what is causing the current grid instability. Wind and Solar are mature technologies, but currently, we curtail (turn off) wind and solar output, when it is adding too much to the grid.
If we had large storage infrastructure, we would no longer need to do that, as we could take the over abundance of power and store some tiny fraction of it, for times when the sun is down and the wind isn't blowing.
And industry is making that pivot, they're just waiting to see how the political dice will fall, how they can maxamise their profits and minimise their costs.
They are businesses after all.

As for scalable storage technology, here's an example we have right now: Liquid Air. It is infinitely scalable, since it doesn't rely on perfect sites like pumped hydro (which requires an ongoing water supply, proximity to transmission and at least 2 storage reservoirs with a significant height differential).

The largest trial I'm aware of happened in the UK 10 years ago, and only had 15% efficency, but considering we were going to throw the power away anyway, and now that 15% is dispatchable, that's suddenly a good deal even if it never acheives the hypothesized 60% efficiency.
There's more of these being built right now: https://highviewpower.com/projects/#uk-projects
And this is just one storage technology example, chosen to address your concern of scalability.
Scale is solved, money to build it is not.

But as I said, the fact that this transition will occur is not in question and eventually the major players will have to pay for it themselves, or the government can pour tax payer dollars on it to ensure it occurs smoothly.
The fact we are seeing nonsense like "Why not nuclear?" from one particular political party, is just a step in this dance.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Time is in the essence. We do not have time to build all these fancy,expensive and mostly experimental stuff. Planet will be already cooked by the time they a ready. There are lots of good potential technologies around. From hight altitude wind, to ocean current turbines, to orbital solar. Problem is none of them is ready for production.

There is are two well tested green technologies capable to provide stable power. Hydro and nuclear. We do not have place to build more hydro in Australia. Nuclear is only option.

Keep burning coal due to radiophobia is just stupid. And we will not get anything else in time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I'm not against Nuclear, go for it.

It's not cost competitive, so I don't think the government should be subsidizing it, but I say we reduce the laws banning it to merely enforcing strong environmental protections (as we should on all things).

Let's say we did that today.
Let's assume you already have a site picked out and ready to go, and that no protestors are going to stop the build.
It'll still be 10 years before it turns on and produces it's first watt: https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/nuclear-power-stations-are-not-appropriate-for-australia-and-probably-never-will-be/
I'd be curious if you can find a source with a shorter build time quote, so link us.

In the meantime under this proposal, the existing coal plants are still going to shut down.
With the nuclear not ready to plug the gap.
So either the government pays for the construction of more coal (because no investment company or bank will touch it), or more renewables + storage is going to go in.
In fact, within a year we'd have some new solar and wind producing power, more in year 2, more in year 3 etc.
By the time the Nuclear plant passes it's shakedown tests, we probably don't need it anymore.

I've got strong opinions about which tech we should be going for based on ecological reasons, but the fact we are going to wind and solar + storage is based on pragmatic economic reasons.

Also, ANU has identified over 3000 promising sites for pumped hydro in Australia.
Some of them could probably be straight hydro I assume.
I'm not against those either, let's go!

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)