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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Just researched this today after talking to some Aussies about it!

The problem is that Australia is so married to coal that they have no national electrical grid strategy, including transmission line investment, so it’s harder to get generation to load centers (“follow the sun” generation”). They also don’t have natural gas to fill in when renewable generation dips (unlike the US).

The solution is going to be a lot of utility battery storage (Hornsdale Power Reserve Tesla battery is currently being expanded, for example), more renewables, and actual transmission infrastructure investment.

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Australia does not have a national electricity grid.

We have this:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/National...

Also, we have plenty of natural gas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Australia#Natural_ga...

I’m familiar. Note the lack of East<->West transmission capability between coasts (important for solar generation to follow the sun), and the lack of almost anything to the Northern Territory (who doesn’t even expose their real time generation data on the internet!).

Also, there are natural gas reserves, it just doesn’t appear it’s used extensively for electrical generation based on historical ElectricityMap.org data.

The Northern Territory has a total population of only 250,000, of which 180,000 live in the Darwin area.

There is no way that spending the enormous amount required to connect it to the east coast grid would be an efficient use of resources.

Really depends on the path an East-West line takes, cost per mile (edit: kilometer), existing generation fuel costs, possible future generation locations, etc.

It’s not just about existing load centers (the population you mention), but possible future generators (big solar plants in the middle of the desert).

There is no shortage of suitable locations available for big solar plants that are thousands of kilometres closer to the big load centres than the Northern Territory is.

There are also plans to go the other way and connect WA to Indonesia with the potential to tap into the electricity market of a population 10x larger than Australia's.

https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2017/11/30/australias-...

> Also, there are natural gas reserves, it just doesn’t appear it’s used extensively for electrical generation based on historical ElectricityMap.org data.

Probably because it's all shipped offshore. > https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2018/12/aussie-paying-gas-j...

that comment (while technically correct) is undoubtedly from someone who has obviously never driven across the nullabor.

I also have never driven across the Nullabor. Would you kindly elaborate on what you mean?

One does not simply drive across the Nullabor.

s/Nullabor/Nullarbor/ (no trees).

The Nullarbor is a vast, arid, unpopulated plain over 1000km wide. I think the comment was meant to suggest that infrastructure projects like this are challenging in Australia, because the distances involved make them expensive, but the low population density makes them much less profitable than in places like the US and Europe with high population densities.

Many tourists from other parts of the world come to Australia thinking they can "just drive" from Melbourne to Cairns or Perth to Adelaide, not realizing how much of an undertaking that is because they don't have a good sense of the distances involved.

Haven’t been through the Nullabor myself, but I can’t imagine it’s so treacherous that you can’t drag a few five inch HVDC conductors through it (which only need to be buried, no concrete channel or conduit required, to support ~2500MW of transmission capacity).

If I recall, that’s where the latest Mad Max film was filmed.

It's not that it can't be done, it's that the Nullarbor is 1,100 km of absolutely nothing. More broadly, it's ~3000 km from Perth to Adelaide, vs ~4000 km for the continental US.

Also, the last Mad Max was mostly filmed in Namibia. The older ones were filmed in Australia, notably Coober Pedy, which is north of Adelaide and not near the Nullarbor.

> Also, the last Mad Max was mostly filmed in Namibia. The older ones were filmed in Australia, notably Coober Pedy, which is north of Adelaide and not near the Nullarbor

The originals were filmed just outside Broken Hill actually. There is a sign on the highway way to Mildura, and there is a big lot where you can see some of the props from Number 3 (notably the plane). I grew up in Mildura.

Also, the latest was filmed in Messum Crater in Namibia, I spent some time exploring there too - (bottom half of this post/pictures) http://theroadchoseme.com/riverbeds-and-craters

The first film (pre-apocalypse) was actually filmed mostly in and around Melbourne. I grew up in Warrnambool and Horsham so any trip to Melbourne would take you through some of the filming locations along the old Western Hwy. The first film was really about 70s Australian car culture and filled with utes, panel vans and of course big V8s. More early Fast & Furious than the later dystopian theme.

You're correct about the second being up Broken Hill way.

My meaning was that it is too far for a transmission line to make sense, and once the transmission line gets to South Australia (the state closest to Western Australia) you have only delivered the power to a state with the same problem - too much solar without enough storage. A better way to solve the problem would be to prohibit new installs of rooftop solar without an accompanying battery system.

This won't happen because it would be politically difficult, and because the power companies would lose a lot of money as consumption fell through the floor. They don't want too much battery for a while because this would require them to move from a usage model to a majority fixed fee billing. To reduce public outrage the changeover needs to be slow.

HVDC systems don't do too well in high temperatures. One thing the Nullabor has in spades is high temperatures.

Why would we go to all the expense to build a long distance HVDC link for that, anyway? WA's grid has very different capacity demands from the NEM grid for the east coast. The difference in populations (and energy needs) is huge.

Makes a ton more sense to invest in energy storage systems on each side than to dump tens of thousands of tons of copper in the ground to build a pointless link.

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