Australia struggling with oversupply of solar power
Australia struggling with oversupply of solar power
As Australia surges past a solar-powered milestone, questions turn to how much is too much, and can we hope to store it all?
Just read the same article about CA last week; too much solar to be used so the excess solar generated, get this, was sold-often at a loss--to Arizona(the fact AZ can't make it's own sufficient solar shows the willful neglect, economic and political nature of energy!) and it lowered AZ bills but not CA. We're back to energy traders and Enron price manipulations in the US after 20 years.
Batteries will fix much of it but until the grid has proper storage consumers getting fucked by businesses per usual.
What's also interesting to me is that we here in Utah used to (and maybe still do?) sell dirty electricity to CA (we produce a lot from coal and gas), because they didn't have sufficient base supply.
CA really needs effective base power supply, whether that's batteries or some other clean-ish energy source/storage solution. Meanwhile, electricity here in Utah is quite cheap at $0.12/kWh-ish, which is nice, and something like 1/3 of what CA charges.
CA has a for-profit energy sector so that's not surprising. They aren't lowering bills there for anything short of the apocalypse.
Every smart person told them, "update the grids before adding solar."
But did they listen? No. Because updating the grids was an expensive and difficult endeavour and they just wanted to lower their costs first.
Obama tried to push grid upgrades for years, kept getting shot down. His plans would all be done by now. Throw in the fuel economy requirements of 54.5 mpg requirements for cars and light trucks and we would have seen billions of barrels of oil not being needed. (Lower gas prices as well). Granted it wasn't everything, but it was what we needed to start doing. Now 13, 14 years later after Trump rolled back those fuel efficiency policies as much as he could because it cost manufacturers more money in research, we are much closer to a rock we can't live on and haven't advanced nearly enough. So we voted in Drill Baby Drill to finish off the rock.
Oh no they did that research. The manufacturers complained because the US was the last great dumping ground for old inefficient engines. They put those highly efficient engines in European cars and used the US to empty their warehouses of old engines.
Sometimes the best way to get things done is to wedge your way in and cause a problem. It sucks, but humans be humaning
Which is so odd to me, because electricity just a couple states over is about 1/3 the cost vs CA. I pay $0.12/kWh in UT, whereas CA pays more like $0.32/kWh.
If we look at solar generation, we're doing pretty well here in Utah vs other states in the US (source). Taking a rough average of that data, here's what the numbers look like:
- California - 8500 MWh, or ~217 MWh per million people
- Utah - 650 MWh, or ~203 MWh per million people
- Texas - 4800 MWh, or about 160 MWh per million people
- Arizona - 1700 MWh, or about 242 MWh per million people
I just don't understand why California electricity prices are so high. It's not like they're generating a ton more than other states in the area or anything.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the figures, but the source I quoted didn't say anything about per-capita production, so I think it's total for the state.
California rates are high because everyone has to pay for forest fires. Everyone except shareholders.
Personally, I said fuck the grid and built my own solar power without it. I have separate grid power too.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, this feels like a good place for Hydrogen power to step in.
One of the oft repeated concerns is that generating hydrogen to power vehicles the takes a lot of energy, which often comes from dirty sources.
One of the oft repeated issues for solar (or wind etc) is that it's available at certain times and not in and of itself storable or transportable, so excess is lost.
So, take the excess solar energy, produce hydrogen and store for off-peak times or to distribute.
Seems like a win to me.
And this involves only driving in summer when there is excess energy? Or getting through winter by storing enough hydrogen to make the Beirut explosion look like a firecracker in comparison?
So, take the excess solar energy, produce hydrogen and store for off-peak times or to distribute.
Storing hydrogen is difficult and expensive. Not even to say it can't be done, but it would require the energy companies to invest money in capital, and they hate doing that.
Good for them! Theoretically that should attract industries that need a lot of electricity and everything balances out cost and demand wise.
So, bitcoin miners
Steel, aluminium and battery production can also make good use of lots of cheap renewable energy.
Wonder when the miners are going to switch over and start running AI models with microtransactions for public API access...
How about investing in grid energy storage, to cope with intermittent production?
They are. Modeling has shown that getting Australia to 98.8% renewable is highly achievable.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/energy/grid-renewable-electricity-simulation/
Austrailia is one of the best places in the world to do that, but it should be pointed out that the article you linked wants 120GWh of batteries (costing ~12 billion USD at current Li-ion prices) as well as building more than 38GW of wind power and 30GW of solar power in order to meet ~25GW of average demand and that still needs pumped hydro on top and more than 9GW of fossil fuel power to make up the gaps.
