David Osmond, who works for the company Windlab in Australia runs a simulation estimating how much of wind, solar, hydro and storage would be needed to fulfil electricity demand in the National Electricity Market by scaling up the actual generation data from wind and solar. These simulations suggest that Australia can reach 100% renewables, whereas the previous pieces I've written about this (links below) suggested that the amount of storage required would need to be much higher. In effect, Osmond's simulation is using hydro as a battery, not as pumped hydro, but just releasing water through the turbines when needed.
Note how solar and wind are negatively correlated -- as solar rises, wind falls. This isn't always true, though it was this week.
Note also that this was achieved using just 5 hours of storage. When we have a 100% electric car/light truck fleet, they will provide another ±14 hours of storage, though obviously that's not all available at one time (see Balancing the grid without storage)
Each week I’m running a simulation of Australia’s main electricity grid using actual generation data to show that it can get very close to 100% renewable electricity with just 5 hrs of storage (24 GW / 120 GWh)
Results:
last week: 99.9% RE
last 31 weeks: 99.9% RE
See also:
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