Australia Struggling With Oversupply of Solar Power (abc.net.au)
- Reference: 0175583877
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/24/12/03/0421204/australia-struggling-with-oversupply-of-solar-power
- Source link: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-17/solar-flooded-australia-told-its-okay-to-waste-some/104606640
> Amid the growing warmth and increasingly volatile weather of an approaching summer, Australia passed a remarkable milestone this week. The number of homes and businesses with a solar installation clicked past 4 million -- barely 20 years since there was practically none anywhere in the country. It is a love affair that shows few signs of stopping.
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> And it's a technology that is having ever greater effects, not just on the bills of its household users but on the very energy system itself. At no time of the year is that effect more obvious than spring, when solar output soars as the days grow longer and sunnier but demand remains subdued as mild temperatures mean people leave their air conditioners switched off.
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> Such has been the extraordinary production of solar in Australia this spring, the entire state of South Australia has -- at various times -- [2]met all of its electricity needs from the technology .
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> [...] [T]here is, at times, too much solar power in Australia's electricity systems to handle.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~Mirnotoriety
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-17/solar-flooded-australia-told-its-okay-to-waste-some/104606640
Negative Pricing and the Spot Price (Score:3)
Australia has a spot price on electricty. Too much rooftop has reduced the input credit to the point where it is at times negative i.e. you pay to put power into the grid so unless you buy a battery to store the excess. Solar may not be the cost saving item in the near future for Australian home. [1]https://www.energycouncil.com.... [energycouncil.com.au]
[1] https://www.energycouncil.com.au/analysis/negative-prices-and-revenues-in-the-nem-over-the-past-decade/
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You can just not put energy into the grid, you don't have to pay... Assuming you can turn your generation off at the flip of a switch, like solar can.
What a disaster, eh? All this abundant, low cost, clean energy. It's not like it can be transported or use opportunistically.
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> Assuming you can turn your generation off at the flip of a switch, like solar can.
A typical solar panel turns 15-20% of incident sunlight into electricity.
If turned off, that incident sunlight turns into heat instead, and the panel gets significantly hotter, shortening its lifespan.
It might be better to send power to the grid even if you have to pay to do so.
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> Australia has a spot price on electricty. Too much rooftop has reduced the input credit to the point where it is at times negative i.e. you pay to put power into the grid so unless you buy a battery to store the excess.
Is this something Australian consumers are subject to? Every system I have heard of which had solar and spot prices (you can get 15 minute, but not 5 minute spot prices on UK home smart meters I believe) allows you switch off generation and/or dump to a battery (at your choice) if the price is lower than you want.
> Solar may not be the cost saving item in the near future for Australian home. [1]https://www.energycouncil.com.... [energycouncil.com.au]
If there's already a much solar as the grid can usefully use, is there much point in persuading people to install more solar without batteries? This seems to me to be one of the cases where a marke
[1] https://www.energycouncil.com.au/analysis/negative-prices-and-revenues-in-the-nem-over-the-past-decade/
Wasted? Whut?! (Score:4, Insightful)
> It needs to accept that much of this solar will have to be wasted — or spilled — sometimes.
What a stupid idea. What sort of deranged lunatic thinks like this?
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a capitalist
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Unfortunately things with country electricity grid is a bit more complex, than some DC schema on a table. ;) If there are no consumption, then overproduction will be lost. And no, batteries cannot solve all of that due to they can discharge and not provide power. You need at least one or better more powerplants with STABLE power output to keep grid stable.
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> If there are no consumption, then overproduction will be lost.
Again with the "lost" nonsense. It isn't "lost" or "wasted". It's solar. Nothing is "wasted". It's just unused. What garbage is this? If this were power from fossil fuel generation then yes - it's wasted - you're note going to recoup the inputs. Solar is effectively infinite until the sun engulfs this planet and brings about the end times.
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No no, you're wrong. Until we have a Dyson sphere around the sun, inside the Earth's orbit, capturing all the sunlight and making sure that every last photon is converted into electricity, Humanity can never rest. I sure hope they never find out about the nearby blackholes and the energy pollution they create.
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It's still "wasted" from the sense that capital expenditures to purchase equipment were made to turn the unused solar power into power that could normally be useful if it could be stored or time shifted effectively. I don't think it's entirely wrong to consider this "wasted" to some degree when wastage can in a broad sense be defined as a useful resource that can't effectively be used, or in this case, maybe even an overcapacity problem until other solutions are found since the capacity produces waste elec
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> It's still "wasted" from the sense that capital expenditures to purchase equipment were made to turn the unused solar power into power that could normally be useful if it could be stored or time shifted effectively.
An argument akin to "We should boil kettles for no reason because we just can't let all this effectively free and abundant energy go to waste!"
It's a ludicrous argument with zero merit. Imagine having a panic attack about all that "wasted" sunshine warming beaches, trees, parks and crops?
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You're unable to comprehend that producing electrical energy and then wasting it is in fact... wasting it.
Why?
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> You're unable to
Your message is unimportant to us. We will not be responding.
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He build it to because one or two extreme events would pay the thing back. The Australian grid had ridiculous arbitrage opportunity if you could get access to it, that was the point of the PR campaign.
Getting the market to pay for batteries if ROI is below 10% a year will be a lot harder.
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It's just an inevitable fact. If the system has more supply than people need, and the network does Not have a producer or middleman with storage capacity to consume the excess quantity during that period of time, then the excess is inevitably wasted.
Wasted just like the sunlight that hits the ground without landing on a solar panel.
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> the excess is inevitably wasted.
> Nope. It's just unused.
