The release of a Brattle report by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) resulted in a Twitter storm and much commentary over the meaning of ‘baseload’. Mark Diesendorf had pushed back against the term more than 10 years ago. But some anti-coal proponents embraced the concept of baseload, including Beyond Zero Emissions with the concept …
The rigour of the Jacobson et al. RE plan
UPDATE: 26 August 2017 - A response to Jacobson et al.'s response has been published with further detail here. Completely decarbonising energy systems is a difficult and complex problem. Wind and solar have the benefit of modularity, falling costs, and scalability. They are contributing to lowering the emission intensity of legacy electricity systems. But at high …
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Synchronous grids and inertia
The Australian NEM spans five states and 4,500 km and has around 260 registered generators, all of which, when online, are synchronous machines spinning in near-exact synchronization at close to 50 Hz across the network (the island state of Tasmania is connected via the non-synchronous Basslink DC link). A synchronous grid implies that the rotors …
Australia’s strategic oil reserve
With the current political debates in Australia around energy and climate policy, it’s easy to neglect the sleeper of Australia’s energy policy - the lack of an oil strategic reserve. The IEA was established in November 1974 in response to the first Middle Eastern oil crisis. One of the rules of membership for oil importing …
The speciation of technology
In the evolving technology space, there can be a tendency to assume that a single class of technology will come to dominate. The stand-out example is Tony Seba’s projection that all new road vehicles—buses, cars, vans, trucks —will be entirely electric by 2030, and that all of these vehicles will be autonomous or semi-autonomous. Seba’s …
The competitive struggle between technology and resource depletion
The study of EROI may be of little more than academic interest except for two factors. Energy extraction has conformed to Ricardo’s ‘best first’ principle, meaning that the easiest resources to extract tend to be the first. But at the same time, human ingenuity continually pushes the technological frontier forward. Hence, there is a competitive …
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Electricity networks and disruption
Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruption was originally based on his observations about disc drives. He saw that the manufacturers of 14” drives for mainframes had been driven out of business by manufacturers of 8” drives for mini-computers, and then the companies that made the 8” drives were subsequently driven out of business by manufacturers of …
