I am pleased that your correspondent in CCN 400 concedes that renewable energy is not free.
In fact, cheap energy is an oxymoron.
I would not consider Adelaide as a hot example on renewable energy use.
SA has an umbilical cord connecting it to the eastern (coal) states and its Premier would like to see nuclear investigated, but was overruled by the big boy in Canberra.
Despite its drawbacks, nuclear could possibly be a viable option for Australia.
More work needs to be done to ascertain its value to us.
Mindlessly investing in large-scale renewables and ignoring other options, as we have done, is a risky business – some would say insane.
So far as I am aware the largest storage to date is the Manatee Energy Storage Centre in Florida USA.
The Manatee Energy Storage Centre will have a 409-megawatt (MW) capacity with the ability to deliver 900 MWh of energy – enough to power 329,000 homes for more than two hours.
That’s the equivalent of around 100 million iPhone batteries, and when operational, it’ll be four times the capacity of the current largest battery system in operation.
Big deal; this is only token storage.
The Tesla in Adelaide has a capacity of 150MW and storage of 194MWh, quite feeble in comparison.
No one to date is claiming that they can provide economic large-scale battery storage of energy.
Batteries so far have only been useful for helping to stabilise the grid or for small-time outages.
It is suggested that those who do not think that large-scale economic storage of electricity is a huge challenge should look at the electrochemistry behind the well-established (for small appliances) lithium-ion battery which is currently favoured for upscale development.
Lithium-ion batteries depend on the migration of lithium cations backwards and forwards (charge and discharge) through a permeable membrane.
The economics of this depend on the concentration and migration speed of the cations across the membrane as well as the area of the membrane.
The battery economics problem is an inconvenient truth for clean, green renewables die-hards.
Email, Jul 27
Charles Hemmings