Slashdot Mirror

There are multiple solar farms in Australia that are currently not connected to the grid because they haven't been able to get their output stability to the point that the network operator will allow them to connect. The FCAS component of the farms always increased the cost and reduced the output significantly but was key to keeping the network stable.

This has been a relatively new change though, a couple of years ago solar compliance was taking a week to 10 days before allowing connection. Now it's out to 6 months or more. This unfortunately caused RCRTomlinson a large civil contractor to collapse as they had final payments on projects tied to the grid connection of projects.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/rc...

You are not only misinformed but a lier
I pointed now out dozens of times, particularly to you in persons: " we are shutting down Nuclear power plants and what is Germany replacing them with? COAL. this is wrong. As you perfectly know that it is wrong. you are a lier.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/ge...

On the graphs you can clearly see that coal power is continuously declining and that both nuclear power and coal power is replaced by renewables. Asshole!

Strange that other reports simply contradict it: https://reneweconomy.com.au/ge...
However https://energy-charts.de/energ... confirms that Germany is still at 39% Coal in energy production.

while emissions in Germany, the blocâ(TM)s largest economy and still dependent on coal for 40 percent of its electricity, was little changed.
Actually it changed, the CO2 increase is due to the hard winter and house heating, transportation, not due to electricity, because even in 2017 coal got educed by another percent point.

Your link does not have June 2018 data. It only goes up to March 2018.

Anyway the data shows the closure of coal has driven the cost up. (30 June 2016)

Also a year later the marker operator decided that Gas would have priority over Wind no matter what price they bid at.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/ne...

Cheaper then the $14.20 / Kwh the fossil fuel people charge. (Although that is due to a different issue)

https://reneweconomy.com.au/te...

That was the response of a senior Tesla Energy executive this week after the extraordinary scenes in South Australia’s electricity market on Monday, when the fossil fuel generators had a party and prices swung from $14,200/MWh

Also where is you 41cents/kWH cost.

http://www.aemo.com.au/ (who run the power grid) has the generators only getting 12c/kwh at peak or SA.

Last coal-fired power generator in South Australia switched off
By Giles Parkinson on 9 May 2016
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

The 520MW Northern brown coal power generator, the last coal-fired power station in South Australia, was switched off for the last time on Monday morning, setting the state on a new path to a decarbonised grid.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/la...

This is as simple as night following day. You kill your baseload generation, you have a grid that is much more difficult and expensive to manage.

For Australia especially South Australia it is actual gas ,diesel and network costs that makes power so expensive.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/la...

The facility in Port Augusta was switched off by its owner, Alinta Energy, ending more than 31 years of generation. Its smaller and older adjoining facility at Playford was switched off last year, due to falling wholesale power prices caused by the influx of renewable energy such as wind and solar

The problem is SA has no gas of it's own and has to import it.

Also a problem is 30 minute settlement.
Lots of generators bid high in the first five minutes and then negative in the last 25 minutes.

Actually, in the Australian State of South Australia, Wind power is curtailed rather often:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/wi...

It will get worse as more renewable energy is deployed locally and in neighbouring states. It's big factor in the business case for grid-scale storage. Pumped-Hydro is the next big thing in Australia.

If we're discussing costs here, the thing is even the very rare nuclear accidents are incredibly expensive. Estimates of the cost of cleaning up Fukushima run between US$180 - US$600 billion.

Estimating US$400 billion, and wikipedia's claim that about 2 PWh of nuclear energy is produced per year, we get a cost of $200/ MWh year, so substitute in how often you think it's reasonable to assume these things happen somewhere in the world (once every 30 years? Gives $6/MWh), and compare to the latest contracts being signed for dispatchable solar (solar with storage) costing less than $50/MWh. It's a significant proportion of the overall cost, not overwhelming, but should not be discounted. And solar costs are coming down fast.

Cleanup costs:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/04/01/national/real-cost-fukushima-disaster-will-reach-¥70-trillion-triple-governments-estimate-think-tank/

Contracts being signed around US$50/MWh:
US$55/MWh in South Australia, including storage
US$30/MWh in Arizona, not including storage

Responding to a frequency drop doesn't really work, you must remain exactly in phase with the received frequency or it looks like a short-circuit to the distribution system. If the incoming frequency changes, the best thing you can do is probably disconnect.

