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Comment by jussij | Hacker News Reader

One of the reasons this is happening in Australia is because the price of electricity has been rising quite sharply for over a decade now and that makes solar more attractive.

It turns out one of the main reasons for these price rises has price gouging by the newly privatized energy companies.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/accc-overspending-on-pole...

Basically these energy companies have been screwing their customers for decades and successive governments have been letting them get away with it.

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And that's a good thing as that increases the speed of solar adoption.

Governments should increase taxes on oil and coal (and electricity generated from oil and coal). That's the only way to speed up adoption of other energy sources.

The income from this tax could be used to build wind and solar power, energy research or paid back as incentives to people installing solar panels.

And people said the LNP were fighting against renewable energy!

Well, they are trying. Problem is they can only fight the market so much. Especially when economics are so much in solar’s favour - the levelised cost (which includes the CAPEX of building) of battery backed solar will cost less than just the fuel for coal power per MWh in a couple of years (LCOE of solar and onshore wind by themselves already is less)!

Lucky the current government has some pet economists that are happy to continue to prove the "lies, damned lies, and statistics" mantra.

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Australian_think_tanks...

Hah! That's pretty funny. By screwing the Australian public with the poles and wires investment guarantee they accidentally heralded 'the great consumer protest' of the fastest worldwide uptake of residential solar panel installations.

Something something law of unintended consequences...

To compound the shame of it, all the money spent on the 'poles and wires' initiative did nothing to contribute to the grid's ability to cope with the influx of power from the volume of rooftop solar installations, and so all that investment has just smeared problems around, and now there's a whole lot more planning and likely investment necessary to migrate to a rooftop solar heavy grid. Maybe that's all part of the plan (I don't believe that - never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence).

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/what-the-us-can...

https://www.csiro.au/en/news/news-releases/2021/australia-in...

https://theconversation.com/australia-is-the-runaway-global-...

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