It's odd that Fully Charged chose not to mention that this presenter has a doctorate in Mechanical/Energy Engineering as well as extensive industry experience. The fact that she's a genuine authority on energy engineering makes me inclined to listen carefully and give credence to what she's saying. If she were just another RUclipsr with a camera (as I assumed before googling) then I would have taken this presentation with the usual grain of salt. Seems to me that when Fully Charged does have an actual expert on board then it would be helpful to make their audience aware of it...
And as such, the experts should be answering questions related to voltage, frequency, and rotor angle stability. Sub-transient & transient analysis, and system resiliency due to small and large disturbances, should be at the forefront of renewable energy discussions as we continue increasing the penetration of inverter-based resources while losing the rotational kinetic coupling of conventional rotating machines, such as synchronous generators. While I agree the two largest physical constraints are energy storage and power flow limitation issues, we need to seriously start committing resources and investments to understanding and improving the conventional protection mechanisms and control algorithms on the grid today. Directional power flow relays must be updated for distributed generation, the increasing nature of voltage harmonics due to non-linearities and their effects on equipment, the list is seemingly endless. If we aren't careful, we will compromise the integrity of the grid, which would lead to blackouts, even with the necessary infrastructure investments in generation, transmission, and storage.
@@mikkoberger8683this is one of those comments that's intentionally and annoyingly pedantic. If you want to have that conversation, go find a group of EEs with no girlfriends.
@@mikkoberger8683 Let us not forget the constraint of materials supply. How about whole of lifecycle cost vs benefits? This is an admittedly short video but unfortunately it's more of a sales pitch than a true analysis of pros and cons.
Point but given how she does already have her own reputation it could be that they expected people to recognise her… or perhaps forgot she isn’t recognisable to everyone. XD But yeah they have had some famous in renewable circles Aussies on lately so Rosie is another one on the list but point that’s not everyone is going to recognise them all or even be familiar with them.
I'm very glad to see that Rosie Barnes has joined the Fully Charged team. I've watched a lot of her videos and she is brilliant. Good topic too. I love solar and wind solutions since they don't depend on a scientific breakthrough that never really happens.
Dr. Rosie Barnes, another wonderful addition to the _Fully Charged_ cast of presenters. I've been following _Engineering with Rosie_ for a long time. She's a wealth of knowledge with an incredible ability to present heady material in an extremely approachable manner. Well done FC. Well done.
Australia always struck me as an ideal place for agri-voltaics, giving shade where needed and possibly using some of the electricity for water desalination for the farm.
They make a great solution for covering irrigation canals to reduce evaporation loss, and with the odd battery here and there, can power the canals pumps.
The idea is to reduce global warming so why do you and others keep on about costs? If sea levels rise any faster then it's going to cost a lot more ... first the governments will faff about with coastal defences ... then twig that's very short term so a waste of cash. Perhaps it would be more prudent to start migrating people onto floating islands or much higher ground. Taking on Mother Nature seems a tad silly, given she's got a lot more experience of climate change and resulting weather.
@@AussieZeKieL Expensive to set up, but the greater yields and a energy & water surplus, would make for larger profits and thus a similar or probably better ROI. However, the goal is of course to reduce emissions, to which hardly a price tag can be put.
Looking forward to seeing Rosie at Fully Charged Show Sydney. Such a well informed enthusiastic & optimistic presenter. We need more promotion of the abundance that a renewable future can bring.
One thing I notice about Rosie Barnes is that she never talks about economics and costs. She talks about solar and wind replacing coal because they are renewable, not because they make economics sense. At the very end of this video (12:35) she says of coal plants, "No one is forcing them to close, or paying them to close. It's not happening because of government policies. It's simple economics. Adding more renewables is now cheaper than continuing to run existing coal plants." But the headline of the news article she shows at 12:15 says, "Australia hastens coal plant closures to catch up on climate". She also doesn't mention that South Australia, with the highest percentage of solar and wind, has the HIGHEST electric rates in Australia. The costs for solar and wind installations frequently "forget" to mention that they don't include the costs of batteries, back-up fossil fuel generating plants (usually forced to idle at an economic loss in order to provide dispatchable electricity during dunkelflaute), or the additional transmission lines that conveniently-located fossil plants don't need.
For those that don't know. Rosie is a Engineer that worked (consulting now as I recall) in the renewables industry, wind mostly. She is The Expert on what she is covering here, no need to interview others. Brilliant!
@@ChaosSwissroIl You have zero evidence about any lies. What are the lies here? That Australia coal mines are closing? That solar and wind and a little back up can easily provide all the energy Australia needs? These aren't lies. It's quite basic factual content here. There's nothing controversial at all. So again, you're just being arrogant and cynical.
Mr Swiss troll wouldn't be much fun at parties. Maybe Mr troll should talk to someone he can trust, like a doctor, about the benefits of lithium, and wind power..
Dave and Rosie should collaborate, that would be quite a YT episode. Maybe on the materials required for wind turbines, innovations in maintaining off shore blades, or potential pros and cons of different micro scale 'at home' or 'in backyard' wind energy systems.
No way! Rosie! Rosie's channel is amazing! I'm so glad to see her on the team and getting more exposure. She's going to be the presenter that gets this channel to 1 million subscribers!
Having lapped the map several times in Australia and taken extensive road trips in the US, all the while observing energy and lifestyle trends, I have a couple of observations. Some of the most desirable areas to live only lack water and previously lacked energy. Those places in the US are actually populated because of water from the Colorado River. Energy is no longer a problem wherever there is wind and sun. Wherever there is cheap energy and sea water, potable water is no longer an issue. The Southern and Western coastlines are now ripe for great living, where previously water from the Murray River was available only as far West as Ceduna. Eucla, Esperance, Kalbarri, Denham, Exmouth etc are all great lifestyle choices. Most of these locations are at the pointy end of the renewables spear. Local water infrastructure that enables population in remote locations is more economical than bulk energy transmission from remote to populated areas. As Rosie points out Australia has the box seat regarding renewables. Having thought about it for years, I could go for days about the economical opportunities.
Excellent presentation of where Australia is up to in the transition to renewable energy. I hope this episode can be spread far and wide to the general population to create much greater awareness of how Australia is well on the way to renewable energy self sufficiency.Thank you Rosie(Engineering with Rosie) and FullyCharged Show.
They need a big east west interconnect across thr Nullabor. When Perth is sunny in mid afternoon it can power Sydney's evening peak. Vice versa in the morning.
@MrDisasterboy They need high voltage DC for distance I think. The UK is currently planning a long distance interconnect to Morocco sub-sea across the bay of biscay. Its possible.
I enjoyed Rosie’s presentation as always. I am 99% off-grid with solar and home batteries. To get to 100% I did consider wind as it tends to be more windy in the monsoon season here, but having seen Rosie’s excellent videos on domestic wind I decided to not go down that route. Instead my next EV will have V2L, maybe the BYD Seal which has 4kW power output. We hear a lot about V2G but very few cars have this built in. I would like to see a show about V2L which is easy to integrate into a solar inverter. As I have a big solar system I am banned from exporting to the grid, this is the case in many countries and people are restricted to smaller 5kW solar systems. This restricts how much domestic solar can be part of the solution.
@@TsLeng home batteries has got me to 99% off-grid. Most people would probably be happy with that but I want to be 100%. About once a year we get 3 to 4 days of continuous heavy rain. Adding home batteries to cover that wouldn’t be economic. A car with 85kWh of batteries would cover the house needs and still have power for local trips.
Why only wind and solar? The more dominant intermittent power becomes, the more energy storage is needed in the absence of baseload power sources, and it's not at all clear how practical that is at such a large scale. Iceland is 100% "renewable" but they do it via geothermal which is essentially constant baseload, so they avoid problems with intermittency's and they are a small country. Whether an entire power grid built on solar, wind and some kind of energy storage can work for a country as big as Australia remains an open question. Also, the reliance on China for solar panels adds additional uncertainties. Obviously nuclear would be a reasonable option to be in the mix, but Australia seems to be averse to it. Right now the "energy transition" remains one big experiment. This is ignoring the fact that whatever reductions in CO2 Australia makes will be more than offset by increases in Asia and Africa.
