& we get 90% of electricity from a renewalable source
That'll be the day. We need to find the Holy Grail of efficient and sufficient energy storage first, and that's as distant as ever.
Closer than you think Rex
The Flow cell batteries can supply reliable back up power at very high dischargerates and run till fully flat then fully recharged with almost no capacity loss
Down side is because of the low volume of productoion they are expensive but could be 75% cheaper if they go into mass production .
However to be used efficiently they need to be in micro grids where the power is needed and not out in the sticks where space is cheap.
Plus of cource they are still batteries so they do have a capacity limit.
To be sustainable the entire grid needs to be configured and that is very big bickies that no one will want to pay for.
The liquid salt reactors , again in micro grids are the only current technology that looks to be viable but no one will want a reactor next to their house no matter how small or safe it is .
And of course you have the problem of investor returns.
Easy with a small nuumber of generators powering a massive grid.
A lot more difficult with a lot of small generators powereing a massive number of local grids with interconnectors .
It is portable power that is always going to be the problem & Lithium is not the answer for heavy current provision .
Way way back a paper on roof top solar calculated that in Sydney Australia alone there is sufficient roof tops correctly oriented to generate enough power to supply the entire Australian grid .
The problem is stabilizing the grid and of course supplying power when like last week the entire east coast is under cloud cover .
The worked model had local roof tops connected to a local battery and the batteries connected to the national grid .
And that was back in 2000 since when solar technology has advaned so far as to now be able to produce small amounts of power during the night.
The idea of hydrolizing water then burning the H & O at a latter date has been around for decades .
Back in the 60's when I was at UNSW the Uni had functioning power plants on almost everybuilding plus a pilot ( research ) plant at Fiji where of course the professors & post grads could fly at tax payer expense to carry on the "research " .
But the national White paper on Australian energy was all about sucking gas out of the ground for the purpose of making massive profits ( and of course tax revenue ) and not about making regions self sufficiet .
So no reason what so ever not to build direct fired turbine Hydrogen powered generators on the site of old coal fired power stations running on Hydrogen derrived from solar powered hydrolysis plants .
A few years back the CSIRO actually presented a paper to the Aust governement with a policy of converting the power stations in the Latrobe valley to syngas , derrived from burning the brown coal under water which reduces the pollution nearly 50 % as comparred to burning in open cell furnaces & usuing reflected radiation to boil water . Then progressively converting the generators to direct fired turbines and eventually powering them with strait hydrogen .
The grid was to be balanced by diverting all of Melbourne's sewerage to there and processing through membrane filters thus making it potable water
So we solved 3 problems in one hit
Cleaner power generation
sewerage pollution
water restrictions
But the looney Victorian ( in more ways than geography ) Greenies would not have a bar of it they were fixiated on their goal to demolish Hazelwood as if this was some fanstic world shattering achievment so the plan got poo pooed and ignorred .
