IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/eneeco/v143y2025ics0140988325000477.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

An analysis of electrical storage demand and cost in South Australia

Author

Listed:
  • Mountain, Bruce

Abstract

The State of South Australia (SA) currently has twice as much variable renewable electricity (VRE) as the country (Portugal) with the highest proportion globally. This analysis of the relationship between storage and VRE takes account of the evidence of generators' response to market prices in their dispatch decisions. It finds that increasing VRE penetration to around 90 % of end use consumption will be affordable with storage (energy) capacity equal to 0.00044 % of annual demand. However a strategy to fully decarbonise supply through VRE and storage has implied carbon abatement costs far above estimates of the Social Cost of Carbon. This is because very large amounts of seldomly used storage is needed to come close to fully decarbonising supply. Storage costs at around one twentieth current costs reductions will make full decarbonisation through VRE and storage affordable. Pursuing other (non-storage) avenues for decarbonisation such as encouraging a stronger temporal association between electricity demand and VRE supply, zero carbon dispatchable generation, and stationary energy system use of storage in electric vehicles, will be valuable.

Suggested Citation

  • Mountain, Bruce, 2025. "An analysis of electrical storage demand and cost in South Australia," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 143(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:eneeco:v:143:y:2025:i:c:s0140988325000477
    DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2025.108224
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988325000477
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.eneco.2025.108224?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:eneeco:v:143:y:2025:i:c:s0140988325000477. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/eneco .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.