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Comment by AnotherGoodName | Hacker News Reader

Quite simply put this is what they ask you to do. To the point that the Australian government will heavily subsidise (30%) home battery installation.

Remember Australia has over 10x the rollout of solar than china (per capita of course). It’s not hard to achieve this for any competent government. Bluntly China’s government is corrupt and inefficient (usa is even further behind china since their current government is also corrupt and inefficient).

This rollout of cheap solar in Australia is causing power prices during a global energy crisis and a datacenter build out to plummet.

And fwiw i don’t think Australia’s government is perfect. But it should set the bar to other nations of ‘what could be’. You could have falling power prices right now if you enabled a government to encourage what is currently by far the cheapest form of electricity (solar).

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The bits of China where most of its people live are pretty mediocre for solar power. Like, Southern France at best, not Australia, not even California.

China is huge, and it does have huge solar farms, but the trouble is now you need a huge power transport infrastructure. Australia can move enough power from a desert where nobody lives to a small city 100 kilometres away on a few ordinary hundred kV pylons and be happy. China has huge cities, 2-3 thousand kilometres from those solar farms so it is building long chains of 1MV pylons which is the same idea but at this incredible scale.

> ”Remember Australia has over 10x the rollout of solar than china (per capita of course).”

China is adding around 10X Australia’s total installed solar power generation every single year. Half of the entire world’s deployed solar is in China.

And while Australia’s solar growth is impressive, it’s worth remembering that it’s only possible because of China. It was Chinese government policy that pushed to develop the huge solar industry that exists today and supplies vast quantities of cheap solar panels to the world.

This is true - without Chinese manufacturing of solar cells and panels, solar energy would not be as cheap as it is today.

Equally true is that Chinese manufacturing of solar cells is only partly possible because of Australian solar research and development. In 1983, a research team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), invented the PERC silicon solar cell. This design fundamentally improved solar cell efficiency to capture sunlight more effectively and reduce electronic losses. Over several decades of refinement, the UNSW team continued to set global efficiency records, pushing cell efficiency from 18% in 1984 up to 25% by the early 2000s.

Today, PERC technology is the cheapest way to generate electricity using solar cells and is utilised in over 90% of solar panels manufactured globally. https://theconversation.com/how-an-aussie-invention-could-so...

The solar research group at UNSW trained over 120 PhD students who went on to establish solar manufacturing, particularly in China.

Thank goodness for globalized economies.

And our solar market regulator is corrupt AF, its just a giant money spinner for battery and solar makers/installer.

RE "......what is currently by far the cheapest form of electricity (solar)....."

this is misleading and wrong. At best it is a half true statement.

My total power bill has not decreased.

Solar electrity may be cheap to produce.

However if only generates for 4-5 houra day, generates non at night or bad weather. May generate non for several days in bad (cloudy weather ) So the supply of reneables (solar ) is un reliable. To make renewables (solar ) reliable , we need big (grid size) batterys. For the grid we need new transmission lines. Predicted to be 10,ooo KM for Austrlia. Cost of new transmission network, last estimate i saw was $40 Billion AU

The government mandated smart meters will allow peoples power supply to be turned off when the likely power shortages occur.

> Australia has over 10x the rollout of solar than china (per capita of course)

This is a remarkable stat that's the opposite of what I expected, but I suppose China is (a) starting from a lower base and (b) much, much larger in absolute population. Australia's population would fit in Chongqing.

Chinas solar rollout is absolutely pathetic. Netherlands is a close second to Australia in case anyone wants to argue latitude or population density alone is a cause. Germany’s up there too. In fact on a per capita basis China’s way down the list.

Where people get misled on China’s rollout is total generation (since it’s a huge fraction of the worlds population) and the fact that they do large centralised rollouts rather than enabling rooftop solar. So they have some of the biggest solar farms. Rooftop solar is the way the countries that have shot past china have mostly achieved results - remove barriers to installation and grid connection and suddenly every citizen is invested in it since it saves them money. It’s the classic efficiency win from a massively motivated population vs a central bureaucracy. China’s showing everyone how NOT to enable solar.

How would rooftop solar even work in China, especially in Chinese cities? Is the assumption that SFHs or at least row homes are as common in China as they are in other countries?

SFH's are rare in China outside the villages; big cities are all high-rises (in Beijing, and I believe other large cities, it's illegal to build SFH's within the city limits, though the few remaining "hutongs" are exempted for historical reasons)

Yes, I think most of us know that, so I find the statement to be confusing that China is behind on personal solar. Of course they are! It is never going to be much of a thing as urbanization continues to accelerate, because people just don't live in those kinds of houses where you have your own roof to put solar panels on. You are much more likely to see community solar instead, or solar plants (along with wind farms) in western china sending energy to eastern china via transmission lines. And you better bet that in rural china the 农民 are using whatever free electricity they can get (I've seen water wheels in the weirdest of places).

When I lived in Beijing, the apartment buildings I lived in usually had solar hot water. Well, I could tell when they turned on the central heating plants for the winter because I finally had hot water showers again.

> When I lived in Beijing, the apartment buildings I lived in usually had solar hot water

was that recently? I lived there from 2011-2017 and solar power was virtually unheard of, much less powering any buildings. But yeah, China is that kind of place that the city decides when you get heating in your apartment (Nov 15 IIRC, so early Nov could be _really_ cold inside; we wore our coats).

That was way back in 2008! Solar has been in China for a long time, but they were using it directly to warm the water, not via photovalic panels (which is why the results were so bad).

well, whatdoyouknow, maybe our apartment's water was indeed heated by solar and I just had no idea :)

It’s hard to say. If they use photvalic instead of pure solar, they can top off a lack of sun with electricity from other sources to keep the hot water warm (outside of winter when it’s all natural gas based anyways). Ome would think they could do a better job with personal heat pumps.

