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Do you know how South Australia solved a problem of the Whyalla Steelworks when transitioning to 100% renewable electricity? They excluded on-site generation of

Do you know how South Australia solved a problem of the Whyalla Steelworks when transitioning to 100% renewable electricity? They excluded on-site generation of the plant from the statistics. "Solarization" of the plant hadn't worked out economically. Continuous manufacturing processes have big problems with intermittent energy sources. China is building tens of nuclear power plants though.

AnthonyMouse 23d ago
> Continuous manufacturing processes have big problems with intermittent energy sources. Intermittent energy sources are predictable in aggregate. A fairly modest amount of storage to smooth things out and you can pretty reasonably get above 50% solar and wind. Make up a large chunk of the balance with nuclear and hydro and you're pretty close to 100%. The last 10% is obviously the hardest, but what's the excuse for countries still doing majority fossil fuels? > China is building tens of nuclear power plants though. Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants.
- red75prime 23d ago
  Predictability will not get a plant through the night by itself. BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage." > Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants. Yeah, it's because of the above points.
  - AnthonyMouse 23d ago
    > BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage." No it doesn't. You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory and "there is no solar at night" is solved, and doing that is already cost competitive with coal on the majority of days. The problem comes when generation is low not because it's night but because it's cloudy for an extended period of time. But that only happens a small minority of the time, and doesn't require you to burn fossil fuels the other 90% of the time. You also don't need things like synchronous condensers when you're using a non-trivial amount of nuclear or hydro, neither of which is coal. > Yeah, it's because of the above points. Then how do so many other industrialized countries do it without that amount of coal? Canada and Spain are each only ~22% fossil fuels. France is <5%. The UK is 31% and only 0.1% of that is coal.
    - red75prime 23d ago
      > You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory I literally laughed out loud, sorry. Providing baseload with BESS alone? That's rich. Literally. Extremely expensive. In addition to impractical amount of batteries it requires impractical overcapacity to compensate for seasonal variation. > Then why is no other country burning that amount of coal? China does about 30% of the world's industrial production and 40% of metal production, while having around 50% of world's coal power plants. They are working on it though. Many of their new coal plants are peaker plants.
      - AnthonyMouse 23d ago
        > Extremely expensive. Battery storage has a levelized cost of ~$0.20/kWh. Solar is ~$0.04/kWh. If you're using the batteries for 50% of kWh you end up at an average of ~$0.14/kWh, which is in the same range as coal. > it requires impractical overcapacity to compensate for seasonal variation. Only if you're trying to do 100% of generation from one source. Solar generates more power in the summer, wind generates more power in the winter. Meanwhile you don't have to use overcapacity at all when your target isn't fully 100%. You have enough solar to not need fossil fuels in the warmer months at all, enough wind to only need them 20% of the time in cooler months, and then only 10% of your kWh come from fossil fuels. > China does about 30% of the world's industrial production and 40% of metal production, while having around 50% of world's coal power plants. Those are unwelcome numbers even proportional to the amount of manufacturing. > Many of their new coal plants are peaker plants. "New coal plants" is rather the problem in itself. The number we need to be going down is instead going up.
        red75prime 23d ago
        1 tonne of steel requires around 5MWh of energy at 50,000 tonnes per day it's around 250GWh of batteries at 50% usage. The largest planned BESS is 19GWh. As I said solar+BESS is impractical. Wind is more expensive. Onshore wind turbines have higher variability. Offshore ones are limited to coastal areas. Overall, there's a lot of practical problems. It's all doable, but building infrastructure takes time. China's onshore wind potential is 12.6 PWh/year[1]. China's 2024 energy consumption is 9.85 PWh[2]. It's not much of overcapacity potential. Huh. I though it's higher. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364032124005045 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640... [2] https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202501/20/content_WS678e47f8c6d0868f4e8ef000.html https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202501/20/cont...
  - dalyons 22d ago
    Nah, it’s coz they were almost all built in an era before renewables became cheaper than coal in the last few years.

AnthonyMouse 23d ago

> Continuous manufacturing processes have big problems with intermittent energy sources. Intermittent energy sources are predictable in aggregate. A fairly modest amount of storage to smooth things out and you can pretty reasonably get above 50% solar and wind. Make up a large chunk of the balance with nuclear and hydro and you're pretty close to 100%. The last 10% is obviously the hardest, but what's the excuse for countries still doing majority fossil fuels? > China is building tens of nuclear power plants though. Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants.

red75prime 23d ago
Predictability will not get a plant through the night by itself. BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage." > Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants. Yeah, it's because of the above points.
- AnthonyMouse 23d ago
  > BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage." No it doesn't. You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory and "there is no solar at night" is solved, and doing that is already cost competitive with coal on the majority of days. The problem comes when generation is low not because it's night but because it's cloudy for an extended period of time. But that only happens a small minority of the time, and doesn't require you to burn fossil fuels the other 90% of the time. You also don't need things like synchronous condensers when you're using a non-trivial amount of nuclear or hydro, neither of which is coal. > Yeah, it's because of the above points. Then how do so many other industrialized countries do it without that amount of coal? Canada and Spain are each only ~22% fossil fuels. France is <5%. The UK is 31% and only 0.1% of that is coal.
  - red75prime 23d ago
    > You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory I literally laughed out loud, sorry. Providing baseload with BESS alone? That's rich. Literally. Extremely expensive. In addition to impractical amount of batteries it requires impractical overcapacity to compensate for seasonal variation. > Then why is no other country burning that amount of coal? China does about 30% of the world's industrial production and 40% of metal production, while having around 50% of world's coal power plants. They are working on it though. Many of their new coal plants are peaker plants.
    - AnthonyMouse 23d ago
      > Extremely expensive. Battery storage has a levelized cost of ~$0.20/kWh. Solar is ~$0.04/kWh. If you're using the batteries for 50% of kWh you end up at an average of ~$0.14/kWh, which is in the same range as coal. > it requires impractical overcapacity to compensate for seasonal variation. Only if you're trying to do 100% of generation from one source. Solar generates more power in the summer, wind generates more power in the winter. Meanwhile you don't have to use overcapacity at all when your target isn't fully 100%. You have enough solar to not need fossil fuels in the warmer months at all, enough wind to only need them 20% of the time in cooler months, and then only 10% of your kWh come from fossil fuels. > China does about 30% of the world's industrial production and 40% of metal production, while having around 50% of world's coal power plants. Those are unwelcome numbers even proportional to the amount of manufacturing. > Many of their new coal plants are peaker plants. "New coal plants" is rather the problem in itself. The number we need to be going down is instead going up.
      - red75prime 23d ago
        1 tonne of steel requires around 5MWh of energy at 50,000 tonnes per day it's around 250GWh of batteries at 50% usage. The largest planned BESS is 19GWh. As I said solar+BESS is impractical. Wind is more expensive. Onshore wind turbines have higher variability. Offshore ones are limited to coastal areas. Overall, there's a lot of practical problems. It's all doable, but building infrastructure takes time. China's onshore wind potential is 12.6 PWh/year[1]. China's 2024 energy consumption is 9.85 PWh[2]. It's not much of overcapacity potential. Huh. I though it's higher. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364032124005045 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640... [2] https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202501/20/content_WS678e47f8c6d0868f4e8ef000.html https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202501/20/cont...
- dalyons 22d ago
  Nah, it’s coz they were almost all built in an era before renewables became cheaper than coal in the last few years.