The Queensland government surprised many when it announced last year that the state would construct two new pumped hydro schemes, dwarfing the troubled Snowy Hydro 2.0 project in NSW.
Professor Bartlett also says it is high risk for Powerlink to connect the pumped storage schemes by only one new line of 500kV towers that carry a double circuit, due to the risk of fires or vandals bringing down towers.
There’s a reason that others haven’t gone that big," Professor Bartlett said.
“At this point in time, the only serious battery proposals that we’ve got on our book are lithium-ion batteries, and all of them have congested around a 2-hour storage time, which tells us that that’s what the market deems as economic at this point,” he said.
In another 10 years at the completion of this project there will be another million people in QLD, along with everyone going electric. They will need this project and more.
We have solution, nuclear power. Well tested and mature. Green, cheap to run and reliable. all these experiments can wait, we need to start phasing coal now.
cheap to run
That’s actually precisely the problem with it. It’s not cheap. A report from almost a decade ago found that going all-in on renewables was more economical back then, and things have only gone more and more in favour of renewables in the time since. If we’d gone nuclear back in the ‘70s or even up until the early ‘00s it would have been good, but the ship has basically sailed on nuclear today, at least unless there are some major breakthroughs in technology.
Unfortunately you can’t build grid on renewables alone. It need’s massive storage, overprovsioning and serious investment in long range transmission. All this pushing prices up. Renewables is create as long as you can delegate providing stability and reservation to other type of generation. With current technology pure renewable grid will be prohibitively expensive. Biggest problem is lack of good storage technologies. Even well established technology as wind turbine is still not well understood. Recently discovered major problems with Siemens wind turbines is good illustration. Nuclear is not great but it is only available technology we have now, which can fully replace fossil fuel.
We need zero carbon now. Anything is better then burning coal.
