The ACT government has an ambitious renewable energy target.

By 2020, 90% of the electricity supply must come from “large scale renewables”:

This will mostly be from wind and solar, with some contribution from waste sites and other sources.’‘

The government reckons that the feed-in tariff required to support this effort will peak at about $4 per household per week in 2020.

The new plants will be built both within the ACT and in the broader area around the capital.

I’m curious about some of the maths: currently the electricity consumption in the ACT is around 3800 GWh per annum.

That is about 430 mean MW. 90% of that is around 390 MW.

Given optimistic capacity factors for the region, this might mean 1200 MW in nameplate capacity for wind power, or maybe 1600 MW nameplate capacity in solar. Given the mix they are going for, let us say that it will require 1300 MW in combined nameplate capacity.

They have budgeted for an extra 490 MW in nameplate capacity, mostly in wind. So I don’t know how this works unless they think they already have about 800 MW in the region, which they certainly don’t:

Alternatively, by 490 MW they do mean mean power, which would be a very unusual way to express the capacity in public documents and would differ from their other materials.

In terms of cost, to make wind power a goer compared to their current mix requires about 1 to 1.5 dollars per mean watt of assistance. 490 mean MW would thus cost something like 0.5 to 0.75 billion dollars. There are about 140000 households in the ACT. If they were paying 4 dollars a week extra for ten years, you would get close to 0.3 billion dollars. They have said it will peak at 4 dollars, so the average would be lower, but I don’t know how long the tariff will apply. Given that about 45 % of electricity goes to households, if they did apply this tariff for 10 years and the average was not much lower than 4 dollars per week over the whole period, then we do end up in the range from 0.5 to 0.75 billion dollars, so I suppose this further supports the idea that their accounting in in mean watts rather than capacity factor.

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http://www.environment.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/581701/Renewable-energy-brochure_ACCESS.pdf

“Updated modelling since the release of AP2 indicates that after accounting for the above sources around 490 megawatts (MW) of new large-scale renewable energy investments will be required to make up the gap and to achieve the 90% renewable energy target:

Ninety one (91) MW of solar generation capacity will be pursued including the previous large-scale Solar Auction and next generation solar technologies Around three hundred and eighty to (382) MW of wind generation capacity will be required being the lowest cost renewable energy source, and Up to seventeen (17) MW of energy can be energy from waste generation capacity can be achieved while diverting substantial quantities of waste from landfill.

Using a blend of renewables will create a smoother generation profile, better matched to our demand for electricity from the NEM. For example solar energy peaks during the day and can contribute significantly to summer peaks in demand. Wind generation tends to peak in the morning and evenings, best matching winter peaks.”
http://www.environment.act.gov.au/energy/90_percent_renewable
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A solar farm that has been billed as Australia’s largest has officially opened at Royalla, south of Canberra.
The 20 megawatt Royalla Solar Farm was developed by a Spanish company, is made up of 83,000 solar panels and has the capacity to power more than 4,500 ACT homes.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-03/royalla-solar-farm-opens-south-of-canberra/5716500
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ACT to auction 200MW of wind farm capacity
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2014/act-to-auction-200mw-of-wind-farm-capacity-58335

>>> By 2020, 90% of the electricity supply must come from “large scale renewables”:

This will mostly be from wind and >>solar<<, with some contribution from >>>waste sites and other sources<<<.’’

Up to seventeen (17) MW of energy can be energy from waste generation capacity can be achieved while diverting substantial quantities of waste from landfill. (Biomass)

Ninety one (91) MW of solar generation capacity will be pursued

A solar farm that has been billed as Australia’s largest has officially opened at Royalla, south of Canberra.

<<<<<<

Royalla is a photovoltaic solar farm. EROEI of only 3.5
Biomass EROEI of only 3.9

“A paper by Weißbach et al.1 in terms of energy returned on energy invested, or EROEI – the ratio of the energy produced over the life of a power plant to the energy that was required to build it. It takes energy to make a power plant – to manufacture its components, mine the fuel, and so on. The power plant needs to make at least this much energy to break even. A break-even powerplant has an EROEI of 1. But such a plant would pointless, as there is no energy surplus to do the useful things we use energy for.

There is a minimum EROEI, greater than 1, that is required for an energy source to be able to run society. An energy system must produce a surplus large enough to sustain things like food production, hospitals, and universities to train the engineers to build the plant, transport, construction, and all the elements of the civilization in which it is embedded.

For countries like the US and Germany, Weißbach et al. estimate this minimum viable EROEI to be about 7. An energy source with lower EROEI cannot sustain a society at those levels of complexity, structured along similar lines. If we are to transform our energy system, in particular to one without climate impacts, we need to pay close attention to the EROEI of the end result.

The EROEI values for various electrical power plants are summarized in the figure. The fossil fuel power sources we’re most accustomed to have a high EROEI of about 30, well above the minimum requirement. Biomass, and solar photovoltaic however, cannot. With an EROEI of only 3.9 and 3.5 respectively, these power sources cannot support with their energy alone both their own fabrication and the societal services we use energy for in a first world country.”

why are they bothering with PV solar farms & biomass?

Wind will take up the rest, but what about storage of power to overcome the problem of indeterminacy with wind ????

“Several recent analyses of the inputs to our energy systems indicate that, against expectations, energy storage cannot solve the problem of intermittency of wind or solar power. Not for reasons of technical performance, cost, or storage capacity, but for something more intractable: there is not enough surplus energy left over after construction of the generators and the storage system to power our present civilization.”

again the EROEI problem -

“If we were to store energy in, say, batteries, we must invest energy in mining the materials and manufacturing those batteries. So a larger energy investment is required, and the EROEI consequently drops.”

Wind power has an EROEI of 16 but adding storage greatly reduces the EROEI .

“Wind “firmed” with storage, with an EROEI of 3.9, joins solar PV and biomass as an unviable energy source.”

http://theenergycollective.com/barrybrook/471651/catch-22-energy-storage

Perhaps they could power the whole place from Tony’s bum?

morrie said:

Perhaps they could power the whole place from Tony’s bum?

I just hope they make sure Noodles has a good view of the turbines from his office.