Do Renewables Have a Future without Baseload?

On April 16th, in Spain and Portugal, both wind and PV combined to generate 100.63% of total electricity demand – a first in Spain’s energy history. Seven dts later 50,000,000+ spanish. Portuguese and some French people were left with NO power for at least 11 hours, and some for more rthan a week.
Red Energie first claimed it was a cyber attack, then moved on to some undefined cosmic atmospheric event.
Then they claimed the four nuclear plants failed, when they were offline because the Government pricing methods prevented them from opening. Spanish Politicins had already been warned of the danger of closing down nuclear plants (read coal in Australia) during high renewable input
Don't forget the failure of the French Interconnector ( that means a powerline fell dowm). France provides a max 4% of Spaiins electricity.
Eleven hours later, hydro kicked in. and so did gas. Does that mean if we extract the black colour from coal and oil, it would be as safe as gas? Apparently Turnbull's uphill solar also helped, but I wonder where it got the electricity in the first place given the early AM failure of the grid.
Anyway, as expected thr real solution is to kick the can down the road.
Get more batteries. Adelaide did that =problem solved.
Melbourne and Sydney have already had brushes with failure.
Broken Hill had a failed interconnectorand and after a week of failure, repaired an old disused coal generator.
In Australia they are not only shutting down baseload generators, they are demolishing them as soon as they are deemed useless.
We will be Spain. Batteries is nothing more than the wet dream of believers

As CLarice said in Silence of the lambs "I opened the gate to their pen, but they wouldn’t run. They just stood there, confused. They wouldn’t run."

We are the lambs.

Comments

  • Wow. So this is why my parents said not to do drugs.

    • You should think better of yourself

  • +4

    Aussies arguing over our 1% of emissions while China starts building 100GW of new coal power plants lol

    • +1

      And 400GW of renewables

      • -1

        Does it cancel out? /s

  • We need millions of giant sand batteries to help smooth supply and demand

    • I'm saving my old torch batteries.
      If it saves one life……

    • Millions seems excessive.
      They would be a hell of a lot cheaper than the project Mr Turnbull got the NSW ALP government to pay him for.

  • -1

    Renewables have a future of course.

    But there is no chance we will ever be carbon free without nuclear power.

    The electrical load is going to grow drastically over the next decade as essentially all new road vehicles will be electric too.

    • -3

      When you say "Carbon Free" do you mean all life, because, simplified, that's what we are all made of,
      or "carbon dioxide" the stuff every living thing on the planet exhales every minute of every day?
      It's important because coal is 50-75% carbon and almost no water.
      The human body is 20 % carbon but about 50-75% water.
      Dessicating humans would leave approximately the same carbon ratio as coal.And that is why the crazies want to eliminate humanity

      • When you say "Carbon Free" do you mean all life, because, simplified, that's what we are all made of

        Well humans are technically a renewable resource, so in theory, you could burn them as a power source without increasing global CO2 levels.

        Feels a bit unethical though, at least to me. Nuclear power is a better option imho.

        • Soylent Green, way ahead of the game

    • We have a lot of sunshine, plenty of wind. Add storage and a smart grid that uses batteries from vehicles etc tonfeed the grid when they arent being used and it is possible. Its also about using the grid smarter.

      Have a look at Janus trucks. Theye retro fitting swappable batteries to trucks. The batteries are charged when its convenient then swapped into the trucks in 3-4 minutes. Not only are they making trucks cheaper to run, theyve become an energy company. Charging off solar and low tarrif power and also feeding back into the grid when the tariff is high when the batteries arent needed in a truck.

      Nuclear is too expensive and requires a lot of water. It is also a bit liek coal in that it is hard to ranp production up and down. It cant react quicly so will be costing money to run while there is abundant chealer renewables available.

      • -1

        'Add storage' - do the math on this and you will see it's just not realistic.

        Would costs hundreds of billions, probably trillions to store enough energy to keep Australia running overnight, especially as transportation transitions to electric too.

        Batteries don't last forever either, especially when you're draining them completely dry every night.

        • Would costs hundreds of billions, probably trillions to store enough energy to keep Australia running overnight,

          It will cost billions to build nuclear plants. Are you an expert in energy infrastructure that has calculated the costs?

          Wind blows overnight, we dont use as much energy during the night either. I dont admit to being an expert, but the people in the know (like the CSIRO) seem to think that renewables will work.

          • @Euphemistic: We use a massive amount of energy during the night.

            It just isn't possible to store this in batteries, that's the reality of it.

            Live data of our energy consumption by source: https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/nem

            • +1

              @trapper: Who says we cant power overnight on renewables and batteries? Got any references?

              We use a bunch of electricity over night partly because weve designed a system to do so. We encourage people to use electricity overnight by making it cheaper. No reason we cant change that to use it during the day. For example, theres a bunch of water heating that could be diverted to when the sun shines very easily.

              I prefer to think what is possible rather than just saying it can't be done. Of course, if science say no, then I'll listen, but anyone else better have some resources backing up their assertion.

              • +1

                @Euphemistic:

                Who says we cant power overnight on renewables and batteries? Got any references?

                It's simple math really.

                Take the Hornsdale Power Reserve as an example - it cost $172 million to build and has a capacity of 194 MWh.

                That’s enough to cover our nighttime load of ~20 GW for just 35 seconds. We’d need thousands of these.

                • @trapper: Have you done your calculations including removing the loads that are artificially run overnight? Then add people/businesses that are buying their own batteries to run their load on their own solar? Yes, we need lots of storage, batteries, hydro and others, ut not as much as you imply

                  Saying our current system cant work without thinking how we can adapt to cheaper renewable sources is thinking backward, not forward.

