This is a great article that uses real data to see how our grid world perform with greater wind, solar and storage. It shows that we can easily achieve a 95% renewable grid with a modest level of storage.
What i really like about this, is it has been running for 2 years now, and it is pragmatic about its aims (ie, not 100%), it aims for reality (this is real data that is collected weekly), and it looks at the cost (in $$ and CO2-e).
He sets some targets (60% Wind, 45% Solar + storage), then works off of the actual data to scale the wind & solar generation, to see how it would meet demand. excess is accumulated in storage (theoretical battery storage and actual hydro), and shortfalls is taken from storage.
The really nice part shows where “other” is required, in Australia’s case, existing fossil fueled peaker plants.
I often use his 1st year report to have the discussion with “non-believers” to show what is possible, and where the gaps are to achieveing a renewable grid.
Have a read and let me know what you think.
Fun fact! At the current rate of about 8000 vehicles a month there will be that much battery driving around in 2038. Sales are doubling annually though.
Presumably EV sales will level off somewhere below 1 million/yr, if that happens there will be roughly this much battery imported every two years.
This is also a great place for all that “wasted” energy to go.
This ignores EVs, but does have some commentary about it.
How we choreograph charging/manage demand will be interesting.
Canberra is running a v2g trial last I heard.
Even just putting a completely dumb 240V 2kW charger on an off peak meter (like hot water cylinders use) and only using it for load shedding would probably cover most of the storage needed. 16kWh/day is overkill for most driving profiles, then the only issue is convincing whoever owns the carpark to install/rent an outlet.
I think that we need something like that. I expect that someone will set up a virtual power plant as a way of managing the service and capacity. Either that or it just becomes a ‘must have’ through legislation.
I would like to see the requirement for any new built house to have solar and some amount of storage as a requirement. It just seems to make sense!
Australia’s solar market is un-price-gougey enough and electricity costs enough that I don’t think anyone would really consider not putting solar on a new build with a battery ready inverter. An investment that yields 50% return in the first year is a no brainer.
Virtual power plants seem a bit too silicon-valley, no need to demand people to submit to someone else controlling the AC when you can just ask instead. I don’t see anything wrong with a bounded variable time of use/feed-in tarriff (ie. Electricity will cost at least x, at most y, time-average z over the year, you get 30% of retail for feed-in and the prices are published day ahead). Let people own their own charger, inverter, and battery and decide for themselves what thresholds are for the controller (or opt into software).
(VPPs) Yep, but i guess if it doesnt work, we may need something different? VPPs can take advantage of wholesale swings in cost to better leverage the market. Maybe that is how a business is encouraged to put in charging capabilities (capex), they become part of a VPP, that will soak solar during the day. (jots idea down in my tech-bro notebook)
Canberra is moving toward full electrification. It’s been renewables (with offsets I think) since 2019. Hopefully more cities make the choice to grids with energy storage to reduce load on old coal and gas plants.
I think the problem with just looking at Canberra is that it can dump or import from NSW and the other parts of the grid, similar to SA, though on a smaller scale.
This looks at the entire network to see what is feasible, without being able to shunt excess generation or import from other networks.
This shows pretty well that we need two kinds of storage. One relativly high efficent, but more expensive for 9% of use cases. The other one large, low cost to built, but larger losses are possible. So I would say pumped hydro, batteries and similar storage in the first category, while biomass and hydrogen are good canidates for the second one.
However priotrity should be to go towards the reaching the 99%. That is a really good position for the rest and well 61% of global electricity still comes from fossil fuels.
Interesting, I never thought of it as storage. I do like that it is referred to as other.
It is the missing piece that we have the option to use fossil fuels, or biomass, or h2 or whatever we like or can come up with.
