OI! How About Doing the Maths on Storeage?
OI! Reality check from the UK, where, OK , 50 degrees North solar is useless, and in the scorched empty Oz wilderness it can usefully offset a/c demand in real time, still at a subsidised premium.. But I address the larger scale dependnency and reliance on the S word. Has anyone done the maths on storage yet?
First you don't need expesnive renewables plus expesnive storage because you can generate as much energy as you need cheapest and unsubsiised with nuclear or clean low carbon gas.
Second of all, here is a sum. For the UK but do your own for SOz. A week of windless winter, when renewables = wind as solar is no-nexistent, requires 0ver 6.4 TWh of energy. I costed that in car batteries and PowerWalls. Copy linked below. Roll yer own for OZ. A Powerwall is optimistically specified at 85KWh for £4,500 in the UK.That would add a cost of £340B in power walls replaced every 3 years or so for a week's leccy, that you didn't need in the first place if you built what just works unsubsidised and people weren't such delusional tree hugging energy science denying Drongos, that is.
I link a copy of my paper on this. Review of facts welcome. Put in Oz terms even more so. The UK Parliament have accepted this and published it.
If you are in a hole stop digging, diggers. Fixing a broken belief even more expensively is making a FUBAR from a SNAFU. Why not build what works best instead? Most affordable, adequate, decarbonising, sustainable and safest of all, unsubsidised, all you can eat. etc. - gas replacing coal followed by nuclear,on the existing grid, all there is that can deliver the energy you need, when you need it, after fossil. If you believe in climate change, gas then nuclear replacing coal on the grid is the fastest and cheapest way to reduce your CO2 related bit of it. Absolute fact.
But those are just the laws of physics, delivered as engineering. You can pass some political laws that deny them to subsidise renewables and make a lot of subsidy profits for lobbyists and payola for politicians. I would't bet your economic future on them, though. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1976309/Storage%20Reality%20in%20a%20Renewable%20Energised%20Environment
OI! Do the maths, join the dots Please tell me what's wrong with the facts and calculation if you disagree. Better still do one for the South Australian grid. In haste but on the ball. Typos excepted. CEng, CPhys, MBA.