RE "South Australia’s last coal-fired power plant had closed, leaving the province of 1.8 million heavily reliant on wind farms and power imports from a neighboring region. " So - now they import power from places that use coal fired power stations and they have grid stability problems. NOT quitting coal at all. Id ask what is the price of their power KWh?
Installing a battery in South Australia did not lead to to a quadrupling of national energy prices. The cost of energy globally has shot up since 2020, and Australia's spot prices are based on the global market.
Energy independence in the form of renewables is now more advantageous than ever. Tethering your economy to global price hikes like this is a vulnerable position to be in.
Australia's spot prices aren't based on the global market.
They are based on the (Australian) national energy market (NEM) which sets price based on supply and demand across South Eastern Australia (WA and NT aren't in the NEM)
> So - now they import power from places that use coal fired power stations and they have grid stability problems.
That sounds like Austria. They really dislikes nuclear power, and are suing all their neighbors for it. But when they have power deficit, they are happily importing power from Czechia or Hungary, where Czechia is having 2 NPPs at the southern border with Austria. Austrians obviously have no issues where the imported power is coming from...
The other key thing is SAs power use is far smaller than NSW, Victoria and Queensland. So while they can shutdown their coal stations and import if there is a shortfall, those bigger states can't.
For example as I type this Queensland is generating about 4300MW of solar, SA is generating about 1300MW of solar, but SA gets all the plaudits for being green.
That page is showing generation not use. 83% of the power SA generated was renewable, but it wasn't enough to cover their use, so they imported 28% of their power from interstate, renewables cover 45% and the rest was gas. Other states are too big to just import 28% of their power. SA is small enough they can shut down their coal and just import coal-based power from Victoria.
Meanwhile Qld, Vic and NSW each produced more than triple the renewable power SA did today.
OpenNEM puts it at 12% imported and states 67.9% from renewables.
Why would SA want to produce multiple times their requirements in renewable energy? Today during the sunny period more than 100% was fulfilled by solar.
As an Australian living in Canada, I want to say unalike Canada, the term "Province" feels weird to be used here. Australia refers to its divided regions as "States".
They still rely on interstate power even after getting the big battery, which solved their frequent brownouts but hasn't actually got much capacity: 150MW and 194MWh[0], when the peak grid demand in SA is 2000MW[1] and they've got grid interconnects with Victoria that can deliver nearly 900MW. They make up the capacity with natural gas generators, and their gas usage went up massively after their coal plants went offline[2].
The biggest problem is that SA is pretty flat[3] and doesn't have good sites for dams. They have a grand total of 3MW of hydroelectric capacity, which means they rely on Victoria (and soon NSW) for renewable energy when peak demand exceeds wind/solar generation, as well as their own gas generators and Victoria's coal plants. The big battery can respond faster than the interstate interconnects (which are far away) and the gas generators (which are expensive to run and only turn on when spot prices are high), which lets it fill the same role a big flywheel would in a coal/nuclear plant.
