Re:Australia has enough solar, wind storage in pipeline to g...
by Retric on Monday March 25, 2019 @07:45AM
(#19481703)
These number should are off the top of my head but should be reasonable.
Suppose, you want to supply an island with nuclear power. Lowest recorded useage at was 1GW of power and the peak recorded daytime use is 3.5KW of power. Average annual power useage was 2GW and peak daily useage was 2.4 GW.
You can buy nuclear power in 0.25 GW increments with 95% of the cost being there of the power is used or not.
Nuclear costs 149x per GW, Wind 45x, solar 40x average daily output. Nuclear needs to be offline 4 days out of the year for maintenance, wind and solar provide a minimum daily output of 40% their maximum.
Now, without lot of storage nuclear needs 3.5GW even if one plant is offline at a minimum but preferably some cushion if future needs are over 3.5GW. Thus we need 4GW of Nuclear for 596x to be safe. (Larger grids need less cushion, but still need to plan for multiple GW or Nuclear to be offline.)
Wind and solar need some storage, but even using the lowest values of 40% average output that’s 45 /.4 x 3.5GW = 400x.
Though if we had some storage we could also drop Nuclear to 2.4GW + safty factor to get closer to 400x. But remember we now produce 2.5x as much solar/wind on the average day for the numbers to get close, and we still need to use storage for nuclear. Further, those assumptions are unfair as in practice solar and wind minimums don’t occur on the same days as maximum power usage.
Suppose, you want to supply an island with nuclear power. Lowest recorded useage at was 1GW of power and the peak recorded daytime use is 3.5KW of power. Average annual power useage was 2GW and peak daily useage was 2.4 GW.
You can buy nuclear power in 0.25 GW increments with 95% of the cost being there of the power is used or not.
Nuclear costs 149x per GW, Wind 45x, solar 40x average daily output. Nuclear needs to be offline 4 days out of the year for maintenance, wind and solar provide a minimum daily output of 40% their maximum.
Now, without lot of storage nuclear needs 3.5GW even if one plant is offline at a minimum but preferably some cushion if future needs are over 3.5GW. Thus we need 4GW of Nuclear for 596x to be safe. (Larger grids need less cushion, but still need to plan for multiple GW or Nuclear to be offline.)
Wind and solar need some storage, but even using the lowest values of 40% average output that’s 45 /.4 x 3.5GW = 400x.
Though if we had some storage we could also drop Nuclear to 2.4GW + safty factor to get closer to 400x. But remember we now produce 2.5x as much solar/wind on the average day for the numbers to get close, and we still need to use storage for nuclear. Further, those assumptions are unfair as in practice solar and wind minimums don’t occur on the same days as maximum power usage.