There's a place for wind for sure, but I wouldn't call it reliable, especially when compared to geothermal or hydro. Even solar is generally more predictable and reliable.
It doesn't matter what the source of the energy if you store in batteries. This is the game changer for solar and wind that the current government seem to have (wilfully) missed
Like everything it comes down to where is the best place to spend limited money, in the end it's always going to be a combination of supply and storage. Government subsidies for household batteries would be money well spent too.
Personally I would have liked onslow to have been given more thought.
We're not 100% off grid but are hitting decent numbers, the misnomer of poor ROI is, again, not accounting for storage.
System cost $25k, only had the battery for just under a year
I think Onslow was a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.
Deployment of grid scale batteries and incentives for residential solar and batteries which could all be used in VPPs to give resilience to the grid (very important in disasters)
Hub and spoke transmission builds in huge risk as we saw last week
It's true, but when our generation is so dominated by hydro we need a better dry year solution than batteries are capable of providing.
I'm not sure too many people are aware of the state of shit we are in right now with major gas supply issues and low lake levels.
Even more reason to reduce the reliance on hydro and massively increase solar, wind and tidal (we are in a great spot for that too)
Solar and wind were always left behind because of the "unreliable" tag, that's not the case anymore when you can store the energy
I think pumped hydro for storage is cheaper than batteries where that is applicable. ArcActive in Christchurch working on cheaper enhanced lead acid batteries. Next gen.
We're already at 80-90% renewable so it's not a full transition, our major issues is a lack of storage in our largest hydro lakes so if we have a dry year it makes a massive issue. We had a proposed pumped hydro scheme under study but the new government killed it off because they love oil and gas.
In Germany, a household battery does not need any subsidies. If I install PV (i.e. 10 kWp for 5,000 €), a matching battery (i.e. 10 kWh <4,000 Euros) is a no-brainer as the solar power is free of opex and the power from the grid is >0.25 €/kWh. A charging cycle costs well below.
It shouldn't need subsidies here either, except we're a low wage economy with stupidly high housing costs, so by the time we are looking at the nice to have things we're out of money.
In Europe wind and solar is a good match since one delivers when the other doesn't. We need all of them. It's not a pissing contest, but a cooperation.
100%, I just wish we had more geothermal going in, we need more baseload generation so we can hold water back in our hydro systems, that will allow us to manage the solar and wind variations a lot better, then throw in batteries as well.
Wind is actually incredibly reliable in both average direction and speed, reliable enough for airport runways to be built facing into the wind to assist takeoff and landing
Well, when you look at utilisation factors of wind vs geothermal or hydro you will see that it's not as good as you may think.
I think we need wind generation as part of a mix, but I don't consider it particularly reliable, especially when our national demand peaks on cold still nights.
