Undersea power cable from Norway to UK

 From the BBC

The world's longest under-sea electricity cable, transferring green power between Norway and the UK, has begun operation.  The 450-mile (725km) cable connects Blyth in Northumberland with the Norwegian village of Kvilldal.

At full 1,400 megawatt capacity it will import enough hydro-power to supply 1.4 million homes, National Grid said.

National Grid Ventures president Cordi O'Hara said it was a "remarkable feat of engineering".

She added: "We had to go through mountains, fjords and across the North Sea to make this happen. North Sea Link (NSL) is also a great example of two countries working together to maximise their renewable energy resources for mutual benefit."

National Grid said the €1.6bn (£1.37bn) joint venture with Norwegian power operator Statnett would help the UK reduce carbon emissions by 23 million tonnes by 2030.

It has four other power cables running to Belgium, France and the Netherlands and said 90% of energy imported in this way would be from zero carbon sources by 2030.

Hydropower in Norway and wind power in the UK are subject to weather conditions and fluctuations in demand.  Using NSL, renewable power can be exported from the UK when wind generation is high and electricity demand low, or be imported from Norway when demand is high and wind generation low.

Specially designed barges were used in the construction of North Sea Link

Victoria backs clean energy

 

Wind farm at Codrington, SW Victoria

While Australia's federal government is backing a "gas-led" recovery, despite gas's much higher costs than renewables, State governments are for the most part backing renewables, including "Liberal" (=right-wing) ones.  Victoria's government is Labor.

From Melbourne's The Age newspaper.

Clean energy projects will receive a Victorian government funding boost in the hope of driving the state's battered economy out of the coronavirus downturn and avoiding a slump in wind and solar investment.

Victorian Energy Minister Lily D'Ambrosio is preparing to brief 300 investors on Wednesday about the launch of a formal process to test interest in building 600 megawatts of renewable energy capacity statewide, which she said would drive down prices and create new jobs at a critical time.

It comes amid calls around the world for "green recoveries" – economic rescue packages targeting investments in clean energy that would tackle global warming as well as stimulate growth. Under the Victorian program, the government would award contracts to buy power from project developers at a fixed price, giving them the revenue certainty to secure debt and proceed with projects in a volatile market.

"It's a shot in the arm for the industry," said Kane Thornton of the Clean Energy Council, a group representing renewable energy firms.

"These sorts of auctions provide a lot of confidence and ultimately bring forward projects that wouldn't otherwise get off the ground because of uncertainty around the energy market."

The government tender process is the second under the Victorian Renewable Energy Target, which aims to lift renewable energy's share of the state's grid to 40 per cent by 2025.

The first tender, launched in 2017, had a target of 650 megawatts but was swamped by bidders and ended up delivering six wind and solar projects totalling 927 megawatts of renewable energy, the government said.

"We know Victorians are doing it tough and affordable reliable power is more important than ever," Ms D'Ambrosio said. "This will help to deliver that as well as creating jobs and stimulating the economy."

This is a clever way to expand fixed investment, because it involves no capital spending by the government.  However, the NW of the state is where solar resources are best, and stronger high-voltage grid connections are required to allow solar farms to expand.  This might well involve State government expenditure.

Europe could get 10 times its energy needs from wind

From Carbon Brief:

An increased rollout of onshore wind turbines across Europe could technically provide the continent with more than 10 times its existing electricity needs, according to a new paper.

To make their estimate, a team of German researchers took into account changing wind speeds, all the available land and, crucially, futuristic turbine designs that are already coming onto the market.

While they note that generating 100% of Europe’s power from wind would not actually be feasible due to social, economic and political constraints, the scientists say their estimate gives a “significantly higher” figure than most previous assessments of wind potential.

Their paper, published in the journal Energy, also suggests that, as technology advances, the cost of the resulting electricity will be cheaper than previous studies have estimated.

Some nations, including the UK, have struggled with political opposition to onshore wind. However, with the EU facing ambitious climate targets in the coming years, wind is expected to be the biggest contributor to the region’s power supply within less than a decade.

As it stands, the EU is aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80-95% by 2050 compared to 1990, amid mounting pressure on member states to agree to a net-zero target.

Achieving these goals will require an enormous shift across the continent to renewable power sources. Germany has already pledged to switch almost totally to renewables by the middle of the century.

