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Comment by thelastgallon | Hacker News Reader

Australia is also 4,000km wide. A time difference of 2 - 3 hours. This adds a few more hours of Solar with long distance transmission.

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As you say, Australia is very big. Big sections of it are also, as a result, empty. The coast-to-coast "long distance transmission" is not in fact a thing in Australia.

China has long distance HV transmission, but it's crazy expensive and they built it because most of China's people live near its coast but most of its solar power is in the interior so the power needs to be moved.

Australia is exceptional for having a lot of humans who live somewhere that's incredibly sunny. The whole place is sunny. It'll vary from place to place whether that's only "Southern Spain" sunny or full-on "Middle of the Sahara Desert" sunny, but it's all very sunny indeed, if you were inventing a country to buy solar panels Australia would be that country.

> The coast-to-coast "long distance transmission" is not in fact a thing in Australia.

The main Australian electricity grid reaches from Cooktown in far northern QLD [0] through to the Lower Eyre peninsula in South Australia [1] and down to the Huon Valley in Southern Tasmania [2]. So if by "coast-to-coast" you mean "East Coast" to "South Coast", then literally we have it already.

Of course, I take it you actually mean including WA and NT into the main national grid. No, we don't have that, and probably won't any time soon.

But there is a project (Australia-Asia Power Link aka SunCable) [3] to run a HVDC cable from Central Australia to Singapore via Indonesia, to export solar power. Why not the same thing between Perth and Adelaide? It simply comes down to economics – Singapore and Indonesia have the energy demand to economically justify it, domestic Australian consumption doesn't.

However, there is a plan to extend the national grid to Mt Isa. [4] There's only around 600 km from Mt Isa to Tennant Creek (where the AAPL/SunCable project starts). It isn't impossible that they'll eventually link up. So we might actually see the northern NT connected to the national grid, eventually.

[0] https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/electricity/nem/networ...

[1] https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/electricity/nem/networ...

[2] https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/electricity/nem/networ...

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

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CopperString

Speaking of insanely good solar power potential in large parts of Australia: I am surprised that we have not seen huge solar farms setup to power aluminium smelters. I guess that the economics still doesn't work. As I understand, all the cheapest places use hydroelectic as their power source.

Nyrstar Port Pirie isn't 100% renewable, it should be now be recovering blast furnace heat as electricity to reduce demand and that demand is partly met by South Australia's renewable generation which covers the non industrial demand with excess left over for some industry.

That aside (I'd be interested in further detail there) Rio Tinto is asserting the the largest aluminium smelter in Australia ( Tomago smelter near Newcastle ) will be 100% renewable energy within the decade:

Australia’s largest aluminium smelter to run on renewables by 2033 after Rio Tinto strikes $2.5bn taxpayer bailout deal - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/13/rio-tinto-a...

Rio can be a bit performative in it's claims though; its battery electric haul pak "fleet" is over stated and they didn't do nearly as well at not blasting protected sites to smithereens as they pinky promised they would.

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