Wow so dense with information. Here's my notes i took, i hope they're useful to others too: in 2021 Australia got 29% of it's energy from renewable sources. In the last 12 months (as of end of Feb) we got 35% from renewables. 13% was from wind, 9% from rooftop solar, 6% from utility-scale solar farms, 8% from hydro. Rooftop solar is currently at 28 GW total capacity (1 in 3 households have solar panels). We're expecting rooftop solar to triple by 2030 (7yrs). Utility-scale wind & solar is currently at 17 GW total capacity that gives us 21% of our energy. We have another 17 GW worth of projects paid-for & ready to build. So that's about 2/3rds of our energy from wind & solar by 2030 without changing anything. Energy Market expects/projects that renewables will be 83% of our energy by 2030, and 98% by 2050; By 2050 2/3rds of households will have rooftop solar with 5x the current combined capacity (i guess ppl will have more panels, but also there's more households); Utility wind&solar will increase by 9x to 153 GW. During last 12 months the minimum from renewables was 1.6% on a windless winter evening & the maximum was 66% at noon on a spring day. If we tripled our current renewables we'd generate day by day between 5% - 200% of our energy from renewables (depending on wind & sun strength). Studies suggest Australia needs between 300-650 GWh of storage with a power output of 15-50 GW. This is less than 1 day's worth of energy storage for the nation. In Australia we don't have long periods with no solar or wind, & basically never across the whole country. Australia currently produces half the world's Lithium, and has the 2nd largest reserves of Cobalt. The mining sector makes up 10% of all of Australia's energy consumption. If wind & solar continues being installed at the current rate we'll triple our current variable-renewable capacity by 2030. Coal still makes up over half of our electricity generation. 30% of Australian existing coal-fired generation capacity will close down by 2030 (just based on announcements so far) but it's projected to actually be 2/3rds by that time.
The Lucky Country should absolutely be at the front of the renewable energy transition. It just makes sense. So glad we seemed to have come to our senses on that front and that we'll hopefully make up some lost time.
Rosie says that to get to 100% renewables isn't much more than we are doing now, then goes on to say it is 3x current production just to get to 100% of existing electricity demand. Australia total energy consumption in 2021 = 1,589TWh Total electricity production in 2021 = 247.06TWh So it's closer to 6 or 7x current renewable production to get to 100% renewables for our entire economy.
Australia is also a major supplier of uranium, which could be used to power reactors like Molten Salt plants that would not need any battery storage at all. With the Moltex design the power plant can also produce power on demand even with highly intermittent solar/wind on the same grid so the reactor using stored heat in salt could act as the only battery needed. So a 2GW thermal plant you would have 1GWe avg output, but with 2GWe generators those could be ramped up and down to counter match the solar/wind. This matching variable nuclear with variable renewable is a good match.
That's a terrible idea. Who wants an industrial heat source that doesn't just make electricity but has direct industrial heat and synthetic fuel applications? We want an electricity-only source that needs 100% backup, is weather, time of day, season, geographic, and material resource dependent. Each of these dependencies makes the energy far more expensive and less reliable but creates green jobs. Sure the waste can be reused to make more energy but until then it will frighten people. Sure it can't hurt anyone but think about their feelings.
can someone tell me what is meant by renewable. What is renewable on solar panels , unless it means ,renewing the panels and renewing the wind generators. What do you do with all the stuff that can't be recycled. panels and blades.
Aus has developed two types of Batteries that use Zn and Br and no Li at all. Both elements are readily available from multiple sources. Then you have the liquid metal batteries based on Sb and Ca and recently Al and S. You have the redox batteries based on V or Fe. Coming along are Na batteries. All have some huge positive characteristics not found in Li batteries besides the easy access and cheapness of the elements they use. All can be cycled between 0 and 100% charge with no damage, last much longer than Li batteries, use simpler electronics for their charge and discharge cycle and are much easier recycled, if you ever need to recycle them. How about an in-depth treatment of each of the alternate battery chemistries. I bet all they need is market share to out-compete Li batteries for cost.
I also asked for a presentation on batteries made with abundant materials. I think that Elon Musk is nuts for using Lithium batteries for stationary storage. Soon those will be "mined" out of the power plants and put into mobile applications that justify the cost of lithium.
This is what fully charged need to be doing! I've criticised some of your content in the past for a rose tinted view without in depth detail and analysis but this is spot on. More please!
I am a big fan of Rosie and really enjoyed this overview. I recently vacationed in Australia and one thing stood out for me. Conservation and energy efficiency did not seem to be important. The norm was buildings with little or no insulation along with single pane windows. I build houses in Southern California and a home with a modern thermal envelope uses half the energy for heating and cooling.
Older homes are often double brick, and are great for thermal management. Newer homes tend to be poor quality because our construction industry is quite corrupt.
We have had mandatory minimum energy efficiency on all new homes for about 15 years. It varies state to state but generally requires a certificate from an external auditer prior to construction. Commercial buildings are the same but the incentive is greatly reduced running costs which is better recognised in building design. This is a well developed industry because the associated running costs savings are significant in larger buildings. There was even a nation wide government incentive about 12 years ago to pay for people to insulate their homes.
Laws and regulations for energy efficiency in new build houses was only introduced within the last 20 years...before that only the bare minimum was done to make a house comfortable enough. Old houses (like mine built in the 1920's) were not insulated. The previous owner had insulation installed in the 70's or 80's but the walls (double brick) and windows (single pane sashes) are still untouched. But any new extension will be subject to energy efficiency laws the same as new builds.
Hello Rosie, Thank you for mentioning the term "Dunkelflaute" (greetings from Germany!). I would like to point out a few local or regional storage systems: 1) RedoxFlow - a liquid-based storage system, where a lot of research is already being done on different chemical element combinations in terms of efficiency, toxicity and costs. What I particularly like about it is the scalability - the converter unit is decoupled from the storage. You increase the amount of storage simply by adding more tanks! In addition, it is a closed system that does not experience any (or hardly any) degradation - unlike e.g. Li-Ion batteries. 2) Seasonal ice storage. I haven't delved deeper into this matter yet, but here in Germany a number of systems for larger houses and house complexes have already been installed. 3) Here in Germany there are already municipalities where all renewable electricity producers are actually brought together and stored in a specially constructed 40-foot container on the outskirts of the village. In the evening and at night, the electricity is made available again. The regional power company supports this project because it saves them having to upgrade the power lines to this location. And the place's fluctuating electricity draw is compensated for pretty well.
Hi Rosie, please talk about the possibilities for sodium ion batteries for grid storage or vehicle use in a future video. I would also like to learn of anything new in energy storage.
An excellent video with another knowledgeable and enthusiastic presenter. I have no doubt that Australia will achieve the goals described by Dr Rosie Barnes and probably in a shorter timescale than she suggests. I really hope they do as the earth's fragile climate is under severe stress and needs all the help it can get ........
Iceland has a unique position on renewable/alternative energy sources. Being on an active volcano means Geothermal power is as far away as the basement. Also, the land is plenty mountainous - thanks to the volcanoes - and steep rivers mean hydro power for the whole Dam nation. Solar may not be worth the trouble at that latitude, but their spot in the North Atlantic gets REALLY windy, and that can fill in a few gaps.
Great to see the progress in Australia. I did not realize how quickly they are transforming their electricity generation. Rosie does a great job explaining, very clear and simple. No doubt her extensive engineering knowledge and experience helps. Her “Engineering with Rosie” RUclips channel is one of my favorites.
i just looked at Rosie's channel, she's been uploading videos for 2 years and literally every single video makes me want to watch it. OH NO, and here i was getting so close to catching up with my youtube videos, welp my list just increased by 59 videos! :D
@@rogerstarkey5390 Even that one should be watched, TWICE! Have you ever considered backing up your personal (controversial/edgy) opinions with any sortof explanation or reasoning? It could give positive results.
Fully Charged videos are so well produced. Great graphics and sound quality. Very cool to see Rosie here. Australia is blessed with sun, wind and renewable energy minerals. Australia's lithium is hard rock as opposed to brines as shown in the video.
The lithium dug out of the ground from one of the mines in Western Australia is 1.3% of the extracted ores. The holes in the ground are already large enough to swallow whole towns. Only 5% of lithium batteries are recycled, it's cheaper to simply dig up more lithium. Ask the question, what is going to happen to all of this infrastructure at end of life? So far most of it is going to landfill.
@@margaretarmstrong2445 I doubt that you are an expert in mining or in recycling. You might want to consider that your sources of information are feeding you propaganda. They have a vested interest in mis-informing you. The question is, what are you more invested in? Reality or the culture of misinformation?
@@AWildBard Nothing I have said is untrue. Before you call other people liars, do some simple research. You are the one choosing to simply believe everything you've been told. I have been lied to by the best of them. The developers who swan onto the properties of unsuspecting farmers don't know how to tell the truth. If you haven't looked at the cradle to grave story of wind, solar, backup batteries and EV's then you know nothing. At least take the time to find out how much lithium is actually extracted out of Australian ores as a percentage. It's too easy for you to simply discredit someone with spiteful language.
