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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

#271

Post by senectus1 »

jjcm wrote: post #128
chankstein38 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man as someone paying a premium for power in the US, Australia is sounding really nice

I took a job with Atlassian out there and got my citizenship. Best 5 years of my life. I'm back in the US now temporarily, but there's zero doubt in my mind I will end up back in Aus. I've lived in 8 cities now(1), and Sydney was the highest quality of life I've had out of any of them. Great infrastructure, great work-life balance, great culture, and fantastic weather. Only downsides are the distance and the lack of…

Just you wait till you get to Perth :-D

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

#272

Post by rstuart4133 »

andrewinardeer wrote: post #239
msy wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bizarrely negative take. No residential is being charged negative prices without very, very explicitly joining a plan that exposes them to the direct minute-by-minute wholesale price. Most 'EV' plans include free hours during the day (and much cheaper power in the early hours as well), it's likely it'll be standard within months thanks to this. They are now also subsidising batteries while should help meet…

I never said anyone was being charged negatively. The wholesale price goes negative. The negative price currently is not passed on.

Your retailer can choose to pass it on, or not.

Mine (a VPP) does pass it on. They charge me the going wholesale rate. If the wholesale price is sufficiently negative they pay me to use electricity. That's pretty rare, but it does happen every few months. The wholesale price has to be below about -4.5¢ for my price to be negative because the people who own the wires get to add a fee regardless of what direction the electricity is flowing, as does the government (admin fees of some description).

The converse is also true. If the price spirals to $19/kWh, I get to pay that too. At that price as single night could cost me $400, or it would if I didn't have a battery.

Which possibly explains why you haven't heard of it. If you don't have a battery big enough to get you through at the peak and shoulder hours and enough solar to charge it during the day you are better off with a more traditional retailer, who charges you a fixed price regardless of the wholesale price.

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

#273

Post by quantor_ »

shushpanchik wrote: post #267
nandomrumber wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what cost, and to who? So you can have three hours of free electricity, while you’re at work, the kids are at school, you’re renting so no battery for you, electricity has already increased 100% and continues to increase, but only once a year , and now you’re being offered something your 10 year old second hand appliances and petrol cars can’t take advantage of. Forget trickle down economics, it’s deluge-up. From…

I'm from Australia and my electricity provider has 12pm-2pm free electricity. As other's said, dishwasher and washing machine has delayed/smart start options, so that is free for me. That saves at least 3kWh per day for me, so ~$30 per month. So it really helps with CoL crisis. And yes, those appliances are (almost) 10 years old.

I'm from Sweden and hearing those energy prices really caught me off guard. With taxes and fees we pay ~€0.1 per kWh on average.

I have stopped caring about when house hold appliances run, our main energy consumers are heating (during the cold months) and charging the electric car.

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

#274

Post by peterashford »

breve wrote: post #218
acdha wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the slightest. I’m saying that it’s possible to recognize that evil without denying that something else is good. Just do both at the same time, like how we might say that the world has benefited from polyurethane, digital computers (Konrad Zuse), or rocketry without in any way excusing the Nazi government which controlled Germany at the time.

You are entirely rationalizing it.

That's assuming the worst possible interpretation of what they were saying. I think you should assume good faith

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

#275

Post by [deleted] »

gpm wrote: post #67
cowboy_henk wrote: post #2

* only in the middle of the day, when the real price of that electricity may be negative, so it's still sold at a profit

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...

[deleted]

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

#276

Post by beAbU »

shushpanchik wrote: post #268
nandomrumber wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the working-poor. Not renters. By rebate you mean: a wealth transfer from tax payers to those who need it least, those who can afford a battery, those who aren’t renting.

Not sure what renting has to do with this? Renters in Australia do not install batteries/panels, it's landlord's business. If landlord has batteries/panels installed, chances are rent would be a bit higher. Renter is free to choose a place with lower energy bills by paying that premium, so these subsidies definitely could benefit the renters.

> it's landlord's business

This is the problem though. Landlords are rarely incentivised to enhance a property by installing solar+batteries on it, as they don't live there to reap the benefits. Solar still takes a couple of years to give an ROI, so I can't see how a landlord will agree to do this on an existing property.

If a property's monthly rent is higher because it has solar installed, what is the benefit to the tenant? Sure they get cheaper electricity, but they pay more rent, so it balances out.

Tenants won't pay for the installation, as it's a permanent improvement on a property that they don't own.

I live in a country with an order of magnitude less sun (Ireland), but there is a big solar boom going on here now, and I'm missing out on the government subsidies (which ended recently) because I'm renting and I can't convince a landlord to put €10k+ up to install a solar system for very little benefit.

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

#277

Post by beAbU »

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.

Also, turning off solar (known as curtailing) is just dumb. It's throwing away "free" electricity. The UK and Ireland is doing the same by turning off their wind turbines every now and then, and it's frustrating.

By making the price go negative, you are creating the market incentives for someone to do something about it: households will invest in BES systems to suck up all that free electricity to use during peak times, and some industrious entrepreneurs might even be convinced to do it on a very large scale to start arbitraging on the price fluctuations.

You don't even need the price to go negative to have a BESS buffer make financial sense.

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

#278

Post by blubber »

teemur wrote: post #64
willvarfar wrote: post #3

Ignoring the politics, we have to say that China has done the world collectively as a whole a major service in strategically developing and mass producing super cheap solar panels.

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.

That's not true. I think China is grateful to them for selling them their PV industry for a Wurstbrot.

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

#279

Post by breve »

peterashford wrote: post #274
breve wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are entirely rationalizing it.

That's assuming the worst possible interpretation of what they were saying. I think you should assume good faith

Slavery is being used to make solar panels. Claiming that is a net good is a rationalization of slavery. That's as good as the faith gets.

The ends don't justify the means.

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

#280

Post by beAbU »

bee_rider wrote: post #24
willvarfar wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes the article talks about consumers scheduling things like washing machines during the day, or even filling up a battery.

This is the “smart grid” idea, right? We just haven’t fully explored it yet. Something I firmly believe is that there’s a ton of low hanging fruit for timing our energy use better. It is just hidden by the desire to present a uniform energy price. Like why not run our water heaters when power is cheap? Then if that became a thing, we might even be interested in larger water heater tanks. Batteries cost per volume, yo…

I'm on a time-of-use tariff, with a special "EV" slot between 02h and 05h. My car is programmed to only charge during this time unless I tell it otherwise.

The price difference is significant: About €0.08/kwh compared to the €0.2 - €0.4 I'd be paying during normal day/peak times.

This has made my day-to-day driving basically free, less than a euro per 100km (€0.08/kwh * 7kwh/100km)

I tried doing the same thing for other large(ish) loads in the house, dishwasher, washer & dryer, but the cost benefit was really really small when compared to the big savings from my EV charging.

I heat my water using an oil burning boiler, but if I had an electric water heater, it would make total sense to run that during the "EV" hours as well. If I could, I would then also invest in more capacity, and set the thermostat higher to have essentially a hot water battery that could last me the whole day.

At my old house I had an overspecced solar system, and I set it up to dump the remaining available solar energy after the batteries are done charging into my hot water heater. The thermostat was set to 75C or something, super hot. I'd then have piping hot water for most of the day, and maybe needed a small electric boost in the mornings, especially in the winter. Another 200L or so would have resulted in me not needing any grid power to heat up enough hot water for the household.

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