I don't know about in Australia but in the UK the ultimate sink loads are electrolysis cells to make chlorine and sodium and the odd aluminium smelter. The number of big steel plants has declined recently.
The electrolysis plant can handle rapid changes in electricity availability and they pay comparatively little for an interruptible supply. They must retain some base load to keep the salts molten but the wet brine based systems don't even need that.
There are also a few pumped storage schemes which absorb any minor excesses at night and give it back during periods of peak load. Pumped storage reservoir water schemes are typically an order of magnitude more powerful. These batteries are toys by comparison but more responsive.
I read an article about Germany shutting down coal and burning wood pellets instead. Something like twice the CO2 from wood... but it's 'green'. (Seems crazy to me.)
Or sell electricity at discount rates to industrial users that can tolerate intermittent power (as Martin Brown mentioned for chemical production). I believe this might be the PG&E "standby" power rates, but I can't seem to view the spreadsheets: Some stuff on how it works at the bottom of the page: More detaiil if you're interested when I have time. I'm kinda curious how little intermittent industrial users actually pay.
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
It had already entered the fast meltdown phase, that's what caused them to jump in that direction.
A year or two earlier, they (*) announced that the Leigh Creek coalfield was closing as it was unable to provide sufficient coal for the then current CF power stations. They (*) decided on an almost instantaneous jump to renewables was the way forward, but they forgot the bridge as they attempted to cross the chasm.
Since that leigh Creek shutdown, the major coalfired power station has been not mothballed but DEMOLISHED to ensure there is no retreat from the abyss. Enter Tesla.
(*) Political decision. Leigh Creek has enough coal available to supply a further 30 years at 2010 rate.
Waiting for our resident left-leaning slowman to chip in here.
** South Australia is part of the National Electricity Market, a grid cover ing all east coast states and Tasmania. As such it obtains a large fraction of its electrical energy, over long transmission lines from its coal rich neighbour Victoria. A number of cascading, storm related events brought the system down last September.
This Wiki outlines what transpired:
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IT is wrong to say SA was headed for such an event, cos the odds against it were rather high.
I haven't a clue about the politics behind the demolition of the last major coal-fired power station in South Australia. The decision to demolish woul d have been made by the generating company - the politicians wouldn't have got a look-in - and Australian generating companies have been shutting down old coal-fired generating plants with some enthusiasm.
The problem is that they are mostly quite old, and getting decidedly unreli able. You've got to spend quite a lot of money to keep them running, and qu ite a lot more if you want them to run reliably.
South Australia has a big gas-fired fast-start generating station, but it d idn't get turned on during last year's shut-down - the local price of gas s piked, and the relevant generating company didn't expect to be able to sell the emergency power it would generate at an attractive price (which hindsi ght revealed to have been poor judgement).
The right-wing of the current Australian government is fairly absurdly righ t-wing, so they have an irrational enthusiasm for coal-fired power stations . The current prime minister isn't that stupid, but he needs to keep his lu natic fringe on-side, and he's been happy to demonise the South Australian Labor state government as environmentalist nut-cases - which they aren't - and blame them for a mess which was actually created by the privatision of power generation some 25 years ago.
** Most of the coal Australia exports to Japan and China is for steel making, so high grade coking coal.
SA has loads of natural gas available ( split between electricity generation and domestic use) but little coal, so would need to transport it from far away states.
Being part of a national grid makes it cheaper to transport electricity than coal.
Greeny guilt doens't come into it. The problem isn't finding coal to feed t he existing coal plants, but rather the fact that the local coal-fired powe r plants are old and getting unreliable, so that just keeping them running requires spending quite a lot on money, and up-grading them until they run reliably takes quite a lot more.
When you've got quite a lot of photovoltaic solar power and wind power arou nd, the need is more for rapid-turn-on generators - gas turbine, hydro-elec tric and thermal solar - than for slow turn-on base-load generators.
Sunlight is free (when the sun is shining) as is wind power when the wind i s blowing, but we can't export either to China.
That may be greeny greed, but guilt doesn't come into it.
There's nothing in that Wikipedia article that states, infers or implies that there was any shortage of available coal there, but that was the line the SA govco fed to the public. The reality of supply is as I stated. You need to get out of your Sydney flat a bit more if you want to find out what really happened.
Hybrid and electric car battery longevity is set by automobile manufacturers warranty and by California emission standards to 10 years and 150,000 miles. In other states, it can be 5 or 8 years and
100,000 miles. In order to get such lifetimes, the depth of discharge must be limited. "Model S battery Life Cycle Exercise" "Battery Lifetime: How Long Can Electric Vehicle Batteries Last?"
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Vehicles would have a much longer driving range per charge if they could deplete the battery more and not worry about battery lifetime.
Using a partly worn out battery for utility storage might be financially attractive for homeowners and consumers, but would not appeal to utility power, where reliability (and profit) are paramount. The dramatic increase in maintenance costs for using a depleted battery would not look very attractive to utility power. For the homeowner, the problem would be capacity and available space. If I sold a PowerWall style load balancer with a substantial loss in capacity, I would be competing against other vendors that are delivering similar capacity but in a much smaller package. Unless the cost differential was large and the warranty was superior, I don't think it would sell. Methinks cell recycling and battery rebuilding would be more likely to succeed.
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
There was plenty of point when they lost the feeder and SA went black. But left-wing-greenie-thinking struck. If you lot lived by the philosophies you espouse, you'd be living in caves without fires.
how much sentimental right-wingers like the link to the past.
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What blacked out South Australian was "storm damage to electricity transmis sion infrastructure on 28 September 2016". There has been a suggestion that was gas-fired generator that should have been brought on line, but wasn't.
Somehow I doubt that left-wing-greenie-thinking had much to do with the sto rm damage that took down the electricity generation network, nor with the a bsence of generators that might have used the working bits of the transmiss ion network to keep more of the state on-line.
The Liberal Party did spin the events as excuse to be rude about the relati vely high renewable component in the South Australian generator mix, but st orm damage has a way of confounding carefully laid plans. There was a big g as-fired generator that should have been able to kick in rapidly, and didn' t, and nobody has explained why.
Since then, the Federal Government has made a fuss about planning to spend a lot of money on the Snowy Mountains hydroelectric scheme to modify it to offer a lot of pumped storage. It seems they could get as much pumped stora ge at about half-the price per stored kilowatt hour in Tasmania, but it wou ld be in lots of smaller chunks, so doesn't make the same dramatic impact o r link to the iconic Snowy Mountains scheme.
Nothing in the story suggests that investing in lots of new coal-fired base
-load generators would be a good idea. Fast-starting gas-fired stations do make more sense, but they'd spend most of their time doing nothing - wind a nd photovoltaic power is now cheaper, and it's probably still cheaper after you've stored it in some kind of pumped storage scheme, which is presumabl y why the government is going the Snowy scheme upgrade.
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