Return To Sustainable Energy
EDIT: Posted this too early with too little proofreading - so I’ve amended and corrected and added some missing bits.
I not so long ago posted about our own home-grown billionaire Mr Cannon-Brookes and mentioned that his bid for AGL Energy wasn’t the only iron he had in the fire. And yep, for the last four years his and his wife Annie’s investment firm Grok Ventures have teamed up with Andrew Forrest’s Squadron Energy on a project named Sun Cable.
It’s been rolling along gathering steam since 2019 and the name’s a good indicator - Sun for solar, Cable because it’ll run that energy over a cable. All the way to Singapore. Yep, we’ll be exporting our sunlight. And this is one of our resources I’m 100% on board with exporting.
Before anyone thinks it’s odd that a mining - well, magnate is the word I guess - like Mr Forrest is ploughing money into a renewable venture, hold back. He’s investing in exporting a different resource, probably - correctly - thinking ahead to the day when making ANY resource from so-called ‘virgin’ resources rather than recycled material will cost too much to be viable.
This is going to come, when excises on freshly-mined resources will price them above the price of recycled materials, and it is going to come because it’s the only way we’re going to halt the ecosystem destruction that’s propelling our current catastrophe.
Solar seems a better thing to be investing in than nuclear energy - unless fusion generators become possible and cheap enough that they make sense. If you followed those two links then you’ll see that progress has been made that makes me think we’ll have fusion energy in under ten years.
And it’s not at all odd that MCB would have his fingers in this pie because he’s made no secret of the fact that he’d like nothing better than sustainable energy in use all over Australia and that would have been part of the larger plan when he made the bid on AGL. (Who are now going to look really stupid when MCB unleashes clean renewable energy sold through his energy provider and at much cheaper base rates.)
I for one am gonna jump ships in a heartbeat when that chance comes along because how many times do you have a chance to sink a company that produces 8% (!!!) of the country’s total pollution, and also be able to give them a middle finger en passant?
There’s A Few Gotchas
Our energy needs keep growing now and solar energy is not only a good stopgap but will also continue to supply energy for decades - and almost eliminate fossil fuel powerplants sooner. There’s a need for fusion power but until it’s a mature technology we still want to end fossil fuel over-use right now, and that means some way of supplying our growing energy demands now.
As the instability in fuel prices due to the hasty actions of Russia invading Ukraine has shot fuel prices through the roof, more and more people are putting in orders for an EV or several tens of thousands. . . There’s going to be a bit of a rip shit or bust effort to get enough charging stations in place and they consume ENERGY at scale each time someone plugs in.
People want their car to charge in the least time possible, that means a charging station will sit there drawing negligible power, then WHAM! draw tens to hundreds of kilowatts for 10 - 30 minutes, then back to quiescent again. This is going to happen because tens of thousands of new EV owners are going to demand a faster-charging car and charging station and that famous “let the market take care of it” attitude will for once bash it up the manufacturers for a change.
I’m predicting that any charger parks will therefore need to be legally made to install enough battery storage to power two charging cycles’ worth of energy - on ALL chargers in the facility at once - to even out the current demand, because the alternative would be to build the grid out to ridiculous extremes just to protect against failures when 70% of charging stations all suddenly come into use at the same time in some suburb or region.
We’d be wasting copper and aluminium on power lines.
It’d be the same problem we currently have with baseload power and demand power, and one of the reasons fossil fueled power stations have to spend half the day running at higher output than the average just for that one time that everyone gets home at the same time and turns on their A/C - and lights - and TVs - and the wall oven.
To cope with that “one in a thousand” kind of scenario you’d have to build systems that can handle megawatts - which would 95% of the time be handling only a few hundred kilowatts. You’d be putting up thousands of kilometres of copper wires that are two to three times the diameter to handle all that demand - but only once every two years - when it could be supplying just slightly more than the usual load while the charging stations sip power and keep the batteries floating at or near full all the time.
The same is true of the Australia-wide grid - you’d have to build a massive overland cable to carry 40MW and 100MW demand bursts to Melbourne, but only a third the size to handle a steady flow of 20MW that goes into local batteries around Victoria and lets the local batteries smooth out the demand on the overland.
So the system should consist of many batteries distributed around the grid and a few redundant hefty main trunks - so that a failure can be routed around - to carry baseload. That’s what the cable between the Elliott collectors and Darwin and Singapore is, a trunk.
The proposed 20GW farm will also host a battery of 36-42GWh meaning it can maintain continuous supply 24/7 and a part of that that will run up an that trunk to Darwin, where Darwin will get 800MW (which will be plenty to allow Darwin to grow for while) and from there there’s that 2GW cable going under the sea to Singapore.
That undersea cable will be officially known as the Australia-Asia PowerLink and will form part of the income of Solar Cable. But that leaves 17GW capacity back at the Elliott plant, hmmm what can this surplus possibly be used for? Maybe there’ll soon be another trunk, to Brisbane or Perth or even to Melbourne or Hobart.
Distances Mapped on Google Maps
Melbourne is the farthest Australian state capital from Darwin and almost precisely the same distance, but over land rather than undersea.
Singapore is a 3,500km cable, but anywhere within Australia is only 2,500-3,000km give or take a few hundred km. Go on, measure it. That puts every capital city within reach of at least 7GW and up 15GW worth of energy. Would put a big dent in power prices when it happens.
And the Elliott site won’t be the only one. It’s the one that’ll prove the feasibility of large scale solar farms and gig scale distribution. And I think that distributed batteries will help a system like this remain resilient to short power demand increases and the dreaded Duck Curve. But there’ll be quite a few investors lined up when they can see it working, earning, and on top of that being a green sustainable resource.
We already have 6GW or more of clean energy production available and between half and one GW of storage. The Sun Cable installation will have 3-4 times the power generating capacity and 20 times the battery storage.
Add another installation like Sun Cable #1 in the Centre somewhere and suddenly any spot in Australia could be connected to a share of 30GW of battery-backed power.
So as soon as other energy providers realise how much better they can operate with a bunch of smaller solar or wind power plants with battery storage onsite, this distributed storage will just happen, but by some stage we’ll be able to export energy offshore in the form of more cables, hydrogen shipments, and also we’ll become a much more desirable place for high-energy-consuming technology and manufacturing companies to set up shop.
So I think it’s safe to assume that local smaller plant building won’t just stop, so assume that the EV demand and A/C demands will provide the impetus to install a further 20-50GW in smaller plant and you can see that the picture can change in just a very few years.
Because with global warming, the current use of air conditioning leads to more pollution from traditional fossil fuel power stations which will a) lead to having to overbuild power grids to cope with demand peaks until there’s on demand batteries, and b) will continue to be a source of global warming until they’re replaced - ASAP - by clean sustainable energy.
And that’s it for this article - there’s more to unpick out of all of this and I’ll do that in a future article, please got to Ted’s News Stand and subscribe (links down the bottom of the page) to the TEdAMAIL Weekly Express to stay up to date and get to see everything I put online.
Cheers, and off the lawn ya go!