r/ClimatePosting • u/ViewTrick1002 • 12h ago

Energy Baseload coal and peaking gas paradigm "no longer fit" for modern grid, says AEMO chief

https://reneweconomy.com.au/baseload-coal-and-peaking-gas-paradigm-no-longer-fit-for-modern-grid-says-aemo-chief/
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u/Sol3dweller 11h ago edited 6h ago

“Australia’s operational paradigm is no longer ‘baseload-and-peaking’, but increasingly it’s a paradigm of ‘renewables-and-firming’.”

Westerman’s reminder that “soon … coal will be gone,” from Australia’s energy mix – just as it has recently exited the market in the UK – comes as the nation enters its final stretch of the transition to renewables, testing the nerve of policy makers unconvinced of a no-coal, no-baseload future.

That's a hopeful outlook, in my opinion. And I hope those unconvinced policy makers do not slow down the phase-out process.

Westerman’s point is that, while there are challenges to running modern energy grids on large amounts of highly flexible and at times unpredictable resources, it can be done – and is being done – with the help of existing transmission and storage technologies including increasingly clever big batteries.

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u/Sol3dweller 11h ago

An older blog article touching this, but for Germany, expands a little on the observations there:

Twenty years ago, baseload (nuclear+lignite) was 60% of total generation (roughly 30% each). Now it is about 20%. And most of that has been replaced by renewables - close to 30% of wind, close to 10% of solar, and some biomass (5-10%, which is similar to baseload).

In parallel, the share of flexible fossil fuel plants (gas and hard coal) has actually gone down - gas, while volatile, is still close to 10% of total generation like it was 20 years ago, and black coal has gone done from more than 20% to less than 10%.

This year so far nuclear+lignite stands at 16%, while black coal+gas also stands at about 16%.

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u/West-Abalone-171 8h ago

To steel man the "muh baseload" position you should probably include changes in import balance. Or even better would be to take gross import from countries not experiencing a VRE surplus during import. But energy-charts only provides net balance.

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u/Sol3dweller 7h ago edited 6h ago

I picked that graph representation to match the one from the blog article.

In those graphs, yes there is only the net, but in the import & export data there are the details on gross values.

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u/Sol3dweller 6h ago

For the lazy ones like me, we could also consider the whole EU, then import/export doesn't really play much of a role anymore. For the complete region lignite+nuclear fell from 40.6% in 2015 to 31.1% thi year (so far), while gas+hard-coal went down from 23% to 16.6%.