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.
If cheap LED light bulbs had been around we wouldn't have need legislation in the first place. Both Germany's solar subsidies and the EU prohibiting (high power) incandescent light bulbs were cases where existing alternatives were bad (solar was way too expensive to be practical, non-incandescent light bulbs sucked), but legislation intentionally created demand for them anyways in hopes that with demand there would be research and scaling effects that create better cheaper products. In both cases it worked, even if the transition was a bit painful in both cases.
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.
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.
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.
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 built out. Then combined that with portable Internet connection via something like Starlink or one of the competitor networks, we can really enable the available human capital in developing nations to realize their potential.
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.
I checked a random Kenyan address on starlink.com, and it would be around 386 USD for the dish there (with service for 50 USD/mo), so not cheap. In Poland I see that they're giving the dish for free with some 1-year contract (58 USD/mo). Maybe it'll become cheaper, they're making millions of them. And you could share it with neighbors - if you can get 300 Mb/s, you could connect like 5 families if the alternative is nothing.
Anyway, Starlink is mostly for places where you have no ISPs or cell service (or they are very bad), so not for 95% of Europe, and probably not for most of India, especially in the future.
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.
All those unfortunate children will be introduced to the toxic, horrid internet.
They'll be addicted, have no attention span, have their own data used against them to exploit and track them, and end up with their political system reeling under manipulative AI and generic bots.
Far better to just give them books for their educarional system, and leave the evil Internet out of it.
So how many books have you given to kids in remote places in the 3rd world?
This sort of arrogance where suddenly everyone remembers all reasons why some technology is bad once the "poor masses" get it (while they themselves had the technology for years), is hypocritical and frustrating.
The reality is that getting online makes a massive difference for someone in some remote poor area. Not just in terms of education but also economically.
Wow. Everything in life has good and bad consequences. It is important that we remember to look towards the light.
What you describe at its worst is still better than the exploitation many of the children in the Philippines endure today by westerners. Hopefully, being able to communicate on the 'evil Internet', the rest of the world, like you, can truly understand what they endure.
Communications and electricity aren't just luxury goods, they're also critical inputs to work. There are lots of anecdotes of one or both of these increasing income by substantially more than their costs.
> 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.
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.
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
I have no phone signal in my village, a few miles from a major town. I have to use WiFi calling to talk on the phone. Our local politician campaigns against it, it is such an issue. Especially since analogue phone lines are due to be turned off soon. We still have a working red phone box though!
I travel around a bit in the area and blackspots are very common
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.
The biggest bottle neck to really solving the energy problem is now the price and fragility of high voltage DC long haul connections. Between those and solar you can have energy anywhere any time.
That they carry massive amounts of power so they'll help you to destruct themselves once the barrier is penetrated, are actually quite complex and can be sabotaged easily.
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.
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'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.
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.
People also absolutely lose their shit when someone does something like build a bike lane, or proposes letting the market allocate automobile storage for housing and businesses, rather than having a local jurisdiction invent some numbers.
I agree their treatment of the Uyghurs is deplorable but the way you had to chop that quote like a creationist undermines your point. It’s possible to say China has done both good and bad things, and recognizing the cost rather than denying something factual is probably a more effective.
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).
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.
This won't happen because the lines are bi-directional. It would be like chopping off their own energy supply. Because of the Earth's rotation, neighbors can take advantage of each other's sunlight. Parts of Europe and North Africa's energy markets are already working on this.
For the past 100+ years, the US has been spending a significant amount of money on protecting oil supplies to protect its oil billionaires and its economy. It's the #1 budget item, outspending the combined military spending of the next 10 economies. This can be reduced to zero, and ultimately, the $ 39 trillion deficit can be eliminated.
Bidirectional powerlines make the grid more stable for tha larger region around most countries because it makes it easier to route around the conflict as far as capacities permit. Not many countries span coast to coast in a way that couldn't be routed around. So that would actually increase the vulnerability of individual countries.
The EU is actually extremely special because its souvereign member states collaborate in almost all areas on a level that is unmatched anywhere else. But the ideological foundation is getting eroded by propaganda and if that assault is effective, Europe will balcanize again and end up experiencing many more armed conflicts.
People believed this before. Then WW1 happened. 100 years later, people forgot the lessons of the past, and believed this again. Then Russia invaded Ukraine.
If Ukraine was part of NATO it wouldn’t have happened I am willing to bet.
Most in depth analysis I’ve seen of these Russia - Ukraine conflicts cite this as one of the top factors in why Russia invaded both a decade ago and the most recent war that is ongoing.
That is to say - mutual cooperation agreements like that have enough teeth to keep conflicts to a minimum as the repercussions are severe
Also another ultimate irony is that Russia didn’t completely cut the rest of Europe off from its oil and gas. That symbiosis continues albeit not the same way. Perhaps electricity would be the same
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.
> 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
>
I think what we seeing in a lot of places now is quite the opposite. There are significant opportunities for arbitrage, so private entities are building HVDC lines in Europe for example (without special subsidies over the usual ones that all big infrastructure always seems to get AFAIK). That's part of the beauty of the renewables revolution it breaks up the stronghold that only a few big corps held over generation.
> 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
There are huge orbortunities for arbitrage in these areas. That's why in Europe there has been significant investment into HVDC connections recently. AFAIK they are mostly (all? ) build privately without special government subsidies (over the usual ones that all large infrastructure projects always seem to get). I think this partly the beauty of the renewable revolution, it
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.
Utility conductors are just aluminum wrapped around a steel core, air is the insulator. You can theoretically handle voltage drop with larger conductors, and there are probably ways to ‘boost’ power over a long transmission line run. I deal with electrical wiring past the utility service entrance and am not super familiar with the utility side so perhaps an EE who works on the grid can chime in with more detail.
I also know breakers for HVDC are extremely challenging to make, AC power has the benefit of sine waves crossing the zero line so power can be switched/broken a lot easier than with DC.