China’s problem is geography and density: they have plenty of ideal land for solar in the west, but people largely live in the east in tall apartment blocks in cities that are often cloudy. They build lines to send the power east, but can only build so much capacity per year while the problem is pretty big.

I reckon more Australians live in SFHs than apartment blocks (so have roofs where personal solar makes sense), and the major cities get more son than eastern Chinese cities do.

Why is China's government corrupt? specifically when it comes to solar? Are they not accused of the opposite, overdoing solar? Help me understand your critique.

The have hardly any solar per capita compared to Australia. They are occasionally held up as an example by misguided westerners as if what they’ve achieved is an example of good policy on solar when it’s utterly dwarfed on a per capita basis by countries like Australia.

They also have hardly any GDP per capita compared to Australia.

And the geography (especially in the more populated areas) is like 60-70% mountains and hills and shit. Australia has significantly more flat land for easy solar builds, with 1/50th the population.

Australia tends to do far more rooftop solar than it does solar farming, so the requirement for flat land is really.more a requirement for houses not to be in valleys surrounded by mountains.

That doesn't actually mean anything though. It's a measurement several layers abstracted from the thing that matters, which is how many panels they can build and deploy.

For every single person alive in Australia, there >52 alive in China. So comparing solar per capita to Australia is a useless metric.

Apparently, Australia has ~3x times rollout of solar than china, what is mostly caused by a much higher per capita consumption in Australia, both countries having basically the same share of electricity generated from renewables.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-electricity-per-cap...

China is adding 10 Australias worth of new solar generation every single year (315 GW of new solar installed just in 2025 alone). Half of all the entire world’s solar is deployed in China.

Chona also has about 50 times more people, what makes the per-capita numbers work like what is in my comment.

Australia has a fake residential electricity market, until this year they had to directly offset electricity bills.

This year is the only year that prices have gone down.

you're providing a chunk of storage for excess power for free

i know a guy who bought an arseload of batteries and buys and sells off the grid to make a moderate amount of money. he says it's not really paying back the time spent but he does it because he finds it interesting to optimise

>Bluntly China’s government is corrupt and inefficient (usa is even further behind china since their current government is also corrupt and inefficient).

So countries are only behind Australia because of corruption? And the US is only behind because of Trump, specifically?

Man, must be nice to have such a basic view of the world; everything so sinpmy explained.

The US is paying developers billions of dollars to scrap renewable energy projects. This is Trump policy. We're in a league of our own for sure.

It's not all Trump, of course. It's also the people who put him in office twice, the folks who block upgrading the grid, etc. etc.

Trump hates specifically wind turbines (or "windmills" as he insists on calling them). Which isn't to say his administration is friendly to solar projects, but the stuff which makes Trump visibly angry is the wind turbines. The fact this works and is free power is very annoying for a man who insists they can't work and shouldn't be used.

So yeah, Trump doesn't help, but in respect specifically of Solar you'd likely see pretty similar policies from many US regimes, including mainstream Democrats.

Texas is beating California by a large margin when it comes to solar due to bureaucratic red tape and "environmental" review in California along with monopolistic utility companies, which have successfully lobbied against solar by removing net metering and adding in extra solar connection charges.

Texas generates a lot more power than California.

The generate more grid solar, more wind, more gas and more coal than other states.

They're still #2 to California when you include distributed solar though.

That isnt an point for california because distributed solar is an economically inefficient solution.

It is only attractive in California due to a combination absurd electricity prices from State sanctioned monopolies and red tape preventing grid development.

Coal is economically inefficient compared with distributed solar.

Nuclear is broadly on par in cost.

The health impact costs of running existing coal plants in Texas are higher than the cost of installing new rooftop solar. That's ignoring carbon costs, which could be the same again.

And that's at Texas install costs. While low for America they are double Australian costs mostly due to poor permitting regulations and lack of competition.

This artificially makes the gap between utility and rooftop solar wider.

So you're being weirdly specific in your desire for economic efficiency.

What is oddly specific about it?

We should cut red tape and permitting processes to enable low cost green energy from the cheapest sources.

The California model is one of the last states should look to as an example of how to run an energy market and roll out solar.

Followup: This article [1] and this website [2] contain some information about grid connection statistics by region.

California grid connections approval times are pushing 9 years, nearly doubling that of nearby western states. In comparison, Texas ERCOT operates on a connect and manage framework, which lets people buildout generation without stagegate approval, and then works out the interconnection issues in parallel or after the fact.

ERCOT process is 18 to 30 months.[3]

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/inside-the-interconne... https://www.interconnection.fyi/?market=CAISO https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2024/10/30/0940-AM-ERCOT-In...

From what I can tell, Trump mostly doesn't like them because you can see some from his vanity golf course in Scotland. He has absolutely zero interest in the significant benefits they provide, he only cares about the fact he can see them from "his" land.

I remember when the first ones started appearing in the UK over 30 years ago and people were quick to complain about how ugly they looked. But actually, over time I think most people accept them now, and personally I think they're pretty cool. Most of the UK ones are actually off shore now - you can just about see them from the coast, but they're just small specks on the horizon at that distance. I think the biggest concern people have with them now is the belief that lots of birds get killed by them, but the reality is that actually many more birds die every year from flying into windows than get hit by turbine blades.

You're right, China should stop selling solar panels to Australia and deploy them internally.

They have been mass deploying solar and battery. They also realise that they can make profit from export markets because internal supply capacity exceeds internal demand.

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