Australian (ASX) Stock Market Forum

The future of energy generation and storage

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perhaps if We got the Diutch to build stuff and bypass the CFMEU things might bgo a little quicker

1693463294185.png
 
mullokintyre said:
A few folks on ASF have suggested that SMR's are impractical, cost too much, will take forever to build, and are stoll a long way rom being reality.
Obviously the koreans don't read ASF.
From Business Korea
View attachment 161690
Hyundai E&C and Holtec, a U.S. nuclear power plant design and manufacturing company, will commence construction of a small modular reactor (SMR) in the mainland U.S. by 2026. With the goal to complete the project within 3 years and start electricity production by 2029, the order is expected to exceed 4 trillion won.

On Aug. 15, in an interview at Holtec’s Philadelphia headquarters, Dr. Kris Singh, chairman of Holtec, stated that the “first SMR will be constructed on the Palisades nuclear power site in Michigan,” anticipating power production by 2029. The Palisades plant in Michigan was permanently shut down in May 2022, but with the U.S. government recommending a “restart,” Holtec is pushing for the construction of the SMR on the remaining site. Singh said, “2 to 4 SMRs will be built on our Palisades site,” noting the advantage that no new environmental assessment is required.

Globally recognized, Holtec holds over 100 patents in core areas of nuclear power plant design, materials, and manufacturing. Based on its technical expertise, the company is developing a 160 MW pressurized water SMR, the “SMR-160.”

Hyundai E&C will be in charge of nuclear power plant construction. In November 2021, they signed a Teaming Agreement with Holtec for the development of SMR and a joint business venture. Hyundai Construction aims to complete the project “within 3 years” and will break ground no later than 2026.
Three years for construction. It would take that long to get the permits in OZ.
That 4 trillion won equates to about 4.6 billion AUD.
The article is a bit vague about how many and what size the SMRs are, but assuming they are building one 160MW smr in this prjoect, thats a pretty expensive supply on a per MW basis. But it is not intermittent, and the running costs over the life of the SMR are pretty low compared to either AGS, coal, diesel or biomass.
Assuming that snowy 2.0 only uses spare capacity wind or solar, to pump the water up hill, its running costs will also be low, though somewhat inefficient.
Mick
Click to expand...
As long as we agree that over the life of the SMR means in the coming 10,000 years where , after gloriously producing cheap power for 40 or 50 years if lucky, we will spend the next 9950 years refrigerating glowing bars in a pool.... The 10000 year is actually quite arbitrary as it will just become half or a quarter of the problem then, not the end of the troubles
That is my issue with nuclear: .as I did part of my cursus in a nuclear institute in Caen and had the pleasure to visit and see the refrigerated pools of la Hague nuclear waste treatment in Normandy where a lot of the world wasted rods and decommissioned reactor parts get processed, enclosed in melted "glass" and cooled down for eternity.
Should that pool get dry or stop being cooled, the heat will meet the glass and we end up with a China syndrome with the lot leaking down to the earth magma .
All that to avoid creating CO2 levels which are in no significant way a cause of global warming as any science litterate person can find /prove.
Moreover, in the current world, SMR are a dream for any nut group or fanatic, the power of a dirty bomb in your backyard.
So not exactly a fan.
But if we accept 600 000 new residents a year, indeed it could be hard to sustain our energy needs otherwise.
And yes it is possible to do some SMR in a few years..ask China, but we are in Oz where a city train line costs 200 billions and decades in planning building
 
sptrawler said:
It will be great to see how it performs,
Click to expand...
These plants have been going on for half a century with limited success.
Thermal solar plus sodium salt..but conversion rates are not fabulous.
Thermal solar can be used to preheat. Aka assist gas or coal power plants, increasing output at low cost, but even thermal HWS for residential home can not compete with PV panel and electric HWS..yet here go your tax dollars again
 
Yes in the 1980's we had a small concentrated solar storage steam set at Meekatharra, it was interesting but didn't pay its way, eventually sold to Sims metal for scrap.
Hopefully the process has improved.
 
The muck is starting to hit the fan...

www.abc.net.au

Energy minister says federal government wants power grid 'as stable as it possibly can be'

Chris Bowen's comments follow warnings from the Australian Energy Market Operator that a hot and dry summer will put Victoria and South Australia at "elevated" risk of blackouts.
www.abc.net.au www.abc.net.au

"The Grattan Institute's Tony Wood agreed Australia can achieve the targets, but said "we don't want anything else to go wrong and we've got to get moving."

