Comment by Robotbeat
1 year ago
I LOVE that site. The Achilles heel of it is that it doesn’t account for transmission costs, but that’s solvable by just picking a single point (ie no geographic diversity or transmission). Overall, it’s the perfect antidote for all the commonly repeated but wrong claims on the Internet (and this goes for everyone).
It seems to ignore the existence of pumped storage. This is as big or even bigger achilles heel, I think, especially given how common the geography is outside of places like Hawaii and Florida.
The equivalent of Snowy 2 - 350 GWh in lithium ion batteries at current prices would be about $48 billion. The actual cost will be about $13 billion - ~3.7x cheaper.
I like that they use actual historical weather models though. I can't stand op-eds that assume that you wouldn't have a mix of solar and wind and short and long term storage to stabilize power output. It's the first model I've seen that's definitely on the right track.
Snowy 2 loses economically to solar plus batteries.
Note I said solar plus batteries. Many of the ridiculous back of the envelope numbers you see for batteries assume every watt is sacred and must be stored and used.
It's usually cheaper to build more renewables, throw some over generation away and charge batteries for short term balancing when that is actually cheaper.
What you actually care about is electricity delivered and having weeks of storage isn't as valuable when you can rely on the sun rising every day.
Snowy 2 is a particularly bad project:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/snowy-2-much-how-can-a-2-2gw-wat...
but I'd suggest any hydro project where the dam isn't needed for other water based uses e.g. agricultural, is probably going to struggle to justify itself versus more renewables and batteries.
>Snowy 2 loses economically to solar plus batteries.
It's 3.7x cheaper with roughly equivalent ability to dispatch power and roughly similar round trip efficiency. I fail to see how that adds up to losing economically.
>What you actually care about is electricity delivered and having weeks of storage isn't as valuable
Snowy 2 isn't weeks. It's about ~4 hours. I agree that Australia doesn't need weeks worth of 90%-roundtrip-efficiency storage. About 8-12 hours is enough to achieve a 95% green grid.
>Snowy 2 is a particularly bad project:
Your article complains that the price is higher than it was advertised at which is true, but the new higher price "blowout" price tag of $12 billion still pegs it as 3.7x cheaper than batteries. For some reason your article chooses not to make this comparison, although it's keen to emphasize that 12 billion is 4k per family.
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Hydro IS renewable. If you need an example of hydroelectricity done right, take a look at e.g. Switzerland.
You can model pumped storage yourself in the Advanced options.