Renewable overbuild and storage requirements for various countries

[GregLocock]

Bit of a tricky set of charts to understand. Basically they look at various amounts of overbuild, and then 0 3 or 12h of storage. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8536784/pdf/41467_2021_Article_26355.pdf

For example, if you have 3h of storage for Australia, and build 100% of nominal demand in renewables, for 1 hour a year 70% of the power will not be there, and for all but 2500 hours the grid will be fully powered up. This is rather interesting. Increasing the storage doesn't help much. If we beef up the overbuild to 150% then the 1h outage figure is 50% (ish) and for all but 150 hours the grid will be fully powered. If you then fit 4 times as many battery, ie 12h, the numbers fall to 10% and 15 hours. If you double up on generation again, ie 300% nominal, you get the same performance with no storage at all. So you can see that if 12h of storage costs less than 150% of generation you should do that (possibly). Bear in mind these aren't plate capacity, a 4 MW wind turbine generates about 1.3 MW of power on average, a 1 MW solar panel is about 0.17 MW on average. For Australia in a different chart they think that for 150%/3h storage you should be about 70% wind, 30% solar, and we want 24 GW, so that's a fleet of 24*.7*1.5*3 =75 GW of turbines, 24*.3*1.5*6 GW of solar panels, 65 GW, and of course 3*24=72 GWh of batteries. That's about half a trillion dollars . If you just use gas it would be more like 50 Billion dollars plus the cost of the gas

I think this is a good start at looking at the tradeoffs.

 

[TugboatEng]

Careful, your going to make dik melt faster than the polar ice caps.

I had some interesting conversation about hybrid diesel technology recently. The trick most believe is smaller engines are more efficient which isn't true. 20 years in and millions of dollars in failed projects later, at least one large engine manufacturer has figured this out. They were surprisingly prepared for my questions but not ready to make the answers public.

 

[GregLocock]

Australia's plan (such as it is) is that nat gas will still run 5% of the time. 400 hours per year. That's compatible with 150% gen and maybe an hour or so of storage. I must add these curves are hopelessly optimistic, you can't stick wind and solar where they are best sited. I am baffled by the difference between South Korea and Japan which are at the same latitude and close together.

 

[GregLocock]

If you say it quickly $500B doesn't sound like the end of the world. But the finance people will want 5% ROC, and the whole lot will need replacing every 20 years, so that's $50B per year. split among say 10M households that means $5000 per year onto your electricity bill, $14 per day.