That isn't even remotely true. Responding to frequency drops is precisely what peaking plants do. You only disconnect if you're out of the suitable frequency range. Frequency is exactly how the grid power flows around. A frequency drop is the result of an overloaded grid, i.e. some coal turbine somewhere is desperately unable to keep pushing the required power and hoping someone else kicks on to help. On underfrequency the best thing you can do is kick in and start pushing power onto the grid. That is likely to push the frequency back to where it's supposed to be. If you disconnect during an underfrequency event you'll make that even worse and trigger a cascading blackout.

There is an entire market for stabilising the grid in Australia called the "Frequency Control and Ancillary Services" market (FCAS). Actually it's 8 markets. 30MW of of this Tesla battery is dedicated to 2 of those market (6 second responses to frequency deviation).

We covered previously how well the battery responded to the Loy Yang trip. As soon as the frequency deviated by 0.2Hz the Tesla battery crammed 8MW into the grid to stabilise it while the slower frequency controllers (gas peaking plants) responded. http://reneweconomy.com.au/tes...
Note from the graph the frequency stopped dropping instantly, slowly started raising (the 6 second market responding), and massively correcting 6 minutes later (the 6 minute market responding).

The AEMO is discussing whether to create it's own regulatory market for batteries which can respond far faster than 6 seconds.

The battery is owned and operated by a French company called Neoen, which provide electricity and services to South Australian electricity grid.

70MW of the power and 39 MWh of the energy capacity is contractually allocated for grid stabilization: responding to transients. This is about 2/3 and 1/3, meaning that it must keep itself 1/3 charged and not be operating at more than 1/3 load unless "something is wrong".

Details at http://reneweconomy.com.au/wha...

The remaining 30 MW of the power and 70 MWh of the energy capacity are available for arbitrage: Neoen may buy and sell energy to make money. This also has a grid stabilization effect, smoothing out supply/demand imbalances, but operating slightly slower.

Remember the battery is located at a wind farm. It's not uncommon for power to be free: the wind is high and the grid load is low, and the windmills are in danger of spinning too fast.

South Australia's grid is not great, meaning that like any thinly traded commodity, electricity is prone to severe price spikes in the event of a shortage. The battery's rapid response means that it can beat any other source to market when prices spike and take advantage of "surge pricing".

I don't know the full details of the algorithms, but it's basically "buy low and sell high". The challenge is to predict pricing: is it worth buying energy now to sell later, or should I wait for lower prices? The risk of the latter is that if prices go up instead, I won't have energy to sell.

And I'm sure their algorithms take wear and tear on the batteries into account too, and how much that adds to the eventual replacement costs.

Batteries can be use for grid stability.Batteries can switch on very fast.

A few weeks ago coal generators tripped, which would normally cause problems for the grid due to power spikes, a frequency drops (or something), anyway, this Telsa battery was able to active while the spike was in progress, its that fast.
Link about the cause of the spike
http://reneweconomy.com.au/coa...

I suspect the original story in the article is this one;
http://reneweconomy.com.au/tes...

Another story on Batteries setting prices
http://reneweconomy.com.au/tes...

They have a nice page to show Aus electricity generation sources as well, its a good site. (this one might have problems with noscript+ad-blockers)
http://reneweconomy.com.au/nem...

Batteries can be use for grid stability.Batteries can switch on very fast.

A few weeks ago coal generators tripped, which would normally cause problems for the grid due to power spikes, a frequency drops (or something), anyway, this Telsa battery was able to active while the spike was in progress, its that fast.
Link about the cause of the spike
http://reneweconomy.com.au/coa...

I suspect the original story in the article is this one;
http://reneweconomy.com.au/tes...

Another story on Batteries setting prices
http://reneweconomy.com.au/tes...

They have a nice page to show Aus electricity generation sources as well, its a good site. (this one might have problems with noscript+ad-blockers)
http://reneweconomy.com.au/nem...

