Ignoring the politics, we have to say that China has done the world collectively as a whole a major service in strategically developing and mass producing super cheap solar panels.
Don't forget Germany. If you look at the amount of PV built in Germany early this century and make some admittedly strong assumptions about learning curve, one could argue the Energiewende, then usually called failure, singlehandedly accelerated PV development by decades. I don't recall Germany ever credited on that.
I 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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Ignoring the politics, we have to say that China has done the world collectively as a whole a major service in strategically developing and mass producing super cheap solar panels.
Don't forget Germany. If you look at the amount of PV built in Germany early this century and make some admittedly strong assumptions about learning curve, one could argue the Energiewende, then usually called failure, singlehandedly accelerated PV development by decades. I don't recall Germany ever credited on that.
I still wonder the same about the EU and LED lighting. Prohibiting traditional bulbs was highly controversial at the time
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I remember some old tidbit about the American westward expansion, most railroad projects failed and went bankrupt and were sold for pennies on the dollar to the ultimate owners.
Something sad about that, really.
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It has been called a "gift to the world". https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/science/earth/sun-and-win...
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.
That's not true. I think China is grateful to them for selling them their PV industry for a Wurstbrot.
It's probably because germany decided to sorta give up on it and all of the production and further research moved to china?
Yeah and then we let it die
It really is a huge service not just to the developed world that needs to decarbonize but also a huge service to the developing world. Solar can be put up quickly and cheaply and is good for about 2 decades and can be paired with cheap LiFo batteries to give round the clock electricity. Both of these are relatively portable. It can really bootstrap the economies of local communities where infrastructure hasn't been built out. Then combined that with portable Internet connection via something like Starlink or one of the competitor networks, we can really enable the available human capital in developing nations to realize their potential.
It's all very exciting I think.
Starlink isn't necessary. In India you can get 1GB/day of cell phone data for $4/month, and other developing nations aren't far behind.
The solar+battery revolution is doing for power what cell phones did for communications in the third world in the 90's and 2000's.
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It is exciting.
> On farmland and on rooftops, Iraqis turn to solar as power grid falters
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/farmland-rooftops-ir...
The biggest bottle neck to really solving the energy problem is now the price and fragility of high voltage DC long haul connections. Between those and solar you can have energy anywhere any time.
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And the US and Germany since the 1970s for putting public funds into early research
US fossil fuel subsidies: 757B$ [0] US solar subsidies: 7B$ [1]
[0]: https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-proposals-to-red... [1]: https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/fossil-fuels/rene...
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Let's hope someone can do the same for grid-scale seasonal storage. "Excess" solar electricity won't be free in (noon, summer) if you can easily bank it for (night, winter).
A second solution is to overbuild so you have enough even in winter. Easier to do near the equator.
A third solution is to pipe it across timezones using HVDC and accept some level of efficiency loss and some geopolitical risks.
A fourth solution is to mix lots of wind, which performs better in winter and cancels out the lower insolation.
Realistically it's going to be all of the above, with the balance determined by local factors.
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Power travels near the speed of light. In theory, the entire globe can be connected and countries with daylight can supply those at night in a cycle.
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It's a thread about Australia not Austria.
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 so cheap, infact, that no other country in the world is able to compete even with huge tariffs.
They are not cheap. They are extremely efficient at manufacturing. The 201st panel look exactly the same as 1st one. Definitely no human labor involved. Huge well readable serial numbers placed on multiple places of the panel for camera based identification. Usually no single failing panel in shipping container. The bad ones were clearly damaged during transportation. This efficiency looks scary when I see output of my workplace in Germany.
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For years I've been hearing one excuse for the US not doing more about climate change is that China is polluting more and if they aren't doing something about it then why should we?
The argument always seemed disingenuous. For sure, China produces a lot of pollution as they are modernizing, but they are also investing a lot in the direction of sustainability. If we take the balance of (pollution produced - pollution prevented) for the two countries, the day will come, if it isn't now, that the US is on the losing side of that comparison, and I wonder what the new argument will be for the US not doing more.
Pretty sure the US has always been on the losing side of that, when calculated per capita.
China's numbers did rise quickly on that measure and is above the EU now I think but still way below the US.
And if you don't like per capita, then China with 4x as many people is still behind the US when you compare cumulative CO2.
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.
Latest excuse: sustainable energy is a scam.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Ending...
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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?
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The article was about Australia, not China. Incidentally it was also Australia that invented the modern solar panel.
> The article was about Australia, not China.
And??? The parent commenter wrote about the manufacturer of said solar panels, going outside the frame of that article to something related but still relevant, given that that article surely is meant to stimulate a more general discussion.
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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.
How is that even remotely related to this topic or to what OP said? Or do you just have a thing you want to rant about no matter the topic?
> China has done the world collectively as a whole a major service
I doubt the Uyghurs would agree:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57124636
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/in-broad...
https://sustainabilitymag.com/articles/gb-energy-blocks-use-...
https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/solar-companies-linked-to-...
I agree their treatment of the Uyghurs is deplorable but the way you had to chop that quote like a creationist undermines your point. It’s possible to say China has done both good and bad things, and recognizing the cost rather than denying something factual is probably a more effective.
