Punx0r said:
If that 600MW interstate link is being used at full capacity for several days that's a different scenario to what I thought. TBH it's scarcely a peaker supply anymore. If the neighbouring state has power to export then might as well use it.
If you look at electrictymap you can see South Australia has been sucking on Victorian coal 24/7 lately and while it draws more during the daytime its still 24/7 and Victorian power providers seem to be charging them a very high amount as the general cost of electricity when using the Victorian interstate grid to SA goes into upper $200MW/h when they go over 500MW draw, so South Australia has a very keen interest in NOT heavily using the interstate grid but they need to. The SA-Victorian interstate grid electricity costs have only gone up since Victorian Hazelwood coal power-station shut down due to a surprise tripling of the coal royalty rate to feed the power-station from the Daniel Andrews state government, because the government thought it was an easy way to bring in some extra state cash and was so clueless about it all, they even publically dared Hazelwood to pass on the cost of generation, they never thought they would aburptly just shutdown,
the state government just didn't understand that Hazelwood was doing them a huge favour operating the way they did ( http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/victorias-own-mining-tax-to-triple-as-treasurer-gouges-brown-coal-for-revenue-20160422-gocymk.html )
South Australia's secret game until it lost Vic Hazelwood was to rely on Hazelwood for cheap electricity imports but now the tables have turned around.
I don't like to use South Australia as a model for how renewables look because its so small and the smaller the state/power usage the easier it is to make RE look good, I think Germany is a better overall example but it its an incredibly skewed due to its 10GW of still active nuclear that they fully use 24/7 etc.
South Australia does have an upside as a raw RE model/example except for the fact that such a large amount of overall electricity is imported via grid that is Victorian coal generation, so its another skew.
South Australia in a lot of technical aspects has gone harder in wind and solar for its power-needs than any other country in the world with little 'cheating' and it does have the most expensive electricity in the world as a result, and from that perspective thats why SA is so interesting because its moved to gas and coal-grid imports to force them to rely on wind and solar as much as possible. Again SA has the most expensive electricty in the world. Sure you can answer 'just build more wind' but from the installed capacity point of view they have built enough, thus the real problem is there is just no wind. No wind means no electricity and that means everyone chucking out their frozen/refrigerated food. Just like the blackout the other week in Victoria so many food establishments had to just throw out all their food which is a good example of the cost of pure renewables.
Just like if there was no water or food for a day some folks would pay 10 times the amount for it and the same thing happens with electricity and that makes renewables so complicated and this is what makes South Australia interesting as instead of models we get to see a mere fractional window the real world costs of wind as if it was pure (no thermal/Victorian grid) then there would be at times no power-at all.
South Australia on electrictymap.org live https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=country&countryCode=AUS-SA&remote=true
So SA could go closer to Germany model and for example build %500 capacity in wind and solar plus storage,
but you need to re-tune the LCOE model of renewables by increasing its price by x5, because in reality, you need x5 the amount of the "claimed capacity" it is currently listed for then its not cheap at all. How many times have we averaged out renewable energy projects and came to a conclusion of anywhere between an average of %15 to max %30 of its claimed capacity The claimed capacity of wind and solar is another Chewbacca defense mind game https://youtu.be/clKi92j6eLE .
So you really do need x5 whatever the official capacity the renewables of wind or solar claim and almost everytime the summer vs winter comparison is double, so you technically need a battery solution capable of holding around to 5 months worth of battery storage-power if you go truly pure renewables, how many times have we gone over this.
A probably closer LCOE model of wind and solar based renewables with storage is closer to x10 the price the official charts say at a minimum, South Australia and Victoria are not paying for $13,000 a MW/h just for fun its the result of raw need of power-on-demand.
And x5 the capacity in renewables is probably what you need and then you need the storage and that's when it gets ultra expensive and this is why South Australia is building more exotic projects like the Aurora Solar thermal salt storage plant as they quite literally looked at all the options aside from lithium-cobalt batteries and decided it was their best choice, no valleys full of water sitting around in SA to make hydro. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_Solar_Thermal_Power_Project
The USA data on salt based solar thermal storage power-plants is laughable and not cheap either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Dunes_Solar_Energy_Project
It's best month last year was 13,666MWh / 720_hours_in_septermber = 18.9MW average power
There are a lot of people really hurting in South Australia now, they sit in the heat rather than turn on their aircons, I know for most pro-renewables people the attitude towards these people is they should just suffer and die or something along those lines like the DRC children but its not right.
When I look at the LCOE model charts wind offshore is still the most expensive side of things
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File
rojected_LCOE_in_the_U.S._by_2020_(as_of_2015).png
If lithium batteries are going to be a long-term future then everyone is going to get EVs, and we are going to need electricity requirements that are mind boggling from what RE are managing to do now, and renewables just can't do it as they stand, the costs just continue to magnify.
*UPDATE*
Just as the day has gone on, its just gotten worse, just like I was saying in yesterdays post https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=89002&start=1475#p1356245 today was forecast to be a warm summer day and a proper work day out of the holidays so business are expected to provide aircon to people etc, so far this summer SA has been dodging a lot of bullets IMO.
The numbers now show $10,000MW/h and wind has continued to die down as it always has on hot days all summer, the wind just disappears on hot days and returns a few days later when its cooler so it becomes essentially useless.
Everytime I look at these sorry charts I think its largely because of the epic brain washing power of ABC news pounding people with garbage information about how great renewable energy is and how the climate is doomed and Getup!'s facebook renewable memes (getup! a leftist political group), a lot of dumb Australians just eat up that getup! baloney.
SOME RE ..!!
