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Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity

electrek.co

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Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity

#111

Post by testing22321 »

larusso wrote: post #98

I still wonder who came up with the charge your car during the day / use it as a batterie. I don’t have the luxury’s of owning two EVs that I can charge and use at the same time. If my car stand unused at home so I can charge it would mean I use it during the night? I understand that there could be useage pattern where someone works from home once or twice a week and waits with the charge during these peek hours. But…

A few things.

Obviously it still works great on the weekend, or whatever days you’re not working to charge the EV at home for free.

Given all power is free, why wouldn’t you charge the EV at work in the middle of the day? Even if you pay to have the charger installed it will pay back quickly.

It’s not going to happen overnight, but with literally free electricity things will change quickly, and even huge parking structures or lots will have a stack of chargers that are free or very close to it.

Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity

#112

Post by hylaride »

antonymoose wrote: post #74
teemur wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget Germany. If you look at the amount of PV built in Germany early this century and make some admittedly strong assumptions about learning curve, one could argue the Energiewende, then usually called failure, singlehandedly accelerated PV development by decades. I don't recall Germany ever credited on that.

I remember some old tidbit about the American westward expansion, most railroad projects failed and went bankrupt and were sold for pennies on the dollar to the ultimate owners. Something sad about that, really.

A lot of them got built with per-mile subsidies and cashed out via shoddy construction. The ones that focused on long-term financial sustainability more often did fine, but it is a lesson in perverse incentives (though some would argue that afterwards cheap overbuilt lines facilitated much faster and more extensive westward expansion of people).

Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity

#113

Post by mrguyorama »

inerte wrote: post #27
tasty_freeze wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For years I've been hearing one excuse for the US not doing more about climate change is that China is polluting more and if they aren't doing something about it then why should we? The argument always seemed disingenuous. For sure, China produces a lot of pollution as they are modernizing, but they are also investing a lot in the direction of sustainability. If we take the balance of (pollution produced - pollution…

I am not familiar with Chinese politics or motivation, but I wonder if it's for the same arguments we have in the US, "save the world" vs. "the strong can do whatever they want". I am not sure China does for the sake of sustainability and environment. Yes I know the end result might be the same but are the reasons the same?

Maybe China wants to "save the world", in at least as much as they literally run into problems with smog and pollution locally and would like to reduce that pollution for practical reasons, as well as some prestige, especially now that the US is having a hissy fit on the global stage.

But none of that matters, China would pursue massive solar power infrastructure regardless, because they want energy independence. Stupid amounts of solar power means they will no longer be importing lots of oil and fuel, and that means they would be less vulnerable to the US blockading them in some sort of conflict, which is one of their primary geopolitical concerns.

They would do this even if solar power was dramatically less effective or was significantly more expensive, because solar power is the first kind of power generation that it is economical to way overbuild, and have serious redundancy and surplus and excess, because there's no consumables that scale your running costs like if you tried to build massive amounts of coal power plants.

China would like to have that kind of scale for power because they can use it to subsidize things like datacenters running less efficient Chinese made computer components. The fact that power doesn't have to run a profit in China helps this.

The US should be taking fucking notes, about how nationalized infrastructure can be a force multiplier economically, and how infrastructure that doesn't have to be profitable can be even more powerful.

Slaving ourselves to the enrichment of well connected capital owners is harming our country, and preventing a literal energy revolution. We have the option to, for the first time in human history, actually have energy resources that are too cheap to meter.

Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity

#114

Post by crmd »

If my 208V,200A service here in New York City were free for 4 hours a day, I might buy a ~30kW chiller to run during free time and store its output in a big thermos or ice cube.

Assuming a COP of 2.5 (small, air cooled), that would be around 300 kW or 1M BTU of cold storage per day, which is around 42 kBTU or 3.5 tons of raw cooling capacity running 24x7.

I imagine if commercial buildings with support for larger and vastly more efficient chillers did this we could take a huge chunk out of NYC’s ~50 TWh power bill.

