What We Can Learn From Australian Solar

Solar energy has been remarkably successful in Australia due to the abundance of sun, but perhaps too successful as there is so much electricity from solar flooding the market that it is going to waste. This results in other forms of power generation having to lower their production or halt it entirely as to not trip the grid. This process is called curtailment, when energy generation is set below what it’s capable of, for example wind is blowing but a turbine isn’t spinning because the grid is at capacity.

This is a good problem to have, an overabundance of cheap renewable electricity but it does present an issue to be solved. The main challenge is that large fossil fuel plants want to avoid “stop and go” production as it is expensive and inefficient, while a significant part of the renewable energy is coming from small scale panels on houses. This creates a situation where there is a high baseline that generation from non-renewable sources and renewable energy from large scale projects is what ends up going to waste. There is a clear solution to this though.

Batteries allow the excess energy that is generated midday when solar is at its peak to not go to waste. Instead, this electricity is stored and utilized during the night when there is no solar generation. The batteries can fulfill the demand that solar was meeting during the day. This is exactly what Australia is doing. They have enough battery capacity planned that it could bring the level of curtailment down to negligible levels.

Here in Canada, we can learn a lot from Australia about shifting to a renewable focused grid. In 2020 the curtailed energy in Ontario was equivalent to 10% of all the electricity generated in the province for that year. While this issue isn’t as severe for us yet, preemptively building the battery capacity can stop us from facing the same challenges that Australia is. By having your own Anorra wind turbine coupled with batteries you too would be able to benefit from the smoothed-out demand and supply, learn more about our Anorra turbines here.