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The future of energy generation and storage

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It gives everyone in NASA, time to get under a desk.
 
According to NOAA we can all relax about warming around 2030, their forecast for sunspot activity is looking rather scary to me

Dropping from 120 pcm now to 30 pcm in 2030

I realise that the CC activists don't believe that the sun provides warmth for the earth but I do, so I believe we are heading for cooler times in 2030s

Predicted Sunspot Number And Radio Flux | NOAA / NWS Space Weather Prediction Center

www.swpc.noaa.gov
 
When you look at the following chart from todays ABS release, it looks pretty good.

Until read the two line comment at the bottom of the chart.

Mick
 

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The clever country, showing that the title is questionable, yet again.
So much for getting new technology up and running, if it isn't big enough you can't do it, but it's a trail plant. Don't care, not listening.


Plans for a green hydrogen hub in Western Australia's Wheatbelt have been halted after planning authorities rejected the proponent's proposal.

Touted by developers Infinite Green Energy (IGE) as the first facility in the country to commercially produce green hydrogen, the project was due to be built within the Shire of Northam with works to be completed by early next year.

But this deadline will no longer be met after the Regional Development Assessment Panel rejected the developer's application due to the facility not being consistent with land use definitions in the area.

In its decision, the panel concluded the project's on-site renewable energy source did not produce enough power to meet the Shire of Northam Local Planning Scheme's definition of a "renewable energy facility".

Information cited by shire officers indicated that on-site renewable energy sources varied between 14 and 46 per cent, which is below the 50 per cent requirement for land use compliance.

The rejection of the Infinite Green Energy project means the company's plan to see buses, concrete mixers, rubbish trucks, and road trains powered by green hydrogen around the state will take longer than first estimated.

The project was backed by $5 million in state government grant funding.

Speaking to the ABC last year, Infinite Green Energy chief executive and founder Stephen Gauld said the completed facility would produce 4 tonnes of hydrogen per day, enough renewable energy to power 78 Class 8 heavy haul trucks.

It was expected that the facility would create 200 ongoing jobs within the Shire of Northam.

Although advertised as the first of its kind in the country, the Northam venture was designed as a demonstration facility ahead of IGE's much larger project, the planned Arrowsmith Hydrogen Plant in Dongara.

That facility is expected to produce enough power to run at least 700 road trains per day when it comes online, which is scheduled for 2028.

Several other large green hydrogen projects are planned for WA, including the Oakagee hub outside Geraldton, which will be focused on exports, and the Pilbara Hydrogen Hub, which will produce hydrogen and ammonia near Karratha.

With the decision finalised, Infinite Green Energy has 28 days to lodge an appeal to the State Administrative Tribunal.
 
mullokintyre said:
Until read the two line comment at the bottom of the chart.
Click to expand...
And until it's considered that price change would need to go substantially negative in order to actually get prices back down.

And the big one - most gas and electricity isn't used by households. It's prices to business, in particular trade exposed industry, that are critical in terms of Australia's economic competitiveness and future prosperity.

It's one thing to pay a higher bill at home to run the heating and lights. It's a much bigger problem when major industry goes kaput because it's just too costly to operate here.

It's now cheaper to import bricks, ordinary house bricks, from the US than to make them here and it's all about the cost of firing the kiln. The lower energy cost in the US more than offsets the cost of shipping to the other side of the world. It's not about wages etc, just about energy cost.
 
We are going to make solar panels here, WOW, someone should ring around and re employ the people who were retrenched when the last solar manufacturer went broke in Homebush back in 2010.

Albanese’s $1b bet on Australian-made solar panels

Australia has the world’s highest uptake of rooftop solar panels with one in three households having them. However, only 1 per cent are manufactured locally.
www.smh.com.au


Silex Systems closes Homebush solar PV manufacturing plant

Silex says the mothballed plant to be permanently closed because it can no longer compete against cheap Chinese imports.
reneweconomy.com.au
 
These people obviously live in a different universe, our biggest solar panel manufacturer shut down in 2010.

Since then 30% of houses have solar and several solar farms have been built, shouldn't the support have been started back in 2010, we may now have had a huge solar industry that supplied our domestic demand. The manufacturing plant was already there.