Ok, I’ve convinced myself. ConEd, please update when the free electricity program is activated.

Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity

#115

Post by testing22321 »

loeg wrote: post #47
notatoad wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

still sounds like an incredible way to incentivize consumers to buy small-scale storage. if i knew i could get free electricity for an hour or two each day (or even each week) it'd be a very easy choice to drop ~$1000 on a home battery.

You'd spend $1000 to save $0.20 on electricity every day?

The average price of power in Australia is 34 cents per kWh. The average Aussie spends A LOT more than $0.20 per day.

Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity

#116

Post by quickthrowman »

xigoi wrote: post #51
jocaal wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power travels near the speed of light. In theory, the entire globe can be connected and countries with daylight can supply those at night in a cycle.

Do we have good enough conductors for that?

Utility conductors are just aluminum wrapped around a steel core, air is the insulator. You can theoretically handle voltage drop with larger conductors, and there are probably ways to ‘boost’ power over a long transmission line run. I deal with electrical wiring past the utility service entrance and am not super familiar with the utility side so perhaps an EE who works on the grid can chime in with more detail.

I also know breakers for HVDC are extremely challenging to make, AC power has the benefit of sine waves crossing the zero line so power can be switched/broken a lot easier than with DC.

Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity

#117

Post by testing22321 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #78
gpm wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real price of solar electricity is never negative. Unlike something like oil wells (which really have driven the price of oil negative) you can just turn solar off. Prices have gone negative because of things like subsidies - which in the short term is a good thing IMHO - it subsidizes industries developing systems to make use of that free (but not negative cost) energy...

> you can just turn solar off Somebody has to go and turn it off, and having this person available overwhelms all of your operational costs. Or alternatively, you need the infrastructure to do it automatically, what is currently expensive. (But there aren't intrinsic reasons for that being expensive, it's probably due to lack of scale.) If it's just slightly negative, or just rarely so, it's not worth it.

Basically every home in Australia, and certainly every home and business solar setup, has a smart meter that is grid connected and can be remotely shut down when needed. Or they even just limit the amount that can feedback to the grid if required I.e you’re making 8kw of solar, but it will only let you feed in 2 if the system determines that.

There is not “person” turning things on and off.

Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity

#118

Post by exoverito »

b112 wrote: post #97
dataviz1000 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I witnessed this traveling through smaller islands in the Philippines. They have cell service without connection to an electric grid in some places. The children with solar charging now have access to education materials and there is access to banking and payments systems. The effects of this are going to massive and huge in 10 years.

Yes indeed. All those unfortunate children will be introduced to the toxic, horrid internet. They'll be addicted, have no attention span, have their own data used against them to exploit and track them, and end up with their political system reeling under manipulative AI and generic bots. Far better to just give them books for their educarional system, and leave the evil Internet out of it.

He says, on the internet.

Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity

#119

Post by Razengan »

So just to fantasize for a bit,

Suppose fusion power becomes a thing, and after handwaiving some issues let's assume it can power everything indefinitely.

Does that make things like heating, cooling, travel, ocean desalination, bandwidth, AI, Bitcoin mining, permanently free?

Shouldn't all of humanity be homing in on that holy grail?

I read here and there that geothermal could be the next best thing. Maybe HN can say more on that.

(P.S. terrestrial fusion may also explain why nobody bothers to build Dyson spheres out there)

Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity

#120

Post by testing22321 »

kulahan wrote: post #50
shevy-java wrote: post #28

But it is so damn HOT there. And Australia has the most vicious animals and plants too. It is like an alien continent.

I'm pretty sure they get snow sometimes in NSW. AUS is big enough you can find many climates there! You're not wrong about the plants and animals though. It's basically an island, and islands always end up with super weird flora and fauna - there usually just aren't many (any?) predators, so the competition takes species in weird directions.

There are many ski resorts. The biggest has 44 lifts.

Yes, it snows.

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