Guest essay by Paul Miskelly and Tom Quirk
With $90 billion spent on batteries and 4,000 MW of more wind farms, South Australia could be a totally renewable state, at least for electricity.
South Australia along with one or two other states has been described by Al Gore as the canary in the coal mine for climate change and renewable energy. This interesting comparison was rewarded by South Australia putting the canary in the dark as there was no coal. But it would be interesting to see what the electricity supply of South Australia might be like with zero CO2 emissions as is the fond wish of many and even of learned societies.
There are many combinations of renewables that could be considered with wind, solar, biomass, pumped storage and various storage technologies. The following is the simplest, combining wind farms and batteries.
The starting point for this analysis is the dominance of wind power in South Australia. To expand this renewable source we must add battery storage as there are no present alternatives. The present 1575 MW of wind farms meets some 35% of demand and expanding this to give an average 100% of supply. We must store the surplus and use that when the wind falls away. The performance of the present demand and wind farms supply is sampled from AEMO data for 3 January to 31 March 2016.
So wind farm output is increased by 358% to 5644 MW, an additional 4069 MW of wind farms, so that the average over 3 months equals the average demand. This is presented in Figure 1 and shows periods of surplus and deficit of supply.
Figure 1: Variations of demand in South Australia for January to March 2016 and 358% increased wind farm supply. (Source AEMO)
The total surplus is equal to the total deficit and the detail is shown in Figure 2. There are periods for example 17 to 24 January 2016 where the average deficit is 750 MW for 168 hours, a total of 125,000 MWh. This is a measure of the energy storage that is needed from the surplus energy of the period 13 to 17 January. For the year 2016 the demand in South Australia was 14,400 GWh so the storage need is of the order of 1% of the demand for the year.
Figure 2: Variations of surplus and deficit from wind farm supply compared to demand for January to March 2016
The variations in storage needs are shown in Figure 3. The maximum storage need is defined as the value necessary to satisfy demand at all times. This is a value of 270 GWh (270,000 MWh) for the period analysed. This is 2% of the annual demand for electricity in South Australia.
Figure 3: Storage of surplus wind farm energy to match demand
The challenge is to identify storage technology for some 300 GWh of supply. The base case is to calculate the amount and cost of lead acid batteries to satisfy this need.
A very thorough summary of storage technologies is to be found in Sustainable Energy[1]. Figure 4 is a summary of the storage technology power and energy density capabilities. The range of batteries extends from lead acid to lithium-ion and beyond. For this analysis the energy densities are the mid range values for lead acid and lithium-ion.
On the bottom far right of the figure, the hydrocarbons (fossil fuels) show energy densities of a factor of ten greater than the batteries considered here.
Figure 4: Scatter plot of power and energy density for storage technologies from page 400 of reference 1.
So for the lead acid batteries adopting a value of 40 Wh/kg for 300 GWh of storage requires 7,500,000 tonnes of lead acid batteries. For higher energy density lithium-ion batteries have an energy density of 140 Wh/kg so only 2,100,000 tonnes would be needed.
But this could be realized at what cost? Estimates of lead acid battery costs are around $0.20 per Wh while lithium-ion batteries vary from $0.50 to $0.90 per Wh. The Power Wall 2 lithium-ion battery from Tesla[2] is A$8,000 for 14 kWh but this is a retail price of $0.57 per Wh. The wholesale bulk price could be as low as $0.30 per Wh with better performance than the lead acid battery in discharge rate and lifetime.
Willem Post has a detailed article on energy storage in Germany[3]. His base case is lead acid batteries with massive, bulk energy storage. The cost per Wh is $0.32.
So the battery storage is some $60 to $90 billion to store the surplus energy from 4,000 MW of new wind farms with substantial running costs due to battery lifetime and erratic discharges.
This analysis outlines the storage required to address wind’s inherent intermittency. It does not address the requirements, presently unaddressed by wind energy technology, of grid stability and control, which is the need for the provision of synchronous inertia to protect grid stability. Should the battery route be chosen to address this requirement, such provision may indeed require more battery storage.
Of course South Australia could close all the gas fueled power stations and build massive interconnectors to the other states and then blame them for CO2 emissions. Perhaps that is why the South Australian government talks of nationalizing the power stations/
[1] Sustainable Energy, Second Edition 2012 by J W Tester, E M Drake, M J Driscoll, M W Golay and W A Peters MIT Press
[2] https://www.tesla.com/en_AU/powerwall
[3] http://www.theenergycollective.com/willem-post/2396941/wind-and-solar-energy-lulls-and-energy-storage-in-germany
South Australia is certainly a Renewable State. South Australia is in dire need of a complete renewal of its politicians who are all in complete ignorance of power supply, Climate, agriculture and natural resources.,Batteries are renewable in the sense that they need renewing after 5-19 years. Wind Turbines are renewable in the sense that they are in need of rebuilding after 10-15 years. Industry in South Australia is renewable in the sense that it is moving to other States in search of reliable low-cost power.