                  • @Euphemistic:

                    Saying our current system cant work

                    Our current system works fine, but it's mostly coal power.

                    • @trapper: Those coal fired stations are on borrowed time and need replacing. We have better options than bulding the same over again. And while we rebuild generation, we can alter the way the system works to make it more efficient.

            • -1

              @trapper: no, that graph showed daytime load was about 26mw and night time was always lower at 20mw, but the bulk of that is due to energy intensive activities like metallurgy, in fact the bulk of output of those coal power station was originally designed to accomodate those industries. But since we transform away from making stuff to importing stuff from overseas so there's no longer the need for baseload at night anymore and no more reason to subsidise the smelter with cheap energy anymore. It's a sad reality that we won't be making our own steel or aluminium anymore but same goes for cars and baby nappies. The concept of baseload is no longer relevant.

              • @lgacb08:

                that graph showed daytime load was about 26mw and night time was always lower at 20mw

                Not 20 MW, 20 GW, and that is all night long, every night. This is a massive amount of energy which cannot be stored in batteries.

                so there's no longer the need for baseload at night anymore

                yes there is, look at the graph, huge power demand all night long. ~ 20 GW

                • @trapper:

                  Take the Hornsdale Power Reserve as an example - it cost $172 million to build and has a capacity of 194 MWh.
                  That’s enough to cover our nighttime load of ~20 GW for just 35 seconds. We’d need thousands of these.

                  Hornsdale was the biggest battery in the world at the time, but don't even make the top 20 these days. There are batteries in China and USA that are several times larger. Neoen's Goydor North project in SA is a 900MW / 3,600 MWh battery alongside 1GW of wind power, and there are plenty of smaller battery projects in various stages of planning, construction and commissioning.

                  This is a massive amount of energy which cannot be stored in batteries.

                  There's no reason to think it's not possible. What you're actually claiming is that it would be too expensive. However, the rapidly falling price of battery storage, and the scale at which they're already being installed all over the country, suggests that plenty of energy companies disagree with you. Tesla's Gigafactory in Shanghai alone is scaling up to a production rate of 40GWh of grid-scale energy storage each year, and CATL and BYD are doing the same thing.

                  The overall plan is to reach around 20GWh of energy storage in Australia by 2030, although it seems that target will be reached a couple years later than originally planned.

                  Besides, there's no reason all overnight demand needs to be met by chemical batteries. It can be met with a mixture of chemical storage, hydro storage and instantaneous generation from wind. Offshore wind, which is more consistent at night, is supposed to be a big part of that, which is why it's so important to get the NIMBYs out of the way.

                  It's also important that we shift off-peak power rates to reflect the modern situation - running power intensive household items like dryers and hot water units overnight needs to be time-shifted to the midday peak of solar generation. I strongly expect that more devices with smart controls will be deployed so the grid operators can manage these loads more actively in the future.

                  We already have several pumped hydro schemes in action and quite a few more are on the way - these can store a collosal amount of energy and absorb a lot of our excess generation during the day. Snowy + Snowy 2.0 (when completed) will have a combined 6.3 GW output and a total 350GWh of storage all by itself. The Borumba Pumped Hydro that's currently in development in Queensland will contribute another 48GWh of storage when completed.

                  It's worth noting that the LNP's $100-600B nuclear plan was only for around 6GW of capacity, so even if they were all running at 100% capacity it wouldn't be enough to meet current average demand overnight. Whichever way you want to slice it, massive investment in new generation and storage capacity is required, and the sooner the better.

                  • @klaw81:

                    The overall plan is to reach around 20GWh of energy storage in Australia by 2030

                    We need 15x this though. So it will be coal power still chugging away for the foreseeable future.

  • -2

    Dont forget Turnbull has sucked in the Qld Govet into Snowy !!!, or whatever, at Wivenhoe dam, and I can be corrected on thr location as well, but it has happened

    • I'm not sure what you mean by this, or what point you thought you were making, but it makes absolutely zero sense.

      • Understood.
        It should have been in response to @tenpercent on 14/05/2025 - 18:30

        • I don't think Turnbull had anything to do with Wivenhoe Pumped Hydro, which has been in operation since 1984.

          Are you thinking of Borumba?

          • -1

            @klaw81: I may have to stand corrrected. The honourable Malcolm won two contracts with Upper Hunter Hydro (UHH) in NSW but I can't find QLD link.
            But I believe in my memory.
            Thanks

            • @Clickbait:

              I may have to stand corrrected

              What's a single mistake in a lifetime of genius?

              (O see your channelling that pirate again)

  • Will take a lot of energy to produce rocket fuel on Mars.

    Using solar power for this is going to be very challenging. Only 43% of the Sun's energy arrives compared to earth, plus there are dust storms which will be a continual pain covering the panels with dust.

    Elon will start a nuclear power company at some point out of necessity for his Mars dream, and bring the costs down >10x for us here on earth too.

    • -1

      Thanks for the latest scifi chat room gossip.
      Saved me logging in.

      Elons kids will eat him alive long before any of that dream emerges.

  • -3

    Latest news from Reuters
    https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/ghost-…
    Everyone knows Rueters is as credible as ABC and the Guardian.
    "Power inverters, which are predominantly produced in China, are used throughout the world to connect solar panels and wind turbines to electricity grids. They are also found in batteries, heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers."

    It fits the Spanish experience

    • +2

      Maybe we need to build our own industry then?

      It seems weve wasted valuable time for developing our own renewable manufacturing because the governments before the present one were hell bent on keeping coal going rather than looking to the future.

      It fits the Spanish experience

      How so? They have said it wasn't a cyber attack.

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