The Inevitability of a 100% Renewable Energy Supply with Rosie Barnes | The Fully Charged Podcast

[Music] hello and welcome to another episode of the fully charged podcast uh coming to you from the Fantastic wonderful country of Australia now I'm this is probably the last one that we record here uh I'm heading back to the UK quite soon I'll be very sad because it is an extraordinary place and there's so much going on here and I haven't even scratched the surface like all I all I ever do every day is learn about some other Amazing Project that's going on in Australia that I haven't been to visit or heard about or seen but hopefully we're going to be able to resolve that with um our wonderful Australian presenters and one of them is going to join me today on the podcast uh Rosie Barnes is an engineer she runs an incredibly fascinating uh YouTube series called engineering with Rosie and she very she people explain it has worked in the wind industry a great deal both in Australia and in Europe and Denmark where she lived for many years so she really knows a thing or two about how wind turbines actually work what they're made of and what they're capable of producing uh so it's a kind of uh it was definitely this is definitely a wind focused episode um I won't tell any more about her is because she's amazing and she will you will be impressed and very confident of that um and she her first episode is uh on uh the fully charged show who actually came out today but by the time you hear this it'll be so it'd be the past that's the way time goes it kind of Moves In One Direction um enough of that let's I don't want to tell you anything about anything else we're doing except we've got some amazing shows lined up that are coming on on the fully child show and on the over the thing electric show our sister sister Channel which is growing very rapidly it's amazing um all I would love you to do is tell your friends about the fully charged plethora of products and about the live shows we're doing and I'm not going to talk about them now because I don't want to be just always go on I'm always going on about the live shows but they are incredible I'm about to go to Sydney to go to the um the fully charged life first one we're done here and it's just but it's very exciting what's going on and how much interest there is in what we're doing which is really um just fantastic uh very reassuring in what can often be quite a a negative environment in terms of the information that's spewed out about Renewables and clean technology and the electrification of ground transport all critically important things for the entire human race uh we're not saving the planet the planet doesn't care planet's quite happy as it is whether we're here or not there's no anxiety as regards to the planet it's the it's a human beings I think we should be anxious about but that's enough of my Waffle please do subscribe to this uh podcast and to the live shows I won't say that at the end I'll just say goodbye but uh before I do that please welcome to the fully charged podcast Rosie Barnes yeah well so I started out um shortly after finishing my engineering degree I wanted to work in Renewables and so I was working for a solo research company designing equipment for them research and Manufacturing equipment for them but it was quite experimental I ended up leaving there and worked for on some other projects for startups for renewable energy and it was always the same it's like yes technically I work for renewable energy but I couldn't say there's like a single electron that's been generated from renewable energy instead of fossil fuels based on the work I did um and at the time so it was you know like around 2010 in Australia the politics here were just like absolutely toxic I was totally despondent um I'm a real pessimist by nature which I think is quite common for engineers because you know your job is to look look for problems so that works well um and I was just thinking you know like how is it possible that we know you know climate change is a thing and that we need to change things and no one seems prepared to you know suffer even the tiniest little bit to solve climate change um and at the time wind energy was and solar both of them weren't at grid parody yet they were both still more expensive than fossil fuels but you could see based on a trajectory that it was coming and I thought you know I want to have some impact I want to I want to work on something that's going to yeah make some green electrons um and I wanted to get out of Australia because I was just I was honestly I was just so sick of the toxic politics um so I I knew I wouldn't probably get a job in um at a big manufacturer um like I wanted to so I went back to University and did a PhD um and I chose a wind turbine project so that that would make my CV very appealing to um yeah to a big big wind energy company that was my my plan um and yeah I chose wind energy because my technical love is composite materials and then my you know my values say renewable energy and wind energy is just you know this this big big generating you know Behemoth um at the time it was way way closer than solar was to having a real impact so when I finished that I think I handed in my thesis one day and on the the very next day I was on a plane to Denmark to meet the team of a company I had a job offer for um and then I took that job so I lived in Denmark for five years working at LM wind power and they are the biggest winter bone blade manufacturer in the world one out of five turbines in the world have blades made by them