Australia grid simulation last 51 weeks: 98.8% on renewable electricity | Hacker News Reader

Australia grid simulation last 51 weeks: 98.8% on renewable electricity

twitter.com

27 pointsguerby11 comments

So much for needing weeks of storage to counter the intermittency of solar and wind.

This also doesnt even count demand shaping (e.g. when german aluminum smelters dial production up and down to account for periods of high/low wind/solar).

You need a storage anyway because moment your grid runs out of power, even for a minute, it will cause cascade collapse of the grid and then grid operator will need days to switch everything back on, given that no infrastructure got damaged during such collapse.

To expand on your comment: When you have distributed storage, you can rapidly isolate parts of the grid where you might have a voltage and/or frequency deviation outside of normal operating ranges, and then bring those segments back up with the equivalent of reclosers and sectionalizers. There is no longer the concept of a cascading grid wide failure.

Storage is commonly thought of as energy arbitrage, but more importantly it provides clean and less expensive “grid services” such as synthetic inertia. Unlike a thermal generator that would need to add fuel and come up to speed to increase frequency, batteries can respond in milliseconds (Tesla’s Megapack product has proven this in the field in Australia, specially the Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia) to hold up voltage and frequency to prevent brownouts or an outage.

For example, Oahu, an island of Hawaii, is about to (the battery facility is wrapping up install and preparing for validation) replace its last coal plant with Tesla Megapacks that will provide grid services the coal plant is providing.

David Osmond (author of the simulation) interview on youtube channel "Engineering with Rosie": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgxOlPu9kiM

Another data point from the youtube video : average price in the simulation is at $83/MWh, while current average prices are at $170/Mwh in Australia. This is a great economic incentive to go the 9x% renewable path.

Where would the storage need to be placed? It would need to be distributed over the continent.

Australia might be one of the most responsible places on the planet. Small population on a massive continent, so so much of Australia is just still wild and undeveloped. Heavy emphasis on renewable energy. If the whole world was like Australia we would have a lot less big crises

This is a simulation showing how Australia could meet its electricity demands using a large amount of additional renewable capacity.

Unfortunately the Australian electricity generation mix as of 2020 is made up of 54% coal and 20% and just 24% renewables [1]. Renewable capacity is increasing but at the current pace 90+% renewable generation is not likely to be achieved within the next 20 years.

You can check the live generation mix on electricitymap [2].

[1]: https://www.energy.gov.au/data/australian-electricity-genera... [2]: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/AUS-NSW

They transitioned 3.5% of grid supply last year, and that's actually an underestimate of the transition since it doesn't factor in behind-the-meter use of solar. Solar adoption has also accelerated over the last couple of years, up from 23% growth over 2019 to 42% growth last year. I wouldn't be surprised to see an almost full transition in the next 10 years.

According to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Australia

Yearly PV capacity increase is between 3 and 4 GW, so tripling PV as the simulation assumes starting from 27 GW means between 11 and 15 years to reach at the current rate.

I did not look for wind data (yet).

If you do the increase as a percentage, say 20% yearly growth in output, which probably better fits the history and other countries, then it's about half that time to triple.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com