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The future of energy generation and storage

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Nice summary..
 


About sums it up
 
Nailed it.
Why can't the media ask those questions?
 
Aiming to be non-political in this comment:

It's one of those things where any combination that adds up will do it. In that sense it's much like, for a more familiar example, transport. It doesn't matter whether it's trains, trams, buses, ferries, private cars or people walking. What matters is that as a whole they get the job done and do so in a manner deemed appropriate (eg those walking are doing so willingly, not because of no alternative).

Here are some charts showing the output of variable renewable energy (wind and solar, not including hydro or biomass). This is just a selection to illustrate the issues, there's no need to look at each and every state here:

NEM, daily for past 12 months. Each bar is the day's total output.



Victoria, same period as above:



NSW, past 7 days. Data resolution is 5 minutes:



SA, past 7 days. Data resolution is 5 minutes:



So there's no denying VRE works, the problem is the intermittent nature of it versus society's need for reasonably consistent electricity supply.

To fill a gap of a few hours, batteries can do that easily and reasonably economically.

But take a close look at Victoria in the middle of winter. No chance we're fixing that with batteries and even at the NEM level overall, there are certainly periods of multiple consecutive days of poor yields.

The practical options to fix that are either hydro or something based on fuel combustion.

For the latter, fuel combustion, gas turbines tend to be the first choice with internal combustion the other option. One particular problem with gas is simply the cost. At close to $20/GJ for bulk LNG, and that is the current market price, that's a seriously expensive way to generate electricity given we're going to be importing the stuff. That alone is an argument against gas, there's no need to mention CO2.

But if we don't want to be burning gas, oil etc well that leaves hydro. Reasons we might want to not burn oil or gas aren't simply about the environment - there's also the finite nature of high grade resources, geopolitical risk, financial risk given price volatility, etc.

Part of the problem with hydro in Australia is we've this widespread misconception of the country having no water, and our political class has very little real knowledge there. In truth we do have viable options for hydro, it's just that our politics isn't at all favourable to their development. Those options being located in the east basically - Qld, NSW, Vic, Tas. Options elsewhere aren't zero but they're far more limited.

Noting for all this that it's not an all or nothing proposition. Nothing precludes using some gas, some hydro and some fuel oil to firm VRE and nothing precludes having some coal or some nuclear and downscaling the VRE + firming accordingly. It's not the black versus white, all or nothing thing the media and politics seem to think it is.

It's much like public transport. Just because a city has buses doesn't mean it can't also have one or more train lines and if it's by the water it can also have ferries. It's not all or nothing, a mix is entirely workable but the key with either electricity or transport is tying them all together as a working system. Constant power from a mix of generation sources. Or being able to get from one end of the city to the other by catching a bus to the train station, then boarding a train. It needs to tie together as one functional system.

That operation as a single system is at odds with modern ideology that demands manufactured competition between participants however and that's a big part of the problem. Overcome that bit, shift the competition to the construction, maintenance and ownership but not to the decisions regarding dispatch, and a lot of problems go away.
 
Well I think one of the big problems is that the Left media will give either side hell if their is any backdown on the net zero targets so the pollies can't see the pragmatic approach and push on blindly with their flawed ideolgy.
 
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SirRumpole said:
Well I think one of the big problems is that the Left media will give either side hell if their is any backdown on the net zero targets so the pollies can't see the pragmatic approach and push on blindly with their flawed ideolgy.
Click to expand...
Nailed it again.
The electrical grid isn't about ideology, it is about maintaining and growing our economy and with it our lifestyle and our kids futures.
It's a shame politics get involved.

Both sides are talking net zero, it is just both sides are trash talking each other, rather than being sensible about the issue, a simple case of politicians putting their future ahead of Australia's future.
 
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Something that @Smurf1976 keeps alluding to and they probably haven't even considered if we needed fuel oil to supply base load generation in the synopsis.

