The issue in oz, is that energy investment by power companies is locked in with decades long contracts - raising power prices for everyone. But investment by individuals is subject to bait and switch.
Most people bought in with the expectation of a 12-15yr break-even, but the dropping feed in prices, and increase in grid costs have meant that break-even will probably never materialise.
Meanwhile, we keep paying excess costs for power companies to produce dirty power, and subsidise mining companies to sell off our gas and coal overseas, without even getting a benefit through taxes or royalties (or barely any).
Makes sense people are kind of pissed off about this (even if their reasoning is batshit-skynews-crazy).
EV, Battery, Solar, Heat pump, Amber. Maybe be give it a tech abbreviation like HBASE? :)
Ok this may squarely be in the upper middle class and up for now but prices will come down and change everything. Almost to the point of off grid being feasible for suburban and rural areas at least.
Then build solar and wind farms and batteries and hydrogen production/consumption for base load.
Why should Australians continue to tolerate a government that gives half our gas exports away, and exports at least as much coal as it uses.
But not build any modern tech coal and gas for cheap reliable base load and load following power? And nuclear too, we export all the uranium we mine, and at least some of that to nuclear armed states. Yet prohibit both on our own soil.
Why must we continue to be told we should, ever increasingly, rely on a) energy technologies that have proven to be more expensive and unreliable, and b) unproven technologies with unproven costs.
Fortunately there are other political options on the table.
Queue the continued downvotes for a reasonable comment that offers an option contrary to the received wisdom.
Today, building new solar, wind, and batteries is cheaper than building new coal or gas plants, let alone the fuel costs. Building new coal and gas would actually be stupid. Running older plants without caring about pollution might be cheaper in the short term, but not by much.
And what do you mean by "new technology"? We've had solar power for over 50 years and wind power for centuries. Australia was a pioneer in grid-scale batteries over a decade ago with Tesla.
Even if you wanted to build gas and coal plants, where would you get the turbines? There's a massive shortage, with deliveries supposedly 5 to 7 years away that is even before the current AI based demand surge. Nuclear will also take decades to build. The only fast, cheap option left is solar, wind, and batteries. Which can be up and running in under 12 months.
The thing you're missing here is timelines. The reason renewables are expensive is because it requires a grid upgrade to make it work, whereas replacing the old coal generators with new ones wouldn't so much. The kicker is though that once that upgrade is done, maintaining it will be very cheap whereas fossil fuels will continue to get more expensive (both sticker price and the cost of dealing with climate change). It's not like installing more fossil fuels halfway through helps either, we can't use coal to eliminate the duck curve without massively overbuilding it for a huge up front cost. We would need to build enough of it to cover when there is no renewables... which would be enough to never use the renewables at all.
There is a lot of evidence in fact that we have _already_ reached the point where just going all in on renewables is cheaper. People like to point to the last 40 years or so to say fossil fuels are cheaper but that was a time when the rate of new power generation wasn't very high and most power stations had already been built. We are at a point now where just about all of our coal power stations need replacing, and actually doing that would be more expensive than the renewables roll-out.
As for nuclear, the average cost to install and run it _in countries with existing industry_ is also higher than renewables. Despite the costs renewables are actually the cheapest method to get power, even if you add in all the extra associated costs.
Of course if you think the CSIRO is full of paid shills then this won't help, but you should probably have a hard think on who is actually spending the most on lobbying money, which you can also look up quite easily.
What it has done is resulted in ridiculously high electricity prices, such that manufacturing anything in this country has become progressively less viable.
The Net Zero story sold to Australians is, and always was always will be, complete bs, as evidenced by three facts:
1) It’s no longer the narrative, because “data centres”
and
2) even when it was the narrative, it was always bs because Australia exports huge amounts of gas, and a metric ship load of coal, so other countries can have affordable electricity. So why don’t we just use it. There’s only one atmosphere.
and
3) Australia could double or triple its emissions and it would have approximately no additional impact on total atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.
We haven’t reduced our emissions, we’ve merely exported them.
In before you say “shut up Pauline”, yes I did vote One Nation at the last federal election.
And if you’re so sure I’m just drowning in koolaid, how certain are you you aren’t?
Remember the good old days when governments weren’t to be trusted and we criticised them when they laid out idiotic policy?
