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>First of all, a high spot price is not in itself a problem as long as the high price lasts only for a short time and effectively brings needed capacity online.
by antt 8y ago
>First of all, a high spot price is not in itself a problem as long as the high price lasts only for a short time and effectively brings needed capacity online. Where you have a serious problem is when spot prices spike, no one responds and load-shedding starts. I appreciate that SA has actually got to the point of load-shedding several times now, which is indicative of a severe problem.
As you should well know being in the business the spot price has a hard cap of $14500. You should also know that spot prices were maxed out from 3pm to 8pm in Vic and SA on Thursday and would have been maxed out for the whole of Friday if not for AEMO stepping in and effectively nationalizing the electricity market.
Anyone with a spreadsheet and publicly available data can see that the SA shedding events have expanded to Vic for the first time this year. Further anyone who even looks at the ages of the coal plants providing base load generation will realize it will get worse on from here.
For the rest of your points: this is absolutely a technological problem. Physics and maths, contrary to what our old prime minister used to say, are respected in Australia. Electricity generated by heavy spinning things takes a long time to ramp up and down and needs a different grid to that used by renewables and batteries. Batteries are about 5 orders of magnitude too expensive to be used as the backbone of the energy network. So the only things renewables do today from the pov of the network is add spikiness both the production and demand side of the market, making both the market and the grid more unstable, more expensive and worse for everyone who isn't a speculator.
In short: with current technology you can have a stable network or a renewable one, you can have both if you're willing to pay at least 10 times more for electricity.
Or we can build nuclear power plants and solve all our problems for the next 50 years.
- eigenvector 8y agoI agree that a 100% renewable grid is not economical at this time. Nor is 90%, nor 80%. The question is where the threshold lies for the maximum amount of renewable generation we can accommodate while maintaining reliability and delivering power at an economical price for consumers. That number is going to vary in different grid systems based on the size of the balancing area, the strength and resiliency of the transmission system and amount of storage available. Balancing areas with large amounts of hydro-storage will be able to accommodate more renewables, as will those that connect 10s of thousands of MW or more. This isn't about physics and math. It's about SA being a very small grid where contingencies (both transmission and unit trip) dominate reliability planning. There are grids operating with the same level of renewable penetration as SA or more that have never experienced load shedding. SA could accommodate perhaps one large nuclear power plant. And then the entire system design would be dictated by unit tripping contingencies. The cost of planning the system to prevent load-shedding when a 500+ MW unit trips at that plant would be massive. Nuclear is not a panacea for system security. Please don't generalize the problems of a very unique and small system to the rest of the world. SA has unique challenges as a vast and sparsely populated region that don't exist in Europe, Asia or even most of North America. ERCOT has run with 40% wind penetration on a 44 GW system, and they've done it cheaper than anyone can build nuclear today.