so it's the biggest renewable company never probably heard of um and they they got bought out by GE Renewables while I was there so I was an excellent employee of of GE yeah and then the pandemic happened um it became very hard to live on the other side of the world from where my family was my partner whose job was still in Australia so he couldn't be stuck in in Europe right and so yeah came back started the YouTube channel while I was uh out of work and with no Prospect of fighting more while the pandemic was raging and I just enjoyed it and it was I just surprised myself that people actually wanted to listen to topic videos about engineering really getting into the engineering um not just Renewables yay um but I've always yeah talking about the the problems um and how they're going to be solved and yeah that's that's that's my story that's good no well what an amazing Story I mean it's brilliant and I mean are you now working for are you doing any engineering work now have you have you got a job I suppose it's a basic question yeah I have a couple I have one um so mostly what I do I try and spend a little time on the YouTube as possible so every time I make some money from the channel I spend it on hiring staff to do the parts that I am less good at and less interested in so right now I'm um I'm working on hiring a writer because I've noticed I've started procrastinating terribly on the writing and I'm not enjoying it that much so yeah hoping that will go well um and then the rest of my time I have a consulting company and I consult about clean energy technology development so yeah all of the work that I've done has been on you know physical products um right developing them basically you know once you've got 20 years of engineering experience you've seen a lot of things break and so yeah I can look at technology and say this is how it's it's going to break and then yeah basically try and break it as quickly as possible you would rather break something in six months than in six years it's a lot cheaper that way and then you can make your product better um yep so I do that also doing a bit of uh due diligence like engineering due diligence for companies that want to invest in Renewable Energy Technologies or um yeah or acquire a company that's something that I wish more companies would do because you see so many just shocking shocking decisions made even by you know like government investors that invest in technologies that you know break the laws of thermodynamics and right you know if you've just given me a couple of hours I could have saved you you know 100 million dollars but thank God yeah wow but then because I mean what I don't know much of what I don't know much about is the extent of of uh well let's stick with wind at the moment I'm kind of very aware of the amount of rooftop solar in Australia that is very noticeable you don't have to be you don't have to be an engineer to notice that you just have to kind of look at roofs but wind wind turbines I remember seeing a huge cluster of them on a hill I think in Southern New South Wales when I was driving down the coast so it's not that there are none but there seems to be I don't know how many there are and is it is Australia developing offshore wind as well as onshore because I don't know what your Coast you know that as you you know from being in Denmark there's this incredible opportunity there because of a very low seat very shallow seas around Denmark and in the UK in that in the North Sea which you know which is why we've got so many wind turbines there is there similar areas here in in Australia it's not it's not as good um in terms of shallow Waters but I think um the real thing stopping Australia from having a lot of offshore wind already I mean we have none now and we've just just recently had our first um offshore Wind Farm kind of it's not been given the green light but it's um it's been given major project status I think so that means that you know they're kind of like expecting it to happen and trying to speed its role out um but the reason why we don't have more I would say is because we have have it too good in terms of onshore winds right so yeah yeah we've still got plenty plenty plenty plenty of space left and including some really really good sites I was talking to someone from um one of the developers recently and they've got a wind farm playing a really big one in South Australia and the capacity factor that they're expecting for that is in the at least in the 40s and you know maybe pushing up to 50 I can't remember the exact number but that's so capacity factor is you know how how much energy it's producing compared to the rating so if you've got a one megawatt wind turbine and its capacity factor is 50 and on average it's making half a megawatt um and so there's these onshore resources left that are as good as offshore um in many cases and offshore wind is still more expensive than onshore um about it's about about half the price of of offshore so you need really compelling reasons to do it and when you see a lot lot of offshore wind happening it's places that yes where it's easy because water is shallow but I think the more important thing is that there aren't a lot of other options so yeah Denmark for example it's a small place it's pretty jammed full of of wind farms I was living in in Jutland um in a small town called colding um about I don't know two hours north of Hamburg and there's been this is wind farms everywhere there it's actually really cool because you can see it's like a little outdoor Museum of wind turbines because