Storage is only needed in local areas it is cheaper and better to have an "oversupply" of green electricity and heat generation! That way we have enough for our domestic needs and the extra can be turned into ammonia and hydrogen for export. Then if still have some spare we can desalinate seawater and pump it over the range to keep our rivers flowing. Inland there are huge amounts of underground water that is salty and we could desalinate that and wouldn't need to pump it so far to use it for irrigation.
@@theairstig9164 I suppose that's one way to do it... or a smart way to do it would be to get one of your own and let the grid pay you to store energy and discharge it when it's needed.
@unknownentity742 Don't tell a South Australian that. Since the "Big Battery" was built at Hornsdale we have got more reliable and cheaper power and as Rosie said 7 days of 100% renewable power in December.
@@grogery1570 The Hornsdale battery is ultimately quite a trivial asset to South Australian energy. The inconvenient truth is that went demand begins outstripping what the weather can supply, SA uses gas peaking stations and imports energy from lignite stations in Victoria. What the horsdale battery does is moderate the grid, which is an important task when dealing with energy sources that can vary a lot in short time frames, but as i said, i doesnt solve SA problems when it begins running out of energy. Batteries are also in general not a great storage mechanism. The best storage mechanism is easily pumped hydro, since the physical infrastructure lasts several times longer, it doesn;t draw on critical metals that are in short supply and it has far greater energy densities and storage capacities than battery systems. There are numerous pieces of literature on it, it's easy to find. The next best solution is to use something that can generate baseload, which is again hydro or geothermal or nuclear. Those three sources of energy aren't big on materials and they also physically last much longer. Where batteries excel is for mobile systems that scale down, not problems that require big scaling. That's not to say batteries (or maybe even ultracapacitors if they get cheap enough) are not an important part of any future energy grid though, because they clearly must be for renewables to function properly.
Nice one Rosie! great to see Australian content to the FCS increasing and a truly world views are now seen and compared....Australia to be a renewable super power...I vote yes!
The great thing about Australia is it uses the most energy when the sun shines, in order to keep cool, unlike the UK where we use the most energy when the sun doesn't shine, in order to keep warm.
I am a big sceptic on all this. However I did a quick estimate of how much just the battery storage for Australia might cost. I take (from the video here) what is likely a minimum viable amount of 50GWH storage. All the numbers here are in USD (including Australia's GDP). Tesla Megapacks are $2 million (including installation) and store 3.9MWH. So you would need 256 of them to get 1GWH of storage and (256 * 50) = 12,800 to get 50GWH of storage. Total cost would therefore be around (12,800 * 2,000,000) = 25,600,000,000. Plus shipping, land purchase, maintenance etc. So we are looking at a 30 billion project. Which is not really such a big deal in a country which has a GDP of 1,552 Billion. Still I am sceptical. Why? Because I have yet to see even a sniff of a coherent plan, with reasonable estimates and timeframes. In the current hysterical over-reacting polity I predict that mad government directives will be implemented with maximum incompetence that will crash the economy and either turn the voters off the whole idea, or render any such plan moot by reason of national poverty.
No the Net Zero report costed it as trillions, you are out by at least 2 magnitudes in your calculations. You ignore massive cost of infrastructure, batteries, and massive overbuild necessary.
Great update! What I like about technology is that as things get rolled out, the costs of production and maintenance go down, so it's getting better, cheaper and easier... 👍
If like to see more about flow batteries. Grid storage doesn't need to be light or small. Flow type batteries can store LOTS of energy, if you are willing to accept it weighing tons and taking up lots of space.
Compared to other sources? Well, we can discount Nuclear(?) . Wind turbines, if you build the pylons correctly, the will outlive the generation units/ blades and can have new units installed with the latest, more efficient technology (already being done in Spain, and no doubt elsewhere) Generator? Recyclability must be "high 90's"? . Blades? Watched a video recently detailing plans to recover 98% of material (now there's enough to spool up the industry!) As I recall (just for instance) "fibrous material" in the blade, once shredded, makes a great filler for cement, offsetting carbon in that production process. ...... Solar? 95%+ Glass and Aluminium, that'll be fully recyclable. Copper? Same, the rest are trace elements, most of which will be recovered in the glass recycling process. . We should of course note that the "lifetime" of a solar panel (similarly to batteries) is calculated at "±80% of original capacity" with a guarantee on the latest units of at least 20 years, so they remain useful for way past that time. Balanced against the high carbon construction and constant daily footprint of other generation, it's not even close.
@@rogerstarkey5390 There is so much you don't know about the recycling of wind and solar. The most obvious of which is that very little of it is recycled. The blades are being cut into three in some states in America and buried in landfill. We've been sent photos of stacks of them that were dumped near a national park in Queensland. Victoria is the only state that I know of to declare solar panels as E-waste so instead of paying collection agencies to pick them up it's cheaper to send them to landfill. The collection agencies strip off the frames and wiring and call that recycling. The bare panels are stockpiled. And don't think that they are "mainly glass" for one thing there is much more to them than that and it isn't easy to separate out the different materials. There are also different types of solar panels. We have a commercial solar utility 4 kilometres from our home that is 87MW of thin film cadmium/tellurium solar panels. These panels are highly toxic and they need to be recycled in special processes including acid baths and use of other chemicals. The nearest facility to recycle these panels is Malaysia. This solar facility has not done well and is on to its third owner, how confident should we be that these panels will be properly recycled?
Great to have Rosie Barnes as part of the Fully Charged Team. It seems for some time I have not heard any reference to wave or tidal as possible intermittent renewable options. Have they fallen out of favour?
Robert has been talent scouting while in OZ! Rosie would be a good one to keep! Very smart woman and has the paperwork to prove it. Hopefully, there will be plenty of good things happening in OZ so she can report on it. A lot is happening in the Universities and private enterprises even when the government was full of deniers.
@ JS S7 Indeed. But would she want to do a repeat guest spot on this channel? If she has her own channel then she might as well cut out the "middle man" once she has enticed potential viewers to her own site. Perhaps Robert didn't see that coming? Of course he didn't. Why would anyone want to see an interview with interruptions when they can go straight to the source and listen to 100% dialogue from the single "expert"?
Another top episode FCL Team and welcome Rosie. Great to see such an expert join and represent Australia on an awesome RUclips channel always pushing the clean, green message. Would love to see more on local community batteries. I think these are much more valuable and a better use of resources then each house having a battery on it. 👍☀️⚡🔋
This is such a huge opportunity for Australia and I can’t wait to see it play out. Hoping we get our act together in time to lead the world the new energy future. Cheap energy has the potential to solve so many of our biggest problems today.
Elephant in the room that no one is talking about life cycle management. Solar Panels will need to be replaced every 20 years or so, what is the cost to replace all these panels on this timescale and what happens to the materials. Same with Wind Turbine blades and batteries. Pumped solar was also mentioned, but in Australia what percentage would this actually add in terms of our overall power needs, remember that it is not a 100% efficient process. To my mind Nuclear is the logical way forward. Nuclear Power stations will also require ongoing maintenance costs but the plants are relatively small (energy dense) and thus don't produce many waste steams of significant quantity like wind and solar do. Finally, how much concrete and steel is used to support wind and solar versus building a Nuclear plant, the difference is significant (in the favour of a Nuclear Plant). Again, full life cycle costs are not being discussed and to my mind this is significant.
Wait a minute... I live in the U.S. All I'm hearing about Australia is that there is no room for partisan politics on energy policies. I heard that 90,000 residents were without power during the summers searing heat. I also heard they shut down 10 coal plants putting nearly quarter million people out of work, all the while, energy prices have jumped 77%. I just read an article that says; "Australia is a National embarassment for floppping on renewable energy." Is none of this true?
Very true. I'm currently have my power disconnected because it's has slowly grown up too 2,700 dollars. Our power cost so much 😢😢 One bedroom unit...my winter bill for power was 850
We tried that some years ago, it didn't work and is rusting somewhere off the coast of southern Australia. I guess they justify the abandonment as creating a 'marine park'.
Excess capacity is a solution NOT a problem. Excess capacity is FREE energy. And there is enough solar in Australia to desalinize and pump millions of gallons of water a day and green the continent.
@@-whackd LOL. They could run 12 hours a day 340 days out of the year. Building desalination is not expensive. Its an old technology now. Without irrigation climate change is likely to make food production impossible without it in Australia. The droughts just keep getting worse.
Well.... It's not free per se as there would be some associated cost but I think the point you are making is that the excess would otherwise be totally wasted. At the very least (from the start) grid level energy storage would reduce and eventually negate the need for very expensive peaker plants. It really is a no brainer.
