So much for &quot; Cheap Green &quot; SA Power

Originally posted by mjp2 ↑

I suspect you are right that additional renewables right now in SA will not reduce emissions. Or at least not much. But only because of limited interconnection. What do you do, build more coal and gas, or new interconnection and wind and solar, plus access more east coast existing fossil fueled plant? The new gas plant going into SA appears justified, but I wonder if a new inter-connector would have been a better long term solution.
Greater interconnection provides more support to the SA grid when it needs it, and greater interconnection reduces coal and gas use up the east coast by allowing more SA renewables export. And promotes a more diverse renewables grid. But the economic analysis on that needs to be done, without being politicised.

I can't quantitatively verify or criticise your model but, if I understand your approach correctly, you've indicated that you've not made any allowance for a more diverse renewables make-up reducing the worst case lows in renewable availability. That's diversified geographically, with better interconnection, and diversified in the mix of renewables sources. And hence reducing the need for storage. I suspect you could be out by something like a factor of two on that. Possibly more. I also suggest that you appear to not be allowing for those Tesla's being able to provide those GWhrs every night, if re-charged with solar during the day.

I suspect we are all capable of doing these sums. But that analysis is a decent project in itself and needs a lot of access to data and time. It's the sort of work that needs to be done. ANU and other efforts seem to be just early and relatively simplistic views on that. It staggers me that with so much plant near retirement and so much new investment decision making required, that the ANU study is as good as Australia has produced so far?

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I think all points you make are valid wrt to my opinion and welcome the critique. I am no expert other than I watch the data, read as much as I can and try to understand the many articles often posted on the subject. We actually have enormous data at our fingertips so like you I can't believe there is not more modelling available.

Re the Solar charging I don't think it would make much difference unless I changed the installed capacity of the solar as given by ANU study. Generally speaking winter conditions are not so good so I think if we charged batteries or pumped hydro with what is generated then we would have to restrict supply somewhere else because the supply is limited by the weather conditions.

All LCOE numbers I've seen use a yearly average capacity factor which is nonsense because they fluctuate daily as does demand. Also the solar factor in SA is lower than Qld so the LCOE is different as is the amount of electricity generated.

Re modelling the thing I posted was quick and nasty done on the overall generation, I also did it on a state by state basis then summed and compared and the result was slightly less but similar. The last approach which is main one I've been playing with is by individual power generators by hour since 21 June. The data is publicly available in the AEMO site. The hourly one is higher but similar -to overcome the lacking data for wind in Qld I used the factors for Tasmania which were the best. For Utility solar I used the NSW farms because they are established. Qld has the Kidston solar now and that has good numbers but still fairly new. The rooftop numbers come from the NEM watch site which has a download feature. I've put the links to the data below, worth a look if you like to play around with excel.

When conditions improve (which they will) the numbers will change and we will go the opposite direction, this is more interesting to me because then we can judge how much curtailment is coming. If generators are compensated for curtailment this will flow into costs so the NEG will need to address this also otherwise the risk to any new project increases.

Links to the data used AEMO data , opennem