gumnut

I’m really hoping this is a temporary problem.

There are a lot of very large batteries in the process of being built that will start to meaningfully address this issue in the next couple of years.

When you “mine” natural gas and burn it for heat, it’s gone. It disappears (and produces harmful GHG in the process) You have to keep doing this to get more output.

When you mine materials for batteries, you end up with a physical thing that persists, can be used over and over and can be recycled into new batteries at end of life.

This means the amount of mining required for renewables + batteries is proportional to only the addition of new capacity, whereas the amount of “mining” for fossil fuels is proportional to the total gross energy output (including significant heat losses)

We’re mining a lot of battery materials now, but that’s because we’re adding a crapload of capacity.

It says in the article that this is likely an exaggeration.

American exceptionalism at its finest.

It’s such a dumb metric for batteries. I wish people would stop using it.

Thanks for the heads up!

This is explicitly addressed in AEMO’s Integrated System Plan but the tl;dr is that in a national grid with geographically diverse renewable generation and a little more transmission, the chances of there being a weather-related shortfall are exceedingly rare.

For these cases we have pumped hydro being built, and we can still fall back to gas peaking plants for whatever unmet demand is left.

Yes, gas is not carbon free, and it will be expensive to run in these cases, but it won’t run often, it is already built and will allow us to operate at well above 80% renewables until we can built enough long term storage to make it redundant. This meets our international abatement obligations, and more importantly reduces the area under the emissions curve, which is all that really matters tbh.

Nuclear: to maintain baseline power (as opposed to peak power) for emergency scenarios.

That’s an incredibly expensive emergency power supply. If you can’t operate a nuclear plant 24/7 it’s going to take a veeeeerry long time to pay off the massive capital investment.

And that’s the crux of the issue. These plants won’t be supplying baseload. By the time they get built we will have twice as much rooftop solar, and lots more utility wind and solar. There will be very little room for them to operate at a spot price that earns them money.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. Energy is bid into the market at the spot price. Because the marginal cost of producing energy from renewables is so cheap, this will displace energy from all other sources when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. This is what’s already happening with the coal generators today.

By the time any nuclear gets built, there will be so much solar in the system that nuclear will have to be forcibly shut off at least 40% of the time or operate at a loss. This capacity factor is then on par with wind, so you may as well just build more of that - it’s way cheaper.

The concept of baseload power is dead and has been dead for a while. What we need is more dispatch-able generation and storage.

No Home app support? Oof.

Well he used to work as a tobacco lobbyist, and he was happy to get Channel Seven to buy him drugs, sex and a fancy apartment.

The overall picture has telltale signs of an entitled, narcissistic, selfish creep. But hey, maybe I only see him like this because Lisa Wilkinson told me to.

Melbourne, Australia