there's ones there from the even the 70s I actually went and visited one from the 70s it's still working now wow that's amazing oh God yeah and everything in between yeah but Danes don't want more onshore wind farms neither do Germans um Norwegians like everybody is is complaining about more wind farms onshore in in Europe because they're so you know packed in um yeah and so they don't have so much choice but to go go offshore and in Australia we don't we don't have that problem we did in the early days have a lot of trouble with Community acceptance and people were worried about wind turbine syndrome um and that sort of thing I don't hear about that anymore because the developers have gotten much much better at realizing that it actually matters what communities have to have to say you know it's not enough to say as an engineer or wind turbine syndrome doesn't exist therefore I'm going to ignore it as a problem because it becomes a problem too when people um you know believe it and are seriously affected um by that belief and don't want your wind farm anywhere near them so yeah that's that's my thoughts I'm not sure but there's a lot of benefits as well like the project that is going to go ahead in Australia is the star of the South project Victoria and one of the benefits that they're saying is not just that it's it's got you know high wind speeds and it's windy a lot of the time but also that the the time when there's the best wind resource is in the late afternoon usually which matches really well with when there's Peak usage and that's something that solar can't really help with because you know by the time it's late afternoon there's very minimal solar power and you know a little bit later none so they're expecting to be getting way higher prices for the electricity that they generate and that will compensate for the fact that their Wind Farm is going to be a lot more expensive too in school and maintain but then the other aspect of it is that well you've got plenty of room for it I mean I think that's that's the case in the UK as well the the case I know I mean there are we do have wind farms Scotland in particular has an enormous amount I mean a lot of people in the in the south of our Island in England who go you know renewable energy just doesn't work are actually able to say that because their lights are on because there's so much wind energy in Scotland you know as we're producing such high amounts of electricity but that's that's a whole other discussion but the the um you know the scale of the size because that's what I'm fascinated by I've only had very minimal but I've had some experience of the red Center and the scale of this country is so mind-boggling the enormous that it is very hard to take it in I think even for Australians to actually really understand how big it is but I mean is there it you know is there the potential for when particularly wind because that's very obviously there's potential for solar but I don't know if there's potential for wind sort of further Inland I mean is there a point where it just isn't that windy in the middle of the country or is it windy everywhere I think it's more about the transmission than anything else because yeah yeah it's so so big that if no one lives there then um you know then you you don't have transmission there so if you have to build a whole transmission line for your wind farm then very quickly the economics um evaporate so where you do see people trying to take advantage of wind resources in the desert there's a lot of um the Giga Giga projects I've heard them called um you know like multiple gigawatts of wind and solar power together um co-located in areas yeah like in in the desert um yeah all across Western Australia is I'm in South Australia as well but they're not they're not close enough to any population that you would consider actually using the electricity there in like here in Australia in general they're all got to think of other ways that they can export that wind and soul of power um so one of them Sun cable is planning um high voltage DC transmission that will partly Supply Darwin in the Northern Territory but mostly it's supposed to supply Singapore maybe that's right yes yeah yeah that project's having some trouble at the moment it's got our our two um like climate change billionaires neither not neither of them are rich from climate change activities but yeah they're both billionaires from something else and spend their money on um yeah on climate change related businesses so that's um Andrew Forrest and Mike Cannon Brooks they had teamed up along with some other investors on this project and now they're having a bit of a a spat about how it should play out so yeah um I hope that that project continues because it's you know it's exciting but all the other projects like that um they're planning either hydrogen or some derivative of hydrogen as a way to to transport right that energy offshore Yeah It's Tricky yes yeah no it is but I mean so the okay that's because the other aspect that I'm staggered by having been up close to a couple of uh very big wind turbine blades well that's obviously your I mean I'm fascinated by the physics the materials how on Earth you can make something that is basically a an enormous lever that's only joined on at one point that is a over a hundred meters long it just makes well you know when it makes no sense to my very crude grasp of physics that should just fall off it just shouldn't be able to stay there how on Earth does that work the strength involved is staggering and I mean and because they're not