The future for electricity production is pretty clear in my view.
lndustry has proved that solar/wind can provide grid scale power very reliably. Thanks to decades of weather data and monitoring that is down to the millisecond, we can predict and manage the grid supply very accurately. Super important when you are relying on the sun and the wind. The National grid in the Uk has been doing this for a few years now. To the millisecond.
Now, with the emergence of grid forming inverters and large energy storage, we have proved that we won't need ' spinning reserve in the future.
Further to that, we have proved that large battery response is far superior to baseload backup as the recent problem that caused Loy Yang to trip has shown.
Of course , with widely distributed generation and storage, large blackouts from power line failures will be a thing of the past.
As battery storage spreads across the community in businesses, homes and cars, we will see compounded electricity backup right throughout the grid . All those batteries and devices will be connected and available for use by the grid operator because it will make the consumer money. People won't be worried that the grid might access a small part of their house/EV/business/community battery during peaks or lulls because they will be getting paid to do it.
Let's say an average EV battery in the future is 70kwh. Making 30kwh available for grid services and leaving 40 kwh available for driving as a minimum .
We buy around 1 million cars per year in Australia.
33000 cars at 30kwh each is 1 gigawatt . 100,000 cars is 3 gigawatts and is one tenth of the annual car sales . 3 gigawatts is the equivalent of the entire Loy Yang power station complex in Victoria.
Evs were at 7.2% of all car sales in 2023 in Australia. China has just clicked over 50%.
So , each year even at those very low numbers, we will be adding at least one very large coal fired power station of energy storage per year .
Of course the real numbers will be much, much higher but you see the point .
That's not including the many thousands of commercial vehicles with really big batteries that will be available . School buses during the day. Thousands of fleet vehicles that are parked overnight or on weekends . Large industrial warehouses that will have very large solar arrays and batteries so that they can offset the costs of the building .
Community power systems will be absorbing excess like mad during the day because they will be getting paid to do so .
For the first time in history power production has been democratized . Large power providers will have to work with consumers for a couple of reasons.
1. They will be using the consumers capital as a generation/storage source.
2. lf the pee off the consumers they risk the consumer going off grid or forming local networks . Consumers have never been able to do this before.
Because of this electricity, will become very cheap. As Rethink X and others have modeled , a surplus of flexible electricity will drive prices down and create new economic opportunities that will make it even cheaper. lt won't be free but it will be very very cheap.
And, because the cost isn't chained to supply/market manipulation issues like coal oil and gas, it will remain cheap.
The future for electricity is looking very bright .
