Electric car thread

[facthunter]

There's nothing LESS reliable that an old obsolete Coal fired Power station. They FAILon Hot days without warning and take ages to repair which can be Impossible  for Many technical reasons. Having steam in the equation means danger and inefficiency.  Coal combustion is a  a polluter on a grand scale.  You continue to Ignore STORAGE. You are the one flogging dead horses and using the Worn out slogans of the Deniers. It doesn't CUT. Why is Dutton Not around anymore? Nev.

[Siso]

 

2 hours ago, facthunter said:

There's nothing LESS reliable that an old obsolete Coal fired Power station. They FAILon Hot days without warning and take ages to repair which can be Impossible  for Many technical reasons. Having steam in the equation means danger and inefficiency.  Coal combustion is a  a polluter on a grand scale.  You continue to Ignore STORAGE. You are the one flogging dead horses and using the Worn out slogans of the Deniers. It doesn't CUT. Why is Dutton Not around anymore? Nev.

tell me anywhere in the world with a high penetration of intermittent generation that has cheap electricity to the consumer.  Coal use to be reliable in Australia. It is now seen as a way large energy company's can make money from our stupid ideological government. They won't give them proper maintenance, they don't care about Australia's energy security and they will threaten to close them down and the government will pay to keep them open (Eraring) or in SA's case, pay some diesel generators to come out of moth balls for the summer period. If the grid is run properly you have enough overbuild so if one drops out the others have the capacity and inertia to take up the slack. Pretty basic redundancy thought process like aircraft have. Germany has 170GWs of installed solar for a max grid demand of 60 odd GWs and they still import power from France, Sweden and burn brown coal(one of the the most polluting of fuel sources)

 

I am not a fan of coal. I think Nuclear should be seriously looked at and am sick of all the misguided hype about weather dependent intermittents. Electricity to the consumer has gone up over 30% in the last 12 months and old mate bowen is still saying how cheap the wholesale price is. Also saying that wind and solar don't care about the overseas conflict, but any spare part for a wind turbine does. I had real time experience with this during Covid.

Hydro and  geo thermal are the gold standard if they are readily accessible.

 

Prove me wrong!

[octave]

You’re assuming prices are high because we’re adding renewables, but that skips the key comparison—what would be cheaper instead?

New coal isn’t being built anywhere in Australia because it’s not economically competitive. If it were cheaper, companies would be investing in it—but they’re not.

Nuclear might be reliable, but in Australia it would take 10–15+ years and cost significantly more than renewables. That doesn’t solve current prices.

A big driver of recent price spikes has actually been coal plant outages and high fossil fuel prices, not renewables. That’s been highlighted repeatedly by Australian Energy Market Operator.

The idea that coal is still reliably holding the system together is outdated. Plants like Eraring Power Station are ageing, breaking down more often, and becoming expensive to maintain—that’s not ideology, it’s physics and economics.

You’re right that redundancy is needed—but that applies to any system. The difference is that renewables + storage are currently the cheapest way to build that redundancy at scale.

So the issue isn’t that renewables are making power expensive—it’s that we’re replacing an ageing, increasingly unreliable system, and that was always going to come with costs no matter what technology we chose.

 

 

 

 

[pmccarthy]

This paper examines the correlation between end-user electricity prices and the share of solar and wind energy in total electricity production in OECD countries. It is shown (i) that end-user prices in recent years (2020–2022) are positively correlated with the share of solar and wind and (ii) that the price of electricity in the majority of countries has risen with the solar and wind share since these types of energy came on the scene. (paper published 2024)

 

Green Electricity Prices | Biophysical Economics and Sustainability | Springer Nature Link

[octave]

 

3 hours ago, Siso said:

Tell me anywhere in the world where a large penetration of intermittent generation has made energy cheaper, stay the same or rise at the rate of inflation.

 

Can you name a country where building new coal or nuclear power plants recently has kept retail electricity prices flat or below inflation?

 

You’re asking renewables to reduce total electricity bills while we’re simultaneously replacing an entire ageing system and building new infrastructure.

 

[Siso]

Cheaper would be to replace coal fired power stations with new coal fired plants in a controlled manner. Nuclear would take a long time but newer reactors will last a long time and be cheaper in the long run. Best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, second best is today. The problem is we aren't just adding renewables, we are adding intermittent renewables. If we replaced our coal with  new coal and gas we don't need battery's (although some would be beneficial) extra transmission, artificial inertia etc it would be cheaper.

[Siso]

France, US, Sweden (except for the south of the country where exporting to Germany has artificially raised them). Thats answering a question with a question nd all we hear from our intermittent supporting is that intermittents are the cheapest form of electricity. We don't need new infrastructure to stay where we are except if the population increases, just maintenance or replacing existing as it wears out. We are building a lot just for the intermittents.

