I’m sure this information will be major headlines in all the Newscorp papers, along with congratulatory pieces on how the government is steering us in the right direction.
I know! There was so much demand on their servers they had to take the articles down but I read them and they were balanced and objective and unbiased.
For the last couple of years I've listened to the parliamentary speeches of Coalition MPs and senators. Every spring they've had dire warnings about "the summer ahead", and how we would be seeing the electricity grid crashing due to an over-reliance of renewables.
Those claims have not been matched by real world experience, and this ABC News article makes it sounds like renewables and batteries are actually a huge boon to our summertime energy mix.
Solar alone has been a huge boon to the grid for dealing with summer heatwaves. For the most part solar solved that problem over a decade ago.
But solar uptake didn’t stop once the problem was solved, and the grid stability was at risk because there was looking to be so much solar on cooler days that there wouldn’t be enough demand for electricity, and demand would fall below the safe operating level of the fossil fuel generators, which would cause them to trip offline. The solution to that problem has been batteries, mostly to increase demand on the grid during solar peak, and we actually will see a net effect of batteries being charged from fossil fuel plants around midday, but that will be offset by the fossil fuel plants remaining at minimum load during the evening peak.
Will never stop being mad how different things would be if under the decade of liberals we invested in solar and batteries as much as we are know which is arguably still not as much as we could be doing
Actually batteries being added to the grid has been much much much faster than anyone predicted since the incentives started. It’s going to be interesting seeing its effects on transmission networks.
I'm going to surprise you a bit. Under the liberals and the state government there was a double dip on solar panels there for a bit. You could get a 6kw system for as little as 2k out of pocket.
Additionally a lot of places that were effected by the black summer bushfires got solar and battery systems (to be early adopters of the current roll out). That was a 50% subsidy. Town where I live has a lot of people on it. It has been great in storms... but....ahhhh... I suspect it's about to be tested out properly in the next week or 3.
Aside from the water, environmental, cost, schedule, expertise, risk management, nuclear proliferation, continued concentration of generation, natural disaster risk, and national security issues… yes, nuclear could be an option too.
I think the concentration one is a good point, the more we can distribute generation, the better. I wouldn't be surprised if we end up with regulation in the future that all jew house builds need a solar system.
Best time to build nuclear was 20 years ago. Too late now when we can just build solar wind and hydro for cheaper and we already got the expertise here (unlike for nuclear)
John Howard gave it a red hot go 20 years ago, but even he realised it was a cash cow for his vested interests too large to fool the public with.
I think his one sided UMPNER report published in 2005 concluded it was going to take a massive carbon tax to make Nuclear competitive against our cheap coal fired power.
We can’t even roll out the NBN but somehow without a nuclear industry we could rollout nuclear power plants.
The countries that already have nuclear industries still can’t get it done on time or in budget but somehow even when the economics in a best case scenario still don’t beat renewables we will be able to.
Nuclear works in more efficiently, both from an economic, and operation sense, when it delivers stable output for long periods, than when it is ramped up and down frequently.
So it is not a solution to the problem of efficiently matching available supply to summer demand peaks.
Nuclear is most efficient delivers stable output for long periods.
Should have been:
Nuclear works in more efficiently, both from an economic, and operation sense, when it delivers stable output for long periods, than when it is ramped up and down frequently.
It does, although the current plan has some gas peakers that are expected to be used ~ 4 days of the year.
These can theoretically be supplied with Biogas to be carbon nuetral.
One of the cool parts is these gas plants will actually be used to stabilise the grid, not by burning fuel, but by spinning the generators with electricity from the grid and using them as syncronus condensers, adding inertia and load capacity.
Yes as instead of using 5kW of energy from burning gas, we can use 1kW of electricity to provide 5kW of heating with heat pumps (Air conditioniners). Even if you went from burning gas in The house for heat to burning gas at a gas generator to power all the heat pumps replacing gas heating, you still greatly reduce the usage of gas. And the electricity can come from renewables most of the time.
