Finkel report destroys baseload coal power

Demand enough renewables and you might as well ban coal

There’s a lesson Australia needs to learn from South Australia. When renewables reach a certain point they make baseload power unfeasible. The situation develops into an impossible dead end that can only be solved with container-ships of cash.

The intermittent supply of wind and solar is the immoveable problem. It eats into the daily chart of the cheapest stable electricity supply — which is coal fired. Coal can’t be ramped in and out in minutes. It is a creature that runs best non-stop, efficiently, smoothly, at a high capacity factor (meaning it works best when it is producing around 90% of it’s design limit continuously).

Tom Quirk shows that sometime after these intermittent renewables hit 30% of the average daily supply — there are times during the daily cycle when they are providing almost all the demand. There is little demand left for the massive coal turbines to supply, so they spin, but costs remain, and profits are zero.

In SA, the owner of the last coal fired stations were still willing to pour in money, but even large cash […]