‘Renewable Energy’ and its four "Icebergs"

Source:

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2020/11/renewable-energy-and-its-four-icebergs/
 

 

" ... the prospect of a Green New Deal in the United States has driven the renewable energy (RE) boosters into a frenzy of excitement. Four obstacles stand in the way of these grand plans, however. Call them “icebergs” in the path of the RE Titanic.

 

1/ Wind droughts; frequent periods up to 30 hours in duration with next to no wind across the whole of SE Australia.

 

2/ The need to supply 100% of demand to the grid continuously 24 hours a day, every day.

 

3/ The island effect; Australia cannot run extension cords to neighbouring nations, as in Europe, to cover shortfalls.

 

4/ No grid-scale (battery) storage is available.

 

... the electric lights will go out when the supply is very low, regardless of the  “installed capacity” of the wind farms and their average output (29 per cent in recent years. Think of it this way: if your tank is empty, the size of the tank is irrelevant.

... Denmark can produce up to 80 per cent of its electricity from the wind on a good day, but over the course of a typical 12 months, they import 45 per cent of their power. 

... The Netherlands has carpeted the countryside with wind farms and solar panels, but these  provide just 2.7 per cent of final total energy consumption. As for electricity, wind provides 10 per cent and solar 5 per cent.  When the wind is off duty, power is imported from Germany, when available, and France, where nuclear makes its availability a given.

... The take-away lesson here is to fear the consequences when we no longer have enough conventional power to provide 100 per cent of our needs.

... The first Musk (Tesla) battery attached to South Australia’s Hornsdale No 3-wind farm occupies a hectare, with a capacity of 129MWhrs and a $90 million price tag. It has been upgraded to 190MWhrs at a cost of $70 million, but compare those numbers with the demand of the SA grid, ranging  from 800MWh to 25,000MWh per hour depending on the season and the time of day. The amount of power that the battery can deliver is clearly negligible by comparison.

Pumped hydro is the other great hope for storage, but this can only end in tears due to the massive capital expense and the need to use between 30 per cent and 40 percent of the power generated to pump the water to the upper reservoir,  the first stage of  the process. 

Many, if not most, pumped  hydro schemes around the world use conventional power to top up the reservoir during periods when RE (renewable energy) is in short supply."