How are they going with storing the energy, there has been a lot of talk and no action in the storage of the power. What type of batterys are they going to use when the wind and sun don't shine for days. These batterys are going to have to be huge, expensive and where are they going to be located?. What contractors and companies are going to be supplying these, how much are these going to cost and who's going to pay for it. How long are the batterys going to take to build. It seems like there is a lot of talk from the gov and the greens but no plan on storage?
You neglected to mention we have a huge coastline so off shore wind yes, but more importantly wave and tidal power opportunities as well as those technologies develop.
Electricity prices in the NEM are set by the highest accepted generator, which in SA is almost always gas generation even though the majority of actually generated electricity is renewable. This means that every generator in SA receives the same amount of revenue per unit as a gas generator (and is why wind and solar are so wildly profitable). Gas generation remains extremely expensive as a result of the legacy of gas price increases worldwide after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent desperation of European governments to secure gas supplies.
I hope Rosie will now be a regular Contributor on the fully charged show. I really enjoy her channel and have been subscribed for some time. Congratulations and great job Rosie!
Iceland has reliable geothermal volcanic heat. Renewables have to be measured from the lowest output (as low as 0% at night with no wind) and requires up to 100% thermal backup for the remainder. Projections for future roof top solar is highly inflated and doesn’t take into account replacement of solar panels every 15 years.
Hawaii just shut down their last coal power plant. They are another power island like Australia so hopefully the two will share their experience as they both become 100% renewable.
Hawaii ended new net metering contracts in 2015. Electricity is very expensive there and they have abundant sunshine. Grid defection there is a big problem for the electric utilities in Hawaii. Homeowners are trending toward 100% renewable which leaves the utilities with a customer base of renters and businesses. I think the utilities will learn from the homeowners that solar is the way to go, and that buying and importing hydrocarbons from the mainland is a dead end.
Missed a point about Coal - it's a great source of carbon for Graphite production, so while the power generation jobs shift from coal plants to renewables, the coal mining jobs are protected by the growing demand for battery production, along with all the Carbon Fibre used in everything now, next to new materials being developed. Get enough solar panels on rooftops in small outback towns, and the local councils will start doing 'community owned virtual power stations', where everyones solar and battery storage is combined, and the town taken off of big city suppliers ledger sheets. Add a power sharing agreement between these local power consortiums, and towns with sunny skies feed those where it's raining.
What use is being made of the electrical connectivity from closed coal fired power stations? e.g. placing wind and solar generation at the closed sites.
I love my solar panels !! My power bill was about $60-70 AUD per month. After installation of my solar panels, my power bills have turned into credits, and I now get free electricity and make around $110 AUD per month tax free on the excess electricity I export to the grid - a whopping 25% Return on Investment (ROI). It's like having a piggy bank on my roof. Rooftop solar is exploding in Australia, and approx 30% of houses in Australia now have rooftop solar. House batteries are getting cheaper and capacity is increasing. If your local electricity supplier is agreeable, you could export to the grid from solar panels during the day and from batteries at night. I am working towards doing this as we speak. I have a surplus of solar on my roof (13.3 kW), and I export 5 kW to the grid (the maximum that I am allowed) during most of the day, every day, even on the rainiest / cloudiest days. I am now looking to add more solar panels and some really large batteries so that I can export from my batteries to the grid in the afternoons, mornings, and as much of the night as possible. I am aiming to export 5 kW (my maximum) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And then, if I can, I will try and upgrade my power to 2 or 3 phase and ramp things up further. If enough houses, shopping malls, parking lots, businesses do the same thing, then we might be able to close down all of our remaining coal fired power stations. It's not rocket science. We certainly should not be clearing pristine bushland and mountain tops of trees to install solar panels and wind turbines. Our existing houses, buildings, parking lots, shopping malls be done first, before we thing of clearing trees and industrialising / clearing pristine bushland. The people who claim renewable energy is not worthwhile or is not an important part of our energy future are complete idiots.
Great presentation Rosie. Would welcome information on the progress of V2G down under. I'm currently upgrading our PV and investigating the possibility of using V2G as solar storage including for grid outages. Seems V2G is still very much in its infancy here in NZ (and in AU from what I have seen), as well as bi-directional chargers being pretty expensive. In NZ at least every power outage report is accompanied by FUD comments regarding EVs being a threat to the grid capacity but the ability for V2G to support and buffer the grid as well as provide emergency domestic power seems to be lost on the masses.
One consideration with V2G. It's only a "house battery" when it's "at the house". If you're running solar, that limits you to selling the energy during the most productive period then buying back, maybe at a peak time(?) . You may well be charging a Megapack owned by the utility rather than your own battery? That's assuming that they want your energy at the productive time. If many consumers do this, there may be excess on the grid? . A battery pays for itself.
@@rogerstarkey5390 In our situation with both of us working from home at least one of our EVs is available for charging from our PV or being drawn down from at the most advantageous times. In that respect an EV being used in a V2G/V2H capacity is equivalent to a house battery installation for us. The added advantage of the mobility of an EV is that it can be charged elsewhere and then return to our property with electricity for home use. The equivalent of transporting fossil fuel in jerry cans. This would only be applicable for a very localised power outage of course when public charging facilities were still operational.
It's odd that Fully Charged chose not to mention that this presenter has a doctorate in Mechanical/Energy Engineering as well as extensive industry experience. The fact that she's a genuine authority on energy engineering makes me inclined to listen carefully and give credence to what she's saying. If she were just another RUclipsr with a camera (as I assumed before googling) then I would have taken this presentation with the usual grain of salt. Seems to me that when Fully Charged does have an actual expert on board then it would be helpful to make their audience aware of it...
And as such, the experts should be answering questions related to voltage, frequency, and rotor angle stability. Sub-transient & transient analysis, and system resiliency due to small and large disturbances, should be at the forefront of renewable energy discussions as we continue increasing the penetration of inverter-based resources while losing the rotational kinetic coupling of conventional rotating machines, such as synchronous generators.
While I agree the two largest physical constraints are energy storage and power flow limitation issues, we need to seriously start committing resources and investments to understanding and improving the conventional protection mechanisms and control algorithms on the grid today. Directional power flow relays must be updated for distributed generation, the increasing nature of voltage harmonics due to non-linearities and their effects on equipment, the list is seemingly endless. If we aren't careful, we will compromise the integrity of the grid, which would lead to blackouts, even with the necessary infrastructure investments in generation, transmission, and storage.
Thank you Mr Obvious
@@mikkoberger8683this is one of those comments that's intentionally and annoyingly pedantic. If you want to have that conversation, go find a group of EEs with no girlfriends.
@@mikkoberger8683 Let us not forget the constraint of materials supply. How about whole of lifecycle cost vs benefits? This is an admittedly short video but unfortunately it's more of a sales pitch than a true analysis of pros and cons.
Point but given how she does already have her own reputation it could be that they expected people to recognise her… or perhaps forgot she isn’t recognisable to everyone. XD But yeah they have had some famous in renewable circles Aussies on lately so Rosie is another one on the list but point that’s not everyone is going to recognise them all or even be familiar with them.
I'm very glad to see that Rosie Barnes has joined the Fully Charged team. I've watched a lot of her videos and she is brilliant. Good topic too. I love solar and wind solutions since they don't depend on a scientific breakthrough that never really happens.
also, see their video on large CO2 "battery"
It's obvious that you wouldn't recognise an expert if they came with a big flashing light saying "expert".
Dr. Rosie Barnes, another wonderful addition to the _Fully Charged_ cast of presenters. I've been following _Engineering with Rosie_ for a long time. She's a wealth of knowledge with an incredible ability to present heady material in an extremely approachable manner. Well done FC. Well done.
Shoes great, ben following for a white
Engineering with Rosie
Yes. "DOCTOR." Give credit when it has been earned. Even when the earner is "just a woman."
Australia always struck me as an ideal place for agri-voltaics, giving shade where needed and possibly using some of the electricity for water desalination for the farm.
That’s so expensive though.
@@AussieZeKieL expensive short term but cost effective when viewed over time.
They make a great solution for covering irrigation canals to reduce evaporation loss, and with the odd battery here and there, can power the canals pumps.
The idea is to reduce global warming so why do you and others keep on about costs?
If sea levels rise any faster then it's going to cost a lot more ... first the governments will faff about with coastal defences ... then twig that's very short term so a waste of cash.
Perhaps it would be more prudent to start migrating people onto floating islands or much higher ground.
Taking on Mother Nature seems a tad silly, given she's got a lot more experience of climate change and resulting weather.
