this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Solar. We know it's solar. Make solar and batteries viable. Jesus there is no mystery here.
Lithium batteries are not viable. The massive battery in South Australia, the largest one in the world, can run the grid for about 2 minutes.
Two minutes are are extremely useful - because in the real world you're never going to need to run the entire grid off the battery, it's just used when the solar/wind/hydro/etc aren't quite providing enough power for a brief moment.
The second issue they have is they wear out. You can't fully drain a battery every night and expect them to last. Batteries will always be a last resort.
What we're heading towards is a diverse grid with a bunch of different energy sources. ABC is right, we need a "glue" power source to fill in the gaps. And we need one that lasts longer than a couple minutes.
It's actually the synchronous condenser's (of which SA already has 4) and grid-forming setting on the solar and windfarm inverters (which is literally just a configuration option).
I'm dissapointed that Chris Davies from AEMO is being portrayed as pro coal because it provides the necessary spinning mass, as if he's unaware that things like synchronous condensors exist.
I think if you had to pick one it would be hydro. We already have about 8GW of hydro dams in Australia and we are building more.
To put that in perspective, right this minute the national grid has 18GW of power coming from coal. In practice we usually only draw from the lakes when they're full (about 4GW of hydro is currently going into the grid)... we really need to start pumping water uphill when the sun is shining instead of relying on rain.
But we don't have to pick one. We can have a mix of hydro and off shore wind (off sure wind turbines tend to produce power at a more favourable time of day) and batteries and synchronous condensers and thermal mass and gravity storage (that last one holds a lot of promise - very simple idea, I don't understand why we're only just taking it seriously recently - https://www.wired.com/story/energy-vault-gravity-storage/)