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Saying renewables are cheap is like saying SDE interns are cheap. The operational instability created by large scale adoption of renewables is an important part

Saying renewables are cheap is like saying SDE interns are cheap. The operational instability created by large scale adoption of renewables is an important part of the TCO. Even places like Australia, which are naturally blessed in terms of wind and sun prevalence, are not able to divest from large scale coal power plants. Intermittency is a huge problems for grids, and many of the widely deployable energy resources are inherently intermittent (which projects like Xlinks try to solve with other flaky engineering solutions)

kieranmaine 1y ago
> Even places like Australia, which are naturally blessed in terms of wind and sun prevalence, are not able to divest from large scale coal power plants. This is not true. In Australia Coal generation peaked at 179135 GWh in 2008 and was down to 126475 GWh in 2024 [1]. The state of Southern Australia generated 71.9% of it's electricity with renewables and only used batteries for 1.1% of generation. It replaced it's coal generation with gas generation, and gas generation is declining. 1. https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/au/?range=all&interval=1y&view=discrete-time&group=Detailed https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/au/?range=all&... 2. https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=all&interval=1y&view=discrete-time&group=Detailed https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=all...
- nostrebored 1y ago
  This is absolutely true. NSW energy crises in May and 2022 caused the AEMO to cap prices. The shutdown of the largest power plant in NSW was extended again just a few months ago due to _grid instability_. Onboarding variable production is great. Just like having spot instances for compute is great. The problem is when enough of your substrate is ephemeral, you open yourself up to a ton of new failure modes. Only "our replication and database failed at the same time" is a lot less bad then "total grid failure".

kieranmaine 1y ago

> Even places like Australia, which are naturally blessed in terms of wind and sun prevalence, are not able to divest from large scale coal power plants. This is not true. In Australia Coal generation peaked at 179135 GWh in 2008 and was down to 126475 GWh in 2024 [1]. The state of Southern Australia generated 71.9% of it's electricity with renewables and only used batteries for 1.1% of generation. It replaced it's coal generation with gas generation, and gas generation is declining. 1. https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/au/?range=all&interval=1y&view=discrete-time&group=Detailed https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/au/?range=all&... 2. https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=all&interval=1y&view=discrete-time&group=Detailed https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=all...

nostrebored 1y ago
This is absolutely true. NSW energy crises in May and 2022 caused the AEMO to cap prices. The shutdown of the largest power plant in NSW was extended again just a few months ago due to _grid instability_. Onboarding variable production is great. Just like having spot instances for compute is great. The problem is when enough of your substrate is ephemeral, you open yourself up to a ton of new failure modes. Only "our replication and database failed at the same time" is a lot less bad then "total grid failure".