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Comment by quillo | Hacker News Reader

For anyone that might be interested, here are live graphs representing different generation types and their current cost for the Australian energy market (caveat: not all of Australia):

https://opennem.org.au/

https://opennem.org.au/#/regions/sa

South Australia - where the battery is located - is an outlier in the Australian market due to its relatively progressive energy generation composition. It's worth noting the battery charge/discharge values depending on the market price of wholesale electricity. Arbitrage in action! :)

The application is open sourced and available here:

https://github.com/opennem

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Ontario has a similar site showing power usage. Key difference: replace Australia's coal with nuclear:

http://www.ieso.ca/power-data

That's a horrifyingly large amount of coal there for a developed country.

Because the left in Australia is deathly afraid of nuclear and the right finds that it constituents are those who work in coal, one of our major industries.

Our largest 3rd party, the greens just won't even consider nuclear, to them it's solar/wind or bust.

Nuclear would be ridiculously expensive for Australia. Renewables and gas would be achievable in under 10 years.

Australia has 34% of the world's low-cost uranium reserves.

Fueling a nuclear power plant is never expensive comparing to just about anything else there.

Yes, what would a country with a "sunshine coast" that is continually engaged in trying to keep the powerful rays of the sun off its skin want with solar power?

...and the government continually talks about building more coal! They love to call it "clean coal" and ramble about it every month or two.

Of course, they have not actually done anything at all, which is the definition of Australian politics.

Thank goodness for that! I hope their inaction persists, buying time for solar & battery infrastructure to be built and make nuclear redundant there.

I always like these kind of plots. Is there an explanation why in the last week the energy price went negative last week in SA but they kept running gas turbines? Is that due to insufficient capacity in part of the net or some special kind of long term contracts or? I have encountered this before but its sometimes claimed that gas power can be modulated within minutes why not here, especially since they very likely where aware of the negative prices well in advance.

Yes, there are longer-term contracts, only a portion of the power is traded at the spot price.

That said, you would think that the gas generator company could just bid the load they've agreed to supply under the long term contract into the spot market when the price dips negative. I assume there is a good reason why this isn't done.

There is also the excellent ElectricityMap site: https://www.electricitymap.org/

As an American living in the midwest, that map (while _excellent_) simply makes me sad. 60% of our energy comes from gas and coal. 30% comes from nuclear (I'm rounding in both cases). The remaining 10% comes from renewables (mostly hydro). It shows how much further we have to go in getting renewables to generate an actually significant amount of our energy.

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