Comment by pydry
1 year ago
>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.
The article goes into detail on why the 350GWh figure you used for your calculation is a lie, which is one big part of the answer.
> The claimed 350,000MWh of storage has long been disputed by energy experts as not being deliverable:
> * The upper reservoir, Tantangara, is rarely full.
> * The lower reservoir, Talbingo, even if empty can only fit two-thirds of Tantangara’s water.
> * Talbingo is normally kept as full as possible as it also serves as the upper reservoir for the Tumut 3 pumped hydro station (1,800 MW).
> * Refilling Tantangara will take a couple of months due both to limited periods when pumping energy is cheap enough and to the limited inflow into Talbingo from Eucumbene Dam.
An article suggseting it can provide less than half, which already puts it nearly on par with just purely batteries:
https://theconversation.com/snowy-2-0-will-not-produce-nearl...
But you seem to have missed my main point that comparing the price of storing energy over longer than a day is silly if you can instead spend some of the money on solar power which can deliver power on a predictable schedule and reduce the need for storage.
>The article goes into detail on why the 350GWh figure you used for your calculation is a lie
Their claims don't make a lot of sense though.
>The upper reservoir, Tantangara, is rarely full.
So... it's a battery that doesn't get filled up. Cool I guess we need to produce more power so we can utilize it better? No. They want it shut down.
>The lower reservoir, Talbingo, even if empty can only fit two-thirds of Tantangara’s water.
And? It's simple physics - you push water uphill that stores power. Push it uphill again and you store even more power.
>Refilling Tantangara will take a couple of months due both to limited periods when pumping energy is cheap enough
"Oh no, we haven't built enough solar and wind yet to match the storage capacity of this enormous battery. Let's just stop building it!" wtf?
>An article suggseting it can provide less than half, which already puts it nearly on par with just purely batteries: https://theconversation.com/snowy-2-0-will-not-produce-nearl...
This article looks even more like bitterness from the competition and they seem similarly COMPLETELY INCAPABLE of comparing what they call a "blowout cost" to the cost of batteries. Probably because 3.7x still blows chemical batteries out of the water and they're acutely aware of that fact being inconvenient.
>But you seem to have missed my main point that comparing the price of storing energy over longer than a day is silly if you can instead spend some of the money on solar power which can deliver power on a predictable schedule
You seem to be saying that storage can be done away with. It can not.
> You seem to be saying that storage can be done away with. It can not.
You're putting a lot of effort into missing my point.
Are you gaslighting on purpose?