Australia emits 1-1.5% of greenhouse gases. Tripling that would absolutely impact global concentrations, especially over human time scales.
But agree, Australia exporting fossil fuels should be reflected. If you counted their export of fuels it would be closer to 5% of global emissions.
IMO, getting to zero would knock over a whole integer percent off the global goal, that's notable. And if you stopped exporting oil, we'd be 1/20th of the way to the goal already!
What we’re doing isn’t working, so let’s do more of it.
There’s a cost of living crisis in this country effecting the majority of Australians.
So let’s make energy more scares, more expensive.
I’m with Gad Saad here, in that the one thing that astounds me the most about other people is their inability to change their opinions in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Ah, so you are taking the anti capitalist stance. Interesting to see that pop up here.
Australia sells its fossil fuels on the global market rather than prioritizing its local market. So when disruptions (like the various wars around) drive up prices, Australia sells the gas at a higher rate. This, in turn, drives up prices locally.
Combined with aging and failing coal infrastructure, which isn't producing as much or as reliably, you have a marginal rate that can get quite high.
Meanwhile, Australia has retail electricity providers and not a single government owned utility. Those retailers must make a profit, and they've invested heavy capex into smart metering. So they charge customers as much as customers will tolerate.
You might be right, it might be time to nationalize some of that fossil fuel usage, and remove the profit motive from energy retailing. That could drive down costs for end users.
But I don't think solar is really a major input here beyond replacing baseload. Expensive marginal priced peaker plants are one of the key drivers of high energy costs. When the sun sets, those plants have to come online. Better battery storage would smooth that demand significantly, as in parts of Australia solar production is already producing negative energy prices.
Yeah every non-China nation can say "everyone else should do it, we is little, China should do it"
Problem with pollution is it is easy to overpollute but in the other direction realistically zero is the limit. Unless we go wartime funding on recapturing carbon.
Balcony solar without storage is actually pretty dumb when we already have integrated battery/inverter/solar mppt units available for a few hundred dollars.
All we need to do is have something like this hub inbetween to ensure grid isolation when an outage occurs.
For crticial loads you would just plug those directly into the all in one battery unit. Almost all of them these day also have a <20ms UPS pass through function as well. When the grid goes down it can isolate the battery from backfeeding the house but the solar will still function and the critical loads will still function.
With a solution like Pila is developing you could even use your homes wiring to transfer power (~1kW) around multiple small battery units (attached to independent circuits) each with some different critical loads and solar attached to them.
I see an overwhelming interest in Nuclear power in our media and in online articles posted to reddit and HN. In many discussions I have had online and in person most people are significantly misinformed in that they think that Nuclear power is playing a larger role than it is currently or that we can not scale EVs/heat pumps/AI Datacenters without building a lot more Nuclear power plants. Most people scoff at the idea that wind power, solar power and hydro power with batteries could ever totally meet our needs.
Above I linked live ERCOT data which you can investigate. Another high penetration renewable to investigate is California ISO.
In both cases yes, I do see that Nuclear power is providing a steady baseload of roughly 10% of power generation throughout the day. But Nuclear power as we currently implement it is:
* Very inflexible.
* Very expensive to build.
* Very time consuming to build.
* Still incurs significant downtime for refueling and ends up producing spent fuel which we don't have a great solution for.
I understand research is going into technologies which may address all of those things and that is interesting and exciting. However is it really a blocker for the future?
Just in Texas they have recently peaked at 32GW of solar generation, 47GW of solar+hydro+wind generation, 10GW of batteries discharging, and 79% of demand supported by renewables. In terms of battery storage they have grown from almost nothing 2 years ago: https://www.gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Tot...
So the question is, why not just build more solar, wind, hydro and batteries? Why is there so much attention on Nuclear power being the only answer?
I am not advocating stopping research on Nuclear power, or shutting down current plants. I actually think we should just naturally follow the technology cost curve and the market forces.
Some people will invest in the most non-promising things just because they are such a long-shot :\
The numbers speak for themselves.
This is not an opinionated article, just plain data, and just for the Texas grid, so it is only representative to a certain degree.
But very concise. And easy to visualize from the graphs.
The top graph says a lot on its own, look at the last few full 24-hour periods 12-14 MAR, when there have been clear sunny skies, as a best-current-performance solar measure for this time of year.
It's not even summer, when skies may not be as consistently clear, but it can be seen that total non-nuclear drops to about twice what nuclear steadily provides as a baseline. And nuclear has about 10% of today's market with its unwavering output. Possibly only competitive at all because the nuclear generation facilities are so old they are all theoretically "paid for" a long time ago. Except in practice under some accounting methods ratepayers could actually still be paying for them decades later, that tendency says even more about overall viability.
Yes, these are all dollars, not just gigawatts.
In the daytime, solar pinches down on everything at this point and almost all the wide open spaces of Texas still remain completely untapped.
Even wind power is curtailed when solar is available, these costs are highly managed from the get-go to fully gouge all ratepayers at all times :\ With that as an underlying foundation, then all apparent activity can be exactly the opposite, which is to minimize the gouging !
So within the accepted limitation that ratepayers will never be able to afford deregulation without all being robbed blind ever since, that bonanza is being competed for by the private companies. ERCOT puts tons of effort into managing the physical grid which represents their market.
"Dynamically bringing the lowest-cost electricity available to ratepayers at all times, to actively reduce the possibility of skyrocketing rate excursions due to shortages."
With future growth, solar will eventually want to pinch down all the way to nuclear. There won't be dollar pressures that make nuclear want to grow, just the opposite, owners of these stranded assets will wish they had never been built even if they are "already paid for", and that was a long time ago for wishes not to come true.
Now to put in perspective the way solar's worst shortcoming is the way it doesn't work at night, the trend is for nuclear to be the most useful at night only where it's non-intermittent nature could be more of a drawback than an advantage. Battery storage growth also appears capable of continually outpacing nuclear construction.
Now the different color bands on the gigawatt/dollar graph all represent different participants in what are now competitive business interests in the "mature" deregulated system. Like any other trading scheme, different players have different advantages at different times, and here you can clearly see their various ups & downs as they all contribute to the overall load on any given trading day.
Each of the different colors actually has an executive "or two" whose bonuses depend entirely on that one type of energy prevailing to whatever degree it can.
If the only bonus you're ever going to get is from nuclear, it's like looking at every problem like a nail because your only tool is a hammer. All you can do is pound away for what it's worth. Under the kind of pressure that is mounting, nothing is ever going to have the fundamental ability to provide as steady a bonus stream as nuclear ever again. That's the remaining financial advantage that is actually what keeps being hammered home, cost is a lost cause for all to see if they can focus through the noise.
At least 90% are not in this boat, and with the downward dollar pressure nuclear may actually be over-represented as it is, lingering as more of an overdone boomer technology than increasingly viable solution on the grid/market of the future.
Win8 was a disaster. Hard to understand what Steven is even saying or his point about the Macbook Neo.
The Neo is enabled by the increasing capability of the phone chips and the pre-existing completed move to ARM for MacOS that happened over a 5 year span. Critically the entire app ecosystem quickly embraced the new architecture and there were some nice fallbacks for legacy apps. The sheer scale of the phone chips allows them to be priced to where the Neo becomes doable, especially when using the previous generation of chip.
Windows 8 and Surface RT had no such advantages. Windows was always going to stay primarily an x86 operating system at the time those products hit. There was no obvious chip that had a scale of the iPhone chips. Windows RT was without many apps (chicken/egg problem).
I disagree about window 8. I quite liked it. I honestly think that it was a better OS than win 10, from an user point of view. But maybe I am biased, as I was using a laptop with a touchscreen at this time.
Yes, you can clearly see the yearly patterns in the graph where brighter weather reveals the continual build out that is masked by lower seasonal output.
It's flipped in the southern hemisphere so you get a year round drumbeat of records being broken if you look globally.
edit: it's even starker for the max renewable, presumably because of high air con load in summer so spring gets a high ratio of solar and wind to demand:
Robert has a whole set of youtube channels on electric vehicles and other renewable technology. It’s quite impressive what he does now but I always see Kryten in him, strange.
He's done a lot of things, but for my money the "Scrapheap Challenge" show was his best.
(This is a show where two teams are left inside a scrapheap and given a day, or so, to build a contraption/device.)
He was just so enthusiastic about all the teams, and seemed genuinely interested in both the design, the building, and the performance of whatever it was they were being challenged to build.
But I can't say I've ever heard of that before, or seen any. I used to watch the UK series while having lazy breakfasts every Sunday morning with my then-partner.
