COALition on coal

Originally posted by mudguts: ↑

How many snowy 2 or how many tesla batteries do you need to ensure 24/7.

Getting through one night just doesn't cut it. You need to build in redundancy.

Using a reasonable 80% efficiency for the scheme, (basic physics tells us here are no “free lunches”, 440,000 MWh of energy is needed to pump enough water to achieve the 350,000 MWh output from one 7 day period. This power will come from “the grid”. The hope is that it will be from “large scale renewables”.

Currently Australia’s installed capacity of wind power – the only large scale renewable resource – is 4,400 MW. On average, they operate at 30 to 35% of installed capacity so averaged over a year the actual capacity is 1,540 MW, (4,400X0.35).

To pump the water needed for the 350,000 MWh output needs the total Australian capacity of wind power for 12 days. That is 12 days without them putting any energy into the grid for ordinary consumers. At midday on 28 August 2017, (when I wrote the initial article), the combined wind power resources of Australia were producing at 150 MW. At that output the pumping time to “fill” the system is 122 days.

The scheme can then deliver 350,000 MWh over 7 days, (50,000 MWh per day). At midday on 28 August 2017 the total grid load was 24,000 MW so in 2 hours the grid consumed 48,000 MWh or 96% of a “Snowy 2.0” day.

Your going to need another 100 snow 2 & thousands of Telsa's if you want 24/7 100% renewable.

That Tesla battery will barely proved 2 minutes of base load power for SA, then it needs to be charges. Renewables can't then charge the battey & provide the base load power demand. Just as the pumped hydro sucks power from the grid to "recharge"

Don't forget all these renewables need to be renewed (is this why they are called renewables ) every 10 to 20 years, so you are on a giant treadmill of care & maintenance.

Then this happens. Imagine cyclone Debbie causing grief.

Who cleans this up & will guarantee being back on line in 24 to 48 hours?

View attachment 1700857

Expand

lols

don't be silly enough to compare just existing wind capacity with the entire current energy demand from the Aus grid.

and don't ignore the point that I was arguing, you can add as much wind and solar as possible over the next ten years and firm with coal and gas

there are better people than you or I who have modeled this in detail. It works. What's needed to make it work economically is cheap storage. Projections of tech/price improvements suggest that will be here soon enough, and if that doesn't happen then we'll be looking at other carbon free solutions.

Cyclone damage is a valid issue. Hence widely diversified renewables. levels of redundancy and strong interconnection is important. But if you haven't seen coal fired stations disconnect on forced outages and be unavailable for service for months then you haven't worked in the industry. And there is a very high level of redundancy also required on fossil fuel powered grids.