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Comment by dghughes | Hacker News Reader

Here in Canada my province went through a hurricane last Sept. I was without power for 10 days.

Much of the problems were due to poor maintenance; trees not trimmed, old poles not replaced, transformers old, salt spray on wires, etc. But the parent company crowed each year of profits and dividends. They also raised rates 5% to 10% each year claiming they had no money.

Solar would help but we also need a stable grid. But even with solar my local government doesn't even allow the use of battery storage in homes batteries can only go in garages.

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> battery storage in homes batteries can only go in garages.

Batteries in that quantity are something of a fire risk, which is why some jurisdictions mandate they be "outside". Although this is probably just a different kind of over-caution.

And yet home heating oil tanks in basements are completely normal and under little regulation; tanks can and do fail, and if the spill is bad enough, it'll result in the house being "totaled."

The PV industry is saddled with an insane number of regulations designed to make PV installations as expensive and ugly as possible to discourage it. The utilities absolutely hate the idea of becoming a glorified standby network, but they fear people going "huh, I...don't actually need you at all" even more.

That's why when you see a typical PV installation, there's giant orange warning labels all over everything, multiple panels/junction boxes, etc.

It's also why you can meet all the state regulations, but still fail one of the multiple inspections utilities require before you can fully connect the system.

Same reason the utilities are pushing for state laws that automatically condemn a property if there isn't a grid connection.

True but right now there is a 1,000 litres of diesel in a tank in a room next to me.

Diesel is fairly safe because it is surprisingly difficult to ignite without pressure. Gasoline is a different animal.

I'm in Western Australia which like South Australia is a state with a very high solar | renewable input to our grid.

We're currently rolling out required remote management to remotely disable rooftop input on high solar input low demand days and likely to see a future where batteries are larger, isolated (for fire | emergancy), and serving local clusters of ~ 200 homes moreso than every home having batteries.

There's an efficiency and robustness at that cluster size.

I understand the need for grid stability, but just deciding "Nah, we'll turn off solar production en-masse" seems like it's not the best solution.

Long distance HVDC runs are apparently now so good that it is commercially feasible to drop a few million solar panels outside of Darwin, and run an under-sea HVDC cable to Singapore.

Why there's apparently no push to hook up WA to the rest of the national grid, I don't know. It would seem to be a great way to shift power from solar and wind between the east/west and help match up demand and production more.

> I understand the need for grid stability, but just deciding "Nah, we'll turn off solar production en-masse" seems like it's not the best solution.

It's not. But we've never before had a "we are generating electricity with a marginal cost of $0" situation before. As coal and gas generators had to pay for fuel they stopped generating rather than create an excess. But ... why turn off a solar panel?

We've come close with nuclear because it can't turn off quickly enough to match the normal demand cycle. As a consequence Japan has the most pumped storage per unit of generation in the world. They store their excess nuclear generation so they can sell the excess later. That's the best strategy for nuclear because it's so expensive, but in the renewable world its cheaper to over provision than it is to build storage (to some extent), so it's likely there will always be periods of excess.

So now we find ourselves in the novel situation of having literally GWh of electricity available for close to free. I can't imagine the situation remaining for that way for long, as we find a use for most concentrated waste streams. Here in Australia we even recycle our sewage solids. I presume that's the one reason for the current "green hydrogen" push in Australia. If green hydrogen doesn't work out, it will be something else like Aluminium or carbon free steel production.

Balancing power grids real time is a challenge, conventially excess production is handled by powering down sources (turning {off|down} {coal|gas} fired generators) or routing excess elsewhere (neighbouring countries|states).

Western Australia is remote .. there is no connected neighbouring grid (to NT or SA) and the distances are vast.

Winding down solar inputs from individual houses is a comparable way of shedding sources, even better is being able to balance the local cluster inputs between "main grid" (wider urban areas) and "local storage" (per N house battery banks).

If water wasn't such an issue here there'd maybe be plans to expand the main dam to handle pumped hydro (that requires both an excess of water and a lower elevation secondary capture dam) so ther are plans afoot looking at alternative short term storage solutions (in addition to battery farms).

> Long distance HVDC runs are apparently now so good that it is commercially feasible to drop a few million solar panels outside of Darwin, and run an under-sea HVDC cable to Singapore.

Whoa, that's impressive. Do you know what the per-mile cost would be? The great circle distance from Darwin, NT to Singapore is a little over 2000 miles; call it 2500 to account for routing around the intervening islands and such.

Though I'm not sure that Darwin is the best place to drop a few million solar panels, considering its stormy climate. A few hundred miles south towards the desert, maybe ;-)

The project I'm referring to is the Australia-Asia Power Link by Suncable[1].

It was supposed to be an AUD$30bn project, but I don't know the proper cost, but $30bn/4500km = $6.6k/meter. That includes the solar panels, and a massive battery too, as I understand it.

It went into administration in January, because the backers disagreed about further funding for the project.

Also, When I say "outside darwin" I didn't mean in the suburbs.

It may not be obvious just looking at satellite maps, but large areas of that part of Australia are subject to seasonal flooding. If you're building a project like this, you need to pick higher ground to avoid it being flooded.

They basically have two seasons: Wet, and Dry. During wet season, they still get plenty of sun.

Also, large areas of that part of the world are protected National Parks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link

It's more than a disagreement about funding, it's a disagreement about feasibility.

Long HVDC lines are feasible, as are long HDVC lines across (some) sea floors.

Even longer lines with intermittent stations across sea floors are feasible.

What's pushing the engineering limits and the stability of forward capital funding is a single really long undersea HVDC cable crossing multiple fault lines in one of the more volcanic earthquake prone regions of the world with a few very deep trenches.

There's no fallback in the quite probable case of disruption, no cheap way to add redundancy, and no cost effective way to deal with breakages.

The kinds of milestones being missed that are alluded to in the wikipedia article are feasible engineering solutions to route challenges.

How would the government even know you had batteries in the house? Build a suitable setup and tell no one

An electrical inspector would need to sign off on it and any connections to the breaker panel. An electrician would have to do that I don't have the qualifications to do that. I do have electronics technician certificate but not as an actual electrician.

If I did it on my own then I'd risk having my home insurance cancelled.

Canada over regulating again..

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