An old adage for investment management is: Do not put all your eggs in one basket -diversification reduces risk.
This applies equally in regards to the options available for replacement of fossil fuels.
Australia has chosen to put all its eggs in one basket, opting only for renewables and rejecting nuclear out of hand.
The intermittent generating capacity of renewables dictates that a stand-alone electricity grid, totally composed of them, must have an enormous storage capacity.
The cost of this enormous storage is a highly significant factor in the overall cost of electricity generated.
To date there is no evidence whatsoever that economic storage can be achieved.
It is a huge technological challenge and there is no guarantee that it will be solved in the near future, in fact if at all.
Lithium-ion batteries, the preferred type for current experimental developments, have been improved over many years but are not close at this time for large-scale economic storage.
Just as capacity of solar panels and wind turbines is limited by area (panel area and turbine circular area) lithium-ion batteries are limited by the surface area of the permeable membrane separating the two halves of each cell through which the lithium cations must pass backwards and forwards on discharge and recharge.
To put total faith in renewables and not have a plan B (nuclear) is an unnecessarily risky approach, leading to ever higher electricity costs and unreliability.
In the MIT Technology Review 2018, James Temple says: “These batteries (lithium-ion) are far too expensive and don’t last nearly long enough, limiting the role they can play on the grid, experts say. If we plan to rely on them for massive amounts of storage as more renewables come online – rather than turning to a broader mix of low-carbon sources like nuclear and natural gas with carbon capture technology – we could be headed down a dangerously unaffordable path”.
Australia needs to consider nuclear at least as option B.
Risky gambling usually has some bad consequences
Email, Apr 1
Charles Hemmings, Woy Woy