> “We can take the …cheapest form of electricity in places like Gladstone and Townsville, take the surplus solar, put it into the battery during the day … and we’ve got eight hours of cheap solar stored in those batteries, and then we can get to 16, 18 hours a day of supply.
All the fossil fuel company shills kept going on and on about how there's no sunshine at night, and that we will still need baseload plants. They were wrong. More accurately, they were outright lying to protect their vested interests, but the point is that grid-scale battery technology has advanced to the point that gigawatt-hours can be deployed without government subsidies.
I had the opportunity to talk to the project manager of the first 100 MWh battery that was deployed in South Australia, and I asked him directly if the nay-sayers were right or if the battery was actually any good.
His response was that it was, and I quote, "fucking awesome", and then elaborated that unlike every other source of power it can track the requirements perfectly, matching the supply to the demand instantly. In the past, they had to over-produce by keeping "peaking" gas plants running and then just dumping the excess into resistors. The electricity price from peaking plants is also charged at something like 7x the normal rate because they had to be spun up and spun down at least once a day, which puts massive wear and tear on the expensive turbines. Not to mention the wasted power.
So, yes, of course the owners of those peaking gas plants put out articles in the press through their buddies in the right-wing media pooh-poohing the battery technology that is actually vastly superior in capability and cost and environmental benefits. Once the batteries are deployed at scale, their investment in those peaking plants may as well be written off.
Green technology is now the cheapest and the best.
Anyone arguing against it is a paid shill or has a vested interest.
jiggawatts•2mo ago
All the fossil fuel company shills kept going on and on about how there's no sunshine at night, and that we will still need baseload plants. They were wrong. More accurately, they were outright lying to protect their vested interests, but the point is that grid-scale battery technology has advanced to the point that gigawatt-hours can be deployed without government subsidies.
I had the opportunity to talk to the project manager of the first 100 MWh battery that was deployed in South Australia, and I asked him directly if the nay-sayers were right or if the battery was actually any good.
His response was that it was, and I quote, "fucking awesome", and then elaborated that unlike every other source of power it can track the requirements perfectly, matching the supply to the demand instantly. In the past, they had to over-produce by keeping "peaking" gas plants running and then just dumping the excess into resistors. The electricity price from peaking plants is also charged at something like 7x the normal rate because they had to be spun up and spun down at least once a day, which puts massive wear and tear on the expensive turbines. Not to mention the wasted power.
So, yes, of course the owners of those peaking gas plants put out articles in the press through their buddies in the right-wing media pooh-poohing the battery technology that is actually vastly superior in capability and cost and environmental benefits. Once the batteries are deployed at scale, their investment in those peaking plants may as well be written off.
Green technology is now the cheapest and the best.
Anyone arguing against it is a paid shill or has a vested interest.