Batteries can be use for grid stability.Batteries can switch on very fast.

A few weeks ago coal generators tripped, which would normally cause problems for the grid due to power spikes, a frequency drops (or something), anyway, this Telsa battery was able to active while the spike was in progress, its that fast.
Link about the cause of the spike
http://reneweconomy.com.au/coa...

I suspect the original story in the article is this one;
http://reneweconomy.com.au/tes...

Another story on Batteries setting prices
http://reneweconomy.com.au/tes...

They have a nice page to show Aus electricity generation sources as well, its a good site. (this one might have problems with noscript+ad-blockers)
http://reneweconomy.com.au/nem...

Batteries can be use for grid stability.Batteries can switch on very fast.

A few weeks ago coal generators tripped, which would normally cause problems for the grid due to power spikes, a frequency drops (or something), anyway, this Telsa battery was able to active while the spike was in progress, its that fast.
Link about the cause of the spike
http://reneweconomy.com.au/coa...

I suspect the original story in the article is this one;
http://reneweconomy.com.au/tes...

Another story on Batteries setting prices
http://reneweconomy.com.au/tes...

They have a nice page to show Aus electricity generation sources as well, its a good site. (this one might have problems with noscript+ad-blockers)
http://reneweconomy.com.au/nem...

To make solar and wind capable of base load, massive battery systems will need to be constructed

That's feasible today. The Tesla battery system recently installed in Australia is already demonstrating how this can work.

Since the battery only needed to supply 7MW to correct the frequency, the grid was only short 7MW.

The battery never brought the grid to the nominal 50Hz.

It didn't respond too rapidly. The frequency was below the absolute minimum of 49.85Hz for normal operation.

Just putting out a wild idea: they configured the battery to kick in at 49.80Hz on purpose.

Yes, If you look at the graph in TFA, it looks like it turned on 100% at 49.80Hz and decreased power linearly until the frequency reached 49.85Hz.

It was designed to deal with situations with downed lines / plants in South Australia, to keep the lights on there. It wasn't supposed to take over the work from standby plants halfway across the country. That it technically can should surprise nobody. But that's not what it was purchased to do.

Err no. From the onset it had 3 primary goals and even has a strategic reserve in it's capacity (30MWH of it's capacity to be precise) dedicated to frequency management. Heck it's first job was peaking a day before it was even put in service. The only thing that stunned people is just how quickly it responded. There's a good summary of what it was designed and purchased to do here: http://reneweconomy.com.au/wha...

As for your comment on powerlines, you misunderstand the original problem and the original tweet. South Australia didn't lose power because a major downed powerline. They lose power because the major downed powerline caused a sudden upset across the grid resulting in complete desynchronisation between major wind providers as well as interconnectors to Victoria. The power demand last year could have been met with the available supply even with the downed HV line to The battery simply isn't capable of keeping the lights on by itself nor was that the reason it was bought. It provides much needed stability on a grid that has rushed in full steam to adopt non-baseload power.

http://reneweconomy.com.au/muc...

The Paris climate accord took decades to achieve, and is valuable as the basis for further international cooperation to encourage industrial development without excessive pollution. In particular notice the cancellation of 104+ coal plants by China and India. 2C maximum as target, once achieve can be renewed with 1.5C, 1C, etc. as technology develops to achieve those goals.

Can we really credit the Paris accord with any of those accomplishments? The shift away from coal seems to be due to an increase in the levelized energy cost of electricity from coal. I suspect those economic forces have more to do with it than the Paris accord. This reminds me of the DOE's sunshot program which promised to lower the cost of solar energy and later took credit when massive investment into manufacturing technology and R&D from the industry drove down the module cost. I'm just saying, it's not safe to assume that correlation between a government program's goals and outcomes imply causation.

The Paris climate accord took decades to achieve, and is valuable as the basis for further international cooperation to encourage industrial development without excessive pollution. In particular notice the cancellation of 104+ coal plants by China and India. 2C maximum as target, once achieve can be renewed with 1.5C, 1C, etc. as technology develops to achieve those goals.

