I was recently asked for an interview about my disruptive energy exploits and doctoral research into renewable energy variability by RenewEconomy who describe themselves as 'Australia’s best informed and most read web-site focusing on clean energy news and analysis, as well as climate policy'.

Parts of Australia - in particular South Australia - are struggling to cope with extremely high renewable energy penetrations, and my interviewer David Leitch was keen to probe around the similar challenges seen in Europe with integrating renewables and some of the key lessons.

You can hear the full roughly hour long podcast here and read some of David's own written analysis.

Topics covered include:

• A comparison between Ireland and South Australia renewable penetration and issues arising.
• A discussion of the 10MW Kilroot Advancion Array (the largest operational in the UK).
• Research that shows that for frequency response purposes 100 MW of fast acting Energy Storage is equivalent to 1500 MW of thermal power (at least in Ireland)..
• That battery storage won all of the recent UK National Grid 200 MW Enhanced Frequency Response tender - clearly outperforming conventional technologies.
• The ability of various Energy Storage suppliers to get 94 MW of storage approved in 126 days to replace gas generation in response to the Alison Canyon gas field leak in the USA (AES is deploying 37.5 MW/4 hours of that and its deployments will be operational by January 2017, 6 months from order placement).
• The relative ability of coal and gas plants to ramp up and down in response to say a PV “duck curve” and what can be done to improve the thermal efficiency of coal plants during the ramp up/ramp down.
• A discussion of battery lifecycle and recycling at the end of life.
• The Factors driving economics of scale in utility-scale battery deployments.