Thread: Katoomba Monthly Temp average set to be SMASHED!!! AGAIN!!!

Originally Posted by Bushmiller

Ian

I made a few assumptions in suggesting a 25% output over a 24 hour period.The way I reasoned it was that at least 2/3rds of the day is without direct sunlight. Commercial farm panels may have a degree of solar tracking associated with them, which would increase output, but they also lose efficiency above 26degs). I reduced the overall output to 25% to allow for cloudy or partially cloudy days. Now I concede that this is not a hugely scientific approach, but I thought it would do to question the figure apparently stated by Sanjeev Gupta.

My calculation is therefore 280 x 6 x 365 = 613,200MW per year, which is 613GW, which is not 10GW.

More of an issue is how is that five times the requirements for SA? Their website maintains SA demand is 1.65GW per year!! My calculations are 1200MW (Purely an average observation as I have seen >2000MW and < 1000MW) x 24 x 365 = 10,512,000MW which is 10,512GW. Unless I have messed up the figures (which has been known to happen so please correct me if I am wrong) there is a big discrepancy there. This is not a journalistic mistake. It is from their website:

Enough renewables to meet SA’s needs five times over: Sanjeev Gupta’s plan | Repower Australia

Regards
Paul

my calculations were different

10,000 MWh / 200 MW = 50 (days) x 5 = 200 (days). Factor in something for cloud, etc and 365 is not too big a stretch so sort of reasonable as an order of magnitude calculation.



on SA's power requirements, annual demand is about 12 to 13,000 GWh (12 to 13 TWh) - https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/File...ity-Report.pdf - not 1.7 GWh so for starters that's a "journalistic mistake" in the order of a factor of four. Did I mention something about not believing everything you read?

Originally Posted by FenceFurniture

Agreed that recharging EVs from locally produced Solar power is the optimum way to go, but isn't it a bit misleading to compare figures for a sedate car such as the Corolla which does 0-100 in around 8-9 seconds (petrol), with figures for a performance vehicle (EV only) which does 0-100 in "as little as 3.4 seconds"?

nope

the main performance difference between the vehicles is in the electric motors. Which is not much of a difference at all.
sub 5 seconds 0-100 is easily achievable with a fully electric powered Corolla.
The "performance" Tesla may have a few more "bells and whistles" when it comes to efficiently getting an electric motor's instant torque to the ground, but both electric powered cars (Tesla and Corolla) would have similar performance figures.

Originally Posted by Bushmiller

WP

Agreed you could, but could you get a commercial return on your $14billion investment?

Paul

This discussion is confirming to me that, as a country, Australia has to totally rethink what constitutes a "commercial return on investment".
For those times when the sun doesn't shine and the wind's not blowing -- you will need storage of some sort. And that storage is not cheep.
And for those times when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing the "commercial return on investment" will be negative. (It's a function of the necessary over investment.)

If the economy is to continue functioning at those times -- I'm assuming that no one is volunteering to freeze in the dark while not being paid -- then it's the role of Government to step in and and provide a "take or pay" price guarantee spread across the Nation's entire tax base.
A role current governments appear to be very reluctant to take.

Further to that point Ian, the income stream the government currently receives from mining and fuel excise will be diminishing so there will need to be some changes to revenue collection system

actually FF, I would agree that you should never edit an in-line response with your own text, even if you choose to bold it, as it's no longer clear that the quote was modified. The forum allows you to have multiple quote sections, so there's no reason not to do that imho... And when someone forgets to mark it as bold, at least it's clear. (yes this is not on the topic of discussion but I still think the reason it came up was to have clarity of message and therefore worthwhile in this context)

Originally Posted by poundy

actually FF, I would agree that you should never edit an in-line response with your own text, even if you choose to bold it, as it's no longer clear that the quote was modified. The forum allows you to have multiple quote sections, so there's no reason not to do that imho... And when someone forgets to mark it as bold, at least it's clear. (yes this is not on the topic of discussion but I still think the reason it came up was to have clarity of message and therefore worthwhile in this context)

Well I've been doing it for years and years, along with other people (which is why I started it in the first place - it appears to be accepted forum practice), and nobody has ever complained about being misquoted before (if you look through my posts just in this thread you will see it used often, but not always). I used to also make it blue but these days (4-5 years) I can't because I have a DarkBackground app in Firefox which changes the colours that I see compared to what is posted.

