Australia Has So Much Solar That It's Offering Everyone Free Electricity

If you built homes with a lot of thermal mass, you could cool the internal thermal mass when energy is $0 and have that mass absorb heat the rest of the day. This is sort of the principle a lot of traditional architecture uses where evaporation, wind over a courtyard, or nighttime lows cool thick walls.

Power at peak times is cheap because load is distributed throughout the day. If everybody ran their heaters at the same time, power wouldn’t be so cheap and we’d reach the same situation we’re in.

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.

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.

> It's quite fun (and educational) with the kids to work out when to put the car on to charge, when to run the dryer etc, looking at the few days ahead forecasts.

As if we aren't busy enough. I see this as just yet _another_ job the government/business is making us do instead of them.

Is it too much to ask for my government to provide sensibly and simply priced energy so we can get on with our day, working, studying, raising kids etc?

IMO this is just setting us up for insane surge pricing for those people who don't do the good citizen thing of becoming nocturnal

> Last month, we paid 11p per kWh on average, which is less than half what you'd pay on a standard tariff

That's pretty rough. That should be about 14¢ per kWh which only a hair less than the median price per kWh in the US (~17¢).

7.3% return, not bad. As battery prices drop it will get even better.

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

Where I live, $1000 would get you about 3kWh of battery power, which would pay for itself in a couple years

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.

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.

Commercial solar fields are entirely automated, nobody is going to the site to throw a disconnect switch lol. For sites without hardwire internet, there’s 4G or satellite connectivity. A 4G cell comm module is a few hundred dollars. Adding in remote operations control is probably a tiny fraction of a percent of a solar field project.

Great point, you might dream of long range connections sending solar energy from the day into the night around the world.

But, what exactly do you mean by fragility? In what way are they fragile?

If only there was a way to deploy solar production at the point of consumption so power didn’t need to be transferred. We’d need large chunks of unused flat surface pointing towards the sky, preferably at an angle. Oh wait we have that on top of every home (coincidentally the south or west face of every roof provides about enough surface area to power most homes). Now we need some cheap way of storing energy produced during the day for use at night. Humm. Got that too. Government don’t even need to pay the full price for this resilience and climate mitigation. Programs offering fractional tax credits have shown great success in increasing deployments of rooftop solar and distributed battery storage.

> 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 Starlink or it's local equivalent are necessary.

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.

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.

That is a lot cheaper than it would cost in a developed country, but is not more affordable.

For example, that would cost about three times as much in the UK but median income is about an order of magnitude higher so its more affordable.

I do realise it is a lot more affordable than telecoms were in the past, but its something like a day of median income.

The one issue with cellular connection is that some software and OS slurp data like there’s no tomorrow and you’re not paying for the connection.

> 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?

We are all likely complicit. When gas prices go up people lose their shit so politicians try not to let that happen thus massive subsidies. Plus it's strategically important.

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

I'm referring to Jimmy Carter's policies that helped kick start solar research prior to the baton being passed off to private industry post a viability threshold being surpassed.

That's mostly "implicit subsidies, which are costs like negative health impacts and environmental degradation that are borne by society"

The source in your [0] link says China fossil fuel subsidies were $2235B in that year. Your [1] link says "Renewable Energy Still Dominates Energy Subsidies in FY 2022" and "traditional fuels (coal, natural gas, oil and nuclear) received just 15 percent of all subsidies between FY 2016 and FY 2022", so the two numbers you've given are clearly counting very different things.

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 (losing the mandate of heaven via natural disasters leading to social unrest)

- The leadership is comprised of smart people (and a lot of engineers) and they don't play dumb political games like denying the reality of climate change.

- Climate change will bring far worse problems in future, which threatens the country's economic growth and therefore their hold on power.

So they have massive incentive to care about the reality of climate change and do everything they can to mitigate it and protect their environment.

China also invests in solar/alternative energy because they still import a lot of coal from many other countries (some of which are aligned with the US) and that is something that could be leveraged in case of conflict.

Therefore reaching self sufficiency in terms of power generation will make this threat less relevant and an enemy will no be able to use it to make them back off.

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.

They say with a straight face as they tout the merits of "Beautiful Clean Coal." This administration man...what's there left to say?

Sorry I should have used the word "inexpensive" I was not referring to the quality, I was referring to the price. I own many Chinese built panels.

We would need impractically high voltages to minimize power loss over long distances.

Maybe something like microwave transmission or cheap superconductors will solve it.

Do we have good enough conductors for that?

This isn't going to happen simply because it would introduce enormous strategic vulnerabilities. The first act ina war would be to sever an opponent's grid connections to their neighbors because that would massively erode their ability to maintain an orderly civil society.

Regional grids are connected via tie-lines, and I heard international grids are also starting to become more connected in this way too. Though, I'd imagine it's complicated to send power from one side of the planet to the other. For starters grids can have different frequencies that need to be converted between. Also all transmission lines are subject to loss factors. In addition all the intermediary transmission companies have to route the power and avoid congestion on their grids, Then you have deal with all the financial settlement of the wheeling charges, which if you have to go through multiple grids and multiple currencies sounds like fun to deal with.

My understanding of the intentions of connecting international grids is for things like emergency supply of electricity to a different grid to stabilise the frequency and prevent blackouts.

Related to overbuilding, vertically mounted solar panels can help flatten the generation curve during the day, and may perform better than "optimally tilted" panels on winter, especially where snow might otherwise be a problem.

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).

The lesson, which we learned in the dot-com era and will likely learn again in the AI era, is that the benefits of step-change new infrastructure technology do not accrue in the long run to the infrastructure builders—the technology only creates the step-change if it finds its way to being a commodity!—but diffuses throughout the new, ultimately much larger, more productive economy as a whole.

Leland Stanford made out ok, AFAIK

See also the dark fiber build out before the telecom collapse of ~2001

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecoms_crash

if we didn't transition through the horrible days of CFLs first. since we did, that's a big knock against

Seems like every 2nd post on HN, regardless of the actual content, becomes an argument between advocates for the US and China. In the case of China it's particularly egregious as they get to use US platforms to push their cause, whilst China blocks all foreign foreign access their own platforms. It's tiresome.

You're rationalizing slavery. That kind of nihilistic apathy is never useful.