225
Rooftop solar eats up all demand in South Australia, world’s most renewable grid
(reneweconomy.com.au)
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
225 points (99.6% liked)
Australia
3600 readers
63 users here now
A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.
Before you post:
If you're posting anything related to:
- The Environment, post it to Aussie Environment
- Politics, post it to Australian Politics
- World News/Events, post it to World News
- A question to Australians (from outside) post it to Ask an Australian
If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News
Rules
This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:
- When posting news articles use the source headline and place your commentary in a separate comment
Banner Photo
Congratulations to @[email protected] who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition
Recommended and Related Communities
Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:
- Australian News
- World News (from an Australian Perspective)
- Australian Politics
- Aussie Environment
- Ask an Australian
- AusFinance
- Pictures
- AusLegal
- Aussie Frugal Living
- Cars (Australia)
- Coffee
- Chat
- Aussie Zone Meta
- bapcsalesaustralia
- Food Australia
- Aussie Memes
Plus other communities for sport and major cities.
https://aussie.zone/communities
Moderation
Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.
Additionally, we have our instance admins: @[email protected] and @[email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
oh yeah totally! i’m in vic too :)
i mean management of the grid to a centralised location IMO is always going to be a bigger cost, which would likely mitigate some efficiency gains from installing solar en masse by a utility
Oh hell yeah :)
It’s actually not as high of a cost as you might imagine. The signals to control the smart inverters actually work through the same system that communicates with smart meters. Which as you know, are already universal here. Whether it’s smart or not, an inverter is an essential part of a solar installation. Part of its job is automatically sensing if there’s a power outage and disconnecting from the grid. This is vital for the safety of repair crews and linesmen.
In talking about utility-level solar though, did you see this article about a prototype project in Western Vic? It’s a combination of solar and storing energy as heated water underground. It can then be turned back into electricity using the process geothermal uses. If I recall correctly, extra electricity from the grid can be fed into the system to be stored as well.
The genius part of that IMO is storing energy as cold, not just as heat.
You need a heat difference to run a heat engine, and the energy lost refrigerating the cold block is more than made up for by making the "waste heat" into usable energy.
Dandrews gov has some great strides to that front, the neighborhood battery initiative is one I'm particularly fond of. Not only islands areas in event of grid failure, but solves the issue of 'overfeed' with shitty street inverters