Here: http://reneweconomy.com.au/muc...

"Graham says that the CSIRO modelling showed that at very high levels of wind and solar, a maximum of half a day’s average demand was needed for storage."

Looks like my order of magnitude approach was actually pretty close.

If you disagree, please offer something more than accusations of partisanship. I want facts. You keep saying you're an expert, well, present your numbers.

Because one is subsidized and the other was successfully taxed and regulated out of existence.

Which one is which?

Because fossil fuels have been subsidized by at least half a trillion dollars.

If you want to see the oppositions disproval, then you Need to fund their research equally, just like the researchers received the massive funding for their work who actually started off with assumption that greenhouse-gas-caused climate change exists and is caused by humans.

That sounds fair until you rephrase it as giving equal funding to those who accept over 100 years of accumulated scientific research and those who think that it is all wrong. You would have to make a pretty compelling case of why you think that way if you wanted to be taken seriously when making a proposal for a new study.

The problem is that science doesn't work like an internet troll. Just because you make an assumption doesn't mean that you have to stick with it in the conclusions of your paper. In fact, you would be far more likely to get your paper cited by others (a metric used by some to determine the worth of a published work) if you can prove your own assumptions to be wrong. For example, you might make a study that poses: "Assuming X, then in theory Y must be true - so let's see if that is the case". If you find that Y is not true, then you can conclude that there is the need for more studies to find whether the theory of Y is false or the assumption of X is false. And more studies means more grants, so the financial imperative is not to follow the company line but actually to be controversial.

That is why this notion of equal funding is unnecessary. It also makes no difference, as the Koch brothers found when they funded (in part) a study that ended up agreeing with the scientific consensus. And boy, did the deniers suddenly turn against Richard Muller, who they thought was their "tame scientist"!

Nope, even India is backing away from Coal. Trump is just incompetent.

No one...

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...
http://www.scmp.com/business/c...
http://news.vattenfall.com/en/...

As expected, the article is pure FUD spread by fossil fuel lobbyists, here's the reality included technical details and analysis: http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

Quote:
On Sunday, November 21, one of the two lines that links South Australian to Victoria was out for maintenance, when at 21:56 the second line “tripped” because of a faulty signal. It was blamed on “non-compatible protection relay configuration” that had been recently installed as part of an upgrade. It was probably human error.

This “trip” caused the the South Australian grid to be “islanded.” This should be a routine situation. 160MW of capacity was shed to deal with frequency issues, and under normal circumstances the power should have been re-established quickly, in less than 10 minutes.

However, the local network could not solve its frequency problems as it expected, but not because of too much or too little wind energy.

First, frequency levels were affected by a rise in output from “non scheduled” generators that lifted frequency levels – most likely co-generators and diesel gensets. Then, the situation was made much worse when the large Torrens Island gas generator ignored requests from the market operator to cut down its output. Instead, it kept raising it, by 65MW all told.

This pushed the frequency level above 50.58 Hertz, outside the normal frequency band, which meant that the South Australia grid was insecure and could not be synchronised with the main grid.

The result, says AEMO, was that instead of power from the inter-connector being restored within 9 minutes, it took an extra 26 minutes for the frequency control problems to be resolved and the link restored.

Has it occurred to you that the main reason existing fossil energy is cheap is mostly just because of scale and infrastructure?

After all, solar, wind, geothermal, tidal etc all have zero fuel costs - no mining, no fuel storage and transport, just maintenance (and even that's usually a lot less). The great majority of the cost is construction - and that always gets cheaper with scale (just look at solar's price curve for the last few years). There's also still plenty of room for technological efficiency improvement. These factors also apply to storage, where required. So there's certainly no reason to assume that renewable energy is inherently more expensive than fossil fuel; generally the opposite.

