for interest, according to the SA Advertiser, the board of GFG Alliance (new owner of ZEN Energy) has committed to a strategic plan to establish nearly 1GW of dispatchable renewable power in SA.
plans are:
- 100MW/120MWh lithium ion battery at Pt Augusta to be operating Q1 2019 (same size as the nearly complete Tesla battery at Jamestown)
- 200MW solar PV plant in Whyalla on line early 2019
- 120MW/600MWh pumped hydro in the Middleback ranges operating by 2020
- addition 480MW solar committed to but details not yet finalised
there are many other such plans underway in SA and it all seems to be happening in spite of the best efforts of coal lobby, The Australian and the shock jocks telling everyone that renewables do not work.
cheers Ray
Edit: also just for interest, it seems that the new "in" word is "dispatchable" energy, which presumably means that it can be turned on and off to meet short term demand, rather than the old favourite "base load", which refers to very long time constant generation (coal fired steam for example) that is very slow to fire up and shut down.
Interesting to see pumped hydro going ahead. It is very 'lossy' compared to battery banks. The rest of the stuff looks promising.
The 'smart' thing to do is to put the battery banks at the weakest part of the networks, or at the point where large wind/solar farms inject into it.
Makes sense to do this stuff in SA.
Base load as a phrase is going out of fashion with the spin doctors, as when you combine wind/solar with batteries, you get base load that is just as reactive as hydro. Network owners love it.
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!
And it is pretty hard to imagine a dam catching fire if a fault develops!
Fracking around the dam to provide fuel to run the pumps starts leaking into the base of the dam????
We already have burning rivers in Qld :-)
Andrew
PS if they did do a pumped Hydro, would it be simpler to use local "Off grid" solar and wind to power the pumps. That way they could run independently of anything else and just devote max efficiency to pumping water up hill when they can????
Whether you like it or not, our "civilisation" is gonna change.
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.
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!
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.
Quote:
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.
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.
More or less what I was thinking, when even the operators of coal fired plants are not interested in extending the lives of what they have or building more then the writing is on the wall for coal.
A different twist on pumped hydropower what I was thinking. I suppose I am pre conditioned to see hydro as tens of kilometres of pipes coming down mountains, which would mean big pumping losses going back the other way. If they can make it work with a few tens of meters of head then it makes much more sense.
interesting question Paul, but no detail from the company. Just looked up the elevation profile of the pit at Iron Knob in Google earth. If that is the one they are thinking of using, looks like they have almost 200m of head to play with, depending on where the top dam goes (and there is already water of some sort in the pit, so maybe it is either waterproof or has a potentially helpful water-table).
If they can make it work with a few tens of meters of head then it makes much more sense.
I need to dig up a paper i saw a few years back for a small private water power system near a stream, but it used a constant gravity feed vs an impulse feed.
Very compact and virtually no loss of potential energy on the way down ( unlike the big turbines ) but not sure how scalable ( or durable ) it would be in large scale, as i assume mechanical losses would go up accordingly.
( Think of it like a string of buckets on a looped rope that goes vertically the whole way from top to bottom. The weighted buckets on the rope always provide a constant torque supply so designing the turbine can be matched to suit.
Nobody is arguing that power is not expensive in SA, but how on earth will a private company investing in new generation capacity increase the bills? Investment in low cost power sources is what we need and that is what this delivers.
I need to dig up a paper i saw a few years back for a small private water power system near a stream, but it used a constant gravity feed vs an impulse feed.
Very compact and virtually no loss of potential energy on the way down ( unlike the big turbines ) but not sure how scalable ( or durable ) it would be in large scale, as i assume mechanical losses would go up accordingly.
( Think of it like a string of buckets on a looped rope that goes vertically the whole way from top to bottom. The weighted buckets on the rope always provide a constant torque supply so designing the turbine can be matched to suit.
Andrew
I think I saw a TV show on that one. It was for a remote restaurant with the hydro setup and a wind turbine competing to power the place? Water taken from a stream some tens of meters above the site, run through a custom made turbine driving an automotive alternator and the discharge water returned to the stream?
Not even any sort of dam required to make it work, just run a pipe over the side of the bank up top, use a little vacuum to initially get the water over the top of the bank and down below the level of the intake and then let it siphon to get it flowing, really simple setup.
This is pretty much the same as large scale battery systems for round-trip efficiency, when you factor in losses for charging, inverters, whole-of-life charge capacity degradation, etc - especially when they are run at high currents, as they would be in a grid installation scenario.
Importantly, pumped-storage hydro can maintain that efficiency over many, many years of continuous operation, with no loss of capacity as they "age". Pumped-storage is already demonstrated to much higher capacity than any battery installation - e.g. Wivenhoe Pumped Storage in SE Qld has a storage capacity of around 5 GW.hr (500 MW for 10 hours continuous running), which it can store and release on a 24-hour cycle. Contrast that with the SA Tesla battery (currently, the world's biggest battery), which has a capacity of 0.13 GW.hr (100 MW for a bit over an hour).