They are not cheap. They are extremely efficient at manufacturing. The 201st panel look exactly the same as 1st one. Definitely no human labor involved. Huge well readable serial numbers placed on multiple places of the panel for camera based identification. Usually no single failing panel in shipping container. The bad ones were clearly damaged during transportation. This efficiency looks scary when I see output of my workplace in Germany.
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 prevented) for the two countries, the day will come, if it isn't now, that the US is on the losing side of that comparison, and I wonder what the new argument will be for the US not doing more.
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 (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.
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.
That's speculation, and probably good speculation.
On the concrete side we do know that they also care deeply about local pollution. They made massive efforts to clean the air for the Beijing Olympics, amongst other many other moves to reduce local air pollution.
I'm in Beijing right now. I was also here 20+years ago. The difference is astonishing. Back then the air was filthy, it was hard to breathe, you never saw the sun. Today it is blue sky most days, EVs everywhere, electric scooters, busses, even garbage trucks. The roads are quiet. The air is clean. The high speed rail system is astonishingly good. This really feels in some ways like living in the future. The West is years behind.
Of course there are still a lot of obvious problems to be addressed, but the rate of progress is the really impressive thing.
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.
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.
If you ignore the pollution and environmental aspects, the main geopolitical reason is because the Straits of Malacca are very vulnerable in the event of a hot war and the overland pipelines from Russia and the middle east are insufficient to supply China. Getting rid of the oil dependency is the quickest way to autarchy. There are few other resources they can't produce themselves.
It's easier to understand that excuse when people realize that Americans tend to start with a conclusion then work their way backwards to support it. As in, 'we aren't doing much about climate change so here's why that's okay'.
And??? The parent commenter wrote about the manufacturer of said solar panels, going outside the frame of that article to something related but still relevant, given that that article surely is meant to stimulate a more general discussion.
Now if only those people who got electricity got yo study for free via cellphone so they could apply themselves to scaming and navelgazing bubble investments.
Srsly though, if the 2 billion in the middle east could contribute to global society freely, that would be fantastic.
For all the people hyping LLM AI in order to raise lots of cash, solar and battery is the real transformational technology of our time. But it gets less press, as it just doesn't benefit a few, who need the press hype.
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 prices become negative during peak solar times - but retail companies will still charge you for using it!.
Obviously, that didn't go down too well and this is the response - free electricity during peak solar hours.
That said, my understanding is that free electricity is only for people who are on the "default offer" from the electricity companies - that is effectively the highest tier of pricing. Most people are not on the default offer.
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 the wave of solar with a wave of distributed storage capacity to smooth out grid demand as well as successful rollout of grid-scale batteries.
This is a generational success story big enough to have geo-strategic implications.
There's currently a significant rebate on batteries in Australia. (Or maybe just Victoria?) So that's definitely one attempted solution. People are getting it for costs paying off in under 5 years.
I got this email from from our local provider the other day..
"For a limited time only, we're offering a $500 upfront electricity bill credit* with every eligible home battery system (Tesla Powerwall 2 & 3, LG Chem HV, SolarEdge batteries only) purchased through Electrify with ActewAGL and installed by one of our approved installers - plus a further $100 credit* every year for the next five years, so long as you stay connected to our Virtual Power Plant.
Join the thousands of households across across Australia taking advantage of the Cheaper Home Batteries Program. Over 100,000 systems have been installed since July 2025, and with the rebate scheduled to decrease as installations rise, now is the time to act."
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.
This seems like a great way to encourage the behavior you want, which is conserving when energy is emitting more carbon by shifting consumption. Do your laundry, charge a car, charge a whole house batter, run laundry, crank the AC, run your own aluminum smelter, whatever.
In the UK, you can go on an agile tariff that does exactly this. I'm on one.
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.
Last month, we paid 11p per kWh on average, which is less than half what you'd pay on a standard tariff, and it's nice to be doing something good for the environment too. It's particularly satisfying to charge up the car when tariffs go negative.
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
> 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
I think it's best to view this from an economics point of view - in a nutshell price signals are usually the most powerful way to create behavioural change; in this case, we want people to shift demand away from peak times. Nobody is being forced to, they just have to pay more for the convenience of not bothering.
> 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
It actually costs a lot more to produce marginal energy at peak times, the cost just reflects the cost of production. It doesn't seem unreasonable for me for the consumer to bear the cost, and also get the benfit if they choose to put their car to charge overnight rather than at peak time.
This also has a nice secondary benefit: anyone on agile tariffs who shifts demand away from peak time actually benefits those who don't want to bother, because the peak price/cost goes down, and so the overall average price of electricity goes down.
> I see this as just yet _another_ job the government/business is making us do instead of them
In most other market, people are expected to respond to price incentives. When local apples are cheap relative to imported cherries, people don't complain that government/business is making us do a job to push demand in the direction of apples.
> 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?
The free market price _is_ the agile price. The government intervention is actually in the direction of fixing prices (e.g. by the energy price cap, which is sometimes below the free market price at peak times). In general, markets do not work very well when the government fixes the market
When you let the market clear and send out price signals, markets almost always become more efficient (which means that consumers benefit overall)
> we want people to shift demand away from peak times
Because governments have let energy companies fail to invest in necessary infrastructure for decades.
And who is the "we"? Definitely not me
I think a much larger conversation needs to happen about people's schedules, commitments and whether it's fair to say those who have less time and less flexibility due to work, children etc are somehow actively choosing to not be a good eco citizen. It's incredibly unfair.
I'd rather go back to root causes and re-evaluate private companies failing to provide the necessary infrastructure
still sounds like an incredible way to incentivize consumers to buy small-scale storage. if i knew i could get free electricity for an hour or two each day (or even each week) it'd be a very easy choice to drop ~$1000 on a home battery.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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, you only pay for the surface are of a metal tank!
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.
If power wasn’t cheaper, there’d be no incentive to run our heaters at the same time. I’d expect the market to work this out, and price power down during unexpected over-supply, rewarding nimble workloads. Then there arrives a reward for being nimble, which is something we should incentivize I think.
They could also run their AC to below where their normal set point would be to “bank” some of the free electricity. I wonder if we’ll start seeing other more passive energy sinks… if you lived in a hot area and could rely on several hours of free electricity each day, it enables all sorts of interesting options like turning on a secondary cooling system to “charge” a large boulder or hunk of metal that you could then pass air over to cool your house when energy is expensive again.
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.
This is how the cold storage caves work in the Midwest. They run their ammonia loops harder in the off hours and let the cave mass handle it(provided a large enough area is kept frozen, otherwise thermal expansion cycling can cause a carve out in the ceiling).
Yep, our house was built like this but in a cooler climate (large windows facing south with the all of the stone flooring and surfaces getting direct sunlight in the winter). But since most houses in the Aussie suburbs aren’t really optimized for this, you’d have to retrofit many million houses to take full advantage. Opens up some interesting opportunities for sure.
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.
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 ozone layer (do not fuck around with the sun in Australia - there's a reason why they have over 10x the global average of melanoma). Happy to answer any questions about it or the process for getting citizenship.
(1) Cities lived for comparison: San Diego, LA, Honolulu, San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Sydney
Not sure if this is a joke or not, but this is much like saying “don’t all Americans carry guns?” Almost none do, it’s more common in rural areas, you will see it in an urban area once or twice in your life. Same for super deadly animals in Australia. But no one in Australia has died from a spider bite since anti venom was invented.
I have been thinking that you have data centers that follow the day around the globe and which are powered by solar power this could be a great business model.
For 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.
It's almost like that idea where the first people to leave in generational star ships will arrive at their new home to find the people who left in the third or forth generation ships already there for some time, technology having advanced so much in that time.
By the time they get the cable to Singapore, it will just be cheaper to generate it in Singapore.
If my 208V,200A service here in New York City were free for 4 hours a day, I might buy a ~30kW chiller to run during free time and store its output in a big thermos or ice cube.
Assuming a COP of 2.5 (small, air cooled), that would be around 300 kW or 1M BTU of cold storage per day, which is around 42 kBTU or 3.5 tons of raw cooling capacity running 24x7.
I imagine if commercial buildings with support for larger and vastly more efficient chillers did this we could take a huge chunk out of NYC’s ~50 TWh power bill.
Ok, I’ve convinced myself. ConEd, please update when the free electricity program is activated.
I still wonder who came up with the charge your car during the day / use it as a batterie. I don’t have the luxury’s of owning two EVs that I can charge and use at the same time.
If my car stand unused at home so I can charge it would mean I use it during the night?
I understand that there could be useage pattern where someone works from home once or twice a week and waits with the charge during these peek hours. But the generalization of just charge your car during the day is weird.
Unless that also counts when the car could charge for free at the workplace of course.
Obviously it still works great on the weekend, or whatever days you’re not working to charge the EV at home for free.
Given all power is free, why wouldn’t you charge the EV at work in the middle of the day? Even if you pay to have the charger installed it will pay back quickly.
It’s not going to happen overnight, but with literally free electricity things will change quickly, and even huge parking structures or lots will have a stack of chargers that are free or very close to it.
Is it falling apart right now? It seems the poster has forgotten that EVs can be charged at home but also away from home. They mention that in the last paragraph, but it kind of seems to undermine the whole premise that this is a problem.
Well, to me the EV conversion push, which undeniably exists and has many government policies supporting it, does represent an agenda, and that agenda is "Cars Über Alles". The obviously more practical approach to the problem is to support the conversion of transportation demand to less energy-intensive modes such as trains, buses, bicycles, and feet. It isn't very practical to say we're all going to have an EV and we'll have plenty of megawatt-scale chargers for everyone.
The liquid fuel distribution system is simply far more space-efficient than any known means of EV charging. The liquid fuel scheme works because the energy flux through the pump is obscene. EVs don't have an answer to this problem.
> The Australian government is floating a scheme that would share the benefits of solar power with everyone on the grid, offering totally free electricity to ratepayers in the middle of the day, when the sun is shining the strongest.
> Australia proposes letting everyone benefit from negative wholesale rates
I know more countries have this now, so that's a good initiative that hopefully will spread to other countries (with negative rates).
It might not be as reliable in other places to do it every day, even just in summer. Still, there's clearly a trend globally towards more dynamic prices.
However, they aren't taking net metering customers yet, but if you end up spending more on the hourly variable rate plan, they'll refund you to the same you would have spent on the regular time of use rate plan.
And they actually charge you a fee if you generate. My brother in law unhooked from the grid because back feeding was charging him $100 a month. To give away power.
> And they actually charge you a fee if you generate. My brother in law unhooked from the grid because back feeding was charging him $100 a month. To give away power.
Which utility and plan is this? I'm not aware of any California residential rate plans that charge you for putting power back on the grid, much less $100/month.
That said, wholesale electricity rates are set by high frequency supply/demand markets.
Recent residential net metering rates are closely aligned with wholesale supply/demand based rates, so most utilities will compensate your brother in law near $0 when you are pushing power to the grid when wholesale rates are <= $0, because there are not enough buyers of the power he is generating.
He is using the grid as a battery, which comes at a cost.
This is of course changing as more grid connected storage comes online and creates demand for off peak electricity. In that case, you actually get paid for selling power back to the grid during high grid stress periods. I get paid a few hundred dollars a year in CA for doing that with my measly home backup battery.
I think they’re referring to the fact that if you’re connected to the grid, you may be charged a base fee of around $100 per month, even if you don’t use any power. Previously, homeowners received credits for the excess solar energy they sent back to the grid, but the state has since ended that program.
A friend of mine is trying to build a house in a remote area of Southern California. He's planning to be completely "off-grid", generating power exclusively from solar. However, local regulators insist he hook up to the local electric utility. Further, in order to run the electrical cables to his property (from the substation), the local fire department insists that the brush is cleared around the new electrical cables. All in, he's looking at around $100K for something he doesn't even want or need. He said he's tried explaining this to local regulators, but they're not hearing it.
Oh yeah, yes, after paying all the money to get the electrical hookup he doesn't want or need - yeah, he's gonna be on the hook for around $100/month.
If your friend wants to build a remote off-grid house that's in the middle of nowhere, why wouldn't they shop for a jurisdiction that allows it? Places that require utility connections are actual places generally. When you live out in the center of Inyo County you can be off the grid if you want. It sounds to me like your friend wants the benefits of proximity to developed places, but also wants to opt-out of contributing to the development of the place.
Your friend is not the last person that will own that house, forcing a utility connection is a good thing for future owners. The same reasoning is why building codes exist, nobody really cares if you want to live in a substandard dwelling (aside from your mortgage insurer) but basically every house has more than one owner over time. Building codes mean when you buy a house, you can be reasonably certain there aren’t any weird cut corners.
He should’ve done DD on the land and local AHJ restrictions before moving ahead with a plan that wouldn’t work. One call to the local planning and permit office is all it would’ve taken to avoid this problem and find a different jurisdiction.
Friends have a full sized off grid house in the Yukon since 2010. Every modern convenience, stunning location. Never a single power outage in all those years.
How many power outages have you had?
It gets even crazier. Latest: he's got a lawyer that says if he plants trees on a certain percentage of his property, it can be classified as a farm, and then exempt from the power utility hook-up requirement. But that comes with its own requirements, like a well to get water and certain fencing. But yeah, keep in mind, this is all so a dude can generate his own power on his own property.
If he wants to be completely off-grid wouldn't he want his own well anyways? I'm on a well and it's actually really nice to have zero water bills. I also have a cabin that's on a well that was dug in the 1940s and is still pumping out 'free' water.
Does not make economic sense, there is still the cost of panels and transmission.
There might be a surplus now but dropping the price to zero will increase use (demand).
I was surprised the story does not even specify "residential," it really says "everyone." That's a great way to exhaust existing supply. Entrepreneurs can presumably be quite creative in the shape of businesses they set up if unlimited free power is on offer during the day.
In short: yes. It can be done. Clean, almost limitless energy, funded in a way to provide effectively free electricity for ordinary people. Restrictions would have to be in place to prevent true excess, but regulations already handle such matters in other areas.
The ambient vibe of our time, and here on HN, is often really pessimistic. I don't believe such pessimism is realistic. Commercial grade fusion power will come, and we should push very hard to make it happen. It will change the equations at the core of the economy and open up whole new paths for technology -- far beyond the pure digital.
Mine 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.
I'm pretty sure they get snow sometimes in NSW. AUS is big enough you can find many climates there!
You're not wrong about the plants and animals though. It's basically an island, and islands always end up with super weird flora and fauna - there usually just aren't many (any?) predators, so the competition takes species in weird directions.
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 still wonder the same about the EU and LED lighting. Prohibiting traditional bulbs was highly controversial at the time
if we didn't transition through the horrible days of CFLs first. since we did, that's a big knock against
If cheap LED light bulbs had been around we wouldn't have need legislation in the first place. Both Germany's solar subsidies and the EU prohibiting (high power) incandescent light bulbs were cases where existing alternatives were bad (solar was way too expensive to be practical, non-incandescent light bulbs sucked), but legislation intentionally created demand for them anyways in hopes that with demand there would be research and scaling effects that create better cheaper products. In both cases it worked, even if the transition was a bit painful in both cases.
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.
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.
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
move fast, break things is never a good long term plan
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
It's probably because germany decided to sorta give up on it and all of the production and further research moved to china?
Yeah and then we let it die
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 built out. Then combined that with portable Internet connection via something like Starlink or one of the competitor networks, we can really enable the available human capital in developing nations to realize their potential.
It's all very exciting I think.
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.
How much is a Starlink setup? They are pretty expensive in Europe, are they cheaper in Africa?
I checked a random Kenyan address on starlink.com, and it would be around 386 USD for the dish there (with service for 50 USD/mo), so not cheap. In Poland I see that they're giving the dish for free with some 1-year contract (58 USD/mo). Maybe it'll become cheaper, they're making millions of them. And you could share it with neighbors - if you can get 300 Mb/s, you could connect like 5 families if the alternative is nothing.
I found a nice website with prices by country: https://www.starlink-prices.com/personal/residential/usd/low
But it may be outdated, because it shows $90/mo price in Poland, while it's much cheaper as I said, even with the free dish.
And some recent articles about Starlink prices in Africa:
https://techlabari.com/average-starlink-prices-across-all-af...
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-starlink-vs-lead...
Anyway, Starlink is mostly for places where you have no ISPs or cell service (or they are very bad), so not for 95% of Europe, and probably not for most of India, especially in the future.
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.
Yes indeed.
All those unfortunate children will be introduced to the toxic, horrid internet.
They'll be addicted, have no attention span, have their own data used against them to exploit and track them, and end up with their political system reeling under manipulative AI and generic bots.
Far better to just give them books for their educarional system, and leave the evil Internet out of it.
So how many books have you given to kids in remote places in the 3rd world?
This sort of arrogance where suddenly everyone remembers all reasons why some technology is bad once the "poor masses" get it (while they themselves had the technology for years), is hypocritical and frustrating.
The reality is that getting online makes a massive difference for someone in some remote poor area. Not just in terms of education but also economically.
Wow. Everything in life has good and bad consequences. It is important that we remember to look towards the light.
What you describe at its worst is still better than the exploitation many of the children in the Philippines endure today by westerners. Hopefully, being able to communicate on the 'evil Internet', the rest of the world, like you, can truly understand what they endure.
He says, on the internet.
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.
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.
Communications and electricity aren't just luxury goods, they're also critical inputs to work. There are lots of anecdotes of one or both of these increasing income by substantially more than their costs.
Yes, I do realise that, which is why I recognise it makes a huge difference, I just want to put it into context as not being very cheap.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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
911 would get you nowhere in the UK;)
I have no phone signal in my village, a few miles from a major town. I have to use WiFi calling to talk on the phone. Our local politician campaigns against it, it is such an issue. Especially since analogue phone lines are due to be turned off soon. We still have a working red phone box though!
I travel around a bit in the area and blackspots are very common
> unless 911
Probably not that even since it's UK. Isn't it 999 in the UK? Has the UK started accepting 911->999 for the tourists?
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.
It is exciting.
> On farmland and on rooftops, Iraqis turn to solar as power grid falters
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/farmland-rooftops-ir...
The biggest bottle neck to really solving the energy problem is now the price and fragility of high voltage DC long haul connections. Between those and solar you can have energy anywhere any time.
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?
That they carry massive amounts of power so they'll help you to destruct themselves once the barrier is penetrated, are actually quite complex and can be sabotaged easily.
This is a nice text on the underwater version:
https://europacable.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Introducti...
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.
You missed the point entirely. If you can distribute the energy you don't need the storage and the storage is the problem right now.
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...
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'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.
On top of that the very same oil industry pocketing the 757B does lobbying and propaganda "renewables don't work yadda yadda".
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.
People also absolutely lose their shit when someone does something like build a bike lane, or proposes letting the market allocate automobile storage for housing and businesses, rather than having a local jurisdiction invent some numbers.
> China has done the world collectively as a whole a major service
I doubt the Uyghurs would agree:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57124636
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/in-broad...
https://sustainabilitymag.com/articles/gb-energy-blocks-use-...
https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/solar-companies-linked-to-...
I agree their treatment of the Uyghurs is deplorable but the way you had to chop that quote like a creationist undermines your point. It’s possible to say China has done both good and bad things, and recognizing the cost rather than denying something factual is probably a more effective.
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.
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.
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.
This won't happen because the lines are bi-directional. It would be like chopping off their own energy supply. Because of the Earth's rotation, neighbors can take advantage of each other's sunlight. Parts of Europe and North Africa's energy markets are already working on this.
For the past 100+ years, the US has been spending a significant amount of money on protecting oil supplies to protect its oil billionaires and its economy. It's the #1 budget item, outspending the combined military spending of the next 10 economies. This can be reduced to zero, and ultimately, the $ 39 trillion deficit can be eliminated.
Bidirectional powerlines make the grid more stable for tha larger region around most countries because it makes it easier to route around the conflict as far as capacities permit. Not many countries span coast to coast in a way that couldn't be routed around. So that would actually increase the vulnerability of individual countries.
The EU is actually extremely special because its souvereign member states collaborate in almost all areas on a level that is unmatched anywhere else. But the ideological foundation is getting eroded by propaganda and if that assault is effective, Europe will balcanize again and end up experiencing many more armed conflicts.
Or if everyone depends on another maybe we will not go into a war with each other.
Well, power dependencies would be uni-directional, not bi-directional.
People believed this before. Then WW1 happened. 100 years later, people forgot the lessons of the past, and believed this again. Then Russia invaded Ukraine.
If Ukraine was part of NATO it wouldn’t have happened I am willing to bet.
Most in depth analysis I’ve seen of these Russia - Ukraine conflicts cite this as one of the top factors in why Russia invaded both a decade ago and the most recent war that is ongoing.
That is to say - mutual cooperation agreements like that have enough teeth to keep conflicts to a minimum as the repercussions are severe
Also another ultimate irony is that Russia didn’t completely cut the rest of Europe off from its oil and gas. That symbiosis continues albeit not the same way. Perhaps electricity would be the same
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.
> 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 >
I think what we seeing in a lot of places now is quite the opposite. There are significant opportunities for arbitrage, so private entities are building HVDC lines in Europe for example (without special subsidies over the usual ones that all big infrastructure always seems to get AFAIK). That's part of the beauty of the renewables revolution it breaks up the stronghold that only a few big corps held over generation.
> 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
There are huge orbortunities for arbitrage in these areas. That's why in Europe there has been significant investment into HVDC connections recently. AFAIK they are mostly (all? ) build privately without special government subsidies (over the usual ones that all large infrastructure projects always seem to get). I think this partly the beauty of the renewable revolution, it
Unsure if this one will ever go ahead but if it does it's pretty impressive in scope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Powe...
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.
Do we have good enough conductors for that?
Utility conductors are just aluminum wrapped around a steel core, air is the insulator. You can theoretically handle voltage drop with larger conductors, and there are probably ways to ‘boost’ power over a long transmission line run. I deal with electrical wiring past the utility service entrance and am not super familiar with the utility side so perhaps an EE who works on the grid can chime in with more detail.
I also know breakers for HVDC are extremely challenging to make, AC power has the benefit of sine waves crossing the zero line so power can be switched/broken a lot easier than with DC.
It's a thread about Australia not Austria.
They are so cheap, infact, that no other country in the world is able to compete even with huge tariffs.
They are not cheap. They are extremely efficient at manufacturing. The 201st panel look exactly the same as 1st one. Definitely no human labor involved. Huge well readable serial numbers placed on multiple places of the panel for camera based identification. Usually no single failing panel in shipping container. The bad ones were clearly damaged during transportation. This efficiency looks scary when I see output of my workplace in Germany.
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.
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 prevented) for the two countries, the day will come, if it isn't now, that the US is on the losing side of that comparison, and I wonder what the new argument will be for the US not doing more.
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.
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 (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.
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.
That's speculation, and probably good speculation.
On the concrete side we do know that they also care deeply about local pollution. They made massive efforts to clean the air for the Beijing Olympics, amongst other many other moves to reduce local air pollution.
I'm in Beijing right now. I was also here 20+years ago. The difference is astonishing. Back then the air was filthy, it was hard to breathe, you never saw the sun. Today it is blue sky most days, EVs everywhere, electric scooters, busses, even garbage trucks. The roads are quiet. The air is clean. The high speed rail system is astonishingly good. This really feels in some ways like living in the future. The West is years behind.
Of course there are still a lot of obvious problems to be addressed, but the rate of progress is the really impressive thing.
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.
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.
If you ignore the pollution and environmental aspects, the main geopolitical reason is because the Straits of Malacca are very vulnerable in the event of a hot war and the overland pipelines from Russia and the middle east are insufficient to supply China. Getting rid of the oil dependency is the quickest way to autarchy. There are few other resources they can't produce themselves.
It's easier to understand that excuse when people realize that Americans tend to start with a conclusion then work their way backwards to support it. As in, 'we aren't doing much about climate change so here's why that's okay'.
Latest excuse: sustainable energy is a scam.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Ending...
They say with a straight face as they tout the merits of "Beautiful Clean Coal." This administration man...what's there left to say?
The article was about Australia, not China. Incidentally it was also Australia that invented the modern solar panel.
> The article was about Australia, not China.
And??? The parent commenter wrote about the manufacturer of said solar panels, going outside the frame of that article to something related but still relevant, given that that article surely is meant to stimulate a more general discussion.
Now if only those people who got electricity got yo study for free via cellphone so they could apply themselves to scaming and navelgazing bubble investments.
Srsly though, if the 2 billion in the middle east could contribute to global society freely, that would be fantastic.
How is that even remotely related to this topic or to what OP said? Or do you just have a thing you want to rant about no matter the topic?
For all the people hyping LLM AI in order to raise lots of cash, solar and battery is the real transformational technology of our time. But it gets less press, as it just doesn't benefit a few, who need the press hype.
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 prices become negative during peak solar times - but retail companies will still charge you for using it!.
Obviously, that didn't go down too well and this is the response - free electricity during peak solar hours.
That said, my understanding is that free electricity is only for people who are on the "default offer" from the electricity companies - that is effectively the highest tier of pricing. Most people are not on the default offer.
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 the wave of solar with a wave of distributed storage capacity to smooth out grid demand as well as successful rollout of grid-scale batteries.
This is a generational success story big enough to have geo-strategic implications.
I haven't look into the details, but It sure feels like a slap in the face to those of us who invested in panels.
I think this is about battery sales for those that can afford it. Fill a battery up for free and use the power during peak hours.
There's currently a significant rebate on batteries in Australia. (Or maybe just Victoria?) So that's definitely one attempted solution. People are getting it for costs paying off in under 5 years.
I got this email from from our local provider the other day..
"For a limited time only, we're offering a $500 upfront electricity bill credit* with every eligible home battery system (Tesla Powerwall 2 & 3, LG Chem HV, SolarEdge batteries only) purchased through Electrify with ActewAGL and installed by one of our approved installers - plus a further $100 credit* every year for the next five years, so long as you stay connected to our Virtual Power Plant.
Join the thousands of households across across Australia taking advantage of the Cheaper Home Batteries Program. Over 100,000 systems have been installed since July 2025, and with the rebate scheduled to decrease as installations rise, now is the time to act."
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.
* 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
This seems like a great way to encourage the behavior you want, which is conserving when energy is emitting more carbon by shifting consumption. Do your laundry, charge a car, charge a whole house batter, run laundry, crank the AC, run your own aluminum smelter, whatever.
In the UK, you can go on an agile tariff that does exactly this. I'm on one.
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.
Last month, we paid 11p per kWh on average, which is less than half what you'd pay on a standard tariff, and it's nice to be doing something good for the environment too. It's particularly satisfying to charge up the car when tariffs go negative.
Here's today's rates (actuals): https://agilebuddy.uk/latest/agile
Here's a forecast: https://prices.fly.dev/A/
> 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¢).
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
> 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
I think it's best to view this from an economics point of view - in a nutshell price signals are usually the most powerful way to create behavioural change; in this case, we want people to shift demand away from peak times. Nobody is being forced to, they just have to pay more for the convenience of not bothering.
> 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
It actually costs a lot more to produce marginal energy at peak times, the cost just reflects the cost of production. It doesn't seem unreasonable for me for the consumer to bear the cost, and also get the benfit if they choose to put their car to charge overnight rather than at peak time.
This also has a nice secondary benefit: anyone on agile tariffs who shifts demand away from peak time actually benefits those who don't want to bother, because the peak price/cost goes down, and so the overall average price of electricity goes down.
> I see this as just yet _another_ job the government/business is making us do instead of them
In most other market, people are expected to respond to price incentives. When local apples are cheap relative to imported cherries, people don't complain that government/business is making us do a job to push demand in the direction of apples.
> 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?
The free market price _is_ the agile price. The government intervention is actually in the direction of fixing prices (e.g. by the energy price cap, which is sometimes below the free market price at peak times). In general, markets do not work very well when the government fixes the market
When you let the market clear and send out price signals, markets almost always become more efficient (which means that consumers benefit overall)
> we want people to shift demand away from peak times
Because governments have let energy companies fail to invest in necessary infrastructure for decades.
And who is the "we"? Definitely not me
I think a much larger conversation needs to happen about people's schedules, commitments and whether it's fair to say those who have less time and less flexibility due to work, children etc are somehow actively choosing to not be a good eco citizen. It's incredibly unfair.
I'd rather go back to root causes and re-evaluate private companies failing to provide the necessary infrastructure
> Because governments have let energy companies fail to invest in necessary infrastructure for decades.
Well, regulating oligopolies isn't fun and it isn't popular with voters.
still sounds like an incredible way to incentivize consumers to buy small-scale storage. if i knew i could get free electricity for an hour or two each day (or even each week) it'd be a very easy choice to drop ~$1000 on a home battery.
You'd spend $1000 to save $0.20 on electricity every day?
The average price of power in Australia is 34 cents per kWh. The average Aussie spends A LOT more than $0.20 per day.
GP isn't talking about a full day's use, but "free electricity for an hour or two each day (or even each week)."
The whole reason to spend the money on the battery is so you can use the free power for a lot longer than an hour or two!
You'll want to draw as much power as possible while its free, and use it duing peak times.
Where I live, $1000 would get you about 3kWh of battery power, which would pay for itself in a couple years
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.
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.
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.
Since this year, you're also forced to have the remote kill switch on the new solar installations at home.
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.
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, you only pay for the surface are of a metal tank!
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.
Power at peak times is cheap because it's the time of highest insolation.
You’re missing the other side of the equation.
If power wasn’t cheaper, there’d be no incentive to run our heaters at the same time. I’d expect the market to work this out, and price power down during unexpected over-supply, rewarding nimble workloads. Then there arrives a reward for being nimble, which is something we should incentivize I think.
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.
They could also run their AC to below where their normal set point would be to “bank” some of the free electricity. I wonder if we’ll start seeing other more passive energy sinks… if you lived in a hot area and could rely on several hours of free electricity each day, it enables all sorts of interesting options like turning on a secondary cooling system to “charge” a large boulder or hunk of metal that you could then pass air over to cool your house when energy is expensive again.
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.
This is how the cold storage caves work in the Midwest. They run their ammonia loops harder in the off hours and let the cave mass handle it(provided a large enough area is kept frozen, otherwise thermal expansion cycling can cause a carve out in the ceiling).
Yep, our house was built like this but in a cooler climate (large windows facing south with the all of the stone flooring and surfaces getting direct sunlight in the winter). But since most houses in the Aussie suburbs aren’t really optimized for this, you’d have to retrofit many million houses to take full advantage. Opens up some interesting opportunities for sure.
Yeah, for sure. Building for 0 carbon AC and electric resistive heating will probably look a little different.
More countries where there's a surplus, are advising people to charge or use electricity during the day.
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.
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 ozone layer (do not fuck around with the sun in Australia - there's a reason why they have over 10x the global average of melanoma). Happy to answer any questions about it or the process for getting citizenship.
(1) Cities lived for comparison: San Diego, LA, Honolulu, San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Sydney
I’ll add Texas, UK, and the Netherlands to that list as places I’ve lived that Sydney far surpasses.
But I’ll add to the downside that housing prices are actually laughable here. How anyone affords to buy a house here is beyond me.
What about the spiders?
Not sure if this is a joke or not, but this is much like saying “don’t all Americans carry guns?” Almost none do, it’s more common in rural areas, you will see it in an urban area once or twice in your life. Same for super deadly animals in Australia. But no one in Australia has died from a spider bite since anti venom was invented.
I've seen more spiders in my house when I lived by the river in the UK than for years in Australia.
If a bad spider bite happens, government-provided health care has your back
You can do something similar in Texas IIRC, with free electricity at certain times
But then you have to live in Texas.
I have been thinking that you have data centers that follow the day around the globe and which are powered by solar power this could be a great business model.
For 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!
Now I'm imagining drilling through the Earth to get the shortest possible line from Australia to my house. I like this
If you're already down there, set up some geothermal!
The core is mostly iron and nickel already, so you don't have to drill the whole way!!
We can repurpose the burrito tubes.
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.
It's almost like that idea where the first people to leave in generational star ships will arrive at their new home to find the people who left in the third or forth generation ships already there for some time, technology having advanced so much in that time.
By the time they get the cable to Singapore, it will just be cheaper to generate it in Singapore.
Hey now, it's not free oil.
Its only for residences ( not business )
Only available in some parts of Australia
If my 208V,200A service here in New York City were free for 4 hours a day, I might buy a ~30kW chiller to run during free time and store its output in a big thermos or ice cube.
Assuming a COP of 2.5 (small, air cooled), that would be around 300 kW or 1M BTU of cold storage per day, which is around 42 kBTU or 3.5 tons of raw cooling capacity running 24x7.
I imagine if commercial buildings with support for larger and vastly more efficient chillers did this we could take a huge chunk out of NYC’s ~50 TWh power bill.
Ok, I’ve convinced myself. ConEd, please update when the free electricity program is activated.
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.
I still wonder who came up with the charge your car during the day / use it as a batterie. I don’t have the luxury’s of owning two EVs that I can charge and use at the same time. If my car stand unused at home so I can charge it would mean I use it during the night? I understand that there could be useage pattern where someone works from home once or twice a week and waits with the charge during these peek hours. But the generalization of just charge your car during the day is weird.
Unless that also counts when the car could charge for free at the workplace of course.
A few things.
Obviously it still works great on the weekend, or whatever days you’re not working to charge the EV at home for free.
Given all power is free, why wouldn’t you charge the EV at work in the middle of the day? Even if you pay to have the charger installed it will pay back quickly.
It’s not going to happen overnight, but with literally free electricity things will change quickly, and even huge parking structures or lots will have a stack of chargers that are free or very close to it.
I don’t know how the charging infrastructure in Australia is. But it’s of course cool that they have excess energy enough.
Everything about the push to convert the whole fleet to EVs falls apart under even the slightest rational scrutiny.
Is it falling apart right now? It seems the poster has forgotten that EVs can be charged at home but also away from home. They mention that in the last paragraph, but it kind of seems to undermine the whole premise that this is a problem.
Yes, it is in the process of disintegrating. The main symptom is the transformer shortage.
"the push to convert the whole fleet"
Is that anything like the "_ agenda being pushed" I keep hearing about, but can't seem to see anywhere?
Well, to me the EV conversion push, which undeniably exists and has many government policies supporting it, does represent an agenda, and that agenda is "Cars Über Alles". The obviously more practical approach to the problem is to support the conversion of transportation demand to less energy-intensive modes such as trains, buses, bicycles, and feet. It isn't very practical to say we're all going to have an EV and we'll have plenty of megawatt-scale chargers for everyone.
Why not?
We extract, refine, transport, store and pump billions of litres of toxic chemicals everyday to power our cars now.
We could do the same with electricity if we wanted to, and use a fraction of the energy.
The liquid fuel distribution system is simply far more space-efficient than any known means of EV charging. The liquid fuel scheme works because the energy flux through the pump is obscene. EVs don't have an answer to this problem.
> The Australian government is floating a scheme that would share the benefits of solar power with everyone on the grid, offering totally free electricity to ratepayers in the middle of the day, when the sun is shining the strongest.
> Australia proposes letting everyone benefit from negative wholesale rates
I know more countries have this now, so that's a good initiative that hopefully will spread to other countries (with negative rates).
It might not be as reliable in other places to do it every day, even just in summer. Still, there's clearly a trend globally towards more dynamic prices.
Solar power benefits the rich in Australia.
Renters, as usual, rarely get it.
Did you read the article?
It clearly said the free electricity will be for renters too.
Wish they would do this in California where wholesale power can go negative for the same reason.