Basically starting from scratch while competing against China and India, will be a big ask.

Today's article:

Australia invented solar panels. Now 99 per cent of ours are made in China

Despite the government’s $1 billion announcement this week, Australian solar manufacturing could disappear as several companies said they have already been approached to move offshore.
www.theage.com.au

Australian solar manufacturing could disappear offshore without government support, as the industry declares expensive local production costs will drive companies to cheaper jurisdictions like China while the US attempts to lure companies for its own green energy push.

Australian researchers created solar photovoltaic technology – which converts sunlight directly into electricity – but China invested strategically in manufacturing and now dominates global supply, producing about 90 per cent of the world’s solar panels.
There is significant growth potential in the local market, with around 99 per cent of Australia’s solar panels coming from China and 1 per cent made locally.

“We’ve created innovation and then seen all the value being added offshore,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Thursday. “We’re not going to miss the opportunities this generation.”
 
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its all about the optics.
Politics at its very finest.
Mick
 
SirRumpole said:
Supply chain security.
Click to expand...
Not only don't we have a supply chain, we don't even have the technical expertise to build a manufacturing facility.
It's Labor's dumbest decision since AUKUS.
It gets even worse.
Australia has comparatively little demand and by the time a facility was up and running, our solar market will be negligible.
And that's not even looking at who our competitors might be should something eventuate.
Here's Wood Mackenzies latest take on prices:

If we think we can do better than Europe or America, we are deluding ourselves.
And after that is India's pricing, which is presently almost 50% greater than China's.
 
Here is a perfect example of how history is written. BP closed the Homebush solar factory in 2009 and the final death knell for the plant was in 2011 when the carcass was destroyed and the factory dismantled.
At least the media is starting to wake up to the ridiculous situation, we have found ourselves in.
The ABC article shows that they may be re finding their mojo again, great article IMO.

Labor has a broken energy fix. The Libs don’t have one at all – yet

Australia can bid for solar cell factories, but if we lack the power to run them, the hope is forlorn.
www.smh.com.au
extract from the article:
Australia invented the solar power cell in 1983 then waved goodbye to it in 2001 as it left home for China. Embarrassingly for Australia, China turned that very same technology into an $80 billion-a-year export by 2022, dominating world supply, and still growing apace.

Now Australia wants the industry back. That’s why Anthony Albanese this week announced a new $1 billion program of government support for companies to make solar cells in Australia. He’s calling it SunShot.


Australia's solar bust: How it all went so horribly wrong

Twenty years ago, Australia appeared set to be a global player in the solar panel manufacturing industry. Today, with panels in high demand, we hardly make any of them. Here's how we lost our head start.
www.abc.net.au

extracts from the article;

Over 20 years ago, the Harbour City was preparing to host the Olympic Games and the BP Solar factory was in full swing, making solar cells that were assembled into panels and then installed at the athletes' village, promoted as one of the largest solar suburbs in the world.

Here was a trumpeted example of Australian ingenuity; the technology had been developed in consultation with the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and its photovoltaics research team, which was famous for breaking record after record for solar cell efficiency.

"The factory was big on the global scale at the time," says Nigel Morris, a solar industry veteran who worked for BP Solar in those years.

"We were serving the domestic Australian market and exporting to South-East Asia as well."

But less than a decade after the 2000 Olympic Games, the factory closed.

Many of the leading lights of the UNSW research team moved to China, where they set up the country's first solar PV factories.

In 1989, a young engineering graduate named Shi Zhengrong moved to Sydney from Shanghai, as a foreign-exchange scholar.
Dr Shi completed a PhD under Professor Green in record time and then stayed on in Sydney to do more research.

He took a gamble in 2000, moving back to China to found a solar manufacturing company, Suntech.

At the time, China produced no solar panels.

In the years that followed, other UNSW solar graduates followed Dr Shi, starting their own factories in China.

In 2005, Suntech listed on the New York Stock Exchange and raised $US420 million, making Dr Shi a billionaire.

"When I started Suntech, I didn't expect it to develop so fast," Dr Shi says.

The listing heralded the start of a Chinese solar boom.

