Why is Snowy Hydro 2.0 "ridiculous" and "silly"? What exactly is advantage of battery over pumped storage? Big problem with pumped storage is that it needs specific location, but it seems they already have it.
As I understand, pumped storage is cheaper, more energy efficient, more mature technology. I understand battery swithes faster. What else?
Why is it important that something is done quickly? As I understand from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout it was caused by once-in-50-year event. I understand political urgency, but technically there doesn't seem to be anything urgent.
Firstly, I guess some of the urgency comes down to whether or not you think climate change is real and that it needs to be acted upon with some urgency.
As to the cause of the outage it is not quite as simple as that.
The SA government certainly believes in climate change since they decided to move away from coal and now get most of their energy from renewables.
But because of this, they got blamed for the blackouts by the opposition parties, who put the blackout down to the mad rush into renewables.
Now there is an election coming up next year, so I have no doubt the opposition would have used that same argument during that election.
But where I think this might backfired and why I think the SA Premier has come up with a master stroke, is come this December SA will have it's battery and in part because of climate change, it will be stinking hot all over Australia.
So if the SA battery works as designed and helps to keep all the SA air conditioners running at maximum, it will be a very big win for the SA Government.
Unfortunately, 1 in 50 year events seem to be happening more and more frequently.
And as yesterday's discussion on this pointed out, it's more about mitigating political risk; if there are any power outages in the next few months then the current state government is toast.
Virtually no voter appreciates the technical lack of urgency. One large voting bloc would be thinking "Labor has dropped the ball on electricity and must be removed!" and another would excuse a project like this as at least heading in the right direction.
You mentioned location, but that advantage can't really be understated. How can you have pump storage near every major city? It's not feasible in most places. Then there is the enormous transmission cost to get the energy to (and from) that remote location.
Batteries can also meet fluctuations in demand instantly. Hydro cannot.
For wind at least, it turns out you want to put the batteries as close to the wind turbines as possible, rather than close to the consumer. The reason is that this evens out the power delivery over the grid. If you put the batteries close to the consumer, the grid from the turbines to consumer must cope with peak generation capacity (powering peak demand, plus charging batteries), whereas if the batteries are close to the turbine the grid only needs to cope with peak wind demand (i.e generation capacity minus battery charging), which is considerably less. Source: from a conversation with someone in high in a major wind power generator.
This makes a lot of sense but would never have occurred to me.
What are the real-world consequences if you fail to "cope" with demand or generation - increased probability of systemic failure? Something blowing out?
Uhm, 5% of national output is a lot of energy. That's not relatively bad or anything, but improvements in transmission would be like getting power plants for free.
High-temperature superconductors: I want to believe.
The Snowy Mountain scheme is around 1500km from Adelaide. It might help in the Eastern States, but transmission losses are significant over that distance, and in the Eastern States they haven't had the power problems yet.
In general the problem with hydropower is, that it is the best energy source if you have the location. Therefore the good locations were developed early on, Hoover dam in the 1930ies, Aswan dam in the 1960ies, and now we are left with marginal locations. In a way we already reached peak hydro.
Battery technology will continue to mature and at a certain point it will undoubtedly be the better option in most cases. Instead of a giant one-off civil engineering project every time (with all the ways that could go poorly), it would presumably be a relatively straightforward and repeatable install. Unless there is a dire need to bring a ton of storage online right now, it seems that investing in batteries is the better option.
I agree battery will be better in the future. But it doesn't follow that battery is better investment today.
On civil engineering project going poorly, I think that's the problem of poor project management, but I guess sometimes technical solution to management problem makes sense. I note pumped storage gets built routinely within time and budget without any fuss all over the world.
As I understand, pumped storage is cheaper, more energy efficient, more mature technology. I understand battery swithes faster. What else?