Home fuel security falls short as 'war-game' report reveals weaknesses

A report on an emergency exercise released under Freedom of Information reveals how Australia's dependency on imported fuel could leave it vulnerable to geopolitical tensions.
www.abc.net.au
 
sptrawler said:
Something that @Smurf1976 keeps alluding to and they probably haven't even considered if we needed fuel oil to supply base load generation in the synopsis.
Click to expand...
Another issue is that we use, and for the foreseeable future will continue to use, huge amounts of fuels for other purposes too.

Nationally 66% of natural gas and 97.9% of oil doesn't go into power stations but is instead used for something else. That's government statistics for 2022-23.

Where that leads is that we're going to need rather a lot of oil and gas for other uses for a long time to come. That then raises the question about geopolitical and other risks to the supply chain as well as financial risks.

Regarding the financial aspect, here's a chart of LNG prices. Source = ACCC


So a lot of volatility there, it's a very real financial risk and of course oil is also a risk as is well known. There's no option to avoid substantial imports at this point, the opportunity to do that was lost long ago, but it's still a case that the greater the level of imports, the greater the financial vulnerability across the economy.

Then there's the physical risk if supply is disrupted. Plenty of countries have learned that one the hard way in the past - among other examples it's why France went so heavily into nuclear and it's why Japan was so keen to buy thermal coal from Australia. The extremely high energy density of nuclear means fuel can be readily stockpiled, whilst in Japan's case they reasoned that Australia would likely be a more reliable fuel supplier than oil from the Middle East, plus coal's easily stored just by piling it up on the ground. Both having been hit hard by the events of the 1970's.

There's definite downsides to relying on fuel imports without even mentioning the environment.
 
But it's all about gwH isn't it?
 


Obviously the savjng coal, but think about it:
Technology we should be able to master even in Australia, no need for water or elevation differential, no need for much material but steel we should still be able to make
We could even harvest the cooling effect during decompression to AC buildings.
Compare this to lithium batteries both for env cost, asset costs, and even co2 impact as this is the current lunacy.
Giving me ideas for a home based solution:
Compressor, gas bottle..i have to do the numbers.
I expect cheap asset, low efficiency but if i can offset some AC energy cost as well
 
What wuld the cost to run the compressor if using grid electricity.
If on roof top solar then would the daylight hours be enough to run at night???
 
qldfrog said:
Technology we should be able to master even in Australia, no need for water or elevation differential, no need for much material but steel we should still be able to make
Click to expand...
We do have a 200MW / 1600MWh project at Broken Hill using a worked out mine as the storage vessel.

The mine's just a convenient place to store the air, any remnant minerals playing no role in that. So long as it's airtight, and tests apparently show it is, then it does the job. Noting that with a mine they're looking at a large volume of air under low pressure, not like using steel tanks with a much smaller sized container at higher pressure,

One issue is thermal management since compressing the air releases heat whilst going in the opposite direction absorbs it. Using an underground mine as the storage gets around some issues there, since the ground itself provides an effective heat sink.

Efficiency depends on detail of pressures and so on but 50 - 70%. Toward the upper end for low pressure using a mine, toward the lower end for steel tanks above ground.

I'm not an expert on the detailed engineering of it but I'm told they're borrowing heavily from the gas industry in terms of dealing with gases under pressure and so on. That it's for a different purpose doesn't really matter - high pressure gas or high pressure air, there's some relevant technology already developed for handling that at scale so no need to reinvent it.

The idea of using depleted gas fields as the storage has been thought of yes. For now a hard rock mine of well understood scale and dimensions is an easy start but other underground structures able to contain pressure could be used in future.
 
farmerge said:
What wuld the cost to run the compressor if using grid electricity.
If on roof top solar then would the daylight hours be enough to run at night???
Click to expand...
Basic concept is compress the air when there's spare electricity from other sources then run it back the other way when required.

Eg compress during daytime using solar, then release it to generate electricity during the evening.

For that to work just requires that everything's adequately sized. Eg the solar needs to not only be able to generate enough to run the compressors during the daytime, it also needs to be supplying electricity to consumers. Plus the storage capacity needs to be adequate and so on. Get the maths right though and in theory it's workable.

The challenge as with most of this will be economics.
 
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