In the very unlikely event that a fusion energy production technology that is genuinely economically viable were to be developed, the people who have been desperately blocking the widespread adoption of fission power would also block the adoption of the new technology. They only like technologies that don't work, because half of them are deeply in thrall to the Appeal to Nature fallacy, and are useful idiots for the other half, who are getting rich from fossil fuels.
Wind power is ideal for these nutters - because it only works about a third of the time. Solar power is even better, as it's reliably useless a good three quarters of the time. Both are an excellent way to force people to burn fossil gas (or to import electricity produced by burning fossil fuel elsewhere).
Yes, it only works about a third of the time - for now.
WTF?
How is it physically possible to improve on that? Are we going to put a few new suns up, so solar panels work at night? Maybe we can install big fans to create wind on calm days?
1) Storage, like batteries, superheated salts, pumping water to higher altitudes and stuff like that.
2) Wind does not blow only blow when the sun shines.
3) Increased interchanges. While Victoria is becalmed it could well be windy in Queensland, and vice versa.
Handwavium.
I don't think you know or care the scale of what you are proposing, but I can assure you that these "solutions" would male electricity essentially unaffordable, if there were sufficient resources in the world to implement them (there probably aren't).
We need solutions now. Not in some imaginary future where thousands of billions of dollars worth of infrastructure has been built to cover the last 20% of demand.
Your opposition to wind and solar power generation is analogous to people who used to object to wearing seat belts in cars - people still get killed in crashes.
No, it's absolutely not analogous. There's no physical constraint that prevents crash deaths from dropping to zero; But you cannot generate solar power at night, nor wind power when becalmed. The current capacity factors for these generating technologies is about as good as it's physically possible for them to be.
Yes it is. Saying that solar and wind generated electricity can never reach 100% of demand makes it useless is the exact same as saying that seat belts are useless because they will never save 100% of lives in car crashes.
No, it really isn't. I don't know why you think that.
More than 60% of South Australia's electricity requirement is met by solar and wind generators. Granted, the population is small (1.8 million) and the climate is particularly suited to both solar and wind generators, but 15 years ago almost all its power generation came from coal and gas. Nationally, 10% of our electricity generation came from solar and wind in 2018, up from close to zero 15 years earlier.
That's lovely. But still leaves you buying Victorian coal powered electricity 40% of the time.
Wrong. For instance, it is nighttime as I write this, and right now South Australia gets 1049MW from wind, 374MW from locally sourced gas, 23MW from batteries, 0MW from the sun and 0MW from anywhere else. (At this very moment 4993MW of Queensland's electricity is generated by black coal, 812MW with gas, 307MW with hydro and 213MW with wind. Victoria's sources are brown coal at 3990MW, wind at 1125MW, hydro at 64MW and battery storage at 36MW) You can look up live electricity demand and consumption by state and generation type at
NEM watch.
Those facts don't even address my comment, much less show it to be wrong.
If right now I have a fifty dollar bill in my wallet, how would that refute (or even address) a claim that I am broke 40% of the time?
SA is just about at the limit of what's achievable (in a place that's ideal, as you say, for both wind and solar); And is completely dependent on electricity imports from Victoria to avoid regular and prolonged blackouts.
It is not. More solar and wind generators are being built. And even if it were, a 60% reduction in fossil fuel generated electricity is a good thing, don't you think?
Not when it costs far more than would have been necessary for a 99% reduction had the investment been made more sensibly, no.
An isolated grid couldn't even achieve those levels - a lot of the 60% is an accounting trick, whereby overgeneration is exported, but still counted in the total, as though the imports were the same electricity being sent back after the Victorians borrowed it for a while. That's not legitimate - electricity isn't a commodity, it's a service, and the electricity SA exports is worth far fewer real dollars than the electricity the state imports.
Unless you have a reliable source I don't know about, you have entered tinfoil hat territory now, Bilby.
My reliable source is 'nobody has ever done it without causing blackouts'. Plus an understanding that apparently you don't have of how the figures you quote are derived, and of the way power grids work.
If you generate excess power beyond your requirements, it needs to go somewhere. Right now, that somewhere is a small but hugely expensive battery which is full in less than an hour, and the rest of the NEM, via the state of Victoria.
If you don't generate as much power as you need, you need to get more from somewhere. But you can't have back the power you exported (you can have the power back that went into the battery, but that's gone in less time than it took to charge it).
As you correctly point out, the NEM is mostly powered by coal, and it's an accounting trick to try to ringfence a a part of it and declare that part to be powered by X% renewables.
The reality is that the total renewables penetration in the NEM is tiny, and mostly Tasmanian hydropower.
And it's impossible for any isolated grid to have more than about 20% wind and solar power generation over the long term, without blackouts. It's been tried, and it's been a failure.
A small percentage of wind and solar doesn't do a lot of harm, it's just very expensive and not particularly effective in reducing overall emissions.
But large percentages are not possible without fudging tne figures.
If I generate 1000MWh of wind and solar power on Saturday, and 0MWh on Sunday; And I use 500MWh on each day, I will be reported in the press as having used 100% green energy on the weekend.
But I would have spent Sunday in a blackout, and have wasted 500MWh of power on Saturday, if I was dependent on wind and solar.
In that '100% wind and solar' scenario, the real situation would be:
Saturday - generated 1000MWh of green electricity. Used half; Sold the rest at the prevailing wholesale price of $0.02 per MWh, earning $20
Sunday - generated 0 green electricity. Generated 250MWh by burning fossil gas; Bought the rest (made mostly from coal) at the prevailing wholesale price of $200 per MWh, spending $50,000, for a total financial loss of $49,980 which was then partly pushed onto consumers elsewhere because the government mandated that my 'green' power should be bought at $20 per MWh regardless of the wholesale price, and the rest pushed onto consumers in their bills.
That's how '100% renewables this weekend!' headlines actually work in real grids. It's essentially a lie that people want to believe.
Treating electricity as something you can stockpile is wrong, and represents an accounting fraud.
There's not enough lithium in the world to build enough batteries to fix that; And the MASSIVE amounts of materials needed for wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, and/or other storage is environmental vandalism of an unprecedented scale, expended chasing rapidly diminishing returns that are simply ignored by the lobbyists for these technologies. Most of whom, tellingly, are fossil fuel companies.
Gas producers love wind power and hate nuclear. That should give you a hint.
(Arbitrary figures used above for illustrative purposes only. The real gap in wholesale prices between times when renewables are available and times when they are not is typically rather larger, and negative wholesale prices are common when it's windy and sunny at the same time. You literally cannot give it away; You're paying the NEM to take it off your hands).
