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by tedd4u 718 days ago
From 2 years ago. Large region of Australia running fully on solar/wind/storage for 10+ days. Seems like the focus has to be on storage and continued improvement of grid-scale and rooftop solar and wind.

    South Australia has just chalked up what is undoubtedly a world first – a run of 
    more than 10 consecutive days over which the average production of wind and solar 
    accounted for 100 per cent of local demand.

    No other gigawatt scale grid in the world has come close to this amount of “variable 
    renewable energy”, or for such a long time.

    RenewEconomy reported on Monday that South Australia had just enjoyed a seven day 
    run of wind and solar that produced more than 104 per cent of average demand. Closer     
    inspection proved it was even more impressive than that.


    According to Geoff Eldridge at data providers GPE NemLog2, the supply of wind and 
    solar averaged 100 per cent of local demand for 10 days and 9 hours (a total of 249 
    hours) from 08:20 on Friday, December 9, to 1720, Monday, December 19. [1]
[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australias-remarkable-100-...
1 comments
belorn 717 days ago
Those sounds interesting and is likely a nice achievement, but averages really hide the critical information here. What was the min and max, and how did they deal with periods of low supply?

Denmark is a nice example why this matter. During optimal weather their wind power produce around twice their local demand. However, in terms of actually consumption each year they need to import about 50% of their total amount of energy. This despite the fact that they export more energy than they import. The only way that would make mathematically sense is if export and import occur during different periods over the year.

This has multiple issues. The biggest being that they are heavily dependent on nearby countries fossil fueled power plants. A secondary problem is that prices they get for exports are low, since optimal weather conditions means a general surplus of energy in EU, while periods of bad weather results low supply and very high import costs. Their exports do not pay for their imports, despite exporting more than importing (in terms of energy, not money).

One can not remove the word averages and conclude that they ran fully on solar/wind/storage for 10+ days. It would be the same as saying that Denmark is running fully on wind a decade+.

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