you know I sort of think oh they must be very light because they're made like airplane Wings they're not that like they they weigh tons oh yeah many many many tons um by the the lengths that we're up to now yeah I mean it's the magic of composite materials I guess that was um Composite Materials is actually probably my first engineering lab and the reason why I ended up in engineering I used to um race bikes competitively and all the best bikes are carbon fiber and as you know it's just like it is like a magic material because it's not like um most materials that you work with like a metal has the same properties in all directions you know every it doesn't matter which way you bend it it's going to be as strong and as stiff in in every direction but composite materials with fibers in them you you line them up in the direction that you need to be stiff or strong um and it's very stiff and strong in that direction but not in the other directions and so you can be really targeted and that that's how you're able to save so much mass right yeah wow and I mean that I mean because is there do you think there is a a limit because I can remember um someone I spoke to like 10 years ago said we're sort of at the limit you know who was involved in I think it was someone at General Electric actually said we're kind of approaching the limit of size I mean those are now looking back at what they were making then those are tiny yeah things like 55 meter blades you know that's left that long behind I mean but do you I'm assuming there's got to be a physical limit you know yeah it's funny this is a question I get asked a lot and I I made a video on it recently so um viewers should check that one out I think I called it how how big can wind turbines get that's right yes okay yeah but I started off in that video I start off with a story because when I was working in Denmark um you celebrate employees anniversaries right and uh in Denmark people are quite loyal to their employers so there were a lot of 10 years and 25 year anniversary wow 25-year ones were the best but what happens is everyone gets in the canteen and the company buys cake and then the employer who's been celebrated they give a little speech and they all follow the same pattern they all start off with when I started in you know 1990 wind turbine blades were 12 meters long say and uh we all thought you know we all wondered how long can they get and we thought 20 meters they definitely can't go past 20 meters and now wind turbines are you know 100 meters long or 140 in the longest case um so people have been having this conversation for decades they've got to be close now right um and yeah so of course my background is with structural design of wind turbine blades so I made this video on the scaling laws about how you would actually you know what happens as you increase the length of the blade then what has to happen to the structure and the interesting thing is that a lot of people think oh economies of scale it's just bigger is better in in all cases but in terms of wind turbine blades there's some things that favor bigger blades and that's things like um connection to the um to the grid and uh what else yeah just having a smaller number of of things of towers and um right that sort of thing but then there's plenty of factors that are actually wanting wind turbines to be small so in terms of actually blade Mass you would get much less blade Mass if you had 10 one megawatt turbines than one 10mh what turbines oh right okay it's because the air the power that a wind turbine captures is proportional to the square of the blade length you know it sweeps out of circle so yeah that's you know pi r squared um but then as you increase a blade if you double the blade length the volume doesn't increase with the square the volume increases with the cube so you've got a square increase of the power but a cube increase with the um the volume and the mass of the materials right so you can do a bit better than that if you start you know getting better design methods and adding carbon fiber instead of fiberglass and that sort of thing but in general yeah smaller smaller is um is cheaper for blade materials and so when people say what's the optimal size for wind turbines the answer is always the optimal is right now is what they're selling right now and then when things change they'll change the size of the the turbine because the wind turbine companies are really really strong incentivized to make the turbine that overall gives the cheapest cost of energy or the yeah is most appealing to their customers so that's what they're they're doing there's nothing stopping us from making a 200 meter Long Blade now it would just produce electricity that was more expensive than the problem now and it's also a reason why you say offshore wind turbines are so much bigger than onshore ones because they've got different design constraints onshore transport is a big problem it keeps things small offshore it's not a problem so they've got more freedom to to grow yeah but I mean that that feels sort of counterintuitive what you said because I do remember there was a story I think I covered on the show a few years ago of some very early offshore turbines off the coast of Denmark that that had reached the end of life I think there was 12 of them and they took them down and replaced them with one which produced more electricity than the 12 original ones but that's also I I guess down to the technology that was available whenever they were put up 12 but I think it was like they were like 25 years old they were