freediver wrote on Jun 16
th, 2018 at 11:34am:
Quote:All intermittent power requires base load power (Coal & gas) to be on line just in case
Not true, for several reasons:
batteries (of various sorts, including pumped hydro)
peaking suppliers (intermittent hydro, gas fired plants)
demand-side arrangements
On the third point, there is no actual baseload in demand. For the most part it was a response to the historical use of coal fired plants for the majority of the supply. This lead to significant periods in each day where power was very cheap, and a lot of industries evolved to take advantage. Those industries will evolve in exactly the same way to more volatile supplies. Likewise, retail customers became psychologically accustomed to fixed prices regardless of wholesale costs, but again there is nothing fundamental there. We now have the technology cheaply available to manage retail pricing the same way as wholesale pricing. This used to be managed by, for example, having your hot water system on off-peak power, but that's a pretty crude adaptation.
If prices were more rationally matched to supply and demand, there would be all sorts of retail and industrial consumers willing to cease consumption based on the spot price. At the moment this is largely driven by politics and legacy hard investments.
Currently in this country with the except of that on single battery capable of providing 1 hr for 30000 houses. Everywhere else has coal fired back up for all their useless intermittent power.
Try this for a quick math exercise.
30 000 divide by 10hrs = 3000 houses for 10 hyrs
9 000 000 divided by 3000 = 3000
3000 x $100 000 000 = $300 000 000 000
And that is only for the houses, not even close if you include all industrial and commercial
Intermittent power is not worth a snatch full of cold water, when you consider our actual CO2 contribution.