Wind Power Erratic and Expensively Subsidized

Originally posted by walbrook: ↑

OK, lets have a level playing field without subsidies and no political preferences and see what technology provides energy the cheapest an most reliably, if they can do it with renewables great.
I don't believe batteries would be much use for providing supply apart from balancing the grid by taking up the slack instantly for a short period as they switch supply sources. Larger sources of power will be needed as for example SA had 26 consecutive days without wind in one period last autumn, the whole of Australia had 4 consecutive days without wind. You can't tell me that if you have enough wind turbines to run Australia then you double up with enough solar and storage for when the wind doesn't blow that all the backup and duplication needed to guarantee supply won't cost more than some fossil fuel plants.
I read about a solar thermal plant in California where they found that the sun didn't get the water hot enough until 11am for the plant to produce and it stopped around 3pm, only running for around 4 hours/day. They then used gas to boost the water in the morning to get it running earlier, but heating water with gas is very inefficient, the amount of gas used if put through a gas turbine would produce more electricity than the production of the whole solar plant.

Expand

If yesterday is used as a guide to required storage then over 24hrs the total wind generated was 19,700 MWh's. Installed capacity was 5,566 MW and this is distributed between SA, TAS, NSW and a small amount in QLD. If we use the capacity factor used in LCOE calcs, which is often 40%, then the wind should have produced 53,431 MWh's. The difference of 33,731 MWh's would be made up by the batteries.

The IFN battery is 52MWh's and costs $30m so we would need 649 batteries. If battery loss is 20% the battery would also have consumed 6,700 MWh's in the charge/discharge process which would need to be added to the cost.

I doubt this solution would be viable in total so there would be a requirement for some storage and backup which is the coal/gas generators until they give up. Imo the LCOE calculation is a yearly average factor and is flawed when considering the hourly demand requirements in the NEM. Once more wind is added and the production is over the 40% if demand doesn't increase the surplus will be curtailed and that imo is why they are putting in batteries. If the wind is added in areas that already have high wind penetration then the network will not cope. Eventually someone will do a proper analysis including the capacity restraints. ATM there is enough coal capacity to make things work but eventually this will not be case.