Historic Ten Minutes
The first week of November 2019 saw what experts are saying is a foreshadowing of what’s to come for Australia’s energy sector. For ten minutes, renewables provided more than half of the power supply to the country’s primary electricity grid.
Kane Thornton, chief executive of Australia’s Clean Energy Council, said:
It is a fantastic achievement to have more than half of the National Electricity Market powered by renewable energy, and it’s worth celebrating. A decade from now it will be completely normal as more renewable energy and storage projects are built to replace retiring coal-fired power stations. At the beginning of the decade South Australia’s power system ran on more than 50% wind and solar for the first time, but today it happens all the time. Renewables and storage can do everything our old coal plants can do, just cheaper, cleaner and more reliably.
Solar, wind, and hydro combined delivered 50.2% into the National Electricity Market – a region that includes Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania. Solar provided 32.5% (23.7% from rooftop solar, 8.8% from large-scale solar), wind 15.7%, and hydro 1.9%. The “first-time” feat, which is now considered a milestone, will soon become increasingly normal.
The figures came from an online tool called Open NEM, which monitors the grid in real-time with data from the Australian Energy Market Operator.
Dylan McConnell of the University of Melbourne’s Climate and Energy College, who helped develop the tool, told The Guardian:
We will start to see this happening more frequently. It was just a snapshot in time, but it’s indicative of an underlying trend in the system.
The Leading Causes
Solar leads the way because there are over 2 million small rooftop solar systems installed across the region that provide 72% of all the solar power. The rest of the 28% comes from big solar power plants.
Overall, renewable energy is rapidly accelerating due to record-breaking levels of investment in recent years. So much so that clean energy could make-up 35% of Australia’s electricity needs within two years. For now, the country is already ahead of schedule in achieving its bigger goal of 33,000 gigawatt-hours of renewables generation by 2020.
Next Step: Battery Storage
For Australia to reap the benefits of its renewable power generation, it will have to invest in battery storage. Now is the time to provide that infrastructure. As the nation inevitably produces more green electricity, the excess will go to waste if it doesn’t get stored.
Industry analyst Giles Parkinson told The Rising:
What we’ll see in Australia eventually is getting to 100% [renewable supply] at certain times, but that excess of power won’t be able to be exported anywhere — it will have to be stored. We’ve been locked in a decades-old paradigm of coal providing base-load [energy] and gas providing the peak load.
Parkinson also recommends that the federal government should be proactive in providing incentive programs for battery storage. He said:
We really need a plan to be put into place and, right now, we’re not seeing that from any government, even though some of the state governments are calling out for it.
Fortunately, there is one big battery storage project in the works by Australia’s energy company AGL. It’s set to go online in 2023 and will be able to store enough electricity to supply power for 30,000 homes at once.
CEO of AGL, Brett Redman, said:
This is the dawn of the battery age and AGL is proud to lead the way. Australia’s energy market is undergoing significant changes and large-scale batteries like these will be pivotal in providing firming capacity in the shift between baseload power and renewables.
Conclusion
The transition to renewables is inevitable. Companies and governments are finally beginning to act upon the need to facilitate the cross-over. As renewables increase, battery storage innovations will be pivotal.