@@AussieZeKieL Expensive to set up, but the greater yields and a energy & water surplus, would make for larger profits and thus a similar or probably better ROI.
However, the goal is of course to reduce emissions, to which hardly a price tag can be put.
Looking forward to seeing Rosie at Fully Charged Show Sydney. Such a well informed enthusiastic & optimistic presenter. We need more promotion of the abundance that a renewable future can bring.
So glad you guys brought Rosie on board she's awesome at breaking things down in a matter of fact logical way.
I was a bit surprised at how much more sleek Engineering with Rosie has gone suddenly…
And then there was the ad segment with Llewelyn.
One thing I notice about Rosie Barnes is that she never talks about economics and costs. She talks about solar and wind replacing coal because they are renewable, not because they make economics sense. At the very end of this video (12:35) she says of coal plants, "No one is forcing them to close, or paying them to close. It's not happening because of government policies. It's simple economics. Adding more renewables is now cheaper than continuing to run existing coal plants." But the headline of the news article she shows at 12:15 says, "Australia hastens coal plant closures to catch up on climate". She also doesn't mention that South Australia, with the highest percentage of solar and wind, has the HIGHEST electric rates in Australia. The costs for solar and wind installations frequently "forget" to mention that they don't include the costs of batteries, back-up fossil fuel generating plants (usually forced to idle at an economic loss in order to provide dispatchable electricity during dunkelflaute), or the additional transmission lines that conveniently-located fossil plants don't need.
Australia..... World's most expensive power
For those that don't know. Rosie is a Engineer that worked (consulting now as I recall) in the renewables industry, wind mostly. She is The Expert on what she is covering here, no need to interview others. Brilliant!
@@ChaosSwissroIl That's a rather cynical and arrogant comment.
@@ChaosSwissroIl What's the truth? What in this video do you think was a lie?
@@ChaosSwissroIl You have zero evidence about any lies. What are the lies here? That Australia coal mines are closing? That solar and wind and a little back up can easily provide all the energy Australia needs? These aren't lies. It's quite basic factual content here. There's nothing controversial at all. So again, you're just being arrogant and cynical.
Mr Swiss troll wouldn't be much fun at parties.
Maybe Mr troll should talk to someone he can trust, like a doctor, about the benefits of lithium, and wind power..
@@ChaosSwissroIl Harsh words - couldn't agree more.
Hi Rosie. Great video! Fantastic to see you collaborating with Robert and the team at Fully Charged. I hope you get more gigs with them 🙂
Hi Dave!
Dave and Rosie should collaborate, that would be quite a YT episode. Maybe on the materials required for wind turbines, innovations in maintaining off shore blades, or potential pros and cons of different micro scale 'at home' or 'in backyard' wind energy systems.
Lovely to find Rosie here, now all that's needed is the right people to listen!
No way! Rosie! Rosie's channel is amazing! I'm so glad to see her on the team and getting more exposure. She's going to be the presenter that gets this channel to 1 million subscribers!
Wonderful to see Rosie presenting for Fully Charged. Already a keen watcher of "Engineering with Rosie".
Having lapped the map several times in Australia and taken extensive road trips in the US, all the while observing energy and lifestyle trends, I have a couple of observations.
Some of the most desirable areas to live only lack water and previously lacked energy. Those places in the US are actually populated because of water from the Colorado River.
Energy is no longer a problem wherever there is wind and sun.
Wherever there is cheap energy and sea water, potable water is no longer an issue.
The Southern and Western coastlines are now ripe for great living, where previously water from the Murray River was available only as far West as Ceduna.
Eucla, Esperance, Kalbarri, Denham, Exmouth etc are all great lifestyle choices. Most of these locations are at the pointy end of the renewables spear.
Local water infrastructure that enables population in remote locations is more economical than bulk energy transmission from remote to populated areas.
As Rosie points out Australia has the box seat regarding renewables.
Having thought about it for years, I could go for days about the economical opportunities.
Just garbage. Think about what you just said.
This is one of the best videos I have watched on Australian renewable energy.....you win the internet today!!
Excellent presentation of where Australia is up to in the transition to renewable energy. I hope this episode can be spread far and wide to the general population to create much greater awareness of how Australia is well on the way to renewable energy self sufficiency.Thank you Rosie(Engineering with Rosie) and FullyCharged Show.
In the meantime cost has gone to the roof.
Rosie Barnes... you are wonderful! Best and most relaxed presentation of facts I've seen in ages. Please do more.
Thanks for the video, Rosie. Nice to see you on The Fully Charged show and your channel.
They need a big east west interconnect across thr Nullabor. When Perth is sunny in mid afternoon it can power Sydney's evening peak. Vice versa in the morning.
Probably quite a lot of loss over that kind of distance.
@MrDisasterboy They need high voltage DC for distance I think. The UK is currently planning a long distance interconnect to Morocco sub-sea across the bay of biscay. Its possible.
@@ecoworrier I'm sure its possible. I'm just not convinced the cost is justified against other options.
I enjoyed Rosie’s presentation as always. I am 99% off-grid with solar and home batteries. To get to 100% I did consider wind as it tends to be more windy in the monsoon season here, but having seen Rosie’s excellent videos on domestic wind I decided to not go down that route. Instead my next EV will have V2L, maybe the BYD Seal which has 4kW power output. We hear a lot about V2G but very few cars have this built in. I would like to see a show about V2L which is easy to integrate into a solar inverter. As I have a big solar system I am banned from exporting to the grid, this is the case in many countries and people are restricted to smaller 5kW solar systems. This restricts how much domestic solar can be part of the solution.
Wouldn't a battery storage system sort your out? They are pretty reasonable in price these days.
V2L is good too but if you need to use the car....
@@TsLeng home batteries has got me to 99% off-grid. Most people would probably be happy with that but I want to be 100%. About once a year we get 3 to 4 days of continuous heavy rain. Adding home batteries to cover that wouldn’t be economic. A car with 85kWh of batteries would cover the house needs and still have power for local trips.
@@EcoHouseThailand I got you. Yes, then that would work. Or a petrol generator haha haha.
THANKS for letting the experts speak directly! Rare in the media ;)
Why only wind and solar? The more dominant intermittent power becomes, the more energy storage is needed in the absence of baseload power sources, and it's not at all clear how practical that is at such a large scale. Iceland is 100% "renewable" but they do it via geothermal which is essentially constant baseload, so they avoid problems with intermittency's and they are a small country. Whether an entire power grid built on solar, wind and some kind of energy storage can work for a country as big as Australia remains an open question. Also, the reliance on China for solar panels adds additional uncertainties. Obviously nuclear would be a reasonable option to be in the mix, but Australia seems to be averse to it. Right now the "energy transition" remains one big experiment. This is ignoring the fact that whatever reductions in CO2 Australia makes will be more than offset by increases in Asia and Africa.
Wow so dense with information. Here's my notes i took, i hope they're useful to others too:
in 2021 Australia got 29% of it's energy from renewable sources.
In the last 12 months (as of end of Feb) we got 35% from renewables. 13% was from wind, 9% from rooftop solar, 6% from utility-scale solar farms, 8% from hydro.
Rooftop solar is currently at 28 GW total capacity (1 in 3 households have solar panels). We're expecting rooftop solar to triple by 2030 (7yrs).
Utility-scale wind & solar is currently at 17 GW total capacity that gives us 21% of our energy. We have another 17 GW worth of projects paid-for & ready to build.
So that's about 2/3rds of our energy from wind & solar by 2030 without changing anything.
Energy Market expects/projects that renewables will be 83% of our energy by 2030, and 98% by 2050; By 2050 2/3rds of households will have rooftop solar with 5x the current combined capacity (i guess ppl will have more panels, but also there's more households); Utility wind&solar will increase by 9x to 153 GW.
During last 12 months the minimum from renewables was 1.6% on a windless winter evening & the maximum was 66% at noon on a spring day.
If we tripled our current renewables we'd generate day by day between 5% - 200% of our energy from renewables (depending on wind & sun strength).
Studies suggest Australia needs between 300-650 GWh of storage with a power output of 15-50 GW. This is less than 1 day's worth of energy storage for the nation. In Australia we don't have long periods with no solar or wind, & basically never across the whole country.
Australia currently produces half the world's Lithium, and has the 2nd largest reserves of Cobalt. The mining sector makes up 10% of all of Australia's energy consumption.
If wind & solar continues being installed at the current rate we'll triple our current variable-renewable capacity by 2030.
Coal still makes up over half of our electricity generation. 30% of Australian existing coal-fired generation capacity will close down by 2030 (just based on announcements so far) but it's projected to actually be 2/3rds by that time.
This is an absolutely brilliant summary. Well done.