Nuclear claims a niche for baseload, not backup, but even that is a myth. http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

Sadly not :(

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

A plant which goes online now has been planned at least a decade ago. And a lot of coal projects actually have been cancelled. So that some plants go online now does not imply that the use of coal is expanding. The new coal plants which will go online now will reduce the amount of CO2 from coal because they are more efficient. So you can put a completely different spin to this: http://reneweconomy.com.au/201... But to get an unbiased view I would recommend to look at actual numbers about electricity generation in Germany: http://www.ag-energiebilanzen.... (if you want to argue that coal should have been replaced instead of nuclear - I would agree)

Doesn't matter how we slice or dice it, storage is where the excitement should be.

And Germany, like before with solar (and wind), is putting their money behind it to develop more and better systems for it.

See the kinds of prediction by the Deutsche Bank are making for 2017 for solar even:

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

I think they are right as long as Swanson's law for Solar and keeps working. Batteries are also still improving, if slowly.

Their predictions, like 2017, seem kind of early. But let's say it's 2020, maybe including a storage subsidy, I don't think it's impossible.

Tri-alpha's tech is really amazing, it really is. I've read a couple of their papers. They are a talented group and they've got the funding as well.

But let's not kid ourselves here. Fusion is not going to be a realistic energy source any time soon. Further, even if we had fusion power, we probably wouldn't use it, as we already have far cheaper sources of clean power available: http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

Would have to be battery storage. Have you read much into the latest developments? Some pretty interesting stuff in the works, far more interesting than Musk and Lithium. Ambri is one I keep a google alert on, they have started testing at real sites this year. Here is an article on the large drops in price expected from new technology, the site itself seems to be well researched and haven't found anything too left/exaggerated in their articles RenewEconomy.

They are an Australian focused site, where I am from, and sadly now the leader in climate denial as well as anti-renewables (especially wind power, our Treasurer and Prime Minister have both been saying coal is the saviour of humanity and good for us while wind turbines are extremely ugly) our mining sector has a huge strangle hold on our politics, we have some of the biggest raw materials in the world and ship a large percentage of them globally but only gain 4-6% of our GDP from mining while they employ less than 0.5% of our population, but somehow manage to convince so many people they are the reason we avoided the GFC and without them our economy would collapse.

We are also one of the few places in the world where you can go off-grid with solar panels and batteries today and re-coup that investment within 5-8 years with warranties of 10+ years. Our warranties are probably the best in the world too, Apple originally fought to avoid our laws on that and lost, but they more than made up for it by tax evasion though.

Want to save 70 million birds a year? Build more wind farms : Renew Economy

Wind and solar require a larger energy input per energy out, so it's EROEI is smaller but still greater than 1, even after accounting for mining the raw materials.

This is now completely untrue by a large amount, it may have been true many years ago but it certainly isn't now. Solar's energy payback time is now as little as 6 months for a panel that lasts 30-100 years*, that's a EROEI of 60-200 not less than 1!!!

Because the manufacturing of solar panels has evolved hugely:
Price history of silicon PV cells since 1977 - Price per watt

Wind is shown here to have an EROEI of 62-117 again rather better than 1.

*Some panels only lose 0.2% efficiency per year after the first year in which they initially lose about 5%.

Re intermittentcy of renewables:

Solutions to a 100% renewable and sustainable energy supply worldwide include but are not limited to hydro-electric and pumped hydro, geothermal, solar pv, wave-power, tidal lagoons and other tidal, onshore and off-shore wind in conjunction with better home insulation, heat pumps - ground source and air source, storage heaters, solar water heating, battery storage and charging electric cars whilst renewables output is high.

Australia's solar policy has been called an "unmitigated disaster". It's basically a method of subsidising the rich by taxing the poor which is approaching the point of collapse. Even the massively pro-green sites like reneweconomy have been forced to admit there is a significant problem (though they try to obfuscate this by talking up the other relevant points like spinning reserve that burns coal).
http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

Renewable energy dominance is inevitable, solar energy is forecast to drop to 2c per kwh vs nuclear's 10c. Nuclear is not getting any cheaper. Wind turbines are getting taller and cheaper because there is a more consistent stronger supply of wind higher up and there is ongoing technical innovation. Wind is already going for under 4c per kwh without subsidy.