Wind – particularly onshore wind – is expected to make a significant contribution to these targets. The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) World Energy Outlook last year concluded wind energy is set to overtake coal, nuclear and gas and become the EU’s largest power source by 2027.

Various studies have attempted to estimate the wind capacity of the entire continent, adding to the body of evidence concerning the technology’s feasibility. These studies take into account factors such as weather patterns and hypothetical locations for windfarms to gauge the maximum potential wind power has across the region.

These studies have tended to estimate a total European capacity of between around 8 and 12 terawatts (TW), which would result in a total annual generation of between 16 and 21 petawatt hours (PWh). Given the annual electricity generation for Europe – according to BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy – is just 3.6PWh, this already vastly exceeds the amount required on the continent.

[Read more here]

I have seen similarly large estimates of the potential supply from offshore wind.  Also, although there are several regions on the map below with low wind potential, they tend also to be coincidentally places with higher solar potential.   With a mix of wind and solar, long-distance HVDC lines, battery storage and power-to-gas Europe will be able to go carbon neutral by 2050 without problems.

NSW starts going solar -- finally

The Bungala Solar Farm (source PV Mag)

In recent years, the government of the state of New South Wales has been on the right, run by the misleadingly-labelled Liberal Party.  The Liberal Party doesn't believe in climate change and still believes, despite the evidence, that coal is cheaper than renewables.  But NSW has the oldest coal-fired generators and the biggest percentage of such generators in Australia which will need to close down over the next decade or so.  Something needs to be done, and soon.

Well, first, after seeing the utter trouncing the denialist (more right-wing) Liberal Party got in the Victorian state election, and seeing apparently safe NSW Federal seats fall to "liberal-light" independents in by-elections, the NSW Liberal Party has suddenly seen the light and is busy embracing renewables.  More to the point, the economics of wind and solar just keep on improving.   Solar is less than half the cost of new coal, which means it will make no economic sense to replace aging coal power stations with new ones.  Large-scale solar is taking off in NSW, finally.

There are a few problems.  NSW doesn't have the wind resources of its neighbouring states of South Australia and Victoria, so to balance solar with wind it will need to import wind-generated electricity from them.  That means upgrades to the grid, which take time to build out.  A solar farm can be built in a few months, but HVDC lines takes a couple of years at least.  Plus, the best solar resources in NSW aren't close to the population centres on the eastern seaboard (where it gets much more rain) but in the drier interior, also far away from the centres of demand.  Again, new long-distance power lines are needed.  A partial fix is storage.  Power lines are designed to handle maxima, so if you could spread the midday maximum output from a solar farm over 24 hours, you could permit more solar to enter the mix.  If solar farms added enough storage, they could send electricity from the outback at night, when the long-distance grid is underutilised, and so could be larger.  We'll see whether the governments involved actually get their act together and start strengthening the grid and the interconnectors between NSW, Victoria and South Australia.  In the meantime, the short-term fix is more storage, though it's not yet cheap enough for large-scale deployment.

From PV Magazine:

In the final days of 2018, Australia’s New South Wales government gave its tick of approval for the construction of the state’s largest solar farm to date, rounding off a year that saw a flurry of utility-scale solar construction activity and an unprecedented number of big solar additions in the state.

The hotbed of utility-scale solar activity, New South Wales, waved through a massive 900 MW solar farm in the last days of 2018, looking to make another major step in its transition to a cleaner energy future.

The Yarrabee Solar Farm costing almost $1 billion will be located in southwest of Narrandera in the Riverina region of western NSW. The project is said to have the potential to power a city of almost one million people.

“When built, this new solar farm will have the capacity to power a city nearly twice the size of Newcastle,” NSW Minister for Energy Don Harwin said welcoming the construction approval.

The Yarrabee project was proposed by Australian developer Reach Solar Energy, which also stands behind the development of the 220 MW/275 MWdc Bungala Solar Project – Australia’s largest completed solar farm to date, which was later acquired by Italian power utility Enel and the Dutch Infrastructure Fund.

According to the project’s environmental impact statement, construction will be dependent on various factors, including power purchase agreements and availability of high voltage transmission network.   
It will cover up to 2600 hectares with approximately 3 million solar PV panels mounted on around 36,000 single-axis tracking systems.