Batteries are an important part of a renewable energy future, but if you want a really big "battery", pumped-storage hydro is hard to beat.
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.
See my previous post - pumped-storage hydro is actually pretty much on a par for efficiency with the latest battery technology, but unlike batteries, it doesn't "degrade" with age, or cycles of charge / discharge.
Also, the footprint isn't necessarily as big as you might think; e.g. take a look at Wivenhoe Pumped Storage - https://www.google.com.au/maps/@-27....-GB&authuser=0
The pumped storage dam is the little "pond" (about 2 km x 1 km) to the east of Wivenhoe Dam (which provides Brisbane's water supply and flood prevention). That little "pond" supports a 500 MW power station (the building you can see sitting at the edge of Lake Wivenhoe below the pumped storage pond).
Compare that with the "footprint" of a large solar power station - e.g. Ivanpah solar-thermal power station in eastern California, with a total combined generating capacity of 392 MW across the three units, with a "footprint" of around 5 km x 2 km: https://www.google.com.au/maps/place...-GB&authuser=0
Don't get me wrong - solar, wind, batteries and pumped-storage all have their place in a renewable energy future, but let's not discard some proven technologies because of un-founded prejudices.
I think I saw a TV show on that one. It was for a remote restaurant with the hydro setup and a wind turbine competing to power the place?
Nope, this was a simple unit by a bloke on a block near a hill with a stream.
It was a simple bucket drive that operated very similar to an overshot water wheel, but rather than being circular, it had about a 10m drop,
and the design used meant it was only about 1m wide vs 10m for a wheel, and very lightweight.
By having multiple buckets all full at the same time on the downward run, it gave constant torque, but without requiring a large flowrate.
The closest i can find so far is attached
( but it operates in reverse using air to lift the buckets. Never seen that before )
The main thing in these is they can extract nearly all the potential energy of the water without leaving much potential energy in the exhaust race.
Again, im not so sure how scalable it would be tho.
I am happy to be corrected on efficiency of pumped hydro versus modern battery storage.
I think both will have a place, battery storage and the immediacy of them taking up load while things like pumped hydro get moving would be essential for events like the SA blackout where a huge amount of supply was lost in a very short time, the battery/inverter setup would be what keeps the network standing up for the seconds to minutes required to take something like pumped solar from standing ready to on load.
Tomorrows grid is not going to look very much at all like todays, but yearning for the simplicity of a network supplied almost exclusively by coal fired steam looks an awful lot like motor nuts yearning for Weber carbs and kettering ignition because it is simple and easier to understand and work on than modern EFI. Ignoring the fact that a modern small capacity deisel makes more power and torque than a big banger V8 from the 1980's.
.... 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.
Yes, dams aren't as environmentally friendly as many might believe. The discharge of cold de-oxygenated water is the biggest issue I'm aware of but they generally try to mitigate that problem. Of course if the storage is in a disused pit and not on a stream that is a major plus. The other enviro problem of course is the concrete. Making cement produces a lot of CO2. I expect that the CO2 savings of pumped hydro would offset the enviro costs but the calculations should be done and laid out plainly before we proceed.
The other enviro problem of course is the concrete. Making cement produces a lot of CO2. I expect that the CO2 savings of pumped hydro would offset the enviro costs but the calculations should be done and laid out plainly before we proceed.
Absolutely!
But don't forget - we tend to use concrete in ALL of our major projects (even if it's just the footings and slabs), whereas not all dams actually need much concrete (Wivenhoe Pumped Storage and Wivenhoe Dam itself are earth / rock dams, with concrete only used in the spillway structures etc.) And while we're doing the environmental audits, let's not underestimate the environmental impacts of mining and processing for lithium batteries: http://gridedge.com.au/assets/facts-...s-20151108.pdf
Pumped-storage hydro simply needs two water reservoirs with a head difference - e.g. you can dig out a "turkey's nest" pond (no concrete!) above an escarpment on the coast, so that the ocean is the bottom reservoir. Environmental impacts are very limited - you have occupied a couple of square km of land above the escarpment, and because the water in the upper reservoir is "turned over" every day, it doesn't get as cold or stratified as long-term storage in a deep reservoir and it doesn't de-oxygenate, so there's no real impact on the ocean, other than in the immediate vicinity of the intake / outlet structure. (Pumped storage can of course be incorporated into conventional hydro schemes as well, or conventional hydro can be converted into pumped-storage, which is the thinking behind "Snowy 2.0".)
Coincidentally, ocean-front escarpments are often great sites for wind wind energy schemes, because of the high energy density of ocean winds, and the energy concentration as the sea wind rises over the escarpment, so co-location of wind farms and pumped-storage schemes at such locations is a great way of producing a zero-emission 24-hour base-load power scheme.
