That it falls short during cold winter days is telling me we could probably solve that by not building Australian houses like tents with no doors.
Proper building codes with proper insulation standards would probably reduce winter demand from residential homes by a huge chunk.
Yeah that’s kinda cool I guess but like…what about paying a bunch of money to keep obsolete coal plants open instead?
just a few hours of battery storage is still a huge amount of storage. Are plans being made to tie BEVs into this on a national scale? I figure that’s the most effective way to get closer to this goal
Check this out: https://raygen.com/projects/raygen-power-plant#resources
Batteries were a stopgap until we worked out something better. This plant gets 70% efficiency and more than enough energy storage by refrigerating a cold block, then using stored waste heat + the cold block to create a temperature differential, creating steam (in a closed loop, don’t need a big water supply) to spin a turbine that generates power when the sun goes down. Absolutely genius, already deployed and operating and yet nobody is talking about it.
i haven’t read about your link yet, but as for storage, the study states
82% of demand was directly powered by wind and solar without having to pass through storage or be curtailed
so the majority of the energy is used without being stored, and having the round trip losses.
… now back to reading ray-gen
What’s the advantage of that solution over existing solutions like heating molten salts?
This simulation used 24GW/120GWh (five hours at average demand) and achieved 98.8% renewable supply at a cost of $95/MWh, including the cost of additional transmission, storage and curtailment.
so they used a large number for storage. However, there is 7GW/33GWh of existing, under construction or financed BESS projects, and according to the study, 10GW/40GWh of storage will allow for 94% renewables, which is pretty bloody good.
But yeah, it would be interesting to see BEV’s assisting.
Are plans being made to tie BEVs into this on a national scale?
Not much yet from the government itself, but it’s a known opportunity. Smarter grids and changes in utility and customer behaviour (demand response, i.e. shifting demand to when power is cheapest and most abundant) would help a lot, and vehicle and house batteries would contribute to that.
Although I’ll add that part of the point of the article is that even with zero storage you don’t need much fossil supply, and that just supplying a large amount of wind and solar can massively cut our electricity emissions. Whereas focusing on the challenges of the last 1-2% too much can get us bogged down in the longer term problems, when we can address the immediate issue today. That doesn’t mean that the longer term problems should be ignored, of course.
I’ve heard a lot about how the grid can use my vehicle’s battery for storage and how this will be hugely beneficial for the grid. However, I’ve never heard anyone explain why I would want to participate.
The grid gets valuable energy storage, adds a bunch of wear to the battery I had to pay for, and I get…?
Demand management is much easier to make a case for and probably much simpler to implement. I get cheaper electricity on my EV charging circuit but the power company gets to turn it on and off. The grid gets demand management, I get cheaper power. I’ll still be charged the next day, I don’t care that my car was turned off for a couple of hours.
True, but at that scale it doesn’t have to be battery storage.
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