The Lucky Country should absolutely be at the front of the renewable energy transition. It just makes sense. So glad we seemed to have come to our senses on that front and that we'll hopefully make up some lost time.
Awesome stuff. So good you have Rosie on board, Brilliant content and presentation.
Rosie says that to get to 100% renewables isn't much more than we are doing now, then goes on to say it is 3x current production just to get to 100% of existing electricity demand.
Australia total energy consumption in 2021 = 1,589TWh
Total electricity production in 2021 = 247.06TWh
So it's closer to 6 or 7x current renewable production to get to 100% renewables for our entire economy.
It's nice to see such a detailed subject put so simply by someone with merit.
Australia is also a major supplier of uranium, which could be used to power reactors like Molten Salt plants that would not need any battery storage at all. With the Moltex design the power plant can also produce power on demand even with highly intermittent solar/wind on the same grid so the reactor using stored heat in salt could act as the only battery needed. So a 2GW thermal plant you would have 1GWe avg output, but with 2GWe generators those could be ramped up and down to counter match the solar/wind. This matching variable nuclear with variable renewable is a good match.
That's a terrible idea. Who wants an industrial heat source that doesn't just make electricity but has direct industrial heat and synthetic fuel applications? We want an electricity-only source that needs 100% backup, is weather, time of day, season, geographic, and material resource dependent. Each of these dependencies makes the energy far more expensive and less reliable but creates green jobs.
Sure the waste can be reused to make more energy but until then it will frighten people. Sure it can't hurt anyone but think about their feelings.
@@chapter4travels
Well said.
Nuclear = Unclear
@@chapter4travels think about their feelings? Please elaborate? I really laughed at that
😂😂😂 and Australian government would change us too mine it. Australian has the most expensive power in the world.
What a pleasure to see two of my favorite RUclips channels collaborating!
You really know your stuff. Great to hear positive information from Australia because I live here and don't hear enough of it.
Great to see Rosie making an appearance on the show. She's got a great channel.
can someone tell me what is meant by renewable. What is renewable on solar panels , unless it means ,renewing the panels and renewing the wind generators. What do you do with all the stuff that can't be recycled. panels and blades.
Aus has developed two types of Batteries that use Zn and Br and no Li at all. Both elements are readily available from multiple sources. Then you have the liquid metal batteries based on Sb and Ca and recently Al and S. You have the redox batteries based on V or Fe. Coming along are Na batteries. All have some huge positive characteristics not found in Li batteries besides the easy access and cheapness of the elements they use. All can be cycled between 0 and 100% charge with no damage, last much longer than Li batteries, use simpler electronics for their charge and discharge cycle and are much easier recycled, if you ever need to recycle them. How about an in-depth treatment of each of the alternate battery chemistries. I bet all they need is market share to out-compete Li batteries for cost.
I also asked for a presentation on batteries made with abundant materials. I think that Elon Musk is nuts for using Lithium batteries for stationary storage. Soon those will be "mined" out of the power plants and put into mobile applications that justify the cost of lithium.
So you haven't checked the volumetric density of Sodium ion cells?
Great for storage.... Not so much for vehicles.
This is what fully charged need to be doing! I've criticised some of your content in the past for a rose tinted view without in depth detail and analysis but this is spot on. More please!
Rosie tinted beats rose tinted any day : D
I am a big fan of Rosie and really enjoyed this overview. I recently vacationed in Australia and one thing stood out for me. Conservation and energy efficiency did not seem to be important. The norm was buildings with little or no insulation along with single pane windows. I build houses in Southern California and a home with a modern thermal envelope uses half the energy for heating and cooling.
Older homes are often double brick, and are great for thermal management. Newer homes tend to be poor quality because our construction industry is quite corrupt.
We have had mandatory minimum energy efficiency on all new homes for about 15 years. It varies state to state but generally requires a certificate from an external auditer prior to construction.
Commercial buildings are the same but the incentive is greatly reduced running costs which is better recognised in building design. This is a well developed industry because the associated running costs savings are significant in larger buildings.
There was even a nation wide government incentive about 12 years ago to pay for people to insulate their homes.
Laws and regulations for energy efficiency in new build houses was only introduced within the last 20 years...before that only the bare minimum was done to make a house comfortable enough.
Old houses (like mine built in the 1920's) were not insulated. The previous owner had insulation installed in the 70's or 80's but the walls (double brick) and windows (single pane sashes) are still untouched.
But any new extension will be subject to energy efficiency laws the same as new builds.
@@indyrock8148 Regards to your last sentence, that went well didn't it. How many people died? So many unregulated small businesses.
Fake accounts
Love to see Australia go green in a big way.
Great to see Rosie join the team :)
Hello Rosie,
Thank you for mentioning the term "Dunkelflaute" (greetings from Germany!).
I would like to point out a few local or regional storage systems:
1) RedoxFlow - a liquid-based storage system, where a lot of research is already being done on different chemical element combinations in terms of efficiency, toxicity and costs. What I particularly like about it is the scalability - the converter unit is decoupled from the storage. You increase the amount of storage simply by adding more tanks! In addition, it is a closed system that does not experience any (or hardly any) degradation - unlike e.g. Li-Ion batteries.
2) Seasonal ice storage. I haven't delved deeper into this matter yet, but here in Germany a number of systems for larger houses and house complexes have already been installed.
3) Here in Germany there are already municipalities where all renewable electricity producers are actually brought together and stored in a specially constructed 40-foot container on the outskirts of the village. In the evening and at night, the electricity is made available again. The regional power company supports this project because it saves them having to upgrade the power lines to this location. And the place's fluctuating electricity draw is compensated for pretty well.
Hi Rosie, please talk about the possibilities for sodium ion batteries for grid storage or vehicle use in a future video. I would also like to learn of anything new in energy storage.
An excellent video with another knowledgeable and enthusiastic presenter. I have no doubt that Australia will achieve the goals described by Dr Rosie Barnes and probably in a shorter timescale than she suggests. I really hope they do as the earth's fragile climate is under severe stress and needs all the help it can get ........
What an asset for the Fully Charged team.
Rosie has a great ability to explain renewables without over simplifying.
Iceland has a unique position on renewable/alternative energy sources. Being on an active volcano means Geothermal power is as far away as the basement. Also, the land is plenty mountainous - thanks to the volcanoes - and steep rivers mean hydro power for the whole Dam nation. Solar may not be worth the trouble at that latitude, but their spot in the North Atlantic gets REALLY windy, and that can fill in a few gaps.
Geothermal energy supplies Iceland with 90% of their energy needs. Yes they are indeed fortunate.
Great to see the progress in Australia. I did not realize how quickly they are transforming their electricity generation. Rosie does a great job explaining, very clear and simple. No doubt her extensive engineering knowledge and experience helps. Her “Engineering with Rosie” RUclips channel is one of my favorites.
i just looked at Rosie's channel, she's been uploading videos for 2 years and literally every single video makes me want to watch it. OH NO, and here i was getting so close to catching up with my youtube videos, welp my list just increased by 59 videos! :D
Not the Toyota/ Hydrogen one (if it's still there)
@@rogerstarkey5390 Even that one should be watched, TWICE!
Have you ever considered backing up your personal (controversial/edgy) opinions with any sortof explanation or reasoning? It could give positive results.
Fully Charged videos are so well produced. Great graphics and sound quality.
Very cool to see Rosie here.
Australia is blessed with sun, wind and renewable energy minerals.
Australia's lithium is hard rock as opposed to brines as shown in the video.
The lithium dug out of the ground from one of the mines in Western Australia is 1.3% of the extracted ores. The holes in the ground are already large enough to swallow whole towns. Only 5% of lithium batteries are recycled, it's cheaper to simply dig up more lithium. Ask the question, what is going to happen to all of this infrastructure at end of life? So far most of it is going to landfill.
@@margaretarmstrong2445
I doubt that you are an expert in mining or in recycling. You might want to consider that your sources of information are feeding you propaganda. They have a vested interest in mis-informing you. The question is, what are you more invested in? Reality or the culture of misinformation?
@@AWildBard Nothing I have said is untrue. Before you call other people liars, do some simple research. You are the one choosing to simply believe everything you've been told. I have been lied to by the best of them. The developers who swan onto the properties of unsuspecting farmers don't know how to tell the truth. If you haven't looked at the cradle to grave story of wind, solar, backup batteries and EV's then you know nothing. At least take the time to find out how much lithium is actually extracted out of Australian ores as a percentage. It's too easy for you to simply discredit someone with spiteful language.