Obviously, this idea would only be feasible in a very small number of locations, but in those few locations, would it work? A reservoir at a higher level and one at a lower level. When you have an excess of wind energy, use it to pump water from the lower reservoir to the upper reservoir. When the wind is insufficient, allow water to flow back down to the lower reservoir through a hydro-electric plant. You’ll never get as much energy back as it took to pump the water up, but it seems storing it as kinetic energy is less expensive and much less polluting than manufacturing tons of batteries.
That is exactly what the Snowy Mountain Scheme does for NSW and Victoria. Built in the 1950’s and still going strong.
Also done at Brisbane’s Wivenhoe Dam. The system is designed so that the local power station operates at a constant and during periods of low use excess energy is used to pump water up to the upper storage dam, when additional power is required during the peak then the water is released from the upper to the lower dam, the pumps become generators returning power to the grid.
http://www.csenergy.com.au/content-(168)-wivenhoe.htm
Dinorwig in Wales (UK) has 1.7GW available in 12 seconds which is impressive but those would be 12 long seconds if it was all you had. 75% efficient (round trip) which is another thing that doesn’t seem to enter into the calculations in the post.
Nigel
grid scale batteries respond quicker than that -that’s why the national grid just tendered for an initial 200MW of such capacity
Or you can use an open cast goldmine, as in this example in Queensland:
https://cleantechnica.com/2016/06/16/gold-mine-recycled-as-australias-largest-pumped-hydro-storage/
You don’t need math, everyday common sense tells any sane person that batteries cannot and will not in the foreseeable future go anywhere near substituting for the power now imported from Victorian brown coal when the wind doesn’t blow.
Wetherill is displaying the symptoms of a cult follower who faced with the failure of his beliefs cannot let go:
… Niederhoffer and Kenner [When Prophesy Fails 1956] say: ‘when you have gone far out on a limb and so many people have followed you, and there is much “sunk cost,” as economists would say, it is difficult to admit you have been wrong’ … (Wiki).
Never you mind about reality.
Lovely Elon said he can do it, so it must be OK.
No one else can loose other people’s money better than Elon.
But hasn’t he sucked a lot of people in so far?
If the canary in the coal mine dies, it’s time to exit the coal mine immediately!
Just back from reading Joanne Nova’s blog on this.
http://joannenova.com.au/2017/03/battery-powered-sa-could-be-100-renewable-for-just-60-90-billion/#comment-1898235
South Australia can’t afford $90B to put batteries into it’s unreliable generation system. And anyway, who believes the cost would be as low as that? Since it refuses to contemplate coal, can’t source enough gas to run a gas plant & really hasn’t a clue, we need a radical alternative.
Without Hazlewood/Heywood, SA won’t have enough generating capacity to make up for common weather events, such as the entire state being windless. Any remaining power it can generate will need to be used for parasitic turning (keeping the windmill blades turning slowly so they don’t damage the bearings).
My proposal is to cut the power on low-wind days. It has already been forced to do this on a small scale, but that was because Victorian coal was coming through the interconnector. In the future, power for most of the state will have to be shut off to preserve it for essential purposes such as keeping traffic lights working. But not for street lighting. Public safety issues are of no interest to the greens compared to their state-wide virtue signalling.
This is an interesting analysis, but definitely one describing a boundary condition ie. 100% battery/wind technology, therefore one that is quite unrealistic As the analysis shows, this is not any where near a condition that might be plausible today. Base load power is always a must and any reasonable analysis shows this to be the case. As the commenters have also noted lead acid is a poor choice in making such a renewable system workable.
What is interesting is that in a much smaller percentage of total supply/demand scenario, say 15-20%, such a system might actually be workable and affordable as a way to capture wind power to substitute for a portion of fossil fuel energy production. I am not a huge fan of windpower…I think solar PV will be the largest portion of the AE contribution down the road.
Interesting that Citi estimates that battery storage will increase by 97% over the next decade. Battery storage is still a major play in electricity management.
jj, too said:
“This is an interesting analysis, but definitely one describing a boundary condition ie. 100% battery/wind technology,”
I’d be very interested in an analysis of various scenarios in between all coal/gas on one side, and just batteries and wind on the other.
For instance, what would happen if you install 4 times the wind power, a billion worth of batteries, and gas generators that now have time to ramp up because the batteries help keep the grid stable?
How about if you only want to achieve 75% renewables?
What happens if you start using gravity rail storage?
I’d love to see modeling of exactly what could be achieved at what price for a certain reduction in carbon output. This scenario is going for 100%. Could 75% be achieved for a lot less than half the money talked about here with gas turbine backup?
