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.
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).
Just today there was a newsletter from Construction Physics about Strap Rail. Literally wooden rails with a iron plate strapped on top put in the mud. Only in the US, 10 times cheaper. But more expensive to maintain and gone in years instead of decades for normal iron rails though.
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.
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.
But since then there was an endless stream of negative press especially in English speaking countries against German energy policies, so not much of this positive comments are still remembered.
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.
Come to Munich, go into any of the large old buildings, the central stairwells usually are phone dead zones. Truly dead.
Or try to go and hike in the Alps. Shit service, but as soon as you walk into Austrian territory, you'll suddenly have service.
Or try taking a train from Munich to, say, Landshut. You'll lose signal about 5 minutes after the train passes through the outskirts of Feldmoching.
Or try driving a car on the A8 highway to Salzburg in Austria. You'll lose signal about 5-10 minutes after passing Holzkirchen.
Or try taking a train from Passau to Wels in Austria. Passau is directly near the border. You will have a shit service right until the train passes the national border and Austrian towers take over.
The reason isn't technical. The Passau and Alps example shows it - identical geography, identical mountainous areas with about zero population... but wildly different attitudes in regulation.
> If it’s a population center someone would probably have put up a tower on their land ll
Here, you get death threats if you even propose putting up a tower on your land [1], in the UK nutjobs set a 5G tower ablaze [2].
I stand corrected. I didn’t realize you could be a MIMBY for cell towers and also not currently have service.
Any organized resistance I’ve witnessed myself in the US has been something like an HOA saying no not tucked right here where our home values could take a hit or a view obstructed, please put it down the street or … anywhere else.
But if you had no cell service and your call dropped as you backed out of your garage or you tried to sell your house and the buyers phones suddenly had no service or they couldn’t get on the Internet at the open house, that’d feel like pretty concerning missing infrastructure.
> I don’t think anti-5G wackos have dented a thing.
They have, at least here in Germany. We have a shitload of what we call "weiße Flecken", zones with zero service, of about the size of half of Schleswig-Holstein [1]. While a lot of these is in forests and mountainous areas, the zones in settlements are mostly due to the whackos and their organized campaigns.
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.
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).
Related to overbuilding, vertically mounted solar panels can help flatten the generation curve during the day, and may perform better than "optimally tilted" panels on winter, especially where snow might otherwise be a problem.
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.
Never going to happen but there should be some sort of global emission accounting standard to factor in exporting goods that reduce emissions (over lifetimes), vs not, i.e. a barrel of oil burned should count at producer side the consumer side.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seems like every 2nd post on HN, regardless of the actual content, becomes an argument between advocates for the US and China. In the case of China it's particularly egregious as they get to use US platforms to push their cause, whilst China blocks all foreign foreign access their own platforms. It's tiresome.
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.
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.
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.
Not in the slightest. I’m saying that it’s possible to recognize that evil without denying that something else is good. Just do both at the same time, like how we might say that the world has benefited from polyurethane, digital computers (Konrad Zuse), or rocketry without in any way excusing the Nazi government which controlled Germany at the time.
Most of them would. These are labour-rural-transfer programs thats been going on in PRC for poverty alleviation for 20+ years that retards in west twisted into slave labour.
The entire coerced labour propaganda are bunch of country bumpkin Uyghurs getting enrolled in poverty alleviation programs where they're paid close to median wage, i.e. 2x+ typical subsistent agri income. This is equivalent to US starting a jobs program to give bottom quantile earners (15k) a median income (40k).
The reality is these are well paying jobs, relative to bottom quantile recruits these programs are designed to uplift usually go towards more ethnically "Chinese" applicants, because factory bosses don't want to deal with Uyghurs who don't Mandarin Good until central pushed Uyghurs (and Tibetans) to front of queue, when frankly much more qualified "Chinese" applicants exist.
Are individuals sometimes fucked in the process, of course, statistic inevitability, but poverty alleivation is net good for Uyghurs, XJ solar is net good for the world.
If I was to post a comment that frames the armenian or rohingya genocide, or indeed any genocide, in a good light, would my comment be flagged? What exactly is HN policy on moderating genocide-washing propaganda?
It's 2025. US/Pompeo's fake genocide propaganda campaign failed. There's no need to genocide wash because you know, there was never genocide to begin with. Even astroturfed wikipedia had to concede "Genocide of Uyghurs" down to "Persecution". Nvm plurarity of UN opinion labels PRC actions as counter terrorism / anti extremism programs. If HN is required to align with US foreign policy positions / be US gov mouthpiece where US maintains XJ genocide designation, then sure flag comments contrary to geopolitical reality that there's no genocide.
Spamming retarded propaganda doesn't make it not retarded propaganda. You didn't even post the og retarded source of coerced labour claims i.e. our innumerate boi AdrienZ at Jamestown, even he had the sense to realize the most disinformation label he can misattribute is coerced labour because all the data he tries to misinterpret still shows labour transfer wages significantly higher than regional average. But tldr yes solving terrorism and reducing poverty to integrate restive minority without doing a Gaza is tripleplusgood. All while proliferating cheap renewables for developing countries and climates and we have to start using exponents good. Double plus undersells the spectacular scope and scale of PRC de radicalism campaign, literally the least bloodshed melting pot integration speedrun in recorded history. Nobel prize worthy vs Obama by none libtard metrics. 20% hyperbole.
It's slavery in the same sense as DoD recruiters use underhanded means to get kids with no prospects to sign up for military. Except those kids get sent in GWOT to kill Muslims for a few tours whereas when XJ bureaucrats hit quota they get more solar panels.
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.
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.
Not sure what renting has to do with this? Renters in Australia do not install batteries/panels, it's landlord's business.
If landlord has batteries/panels installed, chances are rent would be a bit higher. Renter is free to choose a place with lower energy bills by paying that premium, so these subsidies definitely could benefit the renters.
This is the problem though. Landlords are rarely incentivised to enhance a property by installing solar+batteries on it, as they don't live there to reap the benefits. Solar still takes a couple of years to give an ROI, so I can't see how a landlord will agree to do this on an existing property.
If a property's monthly rent is higher because it has solar installed, what is the benefit to the tenant? Sure they get cheaper electricity, but they pay more rent, so it balances out.
Tenants won't pay for the installation, as it's a permanent improvement on a property that they don't own.
I live in a country with an order of magnitude less sun (Ireland), but there is a big solar boom going on here now, and I'm missing out on the government subsidies (which ended recently) because I'm renting and I can't convince a landlord to put €10k+ up to install a solar system for very little benefit.
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."
> 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.
Sure. But if you live in Australia, you knew that slap was coming. You could almost have said to have signed up for it.
Very early in the piece, the government offered to pay people who installed solar about $0.50 for every kWh you fed into the grid. To be clear, that was far more than the retail price of electricity at the time. It was sunsetted, in 2028 from memory (so if you signed up back then, that sweet subsidy money still flowing strong.) I know a few people who installed 50kW of panels on their houses and sheds purely because of that incentive.
The idea behind the subsidy was to kickstart the solar industry, and it worked. It was always obvious what was going to happen to feed in prices if it did work. Given the price of power is now very close to $0 for 8 hours a day, it's working very, very well. That's how this "free electricity" offer came about.
The same incentives are now happening for batteries. The Australia electricity regulator created a special kind of retailer called a "Virtual Power Plant". It's effectively a collective of battery owning consumers, and the VPP allows them to sell their excess storage into the wholesale market. The government is now subsidising batteries, in the same way they subsidised solar panels. And now, they are looking at offering free power to charge the batteries(!) The result you should be able to get will over a 10% return by installing a battery and joining a VPP. Consequently, there is currently a shortage of battery installers.
That 10% won't last forever of course. It will last for a while, especially in Queensland (where I live) as the conservatives are installing more gas turbines rather than building more renewables. The high price of gas generated power guarantees a good return on my battery investment. I will take great pleasure in sending the gas and coal generators broke by selling when the price is highest (which is a night) and taking their profit.
And fortunately night lasts a long time, and years and years of battery installs to take a real bite out of it. Nevertheless the fun and profit will wind down eventually. When it does I won't be whinging about a receiving slap in the face. I will shrug, be thankful I could have my fun while it lasted, and move on.
The feed in tariff you refer to was 52c in the beginning and was limited to a 5kW inverter. I installed 6.25kW worth of panels with a 5kW inverter in 2011 and haven't paid a single power bill since.
There's no slap in the face, sure I have to give up the FIT if I want the battery subsidy but I haven't paid a cent for power in 13 years (beyond initial investment).
In NSW it was limited to 5kW. That wasn't the limit in Queensland. Granted, there is was "only" 44c, but 44c at 30kW isn't something to be sniffed at. The 50kW of panels was to ensure you got that full 30kW for most of the day. You also got the 15c the retailer paid you, so for a while you were easily earning $40k/yr on something that cost of the order of $200k to set up.
What we’re dealing with is successive Australian governments with absolutely no plan for long term energy infrastructure, so they’ve lobbed it over the wall to the residential customer.
Here, you deal with it. No options. It’s solar and batteries rammed down your throat. At your cost. If it doesn’t work out, it’s on us.
No big (reliable base load) energy projects to power industry in to the future, China can do all of that for us.
Snowy aside, households are installing 40kWh batteries now. Add 2 cars V2G that give you an additional 40kWh with impacting the car battery life overly. Across the 12 million Australia houses that adds something of the order of 1 terawatt hours of storage to the grid. It's almost double the total predicted storage (660GWh) Australia will need by 2050 https://www.energycouncil.com.au/analysis/battery-storage-au...
The strategy of "lobbing it over the wall to the residential customer" has already turned Australia households into major suppliers of electricity to the grid. Apparently they don't mind the risk if there is money to be made. Now it looks like the government are hoping household batteries will become major suppliers of storage to the grid. If that is as successful as solar, it will be by any definition a wildly successful strategy for handing the transition away from fossil fuels.
The weird thing is: this was all kicked off by the Howard government. They would be the very conservatives who are railing against renewables now.
Snowy 2.0 isn’t an electricity generator, it’s pumped hydro. It relies on electricity being generated elsewhere.
The governments plan is bait and switch. Make it seem lucrative at the start, and then squeeze everyone who committed on better terms by ratcheting up the fees and ratcheting down the feed-in tariffs.
Alternatively, we could have built a handful of big combined cycle gas plants, close to the retiring coal plants to take advantage of existing transmission infrastructure, and legislated a cheap rate for gas from the gas extraction industry, and Australians could have had all-you-can-use electricity for $40 a month.
But instead of that, we’ve committed at least a couple of generations to virtue signalling, like Australia’s GHG emissions make any difference.
We’re happy to export the gas and coal, and uranium, so India and China can have cheap power to run industrial economies.
Cheap power comes not from residential customers managing their time of use, but from the excess of industrialisation. And we’re rapidly making it cost prohibitive to manufacture anything in Australia, or even run a restaurant. So that people in far away lands can have better lives.
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 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.
So long as you ignore the working-poor. Those who live pay check to pay check, can’t afford solar / battery - or are renting so none of that applies to them.
But isn't the OP article about distributing the benefits to the wider population? Add to that the uptake of batteries GP is mentioning will substantially reduce both the need for back-up power and the cost of transmission that have been driving up electricity prices.
So you can have three hours of free electricity, while you’re at work, the kids are at school, you’re renting so no battery for you, electricity has already increased 100% and continues to increase, but only once a year, and now you’re being offered something your 10 year old second hand appliances and petrol cars can’t take advantage of.
Forget trickle down economics, it’s deluge-up. From those who can barely afford it to those who barely need it.
Let’s not pretend there isn’t a cost of living crisis in Australia, and electricity prices factor in to everything.
Cheap reliable plentiful electricity is the backbone of an economy. Not sitting down and working out how you can use less power next month.
We should be sitting down trying to work out how we can use more power next month, in order to leverage that power to have a better life, warmer / cooler homes. Starting businesses and not having electricity be the killer.
> So you can have three hours of free electricity, while you’re at work, the kids are at school, you’re renting so no battery for you
Probably not useful for cooking dinner or watching the evening news, but most dishwashers and clothes washers have a delay start option. Your fridge is also working its hardest during the middle of the day.
> and now you’re being offered something your 10 year old second hand appliances and petrol cars can’t take advantage of.
A washer/dryer combo would be useful for delayed start. But as mentioned, delay start has been a common option for a long time now.
> We should be sitting down trying to work out how we can use more power next month, in order to leverage that power to have a better life, warmer / cooler homes. Starting businesses and not having electricity be the killer.
BESS are the deluge up you're asking for. Much of the stress on the grid is that power generation is distributed unevenly. Grid scale battery prices have been crashing stupidly year on year, to the tune of about 20-40%, and those effects are only just starting to hit the consumer market. The uptake curve has been reasonably steady, and at current projections we would have 24 hours of world-wide storage by 2035. Which is nuts!
I think this is sensible policy. It ought to reduce power prices across the board. At the very least, energy companies would have few excuses to hide behind if prices don't become more competitive.
Another sensible policy to help renters would be to force landlords and owners' corps to put timers on their electric hot water systems. It's a kind of energy storage that most people don't consider.
I'm from Australia and my electricity provider has 12pm-2pm free electricity.
As other's said, dishwasher and washing machine has delayed/smart start options, so that is free for me. That saves at least 3kWh per day for me, so ~$30 per month. So it really helps with CoL crisis.
And yes, those appliances are (almost) 10 years old.
I'm from Sweden and hearing those energy prices really caught me off guard. With taxes and fees we pay ~€0.1 per kWh on average.
I have stopped caring about when house hold appliances run, our main energy consumers are heating (during the cold months) and charging the electric car.
Yep. Years ago I got sick of listening to people who don't believe in climate change and emission reductions due to tribalism crowing about the solar pv on their holiday house and their incredibly low electricity bills while cost of living keeps going up for lower income families. Everywhere you look anything good is twisted into a wealth transfer. If you are left behind you are never catching up now. Between the housing market and everything else the myth of a classless society has been completely obliterated in a generation.
That's a weird uninformed take. Both solar and battery are heavily subsidised in Australia if your household income is less than $180k AUD. Average solar 6kW installation with subsidies is ~3k AUD, 30-40kWh chineses batteries are 4-6k AUD after subsidy.
Median full-time salary in AU is ~90k AUD, and we have pretty good minimal wages, so solar panels are affordable to almost every working homeowner.
Mine (a VPP) does pass it on. They charge me the going wholesale rate. If the wholesale price is sufficiently negative they pay me to use electricity. That's pretty rare, but it does happen every few months. The wholesale price has to be below about -4.5¢ for my price to be negative because the people who own the wires get to add a fee regardless of what direction the electricity is flowing, as does the government (admin fees of some description).
The converse is also true. If the price spirals to $19/kWh, I get to pay that too. At that price as single night could cost me $400, or it would if I didn't have a battery.
Which possibly explains why you haven't heard of it. If you don't have a battery big enough to get you through at the peak and shoulder hours and enough solar to charge it during the day you are better off with a more traditional retailer, who charges you a fixed price regardless of the wholesale price.
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
In Australia, residential premises are prohibited from running aluminium smelters.
Dunno about where you live.
If you’re going to throw capital at large metal refinery infrastructure, you want it running 24/7, or have guaranteed subsidies from local, state, and federal governments.
And remember that subsidies are paid from the public purse.
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.
If you're going to depreciate the battery then your return will be substantially greater than 7.3%. You can't use BOTH the capex AND the depreciation as your denominator, choose one.
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.
Also, turning off solar (known as curtailing) is just dumb. It's throwing away "free" electricity. The UK and Ireland is doing the same by turning off their wind turbines every now and then, and it's frustrating.
By making the price go negative, you are creating the market incentives for someone to do something about it: households will invest in BES systems to suck up all that free electricity to use during peak times, and some industrious entrepreneurs might even be convinced to do it on a very large scale to start arbitraging on the price fluctuations.
You don't even need the price to go negative to have a BESS buffer make financial sense.
Commercial solar fields are entirely automated, nobody is going to the site to throw a disconnect switch lol. For sites without hardwire internet, there’s 4G or satellite connectivity. A 4G cell comm module is a few hundred dollars. Adding in remote operations control is probably a tiny fraction of a percent of a solar field project.
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!
I'm on a time-of-use tariff, with a special "EV" slot between 02h and 05h. My car is programmed to only charge during this time unless I tell it otherwise.
The price difference is significant: About €0.08/kwh compared to the €0.2 - €0.4 I'd be paying during normal day/peak times.
This has made my day-to-day driving basically free, less than a euro per 100km (€0.08/kwh * 7kwh/100km)
I tried doing the same thing for other large(ish) loads in the house, dishwasher, washer & dryer, but the cost benefit was really really small when compared to the big savings from my EV charging.
I heat my water using an oil burning boiler, but if I had an electric water heater, it would make total sense to run that during the "EV" hours as well. If I could, I would then also invest in more capacity, and set the thermostat higher to have essentially a hot water battery that could last me the whole day.
At my old house I had an overspecced solar system, and I set it up to dump the remaining available solar energy after the batteries are done charging into my hot water heater. The thermostat was set to 75C or something, super hot. I'd then have piping hot water for most of the day, and maybe needed a small electric boost in the mornings, especially in the winter. Another 200L or so would have resulted in me not needing any grid power to heat up enough hot water for the household.
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.