Storage is only needed in local areas it is cheaper and better to have an "oversupply" of green electricity and heat generation! That way we have enough for our domestic needs and the extra can be turned into ammonia and hydrogen for export. Then if still have some spare we can desalinate seawater and pump it over the range to keep our rivers flowing. Inland there are huge amounts of underground water that is salty and we could desalinate that and wouldn't need to pump it so far to use it for irrigation.
I'd like to see more discussion on community batteries - how and who do we convince to get them happening in Australia? Great episode btw!
You start by getting one of your own and telling the distribution network service provider they don’t control it or you
@@theairstig9164 I suppose that's one way to do it... or a smart way to do it would be to get one of your own and let the grid pay you to store energy and discharge it when it's needed.
@unknownentity742 Don't tell a South Australian that. Since the "Big Battery" was built at Hornsdale we have got more reliable and cheaper power and as Rosie said 7 days of 100% renewable power in December.
@@grogery1570 What is the cost of your electricity? Both generation and distribution charges.
@@grogery1570 The Hornsdale battery is ultimately quite a trivial asset to South Australian energy. The inconvenient truth is that went demand begins outstripping what the weather can supply, SA uses gas peaking stations and imports energy from lignite stations in Victoria.
What the horsdale battery does is moderate the grid, which is an important task when dealing with energy sources that can vary a lot in short time frames, but as i said, i doesnt solve SA problems when it begins running out of energy.
Batteries are also in general not a great storage mechanism. The best storage mechanism is easily pumped hydro, since the physical infrastructure lasts several times longer, it doesn;t draw on critical metals that are in short supply and it has far greater energy densities and storage capacities than battery systems. There are numerous pieces of literature on it, it's easy to find. The next best solution is to use something that can generate baseload, which is again hydro or geothermal or nuclear. Those three sources of energy aren't big on materials and they also physically last much longer.
Where batteries excel is for mobile systems that scale down, not problems that require big scaling. That's not to say batteries (or maybe even ultracapacitors if they get cheap enough) are not an important part of any future energy grid though, because they clearly must be for renewables to function properly.
This is so great to hear!
Nice one Rosie! great to see Australian content to the FCS increasing and a truly world views are now seen and compared....Australia to be a renewable super power...I vote yes!
"Australia to be a renewable super power" - at what cost and for what benefit?
@@clives4501 None of these people ask questions! Unicorn farts...as long as it doesn't affect them.
Now there's a lass that knows her stuff, she never missed a beat!
I loved that talk...many thanks for telling us what we wanted to know.
I would like to hear more about flow batteries.
Look up redflow. They suck in density, just made for long term store.
The great thing about Australia is it uses the most energy when the sun shines, in order to keep cool, unlike the UK where we use the most energy when the sun doesn't shine, in order to keep warm.
I am a big sceptic on all this. However I did a quick estimate of how much just the battery storage for Australia might cost. I take (from the video here) what is likely a minimum viable amount of 50GWH storage. All the numbers here are in USD (including Australia's GDP). Tesla Megapacks are $2 million (including installation) and store 3.9MWH. So you would need 256 of them to get 1GWH of storage and (256 * 50) = 12,800 to get 50GWH of storage.
Total cost would therefore be around (12,800 * 2,000,000) = 25,600,000,000. Plus shipping, land purchase, maintenance etc. So we are looking at a 30 billion project. Which is not really such a big deal in a country which has a GDP of 1,552 Billion.
Still I am sceptical. Why? Because I have yet to see even a sniff of a coherent plan, with reasonable estimates and timeframes. In the current hysterical over-reacting polity I predict that mad government directives will be implemented with maximum incompetence that will crash the economy and either turn the voters off the whole idea, or render any such plan moot by reason of national poverty.
100% correct
No the Net Zero report costed it as trillions, you are out by at least 2 magnitudes in your calculations. You ignore massive cost of infrastructure, batteries, and massive overbuild necessary.
Great update! What I like about technology is that as things get rolled out, the costs of production and maintenance go down, so it's getting better, cheaper and easier... 👍
If like to see more about flow batteries. Grid storage doesn't need to be light or small. Flow type batteries can store LOTS of energy, if you are willing to accept it weighing tons and taking up lots of space.
As a german passionate about the field, it gave me goosebumps hearing you adopted Dunkelflaute. ❤
Great to see Rosie on the channel!
Thank You rosemary always enjoy watching your videos
Great to see Rosie presenting on this channel... Q Rosie: What about the issues in regards to EOL of Wind and Solar with respect to the environment?
Compared to other sources?
Well, we can discount Nuclear(?)
.
Wind turbines, if you build the pylons correctly, the will outlive the generation units/ blades and can have new units installed with the latest, more efficient technology (already being done in Spain, and no doubt elsewhere)
Generator? Recyclability must be "high 90's"?
.
Blades?
Watched a video recently detailing plans to recover 98% of material (now there's enough to spool up the industry!)
As I recall (just for instance) "fibrous material" in the blade, once shredded, makes a great filler for cement, offsetting carbon in that production process.
......
Solar?
95%+ Glass and Aluminium, that'll be fully recyclable. Copper? Same, the rest are trace elements, most of which will be recovered in the glass recycling process.
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We should of course note that the "lifetime" of a solar panel (similarly to batteries) is calculated at "±80% of original capacity" with a guarantee on the latest units of at least 20 years, so they remain useful for way past that time.
Balanced against the high carbon construction and constant daily footprint of other generation, it's not even close.
@@rogerstarkey5390 There is so much you don't know about the recycling of wind and solar. The most obvious of which is that very little of it is recycled. The blades are being cut into three in some states in America and buried in landfill. We've been sent photos of stacks of them that were dumped near a national park in Queensland. Victoria is the only state that I know of to declare solar panels as E-waste so instead of paying collection agencies to pick them up it's cheaper to send them to landfill. The collection agencies strip off the frames and wiring and call that recycling. The bare panels are stockpiled. And don't think that they are "mainly glass" for one thing there is much more to them than that and it isn't easy to separate out the different materials. There are also different types of solar panels. We have a commercial solar utility 4 kilometres from our home that is 87MW of thin film cadmium/tellurium solar panels. These panels are highly toxic and they need to be recycled in special processes including acid baths and use of other chemicals. The nearest facility to recycle these panels is Malaysia. This solar facility has not done well and is on to its third owner, how confident should we be that these panels will be properly recycled?
Great to have Rosie Barnes as part of the Fully Charged Team. It seems for some time I have not heard any reference to wave or tidal as possible intermittent renewable options. Have they fallen out of favour?
What about tidal power for Australia?
That was really focused on the energy in the power grid, but there is also energy for transportation, cars, boats, airplanes, etc.
Robert has been talent scouting while in OZ! Rosie would be a good one to keep! Very smart woman and has the paperwork to prove it. Hopefully, there will be plenty of good things happening in OZ so she can report on it. A lot is happening in the Universities and private enterprises even when the government was full of deniers.
@ JS S7
Indeed. But would she want to do a repeat guest spot on this channel?
If she has her own channel then she might as well cut out the "middle man" once she has enticed potential viewers to her own site.
Perhaps Robert didn't see that coming? Of course he didn't.
Why would anyone want to see an interview with interruptions when they can go straight to the source and listen to 100% dialogue from the single "expert"?
Here's another follower of both channels excited to see Rosie on Fully Charged! Woohoo!
Another top episode FCL Team and welcome Rosie. Great to see such an expert join and represent Australia on an awesome RUclips channel always pushing the clean, green message.
Would love to see more on local community batteries. I think these are much more valuable and a better use of resources then each house having a battery on it. 👍☀️⚡🔋
awesome summary! thankyou Rosie!
This is such a huge opportunity for Australia and I can’t wait to see it play out. Hoping we get our act together in time to lead the world the new energy future. Cheap energy has the potential to solve so many of our biggest problems today.
Are you nuts? Please tell me, where in the world, after pushing wind and solar for more than twenty years is electricity cheaper. Name one country!
Elephant in the room that no one is talking about life cycle management. Solar Panels will need to be replaced every 20 years or so, what is the cost to replace all these panels on this timescale and what happens to the materials. Same with Wind Turbine blades and batteries. Pumped solar was also mentioned, but in Australia what percentage would this actually add in terms of our overall power needs, remember that it is not a 100% efficient process. To my mind Nuclear is the logical way forward. Nuclear Power stations will also require ongoing maintenance costs but the plants are relatively small (energy dense) and thus don't produce many waste steams of significant quantity like wind and solar do. Finally, how much concrete and steel is used to support wind and solar versus building a Nuclear plant, the difference is significant (in the favour of a Nuclear Plant). Again, full life cycle costs are not being discussed and to my mind this is significant.