It would also be really efficient, both in winter and summer, to have energy-efficient homes. I know the pink bats scandal is weighing heavily on that topic, but having stronger insulation and refitting homes would help make the switch to electric heating.
I'm not sure how you're defining this, but it's not correct. The key concept here is "residual demand" after variable renewables (solar and wind), where you need gas/coal/hydro to fill the shortfall. It can also be useful to think about that in GWh per day terms rather than MW terms, as batteries already do a great job of covering short-lived demand spikes like hot summer evenings.
Once you start looking at the residual left to cover after renewables and shallow batteries, June/July is absolutely the problem time in all states except Queensland and the current consensus is that we'll be relying on gas power to fill those gaps for decades to come.
At some point it's cheaper to just have a few carbon fuel generators for emergencies. Those will run on gas for a couple of decades, but by 2050 biofuels will be a renewable replacement.
"periods of lowest demand"
But that will not always be true as more and more people remove gas from their homes.
Batteries help but from my own experience since May (when I installed my solar energy system with a battery), in mid-winter batteries can struggle to fully offset expected demand. My battery was empty before dinnertime. We will still need some alternate source, whether that is community batteries or some other solution to store solar energy for those caught short.
Winter isn’t the problem. It’s spring and autumn that is the worry. Plenty of sunny cloud free days, but where it’s not warm enough for people to run their air cons much / at all. The grid was designed with the assumption of electricity flowing one way from generators to consumers. But now consumers are generators and we’re seeing some sections step down transformers suddenly needing to do step up transforming. Lots of research happening in transmission network management these days.
It is remarking on a turning point in management of the grid where a heatwave has not caused any significant issues. The article isn't about how solar panels work but that there are now so many panels installed the surge in demand was largely offset by the surge in supply.
It's a good news story. They are traditionally less interesting.
Where are you getting this from? Go look in opennem.org.au where you can view 25 years of data collated by season. Electricity demand is and always has been highest in winter.
Winter 2025: 57,776 GWh
Summer 2025 54,922 GWh
Winter 2024: 58,881 GWh
Summer 2024 54,507 GWh
Winter 2023 53,945 GWh
Summer 2023 51,422 GWh
Etc. It stands out as obvious annual peaks on the graph every winter.
Lowest for now - there are some indications that the overall grid demand will be highest for the NEM in winter, with plentiful solar in summer behind the meter.
Electrification in the southern states (esp. VIC) makes this look worse, though it will still reduce overall emissions.
Everything being green and alive and gardens thriving from the rain. Happy animals (including my old horse) who I put snazzy horse coats on to keep him warm and fed him his dinner with warm molasses mixed in. Walks in the Dandenongs amongst the ferns or on the beach in the cool fresh air….. etc.
Both Eldridge and Mountain said batteries would — and already were to an extent — help bridge the daily gap between abundance and scarcity.
On Wednesday, for example, they helped meet about 10 per cent of demand during the evening peak
In my head I thought we were only very much at the beginning of the battery rollout. That they were able to contribute 10% already on peak demand day is impressive.
It will be interesting to see this shift in the next 5-10 years as the number of households with dedicated batteries or EVs as well as community based batteries and grid scale batteries increase significantly.
I believe this 10% is only from community or grid scale batteries.
Home batteries would just show up as lower grid demand. So in the next 5-10 years I would expect to see the demand curve flatten, and batteries take up a much bigger percentage of peak demand.
Yes, people should oversize their batteries and sell back.
But it probably won't do enough to the grid meters - they'll still see it on aggregate as lower demand for the suburb. Maybe if home meters get properly aggregated.
Alot of the early batteries have capacity tied up in stability markets and aren't focused on load shifting, in another 2-3 years the difference is going to be insane.
We need more, a lot more batteries. I've been saying this for years now, solar will be the default for most aussie owner-occupied homes soon, we need batteries for all of them as well. Vehicle-to-grid technologies will be a massive win here when they get up and running in Australia, so much energy stored in people's driveways that isn't being used. Of course management of these distributed storage and generation systems will be key, this is what we need the energy market operators to be doing now, not doubling down on coal, but making their poles and wires handle load and distribution from households at the scales needed.
