South Australia Hits 33% Renewal Energy Target 6 Years Early

ferrisoxide.com writes: South Australia has hit its target of 33% renewable energy by 2020, 6 years earlier than expected, delivering clean power to the state through investment in wind, solar and geothermal energy — mothballing one coal-fired power station in the process. Not content to rest on their laurels, the SA government has now announced a new "stretch" target of 50% by 2025. South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill declared that despite initial upfront costs to renewable energy generators such as wind farms, the 50 per cent target will not add one extra dollar to energy prices.

Comments

Works particularly well in SA/Victoria

[Anonymous Coward]

The nice thing about wind plus solar in southern Australia is that peak electricity usage is on hot days in the summer. These are often windy as well as sunny.

That said, this 33% is for South Australia (pop ~ 1.3 mil) which has a much smaller demand than Victoria (pop ~ 6 mil) with well connected grids. So excess power from SA can be readily exported to Victoria.

As renewable engery use in Victoria increases it will likely be harder to shift excess production. The Victoria/SA market may well face the problem Germany has when wholesale electricty prices drop down to zero. We really need large scale grid storage to get a global SA/Vic production up about 30% from renewables.

Re:Works particularly well in SA/Victoria

[fustakrakich]

Well, they could use the excess to desalinate and pump more water inland.. Just a thought..

Re:Works particularly well in SA/Victoria

[Mr D from 63]

Lets not even talk about that fact that SA has seen overall demand drop significantly due to the failure of several large industries, with no indication they will return. So, from that perspective, the goals got a lot easier to attain. Of course political speak, by its nature, always sounds good. "will not add a dollar to energy prices", but of course, we also won't talk about the actual costs and how they are paid.

Overall, they have been able to use primarily wind to achieve what they have. While they've spent a lot on solar as well, its still a small and somewhat irrelevant piece of the pie. It appears the Aussies have figured out that emphasis on wind makes much more sense.

Re:Works particularly well in SA/Victoria

[Registered Coward v2]

Those operations are already completely failure-prone, because they can't handle the least outage in any case. Semiconductor production facilities have power conditioning equipment which covers the entire plant because it's expensive when power fails, or has any other kind of problem. Sounds like these guys need the same thing.

Per TFA, the have added power supplies to maintain voltage when grid voltage dips. This, however, raises two issues with wind and or solar :

1. It's an added hidden cost of power. Sure, the electricity prices may not go up but the cost of power doesn't to customers Ast THFA pointed outré, sat some point companies look to other locations without such problems.

2. Right now, consumers and most businesses aren't seeing a problem because most appliances can handle short voltage drops. However, as the percentage of those sources increase we could see dips that damage appliances or cause consumer or business issues. Expecting them to buy power conditioning equipment isn't a solution that most politicians probably want to suggest, so the producers and or grid companies will have to solve the problem,; whereupon the costs of power will go up as it reflects the actual costs of delivering clean power.

None of these problems are unsolvable but tend to get ignored in the debate. The regulator in Germany already punted the issue by planning "to discuss the problem with experts and associations in detail" which translated to non-politik sprache means "ignore the problem by studying it." Maybe what's needed is for voting machines to experience problems, that cost someone an election, later traced to a power fluctuation. That sort of cost gets a lot of attention from politicians.

Re:They need to get their shit together

[aralin]

Solar thermal power plants covering 2/3rd of Mojave Desert could supply the current electricity needs of the entire USA. That is area 125 miles wide and long. That's it. 10,000 times more public land in USA is devoted to fossil fuel exploration than to solar plants. Same ratio for power plant building, subsidies. If this was reversed, USA could be 100% renewable by 2025. So yes, this might seem like an easy goal to set for them, but given the political climate and the inertia forces of current energy policy and investments, it is actually quite commendable speed.

Although, if someone actually took global warming seriously even in 2000, when the science was pretty clear, we could have been 100% renewable everywhere by now.

Re:costs

[TyFoN]

I live in Norway, we pay around $.12 including taxes and "line rent".
The price fluctuates with rain and season, but $.12 is about as high as it gets. I've seen as low as $.05

Most of the electricity comes from hydro plants (98.5%) and I think other renewables will have similar cost structure. High investment, very low marginal cost pr kwh.
In Hawaii for instance I'd guess you could build some geothermal plants like in Iceland