South Australia is the driest state in the driest continent. It's the most perfect place for solar power. Australia as-a-whole is a perfect place for solar power.
A university lecturer of mine got one of the first solar panel installations in South Australia, it was mentioned in the local Adelaide paper, that's how much of a big deal it was. This was around 20 years ago. Twenty years!
South Australia (still) has some of the highest priced electricity in the world. There's been talk of privatization as the cause of this, which has been somewhat debunked[0], and the primarily agreed reason for the high prices is what's referred to as "gold-plating of the network" in which there was an agreement that the 'poles and wires' companies could not lose money on any infrastructure investment they committed to - the regulator would allow them continually increase the prices they charge in order to cover the cost of the infrastructure investment[1][2][3].
So, despite how perfect Australia is for solar power, private or commercial, despite the fact that solar panels have been getting commercially installed on private homes for 20-odd years, and despite the networks being given carte-blanche for infrastructure investment, somehow, Australia is un-prepared for a flood of solar power.
The various organizations that are meant to be on top of this shit have been asleep at the wheel for fucking YEARS. This was highlighted by the big power failure in South Australia in 2016 when a number of wind farms shut down due to 'safety settings' being set at overly paranoid parameters, which was a problem that had already been solved in Europe (the frustrating irony of this is that the wind farms were being blamed for the power failure, when the actual situation was that the wind farms could have PREVENTED it, if their configurations were 'best practice' - the problems in the electricity network that caused the wind farms to trip were powerful winds that took down some big-arse transmission lines)[4][5]
Australia's issues with renewable energy are entirely of their own making. And it's far more likely attributable to incompetence than malice. I'd almost prefer it was malice because malice comes and goes. Incompetence is systemic.
Hello fellow south australian! I agree completely with everything you said.
One thing you left out though is the very real possibility of an electricity utility death spiral, as the (wilfully) rising grid costs combine with obligation of supply and the declining cost of solar self-sufficiency meet on an economic collision course.
The cost of a tesla powerwall in SA right now is about $10k. One or two of these combined with an average size roof PV array will run you about AUD$20-30k. For people used to a quarterly power bill of $1k+ this is an absolute no-brainer. Even if you don't have the money up front it's an easy loan that simply pays itself off, then it's nothing but upside.
Right now that payback period is 5-10 years but as the tech progresses that will decrease. Once the price tag to substantially remove electricity bills from your life reaches $10k or so everyone will do it and the utilities are fucked. Hell, I can envisage neighbourhood power co-ops. I know someone with so much extra power they have no idea what to do with it. They air condition their garage 24/7!
Perhaps a startup opportunity there coordinating and organising "local sourced" power. There would be hardware involved but I know at least 5 people who would love to be able to sell power to their neighbours. Someone just needs to remove all the friction.
I think the concept of micro-grids is the likely direction. The grid itself is too useful to give up, and it's "there". This may be analogous to the co-op that you're suggesting. I think there are already companies that allow you to share your power like that. If I find a link I'll post it.
The grid will become the backup for when there is a local issue with your system, that's my take from a very shallow amount of reading.
Yes! I said a few years ago that we will need decentralization in power grids and mesh networks around the world, not just in software. It will also help prevent a Carrington event and survive an EMP:
The grid is also important to stabilise the frequency of the grid. The inertia of the spinning rotors from the generator helps to counteract the increase in frequency causes by large amounts of export power from the solar inverters
I'm fairly certain this is systematic malice (or at least systematic self-interested callousness).
And reading through your linked blog posts, it seems you know it too.
People don't just accidentally campaign against carbon taxes and coincidentally embrace climate change denial and attack science when it benefits their largest donors.
This article itself is knowingly malicious in presenting a false narrative in order to stop Australians saving money that would otherwise go to fossil fuel interests.
>And reading through your linked blog posts, it seems you know it too.
Heh, thanks for taking the time to read it.
I like to try to present the facts as I see them before getting too tin-foil-hat ranty.
Yes, the current Australian Government is as close to being in the pockets of mining companies as it's possible to be, and yes, they rail against renewable energy to an extent that is confusing to anyone somewhat literate and numerate.
Our Energy Minister spoke at an anti-wind-farm rally for goodness sake.
The opposition party seem entirely toothless on numerous issues and just do not, for whatever reason, hold the government to account on any of it's ludicrous statements, policy suggestions, or general direction.
But saying that stuff, in a forum where people can reply, is asking for a flame-war.
Hopefully the facts speak for themselves, whilst Australia's political class continues to shred any of its remaining reputation.
As a follow up, as of the third quarter 2019, I'm $50 away from my solar system having paid for itself. I need to update the graphs...
> The opposition party seem entirely toothless on numerous issues and just do not, for whatever reason...
The opposition is a political party who was explicitly formed to champion the rights of people like the coal miners. A lot of their heartland in Newcastle-region and probably QLD is mining towns.