AC on 24 all day running off solar and battery at night and still fed in enough power to the grid to cover my daily supply charge. Hard to argue with that.
About 17k. I was paying $2500 a year in power bills so at current prices it's paid off in 7 years, although that wasn't really my concern with getting it, Whole house backup was the selling point for me.
How do you go regarding the backup part. I've heard that if there's a power outage the battery system is also supposed to switch off, this way if someone is working on the powerlines it reduces danger.
I'm not sure how accurate it is, the person who told me has a backup generator for when the power goes out.
That was true, but is quickly becoming out of date. About 25% of modern battery/inverters have enough brains to isolate themselves and be full backup without interference
That's called anti-islanding and it's usually a requirement from Distributors to connect your solar system in the first place for exactly the reasons you stated.
Generally speaking solar isn't there to provide you with a back up power source (although this is possible) but rather to reduce your costs.
Same, although after yesterday's cloudy day, mine didn't refill as much as I'd like. Charging from the grid atm, to reduce any potential demand on the grid later and make sure our outage backup is usable. It's the first day this month it's cost me anything.
5kw inverter? Mine is a 10 and I was seeing upwards of 7kw at times yesterday when it was 44 degrees with AC running / 2 high end PC's and a server rack going but no issues.
LNP governments are the worst. If it was up to them they'd be no NBN, Solar, Wind. They gave away our LNG resources for almost nothing. Incompetent, ideological, religious, racist, sexist, regressive.
Running a grid on renewables with hydro/battery storage and a tiny amount of gas for freak events when there's little wind and sunshine is absolutely achievable. The only sad thing is that we have to wait so long for a government to get into power who would do something about it.
Yep, as of a couple of days ago, my neighbour has been getting the dual benefit of less sun hitting his tile roof to heat his upstairs, and being able to run his aircon on his solar and battery. What's not to like?
Apparently AGL had big plans for wind and solar farms, but have put that all on hold to focus on battery storage.
The number of grid batteries being deployed or in the works is insane and the general population don't know about it.
5 years from now we are going to be in great shape and a destination for industry due to cheap power. We just need to not loose all the existing industries before then.
This is good news and impressive that even at this early stage batteries are showing up on the chart, not long ago they would have been a slightly thicker line.
Feels like we're missing a trick still dragging our feet on off-shore wind.
Eh, offshore wind is wildly expensive per kwh and super slow. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense when we can move faster with onshore, solar and batteries.
I was just talking about this with some friends the other day about how when we were kids on really hot days we'd have power outages as the grid couldn't cope
I’m sure this information will be major headlines in all the Newscorp papers, along with congratulatory pieces on how the government is steering us in the right direction.
I know! There was so much demand on their servers they had to take the articles down but I read them and they were balanced and objective and unbiased.
For the last couple of years I've listened to the parliamentary speeches of Coalition MPs and senators. Every spring they've had dire warnings about "the summer ahead", and how we would be seeing the electricity grid crashing due to an over-reliance of renewables.
Those claims have not been matched by real world experience, and this ABC News article makes it sounds like renewables and batteries are actually a huge boon to our summertime energy mix.
The article makes it sound like that because solar and batteries actually are a huge boon to our energy mix, summertime or not.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/record-year-for-renewables-eases-prices-and-pollution-as-coal-clunkers-go-missing-in-queensland/
Remember the days of rolling blackouts so everyone got some chance at a/c? Recently blackouts seem to be because local transformers overheat.
As, as happened yesterday, because of fallen trees and burnt powerpoles.
Solar alone has been a huge boon to the grid for dealing with summer heatwaves. For the most part solar solved that problem over a decade ago.
But solar uptake didn’t stop once the problem was solved, and the grid stability was at risk because there was looking to be so much solar on cooler days that there wouldn’t be enough demand for electricity, and demand would fall below the safe operating level of the fossil fuel generators, which would cause them to trip offline. The solution to that problem has been batteries, mostly to increase demand on the grid during solar peak, and we actually will see a net effect of batteries being charged from fossil fuel plants around midday, but that will be offset by the fossil fuel plants remaining at minimum load during the evening peak.
But but I was told renewables are a waste of time and nuclear is the solution to our problems /s
Will never stop being mad how different things would be if under the decade of liberals we invested in solar and batteries as much as we are know which is arguably still not as much as we could be doing
Actually batteries being added to the grid has been much much much faster than anyone predicted since the incentives started. It’s going to be interesting seeing its effects on transmission networks.
I'm going to surprise you a bit. Under the liberals and the state government there was a double dip on solar panels there for a bit. You could get a 6kw system for as little as 2k out of pocket.
Additionally a lot of places that were effected by the black summer bushfires got solar and battery systems (to be early adopters of the current roll out). That was a 50% subsidy. Town where I live has a lot of people on it. It has been great in storms... but....ahhhh... I suspect it's about to be tested out properly in the next week or 3.
I mean... Nuclear could also be a solution to this problem.
An expensive solution to the problem (also heatwaves have caused French nuclear power plants to close).
Aside from the water, environmental, cost, schedule, expertise, risk management, nuclear proliferation, continued concentration of generation, natural disaster risk, and national security issues… yes, nuclear could be an option too.
I think the concentration one is a good point, the more we can distribute generation, the better. I wouldn't be surprised if we end up with regulation in the future that all jew house builds need a solar system.
Straight to the royal commission with you
Yeap. Concentration is a disaster and national security risk
But it's great for big private energy companies.
Should have happened when they introduced the water tank legislation. Not just for jew houses either, for all new houses.
Best time to build nuclear was 20 years ago. Too late now when we can just build solar wind and hydro for cheaper and we already got the expertise here (unlike for nuclear)
> Best time to build nuclear was 20 years ago.
John Howard gave it a red hot go 20 years ago, but even he realised it was a cash cow for his vested interests too large to fool the public with.
I think his one sided UMPNER report published in 2005 concluded it was going to take a massive carbon tax to make Nuclear competitive against our cheap coal fired power.
If we start now we could get nuclear online in 20 years! Or continue with adding renewables and batteries like… right now… for less money…
All the people in Australia who are "pro-nuclear" are never pro-build-nuclear-near-my-house.
Nuclear is way too inflexible to be able to handle the solar duck curve. It fails as an engineering approach for this reason.
Let alone being an undesirable approach for economic reasons. Nuclear is way too expensive.
Literally the worst solution
Compared to fossil fuels? One kilo of uranium is equivalent to 1-3 million kilos of coal.
Coal is cheaper bra.
We can’t even roll out the NBN but somehow without a nuclear industry we could rollout nuclear power plants.
The countries that already have nuclear industries still can’t get it done on time or in budget but somehow even when the economics in a best case scenario still don’t beat renewables we will be able to.
It’s fantasy land.
In 10 years time. Maybe
Yeah and it’s only 15 years and billions of dollars away
"15 years" I'll believe that when a nuclear project ever comes in under time and budget.
Nuclear works in more efficiently, both from an economic, and operation sense, when it delivers stable output for long periods, than when it is ramped up and down frequently.
So it is not a solution to the problem of efficiently matching available supply to summer demand peaks.
PS:
Rephrased for clarity.
This is perfectly accurate. I'm not sure why it attracted a few downvotes.
Upvoted to restore some balance.
Well my grammar was poor, maybe that is it:
Should have been:
I think renewables are the way for public power needs but nuclear to fuel the modern private sector (AI and the such)
Not what the engineers say.
I'd prefer to have the engineers design the grid rather than LNP bullshit talking points.
You made me laugh in this shitty timeline so I’m trying to save you from downvoting oblivion with my upvote.
You mean... solar panels provide peak power at the same time as demand peaks?
How could we have ever have guessed this!
Summer peaks - yes, winter peaks - no
The good news is the CSIRO modeling shows that winter peaks, with the lowest renewable output, are fortunately also the periods of lowest demand.
This means battery storage should be more than sufficient in the future.
Pretty crazy that batteries are already 10% of the grid in peak periods of summer.
Not to mention wind resources are slightly better in winter than summer.
As we move away from natural gas sources of heating I wonder if the modelling stays the same
It does, although the current plan has some gas peakers that are expected to be used ~ 4 days of the year.
These can theoretically be supplied with Biogas to be carbon nuetral.
One of the cool parts is these gas plants will actually be used to stabilise the grid, not by burning fuel, but by spinning the generators with electricity from the grid and using them as syncronus condensers, adding inertia and load capacity.
Yes as instead of using 5kW of energy from burning gas, we can use 1kW of electricity to provide 5kW of heating with heat pumps (Air conditioniners). Even if you went from burning gas in The house for heat to burning gas at a gas generator to power all the heat pumps replacing gas heating, you still greatly reduce the usage of gas. And the electricity can come from renewables most of the time.
It will because electric heating is actually more efficient overall thanks to the wonder of heat pumps.
It would also be really efficient, both in winter and summer, to have energy-efficient homes. I know the pink bats scandal is weighing heavily on that topic, but having stronger insulation and refitting homes would help make the switch to electric heating.
I'm not sure how you're defining this, but it's not correct. The key concept here is "residual demand" after variable renewables (solar and wind), where you need gas/coal/hydro to fill the shortfall. It can also be useful to think about that in GWh per day terms rather than MW terms, as batteries already do a great job of covering short-lived demand spikes like hot summer evenings.
Once you start looking at the residual left to cover after renewables and shallow batteries, June/July is absolutely the problem time in all states except Queensland and the current consensus is that we'll be relying on gas power to fill those gaps for decades to come.
I suggest looking at the CSIRO Gen Cost Report, for clarity, the plan is 82% net zero by 2030 and net zero by 2050.
There will be gas used during the transition period.
At some point it's cheaper to just have a few carbon fuel generators for emergencies. Those will run on gas for a couple of decades, but by 2050 biofuels will be a renewable replacement.
"periods of lowest demand"
But that will not always be true as more and more people remove gas from their homes.
Batteries help but from my own experience since May (when I installed my solar energy system with a battery), in mid-winter batteries can struggle to fully offset expected demand. My battery was empty before dinnertime. We will still need some alternate source, whether that is community batteries or some other solution to store solar energy for those caught short.
That's where the grid comes in. The state has more room to play with for batteries and solar/wind generation than your home
Oh ok, well no point in using renewables then I guess, case closed
Winter isn’t the problem. It’s spring and autumn that is the worry. Plenty of sunny cloud free days, but where it’s not warm enough for people to run their air cons much / at all. The grid was designed with the assumption of electricity flowing one way from generators to consumers. But now consumers are generators and we’re seeing some sections step down transformers suddenly needing to do step up transforming. Lots of research happening in transmission network management these days.
Not what the article is saying.
It is remarking on a turning point in management of the grid where a heatwave has not caused any significant issues. The article isn't about how solar panels work but that there are now so many panels installed the surge in demand was largely offset by the surge in supply.
It's a good news story. They are traditionally less interesting.
You literally just reworded what the person above you said....
I "literally" didn't.
That post made the bleeding obvious statement that solar panels only work when its sunny.
The ABC's article was pointing out that there are now enough installed solar panels that heatwaves are no longer an issue for the energy grid.
them: "solar panels provide peak power at the same time as demand peaks"
you: "there are now so many panels installed the surge in demand was largely offset by the surge in supply"
It's the same picture, just different words unless you're a total, unredeemable pedant
Mate, I cannot help your comprehension skills.
If you need 110% detail to understand a concept you're going to be too insufferable for most people to want to deal with
For heat waves yes, for normal days no
It’s why there is talk of making power free in the middle of the day.
Edit: lol it’s amazing how offended people are by free power
Yea, the free power is going to have great benefits for industry and energy intensive proccess like Aluminium smelters.
Huge competitive advantage if we play our cards right.
Yeah I’m not sure why so many people think free power is bad.
Big coal and nuclear stations can’t gear around demand either, which is why wholesale prices sometimes went negative at night.
Which is when high electricity using industries like refineries maximize output and we recharge the snowy hydro.
Except in winter, when heating is needed.
Yes, although the neat part is that the worst renewable production coincides with the period of lowest energy demand.
Where are you getting this from? Go look in opennem.org.au where you can view 25 years of data collated by season. Electricity demand is and always has been highest in winter.
Winter 2025: 57,776 GWh
Summer 2025 54,922 GWh
Winter 2024: 58,881 GWh
Summer 2024 54,507 GWh
Winter 2023 53,945 GWh
Summer 2023 51,422 GWh
Etc. It stands out as obvious annual peaks on the graph every winter.
Lowest for now - there are some indications that the overall grid demand will be highest for the NEM in winter, with plentiful solar in summer behind the meter.
Electrification in the southern states (esp. VIC) makes this look worse, though it will still reduce overall emissions.
Why is it always like this...
"Renewables do 30% amazing!"
"But they don't solve 100% so are useless and we should build more coal plants"
Thats pretty much exactly what they tell country bumpkins who vote nationals
Thinking we’ll get another winter feels real optimistic right now.
I miss proper winters. Frosty mornings in a coat and scarf drinking a hot coffee. Lovely sounds rain on the roof. Instead of the hell we are in now.
Thats sounds lovely. Keep going.
Everything being green and alive and gardens thriving from the rain. Happy animals (including my old horse) who I put snazzy horse coats on to keep him warm and fed him his dinner with warm molasses mixed in. Walks in the Dandenongs amongst the ferns or on the beach in the cool fresh air….. etc.
I think I should move to Ireland 🇮🇪
you write good. you should do more of it.
That’s very kind of you to say. I’m not very good but I find writing relaxing at shit times like this. I hope you’re keeping cool and safe today.
In my head I thought we were only very much at the beginning of the battery rollout. That they were able to contribute 10% already on peak demand day is impressive. It will be interesting to see this shift in the next 5-10 years as the number of households with dedicated batteries or EVs as well as community based batteries and grid scale batteries increase significantly.
I believe this 10% is only from community or grid scale batteries. Home batteries would just show up as lower grid demand. So in the next 5-10 years I would expect to see the demand curve flatten, and batteries take up a much bigger percentage of peak demand.
Per this paper here it looks like the AEMO estimates behind the meter home PV and battery power production and consumption, see page 64 https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/electricity/nem/planning_and_forecasting/nem_esoo/2023/forecasting-approach_electricity-demand-forecasting-methodology_final.pdf
Therefore, that big battery surge is grid batteries.
Aren't people also selling to the grid if they're on Amber? Might help slightly as well.
Yes, people should oversize their batteries and sell back.
But it probably won't do enough to the grid meters - they'll still see it on aggregate as lower demand for the suburb. Maybe if home meters get properly aggregated.
Alot of the early batteries have capacity tied up in stability markets and aren't focused on load shifting, in another 2-3 years the difference is going to be insane.
We need more, a lot more batteries. I've been saying this for years now, solar will be the default for most aussie owner-occupied homes soon, we need batteries for all of them as well. Vehicle-to-grid technologies will be a massive win here when they get up and running in Australia, so much energy stored in people's driveways that isn't being used. Of course management of these distributed storage and generation systems will be key, this is what we need the energy market operators to be doing now, not doubling down on coal, but making their poles and wires handle load and distribution from households at the scales needed.
Matt Canavan is probably shaking his fist full of coal at the sun as we speak.
Pig of a bloke
AC on 24 all day running off solar and battery at night and still fed in enough power to the grid to cover my daily supply charge. Hard to argue with that.
