Are you effing kidding me??!!

www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-12/power-companies-to-charge-solar-owners-for-exporting-to-grid/100368588

Who other than the back-hander receiving politicians and their corporate mates really thinks this is in the best interest of renewables in Australia?

Mr Barr said that, under the new rules, "the 80 per cent of customers without solar will actually see their bills drop by about $15 a year".

WOW!!!! $15 whole dollars!!!! Amazing!!

We need to wait and see new taxes coming onto people charging their own cars from own solar panel, bypassing national grid.People that goes off the grid, even those is the middle of the city.With my solar peaking 100kWh a day I could easily go off the grid in the middle of the urban city , having appropriate cheap energy storage.
But this time is arriving soon likewise solar panel cost drops for thousand of dollars per watts to few cents now.
Similar revolution is going to happen to storage battery.
Now retail at $1000 per 1kw - see Tesla or LG with retail $200 per kw in LiFEpo4 cells and $50 for bulk storage battery plants.

Lets wait and see taxes on people for not using national grid, staying at home and not driving at national roads, not watching TV -since not contributing to advertisement revenue.
Not smoking? Not drinking alcohol ? Cooking at home instead of eateries restaurants also suffocate labor market. Pay more tax!
Maybe that is not all bad news, More taxes, means more funds in government coffers.
Now that question is what there are going to do with this money? More schools ,hospitals , public parks and bike rides or more wars?US spent 1 to 2 trillion dollars on war in Afganistan alone. Where all the money goes? Definitely not into Afgan public infrastructure or citizen pockets.


Soviets manage to build quite a few hydro power plants during hot but short war period.
Still standing and working till today. Possibly also few schools and hospitals too , but now converted into mosques.
How many new power plants US made during their 20 year occupation?

kiterboy said..
Are you effing kidding me??!!

.....seems like you have just started on the journey to enlightenment.

Putting solar panels on your roof is a pretty dumb idea. Claiming that covering all buildings in PV generating paint will save the planet is the nonsense sprouted by architects on watersports forums.

The path to a better world and actual "green energy" has so little to do with how the energy is generated. Never has been, never will be.

The path to enlightenment is realizing that it is the storage and the use of electricity that matters.

When you've appreciated this, then you just need to realize just how unbelievably inefficient and useless any electrical storage system we have currently is.

When the light bulb shines bright on this you will have ascended. But it is hard for the bulb to shine when the battery is always flat.

I'll let you do your own research

HotBodMon said..
some companies like to charge for small growrooms also

that explain meaning of GREEN ENERGY!

Macroscien said..



Soviets manage to build quite a few hydro power plants during hot but short war period.

Built 1960-68. Soviet invasion was 1979

airsail said..
Too many greedy people putting oversized solar arrays on their roof pumping too much power into a grid that can't handle it. All in a hope they get paid for the power that is unusable at the time delivered.

The solutions are a smaller array where the home uses most of the output, not delivering much to the grid. It will be years, if ever they upgrade the grid to handle the output during a hot summers day. Or install your own battery to store it yourself.

So why isn't there the same problem from solar farms?
Labor has a proposal to fund "community batteries" which looks sensible. It would have to be cheaper to install a few hundred kWh of storage at the local substation than a hundred private batteries.
And us oldies can always buy an EV and use it to store power and put it out to the grid in the evening

Mr Milk said..

airsail said..
Too many greedy people putting oversized solar arrays on their roof pumping too much power into a grid that can't handle it. All in a hope they get paid for the power that is unusable at the time delivered.

The solutions are a smaller array where the home uses most of the output, not delivering much to the grid. It will be years, if ever they upgrade the grid to handle the output during a hot summers day. Or install your own battery to store it yourself.

So why isn't there the same problem from solar farms?
Labor has a proposal to fund "community batteries" which looks sensible. It would have to be cheaper to install a few hundred kWh of storage at the local substation than a hundred private batteries.
And us oldies can always buy an EV and use it to store power and put it out to the grid in the evening

The solar farms are helping the problem, owned by the power companies or their off shoots. The don't want to pay home owners for power as they are producing their own. As more solar farms come online there will be less use for home solar array power.

Corporations will protect there bottom line, now to the point of charging you to give them power.

Community batteries could be good, but I doubt you would ever get paid for the power you provided, but at least you won't get charged for giving it.

The EV idea is the best yet, especially if your car is home during the day. At least it's more usable than a big block of batteries attached to a wall.

Carantoc said..When you've appreciated this, then you just need to realize just how unbelievably inefficient and useless any electrical storage system we have currently is.

Pumped hydro is pretty good, once it's established.

This is just economic rationalism at work. It is going to cost money to augment the grid to accept the additional roof top solar. Causer pays. My only gripe would be that they better provide a live signal to the affected households so that they can stop their solar exporting onto the grid at these times to avoid the negative feed-in tariff.

