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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

#151

Post by dylan604 »

hylaride wrote: post #112
antonymoose wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

move fast, break things is never a good long term plan

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

#152

Post by limagnolia »

hylaride wrote: post #112
antonymoose wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

By building the initial rails cheaply, they could then bring in equipment and supplies over those rails to rebuild the railroad to a much better quality, and at a lower cost than if they had to bring that equipment and supplies in without the rails in the first instance.

That doesn't mean they always actually invested the money to rebuild properly... but it was sound engineering theory.

Of course, there were other financial shenanigans too- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%A9dit_Mobilier_scandal

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

#153

Post by asdefghyk »

The relatively EASY part is building large arrays of solar panels .....

The HARD PART is

1) STORING this electricity ( Storage is very expensive and technology changing)

3) Getting this electricity from the storage to where its wanted - is EXPENSIVE and requires many $BILLIONS of new transmission lines ....

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

#154

Post by rdm_blackhole »

pempem wrote: post #143
rdm_blackhole wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Starlink isn't necessary. In India you can get 1GB/day of cell phone data for $4/month, and other developing nations aren't far behind. There is a huge swath of Australia that does not have good internet access and/or very poor cell phone coverage. And I am not talking about about people living in the middle of the desert, I am talking about people who are 10 to 15 minutes away by car from a small town. So yes Star…

Can you help me understand. Is Starlink, or satellite enabled wifi really the only solution here if you're 10-15 min away from a populated area?

Yes unfortunately.

My parent's in law live on small farm 10 minutes out of a small town in NSW and on the best days, when the sky is clear, they get 1 bar of phone reception on their cell phone and they have to stay within a 10 sqm perimeter within their house in order to make phone calls otherwise calls drop out.

Video chat is basically out of the question unless you want to talk to pixelated blobs on a screen.

After waiting 10 years for the NBN to be rolled out to their property, they decided to bite the bullet and bought a Starlink terminal and now we can have normal conversations on the phone and they can use streaming services whereas that would have been impossible before.

But it is not just them that have issues. When I was living in Brisbane many moons ago, I remember how pitiful the internet speed was so much so that I ditched my home internet and started hot-spotting from my phone instead.

Things have improved in the cities since then I am sure, but for the people out there living in the country side, not much as changed.

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

#155

Post by jimnotgym »

oskarkk wrote: post #77
bryanlarsen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink isn't necessary. In India you can get 1GB/day of cell phone data for $4/month, and other developing nations aren't far behind. The solar+battery revolution is doing for power what cell phones did for communications in the third world in the 90's and 2000's.

I think India is a bad example. It's very densely populated, with high density in most of the country, and as such it's not a good target market for Starlink. See for yourself: https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen India has 1.4B people on 3 million km^2, Africa has 1.4B people on 30 million km^2 (out of which 9 million is Sahara). Starlink's use case is low population density areas, and Africa has plenty of those. Ve…

How much is a Starlink setup? They are pretty expensive in Europe, are they cheaper in Africa?

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

#156

Post by Razengan »

asdefghyk wrote: post #153

The relatively EASY part is building large arrays of solar panels ..... The HARD PART is 1) STORING this electricity ( Storage is very expensive and technology changing) 3) Getting this electricity from the storage to where its wanted - is EXPENSIVE and requires many $BILLIONS of new transmission lines ....

Taking cues from some sci-fi: Could "broadcast power" be a thing? Wireless power on a medium if not mass scale.

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

#157

Post by hexbin010 »

andrewinardeer wrote: post #140

On the flip side here in Australia the government for years encouraged us to get panels put on our house by selling it as, "You can export power and create a small income exporting the surplus you create". So many people did so that at one point last year the government said, "So many people are exporting it now, and the surplus is so great on the network we may have to charge you for exporting it". Wholesale power p…

Governments do this all the time. And wonder why there is resistance and have to roll out the "why do you want your grandchildren to die" propaganda for the next eco green net zero thing du jour.

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

#158

Post by maccard »

floam wrote: post #84
maccard wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile here in UK, we’re unable to get phone signal in the middle of major population centres

Not literally no signal/service, right? More likely “I have a few bars but data doesn’t seem to work… calls often won’t initiate unless 911?” thing you get when there’s too many devices connecting to an overburdened tower, in a network that needs more cells or something, and QoS/qci says no? If it’s a population center someone would probably have put up a tower on their land ll

Yes.

In the context of “cheap mobile data devices are widely accessible” I don’t think the distinction matters. If you’re relying on your £1 sim to trigger your solar battery charger and it doesn’t, then it doesn’t matter if you technically had signal or not.

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

#160

Post by hexbin010 »

adammarples wrote: post #148
RobinL wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - unfortunately the UK has some of the highest electricity prices in Europe. Almost all households are on fixed tariffs, typically about 26p/kwh at the moment.

And the worst part is the standing charge keeps going up

What, do you expect the energy companies to use their own money to invest in infrastructure for net zero and the AI boom? Oops too late it's been paid as dividends. No, just create a levy and make the public be unwilling investors except without getting the shares nor dividends

Don't forget it's also a tax for bailing out the failed energy companies

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