> Again, if this energy were from fossil or nuke, then yes - you have lost something in the chain. This is something that actually happens in power generation. It isn't ciruclated anywhere. Once you've pushed it out from generation onto grid, anything not consumed from the grid is lost. The process is not reversible so you have wasted fuel by powering nothing. In some cases we push this excess into gravity systems for storage and re-use. In most cases it is just dropped.
> This does *not* hold true for solar. In any way.
No problem with incoming batteries (Score:2)
Until now, batteries has being expensive, so any battery installation needs to be used a lot to make a fast amortization. Not for balancing prices with small difference between day and night.
But with upcoming batteries, sodium-ion, in next five years, the price will plummet and even a simple 30$ of difference between night and day price is enough to justify to add a battery.
So the total batteries will be easily the equivalent of six hours multiplied by the total country consumption. A LOT OF STORAGE.
And the
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Yes. In summary, here in Oz panels are cheap and there are financial incentives to install them, but batteries are expensive, so people don't install them. Governments and planners still haven't got their heads around the need for "community batteries" for example, or the need to subsidise house owners to actually buy them.
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> batteries are expensive
They also present a significant disposal/refurbishment problem in the future.
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The "batteries will be cheap because of this amazing new technology that's just around the corner" has been repeated since at least 1990s. Probably longer.
Reality is that the holy grail of batteries is still lithium air, and it's perpetually 20 years away just like nuclear fusion on planet's surface that we can reliably extract energy from is perpetually 50 years away.
Ignore the headline, the article itself is great (Score:3)
Turns out to be a really great article with a fair amount of practical detail (momentum, system strength) about curtailment, the rising role of battery storage, flexing demand up, and the tradeoffs between building out new solar and new storage.
I think the reasonable conclusion is that Australia is faced with a really good problem to have -- it has the ability to provide most of its power needs through the cheapest form of power gen of all, solar, and a mix of curtailment, storage and demand flex will increase the percentage of power that can be supplied from solar even more.
As I've argued repeatedly, burning fossil fuels is like hitting yourself in the ballsack with a hammer. You want to do it as little as possible. If you used to do it daily, and now it's weekly, that's better. If you can do it only monthly, better yet. Once a year, much better. Etc.
Perfectly normal (Score:2)
There will always be some oversupply.
If it will be too large - the batteries will become more profitable.
It if will be too small - the panels will be more profitable.
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There can never be a meaningful oversupply in the grid. If there is, it collapses. Just like there can never be any meaningful lack of supply in the grid. If there is, it collapses. Your controls for this are total grid mass (which is why bigger grids are inherently more stable if switched correctly) and peakers that maintain frequency in the grid.
This is why grids must be balanced. It's always just in time on demand supply. That's why there are rapidly acting power plants that specialize in maintaining gri
If only someone said more storage was needed (Score:2)
It's not like the Australian Energy Market Operator and CSIRO were publishing guidance on the need to invest in more storage and means to distribute the power more effectively since 2018. It's not like we had 3 terms of anti renewable federal government determined not to encourage any investment in a renewable future. Oh wait, both of those things did happen. And here we are.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is a specific technical one. Rooftop solar, which is a significant proportion of Australian solar, does not provide grid forming services. It has to follow something else. And the first generation of grid batteries has the same problem. Batteries are part of the solution, but if they are all that is forming the grid, they can't ever discharge completely or the grid will collapse.
I don't doubt that the technology will be developed and the understanding of how to manage systems with these characteristics. We need to understand how to do this.
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> The problem is a specific technical one. Rooftop solar, which is a significant proportion of Australian solar, does not provide grid forming services. It has to follow something else. And the first generation of grid batteries has the same problem. Batteries are part of the solution, but if they are all that is forming the grid, they can't ever discharge completely or the grid will collapse.
> I don't doubt that the technology will be developed and the understanding of how to manage systems with these characteristics. We need to understand how to do this.
As you say, you simply have to build batteries that include grid forming and have that as their primary service. Given that they already have that, this is basically an article saying "Australia doesn't have a problem that if they did have it could be a problem". The closest the article could come to being sensible would be firstly saying "there isn't enough redundant advanced battery storage in South Australia yet", which is probably arguable and is probably the reason they don't say it. The other useful t
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One interesting option is what Ireland had pioneered - turning old fossil plants into spinning storage. They installed massive flywheels where the generators used to be. Spin them up when there is excess energy, and use them to add inertia and stability to the grid.
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This most likely for load balancing.
Fly wheels can due to earth rotation and Coriolis forces not hold energy very long.
Hm, I think the "pseudo force" is called different, the one that acts when you tilt the wheel of bicycle for instance.
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It's to provide inertia and stability on the grid, like fossil and nuclear powered generators do. As Ireland transitions away from those, it needs inertial mass to replace them.
Some companies do make energy storage flywheels as well, but that's not what they installed. Theirs is to complement wind and solar. They have vast wind energy resources. The plan is basically for on-shore to power the country and export to Europe, while off-shore is mostly generating hydrogen to fuel aircraft. There are quite a few
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The other is compressing air and then spinning things with it.
Both share the same benefits and problems. Problems of being so expensive to build and so inefficient as to be basically a graft for specific ideology and its adherents to siphon government money, coupled with benefits of being something that propagandists of that movement can use to fool average people who don't understand concepts like "efficiency".
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Not really. The one in Ireland cost around â50m, and was one of the first so the cost is coming down from there. That's not a lot for such a useful and powerful grid stabilizer. Compared to the other options like nuclear or building more fossil fuels, it's actually quite cheap.
Once you get into LCOE along with the wind and solar it enables, it's peanuts.