This is now:
Texas city opts for 100% renewable energy - to save cash, not the planet

Cheapest solar - SunEdison sells solar PV output at 5c/kWh ...

How Low Can Wind Energy Go? 2.5c Per Kilowatt-Hour Is Just

The relentless fall in renewables cost has a long way to go yet.

Battery prices are also continually falling:
EV Battery Prices -- The Disruptive Drop In Prices Will Continue

I think solar is great - I have some panels on my camper, which is very conducive to solar type use because it's already designed to function off-grid. But let's be realistic. Let's say every home in America stuck a couple thousand watts of solar power on their roof, and wanted to sell the power into the grid (as opposed of having to store it on-site). How is that supposed to work? If no power generation is required by the power company when the sun is shining, but the full normal generation is required the instant clouds sweep over a community or at night, etc, then how is that supposed to work? None of the power generation plants can function in that "instant on / instant off" type of a mode. Particularly not nuclear. The point is, once the adoption reaches some (rather smallish) percentage, there will be some major problems and costs that will have to be addressed.

Before that occurs (in the US), a lot of years will have passed. Germany has had a day with 75% renewable energy production and 50% solar production and will undoubtedly get similar occurences this year too. They also still have nuclear power plants and it all works. Sure, nuclear power plants are notoriously bad to change in output on short term and will therefore gradually fade from view, which is not a bad thing alltogether (even though I am not opposed to nuclear). New technologies will come to mitigate problems of temporary overproduction, like Elon Musk's battery pack for homes.

It is all not a problem that can be solved. The only problem is big powerful companies fearing for their livelyhood and having the money and influence to prevent these changes from happening.

I think that you will find that the people who complained about the Koch-funded research were the deniers. They didn't take it well that the research agreed with the IPCC estimates. So this isn't really the "other side of the coin".

Natural Gas, Coal, or Nuclear - nothing else has matured enough, and won't for decades.

That's an interesting troll. What do you expect to gain by it?

Solar energy production was the secondary winner in October, generating an estimated 46% of an average home’s energy needs in Edinburgh, 38% in Inverness, 37% in Glasgow, and 33% in Aberdeen. While those houses fitted with solar hot water panels generated enough energy to meet approximately 41% of the hot water needs of an average home in Edinburgh, 31% in Inverness, 30% in Glasgow, and 27% in Aberdeen.

However, the real winner was wind generation, which generated a phenomenal 126% of the electricity needs of every home in Scotland!

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

There have been several instances in recent months when wind energy has accounted for all, or nearly all, electricity demand in South Australia. Last Tuesday, however, set a new benchmark – the combination of wind energy and rooftop solar provided more than 100 per cent of the state’s electricity needs, for a whole working day between 9.30am and 6pm.

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

The 150-kW storage system that S&C Electric installed at its Chicago headquarters is a model for the future. They needed a working demo to show their customers how they would benefit from energy storage. They can see how you can reconfigure the network if there is an induced fault. There is a small working demo of PJM’s frequency regulation market.

The move to battery storage is inevitable, and enables the incorporation of much larger amounts of intermittent energy such as wind and solar.

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

Salvador is also the largest merchant solar plant to be completed in the world, which means that the plant holds no power purchase agreement and sells the electricity it generates on the spot market. This is a business model which Chile is leading due to a combination of conditions including high spot prices for electricity in certain nodes in the nation’s Central Grid (SIC), where Project Salvador is located. SunPower CEO Tom Werner has said that he sees room for more merchant projects in Chile, and expects the model to spread to other nations. “Think of it as the beginning of a trend that we are going to see in the rest of the world,” Werner told pv magazine.

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

Natural Gas, Coal, or Nuclear - nothing else has matured enough, and won't for decades.

That's an interesting troll. What do you expect to gain by it?

Solar energy production was the secondary winner in October, generating an estimated 46% of an average home’s energy needs in Edinburgh, 38% in Inverness, 37% in Glasgow, and 33% in Aberdeen. While those houses fitted with solar hot water panels generated enough energy to meet approximately 41% of the hot water needs of an average home in Edinburgh, 31% in Inverness, 30% in Glasgow, and 27% in Aberdeen.