I’d really like to see a variety of scenarios compared.
Well Forrest my guess is the calculations are going something like this video link.
https://youtu.be/Xm5XUi3tKos
Some more news on how Germanys honeymoon with renewables is drawing to a close on the following link:
https://shar.es/1UhORp
It was sickening to listen to a Press Conference staged by Australia+ channel, where both Jay Weatherill(Bitterpill?) and Josh Frydenberg ‘inadvertently’ participated in a joint press conference. SA’s premier, (the former), displayed the mental acumen of a canary when he let forth his well rehearsed diatribe in favor of renewables and against the federal government. The whole problem could apparently be solved through the introduction of a carbon tax! I am surprised that the Greens have not snapped him up. He is a prime candidate for the progressive green left faction.
Premier Jay Weatherdill is upset that the people in Eastern Australia are trashing his state.
Let’s give credit where it is due.
He is the bloody idiot who has trashed his state – using funds provided by other states!
Germany continues to roll out renewables and is still aiming at its 2050 80% renewable electricity target.
It reformed its payments system and continues to build new wind turbines, notably in th eBaltic.
Any idea it is changing track is nonsense.
The real number is bigger.
Real power systems have reserve margins (generation capacity sitting idle or spinning and ready to increase output), are designed to function reasonably well through everything short of a blizzard or hurricane (this system would fall apart if it was just less than normally windy for a few weeks), require real inertia (pretty technical – look it up), amongst other things.
Point being, there is no technical evidence that a wind and batteries power system would really work. Assigning a cost to it is misleading.
grid storage batteries are better than spinning reserve… they respond quicker. They are replacing it in Europe
Whoever wrote this does not understand mathematics.
Fact – if you increase something by 100%, you double it. Increase it by 200% & you triple it.
The key word here is INCREASE, as used in the article. Of course 5600 is 358% of 1500, but it is only an increase of 258%.
Please get it right in future.
Wind and solar are in effect a parisitic entity on the electricity grid , they can’t exist on their own and rely on other generated electricity to exist .
Sorry, but the assumptions which are used to construct Figure 1 are crap.
Have a look at Aneroid wind energy for SA and you will see that the average output is 23 to 25% of nameplate and that assumes ALL TURBINES ARE AVAILABLE (Ho Ho Ho).
The other fact which jumps out from observations is that the variation in output is way in excess of that depicted in Figure 1.
I do realise that I am making a serious mistake by using observation of things that actually happen rather than models.
There are storage alternatives besides batteries. Pumped hydroelectric is in use in many places, but South Australia and not have many suitable locations. Energy can be stored as compressed air in underground salt caverns. A commercial scale facility is planned.
Let us know how that works out. A salt cavern full of hot (and probably corrosive) air at very high pressure? What could possibly go wrong? I’m also curious about the overall efficiency. I can’t imagine it being all that high, not compared to pumped hydro for instance.
This article does not address how much solar is available and at what times in the day demand is high.
Perhaps there are peaks of air con use during the afternoons? which solar would be a good match to.
Nor does it mention solar CSP which is in use and planned to expand in SA
e.g this pioneering installation
http://www.aalborgcsp.com/projects/integrated-energy-system-based-on-csp-australia/
The idea that batteries would be the sole supplier of power when wind not available is ludicrous.Grid batteries are better used at taking up the strain as wind power or solar (absolutely predictably) fall off.
grid level batteries would be lithium ion – no one is installing lead acid for grid scale apps any more.
A solar PV, solar CSP, domestic battery, grid battery, wind power set up looks quite different from what this article portrays.
You have no idea about weather in Australia, do you?
Not being there, no.
Any of the points I made you’d actually like to comment on?
Nope, your comments are uninformed junk.
so there is no solar or solar CSP resource to supplement wind in SA?
and the demand is constant and there is no point at which substantial demand might not be provided by solar?
Really I would like to see some argument of substance from you.
you are like a small boy threatening to take your ball home.
“Really I would like to see some argument of substance from you.”
We would be absolutely AMAZED if we ever saw any argument of substance from you. !
Green engineering:
1/. Take a technology that is very expensive and doesn’t work well.
2/. Realise its is utterly deficient
3/. Propose adding a further technology that is very expensive and doesn’t work very well.
4/. Make sure someone else pays for it.
5/. Strut around doing the ‘virtue signalling’ walk.
This is a great article, but you miss one obvious point. If the cost of storage is so astronomical, a rational person would seek ways to mitigate it. Two obvious ones are:
1) Overcapacity: overbuild wind turbines and therefore reduce the power deficit on low power days. That will reduce demand for storage, and might be cheaper.
2) Reduce volatility by diversifying to other renewable sources, e.g. Solar. Because wind and solar deliveries will not be perfectly correlated, mixing supply will reduce volatility, and hence the need for storage.
