How much Energy Storage does Australia need?

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Supervisors

Honours students

Project Description:

When renewables are firmed up with sufficient storage they can provide the same power as a coal fired station for about the same price. As renewables are on a downward price trajectory, it is now rare to find new coal fired stations built in the world today. But the big question is, how much storage does Australia really need?

It's an important question because it informs government energy policy and future budgeting. A realistic snapshot also checks on the overall magnitude of the problem, and informs us of overall feasibility.Underestimating storage requirements will result in outages. Overestimation results in unnecessary expenditure and stranded assets.

The idea of this project is to explore the ways overestimation might happen. The more renewables that are installed and the more interconnected they become, the lesser the requirement for storage. If there is large spatial diversity in renewable sources, uncorrelated sources will naturally balance each other.

So it is important not to budget on too much storage too early in the game, because as renewables pick up, the requirement for storage lessens. This is an extremely interesting engineering optimisation problem.

The approach we'd like to take is a classic engineering one. Start off with very simple (and perhaps) unrealistic assumptions and calculate the storage requirements. Then step by step improve the assumptions and see how the storage requirement changes as the scenario becomes more realistic. By and large you should find that more realism drops, interestingly, drops the storage requirement.

A simple starting point might be to download the data for one South Australian solar farm and calculate how much you need you need to multiply the size of that farm to hypothetically run the whole of Australia from one solar farm only (surprise: you should find the area you need is only fraction of the area of South Australia!) Then calculate how much storage you would need. Then to visualize the size of this storage, carry simple mgh calculations to find out what mass of water that is equal to the energy when dropped from a height h = 300m (this is pumped hydro storage). There will be some losses to take into account, and we can discuss some rough estimates as this is a Fermi calculation. (A Fermi calculation is the term for a rough back of the envelope order of magnitude calculation). This hypothetical case will give you an upper bound for storage. Then using meteorological data, for insolation across the country, assume the same amount of solar but spread equally between all the data collection points. The amount of storage you will now need will be a low bound. You can now push this bound lower by including wind and existing hydropower.

An alternative question to address is if Australia intentionally overinstalls renewables (in order to electrolysze water to export hydrogen to Japan) would we really need any additional storage? If we installed double the amount of renewables we needed how much hydrogen could we export and what percentage would we need to retain as de facto storage? What if we triple the minimum renewable requirement? The idea of this project is to get some perspective on what the bounds for storage are. No one really has a handle on this yet, so your project is very hot and topical.

Deliverables

Semester A

Semester B

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