they were old you know by wind turbine standards yeah the first offshore wind in Denmark was early 90s I'm pretty sure right so yeah so a long time ago yeah but then so but that what you're saying is that isn't necessarily the case we can have because I would have thought you know the the tower the actual generator the connection all that stuff if you only have one big one that I sort of feel that's less this is this is my crude analysis please forgive me you know it's not very scientifically based but right you know if you have one big thing rather than 22 Small Things there's sort of less stuff involved in producing that I'm guessing well I mean the installation of it and the maintenance of it will all be easier but in terms of actual materials in the tower and the the blades specifically then it's the yeah it's the opposite you'd have less if you had um more smaller ones yeah right so it's just um the constraints are different to what people think and they're moving all the time because you know like for onshore wind of one of the big constraints at stopping them getting bigger is that Tower diameters uh um if you make them in in one piece you know in in sections um but the whole cross-section is all in one piece you know the tube basically um they transport them on the road and so the diameter can't be bigger than what you can transport on the road but now you see people uh trying to make like Spiral welded Towers yeah people are making towels out of other materials yeah and then another constraint is cranes getting a crane um big enough that can actually you know install all a wind turbine hot you know higher high yeah that's becoming a constraint and so you see technology is emerging that can like climb up they install themselves kind of oh wow um like a crane that clings onto the the tower it's made so far like like a koala um and then it you know installs an expert and then climbs onto it and installs an expert and climbs onto it and um yeah so you don't need a big big crane so as the technology you know as one constraint there's an incentive for someone to come in and with a new technology that removes that constraint and then things keep on going again so I think that's why it's really um hard to say what's the limit to how big they'll get because you can't possibly imagine what the you know crazy Technologies are going to be in the future that remove that constraint yeah and I mean I'm guessing that it must be an incredibly exciting field to work in you know because of the developments that are happening and the speed of those developments you know I mean you could work in I don't know I'm just trying to think of a more dull aspect of engine I mean even bridge building you know the kind the kind of basic concepts of a bridge we've kind of worked that out you know this is how you make a bridge and they make slight changes but wind turbines that it just feels like the whole industry that's developing around it and the technology that's developed around it is on such a steep growth curve it does it must be a very exciting area I just very quickly I mean related to that it's the it's the num I've just read another thing about it the number of people who used to work in offshore oil and gas who are transferring into offshore wind is very noticeable very clear connection and skills yes yes I love that that's one of my favorite things about showing right I mean and that is something you've experienced them and that is a it is a a well-known phenomena yeah yeah I do um I have a podcast uh myself I co-host on wind energy stuff called the the uptime wind energy podcast and one of my co-hosts actually he used to work in oil and gas and right now he's uh yeah now he's in in wind energy and uh yeah I know I know heaps heaps and heaps of people um but it's true across all kinds of Renewables it's one of my um my favorite topics to talk about is how you know politicians in Australia at least always seem to think that it's like this choice between renewable energy or jobs um but yeah obviously that there are a lot of a lot of jobs needed in Renewables and um it's funny as an engineer because you're always you try and design something that doesn't need a lot of Maintenance but wind turbines do need a lot of Maintenance compared to solar power um not as many compared to a lot of other forms of like fossil fuel generation but um maintenance a lot of Maintenance means a lot of jobs and in the case of of wind farms it's really similar kinds of jobs to what have been needed in fossil fuel Industries so you know like I've climbed um I was climbing a wind turbine in Canada one time and one of the technicians I was climbing with said I used to be a coal miner my dad was a coal miner my granddad was a coal miner wow probably his great-granddad too and he said you know what it is so much nicer being 100 meters above the ground than below it that's for sure um so you know he had he transferred right over um he's yeah it's not like some kind of magical skills it's it's normal mechanical normal electrical stuff and then you know you train for the industry specific stuff that you need and and carry on um I don't know are you going down to Newcastle at all on your your trip yeah I have well yes I have we well we've yes I went through Newcastle yeah because that's one of my yeah well it's like traditional coal country in Australia the hunter Valley it's you know full of coal mines and um heaps and heaps of um coal mining jobs and I've spent a bit of time there because it's also a whole lot of companies that are emerging to um yeah with Clean