Edited 7 hours ago by Siso

[octave]

1 minute ago, Siso said:

Cheaper would be to replace coal fired power stations with new coal fired plants in a controlled manner.

Any new generation, regardless of method, imposes a cost on the electricity they generate. New renewables impose a cost, but so would a bunch of new coal power plants.  This cost would need to be paid for for many years to come.   

[Siso]

2 minutes ago, octave said:

Any new generation, regardless of method, imposes a cost on the electricity they generate. New renewables impose a cost, but so would a bunch of new coal power plants.  This cost would need to be paid for for many years to come.   

Yes it would, but it would also last for years to come, not changed out every 30 or so.

[octave]

3 minutes ago, Siso said:

Yes it would, but it would also last for years to come, not changed out every 30 or so.

A coal power plant may last 50 years, but during that time, it would undergo maintenance and upgrades.  Private banks and investors are unwilling to finance new coal.  The long payback means that even if it were viable now, the risk is that somewhere down the line it may become unviable due to advancing technologies.

There is no law in Australia that prevents building new coal; there is simply no good business case.   

 

You keep talking about "intermittent power"  without considering energy storage.  Battery efficiency and cost fall every year. A builder of a coal plant that is burning coal whether it is generating at all, is competing with ever cheaper and more efficient battery storage. It is not just chemical energy storage.  Underground Air Batteries — The Energy Storage You’ve Never Heard Of  

 

Generating electricity with renewables is extremely cheap; this is undeniable. However, the challenge is both long and short-duration storage.   Batteries are being built at an astonishing rate, and there are other promising methods in the pipeline. An investor in coal would need to know that they could never be undercut during the payback time of the plant.   

[kgwilson]

If you want more expensive energy build new coal fired power stations and you will also get added pollution and greenhouse gasses we are trying to reduce. Plus it would take up to 8 years to build. The problem is venture capitalists and banks won't touch this option with a barge pole. Why? Among many reasons it is just not financially viable.

 

The grid was neglected for 20 years by successive governments & population increase along with increased demand for electricity and the costs associated with upgrading the grid are enormous. Add the constant complaints from people who don't want transmission lines on their land and the costs of compliance and you get a logistical and financial nightmare.

 

Storage is the answer. See Octaves comments. I have 9kW of Solar & an 18.6 kWh battery & don't use any grid power and I charge my EV for free as well. Rooftop solar produces more power during the day than all of Australias fossil fuel power generators combined. There is so much the wholesale price in the middle of the day is almost always negative. I sell most of my stored energy during peak demand & keep enough to cover my use overnight & during the peak morning period.

 

Not everyone can do what I do but there are 4 & a half million houses with rooftop solar & all of these could have a home battery. The state and federal home battery subsidies have been so successful that half of the original $2.3 billion expected to last to 2030 was used up in 6 months. Now an additional $4.9 billion has been added along with changes based on battery capacity.

 

 

[octave]

 

When I’m asked what I pay per kWh, I’d usually say around 30 cents. But thinking about it, that’s not really accurate for my situation. Because I have rooftop solar—and the system has already paid for itself—a portion of the electricity I use is effectively free.

A better way to look at it would be to take my total electricity bill over a period and divide it by the total kWh I’ve used (including both grid and solar generation). That would give a blended cost per kWh, which is likely much lower than 30 cents—probably somewhere around 10–15 cents.

When you think about it this way, electricity doesn’t seem especially expensive for households with solar.

Given there are now over 4.5 million homes with rooftop solar in Australia (roughly a third of households), that’s a large number of people benefiting from relatively low effective electricity costs.

That said, this raises a genuine equity issue. Not everyone can access rooftop solar, particularly renters or lower-income households. The solution, in my view, isn’t to reduce the benefits for those who have solar, but to expand access for those who don’t.

 

[facthunter]

Even those without solar are better Off. You can Have electricity for free at certain times and the Price is less because of the Cheap  % which will only become Greater if we get on with it.   Nev

[nomadpete]

Recent stats show that 255,000 households have installed a battery.... in the last 9 months.

 

This represents a significant private investment in the electricity market.

It also, according to AEMO, reduced the average wholesale price of electricity by more than 15%. This is due to not requiring gas peaking plants to start up during peak use times.

 

So, private home solar installations are definitely NOT causing the price of electricity to go up.

[Siso]

Coal fired do have upgrades and maintenance during there life as do wind turbines and then replaced every 30 years. Every machine needs maintenance! You could build a coal fired power station but you miss out on all the government mandated subsidy's.

 

Will the last person out of Australia turn off the lights!

[old man emu]

Anybody intersted in talking about EVs?

[red750]

This thread is about electric CARS, not grids and methods of generating.