Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd spend $1000 to save $0.20 on electricity every day?
7.3% return, not bad. As battery prices drop it will get even better.
It's not 7.3% return rate. There's some depreciation you need to add there.
Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
81–90 of 317 posts
Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I keep hearing this argument (that China does not care about climate change or the environment so it must be doing it for other reasons) but I just don't understand it. Why would you think they don't care about these things? The Chinese leadership understands several things very clearly: - The country has experienced multiple catastrophic natural disasters in the past. - Such disasters often lead to regime change (lo…
I don't understand why you think I am making this argument you're referring to, when I SPECIFICALLY said "I don't understand the Chinese motivation" AND I presented the US side, which I am familiar with.
My whole post was an ask for more information on the Chinese side (each of my 3 phrases were asking this!), which you have provided thank you very much, but I could do without the "you're dumb" when I ask a question.
Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
#83Ignoring 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.
Let's hope someone can do the same for grid-scale seasonal storage. "Excess" solar electricity won't be free in (noon, summer) if you can easily bank it for (night, winter).
A second solution is to overbuild so you have enough even in winter. Easier to do near the equator.
A third solution is to pipe it across timezones using HVDC and accept some level of efficiency loss and some geopolitical risks.
A fourth solution is to mix lots of wind, which performs better in winter and cancels out the lower insolation.
Realistically it's going to be all of the above, with the balance determined by local factors.
Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
#84Earlier 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…
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
Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
#85Mine bitcoin ffs, sell bitcoin and build more solar. That's the only way we ever get ahead of the climate change, through the power of greed and waste. Clean electricity must cost nothing. At no point ever human civilization developed reasonably and in conscious moderation.
Don't bet on us avoiding apocalypse by the only way that never happened in the history of development of our species. We won't suddenly get any smarter, we never did. And now it's important.
Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
#86Earlier 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 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.
Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
#87Sshhh… Don‘t tell the AI companies :P
Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
#88Earlier 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…
Australia has some cutting edge tech that actually sends control signals through the electric wires.
It rolled this out in 1953:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zellweger_off-peak
It let coal plants run more efficiently and people could heat their water overnight.
Somewhat bafflingly they seem to have somewhat failed this same task with the solar rollout.
Presumably 21st century capitalism got in the way of the mid 20th century engineering.
Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For reference, that would give me in Maine the ability to buy power from a solar farm in Arizona or other literally unutilized deserts.
Local power costs are over 30 cents per KWh, so that could be pretty competitive.
The problem is that, no profit based organization will ever build "surplus" solar to enable that kind of thing. If we want surplus power, if we want a strong grid, if we want cheap power, if we want to enable the ability to quite literally waste solar power on inefficient processes (including things like industrial processes that produce less CO2 or generating hydrogen or methane as long term energy storage), we have to get the government to make it happen
But, uh, we hired people who would rather spend $170 billion on harassing random cities and brown people so..... Everyone get ready to pay absurd rates for electricity to support outdated businesses that have been directing American energy policy since Reagan, including paying about 60k coal miners in west virginia for a resource that is economically inferior to other fossil fuels but because they voted for a democrat once they now get a stranglehold on the US economy.
Re: Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity
#90For some reason when I read that I thought it was offering anyone in the world free electricity, and I started imagining the USA setting up a giant undersea cable... then I realized the voltage drop would be too high, then finally realized they meant it for Australians only!
There is one project for an undersea cable to Singapore.
As solar efficiency goes up, and prices of solar and batteries come down and make local installation easier, an already audacious project seems less and less likely to complete.
I think they're pivoting the giant solar farms they were building for this to AI or green hydrogen now.