However, the real winner was wind generation, which generated a phenomenal 126% of the electricity needs of every home in Scotland!

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

There have been several instances in recent months when wind energy has accounted for all, or nearly all, electricity demand in South Australia. Last Tuesday, however, set a new benchmark – the combination of wind energy and rooftop solar provided more than 100 per cent of the state’s electricity needs, for a whole working day between 9.30am and 6pm.

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

The 150-kW storage system that S&C Electric installed at its Chicago headquarters is a model for the future. They needed a working demo to show their customers how they would benefit from energy storage. They can see how you can reconfigure the network if there is an induced fault. There is a small working demo of PJM’s frequency regulation market.

The move to battery storage is inevitable, and enables the incorporation of much larger amounts of intermittent energy such as wind and solar.

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

Salvador is also the largest merchant solar plant to be completed in the world, which means that the plant holds no power purchase agreement and sells the electricity it generates on the spot market. This is a business model which Chile is leading due to a combination of conditions including high spot prices for electricity in certain nodes in the nation’s Central Grid (SIC), where Project Salvador is located. SunPower CEO Tom Werner has said that he sees room for more merchant projects in Chile, and expects the model to spread to other nations. “Think of it as the beginning of a trend that we are going to see in the rest of the world,” Werner told pv magazine.

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

Natural Gas, Coal, or Nuclear - nothing else has matured enough, and won't for decades.

That's an interesting troll. What do you expect to gain by it?

Solar energy production was the secondary winner in October, generating an estimated 46% of an average home’s energy needs in Edinburgh, 38% in Inverness, 37% in Glasgow, and 33% in Aberdeen. While those houses fitted with solar hot water panels generated enough energy to meet approximately 41% of the hot water needs of an average home in Edinburgh, 31% in Inverness, 30% in Glasgow, and 27% in Aberdeen.

However, the real winner was wind generation, which generated a phenomenal 126% of the electricity needs of every home in Scotland!

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

There have been several instances in recent months when wind energy has accounted for all, or nearly all, electricity demand in South Australia. Last Tuesday, however, set a new benchmark – the combination of wind energy and rooftop solar provided more than 100 per cent of the state’s electricity needs, for a whole working day between 9.30am and 6pm.

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

The 150-kW storage system that S&C Electric installed at its Chicago headquarters is a model for the future. They needed a working demo to show their customers how they would benefit from energy storage. They can see how you can reconfigure the network if there is an induced fault. There is a small working demo of PJM’s frequency regulation market.

The move to battery storage is inevitable, and enables the incorporation of much larger amounts of intermittent energy such as wind and solar.

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

Salvador is also the largest merchant solar plant to be completed in the world, which means that the plant holds no power purchase agreement and sells the electricity it generates on the spot market. This is a business model which Chile is leading due to a combination of conditions including high spot prices for electricity in certain nodes in the nation’s Central Grid (SIC), where Project Salvador is located. SunPower CEO Tom Werner has said that he sees room for more merchant projects in Chile, and expects the model to spread to other nations. “Think of it as the beginning of a trend that we are going to see in the rest of the world,” Werner told pv magazine.

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

Natural Gas, Coal, or Nuclear - nothing else has matured enough, and won't for decades.

That's an interesting troll. What do you expect to gain by it?

Solar energy production was the secondary winner in October, generating an estimated 46% of an average home’s energy needs in Edinburgh, 38% in Inverness, 37% in Glasgow, and 33% in Aberdeen. While those houses fitted with solar hot water panels generated enough energy to meet approximately 41% of the hot water needs of an average home in Edinburgh, 31% in Inverness, 30% in Glasgow, and 27% in Aberdeen.

However, the real winner was wind generation, which generated a phenomenal 126% of the electricity needs of every home in Scotland!

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

There have been several instances in recent months when wind energy has accounted for all, or nearly all, electricity demand in South Australia. Last Tuesday, however, set a new benchmark – the combination of wind energy and rooftop solar provided more than 100 per cent of the state’s electricity needs, for a whole working day between 9.30am and 6pm.

