FET #48: The "cheap renewables grid" myth with Ben Beattie

Electrical engineer Ben Beattie runs The Baseload Podcast, providing “common sense and unfiltered commentary” on Australia’s energy sector. Given the enormous investments taking place now (and planned in the next decade) to transition Australia’s electricity grid to predominantly renewables, it is worth keeping a close eye on the engineering and economic realities at play. To know if the costs of the planned energy transition path make sense given the benefits, we at a bare minimum need to know the true costs. Follow Ben on X here and read his articles on energy issues at The Spectator here.In the podcast, we discussed the graph below showing the total generation and demand in Australia’s electricity network (link here). Notice the enormous increase in nameplate generation capacity in the past decade while grid-electricity demand has remained flat. This shows that there has been very little extra energy generated for all that extra investment in capacity, as most of that new capacity is highly variable. You can find data here on the daily generation from different sources in Australia’s grid. Below I show a typical day with the features we spoke about in the podcast:* Coal (brown and black in the chart) is being curtailed during the day to make room for solar generation.* Gas (pink) fills up the even period when solar generation quickly drops off.* Wind (green) is variable and unpredictable throughout the period. * A baseload of about 18,000MW of generation needs to be delivered 24 hours a day.The Frontier report discussed offers an alternative to the Integrate System Plan (ISP) (in the jargon we used, this report shows what Toyota has for sale, not just Ferrari). You can find it here. Lastly, find below a previous FET article by Aidan Morrison explaining some of the deceptive analysis behind the story of a renewables grid being the cheapest option. —————————Follow Cameron and Jonathan on X/Twitter. Buy The Great Housing Hijack here.Please like, comment, share, and subscribe.Theme music: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe