Comment by nandomrumber
1 day ago
What we’re dealing with is successive Australian governments with absolutely no plan for long term energy infrastructure, so they’ve lobbed it over the wall to the residential customer.
Here, you deal with it. No options. It’s solar and batteries rammed down your throat. At your cost. If it doesn’t work out, it’s on us.
No big (reliable base load) energy projects to power industry in to the future, China can do all of that for us.
Equality. Everyone can have nothing.
> No big (reliable base load) energy projects to power industry in to the future
Snowy? https://theconversation.com/white-elephant-hardly-snowy-2-0-...
Snowy aside, households are installing 40kWh batteries now. Add 2 cars V2G that give you an additional 40kWh with impacting the car battery life overly. Across the 12 million Australia houses that adds something of the order of 1 terawatt hours of storage to the grid. It's almost double the total predicted storage (660GWh) Australia will need by 2050 https://www.energycouncil.com.au/analysis/battery-storage-au...
The strategy of "lobbing it over the wall to the residential customer" has already turned Australia households into major suppliers of electricity to the grid. Apparently they don't mind the risk if there is money to be made. Now it looks like the government are hoping household batteries will become major suppliers of storage to the grid. If that is as successful as solar, it will be by any definition a wildly successful strategy for handing the transition away from fossil fuels.
The weird thing is: this was all kicked off by the Howard government. They would be the very conservatives who are railing against renewables now.
Snowy 2.0 isn’t an electricity generator, it’s pumped hydro. It relies on electricity being generated elsewhere.
The governments plan is bait and switch. Make it seem lucrative at the start, and then squeeze everyone who committed on better terms by ratcheting up the fees and ratcheting down the feed-in tariffs.
Alternatively, we could have built a handful of big combined cycle gas plants, close to the retiring coal plants to take advantage of existing transmission infrastructure, and legislated a cheap rate for gas from the gas extraction industry, and Australians could have had all-you-can-use electricity for $40 a month.
But instead of that, we’ve committed at least a couple of generations to virtue signalling, like Australia’s GHG emissions make any difference.
We’re happy to export the gas and coal, and uranium, so India and China can have cheap power to run industrial economies.
Cheap power comes not from residential customers managing their time of use, but from the excess of industrialisation. And we’re rapidly making it cost prohibitive to manufacture anything in Australia, or even run a restaurant. So that people in far away lands can have better lives.
Make us look pretty stupid to be honest.