At the moment, though the post gives some helpful insights, it has some of the flavour of a strawman – “if you do these dumb things, look how much it would cost”. I think that makes your post quite easy for greens to dismiss. If you build on the above points, you could:
A) identify an optimal mix of wind and solar to minimise volatility, assuming similar data to your wind data is available for solar.
B) calculate the lowest cost mix of capacity (of the mix identified in A) and storage which would make renewables reliable.
My gut feeling is that the minimum cost (per kWh) would still be astronomic, and at that point you would really have knocked the ball out of the park, so to speak. Such an analysis ought to be hard to ignore – though obviously greens will try!
On a point of detail, I didn’t notice any mention of battery cycle life in the post. If a battery lasts 1000 cycles, a battery costing $250 per kWh has a minimum cost per kWh delivered of $0.25. If the cycle life is higher, the cost is lower, etc. At the moment I don’t think the cycle life of a power wall is very impressive. You might find that you need to spend the battery cost every few years, making it even more expensive.
A final nit is that since wind depends on weather, which is seasonal, you really need to do your analysis over a period of at least one year to avoid obvious criticisms.
Oops. I always manage to forget that battery cycle life is number of cycles to some lower level of capacity, not zero. I don’t know exact numbers, I think maybe 80%. Adjust above accordingly.
If the wind is not blowing or is blowing too strong, it doesn’t matter how many windmills you have built because none of them will be generating power.
During periods of strong winds the blades are feathered, and brakes can be applied, but that does not stop them from generating power.
@David Dirkse I think a maximum wind condition does apply. They feather the blades, but they don’t produce power to the grid. Safety of the turbine governs in high wind situations.
http://www.wind-power-program.com/Images/turbine_characteristics.htm/Typical%20power%20output%20(500%20x%20330).jpg
South Australia = East Germany
I should hope so!
Germany gets 32% of its electricity from renewables.
right now getting 25GW out of 63 from solar and wind
https://www.eex-transparency.com/
We need to put together an on-line document so we can just link to it each time Griff posts his lies.
I see – in that statement 32% from renewables and a specific figure reported from an electricity industry website, where is the lie?
“South Australia, A renewable state.”
Well, all they can hope is that they can RENEW it at some stage down the path.
It is heading backwards at the rate of knots at the moment.
WRONG DIRECTION, bozos !!!
I am in the unfortunate situation where I have to listen to the ABC discussing this whole thing. The ABC is a left-wing broadcaster that has been pushing renewables for many years. The south australian premier, pushing batteries, and the australian prime minister, pushing expensive pumped storage, both pro – renewable, are trying to promote themselves respectively as some sort of saviour from the renewable debacle, and consequently are attempting to back stab each other as much as possible. Listening to the reporting makes my head spin. There is no sign of sanity anywhere.
This seems to be a working Australian grid battery project.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/batteries-arrive-horizons-grid-scale-spinning-reserve-trial-97548/
I note it is expected to save money, reduce the need for spinning reserve and be available during storm outages.
It really is cute how much faith Griff puts in press releases.
And worrying how much faith you put in ‘some man on the web writing a blog’.
you can check for other news stories and reports on something like a solar CSP plant.
you have only the word of someone on a blog that the surface temp data is fixed, for example
“And worrying how much faith you put in ‘some man on the web writing a blog’.”
Don’t concern yourself , griff..
NO-ONE puts any faith at all in anything you write on any blog.
You are nothing but a LAUGHING STOCK !!
“This seems to be a working Australian grid battery project.”
roflmao..
It will last about 10 minutes !!!
Really griff, your bizarre statements are getting to the stage of FARCE.
It is as though everything you think you know is manifestly WRONG !!!
Are you are far-left politician, or do you work for one ???
I’m quite comfortable accepting the stated benefits of such a grid battery project with a remote town like that Griff. Provided of course it stacks up without Gummint slushfunding and cost shifting onto thermal like the overwhelming experience with unreliables. In that regard the only electrons that should be permitted to be tendered to any communal grid are those the tenderer can reasonably guarantee 24/7 all year round and no more. If batteries are economic for that purpose then so be it and let them compete freely on the level playing field. You OK with that?
There is a non-working 2MW battery system installed in Buninyong, Victoria!
http://www.thecourier.com.au/story/4395019/buninyong-battery-still-out-of-action/
But only as a back up
Once they replace the current crop of politicians, the state will be renewed.
It would be really good so see an article here looking at what the most cost effective methods for various levels of carbon emission reductions are, and figuring out how much they would cost.
Why settle on “bring wind production up to match average energy usage and do the rest with batteries”?
In all likelihood, the MOST effective method is: Nothing. Build the most cost effective power plant for the purpose without regard to CO2. I do advise cleaning up any toxic, noxious, foul, etc. waste streams,