That about sums it up I reckon.
 
sptrawler said:
Yes in the 1980's we had a small concentrated solar storage steam set at Meekatharra, it was interesting but didn't pay its way, eventually sold to Sims metal for scrap.
Hopefully the process has improved.
Click to expand...

Did you meet the Germans?

Had a good talk to one of them really interesting.

Remember being really un-impressed at the size of the turbine.
 
IFocus said:
Did you meet the Germans?

Had a good talk to one of them really interesting.

Remember being really un-impressed at the size of the turbine.
Click to expand...
Yes it was German an MAN system, with parabolic solar tracing mirrors, it actually used more power than it produced over a 12 month period, but the sun following technology driving the array mirrors was developed and proved very successful.
Warren Buffet was heavily involved in a concentrated solar system in California, but withdrew funding recently.
Hopefully the Australian one is a winner, people have been investing in it for a long time, with limited success.
PV and wind are really the only successful renewables that jave been deployed on a large scale and the intermitency and ecological impact is hard to mitigate.
I'm no fan of nuclear, but logics keeps pointing to it being the only CLEAN option to support renewables on a large enough scale.
Fortunately Australia is ideally suited to SMR's so they could be deployed in remote areas.
Time will tell, as usual, the obvious will eventually shine through IMO.
 
orign and endeavour energy have teamed up to setup a "community battery" trial in Sydney.
From renew Economy
New South Wales distribution network company Endeavour Energy has launched western Sydney’s first community battery and will now invite residents to join the program to ‘rent’ a portion of the battery for $15 per month.

Endeavour says the Bungarribee Community Battery is designed to change the way that residents consume and store energy – and is expected to lead to “substantial” cost savings and a more stable energy grid during peak times.

The area has been chosen because of its high adoption of solar power, but the battery will also benefit residents without rooftop solar, including renters, those who live in apartment blocks, or those who cannot afford the currently high costs of solar and batteries.

The trial program operated with Origin will allow customers to ‘rent’ a portion of the battery for $15 per month, and will then receive payments for the energy they store and use.

Endeavour Energy expects that participants in the trial with solar will receive a payment of between $120 and $220 per year, depending on their energy use and solar export, while non-solar customers will receive a payment of $80 to $120 per year.
Click to expand...
So community members who opt in get to pay Endeavour $180 per year for their battery rent.
For this rental they would get somewhere between 120 and 220 per year depending on bhow much their energy use might be, and how much they feed in from their solar.
For those who don't have any solar, they still pay the $180 per year, but their return is between $80 and $120 per year.
Not a great investment I would have thought.
Mick
 
mullokintyre said:
orign and endeavour energy have teamed up to setup a "community battery" trial in Sydney.
From renew Economy

So community members who opt in get to pay Endeavour $180 per year for their battery rent.
For this rental they would get somewhere between 120 and 220 per year depending on bhow much their energy use might be, and how much they feed in from their solar.
For those who don't have any solar, they still pay the $180 per year, but their return is between $80 and $120 per year.
Not a great investment I would have thought.
Mick
Click to expand...
The small print would be worth reading, what if everyone wants to opt out, after it is installed, or new property owners don't want to opt in.
Is there a limit on how much an individual property can use? eg one property owner decides to install whole of house A/C and is using a disproportionate amount of the battery storage.
It would be interesting to read the contract.
 
sptrawler said:
I'm no fan of nuclear, but logics keeps pointing to it being the only CLEAN option to support renewables on a large enough scale.
Click to expand...
From a technical perspective and looking at the Australian context, hydro is most certainly an alternative at least for the eastern states + SA. Technically it's possible, it can be done, quite a few have independently run the numbers based on different assumptions and reached the same conclusion - it's doable.

In a political sense however, well if I were to place bets it would be on diesel and gas. ;)
 
Smurf1976 said:
From a technical perspective and looking at the Australian context, hydro is most certainly an alternative at least for the eastern states + SA. Technically it's possible, it can be done, quite a few have independently run the numbers based on different assumptions and reached the same conclusion - it's doable.

In a political sense however, well if I were to place bets it would be on diesel and gas. ;)
Click to expand...
Firstly are you talking about Australia with regard just removing existing coal generation, I agree that can probably be achieved, but what about removing all fossil fuel burning? That will require a hell of a lot move renewables than just removing existing coal power stations.

As you say diesel and natural gas are definitely the go to at the moment, but when coal is removed from generation, how long before the narrative moves toward removing diesel then gas?