How big a system do you have?
14kw solar, 10kw hybrid inverter and 16kw battery.
Cost you how much?
About 17k. I was paying $2500 a year in power bills so at current prices it's paid off in 7 years, although that wasn't really my concern with getting it, Whole house backup was the selling point for me.
The value of being able to run your AC for "free" is more than the value offset by not paying electricity bills.
Your bills were $2500 a year but I bet during that time you weren't running the AC all day and night.
How do you go regarding the backup part. I've heard that if there's a power outage the battery system is also supposed to switch off, this way if someone is working on the powerlines it reduces danger.
I'm not sure how accurate it is, the person who told me has a backup generator for when the power goes out.
That was true, but is quickly becoming out of date. About 25% of modern battery/inverters have enough brains to isolate themselves and be full backup without interference
That's called anti-islanding and it's usually a requirement from Distributors to connect your solar system in the first place for exactly the reasons you stated.
Generally speaking solar isn't there to provide you with a back up power source (although this is possible) but rather to reduce your costs.
Same, although after yesterday's cloudy day, mine didn't refill as much as I'd like. Charging from the grid atm, to reduce any potential demand on the grid later and make sure our outage backup is usable. It's the first day this month it's cost me anything.
6kw on roof, 5kw inverter, 30kw batteries.
Do you have globird available in your area? You can pull from the grid for three hours free each day.
I'll take a look thanks, this is the first time I've had to top it up.
that’s the dream!
My ac is tripping because our solar is overloading. 6kw an hour I think
5kw inverter? Mine is a 10 and I was seeing upwards of 7kw at times yesterday when it was 44 degrees with AC running / 2 high end PC's and a server rack going but no issues.
LNP governments are the worst. If it was up to them they'd be no NBN, Solar, Wind. They gave away our LNG resources for almost nothing. Incompetent, ideological, religious, racist, sexist, regressive.
<sad LNP noises>
Won't somebody think of the coal donors!
Its incredible how much of a no brainer seems to be in Aus yet its so unnecessarily contentious.
It's only contentious because people with influence won't make as much money as they otherwise would.
This
It's easy to talk about places with low demand using mostly renewable power, but even NSW is, right now, running on over 60% solar - around 7GW and twice the output of coal, with wind edging towards 1GW (link is to a live site so those amounts will change over time).
Running a grid on renewables with hydro/battery storage and a tiny amount of gas for freak events when there's little wind and sunshine is absolutely achievable. The only sad thing is that we have to wait so long for a government to get into power who would do something about it.
Also great to see the batteries charging up too. Doing a great job of keeping the grid stable.
Yep, as of a couple of days ago, my neighbour has been getting the dual benefit of less sun hitting his tile roof to heat his upstairs, and being able to run his aircon on his solar and battery. What's not to like?
Apparently AGL had big plans for wind and solar farms, but have put that all on hold to focus on battery storage. The number of grid batteries being deployed or in the works is insane and the general population don't know about it. 5 years from now we are going to be in great shape and a destination for industry due to cheap power. We just need to not loose all the existing industries before then.
Stupid sexy Cummins and his woke agenda
This is good news and impressive that even at this early stage batteries are showing up on the chart, not long ago they would have been a slightly thicker line.
Feels like we're missing a trick still dragging our feet on off-shore wind.
The astroturfing against offshore wind is wild.
Eh, offshore wind is wildly expensive per kwh and super slow. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense when we can move faster with onshore, solar and batteries.
I was just talking about this with some friends the other day about how when we were kids on really hot days we'd have power outages as the grid couldn't cope
Grid “sails through” heat wave ? We’ve had two days of blackouts in South Sydney. The grid is cooked.
And yet I dealt with multiple power outages over the last few days heatwave.
Protection settings are more sensitive on TFB days to avoid bushfires
Get a home battery to go with your rooftop solar.
My house has a battery, the large business I was at all week does not and could not justify one.