All of South Australia's power comes from solar panels | Hacker News Reader

All of South Australia's power comes from solar panels

abc.net.au

23 pointsakandiah9 comments

If 77% of power can come from rooftop solar when far less than 70% of people have rooftop solar, then you'd expect prices to rapidly decrease for consumers. Unfortunately retailers are now able to sell power that get access to almost for free (solar feed-in payments have been heavily decreased it looks like). This will only further incentivise people to get their own panels, increasing the grid instability. It is actually in the networks best interests to put downward pressure on prices in this case, otherwise they'll need to front the costs of managing an unstable grid.

We are heading to a point soon in Australia where 90+% of the cost of household power will be for the grid infrastructure

I imagine we are approaching a tipping point where the cost of connection to the grid is more expensive than provisioning a home with enough solar + battery capacity to go fully off grid.

Depending where you are, then it's already happened.

Rural areas - a decade ago they were quoting A$18k per pole, and you'd need one pole per ~70-100 metres depending on terrain.

Of course, in rural environments you're more likely to want / need three-phase, and other high-draw appliances -- but conversely you've likely got access to much more roof or ground space to put panels, fewer restrictions on sizing and location for storage systems.

Due to the low cost of solar panels, there is no reason why one cannot have an overcapacity of 2x-3x along with storage.

In that case we really need good applications to take advantage of surplus energy beyond energy storage.

Good applications for surplus energy:

- synthesising hydrocarbon fuels for use where batteries are not practical e.g. long-haul shipping and aviation

- desalinating water (plenty of need for more fresh water around the world)

- scrubbing excess CO2 from the atmosphere

The title is incorrect. It was only electrical power, not all power, and it was only for 1 hour on one day.

Still impressive though.

I wish we had data for how many square kilometre of land do all these solar farms take.

Well 77% is domestic roof-top solar, so it doesn't take up any land.

As for the other 23%, according to Wikipedia [1], South Australia has 2 operating solar farms (338 MW installed capacity), which take up 1000 hectares, so 10 km² (which is about 0.001% of the State's land area). SA also has about 2 GW of wind power.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_farms_in_South_A... — Data is for 2019. May be higher now.

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