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Comment by CaliforniaKarl | Hacker News Reader

Reading this article, the first thing I wondered was, what does Australia have in terms of peaking power plants, which can come online—and, just as important, safely go offline—quickly to stabilize grid voltage?

The second thing I was wondering is, where are the bitcoin miners? Assuming electricity prices are not being held artificially high, then when they start to come down, miners will start coming in.

In fact, I could envision a two-tier pricing model, similar to what is used for EV charging. Combine that with something like Zellweger ripple signaling, and the grid would have a way to tell miners (et al) “Hey, we have excess, were reducing the rate so start mining!”

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Australia is in the unique position of having abundant reserves of gas, coal and uranium but through what is probably blatant corruption the most expensive power prices in the world.

The gas is exported at a fixed cost to Japan and other countries where it can be resold to Australians at a profit.

Other issues are that no power company in Australia is willing to build a new coal power plant because the current coal subsidies are likely to go away with a change in government. The current government is very much pro coal. To illustrate how bad this is the current government Treasurer brought a lump of coal into sitting parliament and was waving it around showing how non dangerous it is. The coal lobbies are very strong and are running out of export options.

Australia is in this position due to a lack of bipartisan support towards any energy policy. Its also a problem because the power networks have been privatized and the incentives were set to guarantee returns on building infrastructure. The network as such is gold plated but the power it carries is very expensive.

While gas should be the answer to the network shortfalls there was a massive profit incentive to not do so initially wait for the spot prices to surge and then jump in and collect massive paychecks.

The result is that people installed solar. Which caused the electricity companies to raise prices which lead to more solar installs. The companies here are in a death spiral. They are insanely profitable right now, but the writing is on the wall.

However companies such as Tesla installed a massive battery to counter some of the issues and that project after 6 months is almost about to pay for itself.

Its a horrible situation to be honest, and I cannot wait for the power companies to fail due to their own hubris.

BTW if you think this is bad, do a quick check into the status of the National Broadband Network NBN in Australia. That's corruption on a whole other level and you should laugh at us Australians. No matter how bad your internet is I promise ours is worse, more expensive and despite billions of dollars not about to get better.

Australia does not need any more coal stations. Wanting to build new ones has weirdly become a strange infatuation by the conservatives, but there is absolutly no need in Australia for more baseline capacity. It's all in the peaks, which is all gas (which mostly of sets the benchmark price given where it sits in the AEMO stack).

So most of our price problems are just the price of gas, and the introduced reservation program has helped with that a little but does not go far enough. That, and the gold plating of the infrastructure (which alone is like 40% or something IIRC of the price rises over the last decade).

Most of the 'reliability problems' than the politician are on about are really just 'fears of possible future reliability problems', stirred up by the blackouts in SA that were mostly due to transmission lines being blown over in a massive storm while one of the interconnectors with Victoria was down for maintenance, and some wind turbines tripping out because of dangerously high wind speeds. There isn't really that much reliability risk apart from the fact that our coal stations are all pretty unreliable (the Australia Institute has taken to tweeting every time a generator trips out, it's pretty crazy how unreliable our coal stations are).

Perhaps we will need some more gas peaking stations but new pumped hydro and big batteries will probably take over some of that.

Sorry, should be 'baseload capacity' in the first bit.

Australia has some of the most expensive electricity in the world. There are no bitcoin miners of any size here.

The electricity problems we are facing are pure corruption and negligence. Solar isn't the problem, its the lack of funding and poorly weighted energy markets that are crippling Australia's grid.

Solar isn't the problem, but the renewables situation is related. We had a Labor government with the Greens holding a balance of power from ~2010 to ~2013. The Labor party had, I believe, been opposed to a carbon tax up until that point. Then, likely because of pressure from the Greens, introduced a carbon tax.

The lesson there will not have been lost on big investors. If anyone invests in fossil fuel generation (ie, the economic option) then the Greens will find a way to destroy their profit margins at some point in the next decade.

And so, little serious investment in the energy sector seems to be taking place. I'm not aware of any big developments planned except an interesting hydropower project by the current government and creeping smaller-scale wind and solar as prices rise and justify their existence.

Following your reasonning, there is no reason why investors should shy away from renewables. The Greens would not harm any project of additional large scale batteries, for example.

Yes but the Coalition will because solar gives you cancer.

> solar gives you cancer

Is that hyperbole or are they seriously saying that?

Hyperbole in that specific case, but they did have an enquiry into wind turbines partly examining alleged health effects...

Okay, that's not as outlandish as health hazards from solar. We have a lot of wind turbines in Northern Germany, and some people complain that they emit low-frequency sounds and thus cause noise pollution. I don't know about the research on this topic, though; I never noticed any adverse effects when staying near wind turbines.

I think there are two main reasons whu investors would shy away from renewables in Australia:

1) Firstly there are no large well-known actors, so there is uncertainty around renewable energy companies are going to "win".

2) Secondly, Australia currently has a government that is hostile towards renewables. It could at any time introduce legislation that would make renewables economically untennable.

These are both true, furthermore a lot of the bigger players became big as a result of the initial round of solar rebate schemes - where a lot of low quality solar installations were put up. Now a lot of these companies are doing much larger jobs without the necessary skillsets. There's a bit of a minefield of shoddy installers still out there - look at the Crap Solar Facebook page for an insider look (there are some horrific installations).

Despite all this, I've seen a huge amount of interest in investors wanting large scale commercial and utility scale solar projects. From what I know, solar engineering consultancies are turning jobs away due to the demand being so great.

Even with the evilest scheme, it seems unlikely to come up with something harming the rentability of renewables, or of solar in particular. It's basically free electricity from sun, which is plenty in Australian deserts. You pay only the installation, which price is determined by the tech market.

I don’t think the economics work for mining only during power gluts. The cost of the mining equipment is high and needs to be amortized over the longest period possible.

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