green power solar is

[Bruce]

If scale reduces costs, how come my water supply at the farm costs much less than it does in Adelaide? The answer is that in Adelaide I am the mug who pays for big profits and obscene executive salaries by way of my water bill, AND they are growing the population insanely and present consumers need to pay for the expansion. Gosh I dislike what the government does these days.

 

At the farm the only executive salary is mine and luckily I work for nothing.

 

 

[facthunter]

You DO need people to pay for infrastructure otherwise it all stays like the outback. Some people" like" that but the community resources won't come to sparsely settled areas just because.. The Royal Flying Doctor is an Australian Institution. which helps . Australia is a City Centric Country. I DID mention MONOPOLIES. There was a a mob called "Sydney Water Holdings" that would have done what you describe.. Nev

 

 

[Bruce]

Specialists have a closed shop and a monopoly protected by the government. So they are on millions a year... isn't that wonderful for them?

 

 

[nomadpete]

Hopefully not all organisations are set up like Sydney Water Holding.

 

 

[spacesailor]

Marty D

 

I stand corrected,

 

"When more people fall off the grid it raises the price".

 

I made a boo boo that time.

 

spacesailor

 

 

[coljones]

When more people fall off the grid it raises the price for the rest. Less customers for same fixed costs mean higher price per customer.

I think we're arguing about 2 different things. To me the current definition of a "grid" is the entire power network - large power stations & associated hardware with millions of users, joined up by thousands of kilometres of power lines.

 

I like the idea of mini-grids like the one they're planning in SA. 50,000 homes which are all relatively close to each other, powered by solar on every roof with batteries on every house. I'm assuming some sort of smart tech will balance out the usage - houses not using as much power will export more to the rest of the grid while those using more will draw more. Power price is about 30% less than current (pardon the pun) which will provide a return on investment for the capital outlay and (again I'm assuming) maintenance for the system.

 

The advantage of having many isolated systems, as opposed to an interconnected grid, is that you don't have transmission losses where the lines go hundreds of kilometres to a few users, which despite them costing many times the average, still pay the same for their power. Also you don't have failures like the recent one in SA where power for the whole state goes out for 4 or 5 days.

 

As has been stated we're the sunniest continent on Earth. How bloody silly are we if we can't use this free ener

a bit too simplistic. You need a grid to deliver power from a generator to a consumer, be it across the roof or across Australia. You also need a grid for supply stability - where supply is provided to a consumer regardless of the operation of their local generator. You also need a grid to provide fault tolerance - to protect against generation and network failures. You need a grid to provide quality of voltage and frequency. To provide the best supply to the maximum number of consumers you need big interconnected networks so that any failure can be isolated and bypassed. Small networks are unsound as the impact of a single event can disable the ability of the consumer to get power when they want it. Having solar cells or windtowers together with batteries will reduce dependency but may lead to dis-economies of scale as there may be a need to overprovision to cover time gaps in generation (this can be helped by interconnectors to other grids with a surplus of available power).

[Bruce]

The trouble with big grids Col is that they empower the forces who rip off the average consumer to deliver obscene money and perks to those who control the big grids.

 

 

[coljones]

The trouble with big grids Col is that they empower the forces who rip off the average consumer to deliver obscene money and perks to those who control the big grids.

One could go off the grid, become self sufficient and self insuring.

 

 

[Marty_d]

This house just up the road from us about a kilometre away, has the most panels I've seen on one house.

[ATTACH=full]3094[/ATTACH]

40-odd panels should well and truly provide enough for an average household. I'd hazard a guess they'd be getting a negative bill most quarters.

 

 

[spacesailor]

M

 

Not always a big reduction on the bill, my daughter put seven KW on the roof & only gets $35 off each quarter!, nice smart metre tho.

 

spacesailor.

 

 

[nomadpete]

I get a negative bill most quarters and I have a 3kw array. No Woodfire, just reverse cycle A/C

 

Anything more than a dozen modern panels is a business proposition

 

 

[Bruce]

The big grid companies will soon start valuing power by the time of day. This will enable them to pay very little for the power you have to sell and charge you heaps for the power you take when the sun isn't shining. As I've said before, to live off the grid, it is the cost of the stored power which matters.

 

One way out is to live a hippy life and just go without power for those times. You would need a different wife from the one I've got. My wife would go ballistic when the fridge stopped working.

