It will take a while to demonstrate the truth of the headline. If you haven’t read the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) Integrated System Plan (ISP), devised in accordance with the Government’s policy, you’ll be surprised at the more than 10 gigawatts of gas power plants to be built by 2045 to backup the grid. That’s on top of 144 gigawatt-hours of batteries that it expects consumers to buy. Lumping this responsibility onto consumers is a convenient way to pretend the system is cheap; it isn’t.
So why all that gas?
The recently released US Department of Energy Advanced Nuclear Liftoff report ends up making the choice pretty clear. Either you build nuclear or you build gas, or you end up with an unreliable grid. Firming up a grid with batteries gives you jelly-level firming at both enormous cost and plenty of greenhouse gas emissions. Batteries aren’t low carbon; especially those built using fossil fuel energy. There’s a reason why the International Energy Agency (IEA) electric vehicle (EV) emissions guide shows the switching from an ICE to an EV only reduces emissions by a little over 50 percent. Nuclear plants, like wind turbines and solar panels, are low carbon. Batteries are not.
So if you want an ultra low carbon grid, as opposed to one firmed by gas as we are doing, then there isn’t a non-nuclear option. Ignoring the occasional exception of countries blessed with large fast flowing rivers.
This Liftoff report exemplifies the stark difference between long range thinking the kind of myopia that characterises Australian political decision making on energy; and other things. Figure 31 captures the difference.
And while that image is all about long term costs, the report considers a far wider range of relevant considerations. Figure 1 lists some of these:
As you can see, nuclear power has many advantages over renewables and LDES (long duration energy storage). Not all of these advantages are about costs. They cover broader economic opportunities. Nuclear power provides heat, not just electricity. So it can support a range of other industrial applications.
Australia, since the demise of our auto industry has resigned itself to de-development. We will be an exporter of raw materials and an importer of stuff made in countries with brains and foresight. Maybe we have so many minerals that we’ll remain wealthy; but its looking more likely that a collection of developing countries in Africa, South East Asia and South America will out-mine and out-supply us in the very near future.
Self interest should have helped Australia make better decisions, but part of being committed to an ideology includes cutting off your nose to smite your face; so we’ve thrown away the chance to build an industry with good jobs for a couple of decades crawling around on roofs making peanuts for ourselves while shovelling our money into hands of our much smarter Chinese neighbours and their coal powered polysilicon industry.
A study by Prof. Bruce Mountain considered decarbonising South Australia’s electricity supply using 20 gigawatt-hour (GWh) of batteries. That gets us to 94% renewable electricity but the cost of each tonne of carbon removed would be $389. This is over 10 times the current global average carbon price of AU$48/tonne. The US Liftoff report cites research showing that decarbonising is cheaper with nuclear. Not only is decarbonisation cheaper, but money is saved by not needing such expensive transmission and distribution upgrades. The final cost of electricity from such grids with one source of clean firm power (be it hydro or nuclear) is considerably cheaper than without.
In short, the vast overbuild of solar and wind proposed here leaves most of it idle for most of the time as well as causing a knock on in its requirements for a much bigger transmission grid to hook it all together. The US modelling shows that increasing the amount of clean-firm electricity from 19 percent of installed capacity to 37% of installed capacity will dramatically reduce the total build required.
LCOE: the “levelised cost of energy”
The current Albanese Government is insistent that the levelised cost of energy (LCOE) is the only metric you need to consider to design an energy system. This is as ill-advised as designing a diet solely on the levelised cost of calories. The Liftoff report has a section listing and describing all of the things that the LCOE can’t take account of. The Lazard LCOE is a popular annually updated international report. It now has a costing called LCOE+ which extends the attributes considered. It includes either firming with gas, something which isn’t low carbon, or firming with 4-hours of storage. Firming with 4-hours makes wind and solar about as firm as jelly. Dispatchable is a better word than firm because it implies you can have it when you want it; regardless of when that is. It means you can handle an unusually windless summer or an unusually sunless winter; or two such events in a row.
Consider June 2024 in South Australia.
The following graph shows the demand in brown and the total wind+solar output in purple. It also has a cyan line showing what we’d get with a doubling of today’s wind+solar output. As you can see, there are still long sequences of nights that would never be covered by any feasible amount of storage.
There are currently 522 megawatt (MW) of storage in SA. I modelled what would happen if we included 12,000 MW of storage. We’d still have had an 8-hour period where we were short by over 15,000 MW. Mountains study (mentioned earlier) did a similar modelling exercise. He considered adding 200,000 MW of battery storage. It still wasn’t enough.
The irony of the Greens and the ALP agreeing to lock in gas
The silliness of using batteries to cater for unusual events, like a month of two of low winds on a significant part of Australia, is why the AEMO ISP requires us to build a whole lot more gas plants. Retiring some older (cleaner) combined cycle plants and building some newer dirtier open cycle plants; usually called peakers.
When you are anti-nuclear, you have no other choice. It’s either gas or blackouts.
The irony of the Greens and the ALP having policies that lock in gas is extreme. But you can’t only lock in gas. You can’t have gas without keeping most of the gas infrastructure. It isn’t like we can do it with a few LPG bottles. You need to keep the pipelines. The pipelines need to be primed and ready to flow. The gas market isn’t like the electricity market, it normally buys in bulk for a significant time period. This is how the industry keeps a smooth flow of product.
Data centres and the future
Data centre construction is booming globally. A data centre is basically a warehouse full of racks of computing hardware coupled with a huge supply of reliable electricity and a considerable quantity of water for cooling.
The Liftoff report mentions that Google’s projections show that “clean firm” technologies will reduce the cost of meeting their decarbonisation targets by 40%. Some of its modelling assumptions are outlined in the table below. While Li-ion batteries only lose about 10% of the energy you charge them with, Google doesn’t see them as useful where even 12h of storage is required, let alone for long term energy storage. Gas isn’t in the table. But the ALP and the Greens have given Australia no other choice for firming our electricity supply.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an incredibly broad term and doesn’t capture the entire perfect storm of new computing technologies which have emerged at roughly the same time. The 2024 Nobel Prizes included not just prizes for the algorithms behind software that can write essays for students and journalists, but behind the tools that can take a DNA sequence and predict exactly how the protein (made by your body using that sequence) will fold. In biology, knowing the shape of a protein is the key to everything else. With enough computing power you can predict how the protein will interact with the many thousands of other proteins in your body.
The fields of Biology, Pharmacology and Medicine are experiencing a computing revolution which is unprecedented. Either Australia will build its own data centres and be an active participant, or our biomedical industries will go the way of our car industry. Or perhaps we’ll just buy computing capacity on Chinese, Indian or US servers. But there are a bucket of complications. For example, laws designed to keep citizen data within our borders may (I’d suggest “will”) prevent Australian scientists using Indian servers from accessing Australian patient data. The complexity of the implications of not having our own sovereign computing power will probably be lost on both the Greens and the old-school Luddite left of the ALP.
But hey, anti-nuclear Australians will settle for that warm inner glow of having the best clean green slogans on the planet.
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