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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.
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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.
My dad was a super super early adopter with a tiny 2kW system that cost him about $20k, but he has a grandfathered feed-in tariff of about 50c/kW.
I'm pretty sure he hasn't actually paid for electricity or gas (same provider) since.
I haven't look into the details, but It sure feels like a slap in the face to those of us who invested in panels.
I think this is about battery sales for those that can afford it. Fill a battery up for free and use the power during peak hours.
There's currently a significant rebate on batteries in Australia. (Or maybe just Victoria?) So that's definitely one attempted solution. People are getting it for costs paying off in under 5 years.
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> 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.
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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.
> This is a generational success story
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.
Yeah, they can just get fucked.
What a success!
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I never said anyone was being charged negatively. The wholesale price goes negative. The negative price currently is not passed on.
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* only in the middle of the day, when the real price of that electricity may be negative, so it's still sold at a profit
This seems like a great way to encourage the behavior you want, which is conserving when energy is emitting more carbon by shifting consumption. Do your laundry, charge a car, charge a whole house batter, run laundry, crank the AC, run your own aluminum smelter, whatever.
In the UK, you can go on an agile tariff that does exactly this. I'm on one.
It's quite fun (and educational) with the kids to work out when to put the car on to charge, when to run the dryer etc, looking at the few days ahead forecasts.
Last month, we paid 11p per kWh on average, which is less than half what you'd pay on a standard tariff, and it's nice to be doing something good for the environment too. It's particularly satisfying to charge up the car when tariffs go negative.
Here's today's rates (actuals): https://agilebuddy.uk/latest/agile
Here's a forecast: https://prices.fly.dev/A/
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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.
You'd spend $1000 to save $0.20 on electricity every day?
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The real price of solar electricity is never negative. Unlike something like oil wells (which really have driven the price of oil negative) you can just turn solar off.
Prices have gone negative because of things like subsidies - which in the short term is a good thing IMHO - it subsidizes industries developing systems to make use of that free (but not negative cost) energy...
> you can just turn solar off
Somebody has to go and turn it off, and having this person available overwhelms all of your operational costs.
Or alternatively, you need the infrastructure to do it automatically, what is currently expensive. (But there aren't intrinsic reasons for that being expensive, it's probably due to lack of scale.)
If it's just slightly negative, or just rarely so, it's not worth it.
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Yes the article talks about consumers scheduling things like washing machines during the day, or even filling up a battery.
This is the “smart grid” idea, right? We just haven’t fully explored it yet.
Something I firmly believe is that there’s a ton of low hanging fruit for timing our energy use better. It is just hidden by the desire to present a uniform energy price.
Like why not run our water heaters when power is cheap? Then if that became a thing, we might even be interested in larger water heater tanks. Batteries cost per volume, you only pay for the surface are of a metal tank!
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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.
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More countries where there's a surplus, are advising people to charge or use electricity during the day.
and only in a few states.
My home state of WA is not a part of the same power netwrok.
With free power for 3 hours a day, I'd skip installing solar and I'd buy a ~30kwh battery (2x Ruixu Lithi2-16) and a big inverter.
Charge the batteries in the free time and then use the stored power the rest of the day.
Australia will give you a 30% discount on that purchase, they have a fund of 2.3 Billion Australian dollars available for this purpose called the Cheaper Home Batteries program.
The 30% battery discount in Australia is only available to households that also have solar systems. https://www.dcceew.gov.au/energy/programs/cheaper-home-batte...
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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
Man as someone paying a premium for power in the US, Australia is sounding really nice
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For some reason when I read that I thought it was offering anyone in the world free electricity, and I started imagining the USA setting up a giant undersea cable... then I realized the voltage drop would be too high, then finally realized they meant it for Australians only!
Now I'm imagining drilling through the Earth to get the shortest possible line from Australia to my house. I like this
If you're already down there, set up some geothermal!
We can repurpose the burrito tubes.
The core is mostly iron and nickel already, so you don't have to drill the whole way!!
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.
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Hey now, it's not free oil.
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.
Mike Cannon-Brookes is involved with a company (Sun Cable) which plans on exporting Australian Solar to Singapore via a 4200km undersea DC cable.
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.
6 free hours during weekend with 7kW home charger give you 42kWh, that's ~200km per week free. That's not nothing.
A few things.
Obviously it still works great on the weekend, or whatever days you’re not working to charge the EV at home for free.
Given all power is free, why wouldn’t you charge the EV at work in the middle of the day? Even if you pay to have the charger installed it will pay back quickly.
It’s not going to happen overnight, but with literally free electricity things will change quickly, and even huge parking structures or lots will have a stack of chargers that are free or very close to it.
I don’t know how the charging infrastructure in Australia is. But it’s of course cool that they have excess energy enough.
Everything about the push to convert the whole fleet to EVs falls apart under even the slightest rational scrutiny.
"the push to convert the whole fleet"
Is that anything like the "_ agenda being pushed" I keep hearing about, but can't seem to see anywhere?
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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.
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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.