Energy Technologies and all of them uh after you know they're hiring they're all growing fast they're hiring people that have you know mining backgrounds because processing equipment is the same as what you need for you know for a lot of similar Clean Energy Technologies yeah um yeah and there's just so many Innovative companies bringing up there a lot of people who have ideas for what you can do with a you know Coal Power Plant once you're not using it to burn coal anymore um I think people really underestimate how I don't know how flexible people are yeah yeah I think so absolutely no I agree with you and I mean that's that's what you know some of the the exciting technologies that yeah that I get excited about then I think that there's quite there's a pattern has emerged in my head anyway that you will hear some really weird outlandish technology being proposed and then it goes completely quiet for years because if you don't know the people actually working on it and then it comes back and there's been quite a few things though there's a company in the States called quays Energy have you heard of them we're doing deep geothermal geothermal yeah and they and I mean I heard about them a long time ago and then nothing happened and they're now doing their first test drilling to oh and what reminded me of is it's attic an existing gas turbine plant so they're replacing the gas with geothermal but the plant already exists it's already got a good connection it's already there they don't have to build a new one that's you know that if it works yeah it's one of those if it works it would be extraordinary but that's uh yeah I mean slightly different technology to um to to win but uh I mean because my uh I mean I just wanted to kind of go that through that um you know what you did in the in the episode for us about the the possibility then of you know how you counter the the uh at the moment I feel tolerant of information that's coming out of the fossil fuel industry lobbying groups you know they've got a lot of money behind them you know to say there's no way we can be 100 renewable and it's a and it's a you know they're doing all this stuff it's a cruel myth that we're that uh middle class elitists and in one occasion and one article in the UK they referred to me uh you know are forcing this on hard-working families who are struggling to pay their gas bills and you can't and I'm chewing my fish to go what if they didn't have gas bills you know is that anyway but I mean I mean you're you you seem groundedly optimistic that it's possible to let's stick with Australia to to make Australia 100 renewably powered yeah I don't just think it's possible I think it's inevitable because it's it's cheaper the economics are there so I said you know that one of the the things that caused me to go to get this job in the wind industry back in I think 2016 I started that was because when power was close to grid parody at that time you know it's nearly as cheap as um you know coal or gas and now it's much cheaper um yeah if you look at just you know a kilowatt you don't care when or where it's it's generated so the next thing is making sure that you know you can get the storage and transmission and everything so you can get the whole system working um but yeah I I was so frustrated by the the politics and I I also I was frustrated in people because yeah why wouldn't you pay a bit extra to save the planet you know it's still it's still really upsetting to me that um we kind of lost that I have come to accept that people won't or not enough people will that it would make a difference you know if you relied on everybody um you know not flying anywhere for a holiday because they felt bad about the environment felt bad about everyone giving up me even though they like it um just for the environment like what are you gonna get like five ten twenty percent of the population that might be on board it's just it's it's not enough right I just became convinced that the only real solution is that the vast majority of these Greener Technologies become cheaper and better than um than the you know fossil fuel Alternatives and in the bulk of cases that's that's true so yeah wind and solar are just so much cheaper that you've got money left over to spend on storage and and things like that to you know get the whole grid working and in Australia we see coal plants announcing their closures constantly every few months there's another one bringing forward to closure and it's not it's not it's definitely not because the government's told them to and you know until recently the government would have been you know providing them no you can't close but you know you're not you're not allowed we're going to try and force you in our you know our free market we're going to push you to stay open operating at a loss but yeah the fact is that it's just not worth it for them to keep going anymore um and so that's you know that's a durable solution that it doesn't matter if uh you know the government gets thrown out or I don't know people change their minds or there's a cold summer one year or you know all that stuff doesn't matter because the economics is there and I think electric vehicles isn't so far behind now I mean we're already at the point wherein you know if you look at a lot of people say that the total cost of ownership is cheaper for electric vehicles yeah so soon the purchase price um will be cheaper and at that point I just think you know there's just no no going back um it'll you know be very very sudden then um and I wouldn't say that every single source