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A few interesting points about the NEM that help explain why it's avoided a simple situation.

1: There are multiple price caps that set a maximum price on energy. 2: There's a commonly traded instrument that effectively acts as an insurance product for retailers against high prices. This means peaking generators get paid every quarter, even if they plants don't run at all. 3: The Australian government is spending billions building pumped hydro and gas generators to ensure supply over and above what the private sector is willing to fund.

That's a larger model, this is the earlier Saildrone Explorer mentioned in that video. The vessel they are launching is 72 feet long, this one is 23 feet. So not a model boat, but not large either.

Are they losing money grounding them? They're probably operating fewer flights that pre covid so they could have more planes then needed and be using this opportunity to 'ground' planes with minor issues as a negotiation tactic to extract concessions from Airbus.

I'm the case of this specific battery, it's been being built specifically because there's generally a surplus of cheap renewables in Victoria when the sun is shining. This energy can be sold back into the market during the evening at a much higher price, pushing out coal, gas and hydro generation.

It's also expecting to make a lot of revenue from frequency control which is a critical service in a grid relying more on renewables.

So yes this battery is going to be very effective at reducing carbon emissions in Victoria. As a similar battery did in South Australia.

Utility scale generation of renewables in Australia creates tradable certificates. These are required by law to be purchased by energy retailers to meet the Renewable Energy Target. If that certificate trades at $50, I can sell my power for -$40 and still make $10 profit.

Putting further downwards pressure on prices, small scale solar generators (eg homes) generally have a fixed price for solar exports. The spot price could be -$1000 but they will still be getting paid $100 under their retail contract. So they have no incentive to stop generating, even when the price is negative. The market regulator is attempting to change this, but consumers are resistant to having to pay to generate power or allow their system to be remotely switched off.

Coal generators won't switch off either as they take a while to ramp up and down, and are sometimes are directed (and paid) to remain running to provide system stability.

Visitation numbers from the article:

"Despite the challenges and restrictions of the COVID pandemic, 129,218 people traveled to Crater of Diamonds in 2020 for what was a record-breaking year, with more than 80 carats of diamonds unearthed"

At $10 a visit the entrance fees add up to a lot more than the value of diamonds found. Kind of like a lottery, but more interactive.

50MW is a small scale solar generator these days. Bhadla Solar Park is 2.2GW, and there are plans being tossed around to go even larger. For example 10GW in northern Australia (Sun Cable).

Hugely. A few of the main factors that will determine your payoff time:

- Subsidies. - Cost of labour. How much do you need to pay to install the panels? - Your energy usage patterns. If you use a lot of energy when the sun is shining, your panels will pay themselves off faster. - Cost of transmission of energy. How much does it cost to get the energy from the generator to you. - Cost of energy. How much it costs to generate energy where you are. - Location. Proximity to the equator, annual sunshine hours, shading, panel angle.

You're going to share the jackpot with dozens of other winners, so it wouldn't be immediately obvious which of the winners rigged it. While if you pick a random number sequence and are the only winner, you'll be the prime suspect if anyone realises the draw was rigged.

This already exist in some places (for example Amber and Powerclub in Australia).

The issue is it's more effort than most people are happy to exert. They are used to flicking a switch having the appliance on whenever they want it. To change that will either involve much higher prices, a substantial shift in the way we think about energy, or an improvement in technology to allow the load shifting to happen in the background without the user noticing.

We turn to batteries instead because it's easier to build something than it is to change behaviour.

> So it's more correct to say that local generation is 100% renewable, not total energy consumption.

In actual fact even local generation is not 100% renewable, they have a small quantity of gas generation too. For example Tamar valley gas power station is running right now - and effectively being exported to Victoria.

"100% renewable" in the sense that generation of renewable electrical energy is more than 100% of electrical energy consumption. It seems like the most straightforward way to account for it.

You use a combination of local measurements (over a year) and historic weather data (over decades) combined with the specifications of your generator to estimate output. That model gives you an expected generation in an average year, amongst other things.

To learn more, this post talks about it in greater detail: https://blog.greensolver.net/en/p50-p90-simplified-two-figur...

I actually think this is quite reasonable. One issue with the "wait until they are a larger share of the market" argument is trying to add a tax gets harder the more people are used to not paying it. The earlier you introduce it the easier it should be.

EVs clearly use roads and should pay to use them. Yes ICE vehicles have serious side effects, and we should encourage a switch. But it shouldn't have to be by giving EVs a free ride. A carbon tax would discourage both CO2 emitting cars, and the coal power generators that make up the majority of Victoria's energy generation.

Note: I live in Victoria, but don't drive an EV (yet).