And for pointing out the obvious, you’re just being negative. A right-wing nut job conspiracy theorist.
No, I just run the numbers. The numbers they provide.
> 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.
The relatively EASY part is building large arrays of solar panels .....
The HARD PART is
1) STORING this electricity ( Storage is very expensive and technology changing)
3) Getting this electricity from the storage to where its wanted - is EXPENSIVE and requires many $BILLIONS of new transmission lines ....
Taking cues from some sci-fi: Could "broadcast power" be a thing? Wireless power on a medium if not mass scale.
Wish they would do this in California where wholesale power can go negative for the same reason.
Not free, but PGE has started an hourly variable rate plan pilot:
https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/hourly-flex-pricin...
However, they aren't taking net metering customers yet, but if you end up spending more on the hourly variable rate plan, they'll refund you to the same you would have spent on the regular time of use rate plan.
And they actually charge you a fee if you generate. My brother in law unhooked from the grid because back feeding was charging him $100 a month. To give away power.
> And they actually charge you a fee if you generate. My brother in law unhooked from the grid because back feeding was charging him $100 a month. To give away power.
Which utility and plan is this? I'm not aware of any California residential rate plans that charge you for putting power back on the grid, much less $100/month.
That said, wholesale electricity rates are set by high frequency supply/demand markets.
Recent residential net metering rates are closely aligned with wholesale supply/demand based rates, so most utilities will compensate your brother in law near $0 when you are pushing power to the grid when wholesale rates are <= $0, because there are not enough buyers of the power he is generating.
He is using the grid as a battery, which comes at a cost.
This is of course changing as more grid connected storage comes online and creates demand for off peak electricity. In that case, you actually get paid for selling power back to the grid during high grid stress periods. I get paid a few hundred dollars a year in CA for doing that with my measly home backup battery.
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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.
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Is that a California thing? In OR it’s like ~$15 to interlink (or whatever the term is)
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.
Meanwhile in Great Sydney Area, Australia, my current energy rate is 60c (peak) 45c (shoulder) 32c (off-peak) / kWh. That's totally fraud
please dont post the same comment twice
Damn that's a big difference when compared to how the State of Alabama treats solar energy.
You get penalized for having solar panels here in Alabama the Beautiful.
Jit chemical processes, refinig and metal melting?
Sshhh… Don‘t tell the AI companies :P
Its only for residences ( not business )
Only available in some parts of Australia
Solar power benefits the rich in Australia.
Renters, as usual, rarely get it.
Did you read the article?
It clearly said the free electricity will be for renters too.
You are not allowed to say that on this site! PLEASE respect the rules
As I said........
In Australia - solar power overwhelmingly benefits the rich over renters.
A few hours a day of free electricity for all does not wipe that out.
Solar power is a rich persons thing in Australia, remains very very strongly true.
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so, like Norway, Australia is squeaky clean (just don’t look at the coal they export for burning in China & India)
So just to fantasize for a bit,
Suppose fusion power becomes a thing, and after handwaiving some issues let's assume it can power everything indefinitely.
Does that make things like heating, cooling, travel, ocean desalination, bandwidth, AI, Bitcoin mining, permanently free?
Shouldn't all of humanity be homing in on that holy grail?
I read here and there that geothermal could be the next best thing. Maybe HN can say more on that.
(P.S. terrestrial fusion may also explain why nobody bothers to build Dyson spheres out there)
In short: yes. It can be done. Clean, almost limitless energy, funded in a way to provide effectively free electricity for ordinary people. Restrictions would have to be in place to prevent true excess, but regulations already handle such matters in other areas.
The ambient vibe of our time, and here on HN, is often really pessimistic. I don't believe such pessimism is realistic. Commercial grade fusion power will come, and we should push very hard to make it happen. It will change the equations at the core of the economy and open up whole new paths for technology -- far beyond the pure digital.
No.
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.
Then some very rich and powerful people become very unrich and unpowerful. And they could never let that happen willingly.
But they'd be able to build their moon castles sooner and control the next frontier in their lifetimes:
What's cooler than being a billionaire? A SPACE BILLIONAIRE.
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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.
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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.
Meanwhile in Great Sydney Area, Australia right now, my current energy rate is 60c (peak) 45c (shoulder) 32c (off-peak) / kWh. That's totally fraud
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
But it is so damn HOT there. And Australia has the most vicious animals and plants too. It is like an alien continent.
Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that even the electrons are poisonous there...
As an Australian, I’ve found the electrons toxicity to be very dose dependent.
Definitely watch out for the severe acute toxicity variants.
Zapbears
I'm pretty sure they get snow sometimes in NSW. AUS is big enough you can find many climates there!
You're not wrong about the plants and animals though. It's basically an island, and islands always end up with super weird flora and fauna - there usually just aren't many (any?) predators, so the competition takes species in weird directions.
There are many ski resorts. The biggest has 44 lifts.
Yes, it snows.
I’ve lived here 15 years and seen two snakes, zero deadly spiders, zero crocs.
Yes, I’m on the city fringe. Like millions of others here.
The daddy long legs hunts and kills other spiders.
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