Wait a minute... I live in the U.S. All I'm hearing about Australia is that there is no room for partisan politics on energy policies. I heard that 90,000 residents were without power during the summers searing heat. I also heard they shut down 10 coal plants putting nearly quarter million people out of work, all the while, energy prices have jumped 77%. I just read an article that says; "Australia is a National embarassment for floppping on renewable energy." Is none of this true?
Very true.
I'm currently have my power disconnected because it's has slowly grown up too 2,700 dollars.
Our power cost so much 😢😢
One bedroom unit...my winter bill for power was 850
Thermal storage for industrial usage
Heeeey Rosie! This is awesome! It's like seeing my subscribed worlds collide :D
You could also include wave and water current energy, Australia's surrounded by a bunch of water currents, including the Bass Straight :)
We tried that some years ago, it didn't work and is rusting somewhere off the coast of southern Australia. I guess they justify the abandonment as creating a 'marine park'.
Excess capacity is a solution NOT a problem. Excess capacity is FREE energy. And there is enough solar in Australia to desalinize and pump millions of gallons of water a day and green the continent.
Build expensive desalination plants to turn them on or off a few times per month to absorb the excess energy minutes.
@@-whackd LOL. They could run 12 hours a day 340 days out of the year. Building desalination is not expensive. Its an old technology now. Without irrigation climate change is likely to make food production impossible without it in Australia. The droughts just keep getting worse.
Well.... It's not free per se as there would be some associated cost but I think the point you are making is that the excess would otherwise be totally wasted. At the very least (from the start) grid level energy storage would reduce and eventually negate the need for very expensive peaker plants. It really is a no brainer.
Tidal power works 24hrs/day, 365 days a year. The UK has plans for that to produce a large percentage of the power demanded by the Grid.
Except for 4 times per day when tide turns
I want to hear more about heat based energy storage as well as Sodium and other alternatives to lithium
How are they going with storing the energy, there has been a lot of talk and no action in the storage of the power. What type of batterys are they going to use when the wind and sun don't shine for days. These batterys are going to have to be huge, expensive and where are they going to be located?. What contractors and companies are going to be supplying these, how much are these going to cost and who's going to pay for it. How long are the batterys going to take to build. It seems like there is a lot of talk from the gov and the greens but no plan on storage?
She missed one REALLY important sentence out of this otherwise great presentation... "and if you have been, thanks for watching" 🤣
You neglected to mention we have a huge coastline so off shore wind yes, but more importantly wave and tidal power opportunities as well as those technologies develop.
I live in South Australia. If we are the leading renewable state in Australia, why are our electricity prices so much higher than most other states?
Electricity prices in the NEM are set by the highest accepted generator, which in SA is almost always gas generation even though the majority of actually generated electricity is renewable. This means that every generator in SA receives the same amount of revenue per unit as a gas generator (and is why wind and solar are so wildly profitable).
Gas generation remains extremely expensive as a result of the legacy of gas price increases worldwide after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent desperation of European governments to secure gas supplies.
Thanks Dr Rosie!
Rosie Barnes on Fully Charged Show - what more do you want?
May I suggest facts and an analysis of costs vs benefits? I am hoping for a little more than a sales pitch.
Well done. Thanks.
I hope Rosie will now be a regular Contributor on the fully charged show. I really enjoy her channel and have been subscribed for some time. Congratulations and great job Rosie!
Iceland has reliable geothermal volcanic heat. Renewables have to be measured from the lowest output (as low as 0% at night with no wind) and requires up to 100% thermal backup for the remainder. Projections for future roof top solar is highly inflated and doesn’t take into account replacement of solar panels every 15 years.
Hawaii just shut down their last coal power plant. They are another power island like Australia so hopefully the two will share their experience as they both become 100% renewable.
If 100% renewable = 100% broke, I think I'll go with Nuclear.
Hawaii ended new net metering contracts in 2015. Electricity is very expensive there and they have abundant sunshine. Grid defection there is a big problem for the electric utilities in Hawaii. Homeowners are trending toward 100% renewable which leaves the utilities with a customer base of renters and businesses. I think the utilities will learn from the homeowners that solar is the way to go, and that buying and importing hydrocarbons from the mainland is a dead end.
Wow Rosie. I usually watch your engineering with Rosie you tube channel. Very surprised (pleasantly) to watch your presentation here. Good work
If you're exploring alternative energy sources in Australia, can you do a deep dive on wave power, tidal power, or sand batteries?
Thanks; great content, as usual. Clearly, storage is the answer, regardless of the question.
I'd love to see future videos on batteries. In particular, sodium ion, hydrogen, vehicle-to-grid, and whatever seems most likely to be cheapest.
And the viability of GMG for vehicles. Batteries are the future, the West should be trying to engineer the worlds best batteries.
Missed a point about Coal - it's a great source of carbon for Graphite production, so while the power generation jobs shift from coal plants to renewables, the coal mining jobs are protected by the growing demand for battery production, along with all the Carbon Fibre used in everything now, next to new materials being developed.
Get enough solar panels on rooftops in small outback towns, and the local councils will start doing 'community owned virtual power stations', where everyones solar and battery storage is combined, and the town taken off of big city suppliers ledger sheets. Add a power sharing agreement between these local power consortiums, and towns with sunny skies feed those where it's raining.
What use is being made of the electrical connectivity from closed coal fired power stations? e.g. placing wind and solar generation at the closed sites.
Another excellent FC presenter, and a fascinating episode. Fantastic to hear about how Australia's renewable energy could be further unleashed.
So good to see you here on Fully Charged, Rosie. Thanks for sharing your expertise with us.
I love my solar panels !! My power bill was about $60-70 AUD per month. After installation of my solar panels, my power bills have turned into credits, and I now get free electricity and make around $110 AUD per month tax free on the excess electricity I export to the grid - a whopping 25% Return on Investment (ROI). It's like having a piggy bank on my roof.
Rooftop solar is exploding in Australia, and approx 30% of houses in Australia now have rooftop solar. House batteries are getting cheaper and capacity is increasing. If your local electricity supplier is agreeable, you could export to the grid from solar panels during the day and from batteries at night.
I am working towards doing this as we speak. I have a surplus of solar on my roof (13.3 kW), and I export 5 kW to the grid (the maximum that I am allowed) during most of the day, every day, even on the rainiest / cloudiest days.
I am now looking to add more solar panels and some really large batteries so that I can export from my batteries to the grid in the afternoons, mornings, and as much of the night as possible. I am aiming to export 5 kW (my maximum) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And then, if I can, I will try and upgrade my power to 2 or 3 phase and ramp things up further.
If enough houses, shopping malls, parking lots, businesses do the same thing, then we might be able to close down all of our remaining coal fired power stations. It's not rocket science. We certainly should not be clearing pristine bushland and mountain tops of trees to install solar panels and wind turbines. Our existing houses, buildings, parking lots, shopping malls be done first, before we thing of clearing trees and industrialising / clearing pristine bushland.
The people who claim renewable energy is not worthwhile or is not an important part of our energy future are complete idiots.
Australia can provide solar for the whole world. Easier than Sahara. Since it's one country. Easy admin
Great presentation Rosie. Would welcome information on the progress of V2G down under. I'm currently upgrading our PV and investigating the possibility of using V2G as solar storage including for grid outages. Seems V2G is still very much in its infancy here in NZ (and in AU from what I have seen), as well as bi-directional chargers being pretty expensive.
In NZ at least every power outage report is accompanied by FUD comments regarding EVs being a threat to the grid capacity but the ability for V2G to support and buffer the grid as well as provide emergency domestic power seems to be lost on the masses.
One consideration with V2G.
It's only a "house battery" when it's "at the house".
If you're running solar, that limits you to selling the energy during the most productive period then buying back, maybe at a peak time(?)
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You may well be charging a Megapack owned by the utility rather than your own battery?
That's assuming that they want your energy at the productive time. If many consumers do this, there may be excess on the grid?
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A battery pays for itself.
@@rogerstarkey5390 In our situation with both of us working from home at least one of our EVs is available for charging from our PV or being drawn down from at the most advantageous times. In that respect an EV being used in a V2G/V2H capacity is equivalent to a house battery installation for us. The added advantage of the mobility of an EV is that it can be charged elsewhere and then return to our property with electricity for home use. The equivalent of transporting fossil fuel in jerry cans. This would only be applicable for a very localised power outage of course when public charging facilities were still operational.
I thought it was an Engineering with Rosie video
Wow.. that was incredibly informative!
Yay Rosie!
More from Rosie please - great communicator and knowledgable.
Except that she did not mention one of the many negative aspects of this infrastructure.