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The future of energy generation and storage

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SirRumpole said:
Usual question, who pays?

Do these spinning machines get spun up by excess solar power that is currently going to waste?
Click to expand...
This is actually a great illustration of how it's going wrong financially.

Transgrid wants to build 5GW of batteries but correctly notes that energy storage capacity isn't critical for this purpose.

Energy storage is however critical for other purposes.

Now what an engineer focused on cost minimisation would do is, with apologies to birds, kill two of them with the one stone:

Batteries built to provide system strength can, of course, also be equipped with enough storage to provide useful peak power, thus avoiding the need for duplication.

And suffice to say it's straightforward to run hydro machines as synchronous condensers if they're so equipped, there's no need to build separately unless you're somewhere (eg SA) that doesn't have any hydro. That said it's also possible with minor modification to use gas turbines for that as well.

So in a rational world, focused on cost minimisation, build batteries to provide peak power and also use them to provide system strength. Build hydro and/or gas for deep firming and when it's not being run for that, use it to provide system inertia, voltage support and so on.

The silly, high cost way to do it is for the transmission operator to note that they don't own generation and have no control over the operation of generation, therefore need to build their own syncons and batteries for system strength. Another name for this silliness is "the Australian way".

That's not about coal versus gas versus hydro versus wind, solar, nuclear or anything else. It's about sound engineering seeking to minimise cost versus ideologically-induced waste.
 
And to quote a very smart guy, energy systems engineering, is one of the three fields AI wont be able to make redundant, in the near future. Lol
Luckily we have politicians in Australia who are proving him wrong. Lol

Bill Gates predicts only three jobs will survive the AI takeover. Here is why

AI is revolutionizing industries with potential job displacement, warns Bill Gates, though coders, energy experts, and biologists will remain essential for now. These professions, crucial for AI development, energy strategy, and scientific research, require skills AI can't yet replicate. Gates...
m.economictimes.com
 
Reminds me of the old joke, the only jobs left will be a dog to guard the machines, and a man to feed the dog.
 
There goes another one.

The Federal government seems to be in denial about the realities of the energy transformation, it's time they came clean.

Blue Float Energy abandons $10 billion Gippsland Dawn offshore wind proposal​


Developer abandons $10 billion offshore windfarm in Gippsland

A policy expert questions whether Australia can still meet its renewable energy targets, as Blue Float Energy withdraws from a major Victorian renewables project, and from offshore wind internationally.
www.abc.net.au
 
Government handouts must be drying up, the return on capital of massive windfarms must be marginal, or they would be viable as they are the cheapest form of generation, aren't they?

We certainly need some generation and sooner rather than later, oh what a mess.

Apparently no one wants to buy the carcass, which says a lot about the financial viability, I feel an NBN brain fart brewing. Lol
 
sptrawler said:
or they would be viable as they are the cheapest form of generation, aren't they?
Click to expand...
Maybe they are if they don't get slowed down by continuous red tape and regulation and have to wait for the indigenous and environmental people to give their approval, not to mention the NIMBYs who object to the view of the horizon being interrupted.
 
That's life in Australia.
A Lot of the problem stems from the companies who spend all this money on building low energy intermittant output equipment, expect a certain return on equity, they put in a 2GW wind farm is a lot of money and it can't reliably give 2GW.
So it has to be a Govt guaranteed return, I'm guessing the sums don't add up for the Govt and without the Govt guarantee the sums don't add up for the conyractor.
As I said early in the thread, to have a renewable grid there needs to be twice as much generation capacity, that is to supply the load and charge the storage.
Who is going to fund the overcapacity that actually is only required occassionally?
That is the question the wind and solar suppliers are going to be asking, why would we put it in unless we get paid for it.
 
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Which goes back to the basic: wind and solar are a very expensive solution
Water for your garden is cheap on a rainy day but the same water purchase in bottled is bloody expensive to water your roses during the drought.
Solar and wind are our bottled packaged energy: nearly free during a windy sunny lunchtime but requiring all the packaging in water or battery storage,losses and transport on a quiet hot summer night.
I go back to the French situation where adding so called renewable power vua wind and solar doubled the bills while bringing capacity issues,all this to try closing their previous main supply for ideology reasons (them nuclear,in Australia coal).
Yet they have a quasi state monopoly, uniform pricing, etc..lets not blame the neo capitalism there, France is on number a Soviet state.
 