It's just about feasible in Australia with excess sun and wind, plenty of empy space, low population density and terrain amenable to hydro storage. But it isnt realy generalisable to most other places.
It is possible that new battery chemistries or compressed air storage may prove cheap enough to use for long term storage.
There are plenty of options to choose from, but only few are actually industrial grade at the moment. So many promising ones are still in pilot stage, and I’m really looking forward to seeing which ones actually prove to be viable.
Traditional lithium based batteries clearly aren’t it, but LFP looks ok though.
What about high energy use industry running only during excess supply. Making aluminum, desalination, even training AI models. There are a lot of energy guzzlers that don't NEED to run 24/7. Why can't they be a sink for excess power?
As a part of grid balancing, we are already doing that to some extent. For the most part, the idea is that you can increase or decrease the load if you see the frequency of the grid beginning to drift off target. These types of frequency containment reserves can usually react very quickly, which means that most industrial processes don’t qualify.
However, since the duck curve is fairly predictable, we could (and should) extend this idea to slower processes too, such as the ones you mentioned. I don’t know if that sort of power reserve is actually being implemented, but it certainly would make a lot of sense.
It’s just that most industries prefer to operate 24/7. Having your reverse osmosis, electorlysis, electrowinning, arc furnace etc. running only during sunny hours is nice for the employees but bad for business. The investors of such factories prefer to see profits sooner rather than later, and restricting operating hours isn’t helping.
Cheaper electricity would obviously result in lower operating expenses, so I can definitely see some potential in this idea. You would just need to find some environmentally minded investors. They would also need to tolerate the risk that comes with a fluctuating power supply, which could be a tall order.
If the fluctuations of the local energy market are dominated by solar power, that means more work during the day and none during the night. If there’s lots of wind in the mix too, that could mean lots of night shifts during windy seasons and none during others, which isn’t great for the employees.
Australia has too many electricity distributors shipping profits overseas instead of upgrading the grid
Not really struggling
All they need to do is subsidise batteries and problem solved
Figuring out grid scale storage isn't easy, but the good thing about it is that you can figure out storage at slightly smaller scales to alleviate the problem somewhat, and build on that success to try to get to daily storage to meet nighttime demand, then up to weekly storage to handle fluctuations in weather, and maybe even seasonal storage to deal with seasonal variation in both supply and demand.
But storage doesn't have to just be chemical batteries, either. Some can be demand shifting, like desalination or water pumping based on excess power supply. Maybe even intermittently powering direct air capture of CO2 if there's so much excess energy they don't know what to do with it. Some can be storage of heat, whether really hot like molten salt that can run turbines for dispatchable electricity, or just at the residential scale with a bunch of distributed hot water tanks, or everything in between. There are also some storage technologies relying on gravity (pumped hydro if the geography supports it), compressed air, flywheels (could be important for maintaining grid inertia for stability).
And there's always curtailment, where you just don't generate the power, and turn off some the panels in the middle of the day.
Mining bitcoin with the excess power and then subsidizing the cost to generate power could work too.
That's what hydrogen production from water electrolysis is for.
Subsidise home battery systems so that the excess is stored locally instead of going back into the grid.
Which also has the additional benefit for homeowners of local backup power in the case of a blackout :)
How else will they be able to continue justify pulling coal out of the ground if they have a robust power grid based on renewables
Yeah I'm getting to that point where I'm willing to pay more to install solar, and a battery or two, just so I don't pay electrical providers as much each quarter.
We're also contemplating batteries because the amount you get paid to feed solar in isn't like for like with usage. 25c cost vs 3c feed in.
"Struggling"
We have so much solar power that we can no longer efficiently profit off of it. We would either need to reduce the margins we make on electricity or destroy our stock of solar capital to reinflate the price of energy.
What to do... what to do...
V2G and V2H is here, so you'll be able to store there and draw down overnight in a suitable ecar.
A large pumped hydro in Qld has been cancelled by the new Lib government, so won't be able to store it there. Snowy Hydro pumped storage is way behind schedule and locally Redflow went backrupt, so huge Zinc Flow storage batteries arent available to rollout to store excess energy and Lithuim is a shitty choice for large grid batteries.
H₂?