The project will feature 222 inverter stations dispersed across the site. There are also plans for a battery storage system of 35 MW/70 MWh capacity.

The project approval followed the release of a new Large-Scale Solar Energy Guidelines developed by the NSW government to lead applicants and the community through the assessment process and site selection for state significant solar farm proposals.

“The new guideline reflects the NSW Government’s strong commitment to NSW’S booming solar energy market,” Harwin said.

It also followed a number of other big PV approvals granted in late December, including: a massive solar+storage project at Darlington Point – a 275 MW solar farm coupled with 100 MWh energy storage facility, the 140 MW Mulwala Solar Farm, the 170 MW Suntop Solar Farm and the 47 MW Gregadoo Solar Farm, rounding off another big solar year for NSW.

According to the government data, six solar farms were commissioned in 2018 alone, representing 305 MW and $475 million in investment, placing the total operating large-scale solar capacity in NSW at around 500 MW coming from nine projects.

Another seven solar farms were under construction representing 530 MW and around $720 million in investment, while there were almost 70 more solar farms with, or seeking, planning approval in NSW, with capacity to generate more than 10,000 MW.

[Read more here]

This single solar farm will provide about 15% of NSW's demand.  Another 3 or 4 will take NSW's renewables penetration to the levels already reached in South Australia, though there it's mostly wind-sourced.  It looks perfectly achievable within the next decade or less.

The South Australia duck curve

The continued expansion of rooftop solar in South Australia has produced a "duck curve" like the Californian one we've talked about.

In the chart below, you can see how increasing amounts of rooftop solar on days of low demand has year by year reduced the midday peak until it is now the point of lowest net demand (i.e., demand after rooftop supply).  But notice something unusual about these curves.  Peak demand is at midnight!  When everyone is asleep and most factories and businesses are closed!  What gives? 

Well, years ago, when SA's electricity came solely from black and brown coal-fired power stations, there was surplus power at night.  So to use up this power, which would otherwise have been wasted, the (then) state-owned utility encouraged users to use electricity after midnight heating their geysers (= hot water cylinders, to Americans), by giving them a discount.   Geysers had two elements, a large one at the bottom of the cylinder, which turned on after midnight, and a smaller one about half way up, which only turned on if the water temperature at that point in the cylinder fell below the desired minimum.  This tended not to be used except when you had guests in the house.  Or teenagers.

This suited everyone: baseload power wasn't wasted, and users got cheap electricity to heat their water.  Heating water can take more than 20% of total household electricity usage, so that was an important consideration.  But of course, these days the SA grid is mostly renewables, wind and solar.  And so it would make more sense for geysers to turn on when supply is at its maximum, which is over the period from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.  Perhaps that's a clumsy solution, because there are times when wholesale prices go negative because the wind blows strongly, at night.  So the clever solution might be a geyser which checks to see what wholesale electricity prices are doing, and heats the water when they are low.  If prices don't get low enough, then it would default to midday plus or minus 2 hours. On the other hand, the most cost-effective solution for households would be to heat their water between 10 and 3, thus using as much of their own solar power as they can, because the feed-in tariff is way below the tariff we pay to get our electricity back from the grid.

If geyser demand were rescheduled to midday, then there would still be a duck curve as more solar (now increasingly utility-scale) is installed, but it would be smaller.  The morning (net) demand peak would run from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and the evening one from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.   On a very rough calculation, this would mean that 2 hours of storage would be more than enough to fill those demand peaks.  (1.5 hours of storage would equal 6 hours * 1/4 of total demand) .  So SA would need 2.4 GWh of storage, provided geyser demand were rescheduled to the period of maximum daylight.  The big battery cost A$66 million for 126 MWh of storage capacity, so SA would need to spend A$1.3 billion to do this, or about $360 per person. 

Even with enough storage, the interconnector to Victoria would remain very useful for periods of exceptional overdemand or undersupply, as would the new HVDC interconnector to NSW, which the new Liberal  (i.e., right-wing) SA government is in favour of.  The more a grid is connected to its neighbour grids; the more storage it has; and the more diverse its sources of power, the more stable it will be.

Source: Dylan McConnell, from the Climate and Energy College in Melbourne