The Big Picture
If Renewables Are Cheaper, Where Will They Come From?

If renewables are a better deal, where are they located? The federal government's 2004 paper "Securing Australia’s Energy Future," provides some clues.
Source: Securing Australia’s Future, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2004

For biomass, it looks to be the western interior areas of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.
For wind, it's the southern coasts.
For geothermal, it's southwestern Queensland and Northeastern South Australia.
For solar, it's the entire interior of the country.

Solar and geothermal resources exist together in northeastern South Australia and southwestern Queensland. As for wind, an isolated portion of the Nullarbor Plain region is the only part of Australia's windy southern coast without sizeable settlements and outside national parks. It's also an area of very high wave energy.

How might that energy could be gotten to market? Given that Australia's eastern electricity grid ends at Olympic Dam, connecting Olympic Dam to the Queensland and New South Wales grid would allow new solar, geothermal, wind and wave resources to get to market. Later, building a power line from the Nullarbor to Olympic Dam could do the same thing for wind and waves. We'll be concentrating here on Olympic Dam as a potential nexus of Australia's new energy system.

Connecting the western and eastern ends of Australia's electricity grid would allow power to flow more freely, lowering prices.
This could be achieved by stringing high capacity direct current power lines from South Australia to Queensland and/or western or northern New South Wales, potentially all three.
Source: Electricity Supply Association of Australia
Source: ABARE (energy maps), ASFEE (power line graphics)
  Click on Image To Enlarge

The Outback clearly provides the best location for a whole host of renewables. Roxby Downs represents the ideal location to bundle them for transmission to the populated east coast. Roxby Downs is the location of BHP's massive Olympic Dam mine, which BHP plans to massively expand. If BHP expands the mine, it will quadruple energy demand at Roxby Downs. At present, BHP gets electricity from two aging dirty Port Augusta brown coal-fired power plants, the Northern and Playford. Meanwhile, another major miner, Oxiana, plans to build a huge uranium mine at Prominent Hill, northwest of Roxby Downs. At present, BHP and Oxiana are discussing joint energy initiatives. These could include building new gas fired power plants, buying more dirty brown coal power or purchasing large amounts of renewable power generated in the region.

A host of geothermal companies are exploring for hot dry rock resources in the area. Should one or more of these companies hit pay dirt, they'll have two ways of getting their energy to market. They can sell the clean power to BHP and Oxiana, or they can deliver the electricity to urban consumption markets situated to the south and east.

The northeastern SA Outback is thick with geothermal explorers
Source: South Australian Department of Primary Industries and Resources

 

Why not build new transmission infrastructure for renewables with a nexus at Olympic Dam? The mine lies exactly where huge solar and geothermal resources are. Given that both mines need power, why not arrange a marriage of convenience? Extending eastern Australia's power line infrastructure into the northern South Australian Outback has already been suggested by geothermal energy companies such as Petratherm and Geodynamics.

Building such transmission infrastructure to eastern markets would close the eastern electricity grid by connecting South Australia to Queensland using power lines passing through the rich seam of low emission energy sources (solar, geothermal and coal seam methane) that lie between Olympic Dam, South Australia, and Roma, Queensland. This would allow a major ramping up of renewable energy. These kinds of things are already happening elsewhere. California, which has a statutory goal of raising renewable energy to 20% by 2017, is instructive here. It has huge needs for renewable energy over the next decade.

California has an ambitious renewable energy target of 20% by 2017, a hockey stick need

 

Like Australia, California has an arid, very sunny hinterland with a vast solar resource. Already, California has in place 350MW of parabolic trough concentrating solar power capacity that has been operating since 1980s. To this has been added (just across the border in Nevada) another 64MW, with more than 1,000MW of additional concentrating solar power capacity planned in just the next few years. The impact could be huge. The graphic on the right shows much California land would be needed for concentrating solar power plants to replace the entire United States' coal-fired power industry. The land is there, the sun is there. What's needed is the will to harness it. In California, they have it.

Already, private companies are stepping up to install vast new solar capacity in California. The power generating capability of concentrating solar power is so huge it could supplant the nation's coal industry.
US National Renewable Energy Laboratory Source: Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures

The state has also drawn up plans to build new high capacity power lines to the state's southeastern desert areas. A far more ambitious plan is afoot to build a 1,000 kilometer power line to bring Canadian-generated electricity to California. Therefore, the template is clearly there for Australia to follow.

In Australia's case, installing new power line capacity to connect Olympic Dam to eastern electricity markets leads to some interesting follow on thinking in creating a future proof, competitive, low emission, low cost, high technology electricity generation industry for the nation.