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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

#71

Post by Tade0 »

fooker wrote: post #49
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.

We would need impractically high voltages to minimize power loss over long distances. Maybe something like microwave transmission or cheap superconductors will solve it.

The loss is not that much - approximately 3.5% per 1000km. IIRC the Changji-Guquan HVDC line reported around 8% over 3300km thanks to working at 1100kV.

Extend that to 10k km and you're looking at approximately 25%, but if it's surplus solar, who cares?

Such a line costs as much as a highway broadly speaking, so it's not impossible to build.

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

#72

Post by acchow »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #40
hangonhn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is a huge service not just to the developed world that needs to decarbonize but also a huge service to the developing world. Solar can be put up quickly and cheaply and is good for about 2 decades and can be paired with cheap LiFo batteries to give round the clock electricity. Both of these are relatively portable. It can really bootstrap the economies of local communities where infrastructure hasn't been b…

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.

> 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.

Does that operate at good speeds in rural areas?

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

#73

Post by ZeroGravitas »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #15
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.

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…

Pretty sure the US has always been on the losing side of that, when calculated per capita.

China's numbers did rise quickly on that measure and is above the EU now I think but still way below the US.

And if you don't like per capita, then China with 4x as many people is still behind the US when you compare cumulative CO2.

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

#74

Post by antonymoose »

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.

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.

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

#75

Post by maccard »

rdm_blackhole wrote: post #43
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.

> 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…

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

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

#76

Post by goodpoint »

unglaublich wrote: post #46
energy123 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the US and Germany since the 1970s for putting public funds into early research

US fossil fuel subsidies: 757B$ [0] US solar subsidies: 7B$ [1] [0]: https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-proposals-to-red... [1]: https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/fossil-fuels/rene...

On top of that the very same oil industry pocketing the 757B does lobbying and propaganda "renewables don't work yadda yadda".

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

#77

Post by oskarkk »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #40
hangonhn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is a huge service not just to the developed world that needs to decarbonize but also a huge service to the developing world. Solar can be put up quickly and cheaply and is good for about 2 decades and can be paired with cheap LiFo batteries to give round the clock electricity. Both of these are relatively portable. It can really bootstrap the economies of local communities where infrastructure hasn't been b…

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. Very different case from India.

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

#78

Post by marcosdumay »

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...

> 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.

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

#79

Post by ZeroGravitas »

somanyphotons wrote: post #69

With free power for 3 hours a day, I'd skip installing solar and I'd buy a ~30kwh battery (2x Ruixu Lithi2-16) and a big inverter. Charge the batteries in the free time and then use the stored power the rest of the day.

Australia will give you a 30% discount on that purchase, they have a fund of 2.3 Billion Australian dollars available for this purpose called the Cheaper Home Batteries program.
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