<
https://reneweconomy.com.au/absolutely-world-leading-why-australia-is-leading-the-charge-away-from-baseload-power/>
"It has become the key part of the debate around Australia’s energy transition:
Will a future grid depend on the old paradigms of baseload and peaking plants?
Or can a grid dominated by variable renewables and supported by dispatchable
power support a modern economy?
It’s a fundamental question, because those arguing that the life of Australia’s
ageing coal fired generators should be extended and then replaced with “always
on” nuclear power plants insist that baseload is the only way to power a modern
economy.
Those that support a green energy transition, based around low cost variable
wind and solar, backed up by storage and other flexible and dispatchable power
sources, say otherwise. And that accounts for just about everyone in the
Australian energy industry.
Opinions vary about the speed of the transition, and the balance between
distributed and centralised generation, and the focus on new transmission, but
few doubt it can, and because of the climate and environmental imperatives,
that it should be done.
The institution that finds itself in the middle of this debate is the
Australian Energy Market Operator, which now has the dual responsibility of
keeping the lights on, and laying out a multi-decade roadmap of how the grid
should transition beyond coal.
And it has no doubt that a transition to a 100 per cent, or even a near 100 per
cent renewable grid is not just possible, but necessary and the lowest cost
option given the options that Australia has available to it – namely its wealth
of wind and solar resources.
“The construct of base load and peaking is that you want consumers to have the
lowest cost generation possible, the lowest cost way to meet energy consumers
needs,” AEMO CEO Daniel Westerman says in the latest episode of
Renew
Economy’s weekly
Energy Insiders podcast.
“And historically the lowest cost has been coal. Always on, it provided the
base load of the power system because it was the cheapest. And it was
supplemented by peaking capacity … and that peaking was often gas, because it
was the next most expensive.
“And then you dispatch them in as you as you sort of go through the merit
order, more and more expensive plants to meet consumers needs
“Today, though, the lowest cost form of energy for consumers is renewable
energy. It’s free when the sun shines and the wind blows, but it’s not there
all the time.
“But so what you do want is a power system that maximizes the output of the
lowest cost form of energy for consumers, that’s variable renewable energy, and
then to fill in the gaps of that variable renewable energy with firming and
ultimately backup power.
“So we’ve sort of gone from an old historic construct of base load and peaking
to today’s world, and frankly, the future world of variable renewable energy
and firming. And that’s kind of the new paradigm that we find ourselves in in
the power system.”
The argument against this, made most loudly by the renewable energy critics, is
that it has never been done before, at least not in large multi-gigawatt scale
grids. But that’s not to say that it can’t be done."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
