A New Power Base
Dr Barry Manor, Sustainability Consultant, outlines how the storage and use of renewable energy is changing how Australia sources its electricity. 
Australia is undergoing a pretty significant paradigm shift in terms of how we generate energy and how we distribute and store that energy. There is a whole suite of technology emerging to support this transformation and the economics are becoming increasingly favourable. 

Batteries have evolved substantially in the last decade, and variants based on lithium chemistry have displaced lead acid batteries as the preferred means of storing electricity.  A battery essentially stores electrical energy in chemical form. Chemicals in the battery undergo a reversible reaction as the battery charges and discharges.  With current technology, the number of charge / discharge cycles is limited (typically a few thousand cycles) and this determines the service life of the battery.  

Lithium batteries are probably here to stay for foreseeable future, given the huge investment in building factories to make them. Elon Musk from Tesla Motors has built the largest factory in the world. It produces lithium batteries both for Tesla electric vehicles and also for the stationery energy storage market. Experts say that lithium batteries will drop in price by 40% - 50% over the next 3 – 5 years. 

Solar panels are also playing a part. In the early days of renewable energy solar panels cost more than $12 per watt but that cost is now down to 20 cents per watt!  This is simply a matter of the huge scale of production with so many solar panels being installed, especially in China.

Above: Tesla PowerPack installation in Mira Loma, California. Image: Tesla
Tesla Corporation has reached an agreement with South Australia to build the world’s largest storage battery in conjunction with a French company (Neoen) that builds wind farms (the Tesla battery will be sited at a wind farm connected to the grid). Elon Musk has promised that if the battery isn’t built in 100 days then it will be free. The battery will have a supply capacity of 100 megawatts (more than double the present largest battery installation) and be able to store 129 megawatt-hours of energy. It will provide load balancing for South Australia’s renewable energy generation and allow emergency back-up power if a shortfall in energy production is predicted.  A Brisbane company, the Lyon Group, already has proposals to build even bigger batteries in South Australia.

Commercial-scale batteries use a modular approach and are often housed in shipping containers that are readily available all around the world (since they’re uneconomical to ship back to China). The Tesla battery housing is of a different style, but is still modular. 

South Australia has done remarkably well in implementing renewables and shutting down coal fired power stations but they are not self-reliant and depend on a Victorian interconnector. Josh Frydenburg, the federal Minister for Environment and Energy, nearly had a biffo with Jay Wetherill on live television after Jay Wetherill accused the federal government of not supporting South Australia.

In the residential energy storage market, another interesting option is the flow battery, based upon technology invented at the University of NSW. Instead of having a closed system of electrolyte and electrodes it has a series of cells with liquid electrolyte flowing through them. This liquid electrolyte gives up its energy as electricity.  The flow process is scalable, by varying the size of the electrolyte holding tanks. Flow batteries are more expensive than lithium batteries ($15,000 for a typical home installation, vs. about $10,000 for lithium) but they have a very long service life (over 20 years). When the electrolyte is refreshed they are as good as new.

Australia is in the process of an energy market transformation and people are thinking big to solve problems. It seems we are well on the way to forming a new power base in this country.

Dr Barry Manor  was interviewed for A Question of Balance by Ruby Vincent. Summary text by Victor Barry, 1 August 2017.