of emissions has a clean technology that's waiting to become cheaper and better but the bulk of them do and I I just see so much momentum now and so I don't get frustrated by the politics anymore even even before excuse me even before our government changed um it it's irrelevant you know they've made themselves irrelevant by not doing anything I don't care what they I don't care what they say I would much rather that they were helping but they can't can't stop it they they just can't and so that's why I prefer being an engineer to being a politician or an actor or anything like that yeah that's why I'm able to have the sense of optimism the other one thing that I'm intrigued with which I I think will happen and it's that a really simple technological shift is is uh the the you know the bat the constant struggle to balance supply and demand and that the grid is built to do you know that but the the what's recently happened in the UK and I've been uh doing it remotely is you reduce your your energy supplier asks you to reduce your demand between a specific it's usually one hour or one and a half hours no you don't have to sit in the dark and the cold but you reduce you don't put on your washing machine your cookie your top you know for that period and that has made mind-boggling impact much much more than I ever expected it's about 450 000 people just turned everything down a bit for that time and it it resulted in like gigawatts of reduction in demand and therefore cost and therefore the benefits and it's just that it's the same frustration you know if four four and a half million people did that it's yeah it's all it's all that gas Pica plants it's all the coal plants that have to be fired up to cover that that Gap you just yeah it's not that hard it's crazy how how little people think or talk about this or how um little or difference they think it's going to make but I'm I'm convinced I just made a bet with someone this morning um about what the solution I was talking about Texas and you know they had their Texas freeze and yeah um now they're changing the laws so that everything has to winterize um to be able to you know ride through something similar in the future and I was saying how it's crazy that you know people can still be running their outdoor jacuzzi at the same time someone in a nearby district is freezing to death like literally raising to death in that case um and that I think that that's going to be the big the big story over the next few years like two or three years is going to be all of that demand reduction stuff finally working because I can see some companies now are finally figured out the way to make it work because you know when you talk about it it sounds so cool complicated it sounds you know like oh are you really going to call up you know like a million people and ask them to turn down that thermostat or um you know what stuff like that or I don't trust the government to turn off my air conditioner on a hot day um thing things like that but it's not how it's going to work it's going to be in my opinion it's going to be companies that find a way to give the value to the consumers because it's immensely valuable to reduce load by you know a meaningful amount if there's going to be a shot fall you know to avoid a blackout in Australian electricity Market at least you know the cost of electricity varies between like negative a thousand dollars and up to plus fifteen thousand dollars a megawatt hour wow wow and so it's it's it's hugely valuable um but we don't see anybody but the very you know like aluminum smelters are allowed to play that game but you know not not you with your solar panels and um your you know car plugged in and household battery and all that you're not you're not allowed in at the moment but I do see companies that are starting to find a way to get households um to um yeah financially benefit from helping the grid out and there's one Australian company actually called red Earth who oh they're in Brisbane actually you should go you should go visit um they've got they've got this cool app and you you know it just has like a big dollars number on it about how much how much you can make if you're you know if you reduce your load by you know a certain amount of this this time and in Australia it's all quite real time um I think the UK Market might be a little bit different because you've got to predict the day ahead and stuff like that but yeah in Australia it's much more like responding every five minutes um prices are changing and so you know you just got an alert oh hey you know the electricity is negative if you charge your batteries now and you'll make money um and you know you set it up obviously so you don't even have to get the alert and change it it just happens um and I I think that those kinds of systems they're about to take off and are gonna um massively reduce the amount of storage that we need in uh you know 100 Renewables system massively reduce the amount of extra transmission and distribution that we need uh I think is so much to be gained and you know I think people are still thinking about our electricity market like trying to make it look like a fossil fuel system yes without realizing that that in itself was really complicated it's not like electricity demand is constant electricity generation is constant and they're just the same and everything is good you know demand is constantly going up and down very fast coal power plants shut down you know in a matter of of minutes sometimes and it's you know it's a gigawatt or two coming offline at once not like a yeah