Siso

Just a update on the cost of a wind turbine I got a quote for a new 3.5MW turbine for an insurance company about 4 years ago. The price was 6,000,000 installed. This doesn't include the price of the civil work, switch yard and the KM's of underground cabling needed for the whole farm. A major hurdle in keeping up with the installation of turbine is the supply chain for new turbines.

We need to remember that putting 30% renewables is reasonably easy. As the penetration get more we need to start adding storage and it gets harder as the base load generators start falling off because it is not profitable. Ireland has some pumped hydro that is filled every night and handles the extra demand during the day. Renewable storage that we need has to handle the multiple days of low wind we had NEM wide like we had at the end of May and other times this year. We still don't really know what this is going to cost because it has never been done anywhere in the world at Australia's scale. (large amount of hydro would help but we don't have the resources for this.)

A bit of info how the UAE got over the regulation writing towards the end of the video

I'm hoping it happens. We have been trying for renewables for the last 10-15 years and we are still nowhere near successful. Can see a bit on the availability and generation of wind recently at this link. https://www.joannenova.com.au/2024/06/despite-spending-1-8-trillion-on-clean-energy-last-year-the-world-is-still-81-fossil-fueled-burning-more-than-ever/ Also some interesting info at Watt clarity website particularly about the amount of wind at the end of last month. https://wattclarity.com.au/ Also see https://opennem.org.au/energy/nem/?range=7d&interval=30m&view=discrete-time for a real time energy use across the NEM. You can see how far we still need to go with renewables and storage. Every GWh of pumped hydro requires 1 GL (1 billion litres) to be pumped to a height of 400m. 1GL is 1km x 1km x1m dam. Roughly 80% round trip efficiency. https://app.electricitymaps.com/map is also an interesting site. Good to keep an eye on France smashing GWs of energy into their neibours most of the time These websites aren't run by the ABC or Murdoch press. I also worked on a windfarm for over 10 years and we quite often constrained or stopped because of excess generation. The synchronous condensers helped this when they came on line. Renewable generation also gets a large scale renewable energy credits for every MW. This is worth about $40/MWh at the moment which means they can generate down to - $40 dollars before they are switched off. (subsidy?)The large scale gas and coal are paying money for each GWh they generate at these times. You can imagine what they charge when the sun goes down to make up for this. I think we will still be seeing energy prices rise for a long time before they fall.