Add to that the extra generation required to supply EV charging, industries that move from fossil fuel heat to electricity, domestic fossil fuel heating and cooking to all electric, maybe Australia can manage it with 100% renewables (I doubt it), but many countries definitely wont be able to.

If you take electrical generation, transportation, industrial processes, domestic appliance consumption, agriculture etc in Australia.
Remind me again how many litres of oil we burn a day? That energy has to be replaced by renewable electrical generation
Add to that the energy supplied per day in the form of natural gas, that has to be replaced by renewable electrical generation.
Add to that the energy supplied by coal per day, that has to be replaced be renewable generation.
This renewable generation is intermittent and has to not only supply that energy required, but also has to charge depleted storage as well.
That's seems to be a big ask from solar, that has very low energy output/m2 or wind turbines, from our daily fuel usage across all sectors of the economy we should be able to work out a rough MJ energy requirement to remove fossil fuel.
I would actually guess this has been done and it is interesting that it isn't been broadcast.
Again only my opinion and we are only voicing our thoughts.
 
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sptrawler said:
Firstly are you talking about Australia with regard just removing existing coal generation, I agree that can probably be achieved, but what about removing all fossil fuel burning? That will require a hell of a lot move renewables than just removing existing coal power stations.

As you say diesel and natural gas are definitely the go to at the moment, but when coal is removed from generation, how long before the narrative moves toward removing diesel then gas?

Add to that the extra generation required to supply EV charging, industries that move from fossil fuel heat to electricity, domestic fossil fuel heating and cooking to all electric, maybe Australia can manage it with 100% renewables (I doubt it), but many countries definitely wont be able to.

If you take electrical generation, transportation, industrial processes, domestic appliance consumption, agriculture etc in Australia.
Remind me again how many litres of oil we burn a day? That energy has to be replaced by renewable electrical generation
Add to that the energy supplied per day in the form of natural gas, that has to be replaced by renewable electrical generation.
Add to that the energy supplied by coal per day, that has to be replaced be renewable generation.
This renewable generation is intermittent and has to not only supply that energy required, but also has to charge depleted storage as well.
That's seems to be a big ask from solar, that has very low energy output/m2 or wind turbines, from our daily fuel usage across all sectors of the economy we should be able to work out a rough MJ energy requirement to remove fossil fuel.
I would actually guess this has been done and it is interesting that it isn't been broadcast.
Again only my opinion and we are only voicing our thoughts.
Click to expand...
I came across this artcle by chance awhile ago, and have since visited the property and actually know the owner of the property pretty well. Google this "sawyers valley flywheel" a very interesting piece of infrustructure, though still in the domestic fine tuning stage.
 
sptrawler said:
Firstly are you talking about Australia with regard just removing existing coal generation, I agree that can probably be achieved, but what about removing all fossil fuel burning? That will require a hell of a lot move renewables than just removing existing coal power stations.
Click to expand...
In short, the numbers have been crunched for the NEM (so all states except NT and WA) both on an "electricity only" basis, and separately on an assumption that everything that can realistically be electrified is electrified.

So all electric homes and businesses including heavy industry, a fully electric road vehicle fleet and so on.

Shipping and aviation weren't included, largely due to lack of any reasonable basis to estimate when or if they'd be relevant to include.

In short it's technically possible. A system of wind + solar + hydro and some batteries for peak power can be made to work so long as a modest degree of load control is applied. Eg off-peak controlled load hot water and charging of parked EV's for example, both of which ought not cause any real drama for consumers so long as they're done properly (indeed in most states there's a long history of using off-peak water heating in the past).

However.....

I won't deny for a moment that the environmental impact and economic cost of what's required to make that work are very substantial and I doubt the community's willing to accept those costs at least not until such time as there's an overwhelming "do something!" consensus on climate and energy.

In terms of those costs, well for the long duration storage we're talking about big dams yes. Suffice to say the sites are known, many have gone as far as core samples and a full detailed design being done, but nobody's seriously expecting we'll see any of them actually built at least not in the medium term.

The hydro isn't needed for the majority of days when wind and solar combined with short duration storage does the job. Its purpose is simply to fill the gap, on a seriously large scale, on the days when wind and solar falls short. It's for deep firming, it's not for routine use.

Same goes for nuclear. In the Australian context the community isn't currently prepared to pay the economic cost and is divided on the environmental aspect.