wind turbine or something coming up so I think yeah people don't realize how complicated the old system was and that there is no no need at all to replicate that with the the new one um yeah they were starting to get close to the point where we won't won't keep trying to do that yeah I mean that's a really I think a critically important point because that roof in a sense relates to electric vehicles as well is the is the hours I've spent trying to explain to people you know it an electric car is not like a petrol car because you don't have to stop or change your journey to go and charge it from for 90 of the time you're using it you charge it when you're not using it you know so so I was I try and it kind of come up with silly analogies like imagine you parked your petrol car on the side of the road and there's some some machine that is dripping petrol into your tank very slowly all night while you're asleep and you wake up and your tanks fall that's how to think of it you know there's constant but then you think I really don't want to live in a in a world where there's petrol dripping anywhere but you know but I think the other one is that I was sort of aware of having made a TV show about a big coal Burning uh Power Plant is that the the general public will hear oh wind turbines unreliable what happens when it's not windy solar panels unreliable what happens when it's not when it's night time coal burning power plants gas power plants unreliable because they break and they have to be shut down sometimes for months nuclear power stations will be shut down for years we don't know that because the whole grid has been built to to deal with that because that's just how those things work but I think the general public have no idea that that's the case no and it's a definite um truism that no matter what the energy crisis Renewables will be blamed for it yes we had one recently in Australia the prices or you know shot up and there were a few causes um one of the problems was that there was yeah some coal power plant that had unscheduled maintenance and it was taking a long time to repair it another problem was there was a lot of flooding and some of the coal power plants their coal mines were underwater and I couldn't you know they couldn't get fuel for their their coal power plants um and yeah prices went went very high um oh the other issue was uh the international you know high gas prices and so it has heaps and heaps and heaps of gas but we export nearly all of it um and the amount that we use domestically actually the biggest domestic user of gas is gas export industry they're using it for their own processing wow yeah I'm good so so when um our local price even though we've got so much more gas than we we need our local price is really tied to the international price and that's been high for reasons that everyone is well aware of um but you know that doesn't stop right-wing politicians blaming it on on wind power or yes I always blame win pass yeah yeah it's funny because I'm in Canberra and we have um 100 renewable electricity here it's all through um you know power purchase agreements there's contracts for difference um and so when the price of electricity from our wind and solar Farms that we have you know an interest in when that's higher than the market then we pay it then yeah then we we pay the difference but recently it's been the opposite the Renewables have been lower because you know obviously their fuel price doesn't increase just because the wind doesn't get expensive just because gas is expensive yeah so next year everybody across Australia everybody's electricity prices uh going up except for Canberra hours is going down so 100 Renewables and our electricity bills will be going down next week wow that's that's a fairly good advert for for maybe changing the way you generate power wow I think that's a very optimistic or it's a mixed message but it's mainly optimistic that it is possible for for the economics the economic benefit I think which is what you've been saying the economic benefits to to play through to for people to go I I don't care what makes my electricity I just want the cheap stuff in which case it's the answer is well it'll be Renewables you know which is really we have to sort of grip grip onto that through these difficult times yes definitely that's why but Rosie I want to thank you so much for your time today it's been really good talking to you [Music] well I really hope you enjoyed that it was fascinating talking to you I'd never met him before we're meeting uh in person next week for the first time which is very exciting along with many other people that have appeared on the fully charcoal including Elliot Elliot is coming down from Shanghai to Sydney and we've never met we've talked together for years now many years I've never actually met him so that is going to be very exciting uh that's it though uh please do tune in for the next episode of the fully charged podcast coming your way very soon but as always if you have been thank you for listening

Channel: Everything Electric Show

Views: 48,086

Keywords: Robert Llewellyn, Fully Charged Show, Fully Charged, Everything Electric Show, Home Energy, The Home of Home Energy, Fully Charged LIVE, Australia, Australia Wind Turbines, Wind Turbines, Renewable Wind, Sun Cable, Star of the South Victoria, Renewable Energy, Renewables Engineering, Offshore Wind, Onshore Wind, Mike Cannon Brookes, Andrew Forrest, Engineering with Rosie

Id: jeUV7TbAhRE

Length: 46min 30sec (2790 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 06 2023