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Originally Posted by The_bluester
As I posted in the other thread, "Base load" is also utterly the wrong catch phrase for our pollies to have latched on to. Given it was originally a description of the minimum load that the generators wanted to see maintained to avoid having to shut down and fire up big, slow reacting steam turbines.
I am sort of on the fence with pumped hydro. The round trip efficiency surely has to be considerably lower than modern battery storage with multiple stages of energy transfer in both directions (Power to drive motors, to drive pumps, to pump water, then water driving turbines driving generators (Which may or may not be the pumps and motors used in the opposite direction) to produce power, but aside from the environmental effects of building honking big dams to store the water it is at least relatively benign in operation and uses up less environmentally unfriendly materials.
And it is pretty hard to imagine a dam catching fire if a fault develops!
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apparently modern pumped hydro has round trip efficiency of around 0.8.
the one proposed is to be in a disused mine pit, so presumably the engineering costs will be relatively low (there is a big hole in the ground and plenty of loose rock/soil to make a simple dam nearby). The site is close to regional industry hubs, so transmission losses will be low.
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Originally Posted by Visionary
Rom, I am with you our Civilization needs to change. Without cheap, plentiful energy Civilization of an advanced industrial kind cannot exist. It takes an advanced society to provide such things as universal healthcare, care for the aged etc: It is care for the sick, the marginalized & poor that are the first things that fall by the wayside as a society slips into poverty. My concern with the feel-good-fairy dance some privileged sectors of our society believe constitutes Power Policy will condemn the least advantaged to even greater disadvantage.
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The announcements on renewable energy come from a hard nosed company director and have nothing to do with government policy. The company is investing in the best and cheapest power technology to make money - nothing feel-good-fairy about that.
Can't see how a company investing its own money in the cheapest sources of power that will initially be used in it's own activities is going to disadvantage anyone. Renewables are already cheaper than coal or gas, even with the add-ons like batteries and pumped hydro that add reliability - so they would be foolish to look at anything else. This is the message that is also coming loud and clear from AGL, Energy Australia, ENGIE etc - but some pollies and the shock jocks are putting their coal blackened hands over their ears so that they cannot hear.