Not free, but PGE has started an hourly variable rate plan pilot:
https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/hourly-flex-pricin...
However, they aren't taking net metering customers yet, but if you end up spending more on the hourly variable rate plan, they'll refund you to the same you would have spent on the regular time of use rate plan.
And they actually charge you a fee if you generate. My brother in law unhooked from the grid because back feeding was charging him $100 a month. To give away power.
> And they actually charge you a fee if you generate. My brother in law unhooked from the grid because back feeding was charging him $100 a month. To give away power.
Which utility and plan is this? I'm not aware of any California residential rate plans that charge you for putting power back on the grid, much less $100/month.
That said, wholesale electricity rates are set by high frequency supply/demand markets.
Recent residential net metering rates are closely aligned with wholesale supply/demand based rates, so most utilities will compensate your brother in law near $0 when you are pushing power to the grid when wholesale rates are <= $0, because there are not enough buyers of the power he is generating.
He is using the grid as a battery, which comes at a cost.
This is of course changing as more grid connected storage comes online and creates demand for off peak electricity. In that case, you actually get paid for selling power back to the grid during high grid stress periods. I get paid a few hundred dollars a year in CA for doing that with my measly home backup battery.
I think they’re referring to the fact that if you’re connected to the grid, you may be charged a base fee of around $100 per month, even if you don’t use any power. Previously, homeowners received credits for the excess solar energy they sent back to the grid, but the state has since ended that program.
A friend of mine is trying to build a house in a remote area of Southern California. He's planning to be completely "off-grid", generating power exclusively from solar. However, local regulators insist he hook up to the local electric utility. Further, in order to run the electrical cables to his property (from the substation), the local fire department insists that the brush is cleared around the new electrical cables. All in, he's looking at around $100K for something he doesn't even want or need. He said he's tried explaining this to local regulators, but they're not hearing it.
Oh yeah, yes, after paying all the money to get the electrical hookup he doesn't want or need - yeah, he's gonna be on the hook for around $100/month.
If your friend wants to build a remote off-grid house that's in the middle of nowhere, why wouldn't they shop for a jurisdiction that allows it? Places that require utility connections are actual places generally. When you live out in the center of Inyo County you can be off the grid if you want. It sounds to me like your friend wants the benefits of proximity to developed places, but also wants to opt-out of contributing to the development of the place.
You're not wrong ^^^
Your friend is not the last person that will own that house, forcing a utility connection is a good thing for future owners. The same reasoning is why building codes exist, nobody really cares if you want to live in a substandard dwelling (aside from your mortgage insurer) but basically every house has more than one owner over time. Building codes mean when you buy a house, you can be reasonably certain there aren’t any weird cut corners.
He should’ve done DD on the land and local AHJ restrictions before moving ahead with a plan that wouldn’t work. One call to the local planning and permit office is all it would’ve taken to avoid this problem and find a different jurisdiction.
Have you ever lived in an off grid house?
Friends have a full sized off grid house in the Yukon since 2010. Every modern convenience, stunning location. Never a single power outage in all those years. How many power outages have you had?
Off grid is not somehow sub standard.
It gets even crazier. Latest: he's got a lawyer that says if he plants trees on a certain percentage of his property, it can be classified as a farm, and then exempt from the power utility hook-up requirement. But that comes with its own requirements, like a well to get water and certain fencing. But yeah, keep in mind, this is all so a dude can generate his own power on his own property.
If he wants to be completely off-grid wouldn't he want his own well anyways? I'm on a well and it's actually really nice to have zero water bills. I also have a cabin that's on a well that was dug in the 1940s and is still pumping out 'free' water.
Is that a California thing? In OR it’s like ~$15 to interlink (or whatever the term is)
Damn that's a big difference when compared to how the State of Alabama treats solar energy.
You get penalized for having solar panels here in Alabama the Beautiful.
Jit chemical processes, refinig and metal melting?
Sshhh… Don‘t tell the AI companies :P
Does not make economic sense, there is still the cost of panels and transmission.
There might be a surplus now but dropping the price to zero will increase use (demand).
I was surprised the story does not even specify "residential," it really says "everyone." That's a great way to exhaust existing supply. Entrepreneurs can presumably be quite creative in the shape of businesses they set up if unlimited free power is on offer during the day.
So just to fantasize for a bit,
Suppose fusion power becomes a thing, and after handwaiving some issues let's assume it can power everything indefinitely.
Does that make things like heating, cooling, travel, ocean desalination, bandwidth, AI, Bitcoin mining, permanently free?
Shouldn't all of humanity be homing in on that holy grail?
I read here and there that geothermal could be the next best thing. Maybe HN can say more on that.
(P.S. terrestrial fusion may also explain why nobody bothers to build Dyson spheres out there)
In short: yes. It can be done. Clean, almost limitless energy, funded in a way to provide effectively free electricity for ordinary people. Restrictions would have to be in place to prevent true excess, but regulations already handle such matters in other areas.
The ambient vibe of our time, and here on HN, is often really pessimistic. I don't believe such pessimism is realistic. Commercial grade fusion power will come, and we should push very hard to make it happen. It will change the equations at the core of the economy and open up whole new paths for technology -- far beyond the pure digital.
Then some very rich and powerful people become very unrich and unpowerful. And they could never let that happen willingly.
But they'd be able to build their moon castles sooner and control the next frontier in their lifetimes:
What's cooler than being a billionaire? A SPACE BILLIONAIRE.
Mine 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.
But it is so damn HOT there. And Australia has the most vicious animals and plants too. It is like an alien continent.
I'm pretty sure they get snow sometimes in NSW. AUS is big enough you can find many climates there!
You're not wrong about the plants and animals though. It's basically an island, and islands always end up with super weird flora and fauna - there usually just aren't many (any?) predators, so the competition takes species in weird directions.
There are many ski resorts. The biggest has 44 lifts.
Yes, it snows.
I’ve lived here 15 years and seen two snakes, zero deadly spiders, zero crocs.
Yes, I’m on the city fringe. Like millions of others here.
Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that even the electrons are poisonous there...
Zapbears