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Australia is so outrageous. So much land, sun, wind, and money but no, they'll just use coal thank you.
by sgu999 4y ago
Australia is so outrageous. So much land, sun, wind, and money but no, they'll just use coal thank you.
- pydry 4y agoPoland is nearly all coal too while Germany is right next door and 50% renewable.
- geertj 4y agoVery sad indeed. Curious if there’s any aussies here that can share the local perspective.
- thrown_22 4y agoWorked in energy as a quant a few years back: the current 'greening' of the grid is nothing of the sort. It's just a cash grab by creating extreme volatility in energy prices. On the right (wrong) days you had swings of $10,000 USD within 5 minutes of each other. The net result was the grid being taken over by the government after a series of rolling blackouts in a number of states and letting everything rip. All this is was directly attributed to _one_ coal station going offline unexpectedly and losing the baseload it generated. I can write a book on how fucked the market here is.
- noibl 4y agoIt's nighttime and there is no wind. That's the downside of extrapolating from real-time data. A couple of highlights from Australia's energy transition story in the last few days, which show some of the work being done at state level in spite of a largely renewables-hostile federal government over the last several years: > the Western Australia grid ... reached 82 per cent renewables for a half-hour period on October 30 ... and it is likely that new peak is the highest for any gigawatt-scale grid in the world. > South Australia ... has established the world’s highest share of renewables – as a percentage of demand – in any gigawatt scale grid in the world, when it reached 146 per cent on September 14. The excess is, of course, exported to the neighbouring state, in this case Victoria. -- https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-stunning-wind-and-solar-leaps-in-australias-most-advanced-renewable-grids/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-stunning-wind-and-solar-leap... [2022-11-04] > [NSW is seeking] solutions on replacing 10GW of coal capacity that is likely to leave the grid within the next decade. > Those plans are being accelerated by fast-tracked closures of the main coal generators, including Liddell early next year, Eraring in 2025, and Bayswater as early as 2030. Vales Point is expected to close by 2029, leaving Mt Piper with the only uncertain closure time. -- https://reneweconomy.com.au/nsw-formally-declares-its-third-renewable-zone-as-shift-from-coal-accelerates/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/nsw-formally-declares-its-third-... [2022-11-04]
- KyeRussell 4y agoWe had ~10 years of a government in the pocket of fossil fuel companies. It’s that simple. Our last PM brought a piece of coal into parliament as a prop, telling everyone that they shouldn’t be afraid of it. The bloke genuinely took the “let God deal with it” strategy, which is more palatable or at least common in the US, but was quite jarring here. With a new government and increased market pressures, the tides are turning, quite erratically though, because of time/market pressure, mismanagement, incompetence, opportunistic capitalists, and whatever else.
- krzyk 4y agoCoal is cheaper than crating solar panels and storage of electricity for them. Wind has other issues. There is no silver bullet here.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoCoal is not cheaper for them. And hasnt been for well over a decade. https://www.csiro.au/-/media/News-releases/2022/GenCost-2022/GenCost2021-22Final_20220708.pdf https://www.csiro.au/-/media/News-releases/2022/GenCost-2022... They just had a government that wanted to funnel money to their backers in coal industry.
- thrown_22 4y agoSo how much can I buy solar power for at midnight? Because coal is the same price at noon and now. That solar is cheaper at noon doesn't mean much. It's a bit like saying that coal is free underground.
- DFHippie 4y agoThose are different goalposts.
- thrown_22 4y agoYou're right. We can just turn off society between sunset and sunrise. Who needs things like refrigeration and life support on all the time anyway?
- DFHippie 4y agoLet me translate my post: You changed the topic.
- thrown_22 4y agoLet me explain my point: power is not energy and energy is not power. Renewable power is cheap in the same way someone whose head is dipped in liquid nitrogen and whose feet are in molten lead in over all pretty comfortable.
- starfallg 4y agoAustralia has the 3rd largest coal reserves in the world, and relatively small population, so economically it makes sense for them as upfront investment is lower for coal compared to renewables, as a lot of the cost of coal power is in the extraction. Obviously not good for the long-term, nor good for the planet, but this is the same driver for coal power also (which we indirectly contribute to due to the sheer amount of goods they export to the advanced economies).
- thrown_22 4y agoYou can burn coal at night. Turning the sun on at midnight is somewhat more difficult.
- e12e 4y agoMeh @69 degrees Northern latitude ;) Now, turning the sun on in December otoh...
- thrown_22 4y agoIt's currently midnight in Australia. Please advice on how to turn on sun.
- e12e 4y agoHere it's half past three and the sun set an hour ago - and polar night starts on the 28th. My silly point was mostly that solar has its limits. Here we have polar day in summer - so the sun does not set (at midnight or otherwise).
- kzrdude 4y agoNot "just" - that's not painting the whole picture. Go to NSW (Australia) on the map. Look at the left hand side panel. Look at production during midday - it says 55-60% of power comes from solar energy for that time of day. If you look at the snapshot at the current time (of this posting), the sun has gone down and there's less solar power.
- sgu999 4y agoIndeed, South Australia can go green mid day! Thanks for pointing this out.
- howeman 4y agoAustralia has the most installed solar capacity per capita in the world, and has installed nearly 4GW of solar in the last 12 months alone. They're also making strong moves on battery storage They started behind the curve, but they're moving quickly, relatively at least
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- toomuchtodo 4y agohttps://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/may/29/australia-to-achieve-50-renewables-by-2030-without-government-intervention-analysis-finds https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/may/29/austr...