Remember Australia has over 10x the rollout of solar than china (per capita of course). It’s not hard to achieve this for any competent government. Bluntly China’s government is corrupt and inefficient (usa is even further behind china since their current government is also corrupt and inefficient).
This rollout of cheap solar in Australia is causing power prices during a global energy crisis and a datacenter build out to plummet.
And fwiw i don’t think Australia’s government is perfect. But it should set the bar to other nations of ‘what could be’. You could have falling power prices right now if you enabled a government to encourage what is currently by far the cheapest form of electricity (solar).
China is huge, and it does have huge solar farms, but the trouble is now you need a huge power transport infrastructure. Australia can move enough power from a desert where nobody lives to a small city 100 kilometres away on a few ordinary hundred kV pylons and be happy. China has huge cities, 2-3 thousand kilometres from those solar farms so it is building long chains of 1MV pylons which is the same idea but at this incredible scale.
China is adding around 10X Australia’s total installed solar power generation every single year. Half of the entire world’s deployed solar is in China.
And while Australia’s solar growth is impressive, it’s worth remembering that it’s only possible because of China. It was Chinese government policy that pushed to develop the huge solar industry that exists today and supplies vast quantities of cheap solar panels to the world.
Equally true is that Chinese manufacturing of solar cells is only partly possible because of Australian solar research and development. In 1983, a research team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), invented the PERC silicon solar cell. This design fundamentally improved solar cell efficiency to capture sunlight more effectively and reduce electronic losses. Over several decades of refinement, the UNSW team continued to set global efficiency records, pushing cell efficiency from 18% in 1984 up to 25% by the early 2000s.
Today, PERC technology is the cheapest way to generate electricity using solar cells and is utilised in over 90% of solar panels manufactured globally. https://theconversation.com/how-an-aussie-invention-could-so...
The solar research group at UNSW trained over 120 PhD students who went on to establish solar manufacturing, particularly in China.
This is a remarkable stat that's the opposite of what I expected, but I suppose China is (a) starting from a lower base and (b) much, much larger in absolute population. Australia's population would fit in Chongqing.
Where people get misled on China’s rollout is total generation (since it’s a huge fraction of the worlds population) and the fact that they do large centralised rollouts rather than enabling rooftop solar. So they have some of the biggest solar farms. Rooftop solar is the way the countries that have shot past china have mostly achieved results - remove barriers to installation and grid connection and suddenly every citizen is invested in it since it saves them money. It’s the classic efficiency win from a massively motivated population vs a central bureaucracy. China’s showing everyone how NOT to enable solar.
When I lived in Beijing, the apartment buildings I lived in usually had solar hot water. Well, I could tell when they turned on the central heating plants for the winter because I finally had hot water showers again.
I reckon more Australians live in SFHs than apartment blocks (so have roofs where personal solar makes sense), and the major cities get more son than eastern Chinese cities do.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-electricity-per-cap...
So countries are only behind Australia because of corruption? And the US is only behind because of Trump, specifically?
Man, must be nice to have such a basic view of the world; everything so sinpmy explained.
It's not all Trump, of course. It's also the people who put him in office twice, the folks who block upgrading the grid, etc. etc.
So yeah, Trump doesn't help, but in respect specifically of Solar you'd likely see pretty similar policies from many US regimes, including mainstream Democrats.
The generate more grid solar, more wind, more gas and more coal than other states.
They're still #2 to California when you include distributed solar though.
It is only attractive in California due to a combination absurd electricity prices from State sanctioned monopolies and red tape preventing grid development.
I remember when the first ones started appearing in the UK over 30 years ago and people were quick to complain about how ugly they looked. But actually, over time I think most people accept them now, and personally I think they're pretty cool. Most of the UK ones are actually off shore now - you can just about see them from the coast, but they're just small specks on the horizon at that distance. I think the biggest concern people have with them now is the belief that lots of birds get killed by them, but the reality is that actually many more birds die every year from flying into windows than get hit by turbine blades.
As the weather warms and we get more solar exposure we will easily be in excess. We get a very small export rate with a bonus for no energy consumption during peak evening hours which can offset the fixed daily charge.
There are a lot of gotchas that you need to be aware of. 42 kWh is nominal capacity not the actual usable capacity. House load, max grid import and export capacity, max inverter capacity, AC or DC coupled panels, battery charging profile, battery temp are all factors in how much you can charge in the window. For example I have max 15 kW grid draw, with a 10 kW inverter that can charge the battery. I can put in max ~30 kWh into the battery, so I also run other loads in the house to use the other 5 kW capacity. If I go over 5 kW house load the battery charge is clipped to maintain grid import limit.
> I am able to charge cars at work
Here's a £50k London parking space: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/136662200#/?channel=R...
While that's an extreme, I would expect the cost of any urban parking space with a low speed charger to be dominated by the land, then the charger one-off install price, and thereafter electricity use is a pretty trivial cost.
Sydney will also charge you 3,000 $AUS annually for central parking spaces: https://www.revenue.nsw.gov.au/taxes-duties-levies-royalties...
I'm in Washington where electricity is cheaper, so 29 cents per kWh is not much cheaper than Tesla's superchargers. The closest one to me is 31 cents in the middle of the day and goes as low as 20 cents per kWh at night. I pay 8 cents per kWh at home, which is where I charge (at much slower speeds) unless I'm on a road trip.
> I am not making any value judgement
Calling something "virtue signalling" is a value judgement.
Edit: should add, that's straight solar no battery
> often had negative quarterly invoices (i.e. got paid by our retailer) ... esp. in winter months
Most likely the aircon is running less in winter so they don't use as much power. There is not much of a winter in the tropics.
We just got a very high efficiency wood stove, I expect we will now have no electricity bill each year.
I believe that incentivizing people to acquire batteries is precisely the purpose of the policy. It's good for the grid for there to be a lot of storage at the edges. As I understand it, the 24kWh cap is subject to annual review, with it being reduced/the policy being soft phased out once curtailment is no longer necessary.
You can't make a blanket statement like that because it depends on a lot of variables about their specific battery system and power needs. If you have just enough battery to get through a normal day so you're running them top to bottom every day then sure, those are likely to have a relatively short life. If you've set up your system with extra capacity to support extended total grid outages and/or bad weather now your normal days might only be cycling from 80% down to 60% and back. Of course battery chemistry is also relevant, and a home battery system doesn't need to care about energy density or peak charge/discharge rates in the same way an EV might.
On top of all that, now that we're over 15 years in to mass-produced EVs we've learned that our battery life expectations were generally pessimistic. As long as the batteries are kept within a reasonable temperature range and not otherwise abused they tend to be in pretty good condition even this far in to their expected service life. Home energy storage systems are a lot easier on batteries than automotive use so as a general rule they should last even longer even with similar cycle counts.
A sneaky tax that keeps rising. In the UK it pays for failed energy companies, people defaulting on their energy bills, energy bill subsidies... and supposedly for grid upgrades lol
It's risen far above inflation (responding to a sibling comment)
In general inflation is increasing everywhere so not completely unexpected. Also solar/battery powered networks are shaped differently than ones only powered by prime movers. The edges become thicker as power becomes generated at the edge.