100% renewable electricity in Australia
Guest post by Energy Matters commentator Roger Young. Roger is a retired businessman from Australia who is concerned by the renewables free-for-all.
The object of his post, which was originally submitted as a comment, is an academic study published by Blakers et al that claims Australia can become a 100% renewables nation at relatively low cost. Roger Young questions the modelling work presented and asserts that the storage requirement has been under-estimated by a factor of 12 which naturally has a profound impact on the cost estimates.
To set the scene, here is the abstract from the Blakers study, Rogers post follows.
An hourly energy balance analysis is presented of the Australian National Electricity Market in a 100% renewable energy scenario, in which wind and photovoltaics (PV) provides about 90% of the annual electricity demand and existing hydroelectricity and biomass provides the balance. Heroic assumptions about future technology development are avoided by only including technology that is being deployed in large quantities (>10 Gigawatts per year), namely PV and wind.
Additional energy storage and stronger interconnection between regions was found to be necessary for stability. Pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) constitutes 97% of worldwide electricity storage, and is adopted in this work. Many sites for closed loop PHES storage have been found in Australia. Distribution of PV and wind over 10-100 million hectares, utilising high voltage transmission, accesses different weather systems and reduces storage requirements (and overall cost).
The additional cost of balancing renewable energy supply with demand on an hourly rather than annual basis is found to be modest: AU$25-30/MWh (US$19-23/MWh). Using 2016 prices prevailing in Australia, the levelised cost of renewable electricity (LCOE) with hourly balancing is estimated to be AU$93/MWh (US$70/MWh). LCOE is almost certain to decrease due to rapidly falling cost of wind and PV.
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