Think of being able to set a price on Amazon Spot instances where it's low enough to charge your home battery for "free". When the price is right, you recharge your batteries as much as possible. When the price falls outside the range, you leverage your battery to offset the higher electricity prices. This would be part of the "smart" in "smart grids".
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.
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.
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).
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 thought I'd read that they planned to expand the scheme to non solar homes to fit in with the ethos of the new "benefits of solar for people without solar" messaging of the proposal under discussion here.
But I checked my supposed source and it was just someone suggesting that it would be consistent and useful if they did make that change.
My subsidised 48kWh battery is getting installed in two weeks - and I can't wait.
I have also upgraded to a 20kW inverter (I have ~10kW of panels on the roof) so I can import or export twice as fast and I will be switching to a provider that offers wholesale pricing. Getting a guaranteed 3 hours of free power a day for charging (even in winter) is just going to be the icing on the cake.
Based on back of the envelope calculations, the battery should be paid off in about 5-6 years during which time I will have paid zero for electricity (outside of a $25/month access charge).
"The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed." - William Gibson
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.
What about the real estate cost? I loved Sydney when I visited earlier this year, but real estate seems more expensive than my home city of NYC, and that's really saying something.
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.
When it is day in Australia it is night in Europe. If one could transport electricity from Australia to Europe and vice versa this would be a win-win situation.
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.
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.
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.
Meanwhile also in part of Australia where the states public electricity utility was sold in a fire sale to foreign investors. The owners gold plate the network so they can get away with charging some of the highest electricity prices in the world despite generation prices often going negative thanks to renewables.
I would bet over time the supply charge and non-free hours will increase in price to compensate and overall bills will be the same. It will shift some load to the middle of the day with people setting timers on appliance and it will take pressure off generation which will be politically convenient when another poorly maintained coal plant falls over but I will be shocked if it will be a win for consumers.
Poorer home owners and rentals that don't have solar pv and can't afford to buy new appliances that might be able to take advantage of being set to run during the cheap hours are going to be left further behind.
The country is full of monopolies, duopolies and price gouging and the regulators are useless.
> 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.
> 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.
The base charge for most customers in PGE territory is $24/month:
> Previously, homeowners received credits for the excess solar energy they sent back to the grid, but the state has since ended that program.
They ended the NEM1.0 and NEM2.0 programs that credited net surplus back to homeowners at retail electricity rates (which includes transmission and distribution costs). Those programs were a subsidy to encourage residential solar PV installation when it was very expensive and rare, not intended to function as long term subsidy programs for PV owners.
The switch to NEM3.0 only affects newer installations -the older installations keep the older rates until a change of ownership in the home.
Under the new net-metering program, homeowners with solar still get credits for net energy sent back to the grid, albeit at the "avoided cost" rate, which while much lower on average at most times, is reflective of the true value of power at the time it is pushed back to the grid, which is close to wholesale electricity rates. During peak hours and days of the year, the compensation rate can exceed the retail rate of electricity.
This incentivizes the installation of energy storage that can be used to move consumption to low-demand times and even arbitrage with stored energy by selling back to the grid at peak hours.
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.
I’m assuming that, based on the property’s remote location and the lack of existing power infrastructure, it would make sense for them to build something that’s primarily offgrid.
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?
No, but I have a very good idea of what it costs to procure, install, operate, and maintain a 24kW or 48kW generator. About 30-40 grand if you’re adding a sizable diesel day tank or propane tank.
Once it’s installed, you’ve got fuel deliveries plus regular maintenance and monitoring. You’re looking at thousands of dollars a year to operate your own generator for a 100A or 200A service. If you’re already installing a propane tank for heating then the costs can be spread between heating and power generation but it’s still a sizable investment.
Generators are nowhere near as reliable as you’re making them out to be. Maintaining and fueling one is a hassle that the vast majority of people would rather not deal with.
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.
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 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.
But in any case, let’s say I agree with you. A ton of rich people have solar and are getting really cheap power. Cool.
Now EVERYONE is going to get free power for a few hours a day, and the “poor” didn’t have to spend a cent to get it.
Sounds like a benefit for everyone to me, regardless of how rich they are.
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.
There is always some capital and operational costs. Plus transfer. Limit is cost of infra and operations. And the financing costs. So you can get to very cheap, but not free.
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.
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.
Yeah you definitely should not be paying that much. Throw your NMI into https://www.energymadeeasy.gov.au/ and it'll show you the most cost effective option from your actual usage. I'm also in Sydney and pay 29c flat/ 18c secondary circuit
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.
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