In this week’s Blowout we continue our recent focus on energy storage, featuring the just-published ACOLA study which claims that Australia can get 75% of its electricity from intermittent renewables with 105 gigawatt-hours of long-term storage, enough to cover demand for all of four hours. We follow with Russia jumping into bed with OPEC; the race for light crude; France considers spinning off EDF; the truth about Chernobyl; Germany’s coalition crisis; Tesla meets its battery deadline; interconnectors in Europe; subsidies in UK; Hinkley under fire again; Brexit and Euratom; EVs as virtual power stations: a Swedish coal plant that burns old clothes; the cooling properties of deep fat fryers and how climate change makes lizards less intelligent.
Australian Council of Learned Academies: The Role of Energy Storage in Australia’s Future Energy Supply Mix
A National Electricity Market (NEM) model was used to assess the requirements of energy storage out to 2030. The model was based on hourly supply and demand data for a year where there was the longest period of low availability of variable renewable resources (worst case scenario for variable renewable supply).
Three scenarios underpinned the modelling in this report: (1) ‘LOW RE’ (where variable renewables account for approximately 35 per cent generation); (2) ‘MID RE’ (approximately 50 per cent generation); and (3) ‘HIGH RE’ (approximately 75 per cent generation). Under the three scenarios, storage capacity requirements for energy security and reliability are shown in Figure 1. Energy storage is both a technically feasible and an economically viable approach to responding to Australia’s energy security and reliability needs to 2030, even with a high renewables generation scenario.
(“System reliability” is the ability to meet electrical energy demand (GWh) at all times of the day, the year, and in future.)
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