Thank you for writing. This topic is confusing. https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/odd-lots/id1056200096?l=en&i=1000683289906 at the end of this odd lots, Lon Huber, senior vice president of pricing and customer solutions at Duke Energy tells Tracy something like please no more solar! (She just installed some panels at her home)
Wholesale prices are one thing, but total prices are another. The surprising thing to me has been just how gargantuan the cost of new transmission has become. Much of the renewable fleet is located remotely, requiring new connectiuon assets and long distance transmission. The requirement to diversify the supply across time and weather regions to overcome intermittency necessitates more.
Wholesale is the sexy public market full of risk and excitement. But network has been the silent killer.
Interesting article and a helpful refutation of the usual suspects. In that vein ... are there any good stochastic models/simulations of the Australian energy market?
I'm not an energy market guy by any means but something like this would be great so that you can see transparently what taking away the marginal coal plant and replacing it with a battery farm would do for reliability/prices etc. Even better if it's open sourced and official, written in a accessible coding language (e.g. Python).
This is very misleading... as you can see in the chart above, brown coal is the cheapest and that can run 24/7. Renewables are cheap at certain times only and do not cover the whole 24/7. Battery is not cheap, just like any other peaking power plants. If the electricity from batteries is cheap, then it is not going to incentivize the private sector to invest in it because returns will be low. Plus, as Simon Maher correctly pointed out below, renewables require massive amounts of infrastructure investment. Green advocates simply ignore this cost. Can you name any one country in the world that has achieved the scenario you pointed out? Renewable + battery combination that resulted in lower electricity prices? None. Don't fight with the facts and science for the sake of ditching dirty but cheap and reliable brown coal.
This just underscores the fact that countries retaining coal power and adopting a diverse mix of energy supply offer cheaper energy. European countries working towards net zero offer more expensive energy than China and India.
Really interesting article as usual!
Thank you for writing. This topic is confusing. https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/odd-lots/id1056200096?l=en&i=1000683289906 at the end of this odd lots, Lon Huber, senior vice president of pricing and customer solutions at Duke Energy tells Tracy something like please no more solar! (She just installed some panels at her home)
Wholesale prices are one thing, but total prices are another. The surprising thing to me has been just how gargantuan the cost of new transmission has become. Much of the renewable fleet is located remotely, requiring new connectiuon assets and long distance transmission. The requirement to diversify the supply across time and weather regions to overcome intermittency necessitates more.
Wholesale is the sexy public market full of risk and excitement. But network has been the silent killer.
What's the argument in favour of Australia adopting net zero though? Australia has a population of circa 25 million.
As of July 2024, China had 1161 operational coal power plants.
Australia had 18.
How can shipping over Chinese manufactured solar panels save the planet? It appears to be an utterly pointless exercise.
Interesting article and a helpful refutation of the usual suspects. In that vein ... are there any good stochastic models/simulations of the Australian energy market?
I'm not an energy market guy by any means but something like this would be great so that you can see transparently what taking away the marginal coal plant and replacing it with a battery farm would do for reliability/prices etc. Even better if it's open sourced and official, written in a accessible coding language (e.g. Python).
This is very misleading... as you can see in the chart above, brown coal is the cheapest and that can run 24/7. Renewables are cheap at certain times only and do not cover the whole 24/7. Battery is not cheap, just like any other peaking power plants. If the electricity from batteries is cheap, then it is not going to incentivize the private sector to invest in it because returns will be low. Plus, as Simon Maher correctly pointed out below, renewables require massive amounts of infrastructure investment. Green advocates simply ignore this cost. Can you name any one country in the world that has achieved the scenario you pointed out? Renewable + battery combination that resulted in lower electricity prices? None. Don't fight with the facts and science for the sake of ditching dirty but cheap and reliable brown coal.
"Can you name any one country in the world that has achieved the scenario you pointed out?"
- Spain, cheapest large market power in Europe. Uruguay. Norway (hydro).
This just underscores the fact that countries retaining coal power and adopting a diverse mix of energy supply offer cheaper energy. European countries working towards net zero offer more expensive energy than China and India.
None of these countries use "battery" + RE to generate electricity as you suggested..