What I could do is put FF: put a response in here

I only read the quote if the response is unclear or I have missed the original quote.

If there is only a quote I assume that it is an error, that there was no response and move on as it is too hard to work out which bit is quote and which is response.

Originally Posted by FenceFurniture

Well I've been doing it for years and years, along with other people (which is why I started it in the first place - it appears to be accepted forum practice), and nobody has ever complained about being misquoted before (if you look through my posts just in this thread you will see it used often, but not always). I used to also make it blue but these days (4-5 years) I can't because I have a DarkBackground app in Firefox which changes the colours that I see compared to what is posted.

What I could do is put FF: put a response in here

Originally Posted by Bohdan

I only read the quote if the response is unclear or I have missed the original quote.

If there is only a quote I assume that it is an error, that there was no response and move on as it is too hard to work out which bit is quote and which is response.

@Bohdan's reply shows why your text in the inline quote is going to get lost in the formatting, even with bold/coloured etc.

Just because someone did something and then others followed doesn't mean it's still a good idea... And sure, in this thread we're talking important things not trivialities like this, but I think keeping things clearly delineated makes sense.

Originally Posted by ian

Paul

This discussion is confirming to me that, as a country, Australia has to totally rethink what constitutes a "commercial return on investment".
For those times when the sun doesn't shine and the wind's not blowing -- you will need storage of some sort. And that storage is not cheep.
And for those times when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing the "commercial return on investment" will be negative. (It's a function of the necessary over investment.)

If the economy is to continue functioning at those times -- I'm assuming that no one is volunteering to freeze in the dark while not being paid -- then it's the role of Government to step in and and provide a "take or pay" price guarantee spread across the Nation's entire tax base.
A role current governments appear to be very reluctant to take.

Ian

We have commented at work that the dynamic is already changing in the way prices are going and realistically we are only a very small way into the transition to renewables.

One point I have made in the past, but not recently, is that for solar (also applies to wind but for simplicity and to explain the concept I will restrict to solar) to replace fossil fired generation you need four times the amount of generation. You need three times to cover for the dark or sunless hours and another amount for when it was cloudy. A quick look at the demand a few moments ago showed it to be 23,673MW across the five states. We will call it 25,000MW as you need at least the maximum demand if there is to be no load shedding. 25,000MW allows you to have power through the day but there is nothing remaining to charge the storage batteries which is why you need the extra 75,000MW (50,000 to charge up 16 hours of storage and another 25,000 for the cloud cover factor) plus 75,000MW of storage batteries too! There are some assumptions there that are not quite correct (the demand at night is less than during the day for example), but I am trying to illustrate a point)

Clearly this is going to be expensive: Make that horrendously expensive! If the cost of producing 1MW of solar power is now on a par with 1MW of thermal power it translates to being only four times as expensive without factoring in storage batteries. Perhaps one day there will be a way of doing this but it is not there now and without a major break through in technology I don't see it happening in the near future.

So that brings us back to needing to find a solution for that base load component, which is the only one for the moment to guarantee continuity of supply. I certainly don't have an answer, although I did suggest that more research was required into Thorium nuclear. As so far only pilot plants have been built it is unclear as to whether it will ultimately be a viable option.

Some information in the Wikipedia link below, but as you can see it is not without problems.

Thorium-based nuclear power - Wikipedia

Regards
Paul

"I think I may have missed the reason why it is better to link WA to the eastern states, when they never have been before, especially at such a cost. Could someone just touch on that again please?" (Quote by FenceFurniture)

Brett

I think this was an idea that was tossed out because of the time differential and the possibility that peak demand times would be staggered. the proposal was that excess capacity could be shuffled back n forward in a similar way that the current interconnectors do between the eastern states. However, it would be ridiculously expensive and then the theme developed from there as to what you could build for the same money.

