I’ve talked a lot about all the great rooftop solar & energy storage happening in our homes, but it will mean nothing if we don’t charge up the national electricity grid too.
That came home to me this week when I read a new snapshot out of Monash University called The Storage Imperative: Powering Australia’s Clean Energy Transition showing that large-scale electricity storage is key to achieving the country’s clean energy targets.
Just to recap—Australia has pledged to cut 43% of our emissions and hit 82% of renewable energy generation by 2030, as well as net zero by 2050. Ambitious of course, but not impossible.
I mentioned in a recent blog that Bloomberg says Australia will have to spend $2.4 Trillion on energy infrastructure if it wants to meet the 2050 deadline.
A lot of that will be on power lines, but a big part of that story will also be how we store all that newly generated solar & wind—and perhaps tidal—renewable energy. That’s because we need to manage the intermittency of sources like wind and solar that can produce excess energy during off-peak times, but not enough during high-demand periods.
The Monash report shows that current methods of trading electricity and the financial instruments that support it are inadequate. It also raises some sensible ideas to help, things like new funding to boost research, incentives & new methods to ensure grid reliability.
Like anything to do with a cleaner world, both more storage and power lines all depend on copper (I’m pleased to say). In fact the ANZ just said new energy grid construction globally accounts for roughly 14% of all copper demand — some 4M tonnes so far this year.
But investment has lagged in recent years and the ANZ says renewed interest by governments could drive a 20% increase in the total length of the global energy grid over the next five years. And that could boost global demand by another 30M tonnes in the process.
We’ve made big promises on clean energy, we now need to make the big changes to help us get there.
Cheers. John Fennell
Detail: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Wo5aei63BdSriBJryqVMhH1wgKR6CNGj/view?pli=1