I'm always impressed that they can take an anti-mining stance at all; anti-coal policies target people who are traditionally core Labor activists. The mining union isn't the be-all and end-all, and I don't follow their internal struggles very much, but the Labor party must have some pretty structural reservations about shutting down mining jobs. These jobs are the easiest way for unskilled or semi-skilled labour to make money in Australia.
Australia's energy problems are a symptom of a much larger issue.
Australia is run by mining magnates and an energy oligarchy. Its government has very little concern for the future of the country - having sold most of it, out from under the Australian citizens - and its political class is hell-bent on cashing in. Australians should stop being so shocked about the impropriety of the nation and start paying more attention.
This is the nation that watched the Great Barrier Reef die in front of its eyes, for the sake of a few smashed avocados. Its the nation that got away with its genocide, while the world wasn't watching. Its a nation which glorifies war criminals as heroes and hides its political dissidents behind secret courts and non-public processes.
Its political system was specifically designed to allow only the ruling classes to wield power - the riffraff of the general population will never get what they want from their government, if big changes are required to get them.
The argument for Solar always sounds a lot like terra nullius, that was used to dispossess indigenous Australians of their land, and later their land rights.
Large scale solar is likely to cause problems for large numbers of native species. YMMV in how important you find that, but to me personally it is a huge issue.
I reckon I've seen a single open cut coal mine that's probably 10% of that size... Leigh Creek in SA. Actually, I just looked it up on GoogleMaps. It's "only" about 8km x 3km or so, or 2.5%. I still wonder how much electricity we could generate if we covered every coal mine in Australia with solar panels?
Carmichael coal mine is planned to be 447 square km [0], over half being "surface disturbance area"
Insolation at that location is about 2.1MWh per square metre per year, or 2100GWh per square km per year. [1]
Solar panels are around 20% efficiency, so lets call it 15% to include things like support areas.
The area used by that coal mine could generate 2100 x .15 x 447 = 140TWh per year
Austrailia currently uses 190TWh/year [2], so an area the size of that one mine could generate the majority of Austrailia's electrical requirements.
That's just back of envelope numbers, if we look at existing solar plants though, Solar Star in California generates [3] 526MWh/acre, or 130GWh/sqkm -- so this plant would generate 58TWh a year, still over 25% of requirements
There are many problems with solar power, but space use in Australia is not one.
Why would 'large scale solar' cause an issue for native species? Even if 100% of Australian power were generated by solar, what percentage of the total land area would be used?
Well, lets check! The total power generating capacity of Australia is about 66GW, but about 18 is already hydro, wind, or solar. So we need to come up with about 48GW. Lets take a fairly moderate estimate of 4 acres per MW (4000 acres per GW). It may be more or less than this, but in the long run this is not a terrible estimate. So we need to come up with about 50 * 4000 == 200,000 acres of land.
South Australia by itself is 243,000,000 acres, we need about 200k, so this is about .8% of the total land area. This seems like a lot! However, the total number of dwellings in South Australia is about 768,000. The average size of a roof, according to google, is about .03 acres. So just putting photovoltaics on 1/2 of the roof area (meh, I don't know how to estimate usable roof area with a random direction and I don't know whether roofs in Australia are flat, so lets take 1/2) would get you 11.5k acres.
So 5% of the total power usage of all of Australia could be provided just by putting solar panels on the roofs of houses in South Australia. Seems like a good deal for endangered species.
What about the other 95%? Well, again, you would only need 0.8% of South Australia to supply the energy needs of all of Australia.
Like you said, Australia is a MASSIVE country, and has extremely low population density and an almost perfect climate for solar power production. So what is your point exactly? That if they took less than 1% of the land of one part of the country and converted to 100% renewable energy some lizard which is only 'unique' by an arbitrary human criterion might have too much shade?
Terra nullius is a bit suspect as legal doctorines go, I haven't seen a reference that it was a used before it was created to be rejected when granting the Aboriginals land rights. The 'legal' justification for considering Australia uninhabited was basically (1) Australia was reachable by the British Navy and (2) the inhabitants didn't have a standing army that could inconvenience the British Navy.
The matter was that the High Court recognised that Aboriginals had every right to be part of Australian society & had a pretty solid claim to be the effective owners of the land. That is to say, 'terra nullius' was more about racism and culture than about facts and technicalities. It seems comparatively unlikely that we are going to recognise 75% of the species in Australia as being property-owning members of society.
You’ve described the legal basis for British sovereignty over Australia, but ownership and sovereignty are different and independent (eg my backyard is the sovereign territory of Australia but the property of me).
The legal basis for considering Australian territory to be the property of no-one was that the Aborigines appeared to have no concept of landownership; they were nomadic, didn’t build and permanent structures, didn’t farm, didn’t have any concept of which bits of land belong to whom. Without that, it’s difficult to say that anyone actually owns any piece of land in particular.
Second paragraph is half based on commonly-held misconceptions that are partially the result of early colonial propaganda: indigenous Australians did indeed have strong traditions of land occupation and diplomacy and knew exactly which land “belonged” to which tribe. They farmed extensively (research Wollombi as an example - yams from horizon to horizon according to white explorers recorded notes).
Of course, all nations are based upon the power to take or prevent what you have from being taken, and in that regard it’s no different from anywhere else in the world.
Ownership and sovereignty are different, but very much dependent on each other. Sovereignty literally means the ability to unilaterally determine what rules and rights shall apply and what rights won't, to define what's legal for that land and people.
You have rights to property, life and liberty essentially because the local constitutional law asserts that these rights are the law of the land - and it's worth to note that the basic set of unalienable constitutional rights is quite different in different sovereign countries, some things are almost universal, but there's a lot of differences. If sovereignty changes hands (e.g. if Australia would be conquered by USSR in a weird alternate history), then it's perfectly plausible for the new sovereign to assert that people like larnmar can't have any property rights, and all real estate is now the property of someone else - and that would be entirely legal, because they get to define legality.
On the other hand, suppose aliens land on Earth and quietly blorple all the fuzzbars between our atoms. We can’t possibly understand the blorpling but it doesn’t seem to be doing any harm so we leave it be.
A couple of centuries later we realise that if we’d blorple our own fuzzbars we’d be rich by now. But let’s face it, we were probably never going to develop blorpling technology on our own.
Solar can be deployed on land that's already being used for other purposes.
For example on top of houses and shopping centres. While we're also looking at shopping centres - there's a huge amount of unroofed parking, throw up some basic shelter to put the solar panels on and you get the dual-benefit of energy generation, and keeping the cars cooler.
They did the analysis for the Square Kilometer Array. WA came up as the perfect place for this kind of construction because of the lack of ecosystem to interfere with. Politics then moved half of it to Africa sigh.
If you had to pick somewhere in the world to build enough solar arrays to power the entire planet, WA is the perfect spot for it.
The site evaluation itself states both sites are about the same, and I think I've read that the eventual political compromise means there will be less RFI overall, at the unspoken cost of some simultaneous coverage of the targets.
interesting. That's not the version of events I heard from some of the people involved ;) But I heard it in WA, so they may have been audience-pleasing
On just merit it seems to have been a rather close thing (though South Africa was the better site), which I think was known in advance. So the entire process was pretty highly politicised; you can find much more information here: https://www.skatelescope.org/site-documentation/ though there is quite a bit of reading between the lines.
Of note to the sort of sociological questions we are discussing here, I note not only is the Site selection report ~200 pages, but also fairly interesting is a 16 page "Report on Validation of the SKA Site Selection Process". This comes with a lot of other documents as appendices, but also lays allows one to make out the timeline a bit more.
The final site report is from February 2012, while an "evaluation plan" was set in November 2011, and a "Revised Plan for SKA Site Selection" approved in May 2011. The Siting Group was created in 2010, to help with the "final" site selection. All this paints a picture of a somewhat fluid process.
Generation is probably less than half the problem. The infrastructure to transport it everywhere is. So even if there's a goldmine of free electricity there getting it to the places that need it is a challenge.
South Australia is the driest state in the driest continent. It's the most perfect place for solar power. Australia as-a-whole is a perfect place for solar power.
A university lecturer of mine got one of the first solar panel installations in South Australia, it was mentioned in the local Adelaide paper, that's how much of a big deal it was. This was around 20 years ago. Twenty years!
South Australia (still) has some of the highest priced electricity in the world. There's been talk of privatization as the cause of this, which has been somewhat debunked[0], and the primarily agreed reason for the high prices is what's referred to as "gold-plating of the network" in which there was an agreement that the 'poles and wires' companies could not lose money on any infrastructure investment they committed to - the regulator would allow them continually increase the prices they charge in order to cover the cost of the infrastructure investment[1][2][3].
So, despite how perfect Australia is for solar power, private or commercial, despite the fact that solar panels have been getting commercially installed on private homes for 20-odd years, and despite the networks being given carte-blanche for infrastructure investment, somehow, Australia is un-prepared for a flood of solar power.
The various organizations that are meant to be on top of this shit have been asleep at the wheel for fucking YEARS. This was highlighted by the big power failure in South Australia in 2016 when a number of wind farms shut down due to 'safety settings' being set at overly paranoid parameters, which was a problem that had already been solved in Europe (the frustrating irony of this is that the wind farms were being blamed for the power failure, when the actual situation was that the wind farms could have PREVENTED it, if their configurations were 'best practice' - the problems in the electricity network that caused the wind farms to trip were powerful winds that took down some big-arse transmission lines)[4][5]
Australia's issues with renewable energy are entirely of their own making. And it's far more likely attributable to incompetence than malice. I'd almost prefer it was malice because malice comes and goes. Incompetence is systemic.
Off on a tangent, here's my 10-years of electricity usage / costs investigation: http://electricity.atcf.com.au/economics/
[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-25/fact-check-does-priva...
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-10-02/senate-inquiry-to-pro...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-25/grattan-urges-consume...
[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-04/energy-policy-solar-e...
[4] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-28/wind-farm-settings-to...
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/oct/19/south-au...