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| Source: OWID: 'Australian solar and wind penetration' |
"Back in the dinosaur days when Australia had virtually no wind and solar power, the price for wholesale electricity was $30 a megawatt hour year after year. Then Kevin Rudd was elected in 2007, and we started to add the intermittent, unreliable generators which have free fuel, but need thousands of kilometres of wires, batteries, subsidies, schemes, farmland, FCAS markets, and an entire duplicated back-up grid that sits around not-earning money for hours, days or five years at a time.
"And [apart from that brief respite during Covid] we wondered why electricity got more expensive..."~ Jo Nova from her post 'The more renewables Australia added the more expensive electricity got'
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| Source: 'AEMO Quarterly Report' |
1 comment:
The people who continually post about how the unreliables, especially solar, are the cheapest form of energy and that is the way the grid should go are just demonstrating that they have no knowledge of how things work. Society needs a stable uninterrupted electricity supply to function. The sun doesn't shine everywhere 24/7 and neither does the wind. Even when they are supposed to be at their best, they can't be depended upon. The support systems needed to "back up" them is basically a complete system plus a lot of extra transmission infrastructure. Even with that, grid balancing is a lot higher risk - the initiating cause of the August 21 power cuts was the wind generation "unexpectedly " died.
And that is why as everywhere has proved, as the degree of penetration of the unreliables goes up, the power price goes up and the reliability goes down.
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