And just because it is easy to do:
every time you see some wind farms: during your travels here overseas or even in any TV shows, as they litter the landscapes in modern films :
Check how many are actually turning!
As an engineer, i am fascinated , monsters of engineering they are, and check how many any are actually turning.
i would roughly say 1 out of 5 is usually static aka in maintenance /repair/destroyed
This experience was based on repeatedly seeing this in FNQ, France, Spain, Panama, new Caledonia and China in the last decade plus watching UK and EU/nordic shows on stream channels
I would really like to get the REAL reliability numbers, not the massaged leaflets
 
Heard the company doing offshore wind down Illawarra got scrapped.
Not economically viable.

Even idiots knew this was a stupid endeavour. Be interesting to see if the rest of the offshore get the flick. They risk of the blades splintering into a million bits and ruining coastal beaches was too great imo. Along with every other problem about it.
Giant toss fest.

Bowen is one of the most stupid politicians to be running this portfolio. Can't even handle social media pressure. Should be moved over to 'special needs' and I don't mean the portfolio.
 
As more renewables go in, the return on capital from them will get less and less, as has happened with rooftop solar, this is going to end up messy IMO.

The Govt will end up having to pay for it, as happened with the NBN, meanwhile the companies will take the profits, as is happening with the NBN.

The NBN runs at a loss and the telco's, media and streaming companies make a motza using it, from my understanding. Lol and the losses will increase as people migrate to low orbit sattelite providers and newr technologies.


From google:
While NBN Co is a government-owned entity, it's not designed to be a profit-making venture. Its primary goal is to provide a nationwide broadband network. However, the scale of the losses has raised concerns and prompted discussions about the financial sustainability of the project.

Here's a more detailed breakdown:
  • Revenue: In the six-month period, NBN Co generated $1.8 billion in revenue.

  • Loss: The company reported a loss of $2.14 billion.

  • Subscriber Growth: The number of activated residential and business premises increased by 907,000 during this period, reaching a total of 6.4 million.

  • Cost Factors: The significant loss is largely due to the substantial costs associated with expanding the network and connecting new users, including construction, equipment, and ongoing maintenance.
 
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It seems local residents are a bit unhappy with the testing of Kurri Kurri power station burning diesel. Seems to be causing quite a fuss locally from what I'm hearing.



The next test runs are going to be done at night apparently. Because, you know, making sure the workers don't get sunburnt or something. I'm sure there's no other reason, it's not as though there's anything to hide....
 
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There's nothing like waking up to the smell of NOX and SO2 in the morning. Lol
It wont be long and it will be running on hydrogen. Lol
 
sptrawler said:
There's nothing like waking up to the smell of NOX and SO2 in the morning. Lol
It wont be long and it will be running on hydrogen. Lol
Click to expand...
Diesel and imported gas will soon be too expensive for Australia, we will burn loads of reject Indonesian coal as the shipments arrive, and blackout in-between.
South Africa rince and repeat.
 
Interesting video claiming that 100% renewables and storage is possible but very expensive, but 95% renewable with storage is far cheaper than comparable networks.

Would be interested to hear expert opinions.

 
SirRumpole said:
Interesting video claiming that 100% renewables and storage is possible but very expensive, but 95% renewable with storage is far cheaper than comparable networks.

Would be interested to hear expert opinions.

Click to expand...
I do not know about exact percentage but indeed 100% renewable is just crazy fanaticism, and not leveraging them nearly as crazy too. 95% seems a bit stretched, as to gain the few % extra renewable will require a disproportionate amount of backup storage.
Unless we do like Australia and do not plan for no blackout?
I nevertheless let people judge the way increasing renewable by less than 10% of total consumption doubled the bill of French consumers.
True they do not have that much sun and wind farms are notoriously expensive to maintain but still.
 
As @Smurf1976 has said in the past the electrical load growth to decarbonise is a lot more than has been mentioned, at last it is getting air play.
A very interesting article, I actually thought the Eastern States load would be higher than 26GW.

A power-hungry beast could smash forecasts of Australia's rising power demand

Australian power demand rose relentlessly until 2008, when it stopped growing. That record has finally been eclipsed, and experts say it is a sign of things to come.
www.abc.net.au
From the article:
On that, more relevant, score, demand in July last year was almost 26,000 megawatts, eclipsing the 25,738MW record set some 16 years ago.

In the first three months of this year, underlying demand rose 1.4 per cent compared with the previous corresponding period to a new record.

Ms York says the numbers are expected to get much higher in the years ahead.

"We are seeing significant growth and we're forecasting significant growth," she notes.
 
Well we have closed our industry and mining processing which collapsed demand (wild clapping from the transgender marxists Greens,)but the millions of new migrants plus natural growth of population soon reverse that, and EV as an EV more or less consumes as much as a household ..might be wrong there but i think it is roughly the numbers
So yes, we need more energy
 
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