Hence short and medium duration storage backed up by gas and diesel it will be as the means of firming wind and solar. It'll need something drastic to happen for that to change and for society to want a fully renewable, or nuclear, alternative.

At present basically all planning assumes continued use of gas / diesel through at least 2070. Anything else, the various ideas of 100% renewable, are either an individual's desktop academic exercise, or it's the work of a company where management just wanted to understand what's possible and how it could be done without seriously expecting to ever build it.

Most are hoping for a silver bullet in truth. That is, it's all pinned on hydrogen or ammonia being a goer. There's a good chance that works out, but it's not ready for deployment yet so oil and gas it is for deep firming.

There's also a company looking very seriously at coal gasification using low grade coal that otherwise isn't being used for anything.

As an example of the problem, to put some figures on it, across the whole NEM (all NEM states combined):

1 July 2023 = VRE output was 75.8% of average
2 July = 62.4% of average
3 July = 46.1% of average
4 July = 38.2% of average
5 July = 89.1% of average

That's too large a shortfall to fill with batteries and it's too large for small, relatively unobtrusive hydro projects especially once we consider this is going to be peak demand season with the electrification of heating. It's either something that burns or it's large scale hydro storing billions of litres of water.

Another example is 29 April to 1 May inclusive (3 days). Yields being 53%, 54.5% and 55% of average respectively. Batteries just can't bridge that gap, and nor can 8 hours' worth of water in an old quarry. :2twocents
 
Last edited:
Smurf1976 said:
In short, the numbers have been crunched for the NEM (so all states except NT and WA) both on an "electricity only" basis, and separately on an assumption that everything that can realistically be electrified is electrified.

So all electric homes and businesses including heavy industry, a fully electric road vehicle fleet and so on.

Shipping and aviation weren't included, largely due to lack of any reasonable basis to estimate when or if they'd be relevant to include.

In short it's technically possible. A system of wind + solar + hydro and some batteries for peak power can be made to work so long as a modest degree of load control is applied. Eg off-peak controlled load hot water and charging of parked EV's for example, both of which ought not cause any real drama for consumers so long as they're done properly (indeed in most states there's a long history of using off-peak water heating in the past).

However.....

I won't deny for a moment that the environmental impact and economic cost of what's required to make that work are very substantial and I doubt the community's willing to accept those costs at least not until such time as there's an overwhelming "do something!" consensus on climate and energy.

In terms of those costs, well for the long duration storage we're talking about big dams yes. Suffice to say the sites are known, many have gone as far as core samples and a full detailed design being done, but nobody's seriously expecting we'll see any of them actually built at least not in the medium term.

The hydro isn't needed for the majority of days when wind and solar combined with short duration storage does the job. Its purpose is simply to fill the gap, on a seriously large scale, on the days when wind and solar falls short. It's for deep firming, it's not for routine use.

Same goes for nuclear. In the Australian context the community isn't currently prepared to pay the economic cost and is divided on the environmental aspect.

Hence short and medium duration storage backed up by gas and diesel it will be as the means of firming wind and solar. It'll need something drastic to happen for that to change and for society to want a fully renewable, or nuclear, alternative.

At present basically all planning assumes continued use of gas / diesel through at least 2070. Anything else, the various ideas of 100% renewable, are either an individual's desktop academic exercise, or it's the work of a company where management just wanted to understand what's possible and how it could be done without seriously expecting to ever build it.

Most are hoping for a silver bullet in truth. That is, it's all pinned on hydrogen or ammonia being a goer. There's a good chance that works out, but it's not ready for deployment yet so oil and gas it is for deep firming.

There's also a company looking very seriously at coal gasification using low grade coal that otherwise isn't being used for anything.

As an example of the problem, to put some figures on it, across the whole NEM (all NEM states combined):

1 July 2023 = VRE output was 75.8% of average
2 July = 62.4% of average
3 July = 46.1% of average
4 July = 38.2% of average
5 July = 89.1% of average

That's too large a shortfall to fill with batteries and it's too large for small, relatively unobtrusive hydro projects especially once we consider this is going to be peak demand season with the electrification of heating. It's either something that burns or it's large scale hydro storing billions of litres of water.

Another example is 29 April to 1 May inclusive (3 days). Yields being 53%, 54.5% and 55% of average respectively. Batteries just can't bridge that gap, and nor can 8 hours' worth of water in an old quarry. :2twocents
Click to expand...
What would be the prime identified sites for large hydro ? Apart from Snowy 2.0
 

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