Batteries will not cut it without a baseload power source
A short note on this week's wind drought
This winter in South Australia has been showing just how impractical and expensive it would be to firm wind and solar with batteries. I wrote about this back at the end of June, and July has been more of the same. Here are the last few days captured on OpenElectricity, with yesterday at 11am highlighted (vertical line):
As you can see on the left of the chart, we had plenty of wind on Tuesday and were dumping it (top green blob). It’s not on the chart, but they were also dumping wind power in Victoria. Astonishingly, we were importing coal powered electricity from Victoria at the same time we were dumping wind. Victoria was similarly dumping wind and burning coal. I could explain the details (only because they were explained to me), but I’d have to throw up afterwards, and so would you. Describing the intricacies of such a broken system carries serious health risks.
By Wednesday, the wind was falling and by Thursday morning, it was gone. The vertical marker at 11am shows 0.3 megawatts of power from our 2700 megawatts of wind farms. We have had close on 30 hours with negligible power from wind. We weren’t dumping it, we just didn’t have it. Here’s Victoria:
Victoria has 5,800 megawatts of wind, but was getting 321 megawatts at 11am on Thursday. And what about NSW? Here it is:
As you can see 110 megawatts of wind power at 11am from 2,800 in the NSW wind fleet.
That’s negligable wind in 3 states simultaneously over days.
Is anybody proposing battery capacity which will cover almost the entire NEM and last days? No.
They rub being that these situations are unusual; but not 1 in 100 years unusual. They happened last year also.
Nobody wants to build batteries that don’t get used. They will never be cheap enough for that. This is why wind, solar and nuclear are so different. Nuclear provides baseload, which means that the unusual peaks and troughs you need to handle are much, much, much smaller. With wind and solar, you get nothing from solar every evening and next to nothing from wind on enough evenings for it to be a serious issue.
The thing I can't understand is that despite the evidence that the windmills and solar panels are not going to work, these people keep pushing on with the idea thinking that somehow a miracle is going to happen and the windmills are going to turn when the wind's not blowing or the solar panels are going to work at night because it just can't work, and yet they keep pushing out more and more of them.
Understand your reluctance to get into the details of why South Australia and Victoria were dumping wind while burning coal, but curious if it a least had something to do with the necessary grid stability provided by synchronous coal fired generators?