Is it really comparable with the bay area? A quick scan suggests that the most expensive city in NZ (Auckland) sits at around NZ$1 million. Compare that to US$1.3 million for San Francisco. The rest of NZ is substantially cheaper, the second city Wellington for example is NZ$0.7 million.

Median wages appear to be about NZ$50k (all NZ) vs US$75k (San Fran). So on both absolute price and price vs income, only Auckland appears to be in the same ballpark as San Francisco.

Solar panels only outperform a human when the sun is shining. From the article:

"But what if skies remained gray for many days in a row? Rather than trying to purchase enough battery storage to cover all reasonable eventualities, I decided that my backup source of electricity needed a backup itself, one that I could use to charge that battery during times when my photovoltaic panels won’t function"

As a primary source of energy a cycle generator doesn't make a lot of sense. But as an on demand source to cover occasional periods of low solar generation it's a great hack.

Why fix sunrise and not sunset? And how do you handle extreme latitudes, where the sun might stay up for days without setting, or set half an hour after it rises?

It's showing live data. Being nighttime, there is currently no solar generation. If you click on the country and look at the little last 24 hour visualisation you can see solar production peaking at 23% yesterday in Germany.

https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE

Sorry I wasn't very specific. It appears to be counting solar generation as coal generation, so the amount of co2 emissions is vastly inflated.

The site is missing a large amount of Australian renewable generation.

Compare it to http://nemlog.com.au/gen/co2e/ for example.

The problem is in fact with the source file, it lists just two solar power stations but there are at least 30 in Queensland.

The map appears to be counting some renewable generation in Queensland as CO2 emitting. There's actually quite high solar penetration.

That said, Australian is a large contributor to pollution. The majority of electricity is still produced from coal. It is improving, but with a federal target of only 20% renewables, a lot of financial incentive to build new generation could be about to dry up.

Flatten the curve means new infections, not total cases. Its primary purpose is to slow the rate of spread to avoid health services becoming overwhelmed.

See the graph at https://flattenthecurve.co.uk/ for an example.

You could pursue an elimination strategy after flattening the curve, but generally the approach has been slow things down and keep them manageable until a vaccine is available.

The comment I was replying to stated that "Renewables _always_ require a fossil backup". This is clearly untrue, as the multiple examples of grids that do not have or need fossil backup shows.

Certainly the examples I have given are those that have the easiest path to renewables. It is entirely logical that they would be the first to transition. But it proves that it's possible.

That's simply untrue. Iceland for example is already 100% renewable. Other grids with large installed hydro generation (eg New Zealand) could move to solely renewable with the installation of more intermittent generation and transmission infrastructure.

Yes, most grids still rely on non renewable resources. But that is simply a relic of the fact that they were built that way. The existing examples prove it's possible.

From another quality publication by the lead author:

"In this research, we show that 5G millimeter waves could be absorbed by dermatologic cells acting like antennas, transferred to other cells and play the main role in producing Coronaviruses in biological cells."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343019053_5G_Techno...

Wouldn't it be better to compare fuel per passenger per hour rather than per km? It's entertainment not transport so the KMs travelled doesn't seem so relevant.

Sure you could, but that's not how the dealers are (usually) operating. The option is much cheaper than the stock, so when selling a call option you're unlikely to have the entire position covered. From further down the article:

"Options are a way to get leverage, too, and can work sort of like an extreme version of the margin loan. If you have $100, you can buy options on $1,000 worth of stock, and a dealer will go out and buy $500 worth of stock to hedge that option."

The dealer doesn't own all of the stock they have sold you the option on. So when the stock price goes up, their exposure goes up, and they have to buy more stock to manage it.

If you're happy to own the entire position, why sell the call option?

It's cheaper to just replace the heat source than attempt to fix it starts malfunctioning.

You can provide frequency control in one part to keep another part stable. For example if you have a part of your grid with a high level of renewables (for example, South Australia), system stability can be provided by large intertia generators in other parts of the grid (in our example, coal power stations in Victoria).

Take away the interconnect, and the islanded part of the grid is no longer stable, requiring the renewables to be switched off and replaced with gas and diesel generators. This happened after a storm earlier this year:

https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/sa-to-remain-cut-off-fr...

Being the flattest continent does not mean that the continent is flat. My point is that there is still plenty of hills and steep terrain around. It's not self evident that if you build a train line somewhere in Australia, that line will be flat. In fact the Pilbara automated rail network does contain some steep sections.

It still snows in Africa, and if you tried to climb Jebel Toubkal without a jacket I don't think knowing that Canada is snowier would provide you much comfort.