Pumped Hydro Energy Storage across Australia, page-138

Using today's 12:00pm actual numbers and adjusting for the suggested 100% capacity this gives a guide to how the numbers would fall in reality.



The problem imo with using yearly average capacity factors for modelling is that they don't reflect reality. In our example we either need to increase installed capacity or significantly increase the storage requirement. Changing either of these numbers means the cost estimates are not reflective of reality. At the moment possibly increasing the Utility Solar would help balance the numbers however that will not help tonight if the wind doesn't pick up. It also increases the overall network cost and when the wind picks up we will need to curtail production due to excess supply. This curtailment increases costs/MWh because the fixed costs are recovered over a smaller production number.

Obviously we have surplus thermal generation atm so this is theoretically but as these generators close this problem needs to be addressed and adding more wind will not fix this issue as there is little wind across the NEM regions at the moment and the storage suggested is insufficient.