 

 

[Jerry_Atrick]

@Bruce - charging by the time of day is how they do it. However, there is a reason for it. The separation of generator, tranmissions and distribution and retailer all in the pursuit of a fully competitive market has given birth to what I think is an artificial inustry - electricty trading. It is based on supply and demand at times throughout the day - when supply exceeds demand, the price drops, and vice versa. In the old days, when there was over capacity, you simply shut down the most expensive generators for the time. Now, there are electrcity futures, etc. and all it does is add cost the whole supply game. Mind you, it makes a lot of money for those involved in it.

 

 

[spacesailor]

Bruce

 

I grew up with four forty watt light bulbs & no sockets (plugs),. Couldn't understand how my friends families had all sorts of things Plugged in. now. I live with more sockets than I had, light bulbs In every room.

 

[ATTACH]49241._xfImport[/ATTACH]Radio, "RadioRentles" addapter.

 

spacesailor

 

[Bruce]

There is hope on the horizon for cheaper storage. Sodium batteries instead of lithium for example. In the meantime, I get grumpy when I hear claims like how Victoria will be 40 percent renewable as soon as all the new wind-farms are finished. By this I think they mean that the coal-fired backup is being wasted on a windy day.

 

Learn up on basic science and go nuclear say I , but my words are also wasted on the wind.

 

 

[Old Koreelah]

...Learn up on basic science and go nuclear say I , but my words are also wasted on the wind.

Learn up on basic economics and go renewables.

 

 

[Old Koreelah]

The big grid companies will soon start valuing power by the time of day. This will enable them to pay very little for the power you have to sell and charge you heaps for the power you take when the sun isn't shining...

They'll always charge more for what they sell than what they buy.

 

Last month I was charged $96.02 for the 143 kWh I bought from the grid, but only paid $25.30 for the 248 kWh I fed back into the grid.

 

 

[Bruce]

Renewables are too expensive old K. Unless you are happy to have no power when they aren't producing. I know of a guy who lives like this, but he is alone because his woman left him.

 

Lots of people would go off the grid ( including me ) if storage wasn't so expensive. Storage costs about $1000 per kWh and that's the problem. This figure needs to come down to about $10 per kWh to compete with present-day mains power.

 

The cheap storage does not have to be light and compact, just cheap. It's the most important research project there is I reckon.

 

At the farm, I am off the grid as far as water and sewage are concerned, and its better and cheaper than being in Adelaide and getting ripped off to benefit some overseas billionaires.

 

 

[storchy neil]

bruce close on two hundred years ago wind power alone was not a good idea think before you bite neil

 

 

[Old Koreelah]

Renewables will be cheaper when we link up widely-distributed wind farms, solar farms and other sources. Storage costs are dropping fast.

 

We will soon look back on coal burners as inefficient, dirty old tech.

 

 

[Bruce]

Hope you are right old K. The worst thing about coal is that it takes days to get going. Hydro is a better backup as it takes less than an hour to get going. And you can pump stuff uphill if you have excess power.

 

I don't know how the cost works out, probably cheaper than batteries if you have a good site but I bet it's more than the average voter will want to pay.

 

 

[Bruce]

Maybe the second worst thing is the slow startup time. Wrecking the planet would be the worst thing.

 

 

[Old Koreelah]

...probably cheaper than batteries if you have a good site but I bet it's more than the average voter will want to pay.

Trump’s trade war is already hammering our exchange rate, pushing up our debt and threatening our biggest export market. When our economy falls over the cliff we’ve so far avoided, governments will be scambling for shovel-ready projects to keep things ticking over.

 

Pumped hydro projects will fit that bill.

 

 

[Jerry_Atrick]

I worked in the nuclear industry for a bit and yes, the cost is high, but advances in small module reactor technology largely knock those costs on the head, and can apparently be installed within existing infrastructure as well - so plants can be re-used. The carp EDF is building is out of date before it is completed.

 

 

[kgwilson]

The cost of renewable energy is now about one third of the cost of polluting fossil fuels. That is why wind farms and solar farms are getting the finance and coming on line in ever increasing numbers. The problem as pointed out is storage. As the ANU study showed, pumped hydro is the best way to store energy, and we only need about 30 out of 2000 potential sites they identified on the East coast. Sure pumped hydro uses more than it produces but who cares when it is coming from excess wind and solar generated energy.