So it remains a product of the brainstorming.



Regards
Paul

Edit: Brett, I must have clicked "reply" instead of of "reply with quote." It was in response to your question over an interconnector between WA and the Eastern states in post #579. I have added in your quote so it makes sense.

Originally Posted by FenceFurniture

Agreed that recharging EVs from locally produced Solar power is the optimum way to go, but isn't it a bit misleading to compare figures for a sedate car such as the Corolla which does 0-100 in around 8-9 seconds (petrol), with figures for a performance vehicle (EV only) which does 0-100 in "as little as 3.4 seconds"?

Brett

It is a little mind blowing to see how fast electric cars can accelerate. This is because (I'm sure you know) they produce instant and full torque. The internal combustion engine is poor at developing power. It has to build power and to compensate for this deficiency we give these vehicles a gearbox. In fact we now quite commonly see 7-speed automatics and 6-speed manuals. I don't know what an electric Corolla accelerates at. The Tesla "S" easily blows away any muscle car you care to name over a standing quarter mile including the likes of V8 supercars. It loses out to all of them over a mile drag. It puts power down in the first 100/200m that no conventional combustion powered vehicle can emulate. I say conventional because somebody will point to the top fuel dragsters (they are amazing, but not terribly practical).

There is a car around called the White Zombie. It is an electric car based on an old, old Datsun. Back in 2011 it was the fastest electric car in the world. There are many videos of this car in action, but this one below is indicative of just how an electric car puts down it's power. (Sorry, the vid is, well, amateurish)

YouTube

The guy that built it also drove it around as his street car. At some point he swapped out the original lead acid batteries for lithium ion batteries. I can't remember how much weight was saved, but the car then accelerated even faster.

Regards
Paul

Originally Posted by FenceFurniture

I think I may have missed the reason why it is better to link WA to the eastern states, when they never have been before, especially at such a cost. Could someone just touch on that again please?

My embolding above in quote from FF.


That was my contribution and the primary reason for raising it is the offset that it could provide in sunlight hours between the east and west of our wide brown land and the variation in cloud and wind patterns from one region to the other.

At its simplest, WA could be supplying solar generated power to the eastern states (not just SA) during peak use of an evening. Tea cooking time on the eastern board (say 6pm) is only 3pm (depending on day light saving) in the west. The reverse would apply in the mornings when they are cooking their breakfast toast in the west before their solar kicks in, but that morning peak is less on an issue than the evening peak.

Secondly, extending the grid would increase the chances to have the wind blowing somewhere at any one time.

The problem we are trying to solve is to reduce the use of CO2 emitting generation when the sun is not shining or the wind blowing locally. Dispatchable power from hydro and batteries goes some way to helping with that but is not sufficient as yet to make inroads into CO2 emitting generation.

An east-west interconnector might partly reduce the need for that dispatchable power until storage increases and generation from sources such as hydro-gen kicks in.

The economics of an east-west interconnector is beyond me, but the $5bn for Snowy 2.0 doesn't seem to have been insurmountable.

Hehe. Base load. Coal. Jeez, if baseload were provided from burning babies alive, people would still be proponents for it.

I suspect people are attempting to save their jobs.

Technology will solve all.

I've provided a dozen examples of life and society changing technologies and all I hear are nay-sayers. Well, I've put my money where my mouth is and invested in dozens of new operations. All tech based, all making a difference and all (surprisingly) making money.

Here is another one to thoroughly bake your cake: New green technology generates electricity 'out of thin air'

IT IS MIND BOGGLING.

Coal is dead. It is game over. It is utterly finished. These technologies will kill it... industrial or home generation, it doesn't matter: Wind, solar, hydro, estuary, geothermal, micro-generation, UV solar, perhaps thorium pebble beds, annnnddd GEOBACTER !!!!!!

I'm also looking at HEMP! How cool is hemp! Its the magic plant!

BIOFUELS!!!

Germany is shutting down its coal industry for good, so far without sacking a single worker - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

That's coal mining, not burning - they are committed to shutting CF power by 2038.