Graph of Day: How solar tower and storage sailed through eclipse

It seems many people are still struggling with the idea of solar towers and storage, particularly those in the conservative press

Judith Sloan, the Murdoch columnist and self-described “Monkey’s Uncle”, is still struggling to get her mind around renewables, and dismissed the Port Augusta solar tower as a preposterous idea.

Her views have been shared by numerous other Murdoch columnists defending coal generation until the last lump is torn from Barnaby Joyce’s sweating palms and thrown into the incinerator.

Sloan appears convinced that the Port Augusta solar tower will be intermittent, won’t deliver power when needed and will only deliver energy for nine hours a day.

Just for the record, it is fully dispatchable, has eight hours storage and will likely operate for around 16 hours a day. Unlike a coal generator, it does not need to stay on when demand is low. And like a gas generator, it can increase its output when demand is high.

Indeed, what is truly horrifying to the fossil fuel ideologues – because that is what they are – is the idea that solar towers and storage can do pretty much what gas fired peaking stations can do , and coal generators, but with more flexibility, next to zero emissions, and at a cheaper price than new fossil fuels.

Nothing can illustrate this better than what happened on Monday during the solar eclipse. While non dispatchable solar PV wound down considerably as the moon passed in front of the sun, the output from Crescent Dunes, the 100MW facility built by the same company that will build in Port Augusta, remained constant.

This graph, tweeted by SolarReserve overnight, shows the blue line of the Crescent Dunes facility in Nevada, and the yellow line of the solar PV output in Nevada and California.

This highlights the ability of plant to maintain production and ride through disruptions such as cloud cover that affect the output of solar PV.

The plant can be configured in a variety of ways, but it is the flexibility and dispatchability that will be the key, particularly in a grid that will see increasing amounts of distributed generation, local renewable based micro-grids, and more variable renewables such as wind and solar, accompanied by fast-response battery storage, and longer-dated storage such as pumped hydro or even renewables-based hydrogen.

(Note: We will do a paragraph by paragraph take-down of Sloan’s latest nonsense in the not-to-distant future. But to explain the Monkey’s Uncle reference, we quote Sloan’s column:

“If sticking with the damaging renewable energy target and committing to a wildly excessive emissions reduction target under our commitment to the Paris climate agreement are not ideological, I’m a monkey’s uncle.”

We think the case is proven).