In the six years to 2011, American investment flowed and Chinese solar production grew by a factor of 200; the country's share of global production increased from 14 to 60 per cent.

There were all these little tinpot companies founded on hope and a shoestring," Professor Green says.

"Through US listings, they got hundreds of millions of dollars and grew to major players overnight.

"Australia was right in the thick of it. The Australians were the ones who knew how to set up production lines, so they provided technical expertise."
To this day, Australian graduates working in the Chinese solar industry talk shop on a WeChat group with 300 members, Professor Green says.

Many of these graduates are top executives.

"Seven of the top 10 Chinese solar manufacturers have Australian graduates at the level of chief technology officers or higher."
But as Chinese production was booming, Australia's was faltering.

Cheap Chinese panels largely wiped out the local solar manufacturing industry.

"From 2005-2008, everything went wild," says Renate Egan, a UNSW solar expert who worked in Australian solar manufacturing in the noughties.

"We were running lines of 100 megawatts and the Chinese were installing 1 gigawatt lines."
BP Solar sold the Homebush factory in 2009, unable to compete with the Chinese factories' economies of scale.
Mr Morris remembers the "death knell" of Australian solar manufacturing being largely ignored by government.

"BP Solar struggled to get money," he says.

"They struggled to get interest from government at various points in time."

Dr Egan agrees there was little government support; Australia allowed its manufacturing head start to dwindle away.
Standard solar panels, or modules, consist mostly of an aluminium frame, a glass sheet, about 60 silicon solar cells, and a junction box.

BP Solar made the solar cells and assembled them into modules.

The only commercial-scale solar module manufacturer in Australia today is a small company in Adelaide named Tindo Solar, which imports all of the components and assembles them into modules.
Its new 150MW facility will produce about 350 panels a day.

(By comparison, the world's largest solar module production plant in Hefei, China is 60GW, or roughly 400 times larger than the Adelaide facility).

Though it's hard to compete on price alone, there is demand for an Australian-made product, Tindo chief executive officer Shayne Jaenisch says.

In the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when supply from China was disrupted, companies concerned about supply chain security looked for panels made closer to home.

"We went from 64 companies contacting me to buy panels to over 1,000 in just over a year," Mr Jaenisch says.

"The whole landscape for us has changed."
He says Australia can't make the cheapest panels, but it can offer better quality customer service, and mitigate "sovereign risk"; the possibility that China will one day stop selling solar panels to Australia.

Solar will account for most of Australia's energy production by the end of decade, Dr Egan estimates.

"If we're going to be that reliant on solar, should we be making the panels here? If half the world's energy come from solar, the solar panels can't all come from one nation," she says.
"Sovereign risk" is partly why the US, Europe and India are looking to increase local production; India has introduced a 40 per cent duty on imported solar modules to boost local manufacturing.

"It might be worth paying a bit more for the ancillary benefits, including supply chain resilience and security," Dr Egan says.
"It's going to be bigger than oil, gas and coal put together."
He's calculated roughly how big.

For Australia to produce enough energy that it won't need coal or gas and can also meet the extra demand of mass electrification, it will need about 450GW of solar and wind generation, he says.

Of that, about 300GW would be solar, he estimates.

With about 20GW of installed solar already, it'll need another 280GW.

"We're going to be importing a lot of glass and a lot of panels with a little bit of silicon attached," Professor Blakers says.

Australia will need hundreds of millions of standard-size solar panels to meet its energy needs in the next couple decades.

And that's just domestic demand; there are also plans for Australia to export renewable energy to Asia from massive solar farms in the Northern Territory and Western Australia's Pilbara region.

The output of these farms alone is roughly equal to the current combined output of all the solar in Australia.

That's a lot of solar panels.
 
If "we" invented the solar cell, did we patent it and get royalties from it I wonder?
 
SirRumpole said:
Solar panels need replacing every 15-20 years. The demand will always be there.
Click to expand...
The estimated operational lifespan of a PV module is about 30-35 years, although some may produce power much longer.

China's present manufacturing capacity could replace every panel in Australia with less than a week's output.
Frankly we would have better luck making colour TVs as there are 10 times more of them and they last much less than half as long.


