It is easy to make goals with regard to climate change. The hard part is doing what is necessary to actually meet those goals.
Australia will have difficulty in meeting its 2030 renewable energy target of 82% renewables in the electricity sector.
From the link… Renewable energy advisory Nexa has joined global analyst Rystad Energy in finding Australia’s green energy share is likely to be barely 60 per cent by the end of the decade under the current rate of progress.
And… Australia currently generates between 30 and 35 per cent of its power from renewable sources such as wind, solar and hydro power.
You can’t run a power grid on 82% intermittent, unreliable renewable sources like wind and solar. You need a large percentage of dispatchable, controllable power plants to match generation to demand. Batteries aren’t going to do it at the scale needed to operate a power grid for a continent-sized country like Australia. Australia does have a small amount of hydro, but I don’t see that able to be built up more to the capacity needed.
How about some nuclear power plants? Australia is already one of the leading miners of uranium, and the US is building the Aussie navy some nuclear powered submarines.
Every megawatthr you generate with clean energy is one less you have to make with fossil fuels.
Yes, nuclear, hydro, geothermal would be more reliable. But that is not an excuse. Yes, fossil fuels may be needed for backup for a while. Surely the experts know how to manage that.
Why are we waiting? What’s our excuse this time? Fossil fuel money is out there doing its thing. Stall and delay at every opportunity!!!
That’s exactly what Tesla’s goal is with their Energy division. Going strictly from memory, I want to say that they figure that will be a market for 140 TWh of battery backup. Hugely big, hugely expensive. But current battery backup has been proving to be substantially cheaper than NG peaker plants. And yeah… battery backup for windless nights is ambitious.
We’re not waiting! There are projects galore going on RIGHT NOW. In fact, there are so many projects going on in the USA that they have a long waiting list to attach to the grid. That’s right, even if a new renewable source is completed in Jun '24, it likely wouldn’t be able to be connected to the grid until sometime in '25 at best.
Indeed they tell us the approval process for the transmission lines needed to connect to the grid takes too long and causes delays. Some want to change that but other resist. Typical politics.
Green energy does require grid updates. The system was built to serve mostly cities and coal fired power plants with a few hyro projects included. Wind and solar are best in isolated areas where new grid connections are needed.
We may be making progress but it does seem slow and investment is tiny compared to what is needed to reach green energy goals. Much more is needed.
Expensive? Yes. If you remember the thread on METaR back in June about the levelized cost of energy. LCOE doesn’t include grid costs, and they are an order of magnitude higher for renewables.