It’s a world turned upside down. From Reneweconomy:
The Australian government’s chief scientific body says there is no apparent technical impediment to reaching 100 per cent renewables for the national electricity grid, and levels of up to 30 per cent renewable energy should be considered as just “trivial” in current energy systems.
The CSIRO estimate was made in the Senate select committee into the “Resilience of electricity infrastructure in a warming world,” which is providing some fascinating insight that we will be reporting on (because mainstream media won’t).
Of course, the whole proposition of the committee was considered absurd by One Nation Senator and climate conspiracy theorist Malcolm Roberts, who repeatedly insisted that global warming was not happening and constantly badgered the energy experts on this point.
“We could probably add that introducing renewables at a share of 10, 20 or 30 per cent is fairly trivial on the basis that the existing generation capacity has a lot of flexibility to deal with the variability,” Graham told the committee, noting that existing back-up and redundancy for the current coal-dominated grid was already in place.
Graham said the challenges could start to emerge when the penetration of wind and solar move above 40 per cent –as it has in South Australia, which explains why it is focusing on storage and is finally getting traction on its call for changes to energy market rules.
“When we do modelling where we increase the renewable penetration above around 40 per cent of the energy delivered (where South Australia is now) that starts to force out some of that existing dispatchable generation, and then we find that you need to add other technologies to support renewables,’ Graham said.
“That can include storage, as we have been talking about, and there are a number of different storage technologies.
“It can also mean adding other dispatchable renewables. We often think about solar thermal as a dispatchable renewable, and there are geothermal technologies.”
And Graham, a co-author of a landmark report with the country’s network owners last year that showed high levels of renewable energy could be incorporated into the grid, and produce a $100 billion cheaper outcome than business as usual, says renewables could go much, much higher.
“But I should add that that takes care of the sort of energy balancing on a half-hour basis. There are also other issues around the need for frequency control and so forth, where you need additional technologies that provide inertia.
“That could include things like synchronous condensers and more advanced inverters for the battery technologies, and so forth.
“So generally there appear to be engineering solutions for lots of different levels of renewable penetration. The only uncertainty is that we have not actually seen them deployed, but, in theory and in simulation and modelling, there do appear to be solutions going forward to achieve whatever is desirable.”
…Several of the Senators on the committee, including Roberts and Liberal Senator Chris Back, expressed their complete distaste for wind energy, and held to their pre-conceived ideas that only fossil fuel “baseload” could deliver reliability and security.
Roberts was quickly disabused of this notion by energy expert Dr Matthew Stocks, from the College of Engineering and Computer Science, at Australian National University, in this exchange.
Senator Roberts: Like Senator Back, I totally oppose wind generation and, if ever solar becomes competitive, then that will be ideal for me when I look at the overall lifespan of the solar technology. Would you all agree that stable base load supply is essential?
Dr Stocks: No, I would not. My submission quite clearly points out that the system could provide a stable balanced system with a combination of wind and PV and pumped hydro storage. I take a very different position: base load is not essential.
Coalition and One Nation: a match made in Heaven.