Harrow said..
This is just economic rationalism at work. It is going to cost money to augment the grid to accept the additional roof top solar. Causer pays. My only gripe would be that they better provide a live signal to the effected households so that they can stop their solar exporting onto the grid at these times to avoid the negative feed-in tariff.

If they offered the excess power to households at negative rates it would make home batteries so much more economical.

If the solar panels fed to batteries that then discharged to the grid it would make the system so much more stable.

But nobody thinks that batteries do that. If their batteries were empty after a sunny day and they hadn't used any power they would cry out. If their batteries were full at 11am on a sunny day it would be pointless.

Community batteries make more sense from the perspective that individuals don't then see them charged or discharged and start believing they should have the power in them for their own use 100% of the time and why are they buying power from the grid when it has been sunny all day. Otherwise the batteries should be as close to the point of generation and use as possible. ie. somewhere midway between your roof and grow house (which is usually in your roof, err so I am told).

Carantoc said..

Subsonic said..
Just to ask the question (and maybe there are valid reasons if anyone here works in the industry?) why can the power suppliers not adjust there own input to the grid to account for the presence of residential power input?

The producers, the sellers and the grid managers are different entities.

was in part already aware of that. Wasn't aware the grid wasn't still managed by the power producer though.


Too many fingers in the pie hands on the line. Grid stability isn't the producer's or retailer's problem. Until the grid manager tells them it is. And then they have to be told what to do so the grid manager can fix it. And then only some of them can do certain things, so the grid managers have to make sure they tell the right person to do the right thing. And they have to do that real quick. Big Tesla batteries give them a couple of extra seconds to make the decisions.


yeah that makes sense (in this age of bureaucratic bullsh!t that is) i guess thats just another way privatisation hasn't helped us out. I saw the way "too many hands in the chain of command" works in telstra exchanges in a brief stint doing work in them some time back. There would be a fault light up (which could be fixed on the spot) but no one will touch it till they get the order from head office to touch it. Sometimes months after it comes up.

if you could tell them how much power your roof top solar will feed into the grid in the next 5 seconds it would genuinely help them. So get outside and check for clouds.

FormulaNova said..
I could setup a business in each suburb. Chewing up all that negative tariffed energy by a bank of incandescent bulbs burning away. A few hundred bar heaters in case its not enough.

Its almost like electric hot water heaters will make a resurgence, but be powered during peak sunlight hours instead of off-peak.

Don't laugh, they're called grid resistor banks and there have been proposals to operate them as an economic solution under various scenarios. Of course, it would be better to actually do something useful with the energy in the manner that you speak of.

Harrow said..

FormulaNova said..
I could setup a business in each suburb. Chewing up all that negative tariffed energy by a bank of incandescent bulbs burning away. A few hundred bar heaters in case its not enough.

Its almost like electric hot water heaters will make a resurgence, but be powered during peak sunlight hours instead of off-peak.

Don't laugh, they're called grid resistor banks and there have been proposals for them to operate them as an economic solution under various scenarios. Of course, it would be better to actually do something useful with the energy in the manner that you speak of.

Actually you could mint some bitcoin with excess energy...
.but Chinese found already that with this electric energy they could produce something more realistic : like steel, aluminium, copple and zinc. Evem some machinery.This way for 1$ worth electricity they have $2 in permament goods,\
Unlike minting Bitcoins that give you 1c for $1 electricity used.Australia could also mint Bitcoins, but to do so you need computers and IT stuff. Our weak point already.
So we could turn good electricity into liquid hydrogen at least.
For every dollar of electric current we get 5c worth of hydrogen sold to Japan!
Lets make Japan big again !

decrepit said..
We wanted to update our instantaneous gas hot water system, so rang solar hart for a solar H.W. system quote.
The guy convinced me to go with a power store unit.
solahart.com.au/products/battery-storage/solahart-powerstore/
This uses a lot of our excess solar power, without using much grid energy.
The installation includes smart monitoring of our electricity use, (which is probably what really sold me).

My father asked about ways to get more value out of his solar panel system, so I suggested much the same as other people are using electricity produced to heat their hot water. He didn't seem too sold on the idea as on the face of it it seems nonsensical.

Here is a commercial version of the controller:

www.australianwindandsolar.com/aws-sunmate/

Years ago they legislated to get rid of off-peak hot water systems because they were inefficient, and then reversed it when they figured out that they had little other use for the off-peak energy. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up with a tariff for hot water during the day to soak up all the excess solar energy.

Lat time I ran detailed numbers for both my home and for an island resort to do solar panels - both had payback periods way above commercially accepted norms.

This governments policy on electric vehicles is basically a policy to STOP electric vehicles !

But before you jump all over Morrison - the labor state government in Vic wants to Tax EV's for not using petrol.

When it comes to EV's this country is 15 years behind the rest of the world.....

Without question its the lobbyists !!