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

The 150-kW storage system that S&C Electric installed at its Chicago headquarters is a model for the future. They needed a working demo to show their customers how they would benefit from energy storage. They can see how you can reconfigure the network if there is an induced fault. There is a small working demo of PJM’s frequency regulation market.

The move to battery storage is inevitable, and enables the incorporation of much larger amounts of intermittent energy such as wind and solar.

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

Salvador is also the largest merchant solar plant to be completed in the world, which means that the plant holds no power purchase agreement and sells the electricity it generates on the spot market. This is a business model which Chile is leading due to a combination of conditions including high spot prices for electricity in certain nodes in the nation’s Central Grid (SIC), where Project Salvador is located. SunPower CEO Tom Werner has said that he sees room for more merchant projects in Chile, and expects the model to spread to other nations. “Think of it as the beginning of a trend that we are going to see in the rest of the world,” Werner told pv magazine.

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

You know that it is those miners that allow you to have the lifestyle to which you have become accustomed?

I'm an Australian miner, and even I can recognise that coal mining needs to go. We have plenty of other things that we can dig out of the ground that are less damaging. Our dependence on coal is a disaster in the making, financially as well as environmentally.

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

Storing solar power is an issue in niche applications, and it is an issue in a future fantasy world where 100% of our power is solar.

Very true, and not even a real issue in a 100% renewable scenario. The entire state of South Australia ran on 100% renewable power for a full working day for the first time last week. The bulk of that was wind generation, with rooftop solar adding a significant contribution.

There have been several instances in recent months when wind energy has accounted for all, or nearly all, electricity demand in South Australia. Last Tuesday, however, set a new benchmark – the combination of wind energy and rooftop solar provided more than 100 per cent of the state’s electricity needs, for a whole working day between 9.30am and 6pm. There were several periods in South Australia from Saturday September 27, and over the following days, when wind generation was greater than total state NEM demand.

In reality, renewables contributed well over 100 per cent because they were generating and consuming their own electricity from rooftop solar – the state has 550MW of rooftop solar, with nearly one in four houses with rooftop modules.

That meant that “true” demand by consumers on that day, i.e. the amount of electricity being used by consumers, including rooftop solar, was in fact considerably higher than NEM demand — up to 20 per cent according to the Australian Photovoltaic Institute — because of the contribution of rooftop PV to total electricity supply.

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

I can prove that an underground solar farm would be a great idea with a back of the napkin calculation, reality however is not so easily simplified.

Reality is that I put a 3kW system on my roof a few months ago for about $3,100 (in Western Australia). I sell excess power back to the grid on days when I'm not using much, and buy from the grid when I am. My power bills have been close to zero most months, and I even had a rebate in May when I was on holiday. In the near future, I'll invest in batteries and additional panels to store enough power to run my house overnight.

There are so many of us in WA switching to rooftop solar that the local electricity utility hasn't even powered up some of the fossil fuel plants it built recently, and looks at risk of getting caught in a "death spiral" as more people transition to renewables and fewer and fewer customers remain to pay off the utility's investment.

The chances of the West Australian electricity grid becoming the first to fall victim to the so-called “death spiral” for utilities appears to have increased after it was revealed this week that the gap between the cost to generate, transmit and sell electricity and the charge to consumer has widened.

The “death spiral” is a term coined by utilities in an attempt to defend their business models against the rise of the “pro-sumer”, customers who are no longer just buying energy but who are sourcing cheaper electricity from their own generation, usually rooftop solar, and cutting demand from the grid.

The WA grid, however, has helped create its own death spiral because it has never recovered the cost of its largely fossil-fuel fired electricity from the consumer. The costs keep rising, and now it has emerged that electricity demand has fallen so low that the major utilities may be forced to pay for fossil-fuel generation they will never use.

http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

But think of the jet engines!

Also, according to his study, windmills 'save' birds, because they replace other, more harmful ways to generate electricity.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...

In the same area? No. So, gosh darn!

But think of the jet engines!

Also, according to his study, windmills 'save' birds, because they replace other, more harmful ways to generate electricity.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...