Essay by Eric Worrall
First published JoNova; Remember all those assurances that the wind always blows somewhere? Not so much on the night of the 27th.
Another wind drought pulls combined renewables output below last year
The story of Australia’s green energy transition is mostly one of new peaks in output and share of renewables, but there inevitably ups and downs.
The last few days have seen another so-called wind energy “drought” – the second in as many months. Autumn is “traditionally” the season with lowest wind outputs, but the lull this year has pushed the combined output of renewables below its level of last year.
The graph above from ITK Services principal David Leitch, a contributor to Renew Economy and co-host of Renew Economy’s popular and weekly Energy Insiders podcast, shows that the share of variable renewable energy (VRE, or solar and wind), has fallen below last year’s levels.
Another data provider, OpenNEM, puts the share of wind over the last three days at just 4.1 per cent, and five per cent for the past seven days, compared to more than 13 per cent for the past year.
…
Read more: https://reneweconomy.com.au/another-wind-drought-pulls-combined-renewables-output-below-last-year/
Let’s see, if wind power drops to below 5% normal for 3 days and counting, does this mean we’d need at least 72 hours of battery backup, and counting? Or is the green solution to build 2000% overcapacity?
Large scale wind droughts are not exactly rare. A similar event occurred in 2022;
Longer outages over vast areas can also occur, such as the 2017 season long wind drought which afflicted South Australia.
Obviously we could always keep all the coal and gas infrastructure on rolling standby, ready to jump in every other year when the wind completely fails over the entire continent, but how much would it cost to keep an entire second electricity generation system operational, just in case the renewable system fails?
Actually we don’t have to ask that question – consumers are already learning the hard way what the renewable circus costs, through skyrocketing household energy bills.
Or maybe we’ll all just have to get used to multi-day power blackouts, like South Africa is currently experiencing.
Related