Until Australia's energy cost are fraction of China's we are wasting our time trying to manufacture things they can produce at scale, in high quality, and at the lowest cost globally.
 
rederob said:
Until Australia's energy cost are fraction of China's we are wasting our time trying to manufacture things they can produce at scale, in high quality, and at the lowest cost globally.
Click to expand...
I see definite parallels with the 1970's in all this.

So long as living standards are rising then the majority of the population will overlook all manner of things they're not really in agreement with. "The price of progress" was an actual saying in the past, a reference to pollution, industrial accidents, demolishing heritage, clear felling and/or flooding the wilderness and so on as being necessary evils or "the price of progress".

So long as unemployment was minimal, living standards were consistently rising and so on that largely went unchallenged. A few dissenters had objected to Lake Pedder being flooded, challenged the idea of building highways within the big cities and suggested that having the air filled with lead and tobacco smoke wasn't going us any favours but overall the majority voted firmly for "progress" - being a "greenie" wasn't a way to make too many friends.

Once the economic music stopped, once unemployment and inflation shot up during the 1970's, all of a sudden the critics found a lot more people willing to listen. It's one thing to accept "the price of progress" so long as there actually is progress, it's a much harder sell when the whole thing doesn't seem to be working. All of a sudden the argument that there must be a better way had an audience.

Today there are definite similarities there. Living standards are going backwards, inflation's back, there's a degree of sabre rattling going on and once again we're seeing all manner of things about which there's long been simmering disquiet rise to the surface. Everything from town planning to the basis of political influence to population to globalisation, all are now under much greater scrutiny.

In that context I think the federal government has correctly worked out that "more of the same" isn't going to be the way forward. As was the case 40 - 50 years ago, we're once again on the cusp of major change in society where whatever the future looks like, it likely doesn't look like an extension of the recent past. Public disquiet is rising, and the wheels are coming off economically.

That said, I'm not even slightly convinced that solar panels are the thing to be manufacturing in Australia. Having cheap energy is the key to any manufacturing and that precludes using high cost solar modules, it becomes a self-defeating objective.

I do think though that we're going to be going back to manufacturing more broadly - the idea that we just keep ramping up the exports of coal, gas and iron ore and running an economy heavily reliant on a housing boom and lower value service industries has reached its limits both practically and politically. Change is inevitable just as it was 45 years ago, the question's about the detail.
 
Smurf1976 said:
That said, I'm not even slightly convinced that solar panels are the thing to be manufacturing in Australia. Having cheap energy is the key to any manufacturing and that precludes using high cost solar modules, it becomes a self-defeating objective.
Click to expand...

Even if large scale manufacturing of solar panels is uneconomic here, there is a benefit to having a capability, ie being able to do it and being able to scale up if things go wrong with the supply chain.

China is a risk, it doesn't sell things simply for economic benefit it very much a political player and if it sees that other countries have a dependance on them for certain critical goods then they will exploit that at some time.

We are dancing with the devil trading with China and we need to cover our asses.
 
SirRumpole said:
Even if large scale manufacturing of solar panels is uneconomic here, there is a benefit to having a capability, ie being able to do it and being able to scale up if things go wrong with the supply chain.
Click to expand...
Explain the benefit, when costs will be excessive and there won't be a market for the product when the same could be bought for well below half the price and a better quality.
SirRumpole said:
China is a risk, it doesn't sell things simply for economic benefit it very much a political player and if it sees that other countries have a dependance on them for certain critical goods then they will exploit that at some time.
Click to expand...
You might want to replace China with America, who has hobbled most countries in the world at some point in time with sanctions, excessive tariffs, dumping, or simple quotas and trade restrictions.
Australia sits closest to Asia, and this is confirmed by all trade data.
Teaming up with the UK and USA who nowadays play a minimal and decreasing role in our economic future is the joke we pay for with AUKUS.
SirRumpole said:
We are dancing with the devil trading with China and we need to cover our asses.
Click to expand...
We owe our present standard of living to China. They dragged us out of and through the 2008 economic crisis by maintaining strong trading relationships, and have been out principal 2-way trading partner for decades.
With respect to renewable energy targets, China will be responsible for the lion's share of global deployment. That include solar, wind turbines and home battery storage.
 
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